Enormous

My high school history teacher, Miss Lavoie, once mentioned to the class that she was thinking of writing a paper on some topic we were discussing.  This led to a long, confused discussion about why an adult--anyone, really--would write a paper that wasn't required for a grade.

Suddenly I understand it.  There is so much going on in Lifelode, by Jo Walton, that I'm not even sure I could list it all, let alone expound on it.

Let's start with the most obvious, interesting, easy to talk about fact of this book: its relationship with time.  The whole book is told in the present tense--but the timeline jumps around.  Every scene is in present tense, including flashbacks, memories within scenes, everything.  There are a very few words in the past tense within the book outside of dialog.  When it does appear, it's invariably referring to something that happened a moment ago in the same scene, not an earlier moment in time.

An example: Hanethe is helping with the harvest and thinking about how much she dislikes the job and always has.

She remembers, as she thrusts a gathered sheaf into the hands of the youngster behind, the harvest after the plague.  Young Hanethe cuts and cuts, her legs trembling at every step, not daring to shut her aching eyes for a minute in case she falls asleep in the field.

The narrative also skips around in time, not only from a distant future where several characters are discussing whether to write a book about the main events of the story, but laying down scenes out of order, introducing the character who arrived second, then later the one who arrived first, then later still showing the arrival scene of the second.  We learn about the night the alarm was sounded and everyone armed themselves, and then we see the characters putting away their weapons.  Several tranquil, domestic scenes later we learn what happened on the wall that night.

And the thing is, it's not awkward.  So far, I'm pretty sure I haven't been confused once.  I've been curious, yes, and really wanted to know what was going on, but not confused at all.

Another element of this relationship with time is that the main character, Taveth, can see through time a bit.  When she's talking to someone, she sees shadows of their older and younger selves, who they have been and who they will be.  She gets hints from these people of what might happen, though only slight--she doesn't converse with these shadows. 

Even the reality of this world has a complicated relationship with time.  Days pass differently depending on where you are geographically, and depending on which direction you travel in, the year you're gone might pass at home as a month or a decade. 

It's confusing just to write about, right?  Look how long this blog post is!  But the thing is, it's seamless.  I've read  more confusing world building in nonfiction books, I kid you not.  It's a smooth, seamless read, and the hints and indications you get out of order build the story in exactly the right way.  It's a domestic fantasy, for the most part, about the relationships of the people at Applekirk and how a moment of crisis--one moment, as we clearly understand, no more nor less telling than any other moment in the centuries of this village--touches all those relationships.

This post is already huge, and I haven't even touched on the range and depth of the meanings of love that are addressed here (brief rundown: spouses, permanent pairings called sweetmates, casual lovers, the desire to hold onto your children, the rush of unexpected sexual desire, the affection you feel for an incredibly irritating 14 year old--especially when he was a sweet kid, and double especially when you can sort of see through time and know that he's going to be a good man when he grows up).  Again, I'm pretty sure I'm not being hit over the head with it (though sometimes I miss it when books do try to bludgeon you, so corrections appreciated)--it's just there, as natural as breathing--this is a world in which all these loves exist, and here is how they work.

And of course the other topic I wanted to cover, which is Jo Walton's work in general and how you MUST read Ha'Penny and Tooth and Claw, and I must read The King's Peace and Among Others as soon as possible. Lifelode is deceptively simple, domestic, and not earth-shattering.  But as my sister is fond of saying about her nephew: it's freaky smart.

An Imperfect World

Alternate post title: Jo Walton is a brilliant genius.

Never mind her ability to write charming, fascinating, beautifully constructed stories that I love.  And don't just look at the incredibly different stories she takes on, from alternate 20th century history to Victorian dragons to domestic fantasy. (And I'm also not just saying that because she linked to my blog that one time.)

No, what makes me say "genius" is the kinds of enormous conceptual ideas she undertakes when she writes.  She tells stories that read as very feminine--personal, intimate, and based around the emotions and psychology of individuals and families, and that are often centered in the domestic sphere.  But she uses these stories to take on ideas that are every bit as big as any Great American Novelist might pick up (and my apologies to her for the comparison, as she's British; I don't know if the Great British Novelist is a thing). 

Lifelode was about love and family and complicated domestic relationships, but it was also about how time and memory work, and intimacy and geography and a lot of other things.  Farthing was a murder mystery with a charming, flighty aristocratic girl for a narrator, and also about the insidious appeal of fascism to the intellectual.  Tooth and Claw was about Victorian dragons, but it was also about how the strictures of culture are no less binding or real for being artificially constructed.

