nineveh_uk

Recs would be gratefully received for science fiction (or other fiction) for someone who likes the Ancilliary Justice trilogy and has requested the following for Christmas: The Light Brigade - Kameron Hurley; The War of the Maps - Paul McAuley; A Memory Called Empire - Arcady Martine.

For my brother-in-law. I am pretty good at identifying something that I think he will like when I read about it, but I don't really read SF these days to find it for myself. Assume that he has all Iain M Banks and isn't in to things like The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. I may not end up with giving books this year, but any recs will remain a useful resource for 2021 birthday and Christmas as well!

It took me about a year to read this. In fairness, it was not entirely or even mostly the book's fault. It turns out that 427 of tiny print on a subject on which you know almost nothing, plus 110 pages of endnotes, is not something that goes well with being a bit under the weather. When I returned to the last 250 pages without a sinus infection I romped through it. Well, up to a point.

Luther is a good book. It won the Wolfson History Prize, it was multiple 'Book(s) of the Year'. It's well written and despite the above, very readable. It's no hagiography, and doesn't flinch from the less savory sides of Luther's character, the anti-semitism, the 'if you're not with me you're against me' tendencies, the fact that he was very obviously a man who could dish it out, but not take it. I came away from it impressed with him in a way - you don't create that kind of change without being someone with some impressive qualities, and he was undoubtedly intelligent, courageous, and highly creative - while not liking him as a person.

As for the book, it's a good biography of Luther, probably, but not a good introduction to him and to the Reformation more broadly. Unfortunately, as someone who knows sod all about the Reformation, I was reading it for the latter. The first chapter doesn't even give his date of birth; I looked it up on Wikipedia, though I might have worked it out approximately from the first page of the second chapter, which informs me he was 14 in 1497. But would a date, or a timeline have been so bad? There is little by way of overview as to what else is happening outside the issues being focused on. Not really up on the German princely states? This may not be the book for you. I was reading this because my schooling basically included no pre-1800 continental European history* and I ended up feeling like someone from Russia reading an academic biog of Henry VIII while knowing nothing about him or the Tudor period at all except he got married a few times.

I don't think that all books should be equally accessible to the general reader, and Luther seems an impressive scholarly achievement. My beef, such as it is, is not really with Roper** so much as the presentation as, to quote Hillary Mantel, "a smart, accessible authoritative biography". It's certainly the first and third, but it isn't the second. If your school history included the Reformation, or you know a reasonable amount through cultural history and you want to know more, this could very well be the book for you. If it didn't, pick up a Very Short Introduction first.

*Literally everything I know about pre-Revolutionary France I have learned from fiction, not least The Three Muskehounds.

**Though seriously, can't you manage to mention he was born in 1483 near the start? I don't think that's an unreasonable expectation of a biography. I was on a train with no WiFi!

Not the book review I meant to write, but the fic I ended up writing instead.

The Sun on the Water by Nineveh_uk
Chapters: 1
Fandom: Sunshine - Robin McKinley
Rating: G, CNTW
Characters: Rae "Sunshine" Seddon, Constantine (Seddon)

Rae takes a trip back to the lake.

*

I bought Sunshine* years ago in Cambridge at one of the late lamented Galloway & Porter's big sales, read it then, and think I probably haven't for a decade. It felt like a good choice to take on holiday and I'm glad I did. It works for me because although it's a vampire novel it isn't really a horror novel, and vampire fan as I am, I am a wimp when it comes to horror of the gory sort. I'm much more into fear than horror, and it does fear very well.

The story concerns an early twenties-ish cafe baker who goes out to a local lake to get away from it all for an hour or so and finds herself kidnapped by vampires (how different from the home life of our own dear Ramblers Association), imprisoned in an abandoned house, and destined to be a vampire's dinner. Only the vampire is not so keen to go along with this particular script.

