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Reading Recs: Diana Wynne Jones and C.J. Cherryh
These are mostly for smillaraaq. Somewhere deep in the guts of the Meta Thread from Heck (f-locked, I am afraid), which started out innocently as a notice of a fic posting on my other account and now exceeds 300 posts, she mentioned that she had not read much (or did not recall much) Cherryh, and as CJC is about my favorite SF writer, I felt this needed to be remedied. And when I said so, she said she'd also appreciate recs for DWJ - who is one of my favorite fantasy authors. So, without further ado ... .
Diana Wynne Jones
- Apropos of some of the themes showing up in "Cupidity", I have to rec Fire and Hemlock, which is probably her most complex book. Curiously enough, rushthatspeaks has just written a marvelous essay on this book, but you should on no account read the essay until you are finished with the book.
- As smilla is a dog lover, I must rec Dogsbody - and hope that it will not break her heart.
- For something much lighter, and very cleverly silly, I recommend Archer's Goon.
- Because smilla is something of a gamer, because it has one of DWJ's best (albeit saddest) endings, and because it is a less-well-known book than it deserves, I recommend The Homeward Bounders.
- And because it is my favorite aside from those I have recommended, and because it involves a science fiction convention, the Lyke Wake Dirge, centaurs, and Babylon, I recommend Deep Secret
C.J. Cherryh
- As a standalone, as a cool book about martial arts in a fantasy oriental setting, and as CJC's best fantasy, I recommend The Paladin.
- As a tough, no-nonsense short series about what it's like to be a cog in the future industrial and military complexes, I recommend Heavy Time and its sequel Hellburner. This will also introduce the Company Wars, the subject of several additional novels.
- As either a standalone, or as an introduction to her Compact Space books, I recommend The Pride of Chanur, which is a good example of one of CJC's most famous and durable themes, the human being as the alien. It is also pretty much a space opera, and fun. And if you like it, there are 4 more books in the series. (And Pyanfar Chanur is one of my most enduring POV characters! Gods be feathered, I am that long-suffering Hani ship's captain ... !)
- And because smilla likes dark themes about the evils that people do, I recommend Cyteen, with the caveat that the introductory section can be slghtly sticky going as CJC sets up the political situation from the opposite POV of the Company Wars books. These are the Bad Guys of those books, and the book covers themes of identity, what it is to be human, what makes a person him or herself, and what it is like to be brilliant in a world of lesser minds, against a setting where cloning - ranging from production of custom children for the wealthy to supplying slave labor for a developing world (and including the production of attractive "companions" for those who can afford them) - is common. Unsettling and involving.
Enjoy!
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-MASSIVE- Spoilers for Dogsbody:
Main POV character has his consciousness transferred into a puppy. Puppies put into a sack to drown, experienced from pup's viewpoint (most - maybe all - are rescued from the river); day-to-day misery of life among incomprehensible humans from a dog's viewpoint: sadness includes being unable to protect abused and exploited young human mistress (not sexual exploitation, though); from girl's viewpoint, her dog has died at end of story, although his consciousness actually goes back where it belongs; his realization that they can no longer be together, because now he is a frighteningly powerful superhuman being and not her dog.
You'll have to decide for yourself, smilla ... . It's a pretty good book.
Yeah, Morgaine - I found those pretty lame. They're early. I like her early SF (Hunter of Worlds for example) better. Downbelow Station was the first of the Company Wars books to be written, although it's not first in terms of internal chronology. It introduces Signy Mallory, jump-carrier captain, the first (IMO) of CJC's truly successful tough older female characters; she shows up as a minor character (rather like Vimes in Monstrous Regiment) in a couple of other books.
And plainly the Chanur books didn't make the same sort of impression on you that they did on me! For me, the scene in Chanur's Homecoming where Py and Jik (the mahe spyship captain - not Goldtooth, but his partner) have a tense heart-to-heart, and she says "I love you like kin, Mahe, but I'd shoot you with my own hand ... " if he posed a threat to her species, and a few moments later, he comes back with "I love you like kin. Same. Got to tell you, you going to bleed. Same you win, same you lose, " because they're going to have to make some hard, hard choices, both of them - argh, the angst, the hard-won cross-species friendship up against preservation of one's own species ... .
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Yes, it is rather like your Nobilis character - Sirius is definitely a Power.
:-) Pyanfar and Jik make an interesting friendship. And in fact Py is still very much married and devoted to her husband, Khym Manh, so it really is a virtual-sibling female-male type friendship, of the sort that is all too rare in fiction. And I'm just busting your chops about remembering the book, but it is one of those very, very important books to me.
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I did read it through, but quickly. I really need to run a game again. The last big campaign I ran had a super-powerful creature in disguise as part of the party, and it worked out OK ... I put severe limits on how he could use his powers early on.
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Well, it could certainly be fun, fitting her in. I'll have to think about it. Maybe once the radiation & crud are over with, I'll be able to focus on it. Tell you what, you have my full permission to remind me from time to time that you're interested.
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It might not be Nobilis; it might just be whatever version of my game I can come up with, possibly using the Hero system.
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I can promise that the system won't matter. I've run games in tournaments at conventions where no one knew the system I was using. You just need to know the general concept of how roleplaying games work.
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Naaah, we've always had some players that were not too system-savvy. Usually we'd have a couple of sessions helping people put their characters together before we started the campaign, and then during play, if you wanted to do something, you just say "OK - I want to search that closet. What do I do?" and we'd tell you what dice to roll and what on your sheet to add to it (or whatever the mechanics were).
