Currently Reading - 27 September 2014
Sep. 27th, 2014 04:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davidgillonCompleted Reads:
Thunderbird Falls, C.E.Murphy
Read this on the train North as I decided I wanted something light-ish. The cover calls this 'book 2 of the Walker Papers', Amazon's description calls it book 3, the discrepancy's why I hadn't gotten around to reading it before as I liked Book 1 (Urban Shaman) - it looks like there's a novella or short story set between them, which is probably why the confusion. Joanne Walker (aka Siobhan Walkingstick, it's complicated) discovered she was a shaman in the previous book, saved the world, but caused one or two minor issues with the regional weather, and this book is mostly her digging a bigger hole as she tries to fix it. I like it, but just possibly would have liked it more if it wasn't world in the balance stuff - starting small can't hurt, surely? Her situation - just wants to be a mechanic for Seattle PD's motor pool, but did police academy as a favour to old boss as she looks really good on the diversity stats, but has now been manipulated into being an actual SPD officer by new boss with whom there is much sexual tension - is still irritating me, it feels just too contrived. OTOH it's nice to have a police procedural in which the detective is a uniformed officer, not an actual detective.
(This book confirms Joanne operates out of Seattle's North Precinct, which is basically the same as my novel in progress, I'm definitely going to have to rename at least one character - though that will save me the requisite 'how to pronounce Siobhan' explanation)
Locked In, John Scalzi
I needed a comfort read after Dad's stroke, and had been intending to re-read Locked In anyway, having missed the non-gendering of the protagonist on my first pass. I wasn't certain I could sustain reading it without unconsciously gendering the protagonist of my own accord, so deliberately tried to read Chris as female this time instead of male to balance it out and verify it works that way around; maybe I'll manage a non-gendered reading at the third attempt. Scalzi's attention to detail in the non-gendering really impressed me, for instance Chris has one female nurse, and one male nurse, so there are no clues there. The only scene where I wasn't too sure over it was a scene where Chris confronts four drunks who are harassing Chris's new housemate; given the nature of aggressive male drunks, I think gender would likely have been significant in how three of them react (the fourth was always going to take a pop at one or both of them) - OTOH that assumes the drunks treat Hadens as gendered, and I'm not sure that always happens even with sober non-Hadens. Interestingly, while we're explicitly told that there are child and adult-sized threeps (the drone bodies used by people with Haden's Syndrome), there is no indication anywhere that threeps are gendered in any fashion. The only customisation we are told about is faces (a handful of protesters use Founding Father faces to make a political point), and paint jobs.
(Yes, reading a novel about people with Locked In Syndrome to avoid fretting about a family member's stroke is weird, but worked for me, possibly because the neural nets and threeps provide a clearly effective way of managing the disability)
Great North Road, Peter F Hamilton
Still on the comfort-read theme, I'd always planned to re-read Hamilton's doorstopper (1087 pages - thank god for my Kindle!). I'm generally a fan of Hamilton and I really like this, but he's not exactly a concise author.... One reason I particularly like GNR is it's set in Newcastle, and I'm a Northern lad (most people would call me a Geordie, though we're a bit more pedantic locally), so I know the areas it's describing to various degrees - I chortle with glee over the scene where they set a spaceship down on the Town Moor - and it's just comforting to read a book where everyone calls each other 'pet' and uses 'aye' instead of 'yes'. And bonus points for being possibly the one book in my library to use 'claggy' (OTOH penalty points for gratuitous overuse of his thesaurus - I'm far from convinced it is ever necessary to describe a dawn sky, even an alien one, as 'nankeen'.)
Essentially it's a murder inquiry, but set 130 years in the future, in a universally-surveilled world (interesting to me as I'm developing an idea with a similarly surveilled society). Complicating the murder are that the victim is one of an extensive family of clones and they don't know which one - there's evidence to suggest a substitution may have been made, and that said family are hugely, even uniquely powerful. Further complicating things, there is evidence to link the murder to a massacre of several other members of said family 20 years ago, on a colony world, and the sole-survivor, jailed for that killing, always swore it was done by an alien monster. Strategic necessities mean that there can't just be the police investigation, there also has to be an expedition into the colonial wilderness to prove whether or not said colony has any form of animal life. So you get a double-threaded narrative in which the police investigation, with a really well imagined set of police characters, alternates with an Aliens-like narrative on the expedition. Just to further complicate things, the protagonist for the expedition is a somewhat unreliable narrator, having managed to keep a substantial part of her past history hidden through 20 years of wrongful incarceration and an interrogation that makes the worst Guantanamo excesses look like a cakewalk.