There isn't a vampire novel that doesn't have some vampire cliché, but in general I find this one pretty fresh. You can tell that this was originally written for adults rather than as YA, because the eponymous Sunshine is very much positioned as a young woman, social category full-blown adult rather than teenager. She's got a job, a flat, friends, is pretty content with her life these days, and it isn't a novel about being swept away from the mundane, but hanging on to it when disruption comes. The vampires are very effectively inhuman. They're creepy and inhuman and horribly compelling, and people perceive them as glamorous and mysterious (and then they die). I've read review comments about people being frustrated that it doesn't delve deeper into the worldbuilding, but the amount that is there is perfect for me. I don't want a Compleat World of Vampires and Eldritch Foes with Bonus Political Oeconomie detail. I want enough background for the story, and that is what it does. It does require a certain tolerance of ambiguity: I like that we don't know everything about the world, that the story has a very narrow focus and that although the central narrative has a satisfactory ending, the heroine doesn't solve all her personal mysteries, let alone how the vampire foe is going to be defeated long-term, but that it ends with a sense of future that is a life-like future, that the future will continue to unwind, but you can't know what it is. But I can see that the unanswered questions could reasonably be frustrating for some readers. I'm also a big fan of the casually lyrical narrative style. I think the final action sequence isn't as strong as it might be, and in fact is probably weakened by not taking the horror approach: it needs a bit more ludicrous vampire grandstanding, but that's a minor quibble.

*That cover is absolutely terrible. It's simultaneously a scene from the book and conveys absolutely the wrong idea of the book. Mine was this cover and I'm pretty sure that I picked it out of the pile because of that. Much creepier, but also, being the romance of the clapboard house, much creepier. I think the current cover also does the book a disservice in another way in that I realised while reading it that there is almost no physical description of most of the human characters, including the heroine, and all of them could be of any ethnicity, which feels like it works well in a vampire book where the ostensible sides are humans or Others and we don't even know the name of the heroine's country (OK, it's obviously the US, but in this AU world we don't know that it is called the US. Manchester does exist, however. It has a vampire problem.)

Feel the Force and Do it Anyway

What Colour is Your Lightsaber?

Eat, Meditate, Repress all your Emotions

I'm a Wookie, You're a Wookie

How to Win Acolytes and Influence Billions

Who Moved My Droid?

The Seven Habits of Highly-Effective Jedi

Men are from Tatooine, Women are from Alderaan

*

Suggestions for more?

Somewhat belatedly mentioning, I have finished Envious Casca. I enjoyed it. I got whodunnit, on account of having come across something related in another book (strictly speaking, having seen it on a televised version), so I knew that something was iffy. What I didn't get was how the murder in the locked-room mystery had been done. Which was, for circumstances I am about to relate, really stupid of me.

( Spoilers for the murder method and clues... )

My fandom year ended annoyingly as the new year's eve performance of Five Guys Named Moe I was supposed to go to was cancelled due to cast illness (possibly the stinking cold going round that has deprived me of most of my voice). But the year ended, a new one has begun, and as I am supposed to be packing to get the train home tomorrow, I am allowing time for a meme instead.

Courtesy of naraht

1. Your main fandom of the year?

I think that this probably has to be Tanz der Vampire. Not because I've written loads in it (grand total: two fics) or am active in the online fandom, but because as a direct result of it I've started learning German again and went on holiday to see it, so in terms of personal commitment it definitely gets a lot of points.

2. Your favourite film watched this year?

*Attempts to think which films I've seen this year* I'm really not sure. Perhaps When Marnie Was There. Not because it was the best film I've seen this year (I'm assuming they were also supposed to be in the cinema), because Carol, Rams, and The Wind Rises were all better. But it was an excellent film that introduced me to a new genre, was gripping all the way through, and portrayed the travails of childhood done with much sensitivity and skill.

3. Your favourite book read this year?

Oh dear, I'm not sure about this one, either. Not the first Elena Ferrante - it caught me in the wrong mood and I didn't finish it, though I shall certainly come back to it. I don't think I could really call it a favourite, but perhaps the book that has left the most lasting impression on me this year has been Stefan Zweig's autobiography The World of Yesterday, which felt at times appallingly topical. His description of the events leading up to the First World War, not as the thunderous hoofbeats of history, but as something that just sort of happens while being so bizarre a concept that it is impossible to believe it is actually going to happen. Zweig literally gets the last train back from Belgium (where he has been on a seaside holiday) to Germany and sees troops and trains massing at the border and even then he recounts still thinking/telling himself that it's obviously manoeuvres, because there's no way that Germany is going to invade Belgium. It's not the best-written book I've read this year, but it was fascinating. Even the several chapters of deeply-tedious fanboying of early C20 minor French and Belgian poets gain pathos later when one appreciates the degree to which Zweig is writing in exile, looking back to a different world that, for all its egregious faults, was not the world of World Wars and the Holocaust.

