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sunfortune · 4 years

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sunny i just read the the queen of nothing and you were so right about it. it was so anti climatic. nothing happened! it would have been so much better if cardan actually betrayed jude (and a little funny i wont lie). cardan's bimboism was worth reading it tho dsfjddksjdfsdj

she did not do a SINGLE thing right in that book. i was baffled

(you didnt ask for this but now im about to air out ALL my frustrations)

like plot aside, she even fucked up the jude/cardan dynamic and reunion and getting that right was the BARE minimum. but she was like “NO im gonna make this as dry and boring as possible” like MA’AM?

and coming off how fun the wicked king was….she had me fucked up

so many of jude/cardan scenes just felt ridiculous bc they barely acknowledge judes anger on how he did her at the end of the wicked king. he just says he loveds her and she was like fuck you for a few pages and then was like “okay im over it” like JUDE??? JUDE DUARTE?? NOT ripping him a new asshole? youre on crack, holly. he should have had to GROVEL for fucking EVER. and knowing HIS character? he WOULD have. he wouldve LOVED to!! but for some reason we just skip that entirely and their reunion just feels incomplete and out of character

like it was so unrealistic i cant even be mad the characters bc it was obviously the bad writing.

and then i found out the other day she DID write cardan groveling and being fucked up over jude being gone (bc OBVIOUSLY…the jude cardan aspect FEELS like theres a chunk of information missing) but for some reason she thought it was not that important to the story?? so its just an extra excerpt in some of the special editions?? like MA’AM. WHAT are you doing?

also jude having access to MAGIC bc she was queen now shouldve been much more important?? after how hard she worked specifically FOR power? but it was just treated like “eh whatever” HELLO?

and the plot….okay as much as i think the wicked king is sexie…holly blacks strong point is not plots (its character dynamics) but the wicked king is still decent enough (and with the character dynamics its way better). BUT the queen of nothing..was literally NOTHING. the plot was unbearable..the characters were all skewed…like bro can i have one thing? just ONE thing

next. taryn and locke….what in the got dam. WHO gives a Fuck?

taryn didnt do ANYTHING to deserve jude caping for her. she fucked her over CONSTANTLY and shes so DUMB. im not saying shes unforgivable but holly black actually had to put it in some work for jude and US, the audience, to be cool with her again. BUT just like the jude/cardan reunion we skip ALL the development and good characterization and instead jude is just cool with her almost immediately bc it was convenient to the TERRIBLE plot

(jude only going back to elfhame bc of some shit taryn did and that DRY ass reunion with cardan and then the rest of the mess…WHO wrote this? she did jude SO dirty)

also i literally do not understand the purpose of lockes ENTIRE character…like i get in the first book he was a little relevant i guess? but even then locke being a snake was so predictable (hello? judge people by the company they keep???). but his persistent inclusion in the trilogy?? for WHAT? he does nothing. hes literally the fucking vision of this series. mentioned constantly but barely ever does anything relevant

but YKW…i wouldve STILL let holly black have rights! if she just didnt fuck over jude and suck all the fucking flavor out of jude/cardan? i wouldve LET her get away with that plot. ALL she had to do was write the characters consistently (her strong suit)..but NO!! she didnt wanna give us anything!

no plot. no good characterizations. nothing!

the queen of nothing was just underwhelming and disappointing

#ask #the queen of nothing #Anonymous #the cruel prince #books

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glassworkspiderlilies · 5 years

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giyushino week wrap up!

aaaaand that’s a wrap!! thank you to the moderators of giyushinoweek, and to everyone who liked/reblogged/commented on/sent me asks about my fics!!

