Sarah J. Maas – Throne of Glass

The continued re-envisioning of fantasy has been eye-opening. I had given up on the genre by the 1980s, as writers milked Tolkien’s formula in ways that I found not that interesting.  As often happens, the genre itself was simply going through the types of changes that happen when young readers rethink the generic expectations that they grew up with, and then become writers. Beautiful stories often are the result.

That said, Sarah J. Maas’s Throne of Glass hints at that kind of rethink.  Several African authors have created some amazing texts (I’m currently working my way through this list), N.K. Jemisin has won a Hugo and written a fantasy series that I still think about a lot, and even the white guys (Erikson & Esslemont, Martin, Abercrombie, et al.) have pushed fantasy far beyond its previous incarnations, making it both more and less based in real-world laws. Beyond the genre, authors like Susannah Clarke, Karen Lord, Jo Walton, and Akwaeke Emezi incorporate elements of fantasy in texts that fit into a variety of categories, all of which look far different for having accepted this straying.

Maas’s exploration of generic boundaries is a bit more restrained, at least in this first novel, but still Throne of Glass defied my expectations, often.  I’ve catalogued some of these thoughts below:

• The female protagonist and heroine has been done, of course, but Maas adds a couple of interesting elements of choice to her portrayal, (this is sort of a spoiler, but not really) including who she chooses to end up with. There are elements of romance in this novel in ways that I do not often see.
• Bringing in chaos and the Wyrd (and the land of faerie) is a touch that I wish more authors did (Clarke is brilliant at it, and Martin’s children of the forest owe a lot to this concept as well), and these features add depth to this novel.
  • This is a long series, so I am assuming that these elements get explained more thoroughly in future texts, but there is a lot of potential in that world…
• These characters are also developed differently, in a way that hints at what Lauren Berlant saw as ways to deal with the constant trauma that many people in our world experience. The main character, for instance, is rescued from a slave mine, albeit for a competition that she might not survive (although we know she will). At first I was frustrated, because the slave mine experience seemed to be one that was offered as a isn’t-she-amazingly-tough backstory. As the novel develops, though, the horrors of that place become more apparent, and we start to get glimpses of how the experience has both traumatized and molded her.
  • It’s an interesting approach to character development, and I wonder if Maas does this as an element of her craft, mimicking the gradual reveal of trauma that might happen in intensive therapy.

Throne of Glass helps expand the generic boundaries, and I am curious to see how that expansion continues.  Fantasy has moved far from the hide-bound genre it was in the 1970s (with apologies to Stephen R. Donaldson, of course), and here’s hoping its influence lives long…

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Yukito Kishiro – Battle Angel Alita Vols. 1 & 2

Although I love cyberpunk I was not familiar with Kishiro’s Battle Angel Alita series until I saw the film with a friend. I then picked up the comic books, and…well, thoughts below:

• The genial cybernetic surgeon who works for the poor (Dr. Ido) and still swings a mean atomic-powered hammer at night is not something I saw coming…
• The morphing of “battle” and “angel” feels like another look at the Molly from the Neuromancer series…Kishiro seems to roll seamlessly between having characters comment on how cute she is and then having her disembowel or decapitate them. Or both.
• The search for a backstory hints at the economic separatism and destroyed world that the film emphasized, and while the enemy (impossibly rich and obsessed with occupying the top rungs of the economic ladder) is sort of an easy one, the idea of a fall from the heaven of economic security only to be reinstated in a worthy body posits a world in which violence gets directed downwards over and over again…
• The image is fascinating to me, and I think speaks to how little I know of Japanese culture – why a tiny very young woman?  Why does Kishiro invert the stereotype so broadly? Why do the “evil” cyborgs fall in love with her, and what are the implications of that?
  • Because I’m comfortable with sci-fi and western culture, these questions feel appropriate (and they may not be) – I can endlessly talk about how using Molly as the bodyguard (with a cybernetically-enhanced body that is still captured constantly in all sorts of powerfully disruptive ways) and Case – and Bobby Newmark – as the emotional core shreds science fiction conventions.  I have no idea if Kishiro is doing the same thing, but it sure feels like it…
• I am very glad she has some serious plasma weaponry – the film seemed to emphasize her fighting style in ways that felt too used to Hollywood mano-on-mano narratives…
• Finally, the pen-and-ink, sketched out art speaks to manga in my less-than-literate-in-Japanese culture mind…

Lauren Berlant – Cruel Optimism

I will not be able to do justice to Berlant’s Cruel Optimism for a number of reasons, so this post serves mostly to document key elements and a couple of my reactions to them.  Suffice it to say that Berlant’s argument tries to understand the frantic nature of contemporary story-telling, and it attempts this understanding in a profound, brilliant, and human way.