4. Your favourite TV show of the year?

Oh dear, this probably has to be Yuri on Ice. Fun as Deutschland 83, Trapped and The Night Manager were, enchanting as Planet Earth II inevitably was, YOI was a delightful accompaniment to a rather trying autumn and something to look forward to amidst the global and domestic politics and perpetual nose-blowing/sniffing/48 hour flu etc.

5. Your favourite online fandom community of the year?

I have certainly spent too much time on FFA.

6. Your best new fandom discovery of the year?

Quite how many hits/kudos it is possible to get through production of a timely fic in a larger fandom. I shall not be switching all my fic production to hunt-the-kudos, but it is a nice change on occasion.

7. Your biggest fandom disappointment of the year?

(1) Me. Definitely not enough writing, the giant Wimsey/HP crossover made some progress but still isn't finished (and I've realised that I think I'm going to do a major edit of one aspect of it, kill your darlings argh), and I had lots of ideas for various things and just haven't got to more than rough notes of it. It's basically a question of time and energy (and German), but very annoying.

(2) Therese Johaug (Norwegian cross-country skier) failed a doping test and is currently suspended pending the formal outcome. I veer between thinking that her account is plausible as someone having an ill-timed but understandable in the circumstances moment of carelessness over medication that clearly brought no performance benefit, and that that is exactly the sort of story that you'd come up with if you were in fact doping and that maybe there's a reason for that extra sprint prowess last year.
I'm a lot less disappointed with the ongoing revelations about some of the Russians because I've had suspicions for longer, not least because of their pattern of competition.

(skips a couple of questions, can't be bothered to re-number)

10. Your biggest squee moment of the year?

Without a doubt, going to see Tanz der Vampire live, which is a good thing considering I went to another country in order to do so. Absolutely enormous fun, surrounded by an audience of people also having enormous fun. With vampires.

Honourable mention for Yuri on Ice episode 10 . I laughed like a drain the entire episode and spent far too much time on the internet afterwards. It was hilarious, but also really enjoyable to see a work really pull off a narrative switch on the audience like that. It's something far more creators attempt than succeed at.

11. The most missed of your old fandoms?
Definitely the moment at which I realised that yes, I really, really did want to go and see The Cursed Child once it was on stage and tickets were unobtainable. I had assumed beforehand that I wouldn't be that fussed, that I'd wait and see how it was reviewed etc. etc. It was a mistake.

12. The fandom you haven’t tried yet, but want to?

My first interest isn't fandom, it's canons. If there turns out to be a fandom that I enjoy that's great. There are plenty of things I have enjoyed reading or watching in which I have very little fannish interest at all, such as Tolkien.

The series of the year I haven't watched appears to be the third series of Norwegian Skam, and I plan to catch up with the lot in 2017. However the English-language fandom (tumblr) sounds awful, and I'm both too late for the Norwegian one and don't have good enough (i.e. any) written Norwegian to participate. Also, world enough and time...

13. Your biggest fan anticipations for the New Year?

Can Andrew Musgrave make the top 10 in the Tour de Ski? (Dubious. Top 15, OTOH, possible and would be nice to see.)

DOING MORE WRITING MYSELF and making an attempt to finish the eternal Wimsey crossover WIP. I will conquer, I swear!

Should Chuck Tingle run out of subjects for his unique brand of fiction, may I suggest that he consider the rich field offered by language learning?

Pounded in the Butt by Grammatical Gender and Turned Gay by the Indirect Object would surely be best-sellers.

Thank God for Collins easy learning... German Grammar and Practice, that's all I can say.

On AO3, An Archetypal Schloss. Patrick Leigh Fermor/Tanz der Vampire crossover.

Caught in the wilds in treacherous weather, Patrick Leigh Fermor seeks shelter in a Transylvanian castle. It's not the first schloss that Patrick has visited in the course of his journey on foot through central Europe, but is he prepared for the perilous hospitality of the Graf von Krolock and his son?

