Geek Girls Rule! #132 – Gail Carriger’s Soulless

You know how frequently when you pick up a fiction book, especially genre, especially the hot new genre, and you start reading, you find yourself thinking, “Hell, who do I have to blow to get a book contract?” 

You will think nothing of the sort about Gail Carriger’s Soulless. 

Soulless by Gail Carriger

I borrowed the first book from the Headmistress of Gothic Charm School, because I was curious, but wasn’t sure I wanted to make the monetary or space investment in a book I wasn’t sure about.  As I started reading, all I could think was, “Damn, I totally know why they gave her a book contract!”  Carriger blew me away almost immediately.  She writes well, descriptively without burdensome walls of text, her characters are engaging, they make sense within the world they inhabit.  The dialogue is believable and flows well, it is stiff when the situation would require a stiff formality, and casual where it should be.  

Miss Alexia Tarabotti is a spinster.  The child of a proper English mother, and Italian father, her father died when she was young, and her mother remarried.  Alexia is too Italian looking for the style of beauty favored in her world, English roses with peaches and cream complexions and heads full of fashion and fluff.  She’s smart, sarcastic, and very capable of taking care of herself.  She also has no soul, which makes her a danger and curiousity to London’s vampires, werewolves and other supernatural creatures.  Carriger is brilliant at conveying Alexia’s personality, straining at the bonds of the rigidly polite society in which she has been raised.

I highly recommend Soulless to anyone interested in Victorian, Steampunky horror fiction.

Geek Girls Rule! #112.9 – Golden Dreams by Ardath Mayhar

I really don’t have a whole lot to say about Golden Dreams.  I enjoy it.  It makes me tear up in the right places, and laugh out loud where it should.  Ardath Mayhar captures the essence of Fuzzies very well, although there are a few inconsistencies.   For one, she has all Fuzzies aware of the story of rescue coming from the stars.  In Piper’s books no Fuzzies mention this, and in Tuning’s he has Little Fuzzy and the other southern Fuzzies completely ignorant of the idea.  Stargazer is the one who shares that story with the Hagga (big ones) in the Tuning book.  She also has the names of the guys who capture the bunch of Fuzzies who become Ruth Ortheris’s Fuzzy family wrong, but that just feels like me nitpicking.

Honestly, while not as gripping as the original Piper books, it is well written and a lot of fun.  She emphasizes the lack of gender divided tasks among Fuzzies, and the importance of fun to Fuzzies as a whole.  She begins her story a generation past when a landslide cut the Fuzzies off from the technology and tools they’d salvaged from their downed ship, and follows the deterioration of their culture as they are forced to spend more and more time hunting and gathering, as well as trying to survive on a planet with many large predators who think Fuzzies, or Gashta, taste great.  I think she successfully conveys the gradual loss of knowledge as the stories are passed on orally, although if the original Fuzzies had a system of writing, as they must have being an interstellar travelling race, I am a little dubious that would have disappeared entirely by the time she says it does.

But again, the bulk of my criticisms sound like nitpicking.  I find this book superior to Fuzzy Bones in most ways, lacking only a focus on the current Upland Fuzzies.   Hearing the coming of the Marines and the ensuing archeaological dig described from the point of view of the Fuzzies would have made me happier.

Apart from the story of the ship and stars being credited to more than just Stargazer, there’s really nothing in this book to contradict either the 3rd Piper book, nor Tuning’s book.  In the second and third Piper book they are aware of the group of Fuzzies up north who haven’t migrated, but he doesn’t explore them.  Having read all of the books in rapid succession this last week, if you want no sizeable or jarring contradictions, read the three Piper books and this one.  If you don’t care, or are a completeness nut, then pick up Tuning’s as well.

Geek Girls Rule! #112.75 – Fuzzy Bones by William Tuning

I just finished Fuzzy Bones, and started Golden Dreams, so you’ll get my analysis of that one, too, as soon as I finish it.

Ace contracted William Tuning to write Fuzzy Bones to either coincide with, or ride the success of, the re-release of the first two Piper books.   I find it sort of  odd that the book written in the 80s is FAR more sexist than the books written in the 60s.  All of the established female characters are there, since Tuning wrote it  as a continuation of the storyline begun in Fuzzy Sapiens.  But Tuning diminishes their importance and involvement as professionals, and emphasizes their domestic roles, choosing to play up stereotyped and cliched male/female interaction.   It’s kind of painfully like watching an episode of Donna Reed.

