Asakiyume mita

I am loving Saint Death's Daughter, by C. S. E. Cooney, with a powerful love and a deep wonder. No description I encountered of the book before starting it comes anywhere near doing it justice, including the author's own, so I'm not going to try. Instead I'll tell you about its effect on me and some of the things it's done so far. (I'm a little more than a third of the way through the story.)

I was enjoying from the start its humor, both in language and in in-story encounters, and its tenderness and darkness, and how deftly and quickly I knew and loved the characters--there were some dramatic moments, some regrets for the main character, Lanie Stones, and some sweet successes--and THEN there was a tremendously dramatic moment, and I realized I was experiencing the story with the sort of bated breath and tenterhooks feeling that I haven't had since childhood. In that moment there were several swooping twists and turns that I totally didn't expect, and yet they were completely right and justified, if you know what I mean. They had been prepared for, but I hadn't noticed the gears and scaffolding of the preparation, not because I wasn't reading closely but because it had been in beautiful plain sight all along, and I'd been admiring it for other reasons. As if the painting on the wall of a woman with a sword is actually a woman with a sword--I didn't notice! But of course!

To be transported like that by a story, it's like flying.

But it's not plot magic for just for plot magic's sake, there's profound stuff going on too, about different understandings of love and everything it can shade into, and about regret/remorse/recompense, and about children and adults, but none of that stuff is blared out like an object lesson; it's not a burden the story's carrying-it's all just part of the weave.

Have some wonderful lines.

Here, a terrifying character observes her beloved:

Nita’s gaze tracked the gyration, a terrifying tenderness colonizing her face.

Here, a conversational gambit typical of children:

“Why not?” repeated her remorseless niece now. Datu was entirely capable of repeating those same two words for the rest of the night.

Here, curiosity described in a way that lingers:

“And what is it,” breathed the Blackbird Bride, her colorless eyes brilliant with calamitous curiosity, “that you ask?”

Here, a father (Mak) saying to his young daughter that choices have consequences:

“Mumyu is not here,” said Mak flatly. “Mumyu made her own choices, and her choices found her out. We are here. You and I and your aunt and the Elif Doéden. We are all here together in this place. We are in great danger. We must trust and respect each other. We must treat each other as allies.

Anyway--thoroughly enjoying it. And the sequel, Saint Death's Herald, comes out next month!

In The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler made the fact that octopuses were able to write a central part of what indicates they're advanced (a character says, “Yes, they have writing… which is an enormous leap in cultural evolution”)--a hugely ethnocentric notion.

So it's very affirming to read Natalia Brizuela's introduction to another brief collection of essays by the Indigenous Brazilian activist Ailton Krenak. (The collection is called Life Is Not Useful.) She writes:

Yasnaya Aguilar, the Mixé linguist, writer, and activist, reminds us ... that Indigenous people do not have “oral traditions,” but rather “mnemonic traditions.”⁸ ... Western modernity, with its countless institutions and homogenizing temporal framework, always sees the oral as preceding the written, as falling somewhere behind in the chronology of development. But as Ailton and many other Indigenous people explain, the practice and activation of memories – through dreaming, singing, dancing, storytelling, and various other activities – are ways of belonging to and sustaining the cosmic sense of life.

⁸ See Yasnaya Aguilar Gil, “(Is There) an indigenous Literature?”, trans. Gloria Chacón, Diálogos 19.1 (Spring 2016), p. 158.

She goes on to quote Ailton about the importance of listening and then to unfold that:

“Either you hear the voices of all the other beings that inhabit the planet alongside you, or you wage war against life on earth” (p. 38) ... Listening means being alive, staying alive, and keeping the ecosystems to which one belongs alive as well. Listening is caring. Not listening brings war: that is, a type of destructive encounter, a form of non-co-existence. We listen with our entire bodies, not just our ears ... Our bodies are part of and an extension of the Earth. If we allow them to become sensing instruments for dreaming and conversation, the cosmic sense of life would not be so threatened.

I love this statement: We listen with our entire bodies, not just our ears.

I'm nearly done with The Mountain in the Sea, by Ray Nayler, which I picked up hoping and expecting a cool nonhuman intelligence first-contact situation (with octopuses), and which has that, sort of, but is mainly about the nature of consciousness and the mind, human loneliness, and How Bad We Humans Are For This World Of Ours. To my amusement and chagrin, the plotline that pulled me in is the corporate scheming one--more so than the octopus researcher + lonely android, and definitely more than the slave fishing vessel. (Favorite characters so far: Rustem the hacker and Altantsetseg the security person.) But they've all been gripping enough to keep me reading and thinking.