it was a wild ride to write 8 fics in basically a week or so; i keep saying the fics were hastily or frantically written but LMAO considering how little fic i put out nowadays and how long it usually takes me to write because i edit as i go (which means i take f o r e v e r ), i was seriously just screaming like I JUST GOTTA DO IT I JUST GOTTA GO WITH IT I DON’T HAVE TIME the entire time haha. it was really good to be able to just think of a thing and run as far as i could with it, though!! it’s been quite a long time since i was able to do that, and it was really nice to have a project to work on in the back of my head. <3

ideally, if i work myself up to it, i’d like to revisit all of these and spruce them up to post to ao3, but we’ll see. :’)

under the cut is just some thoughts on my process during this and also writing each of the fics, if you’re interested! favorite prompt, the most difficult parts to write, what the fic was originally was, things like that.

thank you again, everyone!! back to hibernation and occasional slow snail pace writing i go, haha.

re: writing process -i tried writing a fic per day during the week before the actual event, which...kind of worked!! ideally, i was going to write a mostly complete fic each day, and then spend the week of the event editing each one before i posted it. what really ended up happening was that i partially wrote several, but not all of them, during the previous week, and then spent the week of finishing up, editing, or writing the whole thing more or less the day before the prompt was “due”, LMFAO. my weekday schedule is pretty structured because of work--I have maybe an hour or two of free time before i have to sleep--so i doubled down a bit more on the weekends. i know like it wasn’t imperative that i meet the “deadline”, but i really, really wanted to!! i figured i’ve written a fic per day for fandom weeks before so why can’t i do it again, but BOY i don’t know who i was back then. i mean, i still did it (yay!) but it seemed so much easier then?? either i was just writing more back then or less afraid or...something, or it’s just been so long that i don’t remember what i felt, LOL.

-i was really quite nervous in the beginning to post the fics, since again, they’re pretty hastily written and my usual writing process is much more “careful” and drawn out. but, it was also freeing as the week went on to just post and not worry, because the point of the week was to have fun, and not necessarily to write the best work i expected of myself within a limited time. (oh, how the perfectionist in me still hisses, though.) still, i’m glad people liked them, and even the extra notes that i just kinda spit out for some of them. :’) i do wish that some had gotten more attention than others, but those ones don’t show up in the tags and i’m not sure why, so. alas.

re: the fics -confession: as of now, i feel pretty neutral about all of them, since i wrote them in a frenzy. at some point i’ll probably go back and read them and feel differently (and catch my mistakes! oh no!), haha. -a lot of them ended up being AU, which is...??? unexpected?? but i think it was just easier to put them in an entirely different setting, so i could play a bit more loose with their characters, haha.

day 1 - glance (or hug) -this one...im pretty sure was one of the ones i waited until the last possible minute to finish up. it’s pretty basic event-wise, one of the few more regular slice-of-lifey ones for the week. it was surprisingly hard to get down the “movement” of it all; a glance is hard to describe in detail and in any other way, but i had really wanted to create kind of this...fleeting, almost nostalgic atmosphere in the back and forth of “he keeps looking, she keeps missing”, if that makes any sense. oof, it’s still hard to describe what i had wanted to achieve even outside of the fic!!

day 2 - soulmate (or family) -this one was SUPER HARD to write!!! originally i had wanted to go with a “A sees flashes of what B sees” soulmate prompt, because i figured that would be SO disorienting and would be fun to play with. but i ended up not being able to run with that one. i had also wanted to do the “soulmates write on themselves and the words show up on the other’s arm” idea, based off of what i had started in a 100 word drabble i did, but that deserved wayyyyyy more exploration and angst i was able to write in the time i’d allotted. i do like the “tattoo” soulmate aus the best, i think, and i did want to explore the one i did more, buuuut. alas. soulmates aus are something i prefer to read rather than write, i think, they can get so complicated!!

day 3 - AU (or touch) -i’ve already made enough notes on this haha, but this ended up being a little too ambitious!! it wasn’t originally supposed to stop where it did, but i just...kinda got stuck and couldn’t bring myself to continue it, because i knew it would just keep going and needed more thinking out. so i just stopped it at the scene break, and hoped it would be decent enough. :’) surprisingly people seemed to enjoy this one most of all????? or maybe it was just the au itself that was a appealing, haha. regardless, i was surprised at the amount of notes this got!