This fic is the fault of white_hart, whose comment "But why does no-one appear to have written a crossover between Patrick Leigh Fermor's Between the Woods and the Water and Rocky Horror?" gave me the idea of this fic before I had read any more of Leigh Fermor than the extracts of Mani in my Greek guide book. Then she lent me the books. I have since purchased my own, as they are terrific in their own right and not simply as begetters of crackfic.

There is still no crossover between Between the Woods and the Water and Rocky Horror, but I hope that this is close enough to serve.

A note on the canons:

Patrick Leigh Fermor's books A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water* (together with a third posthumously-published volume I haven't read yet) are the account of one of history's great gap years, as 18 year old Patrick sets out to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. En route he stays in a wide range of barns, inns, a Salvation Army hostel, with a host of friendly people from bargemen to students to woodcutters, and in the schlosses of a string of aristocratic relics of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where he is mentored by his older hosts and entertained by their offspring. The books, written over 50 years after the journey, are a fascinating look back at a world that was about to vanish entirely, a fact of which the older author is painfully aware, and the youth oblivious. In 1933, young Patrick's adventures had the charm of novelty, but he was also evidently tremendously personally engaging, and it can't have hurt that he was rather good-looking.

Tanz der Vampire is a German-language musical that follows the adventures of Alfred, the young assistant to a vampire-hunting professor, as they go horribly wrong. Attempting to save an innkeeper's daughter from the clutches of the vampire Count von Krolock, Alfred finds himself a guest at the Count's castle where he experiences some very bad dreams, gets hit on by the Count's son, and fails to save the girl. The girl didn't want to be saved, anyway.

*Not Death Twixt the Woods and the Water, that's the Harriet Vane crossover.

I am reading Outlander. It is completely ridiculous and I haven’t even got to the Really Infamous Bits yet. I am relieved that my knowledge of mid-eighteenth century Scottish history is almost nil* because it means that the total fantasy isn’t annoying me. Unlike the opening section, which contains such minor inaccuracies as WW2 ending before April 1945.

I'd heard that this was a novel so packed full of tropes it could give fandom a run for its money, and that certainly seems to be true. The sheer amount of hurt/comfort is hilarious. By little more than a hundred pages in, love interest Jamie has had the following injuries tended by nurse heroine Claire: dislocated shoulder, musket ball in (arm?), stabbed with a bayonet, been repeatedly punched, including in the head, by a professional Disciplinary Puncher, because he nobly took the place of a girl who was to be whipped. Jamie, of course, has also been whipped, but that was in flashback, so Claire only gets to listen in horror and caress the scarred flesh. Claire, on the other hand, seems remarkably unfazed by being stuck two hundred years in the past, and one would have thought that a doorstopper volume could have spared half a paragraph for her to wonder what her husband is thinking about her mysterious disappearance, especially as the first section kept mentioning how in love they were and how much sex they were having.

Having said all that, I can see why this would work as a television series. It has a decent central premise, the time-travelling heroine’s being a nurse is very useful to the narrative, and it has classic Romantic Scotland settings. Oh, and a lot of knitwear and a villain whose portrayal from the pictures I've seen appears to be based on ‘Jason Isaacs in the scene in That Patriot when he kills Heath Ledger’. Apparently the knitting is rather popular.

*Though still sufficient for me to be able to tell that the world portrayed is a total fantasy.

I should like to be more enthusiastic about the newly-announced Vorkosigan book - to be published next February - than I am finding myself. I haven't been keen on the last three, and I imagine that I would need a change in what Bujold currently seems interested in doing in order for it to engage me. It's about Cordelia, and while I like early Cordelia, her later incarnation does little for me (though that may partly be fandom osmosis of her All Knowing Wisdom in Personal Relationships interposing itself between me and the text).

The title is Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen. I hope that's a working title. Jole, IIRC, is the off-screen v. minor character that parts of fandom think Aral appointed for his good looks. This all sounds rather grudging; I hope that it is good and my kind of thing, I am just not counting on it.

*

On books, but another subject, I must work out how to organise my kindle library while it is still fairly small. Why has the Gutenberg download of John Halifax, Gentleman* emerged with a little square icon that reads simply "Personal"? Is Mrs Craik NSFK compared to Austen? Also need to delete accidental clippings.

*A must read for Mrs Gaskell fans. You can't have too many Midlands self-made men, and their manly friendships.