Reading not-Wednesday 18/5

[liv]

It is more or less the twentieth anniversary of my joining LJ. At the time I said I was going to use my journal mainly to record my reading, but at the time I was reading 50-60 books a year. Now it's about a tenth that, but anyway.

In the past few weeks, I've read:

The starless sea by Erin Morgenstern. (c) E Morgenstern 2019; Pub 2020 Vintage (Penguin Random House); ISBN 978-1-784-70286-1. This was an afikomen present from my sister a couple of years back, and it is the epitome of portal fantasy for adults.

The many-colored land by Julian May. (c) Julian May 1981; Pub 1982 Pan Books; ISBN 0-330-26656-X. Lent by cjwatson because we were talking about nostalgia reading. It's pretty good and definitely original although very much of its time.

I can't enthuse enough about The starless sea. It hits every note just perfectly, it's exactly what I want from my reading. Lovely prose, exquisitely detailed worldbuilding, real sense of magic, genuinely clever metafiction which still manages to be pacey and exciting. And it pulls off the particularly impressive trick of creating a background mythos which feels real, there are lots of allusions to in-world folklore in a way that conjures a setting where these stories are common currency.

It's an adult book not because it has a lot of explicit sex (though possibly a little more violence than I would recommend for a sensitive 12yo), and not because everything is grim and hopeless, but because it assumes that the reader is well-read in the genre and has their own reading protocols and doesn't need stuff spelled out. It's also unashamedly fantasy, it's not pretending to be litfic, it's not trying to give some kind of technobabble or pseudo-rational explanation for the magic, it's fantasy. It's also properly original, it has the right tropes but it's doing something fresh with them. The characters are real people as well as archetypes of the invented folklore, and it's interested in the sort of post-naive questions about what happens when you lose your Narnia, but also completely buys in to the joy of going through a portal to a magical place.

I slowed down towards the end because I didn't want the story to be over, and it turns out the last section is precisely about not wanting the story to be over, but with some really clever twists on that idea. It works on both levels, having some really cool insights about what story is and what it means to desire to be part of a story, and just as a plain adventure which is really exciting. I didn't enjoy Morgenstern's debut The night circus that much, but tSS has all of its strengths and none of its weaknesses, and I'm really excited to see what she'll come up with next.

The many-coloured land is an amazingly weird book. For the first third it seems to be about a utopian future where Earth has joined the federation of highly civilized aliens, sort of Star Trek style post-scarcity, except that we humans are the primitives uplifted by benevolent, advanced races. It's told as a series of character vignettes about how different people fit or don't fit into this utopia, doing what this kind of SF does of raising questions about whether this perfect society is really perfect. But then it turns out it's not really about that, it's about the characters going through a one-way portal to pre-historic times. But it's not really about that either, it's about a war between time-travelling humans and some completely unrelated aliens to the ones in the first section.

There are some aspects of it that haven't aged well. It puts way too much emphasis on people's "ethnic character" (and occasionally expresses this in words that are actual racial slurs nowadays). It attempts to challenge gender roles but in a way limited by the imagination of a writer living in 1980s America, making way too much of a big deal out of the fact that some women enjoy sex, and others are good at fighting or leadership.

But as well as fitting into the groove of the kind of SF that was popular in the late 20th century, tMCL is also doing something quite original, and although the writing is a little clunky in places it's certainly enjoyable to read. It's the first in a fairly long series and I'm enthusiastic to read some of the sequels. I think if I had read this when it was published or at least when I was a teenager myself I would have had more patience for it, I don't blame May for the fact that the field has moved on.

Comments

[cynthia1960]

I've read all of May's stuff in this universe, and I prefer the Galactic Milieu/just before the Milieu got established books more than the Pliocene Exile books. Oh yes, the books haven't aged well in many ways, but I also think they're ahead of their time in others. In the Milieu, the Catholic Church has actually progressed (female Jesuits, and that makes me grin, because I did my BS at a Jesuit university).

[cjwatson]

I prefer that series as well, and vacillated on which to suggest that liv try, but landed on publication order as a default.

In particular I have a massive soft spot for Intervention as it hits so many of my things-I-enjoy-in-SF buttons. In theory I think one should be able to read the pair of series in either order, but there are things that only make sense with them in combination and I've only read them in the order I've read them, if you see what I mean ...

[nineveh_uk]

I read them as a teen in the 90s, and preferred the Pliocene books, which I discovered at 14 and absolutely adored - they were the right books at the right time. Rereading since, I've seen the things that have worn less well, but as stories they still stand up for me, and I appreciate that May did make an effort in the Milieu books to have some non-villainous queer characters. Still imperfect, but a change not all her peers were making even to that limited degree.