day 4 - demon & wedding -soooooo this might’ve been my favorite prompt LMAO, like when i realized what i wanted to do for this day, i got excited because like, oooh yeah, pain. definitely wanted to go in on this to flesh out and explore various aspects more than i did, but i think of all the ones i wrote, i might be the most pleased with this one so far.

day 5 - moon (or angst) -honestly, it’s a surprise i didn’t choose angst for day 5. writing about shinobu’s death would’ve been so easy, but i’ve seriously been putting it off since i started writing for kimetsu no yaiba. both “a blade of honey” and “if not cut at dusk”, which are my longer fics, were intended to be about shinobu’s death scene and turned into something completely different, and i ended up avoiding it for day 5 even though it could’ve been so easy. it’s denial, probably! anyway, shinobu’s MAD BOLD here. she would never. maybe. there’s two shinobus that i think about--the "usual” one, modeling herself after kanae, and one who’s more in line with her younger self/inner feelings. i think i went with the latter for a lot of these fics, because i didn’t have to be as careful with dialogue. giyu might’ve suffered character-wise, though, woops. but again, maybe shinobu would, in the vein that she wants to win and have the last laugh, haha. still, i feel more like she wouldn’t. :P oh, also, do you remember ages ago, when AMVs were still widespread, that scene that was everywhere in naruto where hinata’s bathing/training at the waterfall and it’s like really pretty and cool and stuff? yeah. that’s what i wanted this one to be, a little, LMFAO. genuinely surprised that people thought this one was pretty spicy!!

day 6 - kiss (or ocean) -confession: i wrote all of this while i was at work LOLLLL. it was a slow day, i promise. this might’ve been the easiest one to come up with, because the “quick, kiss me!” to escape situation is a classic. the characterization is preeeetttyyyyy loose here, but it was also kind of fun, honestly. my day 5 and day 6 run in pretty similar veins though, so i had kind of wished the endings were a bit more distinct from each other.

day 7 - date (or crossover) -honestly i had wanted to do like, a soul eater crossover!! really i was planning out an au, but i think a crossover specifically has characters of two series interacting, and then i was Tired and was like, i can’t do that. crossovers aren’t something i usually read, either, so the planning got too complicated and i gave up. the date idea was also one that came much later and one that i finished up last minute; i’d wanted to make it a little more cohesive and come up with better things for sabito’s list, but. eh. it got longer than i expected too! ideally there would’ve been more of the college life, and sabito and makomo. i thought about doing another additional notes for this, but there was wasn’t enough i had wanted to add on. really it was just the majors for them i’d been playing with--shinobu as a med student (possibly a minor in horticulture/botany, SOMEHOW), sabito & giyu as hydraulic engineering majors (sabito more on fieldwork, giyu more on research), and makomo as a marine veterinary student. shrug!! the lines of “you do realize we were set up, right” and “this was a date, tomioka-san” were the highlight for me, haha. and i’m inordinately fond of the title.

day 8 - halloween (or n*sfw) -sexy stuff isn’t my forte at all!!!! so halloween it was, but. i was thinking of skipping out on this one, and then was like, oh what the hell, you’ve come this far, of course you’re going to go the last leg, too. already wrote enough notes on this one too, but yeah, this one really was quick, and just barely meets the prompt, i think, lmao. ended up being more of a fantasy au, which was fun, though there was a lot left unexplored. ultimately just glad that i was able to come up with something for the last stretch. :)

please feel free to drop me an ask if you have any thoughts or comments! i’d love to hear your thoughts on the fics for the week, if you’d like to share. :)

thanks for reading!!

#author's notes #giyushinoweek #thank you!!#spitting out more notes without proofreading ayyyy

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emilywatchescursedshow · 3 years

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Spn Season 1 Review

Hoboy

First, the live blogs of the last 4 episodes were done in a haze of jetlag depression so were less specific to what was actually happening in the episodes than normal and contained no extraneous information. HOWMEVER. I will get into those episodes more in this recap because:

1. I do not feel like the season really Led Up to this finale. Part of that could be because I took a bit of a break halfway through, but I think also the groundwork for the Sam/John parallel they tell us about was not really set up in previous episodes. 2. I think that the characterization of the brothers and their relationship to John is really Interesting in these episodes and the drama of that is a big part of the show as a whole, so the last several episodes are pretty relevant here.