Thoughts:

• She analyzes texts that are located in the world of art, and takes a cultural studies approach of sorts, to argue that the socio-economic promise of the 1980s is unmaintainable and some of our best art responds to the insecurities generated from this reality.
  • Thus the title, eh?  Cruel Optimism is the sort that happens when what we are optimistic about stuff that cannot happen.
• She focuses on the ways that we are constantly in a state of hyper-tension between the wealth we have and the desires we have to live lives of meaning and the inevitability and impossibility of reconciling these two norms.
  • She argues that we feel all of this before we understand it cognitively, and those feelings become traumatic, although not in the ways that we usually think of that word, as an opposite of chronic.
  • In fact, in her definition trauma becomes chronic, in ways that are immensely uncomfortable…

Akwaeke Emezi – Freshwater

Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater is like nothing I have ever read. It is not (even though I spent the first half of my reading experience trying to make it so) about the immigrant experience, the migrant experience, or even the African experience (directly anyway) – its narrators immerse themselves in the entire body and soul of a young woman who was sexually abused and beaten as a child, and who has evolved an elaborate set of defense mechanisms to cope.

Thoughts:

• My quick overview limits – in an almost generic sense – the ways in which this novel might be perceived.  It does not read like the haunted memories of a woman trying to keep her sanity. Instead, with only two exceptions chapters are told from the point of view of the gods and goddesses who  ride her, and who enable her to survive, and they are living, breathing characters (often to their chagrin, as they sometimes endlessly lament)…
  • Emezi in the essay at the end of the novel describes it as “metaphysical,” so they (their preferred pronouns are they, their, theirs) are asking us to treat these big questions from a religious and spiritual standpoint, in addition to the psychological one.
  • The borders – between body and soul, between religious identities, between genders – that we usually imagine are solid (if not rigid) do not exist in this novel, and Emezi clearly wants to examine them. They describe their work as existing in a liminal space, and those types of spaces are rife with conflicts, power, and energy.
• The use of many different embodiments of human personas in the form of a pantheon of all kinds of gods had me engaged (and possibly even immersed). There are no hints until about two-thirds of the way through the novel just what these various forms are, but there is lots of conversation of how they mean to both protect and annihilate Ada, the main (human) character.
  • And the two extremes are not that far apart…
• As Ada deals with her own trauma, and jousts with the spirits inhabiting her, I never wondered about what parts of her were human. I am curious about that now – why did I so easily buy that these were gods inhabiting her body, mostly Nigerian or Yoruban? Was I imagining this novel was simply one of possession?  Admittedly, that alone would be pretty cool…
• Finally, Emezi’s willingness to experiment is frightening in its precocity.  This could have gone very wrong, and the fact that they also work in video and other art forms, according to the Internet goddesses at Wikipedia made me wonder if Emezi was simply too full of ideas to execute any of them.
  • Answer – nope. They’re definitely talented enough to pull this off – it is one of the rare novels that I couldn’t wait to finish but which also didn’t find me rushing through and having to re-read because I had become impatient.

Big Mouth – Nick Kroll, Andrew Goldberg (creators)

Big Mouth is an animated series about teens that is definitely not to be seen by them.  It’s a hilarious, sex-positive, sensitive look at what it means to be a teenager and be nearly crushed by the chemical madness in your body. My wife and I enjoyed it, laughing so much that we often missed lines.

Other thoughts:

• I’ve not been a fan of Kroll, but this series made me rethink that.  His pre-teen self is witty and yet really small physically, something of a nerd. His friend, Goldberg, is physically more mature but emotionally sort of a wreck. Throughout, their friendship waxes and wanes as they sort through the craziness of being a teenage boy.
  • And Kroll voices a ton of characters, in and of itself a huge accomplishment.
• There are episodes discussing all sorts of perspectives – girls liking sex, kids respecting each other’s limits, masturbation, identifying LGBTQ – and much to my surprise no one is put down or disrespected. Even characters who are not the nicest people are given motives and reasons for acting as they do, except for the episode on toxic masculinity, which was still brilliant.
• Perhaps the most brilliant creations (as in all good sit-coms) are the side characters. Coach Steve is this innocent guy who somehow manages to go along day-by-day without either learning too much about the world or betraying his own general good-heartedness, and all the sets of parents are very fun and very odd.
  • The best, though, are the hormone monsters, voiced by Maya Rudolph and Kroll. They are animated, furry critters (they are featured prominently in the trailer below) who make all of our hormone-driven-decisions-gone-bad real, and usually incredibly funny.
• Finally, I knew this series was good when I heard students talking about it.  Lots of them watch it, and while that alone doesn’t speak for the series it doesn’t hurt.