That said, I do like this book, just not as much as the Piper or Mayhar books.  It’s much longer, the villains are stock, cliched and two-dimensional.  And his depiction of Little Fuzzy is way off the mark.  That said, I love his  Upland Fuzzies, especially Stargazer.  “What make do, Cobra Eyes?” is still my favorite quote.  Sorry, but if you want context you’ll have to read the book. Which is not quite as painful as I make it sound.  Just skim over the Victor Grego/Christianna Stone storyline parts, and the Hugo Ingerman parts, and focus on the mystery of the Upland Fuzzies and you’ll be fine.

I think Tuning felt that “more is better” in the drama/antagonist department, as there are several plotlines occurring concurrently.  The Victor Grego falling in love with Christianna Stone who had gone to Zarathustra to be a prostitute and failed, and her trying to hide that from him, making her blackmailable by the villains.  The crooked attorney Hugo Ingerman and his crazed (completely out of character as established in Fuzzy Sapiens) hunger for sunstones and attempts to rile up the populace while the priest, Rev, tries to hold things together.  And the discovery of the Upland Fuzzies and their secret.  Honestly, he really should have just picked one plot, preferably the Upland Fuzzies, and stuck with it.

I read it out of a sense of completeness, but like I said above, if you skim the Ingerman and Victor/Christianna stuff, the Upland Fuzzy storyline is excellent.  Although the fact that he felt the need to provide Jack Holloway a love interest at the end of the book as a happy ending tack-on is more than a little annoying, and again, sexist as this Sociologist (female character, so of course a “soft science”) who came out to study Fuzzy society suddenly decides to drop everything to take care of him after he’s shot in one of the climaxes of the book.  Barf.

My friend Chris and I discussed the parts of this book I found problematic tonight, and he said that he wasn’t at all surprised that Tuning’s book was the more sexist of the two.  For starters, Piper imagined a world where we would have moved away from the sexism of his era, and Tuning probably decided that he’d have to play up the sexism to realistically mimic the writing of someone from the late 50s early 60s.  Citing more recent works in the Conan world, he explained that when more recent authors try to write in the style of an author from an earlier period, they often wind up creating more of a charicature than a true reproduction because they try too hard.  Also, the 80s really weren’t all that less sexist and horrible than the 60s.  They were sexist in a  different way with the backlash against Feminism really coming into it’s own with the election of Ronald Reagan and his criminal gang, to paraphrase George Carlin.

So, yeah, there it is.  Not a bad read, a little bloated by the extraneous plotlines, more sexist.  I really would have liked him to have focused more on the Upland Fuzzies and their “mystery” as well as the legal repercussions, but I don’t know that he could have convincingly pulled off the legal stuff.  But the Upland Fuzzy stuff is great.

Geek Girls Rule! #112 – Forgotten Fiction 1 – H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy

Ok, I don’t know how forgotten the Little Fuzzy (Little Fuzzy, Fuzzy Sapiens, Fuzzies and Other People) books actually are.  But I’m one of the few people I know who has read them.  H. Beam Piper wrote them in the early 60s shortly before committing suicide.  The first two books, Little Fuzzy and Fuzzy Sapiens saw the light of day during the 1960s, and were republished in the early 1980s by Ace.  At that time, Ace contracted two additional Fuzzy books to finish the story arc begun in the first two books:  Fuzzy Bones by William Tuning and Golden Dreams: A Fuzzy odyssey by Ardath Mayhar.   In 1984, the partially completed Fuzzies and Other People emerged, contradicting some of the events in both of the new books contracted by Ace, but I don’t feel it makes either of the new books any less enjoyable.  Fuzzies and Other People definitely feels less finished, less polished, than the other two, and it is possible to see where Piper may have intended to go back and fill in dialog or make smoother transitions.

When one takes into consideration the time period in which Piper wrote and lived, the Fuzzy books are surprisingly not hideously sexist.  Women have jobs and professions, many of them are scientists or doctors.  Ok, so all the male characters, and the women themselves, refer to collective groups of women as girls, and most of the female doctors and scientists are in fact involved in either the soft sciences, like psychology, or pediatrics.  However, there is at least one female chemist.

I also realize that the attitudes toward and descriptions of Fuzzy mental capacity and the Fuzzies themselves will probably set off several racism buttons in people, but again, remember the time period in which these were written.  The fact that Piper has a character threaten a hotel with a discrimination suit if it kicks out the Fuzzies staying there for a trial when the majority of hotels in America at the time were still legally segregated was pretty damn progressive.

