Weekly Roundup

Another week in what I’ve watched and read.

Books

Last week I had started into Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and I finished the book earlier this week. I enjoyed this one particularly for the portrayal of what goes on in the head of a woman who has been forced to become a handmaid – breeding stock for the upper classes, denied all rights of their own. The boredom of having no purpose other than to breed; the constant dwelling on suicide, on the past, on what might have happened to people she knew. The unnamed Handmaid of the title (we know her only as Offred, that is, the handmaid of Fred) is a well drawn character whose experiences in this society of distorted religious values are all too easy to believe. Elements of Stockholm Syndrome, survivor’s guilt, and all kinds of coping mechanisms make up her way of thinking. The book often has a dreamlike quality to it in the way it easily drifts from the emptiness of Offred’s current life into reminiscences of her past and how things got that way.

After finishing The Handmaid’s Tale, I quickly dove into a different book: Lauren Beukes’ The Shining Girls. This is a novel about a time-travelling serial killer, Harper Curtis, who moves around in time across a sixty year period stalking and killing his victims, his “shining girls”.

I intend to write a review of The Shining Girls up separately, but in this post I wanted to muse briefly on the juxtaposition of the two novels I read this week. Both deal in their way with female disempowerment.

In The Handmaid’s Tale it’s widespread institutionalised disempowerment: Women are disenfranchised, stripped of all rights, and exist only to serve the purposes of men. We see a society that has succeeded in stripping women of any power or strength they had. Those who had backgrounds in business, media, science, or civil rights received the harshest treatment for their transgression of traditional boundaries.

In The Shining Girls you have almost the opposite: These women that Harper kills are strong, independent women, women who deal with prejudice, who survive and succeed in the face of society’s judgement. Their disempowerment comes not from society but from a single man, a man who sees this quality in them and chooses to cut it out, out of some kind of fear and hatred of what they represent.

It could be said that both books, in a way, depict traditional, conservative society responding to the emergence of women into equality through forceful suppression.

Comics

The Unwritten volume 7, The Wound is the most recent in the ongoing series by Mike Carey and Peter Gross. I wrote a whole thing about this and then WordPress decided to stop autosaving. Let’s just say that it continues to be a fun and smart series, Pauly Bruckner’s issues remain the funniest, and I quite like the newest addition to the cast of characters, Australian police officer Didge Patterson.

The other comic I’ve read this week was Batwoman: To Drown the World, the second volume of this New 52 serial. Batwoman is one of the only mainstream superhero comics I read – generally I have little interest in DC and Marvel heroes, but Batwoman has a strong lead who faces up to some really weird enemies. It’s more interesting to me that what seems like the same old-same old of Batman’s familiar rogues gallery. This volume keeps up the high quality in writing and artwork, though I can’t help thinking I preferred Williams’ art slightly over that of Amy Reeder, who has taken over all of the pencilling now.

Guess I better hit publish before it decides to dump half the post again.

Weekly Roundup

Another week in what I’ve watched and read:

Books

This week’s book as China Miéville’s Embassytown, and I’ll get right to the point: This is one of my favourites of his so far. A story about language and communication, with Miéville’s very smart inventiveness providing a weird take on the dilemma of talking to aliens who engage with language differently from us. I will try to write up a longer post about this one.

Comics

A while back I picked up the big Blacksad hardback (by Juan Diaz Canales and Juanjo Guardino), and was pretty impressed with the art and the storytelling in this series about the eponymous private detective. This week I got the latest addition to that series, Blacksad: A Silent Hell. While it’s a little annoying that the publisher chose to put out a book containing one story in the same format and price as the previous book containing three, that doesn’t detract from the work itself. Once again we’re treated with the excellent watercolour artwork by Guardino; I particularly like the expressiveness of the various animal characters. The story I think was a little less strong than the previous ones, and the ambitious structure intertwining a one-night narrative with flashbacks to the days leading up to it didn’t quite work (I definately got confused about the order of events). But that’s only a minor detraction; overall Blacksad continues to be one of the better comics around.

Television

Continuing with the big X-Files watch, I have now finished the first season. There was really a hell of a lot of monster-of-the-week on this show, with only a bare handful of episodes sharing in a larger continuity. The quality of the series did seem to go up a little on the final disk, from “Tooms” to the finale. I’m still interested, at least. I’d like to see more ongoing plot and less filler. Hopefully season two has more to offer.

Weekly Roundup

Bit of a light one, this week.

Books

This week I was reading The Somnambulist, by Jonathan Barnes. Set in Victorian (well, I’m not sure if it qualifies when it’s after Victoria’s death) London, this starts out as a detective story but ends up in places much stranger and more interesting. It follows the magician and investigator Edward Moon and his enigmatic assistant, the mute giant called only The Somnambulist, as they attempt to solve a mystery surrounding a man’s death – and a possible threat to the city itself.