 

Deborah Eisenberg – Your Duck is my Duck

I picked up Your Duck is my Duck based on a recommendation from a best-of 2018 list, and I’m glad I did. Eisenberg’s stories aren’t the sort I usually read – they’re full of rich, spoiled people who aren’t always aware of how horrible they are, and in general her work is not all that kind to homo sapiens sapiens. I flew through these though, in that way that makes me have to intentionally slow down, and that alone speaks to my enjoyment.

More thoughts:

• These stories aren’t really all that concerned with class, and while they show the rich in a fairly awful light they’re not satires out of New Yorker, stories designed to help confirm the image we already have of just how terrible rich people are.
  • Instead, thematically they’re much more concerned with time. A typical narrator’s overview reads like this:

But seriously, wasn’t that the whole point of the past? The point of the past is that it’s immutable (p.42)

• • This is a narrator who hints at the ways that time bends, but not in a Matthew McConnaughey in True Detective way. Time in this configuration sashays and flirts around and is just sort of naughty, promising us all kinds of delights and then slamming the door as we try to re-imagine them from our past.
  • Another from the story “Recalculating”:

The day, so fresh and glistening, seemed to contain every summer that had ever been and to promise more, endless more. (206)

 

• Her stories are full of these little hints, all spoken in a narrative voice that is distinctive, fun, and deadly…
  • And in its virtual hands time becomes a strange creature, one that certain of those among us with a shamanistic bent can read and perhaps even ride…just never control.
• The narrator is also consistent, speaking in a voice that feels both innocent and lively and enthusiastic as well as winking at the characters for us (and probably at us as well, for being, well, dumb).
• Finally, I’m not sure I’ve read a story as light and airy and depressing as “Merge,” which functions as a sort of mini-novella in the middle of the collection. I won’t go into too many details, but one character evaluation will probably tell you all you need to know – the investment banker who is convicted of fraud and seems at best a deadbeat dad is not the least likable character.
  • The story also features a return to the primordial ooze, as Cordis, a wastrel son who his dad (the banker) may or may not want killed, ends up in a dream watching his dead shoot a homo heidelbergensis (a particularly fearsome potential ancestor of ours) in the head.
• Again, not my usual cup of tea, but man I enjoyed this collection…

Stephen R. Donaldson – Lord Foul’s Bane

This is my second time reading Lord Foul’s Bane – I read it as a much younger man, fairly soon after being introduced to fantasy through Tolkien. I remember being immensely frustrated with the novel at the time (not so much that I didn’t read the rest of them, however), and wondering with my mom how Thomas Covenant could be such a non-hero.

I picked it back up after reading the Malazan Book of the Fallen series a couple of times, mostly because Erikson talks about Donaldson’s influence on him. The re-read was interesting, and I thought I’d comment on it here…

• Part of my frustration the first time came because I wanted Covenant to be a hero – for Frodo’s sake, he was picked up and dropped into the middle of a Middle Earth of sorts, and he’s got magic powers…what fantasy fanboi wouldn’t have immediately picked up the mantle of hero and done great things?
  • I’m guessing that’s partially Donaldson’s point – us fan boys cannot imagine our favorite genre as anything but a constant retelling of the hero cycle, the monomyth…and Donaldson toys with the idea that we would be heroes, dropping all of our current identity to play Aragorn or Frodo or Sam…in this novel, the shock of being transmitted is too great…
• In fact, *everyone* in this world is far more heroic than Covenant, including children and horses.
  • Any heroic action he undertakes happens either because he’s forced to or because the action triggered an unexpectedly heroic consequence.
• The folks of the Land even *recognize* Covenant’s weaknesses – he is not looked upon as a potential savior but as someone who wears white gold (again, a wedding ring, picked out by his now ex-wife) and has no concept of the potential for destruction that lies in it.
  • White gold is considered wild, uncontrollable magic in this world…and whatever Covenant does is not out of long study or intent but simply some immediate impulse.
• The Land is this insanely beautiful place threatened by those who can be legitimately be called evil – it’s set up as the ultimate insert-yourself-and-be-a-hero story, and Covenant can’t manage it.
• And I’m convinced that Donaldson is very intentional with all of this – when he brings Covenant back to the mundane world at the end, he has a doctor comment on how medieval leprosy is, and how rarely it’s seen – all Covenant gets from the fantasy infatuation with the middle ages is a wasting disease…
• There’s a lot more to do here, and I hope to pick this back up as I re-read the rest of the series…