I'll do a proper review later, but what I want to talk about here is the concept of "Point Fives" (.5). In the novel, a character remarks that many people don't really want to interact with a whole, complete other person (1.0)--too much friction! They want someone who's always interested in what they're doing--not just as a yes-man, but with genuine interest, asking appropriate questions, etc.--someone who has enough of a personality to have their own interesting quirks and unexpected conversational gambits, but who will never grandstand, never make emotional demands, will always take second place to the "full" person. (As I type this, it occurs to me that basically the character is saying that people want the stereotyped 1950s male ideal of a wife.) In the story, these exist! AI virtual companions. (Not physically, I don't think: just as like a hologram.)

Maybe needless to say, the narrative thrust of the story disapproves of this philosophically, while acknowledging its seductiveness. And I'm here to underline both parts of that! Both the disapproval, but also the seductiveness--speaking as someone who has essentially built up Point Fives in my head from time to time.

Example: When I was eight, friends of my parents came over from England, bringing two of their kids, one of whom, a girl, was my age. She read the same stories I did! Even the weird ones! I had a great time playing with her, and after she left, I decided she was my True Best Friend, my one and only. She wrote me letters in which she drew pictures of horses--and she could draw them so they looked real! I fantasized about her coming back to visit. I fantasized about her coming to school with me. I fantasized about drawing pictures together, going on adventures together, reading stories together, etc.

I did have some real input for these fantasies--she was really writing letters--but for the most part I was creating her to suit me. But it caused eventual disappointment because guess what! She was her own real person, with her own real interests, not ones scripted by me! I've done similar with other people. It always requires that the person be conveniently unavailable in some way: real, present people are not so amenable to this treatment. After years of experience, I now can recognize the danger signs of this behavior and (try to) nip it in the bud.

Meanwhile, I'm happy to say I've had real friendships, with people who are really present--not necessarily physically present in my house or neighborhood (though yes, in my house and neighborhood too)--but present in the sense that I'm interacting with them in multiple ways, and frequently, so we're seeing multiple aspects of each other. We have a sense of obligation or responsibility for one another--probably not an equal sense: for one thing, people are rarely exactly balanced in their degree of interest in or commitment to one another, but also, people need and want different amounts of commitment, and people have differing abilities to give. So it's not a balanced thing, and it's not without friction, stress, and disappointment. But it's also very rewarding, very beautiful, in moments.

In The Mountain in the Sea, one character reflects on not really seeing the people he's around. A traumatic thing has just happened, and it awakens in him a desire to have his eyes open from now on, to see and pay attention to the people (and one can extend this beyond just people, though probably we do own an extra something to our species siblings). It's the first step away from the solipsism represented by Point Fives.

I have so many saved up for this! And I'm actually writing on a Wednesday. Wohoo, win condition!

What I've just finished

A Family of Dreamers, by Samantha Nock. radiantfracture put me onto this collection by quoting one of the poems. Samantha Nock is an indigenous poet, and her poems reflect that heritage, but also explore family relations, love, self doubt--you know: the stuff we write poetry about.

( Some quotes )

* * *

Ideias Para Adiar O Fim Do Mundo, by Ailton Krenak
This has also been translated into English (Ideas for Postponing the End of the World). Ailton Krenak is an indigenous activist from Brazil, of the Krenak people, and this very short book collects talks that he's given, including the title one. He's very, very good at reminding his listeners that there's more than one way of understanding things, more than one way of approaching problems, and that for some people, the end of the world has been happening for a long, long time. (My Goodreads review has quotes that give a feel for it)

* * *

Besty and Tacy Go over the Big Hill, by Maud Hart Lovelace
They do, and they discover a community of Syrian refugees. The more things change...

This story mulls over kings and queens in lots of different ways. Early on the girls write a letter to Alfonso XIII, who upon turning sixteen has become king of Spain. The girls tell him that they'd love to marry him but realize that, sadly, they can't, since they're not of royal blood (also they're only ten, but they don't mention that), but that nevertheless they wish him the best. And then at the end of the story they get a letter back from the royal secretary, telling them the king appreciates their thoughts! And I was thinking how much smaller the world was then--that girls could write a letter to the royal palace in Madrid, and that a palace secretary would actually answer! ... Well, assuming that that incident is based on something that actually happened in MHL's life--it might not be. But it's conceivably possible. Alfonso XIII came into his majority in 1902. Wikipedia tells me that in 1900, the human population was a much more intimate 1.6 billion. Not like our current 8 billion. Palace secretaries could write to little girls in Minnesota!

What I'm reading now

Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer. My approach to this has been very roundabout. I'm not a big fan of long books of serious essays, even when I should like them. So I started by just dipping in. But it's won me over, so I'm going to read it straight through.

* * *

Why Didn't You Just Leave, edited by Julia Rios and Nadia Bulkin. A collection of horror stories that answer the question of why people don't just leave the haunted place they're in. Excellent so far.