THEMING The theme of season 1 is more or less: family. How do you handle family trauma and loss? How do you as a parent protect your children vs let them have independent lives (or just suck major ass)? To what extent is your family holding you back? Etc. The two sort of relationship dynamics this plays in is the Sam/Dean dynamic and the John/sons dynamic.

DEAN Dean’s characterization through this theme remains pretty consistent: he wants to be with his family. He showed up to get Sam at the beginning of the season, and he wants to keep them all alive at the end of the season instead of sacrificing John to kill the demon. The irony is that the season ends with them all “dying” (I know they’re not dead, but right now that’s what the show wants us to believe) and Dean’s insistence on family unity is what ends up getting them all killed.

Dean’s story line throughout has been one of responsibility assumed too early. After their mom died, his dad basically made him co-parent. Dean had to give up his ambitions to bend to his dad’s wishes while also trying to protect Sam from John and various monsters. It makes sense for him, given that backstory, that keeping the family together is his highest priority: he has been forced to give up all sense of self to keep his family safe, so if they die then he literally has nothing. I think it’s interesting that Dean is the only one of him or Sam who actually knew their mother, and yet Sam is the one who gets a mother-relevant character arc.

That might be because of the next aspect of Dean’s character we see: he likes to have sex with women. I tend to be pretty sensitive to misogyny/mistreatment of women on screen, so either I’ve lost my mind or I’m already watching this show through a very queer lens because Dean’s treatment of women throughout the season Did Not Bother Me. The only thing that really rang sour was at the beginning of Provenance when Dean is lying to women about his job to get into bed with them, but even then, like, eh? The whole scene (and all the other such scenes) are depicted with a lightheartedness that is hard to read malice into, and Jackles plays that part with such a wide-eyed “Wow! I get to have sex now!” that it’s hard not to feel anything but happy for the guy. I do suspect that Dean is supposed to be characterized as “treating women like whores/expendable” and so does not have an attachment to his mother in this season because he’s not allowed to have a complex relationship with a woman.

SAM Uh boy. So Sam’s arc begins with his girlfriend getting immolated - we learn later that Sam wanted to propose to her and so she was getting in the way of the demon’s plans for “kids like him.” Whatever that means - the show does not communicate its stakes to us AT ALL, more on that later. Sam gets some episodes of characterization throughout. The only two I can remember are the one with the abused psychic and the one where a woman decides she’s in love with him within seconds of meeting him. In neither episode to I really feel like I understand Sam as a character. We are told at various points that he really loved Jessica and her death has affected him greatly. At the beginning of the season, he dreams about it often, but these dreams end up being psychic in nature (I think?) and fall off by mid season. He doesn’t have a keepsake of hers to gaze at longingly or any other way of showing he’s having trouble letting go. Dean basically lets him off the leash to go kiss Sarah in Provenance, which he seems pretty happy to do and has no real guilt over after. Sam’s characterization is carried out very directly - we are told what he is feeling or had felt, instead of some combination of saying it via dialogue and reading it from his actions. I’ve mentioned that I don’t think Jarp is especially strong as an actor, but I have to chalk this up to both weaknesses in writing and acting because scenes that communicate Sam’s internal world are largely nonexistent IMO.

We are told that the connection between their mother’s death and Jess’s death has had a great impact on Sam. He believes that he is cursed so that the “people he loves” (read, women) will die. While in a broad sense this might be true as the demon does admit to have targeted Sam, the supposed “curse” is not really dealt with by Sam except as a barrier in his journey to move on from lost love. Jess’s death served as Sam’s call to adventure at the beginning of the season and should give some emotional connection to Sam’s continued commitment to hunting, but until the final episodes Sam’s involvement in the monster world is continually explained as “wants to find dad” and not “wants to break curse.” In these episodes, Sam’s Jess backstory comes back and we are told that his desire to kill the demon makes him “like John.” Which. Is. Stupid. Let me explain.

