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rushthatspeaksVia Papersky-- I'd read many of Martin's short stories, and also The Armageddon Rag, but hadn't even known of the existence of this one. (No, I have not read A Song of Ice and Fire. Asking me when I'm going to read it won't help anything. I have now bounced off the first one very hard twice, so it only gets one more shot, and I'm saving it for a time that feels propitious.)
There are some writers I love, and race through, and sit down with and look up six hours later and have no idea where the time has gone. There are other writers I love who take a bit longer, because they are denser, and I have to work to get everything they're saying into my head.
There are still other writers, and Martin is one of them, whom I respect and admire and enjoy terribly in the abstract and after I've read them, and then when I am trying to read the actual book it requires a physical act of will and effort to get my eyes to remain focused on the paper. I have no idea why, unless it is that they think so incredibly differently from the way that I think that I am having to translate as I go, to find some way of construing and contextualizing each and every sentence because it goes so against the usual way I see things that it barely makes any sense. (The principal other writer I have this issue with is C.J. Cherryh. I have come to the conclusion that she literally thinks perpendicularly to the way I do and that even when I do understand what she is trying to say, I probably do not get anything out of her remotely resembling what she intended me to. For instance, people keep telling me her novel Rusalka is depressing, whereas it is one of my comfort books.) This is why I bounced off A Game of Thrones: it's very long and I was getting a nasty headache from having to think about it so hard and I haven't the endurance and so I found that I was making excuses to go clean the bathroom instead. B. says I should try the audiobook. Maybe so.
At any rate, I consider this kind of reading good for me; it expands the inside of my head. When I finally did click with Cherryh's Foreigner series, it changed the way I think about some things involving logic; the way I think about logic now would not have been comprehensible to me before reading those. So when I heard that there was a Martin novel I didn't know about, and which is short, it went on my list. Yesterday I read four hundred and ten pages of Mette Ivie Harrison (who is, granted, easy) in an hour and a half. Today I read two hundred and fifty-four pages of Martin in just under seven hours. That will tell you.
As to how the book is? The book is great. It reminds me a lot of Donald Kingsbury's Courtship Rite and somewhat of Andre Norton (deep time, elements that would in other writer's hands be fantasy and are here sf) and just a touch of Iain Banks' The Player of Games, but mostly of itself.
The setting is impressive, for one thing-- it's on a world without a star, a planet that's never come close enough to any sun to fall into orbit. But the planet passes through a system with a lot of suns in it, and so for about fifty years it's capable of supporting life, and the different worlds of humanity all band together and hold a Festival on it. They build cities and sculptures and works of art, and they stock it with plants and animals, and they make it a beautiful world: and now, when the Festival is over, it's all going into the dark, either a massive waste or a massive gesture of defiance or an odd art statement or just what happens to every world eventually. One of the main characters is an ecologist who's come to study the interactions of the native life of several worlds in the face of the increasing cold, and I have to say, this is pretty much the place I have seen an ecologist in a book where I consider one to be most required. There should be a frickin' academy of ecologists out there. It is one of the most interesting things ever to happen to an ecosystem.
Anyway, Gwen, the ecologist, is from a world that is rather technologically advanced, but she's gotten into a relationship pattern with some people from somewhere else entirely. When I say 'relationship pattern' I don't mean quite marriage, because it isn't. This is one of those cases where the coined vocabulary in an sf novel is genuinely trying to express concepts we don't have. The culture she's engaged with is much less technological, very warlike, very violent, very very macho, and she's having complicated issues with who she wants to be in relation to her past self and all of that. And the protagonist, Dirk, her ex-lover from back home who has never ever gotten over their breakup, adds another element of confusion and instability to it all.