Pratchett's Women: Unauthorised Essays on the Female Characters Of Discworld, Tansy Rayner Roberts
Enjoyable set of essays on the development of Pratchett's female characters.
Reading Right Now:
Keeping it Real, Justina Robson
Not making a lot of progress as I've mostly been 300 miles from my copy.
Having finished GNR in the wee small hours I don't have much on the go at the minute, I suspect I'll buy at least a couple more of the Joanne Walker stories to read when I head back to Durham, maybe some other urban fantasy as well, as I'm likely to want comfort reading, and probably Hamilton's Misspent Youth as that's about the one gap in my Hamilton collection.
Temporarily Stalled:
Mirror Empire, Kameron Hurley
Not the book's fault, I'm looking for something lighter right now.
Completely Stalled:
Shaman's Crossing, Robin Hobb
Upcoming:
Kaleidoscope, the diverse YA SF anthology
The Incorruptibles, John Hornor Jacobs
Siege Perilous, last book of the Mongoliad shared narrative
Brilliance, Marcus Sakey - don't even remember buying this, but found it on my kindle and the opening is okay tho nothing new.
Feminist, Queer, Crip, Alison Kafer -I very rarely read disability theory stuff, but this was recommended to me by Kathryn Allan as likely to interest me and the Amazon sample reads very well, so I'm likely to pick up the full book.
Thunderbird Falls, C.E.Murphy
Read this on the train North as I decided I wanted something light-ish. The cover calls this 'book 2 of the Walker Papers', Amazon's description calls it book 3, the discrepancy's why I hadn't gotten around to reading it before as I liked Book 1 (Urban Shaman) - it looks like there's a novella or short story set between them, which is probably why the confusion. Joanne Walker (aka Siobhan Walkingstick, it's complicated) discovered she was a shaman in the previous book, saved the world, but caused one or two minor issues with the regional weather, and this book is mostly her digging a bigger hole as she tries to fix it. I like it, but just possibly would have liked it more if it wasn't world in the balance stuff - starting small can't hurt, surely? Her situation - just wants to be a mechanic for Seattle PD's motor pool, but did police academy as a favour to old boss as she looks really good on the diversity stats, but has now been manipulated into being an actual SPD officer by new boss with whom there is much sexual tension - is still irritating me, it feels just too contrived. OTOH it's nice to have a police procedural in which the detective is a uniformed officer, not an actual detective.
(This book confirms Joanne operates out of Seattle's North Precinct, which is basically the same as my novel in progress, I'm definitely going to have to rename at least one character - though that will save me the requisite 'how to pronounce Siobhan' explanation)
Locked In, John Scalzi
I needed a comfort read after Dad's stroke, and had been intending to re-read Locked In anyway, having missed the non-gendering of the protagonist on my first pass. I wasn't certain I could sustain reading it without unconsciously gendering the protagonist of my own accord, so deliberately tried to read Chris as female this time instead of male to balance it out and verify it works that way around; maybe I'll manage a non-gendered reading at the third attempt. Scalzi's attention to detail in the non-gendering really impressed me, for instance Chris has one female nurse, and one male nurse, so there are no clues there. The only scene where I wasn't too sure over it was a scene where Chris confronts four drunks who are harassing Chris's new housemate; given the nature of aggressive male drunks, I think gender would likely have been significant in how three of them react (the fourth was always going to take a pop at one or both of them) - OTOH that assumes the drunks treat Hadens as gendered, and I'm not sure that always happens even with sober non-Hadens. Interestingly, while we're explicitly told that there are child and adult-sized threeps (the drone bodies used by people with Haden's Syndrome), there is no indication anywhere that threeps are gendered in any fashion. The only customisation we are told about is faces (a handful of protesters use Founding Father faces to make a political point), and paint jobs.
