Wis[s]e Words

Komarr – Lois McMaster Bujold

Published on November 4, 2010

Cover of Komarr

Komarr
Lois McMaster Bujold
311 pages
published in 1998

Komarr was the first Miles Vorkosigan book I’d ever read, back in 1998. At the time it was the latest in the series to have been published and deliberately written as a jump on point for new readers like me. I didn’t jump in completely ignorant however, as the Vorkosigan series was one of the favourite series of rec.arts.sf.written, which each new novel thoroughly dissected and discussed. It was these discussions that prompted me to finally pick up one of the series and luckily, it was the perfect starting point.

What I missed about Komarr the first time around was how feminist it is in its own right. It’s not an overtly political book, but the heart of the story is how one woman manages to escape from a bad marriage and the gender assumptions, traditions and expectations she grew up with. It’s her story that makes Komarr special, in what otherwise would’ve been a fun but unremarkable adventure science fiction story. As I’ve realised since, Lois Bujold has always been good at infusing even her slightest science fiction with subtle sociological backgrounds, imagining what effects the usual genre props might actually have on a society. So for example, the coming of Galactic gender assignment technologies to backward Barrayar has lead to a glut of males, as tradition values male heirs more than costly daughters and every family scrambled to make sure they got their quota of males. It’s something that has happened in the real world as well, not that outrageous a prediction to be sure, but Bujold pulls that sort of thing all the time, hidden in plain view in the background to Miles’ adventures.

Your (rolling) papers, please

Published on November 3, 20101 Comment

Amsterdam coffeeshop

With a new rightwing government in power in the Netherlands it was just a question of time before the coffeeshops would be targeted again. Attitudes towards cannabis and coffeeshop culture have been hardening on the right in the past decade or so, at least amongst national politicians and there’s less and less support for continuing the policy of tolerance towards cannabis users. The latest argument in this battle is the nuisance coffee shops supposedly cause, especially those aimed at foreigners.

Normally we do everything to lure visitors to the Netherlands, but as soon as they come here to toke up without risking jail, it’s a nuisance. Sure, there’s no denying that some coffeeshops do annoy their neighbours and the mega popular ones down by the Dutch-Belgian and Dutch-German borders are not places you would like to live next to, but on average coffee shops cause much less disturbance than e.g. pubs routinely do. People who’ve enjoyed slightly too much hash are more likely to fall asleep than cause trouble after all, unlike your average lager lout.

So the government has come up with the brilliant idea to introduce a “wietpas“, a membership scheme for coffeeshops, where you have to get a pass to be able to buy cannabis. Only Dutch people would be able to get such a pass so no filthy foreigners will get their hands on our weed.

You can guess what that would mean for tourism in Amsterdam. One of the few things that makes the city something more than a secondrate Vienna is the ability to score cheap, safe weed and enjoy it without harassement. As the Amsterdam bureau for tourism has calculated (Dutch), of the four and a half million tourists who visit Amsterdam each year, roughly a quarter visits a coffeeshop during their stay. That’s more than a million people, who each stay on average two days and spent around 100 euros — and not just on cannabis either. How many of those will continue to come to Amsterdam if they can’t get their fix anymore?

Books read October

Published on November 2, 20103 Comments

I was going to read more this month, but my Essentials project got in the way. Unlike some bloggers, I don’t count comics towards my book reading. It just feels like cheating. So only four books this month, all science fiction or fantasy.

The Restoration Game — Ken MacLeod
Ken’s latest novel is as good as always, but somewhat of a departure from his last few, more philosophical perhaps.

Brass Man — Neal Asher
Another almost indecypherable Polity novel depending for its impact on a lot of prior knowledge on the part of the reader, knowledge I don’t have. It reminds me of first getting to grips with the Marvel Universe, the same hints about earlier stories being dropped, the same characters with unexplained backstories. I like that sort of thing, you may not.

The Ship of Ishtar — A. Merritt
A classic pulp fantasy story from 1924, long before Tolkien codified our expectations of that genre. Interesting to read, but every now and again needs effort to continue.

Komarr — Lois McMaster Bujold
The first book in a campaign to make up for my deficiencies in reading science fiction and fantasy written by women. A reread of the first Miles Vorkosigan novel I’d ever read. What struck me this time was how quietly feminist this book is, something I need to write about in greater detail.

Smug gits

Published on November 1, 2010

What Would Optimus Prime Do?

It took this photoseries to crystalise for me what was nagging me about Jon Steward’s Rally To Restore Sanity And/Or Fear. The signs featured are clever, geeky, ironic, somewhat smug, but apolitical. It’s protesting as performance art, bloodless and meaningless. Well intentioned, I’m sure, but meaningless. Seeing the rally on the news and reading about it on the internet I could not help but think that this was what all those well meaning, smart centrists and war apologists wanted the anti-war demonstrations to be back in 2001-2003. Polite, cheerful and ineffective.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days: Epilogue

Published on October 31, 2010

So I’ve spent the last fifty days reading and reviewing fifty Marvel Essential collections, simply because I could. Today, let’s look back at what I’ve learned.

First up is the most obvious lesson: not all Essentials are created equal. As should be guessed from the existence of Essential Godzilla, Marvel will slap an Essential collection together for every character or title likely to shift books. There’s a lot of dross out there, mediocre titles not deserving to have been rescued from oblivion and weak volumes of long running titles you can skip easily.

Second, because the Essentials are relentlessly chronological in nature, mechanically collecting twenty to thirty or so issues together, there can be a lot of bad mixed in with the good in each volume. A good example is Essential Dr Strange Vol. 01, which features the complete Lee-Ditko run, which is absolutely brilliant, plus another dozen issues or so featuring lesser talents that are so inferior that any pleasure in reading them is gone.

Third, reading so many volumes in such a short time, in a roughly chronological order, it drove home to me how much the socalled Marvel Housestyle has changed over the years. There are four distinctive periods I could see. There’s the Early Silver Age, when Lee and Kirby and Ditko first start to build the Marvel revolution, with relatively simple one issue stories, lots of commie villains and little to no crosstitle continuity. This morphs into the Late Silver Age, with Lee still involved in the day to day running of Marvel and writing several series, but with younger writers like Roy Thomas and Steve Gerber onboard as well. More intricate stories, more crosstitle continuity, an expanding universe and heroes who sometimes question their calling. In the Bronze Age more relevant social issues of the day take their place, while the always present soap opera becomes as important as the superheroics. After that, with the coming of Claremont, you get the obsessive layering of subplots and a much darker, pessimistic take on superheroics, especially in the X-Men volumes of course. It’s subtle and there are no definitive boundaries between those periods, but each volume here I could assign to a period easily.

Fourth, reading this has been fun, has rekindled my interest in superhero comics, but also reminded me of how much I miss proper superhero comics. I miss the Marvel Universe, the way in which series would interact without being part of an universe wide crossover, the little details and nudges that made clear that all these stories did take place in the same universe.

Anyway, below is the complete list of reviews. Enjoy.