It’s quite a fun novel, with all kinds of weird characters and events. You’ve got a secret government agency made up of civil servants all badly disguised as Chinamen; an evil organisation where everyone is named Love; a man who lives backwards; assassins, psychics, bearded women… and then there are the Prefects.

The novel all comes together into a beautifully messy climax; Barnes handles stitching together the various points of view at the end quite well considering his unusual choice of narrator. (I do wonder how the narrator knew what the Somnambulist was thinking.) There’s also a sense of a larger world, of things going on before and after this novel in the lives of the characters and the city.

I enjoyed it.

Television

This week I started to watch The X-Files. I’ve seen the odd episode here and there, but now I’m planning to see the entire series and movies. My first impressions are:
- There are an awful lot of episodes (the majority so far) that involve Mulder and Scully being brought onto a case that is not known to be connected to an X-File, only for it to later turn out that something weird is going on. Few episodes I’ve watched have actually involved an X-File at all. I realise this is probably because investigating historical and closed cases won’t be as interesting as showing them involved in a fresh crime, but it sticks out.
- There were occasions where the lack of mobile phones back in 1993 has stuck out. (Mulder has used a cellphone, but only once so far.) I’m too used to Criminal Minds, where all the characters are constantly calling each other to check in or share information. It makes it all the more jarring when Mulder and Scully walk into the lair of a known murderer without letting a single person know where they are.

A Few Links

Good things seen on the web recently.

1.
You should read this excellent essay by Kameron Hurley on the depiction of women in media and in history lessons, and its effect on cultural perceptions. And also llamas.

So you forget the llamas that don’t fit the narrative you saw in films, books, television – the ones you heard about in the stories – and you remember the ones that exhibited the behavior the stories talk about. Suddenly, all the llamas you remember fit the narrative you see and hear every day from those around you. You make jokes about it with your friends. You feel like you’ve won something. You’re not crazy. You think just like everyone else.

2.
io9 has posted a very funny FAQ that tears apart the many, many plot holes in Star Trek Into Darkness. I saw the film a bit over a week ago, and while I did enjoy it, I can’t help but agree with the points made here. Note: Spoils the entire film.

3.
And in fiction, I recently read this excerpt from the novel Rupetta by Nike Sulway, posted on Weird Fiction Review: The Miracle of Consciousness. It has easily convinced me to buy the full novel. Check it out.

And Another Thing

I meant to include this in yesterday’s roundup, but it slipped my mind.

This week I started reading Nimona, a webcomic by Noelle Stevenson about a teenager who is sidekick to a supervillain. It’s very funny and has an interesting take on both the hero/villain idea and on the villain/sidekick relationship. Go read it!

I found out about this one because I’ve been keeping my eye on a new monthly column by Hannah K Chapman on Women In Comics. Hannah’s column is also why I decided to pick up I Kill Giants, another comic I loved recently. Check out her column (March and April for more good recommendations.

Weekly Roundup

I’ll try to blog more in between these posts.

Here’s what I’ve been reading since last week.

Books

Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts. Set in Cold War Russia, this is the story of science fiction writer Konstantin Skvorecky, recruited by Stalin, along with other writers, to come up with a convincing alien invasion story for the Soviet Union to use – and then told to forget all about it. Forty years later, some strange encounters begin to suggest that their story may be coming true.

With an ironic narrator and a fair share of humour, this is a pretty entertaining book. Early on I wasn’t quite drawn into it, and I was thinking that – after this and Splinter – Adam Roberts, while good, wasn’t quite for me. But then the book started going in some interesting places, and there are a couple of brilliant scenes in the second half, including one particularly fun scene with Skvorecky alone in a hospital room with an assassin. The ending is another good part, segueing easily from threat to farce to fantastically science fictional. The SF conceit behind the novel is quite a clever one.

Worth note is the rare inclusion of a positive portrayal of a heavily overweight woman, in the person of Skvorecky’s love interest, Dora Norman. This may be a humourous novel, but there are no cheap laughs about her weight to be found here – she’s treated with affection and respect. The same goes for her Scientologist faith – not a word of easy mockery. It’s something of a breath of fresh air.

Comics

1. Hawkeye: My Life as a Weapon, written by Matt Fraction, art by Dave Aja and Javier Pulido. This was my first taste of Hawkeye, and in fact my first Marvel comic, picked up because of the postive word of mouth. And it deserves every bit of praise it’s been getting. Hawkeye is clever, very funny, and Aja’s art in particular is brilliant. Read this comic.