(Yes, reading a novel about people with Locked In Syndrome to avoid fretting about a family member's stroke is weird, but worked for me, possibly because the neural nets and threeps provide a clearly effective way of managing the disability)
Great North Road, Peter F Hamilton
Still on the comfort-read theme, I'd always planned to re-read Hamilton's doorstopper (1087 pages - thank god for my Kindle!). I'm generally a fan of Hamilton and I really like this, but he's not exactly a concise author.... One reason I particularly like GNR is it's set in Newcastle, and I'm a Northern lad (most people would call me a Geordie, though we're a bit more pedantic locally), so I know the areas it's describing to various degrees - I chortle with glee over the scene where they set a spaceship down on the Town Moor - and it's just comforting to read a book where everyone calls each other 'pet' and uses 'aye' instead of 'yes'. And bonus points for being possibly the one book in my library to use 'claggy' (OTOH penalty points for gratuitous overuse of his thesaurus - I'm far from convinced it is ever necessary to describe a dawn sky, even an alien one, as 'nankeen'.)
Essentially it's a murder inquiry, but set 130 years in the future, in a universally-surveilled world (interesting to me as I'm developing an idea with a similarly surveilled society). Complicating the murder are that the victim is one of an extensive family of clones and they don't know which one - there's evidence to suggest a substitution may have been made, and that said family are hugely, even uniquely powerful. Further complicating things, there is evidence to link the murder to a massacre of several other members of said family 20 years ago, on a colony world, and the sole-survivor, jailed for that killing, always swore it was done by an alien monster. Strategic necessities mean that there can't just be the police investigation, there also has to be an expedition into the colonial wilderness to prove whether or not said colony has any form of animal life. So you get a double-threaded narrative in which the police investigation, with a really well imagined set of police characters, alternates with an Aliens-like narrative on the expedition. Just to further complicate things, the protagonist for the expedition is a somewhat unreliable narrator, having managed to keep a substantial part of her past history hidden through 20 years of wrongful incarceration and an interrogation that makes the worst Guantanamo excesses look like a cakewalk.
Pratchett's Women: Unauthorised Essays on the Female Characters Of Discworld, Tansy Rayner Roberts
Enjoyable set of essays on the development of Pratchett's female characters.
Reading Right Now:
Keeping it Real, Justina Robson
Not making a lot of progress as I've mostly been 300 miles from my copy.
Having finished GNR in the wee small hours I don't have much on the go at the minute, I suspect I'll buy at least a couple more of the Joanne Walker stories to read when I head back to Durham, maybe some other urban fantasy as well, as I'm likely to want comfort reading, and probably Hamilton's Misspent Youth as that's about the one gap in my Hamilton collection.
Temporarily Stalled:
Mirror Empire, Kameron Hurley
Not the book's fault, I'm looking for something lighter right now.
Completely Stalled:
Shaman's Crossing, Robin Hobb
Upcoming:
Kaleidoscope, the diverse YA SF anthology
The Incorruptibles, John Hornor Jacobs
Siege Perilous, last book of the Mongoliad shared narrative
Brilliance, Marcus Sakey - don't even remember buying this, but found it on my kindle and the opening is okay tho nothing new.
Feminist, Queer, Crip, Alison Kafer -I very rarely read disability theory stuff, but this was recommended to me by Kathryn Allan as likely to interest me and the Amazon sample reads very well, so I'm likely to pick up the full book.
no subject
Date: 2014-09-27 04:39 pm (UTC)I found Kafer's book fascinating, and I had the good fortune to hear her speak at a conference last year. An excellent presenter, and could definitely rouse the rabble with the best of them. I hoped to find an explanation of reclaiming "crip," which I find problematic in using the physically impaired as a stand-in for all of us. That happens enough, damn it. If we need to reclaim something, I nominate "freak."
Have you read Skallagrigg? Have you ever been at a discussion/panel? I adored that book, which might be labelled fantasy but that would be an error.
GNR sounds quite nice. At least an e-reader offers lightweight access to the dictionary when authors overuse their thesaurus.
no subject
Date: 2014-09-27 05:04 pm (UTC)I'm a fan of 'crip', particularly for putting normies in their place, but I recognize it's problematic.