And now I'm reading The Just City (which I got as an advance copy from Netgalley thankyouverymuch) and it is blowing my mind.  Seriously, after Ancillary Justice I thought I'd met my quota of compulsively readable concept novels for a few months, but no, here's this gorgeous piece of work that has me wanting to read Plato, for crying out loud.

So the idea here is that in Plato's Republic, he outlined what the perfect society would look like.  The goddess Athene decided it would make a cool experiment to try it out, so she got some people throughout history (if you ever prayed to Athene to let you live in The Republic, you're in) and they started setting it up.  Children raised from age 10 (acquired from slave markets and ancient Greek orphanages), duties assigned according to skills, technology and art from across the ages come together to create an ideal world, with the hope that, raised on a diet of all that is Good and Right, the best of their generation will grow up to be philosopher kings.

What would happen if these ideas were put to the test?  Well, a lot of things, from disagreements to entrenched sexism, to ten-year-olds maybe not being quite as blank-slatey as Plato expected.  To Socrates himself showing up and turning things on their heads.

I was about to talk about all the themes, but so many of them come back to choice and consent and personhood.  This is stated very bluntly by Apollo, who shows up to learn about exactly these things, but it's reflected in so many ways throughout the story.  Slavery is a big one, since most of these children were bought.  The shadow of slavery hangs over things, from the robots who do the menial tasks (can a city claim to be egalitarian if someone still has to do the gruntwork?) to the children bought from slavery who, in different ways, don't leave it behind.  

The more specific ideas of consent and equality turn up, unsurprisingly, in the experiences of women.  Although Plato's society has women as equals, not everyone believes everything Plato said with equal ferocity.  The place of sex in society (because eros is inferior to agape and philos), the ways women have to deal with their own concerns (because if you tell everyone he raped you, they won't believe you and they'll look down on you afterwards), and the difference between the lives of the adults and the world they're constructing for the children (sex/procreation by lottery, anyone?) are all complicated and invite you to think your way through a logical society until the logic starts to fall apart under the constant footsteps of normal, flawed human beings, all trying to do their best.

I love the Socratic dialogues.  I love the different information you get when you switch points of view, and see Apollo's take on the masters, and the children's take on their world.  I love that Socrates keeps trying to get the robots to talk to him (I'm only halfway through the book, but I'm pulling for a robot uprising led by Socrates).  I love everything about this book, and I'm thrilled that the sequel, The Philosopher Kings, comes out in June.  I'm absolutely preordering it.

My First Con: Smashing Success

It seems strange that I've never been to a fannish gathering before. I've never considered myself a con person; I actually tend to shy away from listening to the creative types behind my favorite works.  I mostly blame Hollywood and Orson Scott Card for that.

But then Mike sent me this link, and Ann Leckie was giving a keynote at some thing in Cambridge, and Jo Walton was going to be there, too, and oh yes just everyone else on my Kindle thank you very much. So I talked Lily and Christian into coming with me to listen to Ann Leckie speak.

Which was delightful.  The whole thing was delightful.  Ann Leckie was delightful--she claimed it was her first speech, which I have a hard time believing because is it possible to win a Hugo and a Nebula and a bunch of other things without giving a speech (even if you discount thank you speeches)?  Also it was a good speech, about our cultural fear of AI and how it's a fear of the Other and therefore dangerous to keep around unexamined.  I wanted very, very badly to grab her and make her talk to me extensively afterward.

Then, after Lily and Christian went home, I went Jo Walton's reading, from the next book in the Just City series, Necessity, which will be out this summer.  After that, since there was nothing else going on, the crowd (about half of whom seemed to know each other) coaxed her into reading some of her poetry.  I'd never read any of that, and it was really lovely (Prospero's monologue to his daughter came very close to making me cry), but it also (like so many other things) started me thinking about Hamilton and the how much I love the use of formal structures in language (and how much trouble I have connecting with free verse, which I suppose is why I think of myself as not caring for poetry.  Separate blog post, really).

And after that, I got into the elevator with Jo Walton, and when I mentioned that I was walking to the bookstore where she was doing a signing, she walked with me, since she didn't quite know the way from the building we were in.  And we had a lovely chat, about first cons and blog posts and domestic fantasy, and she is a great lady and I was only a little too fawning, if I do say so myself.  When we got to the bookstore I got a copy of Lifelode, which I read years ago, but isn't available as an ebook and hasn't been in print in a while.  Now I have one, and it's autographed, so there.