In terms of the theming, Sam’s wanting to kill the demon even though it might cost the lives of any number of the Winchesters makes sense because of his established relationship with his family. He wanted to have a normal life which alienated him from Dean and John. Sam has very negative memories of John, and has little brother blindness to the stuff Dean did for him growing up and is largely unhappy with Dean as well. Thus it is not surprising that to Sam, a Winchester dying is not as large a price to pay if it means that Sam gets to have a normal life.

HOWEVER. I am giving the show a LOT of credit here because they DO NOT make that connection, instead going for the stupid “Sam is like John” parallel which is treated almost like a surprise reveal. John’s reasons for killing the demon are NOT Sam’s reasons for killing the demon. John is motivated by revenge to an insane degree: it has consumed his life and the lives of both of his sons. Sam is not revenge motivated. He moves on from Jess’s death in literally THE EPISODE before the finale run starts. Sam is motivated by what he has always been motivated by: his desire for a normal life, including a wife who wont burst into flames. So on a thematic level, short-handing these character conflicts as “Sam is like John” (which is explicitly stated multiple times throughout these episodes) does not work because these characters are approaching family from a very different place even if they end up with the same goal.

I do want to mention that I think Sam’s backstory of wanting a normal life could have been set up better; the show does a good job with Dean’s “too much responsibility too young” child stand-in, but Sam does not get a “I just wanted to go to prom” child stand-in. Which I miss because that would be HILARIOUS. I think the issue the show has here with Sam is, in short, that Sam wanting to be normal is Very Boring, whereas the world of monsters and how Tortured and Jaded everyone is is much Sexier.

JOHN The text of the show is pretty unabashed about telling us things that John did that a reasonable audience member could interpret as being Very Bad. In the brief moments he has on the show, the dynamic between him and his sons is mixed. There are plenty of heartfelt family moments, and there are plenty of fights. I think the show is definitely weakest when it is following John by himself. I do not care about John except as he relates to Sam and Dean, and really if he is in any sort of danger I just want him to die based on how awful he is as a person, so the suspense does not swing the way the writers maybe wanted it to.

I think the twist at the end, where Dean realizes the demon has possessed their dad because he’s acting nicer, just b a r e l y works based on what they’ve set up. Honestly, I think the real problem is that John Winchester’s actor does not, to me, read as having any onscreen charisma. In the altercations that he has with Sam, I don’t really feel a threat from him. There isn’t any explosive or destructive energy, just sort of “your mom is mad you ate the last of her ice cream” energy. I’ve literally BEEN a more intimidating fake drill sergeant than John Winchester and I’m 5 feet tall and 110 lbs. John has big sad wet dog energy. He can get mad, but not in a way that’s actually intimidating. Thus, him telling Dean that he’s proud is sort of like “yeah, I bet this milksop is proud or whatever” and not “wow I would have expected that character to be a lot more upset right now.” I get that family dynamics can be complicated and a parent can cause you Bone Pain with just a look that to anyone else would seem harmless, but this is a television show where things have to read on screen. One Look Bone Pain is a lot more nuanced to construct. I think John being Big Mean Drill Sergeant is what they’re trying for, but in my opinion he's mostly just annoying.

Anyway John sucks.

WHAT’S NOT THERE The above talks a lot about what *is* in the show vis. the family theme. But Emily, this is a monster show. What about the monsters? Well. What about them indeed.

This first season of Supernatural is very clearly referencing the tradition of The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A lot of former X-Files people are credited on the season and they mention BTVS by name in an episode that is clearly themed around season 6 Buffy villains. Howmever. Both TXF and BTVS have a very important thing that Supernatural does not. STAKES. And not just ones meant for vamps that then get ignored by SPNs stupid vamp lore voice over.

