Wis[s]e Words

Ethan of Athos — Lois McMaster Bujold

Published on November 11, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of Ethan of Athos

Ethan of Athos
Lois McMaster Bujold
237 pages
published in 1986

Ethan of Athos is the third published book in Bujold’s Vorkosigan series and the third published in 1986. Whereas Shards of Honor told the story of how Miles Vorkosigan’s parents met and The Warrior’s Apprentice showed his first adventure, this is a spinoff not featuring any of the main characters in the series. In fact, at first it barely seems to take place in the same universe.

It all starts on the all male planet of Athos (named after the all-male Greek monastry on mount Athos, natch) where Ethan’s greatest worry is how to take his relationship a stage further and get his boyfriend to be more responsible. His dayjob is as a obstetrician. On a planet full of men natural child birth is of course impossible so uterine replicators using female gene cultures taken along by the original colonists are used instead. Recently these cultures have started to deteriorate however, showing their age and new cultures have been ordered from Jackson’s Whole. Unfortunately, once they show up, these turn out to be unusable thrash. Despite their desire to remain cut off from the rest of the Galaxy, the people of Athos have no choice but to send somebody out into the darkness, somebody pure who can handle the temptations of women, somebody like, well, Ethan.

Your Happening World (November 7th through November 10th)

Published on November 10, 2014Leave a comment

Taizong’s hell – The Chinese hell scrolls presented here treat the afterlife as a spectacle, as a display intended for public consumption. Ostensibly based on popular tales such as Tang Emperor Taizong's visit to hell in the first half of the seventh century C.E., they attract their viewers through their dark and yet cartoonish torture scenes, appealing to the same morbid curiosity fed by gothic novels, horror movies and Halloween ghosts in the West. Yet their main function was not entertainment but didactic, propagating a basic message of retribution. Every act of goodness will be rewarded; every act of evil will be justly answered.
Tax Research UK » The personal tax statement George Osborne doesn’t want you to see – Linkis.com – Add together the cost of subsidies to banks, the subsidy to pensions and the subsidy to savings (call them together the subsidy to the City of London) and they cost £103.4bn a year – more than the cost of education in the UK.
Greek Bronze Age ended 100 years earlier than thought, new evidence suggests – Conventional estimates for the collapse of the Aegean civilization may be incorrect by up to a century, according to new radiocarbon analyses. While historical chronologies traditionally place the end of the Greek Bronze Age at around 1025 BCE, this latest research suggests a date 70 to 100 years earlier.
Leefbaar hangt stad vol met Pieten – NOS Nieuws – In Rotterdam zijn honderden Zwarte Piet-poppen opgehangen aan lantaarnpalen. Om hun nek hangt een briefje met de tekst "Wij willen blijven". De pietjes zijn door de stad verspreid door de politieke partij Leefbaar Rotterdam.
Budapest autumn: hollowing out democracy on the edge of Europe | World news | The Guardian – Eva Acs, an agronomist who has run the thriving organic farm for 22 years, is at her wits’ end. “The state just took the farm away. We were absolutely punished and rubbed out. Then the private security firms came in and closed down the roads and blocked the tractors. The new owners destroyed all our plants and crops. Just to bankrupt us and hurt us.”

The Dreamblood Duology — N. K. Jemisin

Published on November 9, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of The Killing Moon

The Killing Moon & The Shadowed Sun
N. K. Jemisin
415/504 pages
published in 2012

Have you ever reached that point where you’ve read twothirds of a fantasy trilogy, quite like the writer but don’t want to read the last novel because it would mean rereading the first two? Yeah, that happened to me with N. K. Jemisin’s The Inheritance Trilogy, so instead I read her new series, The Dreamblood duology. Both The Killing Moon and The Shadowed Sun were published in 2012 and can be read as standalones, though you’ll miss a lot of the background if you only read The Shadowed Sun.