There's a plot, and it's interesting, and there are several suspenseful chase scenes and that incredibly impressive and atmospheric setting-- I would read a phone book set on this planet-- but the thing I find most spectacular about the novel is the way in which it clearly and bitingly shows a lot of intelligent and occasionally quite well-meaning people, some of whom consider themselves broad-minded, utterly failing to cope with the cultural baggage they brought with them. It's pretty rare to see mindsets this different from one another shown in fiction without the author taking sides, and although the very macho culture has a lot of things about it that are upsetting and repugnant to a reader resembling me, Martin does not take sides; we clearly see how and why they are what they are, and how it happened, and what merit it has. The whole thing reaches heights that might be considered high tragedy, if Dirk were not the sort of person who occasionally misses when he is very sincerely trying to shoot himself in the foot. As a result, I do not consider the ending unthinkably depressing. Melancholy, maybe. Which fits well with that dying world, and the long night coming.
So yeah, go read this, it was interesting and different, and I suspect a quicker read for people who aren't me. And after a while I am sure I will try more Martin. Difficult books are good for you, maybe: learning to enjoy them is better for you.
There are some writers I love, and race through, and sit down with and look up six hours later and have no idea where the time has gone. There are other writers I love who take a bit longer, because they are denser, and I have to work to get everything they're saying into my head.
There are still other writers, and Martin is one of them, whom I respect and admire and enjoy terribly in the abstract and after I've read them, and then when I am trying to read the actual book it requires a physical act of will and effort to get my eyes to remain focused on the paper. I have no idea why, unless it is that they think so incredibly differently from the way that I think that I am having to translate as I go, to find some way of construing and contextualizing each and every sentence because it goes so against the usual way I see things that it barely makes any sense. (The principal other writer I have this issue with is C.J. Cherryh. I have come to the conclusion that she literally thinks perpendicularly to the way I do and that even when I do understand what she is trying to say, I probably do not get anything out of her remotely resembling what she intended me to. For instance, people keep telling me her novel Rusalka is depressing, whereas it is one of my comfort books.) This is why I bounced off A Game of Thrones: it's very long and I was getting a nasty headache from having to think about it so hard and I haven't the endurance and so I found that I was making excuses to go clean the bathroom instead. B. says I should try the audiobook. Maybe so.
At any rate, I consider this kind of reading good for me; it expands the inside of my head. When I finally did click with Cherryh's Foreigner series, it changed the way I think about some things involving logic; the way I think about logic now would not have been comprehensible to me before reading those. So when I heard that there was a Martin novel I didn't know about, and which is short, it went on my list. Yesterday I read four hundred and ten pages of Mette Ivie Harrison (who is, granted, easy) in an hour and a half. Today I read two hundred and fifty-four pages of Martin in just under seven hours. That will tell you.
As to how the book is? The book is great. It reminds me a lot of Donald Kingsbury's Courtship Rite and somewhat of Andre Norton (deep time, elements that would in other writer's hands be fantasy and are here sf) and just a touch of Iain Banks' The Player of Games, but mostly of itself.
The setting is impressive, for one thing-- it's on a world without a star, a planet that's never come close enough to any sun to fall into orbit. But the planet passes through a system with a lot of suns in it, and so for about fifty years it's capable of supporting life, and the different worlds of humanity all band together and hold a Festival on it. They build cities and sculptures and works of art, and they stock it with plants and animals, and they make it a beautiful world: and now, when the Festival is over, it's all going into the dark, either a massive waste or a massive gesture of defiance or an odd art statement or just what happens to every world eventually. One of the main characters is an ecologist who's come to study the interactions of the native life of several worlds in the face of the increasing cold, and I have to say, this is pretty much the place I have seen an ecologist in a book where I consider one to be most required. There should be a frickin' academy of ecologists out there. It is one of the most interesting things ever to happen to an ecosystem.
Anyway, Gwen, the ecologist, is from a world that is rather technologically advanced, but she's gotten into a relationship pattern with some people from somewhere else entirely. When I say 'relationship pattern' I don't mean quite marriage, because it isn't. This is one of those cases where the coined vocabulary in an sf novel is genuinely trying to express concepts we don't have. The culture she's engaged with is much less technological, very warlike, very violent, very very macho, and she's having complicated issues with who she wants to be in relation to her past self and all of that. And the protagonist, Dirk, her ex-lover from back home who has never ever gotten over their breakup, adds another element of confusion and instability to it all.