Both BTVS and TXF handle their monsters very differently. BTVS is a universe where the main character has been fully initiated into the world of monsters so that, throughout the course of the episode, it is reasonable for her to detail pretty specifically what the monster is and what it is capable of. On the other hand, the characters in TXF must always be kept on the edge of the monster world, getting faint glimpses here and there. Usually, Mulder has an expository scene giving information on “what is known” at the beginning of the episode and then further monstrosity is communicated to the audience via interstitial scenes that tell the audience what the monster is and where it’s going, introducing dramatic tension: AA NO SCULLY DON’T TOUCH THAT IT’S SUPER GROSS. Both avenues successfully communicate to the audience what the monsters are (approximately), what they can do, and what their motivations are. This means that in the climactic scene, the audience knows what the STAKES are. They know what might be lost of the main characters fail, they know what the characters need to overcome to succeed, and they know what the monster is trying to accomplish.

Now. Some of the MOTW episodes in Supernatural do communicate what the monster is and what it wants. Scarecrow and Bugs are two that come to mind that both do this. Tellingly, both of these episodes also seem very modeled on TXF (compare/contrast Bugs with the trash golem episode of TXF where Mulder hip thrusts after sticking a flamingo in the yard, essay for another time).

Home is the first Supernatural episode that I identified as being extremely plot-oriented after the pilot. It’s also the first episode after the pilot to give sole writing credit to Kripke. There are interstitial scenes wherein the audience sees spooky stuff happening. However, these scenes do not further the audience’s understanding of the monster - we already know the house is evil and trying to kill people, and that’s pretty much all those scenes show. Moreover, Sam and Dean do not learn more about the monster in the house during this episode; their arc is basically just “Wow, isn’t it strange that the house is spooky now? Our mom died here!” The resolution at the end is borderline incomprehensible and their mother just sort of. Appears. Out of nowhere and then vanishes again with very little emotional weight given to this occurrence later in the episode or in the next episode. My summary of Home was pretty much “I did not like this and don’t want to be mean.” I talked about how I like monsters in monster shows, whereas Supernatural is more of a soap opera.

And yeah, the finale of Supernatural (written by Kripke) basically follows that track as well. I don’t know what these demons are or what they want. I don’t know what they can do besides possess people. When Meg confronts people and talks all big it’s hard for me to take seriously because I don’t know what she wants or what she is capable of, except in that one scene where she wanted to fuck Sam which. gross!

This is what I mean by saying that Supernatural does not have stakes. When the choice between losing a family member verses not defeating the monster is posited, the only reason I as an audience member feel engaged is the family conflict that has been established. There is no tension about the monster because I just have to assume that it will do whatever the writers decide it should do. I’m not weighing the odds of the Winchesters winning, I’m just watching them point guns at each other and hoping for the best.

CONCLUSION Jensen Ackles does a good job of playing Dean and he should get an award especially for his performances in the last two episodes of the show. IMO, he basically carried the emotional weight of the conflict and really made us root for Sam to not shoot his dad which is HARD because of how badly John sucks. I’m going to keep watching this show because of Jensen Ackles playing Dean Winchester. Fight me about it.

I think season 1 of Supernatural felt like watching two different shows with the same main characters. On the one hand, you have the MOTW episodes which invariably begin with “Here’s why we’re not tracking down our dad, even though that’s our stated motivation” and then tell a nice monster mystery with some good character beats. On the other hand, you have the series arc episodes, which are soap operas with demonic elements. I’m fine with it - because of Jensen Ackles as Dean Winchester. I’m interested to see what season 2 is like.

#supernatural #season 1 review #spn

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theglintoftherail · 7 years

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Review: The 1972 Annual World's Best SF

For years and years, I’ve been collecting editions of the Annual World’s Best SF anthology series edited by Donald A. Wollheim, which ran from 1972 to 1990. A couple of years ago I decided to commit to reading or rereading every single one of them - and to reviewing every single story in each of them on Goodreads. As of now, I’ve gotten through 10 of them and reviewed a total of 107 stories, which can all be found here!