Intervention didn't work for me at all, but I think that was partly that I wanted more of an exotic setting, and partly that not being from the US I lacked a lot of the cultural references for the setting we did get (I was totally confused by Kieran O'Connor, among other reasons because I didn't realise he was in the Mafia...). Plus there was no Marc. I should probably reread it twenty years on as an adult with broader knowledge, I expect I'd enjoy it more.

[cynthia1960]

I totally get your observation about Intervention being very US-centric. It's funny, because I'm a Californian, I really didn't know that much about how New Hampshire and a lot of New England have connections with Canada, and especially Québec. And, I was raised Catholic, but not from the French Canadian tradition that shaped the Remillards, so I learned stuff there too. I started digging into all that, and I ended up finding out to my vast amusement that a whole lot of Québecois swears are Catholic blasphemies (oooh *fun*).

Re: O'Connor and the Mafia, he married into a Mafia family and I think that wasn't perhaps an unusual thing.

Finding non-villainous queer characters in SF right as we were coming out of the worst of the AIDS epidemic was eye opening to me.

[liv]

Oh yes, 100%, 14yo Liv would have absolutely devoured these books. Especially given I was quite contentedly reading your standard Silver Age stuff where all the significant characters were male. The Pliocene setting is certainly original, whereas the Milieu looks more like a variant of the setting for every other SF series of the era.

[cynthia1960]

I agree with you on reading Intervention and then the three Milieu books in publication order. There's a marvelous scene in Intervention where Lucille is connecting with a cat to manifest creativity that I can never forget. It really hits home for me as a cat mom of 6 to think about what's going on inside the minds of the West Oakland Feline Complaint Choir.

My biggest problem with reading the Pliocene books first was I really wanted to know more about the worlds these people were fleeing than I was in the world they were fleeing to.

When I next revisit the Pliocene/Intervention/Milieu books, I think I'm going to read them in this order: Intervention/Milieu trilogy/Pliocene books.

[liv]

Ohh, there's two interlocking series? I thought we were going to abandon the Milieu setting altogether after the first third of the book. I don't love long fantasy series nearly as much as you do but I kind of like the idea of lots of different novels set in both the future and the past of the same setting. I am definitely temptable :-)

[cjwatson]

Yes, I didn't want to explain too much as it's kind of a spoiler, but they definitely interlock; and the Milieu origin becomes more relevant again about half-way through the Pliocene series.

[cynthia1960]

You have Intervention, then Jack the Bodiless, Diamond Mask, and Magnificat for the Milieu.

[liv]

Right, I think if I had read this, probably not when it came out because I would've been too young, but even in the 90s, I would have thought it was amazingly progressive compared to a lot of contemporary stuff! And in some ways it's really heartening that a few decades on it feels really heavy-handed when the narrative spells out that in the utopian future women will be able to do things, and same-sex attraction will be accepted. I was interested in the glimpses of imagined futuristic Catholic Church; it reminded me a bit of the Ada Palmer Terra Ignota series, but unlike Palmer, May raises questions about the benefits of having centrally imposed rules to make religious institutions more socially useful.

Based on the opening section of this book I would definitely be interested to read more about the Galactic Milieu. The Pliocene stuff is just such a strange premise, like there's time-travel, but only to this specific location and this specific moment in time? Possibly May was just really interested in that particular prehistoric era, which is totally fair enough, but it felt really artificial.

[cynthia1960]

Yeah, I did read the Milieu books in my late 20s and mid to late 30s when they were published. I needed them to really have the Pliocene books (that I had read when they came out in my early 20s) finally make sense to me.

[simont]

I have a copy of the four Pliocene Exile books going spare, if you'd like them.

I encountered them in a charity shop a few years ago, vaguely remembered having read at least one of them as a teenager but recalled nothing about it, and bought them to see if I'd like them as an adult. I didn't get on with them, and it sounds as if you'd make better use of them than I will, so shout if you'd like to take them off my hands!

[liv]

Thank you – it's always a good find when you manage to bag a whole series together from a charity shop. I am trying to own fewer fiction books because of transitioning to being a humanities person and needing space for scripture and textbooks. But that said, I reckon I'd at least read them once before giving them away so they're more valuable in my bookshelves than yours. And anyway it would be good to have an excuse to see you. I'll email with logistics.

[simont]

And anyway it would be good to have an excuse to see you

A cunning plan! I like the way you think :-)

[sfred]

Happy anniversary!