Character drives the stories, with the technology being mostly background noise.  They have air (hover) cars, video phones (no way, not first thing in the morning anyway), anti-gravity lifters, stenomemophones which transcribe from the spoken word*, but mostly the technology stays safely out of the way of the story.  Just the way I like it.   But it’s also notable for what’s lacking.  No cell phones, no mp3 player type things, and film is still film even if the images can be electronically transferred in the blink of an eye to the other side of the planet (with a noise, one imagines, very like the high speed dub on old reel to reel tape recorders).

Piper does not linger over his descriptions of violence, and I feel fairly comfortable allowing younger readers access to the Fuzzy books.  I can see much in these books to use as teachable moments for younger readers about the way things were.  The problematic symptoms of the time period in which they were written could be awesome discussion points for the parent wanting to explore themes of sexism, racism or paternalism.

I, however, prefer to take them as they are.  I read them for fun, not for education, and my musings about the charming anachronisms within are more the product of an undergrad Comparative Lit course than any serious effort on my part.  The fact that EVERYONE in the books smokes and cocktail hour is de rigeur even in the bush, cracks me up.  I enjoy them because the characters are relatable, the Fuzzies are awesome (I dare you to come away from these books not thinking having a Fuzzy around would be a blast), and the world is believable, with genetic anomalies and everything.  If you can, pick these up for a quick, light, fun read.  There are a few tearjerker moments, and some kind of scary ones, but the endings are always happy and the bad guys all get punished.

While Piper’s Fuzzy books are currently in print, you’ll want to scan used bookstores for both Tuning’s and Mayhar’s.  Neither are currently in print.

*If only voice recognition software were that good yet.

Geek Girls Rule! #105 – Man, I have a lot of stuff.

Ok, I don’t know if it’s like this for all geeks, but damn we have a lot of crap.  A LOT of crap.  We’ve been going through boxes and closets, and trying to divest ourselves of a good chunk of it.  I don’t know if all geeks are packrats like this, but an awful lot of the geeks I hang with are.

Part of it, geeks are information hoarders.  And yes, while technology is somewhat more compact than it was, I know I’m not the only one out there with a 12 year old computer sitting in my closet because it’s the only system that will play an old favorite game (Blood Bowl) and there’s a bunch of stuff on there I would like to retrieve one day, but I just haven’t gotten around to it.

Another form which information takes is books, and we have… many.  We have applied a second layer of insulation, in the form of bookshelves on every flat wall, to our living space.  Now, some of them I’m not ever giving up:  my copy of “Unicorn Variations” signed by Zelazny, my collected works of Manly Wade Wellman, the hardcover Little House on the Prairie books my grandmother bought me when I was little, the complete L. Frank Baum Wizard of Oz, and I could keep going.  We have gotten better in recent years about culling the collection every so often and selling them off or donating them to a library.  But still, after about six months of the Geek Husband What Rules picking me up at a Barnes and Noble after work, yeah, those shelves fill right back up real quick.

In addition to information, we also have music.  The Geek Husband What Rules is a Music Nerd of the first water.  He used to DJ at a college radio station and occasionally at the club where we both worked.  As a result, we have a couple thousand CDs, most of which we got for free.  We have a HUGE Reggae and Dancehall collection, as well as Industrial, Heavy Metal, Nu Wave, Punk, Ska, my chick rock, Rockabilly and the classics like the Beatles, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams Sr. and Patsy Cline.

After that come the comics and comics-related collectibles.  I have the wall of Nightcrawler, which is not quite complete, but getting there.  We have a Man-Eating Cow action figure, lots of Spawn, the Hansen Brothers from Slapshot and lots of other random things that catch our fancies.

I also collect fountain pens, hedgehog figures and Devil Duckies.

THEN we have the gaming shelves.  Traditional, Indie, weird, all sorts of RPGs populate the collection.  Early White Wolf, two editions of GURPS, two editions of Warhammer FRPG, ASL, dozens of copies of White Dwarf and Dragon magazine all grace those shelves.

We really do have an insane amount of just crap, but we’re getting better.  In fact I spent this evening going through a bunch of my writing from jr. high and high school and tossing out old notebooks.  I have not yet decided whether to throw a dramatic reading or a bonfire.

G.I. Joe fanfic with a serious Mary Sue, anyone?