I’m doing this partly to expose myself to a wide range of SF in order to grow as an SF author, and partly because there are so many great SF authors whose work didn’t just stick around in public consciousness for one reason or another. I’ve found so many authors that I absolutely love and had never heard of before. (And because those authors are not widely read, it makes me feel like a total SF hipster, which is perversely enjoyable.)

Here are the reviews of the stories from the 1972 edition:

The Fourth Profession, Larry Niven

Well what do you know. I’ve read a few things by Larry Niven and straight-up disliked most of them, but this one was very fun. A few mysterious aliens have landed on Earth, and a bartender happens to get one of them way too drunk and is given pills that essentially give him superpowers. It’s well-paced and funny, with likeable characters and surprisingly high stakes. The ending didn’t quite live up to the rest of the story, but I still liked this a lot.

Gleepsite, Joanna Russ

The editor’s intro to this one recommended reading it twice or even three times, and I’m glad it did, because it’s pretty much impenetrable on the first read – but once I figured out what was going on, it was really cool and fairly chilling. It packs a huge amount of worldbuilding and characterization into about five pages. I’d hate to spoil it so I’ll just say, it opens on a woman with bat wings pedaling dream machines in a polluted dystopian wasteland where most of the men on Earth have died, and goes all sorts of even weirder places from there.

The Bear with the Knot on His Tail, Stephen Tall

Eh. Maybe it’s just that this story is closing in on 50 years old, but it was really just a bog-standard ‘humans discover the first alien life and oh no they’re in trouble’ story. I really thought there was going to be an interesting twist at the end – I even thought I could see how they were setting it up – but nope.

The Sharks of Pentreath, Michael G. Coney

In the near-ish future, overpopulation has resulted in a system where at any given time, two-thirds of the population is kept in Matrix-style tanks and can interact with the outside world via tiny robots, and people swap out on regular schedules. The story’s about an innkeeper at a popular tourist destination who is currently in non-Matrix-mode and who is kind of a dick. I always like SF where the speculative part is just a backdrop to a character-based story, but there was something about the whole concept that just didn’t feel quite right to me - and honestly, the main character was just too much of an asshole for his ‘I learned a lesson’ moment to ring true for me.

A Little Knowledge, Poul Anderson

Three human criminals stranded on a planet of extremely pacifistic aliens kidnap an alien space pilot so that they can sell forbidden technology to a warrior race. I loved everything about the premise, the characters, the worldbuilding, the plot resolution, etc – but the pacing was bizarrely bad, particularly when compared to how strong everything else was. Huge exposition dumps, lengthy scenes that were interesting but have little plot importance followed by rushing through much more significant events, more exposition, etc. Still worth reading, but man, somebody should have taken a scalpel to this thing.

Real-Time World, Christopher Priest

A group of research scientists in an enclosed space station are secretly being manipulated by the people who sent them there, via carefully controlled feeds of news and information personalized for each of them. I loved this at the beginning, but then a bunch of additional SF concepts and twisty plot elements were added in, and then more, and then more. Which could have been cool, but in practice it just wound up making kind of an incoherent hash of what could have been two or even three good stories.

All Pieces of a River Shore, R. A. Lafferty

Perfect from start to finish… almost entirely. An eccentric Native American collector of Old West and Native American artifacts has run across a few impossibly detailed, several-foot-long paintings of the banks of the Mississippi River. He has a theory that there are even more of them out there, and that they might actually depict the entire span of the river when put together. I loved everything about this – but the final cymbal-crash line that explains the mystery pretty much requires you to have had personal experience with 1970s information storage technology. I had to google the story to figure out what the hell was going on, and once I did, it was like “Oh! I see, awesome!”

With Friends Like These . . . , Alan Dean Foster

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, there was a galactic war in which the humans, fighting on the side of the good guys, destroyed the enemy so thoroughly and terrifyingly that the rest of the galaxy forced them all back to Earth and barricaded them in there. But now the bad guys are back, so the other good guys plan to free these mythical monstrous warriors. I wasn’t mad at this, but I personally dislike the trope of ‘humans are the most exceptional race in the galaxy.’ (Also, in general I feel like 70s SF throws a lot of psychic abilities shit around when there’s no real need or justification for it, so that aspect was also annoying.)