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And I can't believe I'm forking the thread again, but ... yes, Witches of Karres is wonderful fluffy fun. But note how even through the filter of the social mores of the 1950s/1960s, Schmitz respects his female characters. Yeah, they have some ditsiness, but so do all the male characters. He was an unusual chap.
And for a really silly crossover among our various interests, check this:
That, my friend, is an illustration for the book by Hayao Miyazaki!!!
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Exactly right, Goth and Pausert. Goth was one of my childhood heroines, if you recall. If I ever figure out the animated .gif thing, I should do a rotating exhibit of my tough little role models. (I wish I could find a larger version of the Miyazaki pic, because most of the cover pix of Goth are unsatisfactory in the extreme, especially considering that there's quite a pithy description of her.)
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I'll need to dig out copies of the books and do some scanning. But thanks for the offer!
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Homeward Bounders is the only really good book that came out of several attempts by various authors in the late 1970s/early 1980s to write something that had the feel of what it would be like to be a real person trapped in a roleplaying game (Quag Keep, anyone? ... >shudder< ).
I really appreciate that DWJ didn't attempt to push the boy/girl aspect of things in that - which she could have, because Jamie and Helen and Joris and Adam all seem to be about 13 years old. But yes, I think that Helen and Jamie could have grown into a real relationship, because there is a certain amount of spark there and a lot of mutual respect, and Jamie was even showing signs of being able to understand her early traumas and to give her space when she needed it, without getting all mushy about it.
(And redbrunja, if you're reading this, and can find and read this book, I'd be interested in your take on this relationship in reference to the buddies vs. lovers conversations we've been having. Jamie calls Helen his "friendly neighborhood enemy" ... . Of course, they are both quite young.)
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Heh ... I liked Andre Norton quite a lot as a kid, but I was already a moderately sophisticated gamer when it came out ... a disaster was the only way I could describe it!
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LotR was my first grown-up fantasy, but The Witches of Karres was my first grown-up SF. I may have read Norton after that, but I'm not sure. Oddly enough, the only Nortons I can remember very much are Catseye and The Stars Are Ours, even though I think I read everything she ever wrote through 1970 or so.
(I also remember learning (partway through college) that she was very squicked out by the brother incest in Elizabeth Lynn's The Dancers of Arun ... . Poor woman - luckily she never discovered manga!)
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Yes, Norton was squicked.
Elizabeth Lynn wrote a trilogy that consists of Watchtower, The Dancers of Arun, and The Northern Girl. The books are widely separated from each other by their internal timelines, and you don't need to read any of them to appreciate the others ... however, the only one I really like is The Northern Girl. (And I like that one enough to have worn out my first paperback of it.)
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:-)
I think 13 or 14 is young for much boy/girl stuff! You're a chunk older than that - at this stage, those few years make a big difference, especially for the boys. I don't think that Joris was thinking about Helen much except as a member of the upper class, from his viewpoint - you remember he kept saying that Helen looked like a Khan.
I'm also a sucker for friends or companions becoming lovers, whether straight or not. But although Jamie was definitely forming some early thoughts along those lines, I can't really see it in Joris. But they say the parents are always the last to know!
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But yeah...Joris...I dunno about him. He's such an interesting character! I mean, it was also pretty clear that he was in love with that Khan girl, and I kind of saw his insistence that Helen looked like a Khan an indication that he was a bit attracted to her. Gosh, I need to read it again.
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Hmmm, yeah, but Jamie's heart hasn't aged (to get mushy and metaphysical on you) - he's still a 13-year-old boy, more or less, in matters of the heart. I mean, he's got more perspective on how much it should matter, and on being compassionate and non-judgmental, but the circumstances under which he's likely to find himself smitten are probably the same.
Yes, Joris had a crush on Elsie Khan, it seemed. At least, he got all pink when Konstam brought her up. And there, of course, is the real target of Joris' devotion: he hasn't got much room for an emotional attachment to a crush when he's so totally obsessed with his teacher/master! But I don't think he was transferring his crush to Helen. (Good memory, you! I had forgotten all about Elsie - presumably named for her impressive grandmother Elsa, the leader of the Khans.)
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Hahaha, God I love Joris. His obsession with Konstam is GENIUS.
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Hmmm, let's see ... Jamie's been working so hard at surviving as he wanders the Bounds that he hasn't had much time for social interactions outside what's necessary to survive, and probably relatively little interaction with peers. Remember that the other Homeward Bounders he met rather looked down on him because he was just a kid. He's had to learn compassion etc. from the inside out, by experiencing being on the receiving end, but because of his apparent age, no one's going to play at romance with him. You'll notice that he never mentions any female person's looks until he runs into Vanessa (Adam's older sister), and that's when he finally has something of a peer group, and can relax a little - he's got the leisure to notice something like that and the social atmosphere to make it seem worth noticing.
Yes, the Great God Konstam!!! Poor Joris, he's such a mess emotionally ... .
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MUST. RE-READ. I'll get back to you once I do.
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Oh, I was never arguing that he didn't! I think he truly did, although I don't think that he himself fully realized it until the very end, when he's talking about what he now has to do to keep Them from regaining power.
Any excuse will do, for re-reading a good book!
:-D
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Indeed!
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Oooh, sorry!
Yes, romance is a complicated topic (I'm sure Jamie thinks so, too ... .)