Reading Wednesday

[sabotabby]

Recently finished: Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time: An LGBT and two-spirit sci-fi anthology, edited by Hope Nicholson. I should probably stop prefacing reviews of short story anthologies with "well, I'm usually not that into short stories but" because I've read a bunch of great ones lately, and this is no exception. It's exactly what it says on the tin: queer and Two-Spirited Indigenous sci-fi, by some incredible authors, including Gwen Benaway (heart eyes), Daniel Heath Justice, and other authors who impressed me and I now must check out. You should probably read it for the one by Darcie Little Badger about puppies in space because it's just beyond charming and I want to have a copy to re-read when I'm in a bad mood. There's more serious fare too, and reckoning with trauma,  but in general it's an imaginative and uplifting series of views into Indigenous futurism.

Heart Berries: A Memoir by Terese Marie Mailhot. How much you enjoy—if enjoy is the right word—this one corresponds to how much you like to be gut-punched, I guess? I read it in one sitting because I was visiting my cat at the veterinary hospital and she fell asleep in my lap. It's a familiar story in many ways: A shitty older white male professor destroys his brilliant, bipolar grad student, and she fights to get out of the mental health hole she's fallen into. Dudes. Stop doing this. Stop breaking amazing young women. It's gorgeously written and devastating.

Currently reading: Peter Watts Is an Angry Sentient Tumor: Revenge Fantasies and Essays by Peter Watts. This might be the case of the right book at the wrong time for me, but I'm reading it anyway because Peter Watts is hilarious even when he's hurting me. It's mainly a compilation of his posts from Rifters, which I haven't read in awhile and should probably go back to reading regularly. The only novel I've read of his was Blindsight, which still holds the record of Most Upsetting Sci-Fi Book I've Ever Read (I came thinking "lol space vampires" and stayed for the brutal existential horror), and you either love or hate that. I fall into the former camp but I understand why people fall into the latter.

Anyway, the essays. Peter Watts? Not a happy guy. Which is understandable as I'm 3/4 through the book and his brother and father have died, two of his cats died (described, of course, in the sort of visceral detail and grief that only a biologist-turned-author can manage), he's contracted flesh-eating disease, he accidentally dissolved a toad in Drano, and the world is ending. This is what I mean about maybe not being the right thing for me to read right now.

This said, it's really good. Also he name-checks @ed_rex in the first essay, which amused me because I'm old and I remember reading that exchange.

Comments

Peter Watts

[dewline]

One of those authors I keep meaning to get around to reading...

Re: Peter Watts

[sabotabby]

Highly recommend Blindsight with the caveat that it is the literary equivalent of this sign: https://www.amazon.com/PetKa-Signs-Graphics-PKFO-0167-NA_10x7-Aluminum/dp/B01549ZRLS

*

[minoanmiss]

*stares in astonishment at that last book's description*
*copiesthis down so I can save the info of the first book*

Re: *

[sabotabby]

If he wasn’t a friend of friends, I would not believe that one man could have that amount of awful shit happen to him but I have it on good authority that it’s all true (and some of it made the news, like the reason he’s banned from the States).

I suspect you’ll adore the first one.

[evilpettingz00]

I typically avoid short stories because I really love to get into the characters and I find with short stories, I either don't and therefore don't get into the story, or I do and feel the story's too short because I want more of them. Puppies in space sound like a necessary thing to read about, though.

[sabotabby]

Yes, that's exactly it.

The puppies in space women are insta-endearing though. I'd read a whole novel about their adventures.

[hano]

I adore Peter Watts, for some reason I didn't know he had a new collection out. Thanks for the heads up!

[sabotabby]

I didn't know either until I saw it in a Seattle bookstore. I like to do my bit to spread the word!

[rdi]

I have Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time but haven't cracked it open yet.

Also a fan of Peter Watts, and have a copy of Echopraxia, which is a sequel of sorts to Blindsight, waiting to be read.

[sabotabby]

Ah, read it. It's short and you'll love it.

I keep meaning to read Echopraxia but tbh the world of Blindsight isn't one that I'm all that eager to revisit, as brilliant as I thought it was. Like I keep going, "absolutely I'll read it when I'm not so depressed."

[lapinlunaire]

I love short stories! Some stories just work better in a short format. I feel like stories in a mundane setting can be pretty boring because you don't always get to know the characters very well, but when it comes to SFF it's easier to find stuff to hold my attention. If you want recs for other good anthologies, let me know! I hadn't heard of this one but I'll look for it.

I'm curious about Blindsight now.

I don't think I'll be able to read Heart Berries, that sounds really upsetting.

[sabotabby]

I'm happy to take recs! For me, short stories aren't as compelling as novels for the same reason that film isn't as compelling for me as TV. Both of the former can absolutely be superior but I don't bond with it in the same way.

So Blindsight. It's been a long time since I've read it but it stuck with me. It's hard sf about vampires in space. I mean it's not about that—despite a dissertation at the end of the novel about how vampires work, it's about the nature of consciousness, but I picked it up because I heard it had a plausible explanation for vampires. (Short version: vampires were an ancient offshoot of homo sapiens sapiens that were apex predators with, among other things, really good night vision and a protein deficiency that required them to human people. Part of the night vision created a mental glitch that wasn't a problem because there are no right angles in nature, but as soon as humans developed to a point where they started building things with right angles, they were able to exploit the vision glitch and give the vampires seizures, eventually hunting them to extinction.)

But that's just like this peripheral thing to explain why one of the characters is a vampire and everyone else is sort of a vampire so that they can go on long-distance flights. Anyway they encounter an alien spacecraft and attempt first contact and it goes really, really badly and concludes with some depressing theories about life in the universe.

So if you want to be horribly depressed you can read it for free. off the author's website.

(It's not depressing in the way that Heart Berries is depressing. It's depressing in a whole other different way.)

The internet ate my comment!

[ed_rex]

Fortunately, it was short, so I can more or less reproduce it.

This said, it's really good. Also he name-checks ed_rex in the first essay, which amused me because I'm old and I remember reading that exchange.

If you're old, what in the world does that make me!

Anyway, thanks for the heads-up on the ego-boo. I've been meaning to get my hands on Watts' new book, but haven't been in a hurry since I read his blog pretty regularly. Clearly, though, I owe it to my daughter's future pride in her daddy to get my hands on a paper copy toute-suite!

Re: The internet ate my comment!

[sabotabby]

If you're old, what in the world does that make me!

Eternally young, Geoffrey!