One of my ongoing frustrations with fantasy in general is how few novels take their inspiration from anything but medieval Europe. Medievaloid worlds as filtered through Tolkien and his imitators — where you can find pipe smoking peasants eating potoes with their turkey but few people of colour –are a dime a dozen, but books with Egypt as a source of worldbuilding are rare. In fact, The Dreamblood duology is the first series I can remember reading with Egypt as the inspiration for its setting, polytheism, annual flooding river surrounded by desert, powersharing between the priesthood and nominal god-king and all. What’s more, Jemisin was also inspired by Egypt’s historical relationship with Kush, the kingdom to the south of it in what’s now Sudan, who shared its culture and at times actually ruled it. In short, this is one fantasy in which pale Northern European heroes are in short supply.

Styx — Bavo Dhooge

Published on November 8, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of Styx

Styx
Bavo Dhooge
295 pages
published in 2014

I hadn’t heard of Bavo Dhooge before I saw this book spotlighted in the Amsterdam public Library in their new additions section, near to where you hand in your borrowed books. It was the cover blurb saying that this was going to published in America that drew me to it and the back cover blurb that sold me on it. Raphaël Styx, a corrupt and aggressive chief inspector in the Oostende police, is chasing a notorious serial killer, the Stuffer, who murders young women, takes out their organs and stuffs the bodies full of sand. So far, so predictable, but then it comes to a confrontation between Styx and the Stuffer and Styx is killed … only to raise the next day as a zombie cop. Now he has to trust his successor, the Congolese-Belgium dandy Joachim Delacroix, to help him bring the Stuffer to justice.

Zombie cop taking revenge on his killer is not a concept I’d seen before, though John Meaney’s Bone Song is set up along similar lines. That on it’s own was good enough to take a punt on, with the icing on the cake being the setting. Oostende is one of Belgium’s grand old seaside resorts, being the favourite haunts of its first two kings, but having declined a lot in the second half of the 20th century. It also was the centre of Belgian surrealism, something that turns out to be important in Styx.

Your Happening World (November 4th through November 7th)

Published on November 7, 2014Leave a comment

DWP orders man to work without pay for company that let him go | Society | The Guardian – A man who was let go at the end of a temporary job has been ordered by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to work for the same firm for six months without pay.
Dear Griff Rhys Jones: if you don’t like tax, why not move to the Central African Republic? – Fleet Street Fox – Mirror Online – You’d have to be a complete idiot to leave a country where many of the citizens give you lots of cash and you live in great comfort, writes Fleet Street Fox
shapeless, I’ve had a lot of people ask why I’m retracing… –
Miles Davis Albums From Worst To Best – Stereogum – Ranking a catalog the size of Miles Davis’ is an impossible task. There are so many lavish boxed sets, live releases, compilations issued during his hermit period, etc., that in order to make this article at all manageable, major cuts had to be made before it could even be begun. So here’s how this is going to work: I chose studio albums only. But to truly understand Davis’ catalog, there are a bunch of essential live releases, including Live-Evil, In Concert: Live At Philharmonic Hall, Dark Magus, Agharta, Pangaea, and The Bootleg Series Vol. 1: Live In Europe 1967. So consider the 30 albums below a starting point. There’s so much more.
A Report on Damage Done by One Individual Under Several Names | Laura J. Mixon – Friends, the tl;dr of this very long, comprehensive, analytical report is that up-and-coming John W. Campbell nominee Benjanun Sriduangkaew (who is also rage-blogger Requires Hate, who is also several other internet personalities including Winterfox, pyrofennec, acrackedmoon, and others) (oh yes, the list goes on), is VERY BAD NEWS.
Cat Trap – Trends Addict – it's a cat trap Billy — and you're already caught!
Women Rise in Sci Fi (Again) – The Atlantic – Like the fighters she wrote about, Hurley says that female science-fiction writers are often forgotten. “It’s always Asimov and Hineline,” she says. “You don’t hear about Russ or LeGuin. And there are very particular ways that people talk about it. One of those is by saying ‘well she did it, but it wasn’t really science fiction,’ or ‘her husband has a big impact.’”
179 RR Accountability and Diversity with Meagan Waller – DevChat.tv – a treasure trove of insights and info about unconscious biases , diversity, employment, culture, tech, and more.