After lunch (Darwin's, for the record, where I haven't been in years but oh, that Mt. Auburn sandwich is still delightful; I ate only sandwiches this weekend), I went back to the con for a panel on metaphysics, where I developed a pretty intense crush on Ada Palmer, whose first novel, Too Like the Lightning, I have from Netgalley and can't wait to read now. At the point where someone can explain to me how Renaissance philosophers wrestled with Homer in their attempts to understand whether Dante was divinely inspired, I need to subscribe to their newsletter. Pamela Dean spoke on that panel, too, and Jo Walton convinced me to buy her reissued ebook The Dubious Hills (which I have); also John Chu, author of the Hugo-winning story "The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere." 

At this point, as much as I was enjoying this, I had a raging headache, so I headed home.  This was my big solo weekend, when the menfolk were visiting my in-laws, so I ate another sandwich (torta from Tenoch, if you're keeping track) and started writing this post and called Lily to tell her that she left too early, and chatted online with my fanfic friends, and kept rereading The Goblin Emperor, which is such a lovely book.  And I put next year's Vericon in my calendar, because these are the conversations I want to have, just me and writers and thinkers whom I admire greatly and a handful of other fans. 

This is living.

Top Ten Tuesday: Underrated

Oh, I'm stealing this one from Elizabeth, because she was right, I was shocked at how many of my most beloved books don't have more than even 1,000 ratings on Goodreads! The Top Ten Tuesday feature is from Broke and Bookish, and today's list: Top Ten Books We Enjoyed That Have Under 2,000 Ratings On Goodreads.


So, I'm going to skip the really old or obscure ones--I mean, Rumer Godden doesn't need my boost, even on her "backlist," and the translation of that French nun book from the 1950s was terrible.  Let's just go with the stuff that I am truly shocked to learn is not being scored by 100 new people every day!

1) Lifelode, by Jo Walton.  Really, there isn't enough love for Jo Walton by definition, because All The Love would not be enough love.  But this one is definitely underrated.  There's a lot going on here with time and memory and alternate family situations.  But what it comes down to is just a beautiful glimpse of a moment, and the lives of some incredibly real people--some likable, some not--doing the best they can.

2) Sorrow's Knot, by Erin Bow. The Scorpion Rules is getting great buzz, but don't be afraid to go back to this fantasy novel with a Native American feel, because the friendships here are incredible.


3) Scarlett Undercover, by Jennifer Latham.  If Veronica Mars was Muslim and maybe a little supernatural.  But that dark noir bite? Is so hard to find.

4) I'm going to put a bunch of K.J. Parker novellas here, because I'm not going to choose between Blue and Gold, The Devil You Know, and Downfall of the Gods. (Oh, who am I kidding? Go read Blue and Gold.) Suffice it to say, all three of these books are clever and snarky and twisty, and clearly underrated, if only in that they're not often enough rated.

5) Shadowboxer, by Tricia Sullivan. Once again, I assume that because the word of mouth reached me, it reached everyone. The combination of cultures and mythology and way more about Muy Thai fighting than I ever believed I'd love to know.

6) Ursula Vernon--really, everything she writes.  I mean, maybe it's just that kids' books don't get many reviews on Goodreads, but seriously, Danny Dragonbreath, Harriet Hamsterbone, and my personal favorite, Castle Hangnail, are exactly what your children should be reading.  (Yes, Danny can be annoying when he finds girls weird. Even though he learns, some kids aren't aware of the boy/girl thing yet. Still.)

7) The Wolf Road, by Beth Lewis. I mean, okay, this just came out, but the far-future old-West feel is amazing, and Elka is one of my favorite not-quite-likeable characters ever.

8) Point of Honour, by Madeleine Robins! All the Sarah Tolerance books, people! Fallen woman turned private detective (living in the guest house behind her aunt's bordello) in the 1800s. Sarah is a badass, and if you guys don't start reading these there won't be more--please, for me!

9) Gena/Finn, by Hannah Moskowitz and Kat Helgeson. Maybe this one just hit me really close to home, but in the age of internet friends, it means so much to have a picture of what that kind of a bond can be.

10) The Golden City, by Kathleen J. Cheney. This one--this book was so great.  Fantasy set in turn of the century Portugal, with selkies--and, even better, a potential romance built on mutual respect and admiration before hormones.  This deserves way more attention.

I'm leaving out so much.  So many comics series (Princeless! The Three Thieves! Hexed, and its tie in novel, which was really surprisingly great!), so many old favorites (A Patch of Blue, The Nun's Story, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane), so many kids' books and novellas and brand new books that I have faith will still get their buzz.  I thought I was behind in my reading and reviewing; you guys have to get on the ball!