2. Dial H: Into You, written by China Miéville, art by Mateus Santolouco. How could I not pick up a comic written by China Miéville? This series is one of the weirdest you’ll read, the protagonist Nelson turning into some incredibly surreal heroes whever he dials H-E-R-O on a particular phone. I have no idea how Miéville comes up with thing like the Iron Snail, but what I do know is that whatever he comes up with, he knows how to make it work. This is a funny and well-written series, with some meta-commentary on the genre of comic superheroes on top. Read this comic too.

3. The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the War of Words, by Mike Carey, Peter Gross, and others. This sixth volume of the series almost looks like it’s building to an ending, but it seems there’s still more to tell. Alternating the ongoing story of Tom Taylor’s struggle against the Cabal with stories of that cabal’s history and origins, this volume keeps up the high quality of storytelling from the series so far. Looking back now I’m not sure why I was so ambivalent about The Unwritten after the first volume. I hope they can keep this quality going through to the end (however far off that is). And I also hope they give us some more Pauly Bruckner – he’s only had two issues so far in the whole series, but he’s easily one of the most entertaining parts.

Roundup: The First

Clearly I can’t be trusted to write a book review every week. I’m thinking of just doing a weekly roundup of what I’ve been watching/reading instead, and this here is my first try of that. I’ll still do longer reviews when I can get myself going on them.

Books

1. It took me a couple of weeks really, but this week I finished reading A Hand-Book of Volapük by Andrew Drummond. The book combines actual instruction in the “universal language” of Volapük with a comic novel set in Scotland in 1889. The narrator is Mr Justice, General Secretary of the Edinburgh Society for the Propagation of a Universal Language. Justice is a keen supporter of Volapük, and spends his narrative extolling its virtues – and entirely oblivious to its flaws, which become apparent nevertheless to the reader.

Justice travels with a cantankerous, lecherous, and sesquipedalian six-hundred-year-old dead knight, which sentence should tell you something about the tone of the book.

The lessons in Volapük were genuinely instructive, and the unreliable narrator interesting, but I wasn’t quite carried away by this novel. The humour was only mildly amusing for me. But if you want to learn about an interesting and obscure constructed language, this will be more entertaining than an ordinary textbook.

2. I was in London over the weekend, and on the train there and back I read Farthing by Jo Walton. It’s a murder mystery novel set in an alternate history – one where the US never joined the Second World War, and the UK made peace with Hitler. A man is murdered in Farthing House, home to the Eversley family, who are at the centre of the politically influential Farthing Set. Inspector Carmichael of Scotland Yard is dispatched to investigate the crime. Lucy Kahn, daughter of Lord and Lady Eversley, provides an inside view of the family. Married to a Jewish man, she is somewhat estranged from her family, and the circumstances of the crime lead to her husband being a prime suspect.

This is equal parts crime novel and an exploration of privilege, power, racism, homosexuality, marriage as a political tool, the relationship between servants and masters, scapegoating, and all the things that go on behind closed doors among the upper classes. The world we’re shown isn’t some clean and polished version of the past but one where the scandals are close to the surface, known to all but simply not spoken about.

It was an enjoyable enough read, though not the most uplifting ending. There was one thing that bothered me, which is the use of the trope where a woman knows instantly that she is pregnant during the act of conception. It’s nonsense, but the book plays it straight, with Lucy deciding sans evidence that she’s pregnant and then spending the rest of the novel thinking and telling people about the baby.

Comics

1. Manhattan Projects vol. 1: “Science. Bad.” by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Pitarra. I’d heard some good things about this one, so decided to check it out. It’s a pretty out-there reimagining of the Manhattan Project, where instead of just developing the atomic bomb, the scientists are involved in all kinds of crazy science – interdimensional portals, alternate realities, aliens, split personalities, giant mechanical limbs. It hasn’t quite grabbed me yet, but I also felt the same way about The Unwritten when I read the first volume, and now I’m a big fan.

2. I Kill Giants by Joe Kelly and J M Ken Niimura. Another picked up because I’d heard it was good but didn’t know much about it. And I can say now, it is excellent. Highly recommend. A young girl retreats into fantasy to avoid confronting difficult problems at home. The girl in question, Barbara Thorson, is smart, sarcastic, and weird, and the story is both heartbreaking and ultimately heartwarming. The clever writing and great artwork fit together perfectly.

Read this book.

Film

1. Iron Man 3 – This was a fun film. It’s ridiculous spectacle, but it works, and it’s way better than IM2 was. The film handled the Mandarin the best way it could be done these days.

2. Argo – While I was in London I went to the cinema for this one. There was more humour in this than I expected, for the subject matter. The final chase down the runway was a little hard to believe (of course, it never actually happened), but otherwise it’s a solid film, worth seeing.

Other

Also in London, I went to the theatre for a showing of Wicked. A fun night, a great show. Particularly enjoyed Gina Beck as Galinda/Glinda.

*

This post went on longer than I expected.