I've not read Skallagrig, but STR watching a tv adaptation a few years ago. Not sure whether you meant a panel on Skallagrig in particular or disability in general. No to the first but was at (but not on) a bunch of diversity related panels at LonCon
no subject
Date: 2014-09-27 05:12 pm (UTC)Reading Skallagrigg in 90s was like reading Lord of the Rings in the 60s -- a trip inside the heavenly chambers in my heart and head. Among its many charms is an evocation of the thrill and challenge of developing assistive tech with 1981-strength Acorn PCs. That was a time of enormous possibilities of "power to the people." I've tried and failed to lay hands on the BBC version; if you stumble across it, let me know.
no subject
Date: 2014-09-27 06:31 pm (UTC)I'm not sure there's much talk about organising happening in UK disability circles. Most UK disability activists and groups are necessarily focussed on stopping the savage benefit cuts, rather than campaigning to make things better at the moment. Some of that is individual, one of my on line friends is involved in extended legal action over whether the changes have breached UK or international law, another is Sky New's goto person for the disability view, many of us have written for various papers, etc, other campaigning is via a variety of groups:
Spartacus are a very loose collective of disabled people who have assembled behind a bunch of reports that have been put together by various disabled people (most of whom I know to one degree or another), which dissect government disability policy and point out the inconvenient truths.
Disabled People Against The Cuts (DPAC) and Black Triangle are probably the biggest, and most radical, activist groups, I was at the DPAC launch, but I don't agree with some of their policies (too rigid), so I prefer to keep my independence.
There's also WOWCampaign, which was specifically focussed on getting a petition through to force a parliamentary debate on disability cuts. They did that (the debate was a farce), but are still active on a general campaigning basis.
Problematic for many disabled people is Disability Rights UK, which is a merger of several traditional disability charities and whose chief exec was behind several deeply divisive policies, such as the decision to close the Remploy sheltered workshops. They've taken government money to be an organising voice for disabled people, a concept I find deeply problematic, and they're frequently far too reluctant to oppose government policy.
ALLFIE - the Alliance for Inclusive Education - campaign to close the remaining segregated 'special' schools.
Transport for All are a London focussed group working for transport accessibility. I think they're pretty damn good at it and wish they would go national.
Inclusion London is another London focussed group who seem to do a particularly good job on general disability matters.
People First England is a new umbrella group designed to give a voice to learning disabled people on political matters.
Scope was formerly the Spastics Society, one of the big traditional disability charities, but it rebuilt itself on a much more inclusive general disability basis (though not without some ongoing issues) and it's probably the most significant charity WRT physical disability and more generally WRT things like Disability Hate Crime - I was their goto 'actual victim' for media interviews for a while. They're very media savvy, google 'End the Awkward' for a recent national campaign.
Mind are roughly the equivalent to Scope for mental health issues.
Ouch used to be a BBC disability forum, which is where I and many of the current generation of activists learned our stuff in the early Oughties, but the BBC shut it down a few years ago :( They still run disability news under the BBC Ouch headline and have a monthly podcast.
In the Lords Baroness Jane Campbell and Baroness Tanni Grey-Thomson are particularly effective campaigners for making sure our voice is heard.
Most of these have pretty extensive web, Facebook and/or Twitter presences, so should be easily googleable. Feel free to poke me for any particular link or for anything else disability wise. If I don't know it myself I probably know someone who does.
no subject
Date: 2014-09-27 08:46 pm (UTC)I'd already encountered Mind's and Scope's very smart PR campaigns. (I'm sorry you're able to be an "actual victim.") I adored Ouch before it became a regular news show; in fact I'd point my comrades to it as an example of cross-disabilty solidarity.
I followed some of your links to DR-UK; their neoliberal position made my jaw drop. With the capsule background you supply here, I can imagine how conflicting it is for an organization with "disability rights" in the title to be government funded—especially by this government.
Then again, that's a constant push-pull in our sector, since for so long our needs, education, transport etc have been under the government domain. The US's P&A network distributes Federal money to 50 states for public disability-specific law agencies. They file lawsuits in severe cases of our rights being squashed. (They couldn't begin to handle all the possible lawsuits.) There's a lot of paperwork attached to the money, but the Feds can't override a P&A's actions.
Thanks again for the nummy list.