Geek Girls Rule! #66 – George R. R. Martin -v- Steven Erikson: Steel Cage Death Match

OK, not really.  It would be kind of funny, but I’m pretty sure Erikson would own Martin.  He’s younger and probably in better shape. 

So, ages ago when the Game of Thrones series was in its relative youth, Mr. Geek Girl What Rules got hooked.  And, as is our want, when one of us gets really interested in books, the other one will eventually pick them up and give them a try.   So I pick up the first book and start reading.  About a quarter of the way through it I gave up.  Honestly, with the exception of Arya (the younger daughter) I couldn’t give two shits whether any of those characters lived or died.  Seriously, I just didn’t care, and when you don’t care what happens to the characters it’s hard to maintain interest in a book regardless of how clever the plot may be.  I mean, even the villains were so over-the-top characatured that I just didn’t buy them.  Seriously, how long am I supposed to sit around watching what’s-his-butt (Tyrion) twirl his metaphorical mustache?  Not to mention, with the exception of the aforementioned Arya, all of the female characters had less depth than your average teaspoon, and were either completely useless (Sansa) or manipulative and conniving (everyone else) or a combination of both (the mom). 

When the Mister picked up the Malazan books at the urging of a club regular, I was dubious at best.  I had been burned by Mr. Martin, and was not eager to pick up another, ultimately, disappointing book.  However, the Mister was so enthusiastic about it, gushing about it constantly, even more than with the Martin books.  So I caved. 

I loved Gardens of the Moon.  I could not get enough.  Erikson does not rely on the cheap tactic of cliffhangers to keep you interested, but you WANT to know more about what happens to these people.  You care.  I finished Gardens of the Moon and immediately went in search of the next books in the series.  He even has fully realized female characters who are actors in fate, not just its victims, as well as male characters who get to act.  The first two books made me sniffle and cry a little, but the end of book three made me sob openly while I finished it.  Since then, I find myself sobbing more often than not during the climaxes of Erikson’s books.  Last night, finishing up Toll the Hounds was no exception.  I stayed up past my bedtime, sniffling, snuffling and sobbing on the couch wiping my eyes with one hand and turning pages with the other. 

See, Erikson kills characters as often as Martin, well, nearly as often.  But in my opinion he does it better.  You even care when the rat bastards die.  And he kills a lot of characters that you love.  A lot.  The Chain of Dogs in books two and three (edited to fix because I should not rely on Wikipedia entries instead of going back and figuring it out myself) springs readily to mind here.  But let me get back to the rat bastards.  See, villains who have no redeeming features whatsoever are A. unrealistic and B. boring.  And Martin’s work is full of them.  Shit, even Hitler loved children and dogs.  I’m sure Idi Amin loved his mother or something.  Granted, there are a couple of just plain evil characters in the Erikson books, but they tend to die quickly.  Gorlas Vidikas springs readily to mind, as does Venaz.  But for the most part Erikson’s villains are just as nuanced as his heroes, and his everyman characters who want to be neither but wind up sucked into the machinations of the gods. 

Both men have very lushly realized and described worlds.  Martin’s falls into the “pseudo-Medieval Europe” trap of most conventional fantasy.  Erikson’s has many, many worlds reflecting different types of societies and stages of civilization, from the stone/bronze age barbarity of the Toblakai, to the Middle Eastern flavor of Darujhistan and the Seven Cities to the alien culture of the K’Chain Che Malle and the Byzantine society of Letheras. 

Ok, I realize… I’m gushing.  A lot.  I’m a total gribbling fangirl for Steven Erikson, and when I met him at his Seattle book signing in September, it was all I could do not to squeal like an idiot.  The Mister didn’t trust himself to not become a drooling fanboy, and so left me to get the books signed.  Sigh.  However, it was nice that when I told him that we appreciated his scope of history and the way his societies were built, us being history majors, HE got excited about that, asking if we’d figured out which battles were based on historical battles of our world.  The Boy and I frequently, once he finished books, discuss which battles remind us of which historical battles, so it was just cool.  EEEEEEEE!!!

So as far as I’m concerned, that steel cage death match?  Erikson wins hands down.  I realize Martin has the sales, but popular does not necessarily mean good.  Hell, Dan Brown was on the best seller list for how long with The DaVinci Code? (Speaking of poorly crafted characters.)  

I highly recommend the Malazan books to anyone who loves epic fantasy.