Aunt Jennie's Tonic, Leonard Tushnet

A research chemist interviews his old-country hedge-witch-style aunt in order to discover the secrets of her medicines. There was a lot I liked about this, but the main character was just too much of an idiot for me to be fully immersed in it. “I’m purposefully not even writing down the parts of these processes that I think are bullshit, even though there’s no real reason not to” plus “I didn’t make any backup copies of my notes on this incredibly valuable medicine recipe” equals how the hell did you ever manage to become a research chemist in the first place.

Timestorm, Eddy C. Bertin

Did you know that changing the past in a way that you’d think would be beneficial might actually cause something terrible to happen? A guy gets transported to a future place where aliens are doing things to Earth’s past that seem bad, he stops them, oh no they were actually helping. Like the third story, this was either unoriginal at the time or feels unoriginal now that we’ve seen it a million times. And the collection of things that the aliens were manipulating was weirdly arbitrary – stopping the birth of Hitler and the birth of… the Marquis de Sade? Really? And of course, since this was written in 1971, it opens on the assassination of JFK.

Transit of Earth, Arthur C. Clarke

Ok, well this almost made me cry. A Mars exploration mission is doomed and they’re going to run out of food/oxygen, so everyone but one man takes suicide pills early in order to give the man enough time to record a rare astrological phenomenon before he dies. The story is written as a combination of his notes of the transit of Earth plus his personal reflections on life and death. It’s really great. (There is also an almost completely throw-away suggestion that maybe just maybe there are also aliens on Mars, which added absolutely nothing to the plot and probably should have been edited out.)

Gehenna, K. M. O'Donnell (aka Barry N. Malzberg)

This was gorgeous. It’s three vignettes about characters with intersecting lives – all of them go to the same party, and their meeting there changes their lives in various ways, but each story also takes place in a just slightly different world. It uses parallel universes as a metaphor for how everyone’s experience of the world and their conception of themselves is totally different from what other people see. The fact that the stories are taking place in parallel universes is established at the beginning of each vignette by a device that I thought was really cool – each character takes the subway down from Times Square to get to the party, and the stations they pass are all numbered differently. (I looked up another review of this and the reviewer described it as ‘funny’ and ‘an amusing puzzle,’ which is hilarious to me – I thought “how could we have read it so differently” and then realized that that’s exactly what the story is about…)

One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty, Harlan Ellison

Earlier in this project I read Jeffty is Five, also by Harlan Ellison, and this is so similar that I would have known immediately that it was the same author even if I wasn’t already aware. You can never go back to your lovingly-described childhood which specifically involves a lot of comic books and radio dramas and delicious no-longer-produced candy, but you desperately want to because your adult life is boring, but if you try to, it will have terrible consequences, because childhood is delicate and precious. This story is good on a technical level but that theme just doesn’t do anything for me at all, so I didn’t love it.

Occam's Scalpel, Theodore Sturgeon

The mysterious head of a shadowy criminal organization is about to die, and his personal doctor is worried about the right-hand man who is primed to replace him, so he goes to his brother for help… but what kind of help? There are a couple things in this story that are awfully convenient, and it does rely on a super-genius being tricked in a way that an actual super-genius would almost certainly see right through, but I liked the concept enough to overlook those things.

Favorites: Gleepsite, All Pieces of a River Shore, Transit of Earth, Gehenna

#science fiction #sf #classic science fiction #classic sf #Larry Niven #Joanna Russ #Stephen Tall #Michael G. Coney #Poul Anderson #Christopher Priest #R. A. Lafferty #Alan Dean Foster #Leonard Tushnet #Eddy C. Bertin #Arthur C. Clarke #K. M. O'Donnell #Barry N. Malzberg #Harlan Ellison #Theodore Sturgeon

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