There's a plot, and it's interesting, and there are several suspenseful chase scenes and that incredibly impressive and atmospheric setting-- I would read a phone book set on this planet-- but the thing I find most spectacular about the novel is the way in which it clearly and bitingly shows a lot of intelligent and occasionally quite well-meaning people, some of whom consider themselves broad-minded, utterly failing to cope with the cultural baggage they brought with them. It's pretty rare to see mindsets this different from one another shown in fiction without the author taking sides, and although the very macho culture has a lot of things about it that are upsetting and repugnant to a reader resembling me, Martin does not take sides; we clearly see how and why they are what they are, and how it happened, and what merit it has. The whole thing reaches heights that might be considered high tragedy, if Dirk were not the sort of person who occasionally misses when he is very sincerely trying to shoot himself in the foot. As a result, I do not consider the ending unthinkably depressing. Melancholy, maybe. Which fits well with that dying world, and the long night coming.
So yeah, go read this, it was interesting and different, and I suspect a quicker read for people who aren't me. And after a while I am sure I will try more Martin. Difficult books are good for you, maybe: learning to enjoy them is better for you.
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no subject
Date: 2011-01-15 08:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-16 04:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-16 04:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-15 02:56 pm (UTC)This idea fascinates me. It also reminds me of a book by Steven Pinker called "The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature." The book discusses language and the way language usage develops in children to tease apart basic concepts about the way human beings see the world (time, space, etc.) It doesn't get into how different people might think differently though. I hope maybe you'll elaborate on this idea sometime.
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Date: 2011-01-16 05:01 am (UTC)There are some writers out there who are incapable of surprising me because I think exactly the way they do, so my reaction to their plot twists is 'oh, I thought you were going to do something surprising, wouldn't anyone just do x?' and then I have to have it gently explained to me that x is not intuitively obvious to everybody. Joan Aiken, for instance. I can't read Joan Aiken because I can predict the entire book accurately from the first three pages, and I am assured this is not a standard capacity. Kind of the opposite to the way Martin is for me. Unfortunately, I have yet to figure out what causes it.
*notes down Pinker*
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Date: 2011-01-25 02:44 pm (UTC)probably my favorite book by GRRM. while I had some issues with the lack of agency exhibited by the protagonist, they were resolved by his eventual decision to make a stand at the ending. when people ask me about what GRRM books to read, this is the first one I recommend.
oh, and apropos of one of your comments regarding GRRM short stories on your lj cross-post, I found "Sandkings" to be a bit too much for me, and I don't even share your entomophobia. my favorite GRRM short story is "Way of the Cross and Dragon".
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Date: 2011-01-15 11:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-15 09:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-15 11:15 pm (UTC)(Not sure why it's important for me to know; I guess for the immediacy of the threat?)
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Date: 2011-01-16 05:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-16 12:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-15 01:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-16 05:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-15 02:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-15 07:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-16 05:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-15 03:11 pm (UTC)It's interesting that you mention Cherryh. I love her to pieces, but I've learned that she's not accessible to everyone, and it's not a matter of "difficult" or "easy." Your comment about direction of thinking makes sense.
So maybe I ought to look at this book. I generally don't even try GRRM, mostly because "Song for Lya" (which many people I respect absolutely love) disturbed me in a bad way.
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Date: 2011-01-16 05:10 am (UTC)... oddly enough there are a couple of her books, most notably the Rusalka trilogy, that do not have this at all and I simply enjoy. No idea why.
I left off reading Martin for about a decade because his short story 'Sandkings' is the worst story ever written for insect-phobic people to read, bar none, I have never found worse and I don't want to. But this novel, while it had, you know, people being nasty to each other, did not existentially bother me and I found it difficult but very rewarding.
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Date: 2011-01-15 06:32 pm (UTC)P.
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Date: 2011-01-16 05:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-16 05:09 pm (UTC)P.
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Date: 2011-01-15 07:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-16 05:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-16 04:54 pm (UTC)It probably does not help that I think Dirk has a terminal case of Nice Guy Syndrome.
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Date: 2011-01-16 05:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-17 11:23 am (UTC)