* * *

Lady Eve's Last Con, by Rebecca Fraimow. A rom-con romcom in SPACE that I've only just started but is highly delightful already, with lines like this:

Ever since we got in on the luxury-liner gambit, money had been dropping into our hands like coolant from a leaky ceiling

and

It wasn't so hard to get someone like Esteban to think that you were their romantic ideal; all you had to do was present an attractive outline and leave plenty of space, and they'd fill in the rest all by themselves.

I think I can see what the end state is going to be, but I am here for the ride!

Coming Soon
Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown, the next of the Betsy-Tacy books.

I'm nearly done with Betsy-Tacy and Tib, which continues to be delightful. It's not just that the things the girls get up to are both very believable and amusing, but also the way it's told, the way Maud Hart Lovelace lets in the parents' perspective or the baby siblings', and how events flow one into the next kind of like a picaresque novel, but they're not traveling; they're just living their lives.

They want to cut off locks of hair to give to each other as keepsakes in case one of them dies--which nearly happens! Tacy gets diphtheria! But they end up cutting huge hanks of hair off, not single locks, which means they end up needing haircuts. And then they make a club focused on being good, but they're so intrigued by the penance they invent for if they do bad things that it doesn't work out as planned. I read sections of that out to Wakanomori, it was so funny.

And there was a description of Tib that stuck with me:

Tib was tiny but she was never scared.
"Come on," she said. "There's nothing to be afraid of." And she flew ahead like a little yellow feather.

That: like a little yellow feather.

And then I read another short story in the next issue of my gift subscription to the Sun, "Longshanks" by Samuel Jensen.

( below the cut are spoilers for this story )

It's all very litfic. But it *was* well written, and for all my criticisms, I enjoyed reading it.

Probably most people who read my journal also read sartorias, but for those who don't, or who missed it, Antiphony, the culmination of her stories set on Sartorias-deles, is out now.

This is a wonderful one, full of people finding each other, healing and growing, and getting themselves in a good place for the next great adventure, whatever that might be. It's an absorbing delight to read. You see Carl (a woman; her actual name is Mersedes Carinna), a nervous, conscientious shadow cast by a domineering mother, gradually grow into a confident person who turns an obsessive crush into ... something else. Jilo, now king of the Chwahir, also continues to grow in confidence, and it's wonderful to see Chwahirsland transforming, unfolding and blooming. Lyren, the headstrong, self-centered daughter of Liere, grows a LOT, and finds a place, a purpose, and a partner. Several of Detlev's boys also pair off, and others we see happily engaged in worthy work. Imry's storyline resolves nicely. And I can say all this and it isn't even spoilers, because the fun of the book is in how all this happens.

Probably it would be hard to pick up this book if you aren't somewhat invested in at least some of the characters--though I do believe you could read Carl's story (and then by extension, develop an interest in seeing what will happen with Lyren) even with no prior knowledge. I most certainly recommend Antiphony wholeheartedly for those of you with familiarity with the modern era of Sartorias-deles (the era of Senrid, Clair, Liere, Siamis, etc.). You can purchase it at all the usual places, and also through Book View Cafe.

I'd hoped to finish this today, but I probably won't. But look for it soon! I have so many THOUGHTS.

I really love Ann Leckie's books; I've enjoyed all of them, and I gobbled this one right up and did enjoy it ... but not as much as the others. I was more quizzical about narrative decisions, etc. (I have a review here on Goodreads.)

The essay's not going to be about the book overall, though: it's going to be about the Presger Translators.

Putting off the Amazon posts because it's Wednesday and I actually have two books to report on, which I read in airports. They're both novellas, Malka Older's The Mimicking of Known Successes and Nghi Vo's The Empress of Salt and Fortune. The former is newly out this month; the latter has been out for quite a while but I only just now got to it.

I'm a fan of Malka Older's: her stories are full of interesting ideas that the characters talk about in interesting ways. This one was billed as "cozy Holmesian murder mystery and sapphic romance, set on Jupiter," none of which I object to in the least, but that wasn't where my interest lay: it was in the worldbuilding and the underlying assumptions (as I perceived them) that I was both intensely interested in and felt intensely argumentative about.

( more about The Mimicking of Known Successes; no spoilers )

Nghi Vo's The Empress of Salt and Fortune I just loved. Wonderful story, told in a series of conversations between the old servant of a former (now dead) empress and an itinerant cleric. The former empress was a northern outsider brought into the imperial court of Anh to give the emperor an heir; she's marginalized and sent into exile, but slowly slowly turns the tables. The finely observed details in this story!

( a handful of gorgeous quotes )

So who has read either of these, and what things did you love/argue with/dislike?

This is an imaginative and ambitious book.

What I loved most was its worldbuilding, so rich and overbrimming. It takes place in a high-tech, Pacific-centered, post-apocalyptic future. It’s a future in which people are given prosthetic irises at birth to compensate for damage omnipresent radiation would do to their eyes, and in which the Pacific islands that are protagonist Tia’s ancestral homeland now lie 10 meters underwater. Even tiny wordbuilding details are delightful, like lakescreens, films of water that serve both as communications screens (for visuals across long distances, or to display data) and as doors, or like the main Earth spaceship type—the puffer fish.

The indigenous, oceangoing peoples of the Pacific are a big part of this future, and I love that. In an interview, Cole says she wanted to portray a future in which indigenous peoples exist and are thriving, and she definitely succeeds. At the start of the story, Tia is training to work for the Global Indigenous Alliance:

She had a job to do, mapping Pacific Ocean currents for the gravity web – Kermadec Trench, Tonga Trench, Lau Basin. She had learnt to sail with the ocean rhythms, to steer the cross currents. She’d learned these skills from her grandmother, her bubu. She had trained all her life to map the ocean.

I say the book is ambitious because it tries to cover a lot. It wants to highlight Pasifika lifeways and outlooks, and does, both in how deep-space phenomena and travel are understood and also in some wonderful scenes on Earth, like when Tia is sailing a drua, a traditional double-hulled sailing ship, with her uncles. I loved how traditional and modern were blended in the creation of the drua’s sails:

Dua hauled a rickety old 3D printer into the lounge and inputted a design for multiple large exo-patch squares. The printer spat out reams of plaited exo-patches resembling pandanus matting in colour and texture, but stronger and interwoven with multiple solar power conduits. Tia sat in the long grass next to the uncles and helped sew the patches together into a triangular sail with a large hook needle.

But there’s also the through-line plot: events take Tia away from the currents of the Pacific and into deep space on a mission to rescue her older sister, Leilani, who has been lost in a space whirlpool. Once Tia is out in space, she becomes aware of dangerous, bigger stakes. ( spoiler )

And meanwhile there’s also a painful family story going on: Tia and Leilani’s mother Dani left them behind with their grandmother when they were small so she could pursue a career in the stars. Dani’s lack of involvement with Tia and Leilani is a source of pain and resentment for Tia, who firmly rebuffs her mother’s few, half-hearted attempts to reach out.

That’s not all: there’s also a love story involving an AI (referred to in this story as a ghostborg—great term—or an embod), which goes into a fair amount of depth regarding that AI’s history.

It’s a lot to weave together, and for me in some places it lurched a bit. That’s more or less forgivable, though, because the parts that you lurch to are so interesting. More bothersome for me was Tia’s relationship with Dani. We pretty much exclusively see Tia resenting and disliking Dani, so it was a bit hard for me when Tia would waver and seem to want validation from Dani or disbelieve negative information about Dani—especially seeing as Tia has never lacked for love and support from her grandmother and big sister. But maybe Cole is intending to show the power of the notion of “mother.”

Interestingly, when the ghostborg Turukawa is sharing the story of her creation with Tia, she recounts the tale of how the Fijian snake god Degei nurtured two eggs that his lover Turukawa (for whom the ghostborg is named), a great hawk, had abandoned. The hatchlings became the forebears of the Fijian people. Turukawa says

“[My creator] often pondered how people might have turned out if Degei hadn’t stolen Turukawa’s eggs. Would people have grown into different beings if their real mother Turukawa the hawk had raised them?”

This seems like a fruitful and thought-provoking way to think about Tia and Leilani’s situation, and I would have loved to have seen that parallel expanded on somehow.

I want to end, though, by returning to the imaginativeness of the worldbuilding, landscapes, and characters. If you think of stories as places where you spend time, Na Viro is a great place to spend some time. I will definitely read more from Gina Cole.

Some more quotes from Aventura en el Amazonas:

En verano llueve todos los días, en invierno llueve todo el día (In summer it rains every day, in winter it rains all day long)

... Or, why I need to go back at the peak of the rainy season and see if I still love it.

And this, from a section where the parents are talking to the children about the children's names (and also about their own names):

Tu nombre es como una cancíon que no acaba, el aqua limpia que corre desde la montaña sembrando vida (Your name is like a song that never ends, pure water that flows from the mountain, sowing life)

What a lovely thing to say to a kid. That's what they say about the daughter Mayam's name. The son, Nashi, is named after a traveler from Somalia, who ended up loving the mother's people so much that he settled with them and married her grandmother.

Por ello te escogí su nombre, Nashi, para recordar a ese hombre venido de muy lejos (Thus I chose for you his name, Nashi, to remember that man who came from far away)

The father's name, Antonio, seems very ordinary, but the father says:

Me lo escogió mi padre en recuerdo de un escritor francés que era aviador y escribió muchos libros hermosos, llenos de poesía de la vida (My father chose it for me in memory of a French writer who was an aviator and wrote many beautiful books, full of the poetry of life)

And so we know the father was named after Antoine de Saint Exupéry, which I found somehow really touching.