lightreads | Entries tagged with transformative work

Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, and The Last Command

3/5. Now here's a blast from the past. Trilogy from the early nineties set five years after Return of the Jedi that I read many, many times as a pre-teen. A strategically gifted commander has taken over military operations for the imperial remnant, Leia and Han are expecting twins, and various personal and military crises converge. (Apparently we are calling the extended universe "Legends" now? Hokay).

Objectively these books are well-plotted adventures, but otherwise workmanlike. There's a stab at theme here having to do with the exercise of control over others – Luke experimenting with clouding the minds of others in a moment of combat and immediately regretting it, the references to the mental control the emperor exerted over his military, and of course Mara walking around with a compulsion buried in her mind. But the books don't know what to do with any of this other than some pat stuff about free choice which, if you ask me, is not ground any Star Wars author really wants to be on considering this universe's, uh, checkered view of agency (droid slaves, anyone?).

But. But it turns out I remembered entire passages from these books verbatim, and also you will pry Mara Jade from my cold dead hands, new canon.

Agatha H and the Voice of the Castle, Agatha H and the Seige of Mechanicsburg

4/5. Third and fourth novelizations of the webcomic, which bring us through a bit more than half of the published comic. Delightfully zany, with a lot of heart. And I realized that I am going to be genuinely upset if the comic is not setting up the OT3. Let's get real, I have well-developed skills of consuming media that does not give me what I want, and shrugging, and going to get it on the AO3. I do not generally get upset about these things. But here I really would, because not following through on the OT3 would feel like a betrayal of the terms the text itself has set out. The text is joking about having a love triangle, and the boys sort of playact one on occasion for the look of the thing, but the text is totally uninterested in actual dumb love triangle toxic jealousy crap, and that whole she must choose one and the choice defines everything about who she is thing. In reality, the text is interested in how they all three strengthen and balance each other, and how to become really good friends with your supposed romantic rival while vigorously pretending you aren't, and the three of them caring a lot about each other and showing up over and over again in ways that count. So yeah. If it's not the OT3 I am going to be deeply let down.

The Angel of the Crows

3/5. Genderqueer Sherlock historical wingfic, subgenre angels, that eventually becomes Holmes canon wingfic, subgenre angels, also werewolves, vampires, hellhounds, and Jack-the-Ripper.

I care very little for Holmes-related everything, but did enjoy this to a point. That point comes when I start asking okay….but why does this cost $28 while nearly everyone else is posting theirs for free on the AO3? It should not be a surprise to anyone that there are multiple kinds of privilege at work in who gets to sell their fanfiction and who doesn't. AT least it’s a woman who gets to do it this time, which makes a nice change. And it's not like – hm. I always twitch a bit through these arguments, because it's not like getting paid is the same as selling out, and it's not like there's some automatic virtue in participating in the fanfic gift community, but it's hard to have these conversations about who gets paid without assigning a lot of moral valence to one path or another. (And don't even get me started on the tumblr contingent who think all art should be free always and being charged ever for anything they enjoy is class warfare. Lol okay, child, you institute a system where no artists get paid and then we can talk about class warfare).

But . . . I'm trying to put my finger on something here. There is something about the wall-to-wall indulgence of this book, how it is clearly stuffed full of all the loosely-related things the author likes at the expense of things like a through line and pacing, which makes it feel particularly like fanfic even when it isn't lifting scenes wholesale from Sherlock. And even when it isn't lifting scenes wholesale and is off sort of doing its own thing – which it does, a bit, with the Sherlock character in particular – it has a density of reference that goes past charming into something else. Like the almost entirely offscreen character named for a Sayers character. And there's something about the fanfictionness of this whole thing and the fact that it is for sale that turns the density of references from charming into . . . cliquish? More like in-jokes than easter eggs. A thing that keeps people out rather than a thing that invites them further in, because it costs $28. IDK.

So does this totally belong on the AO3? Yep. Does the author deserve to get paid for it? Sure. Do I have complicated feelings about the intersection of those facts? Yeah.

Winter Tide

4/5. How to explain this? It's Lovecraft mythos transformative work. Aphra's people spend some years on land when they're young before living out their long lives in the sea. Until the U.S. government raided their town in 1928 and interned them all. Decades later, Aphra and her brother are the only survivors of the camps, and they go home in the company of an FBI agent to reluctantly do work for the government that destroyed their world.

You need zero fingers to count the number of fucks I give about Lovecraft. Never read it, never going to, don't care, don't care, don't care. Also, I had not read the free online novelette that is the prequel to this book; I didn't even know it existed until I started going wait a minute…this is assuming I've read something that I haven't. Something other than Lovecraft, even.

So this book had a hard uphill climb, is what I'm saying. And yet . . . and yet . . .

It's strange and a little chilly and extremely conscious of who its monsters are. Hint: they aren't the Lovecraftian horrors from the deep, they're us. There's a lot of time in libraries in this book, and time performing magic in groups; lots of still scenes while people rub complexly and uncomfortably against each other. This is roughly 80% character work by volume, and an indeterminate amount Lovecraft stuff. I don't even know enough about Lovecraft to more than guess what is canon and what is invention. Except I'm pretty sure Lovecraft's work wasn't a sustained, pained meditation on the complex faces of privilege and oppression and monstrousness.

Which is why I'm not reading that, but did read this.

Everfair

2/5. Alt history turn of the twentieth century story of a nation state founded in the Belgian Congo by a mixed bag of black and white socialists and proselytizers, and how they aim for "utopia" and . . . miss.

Yeah, it's inadequate to say that this book did not get my attention. More accurately, this is the book I read on the cross-country flight I took a week after the Inauguration in spite of the metaphorical trashfire in my work inbox out to see my parents, from whom I have been estranged for years, and specifically to say goodbye to my father, who went from having a bit of pain to being told he is dying in the course of a week. So like. There's some stuff going on.

This book is okay? I think? It's not to my taste – it is written in hundreds of tiny fragments loosely strung over thirty years. Not so much a tapestry as a bunch of carefully placed but unwoven pieces of thread. The fantasy elements are strange and, as they are rooted in religious practice and conflict, somewhat off-putting to me. Oh, and there's a long, painful central lesbian romance between AU E. Nesbit and AU Colette which would probably have meant more to me if I knew anything about either of them. I wanted to like their conflict over not!E. Nesbit's racism, but I found its resolution unsatisfactory.

Basically I described this book to my wife, who got more and more excited the more I complained about the bits I didn't get, so clearly there is an audience for this who is not me. But mostly, let's be fair: I read this two weeks ago and for the life of me can't clearly remember a damn thing that happened in it now, so. Don't take my word on anything.

Planet of Twilight: Star Wars (Star Wars - Legends)

2/5. Sequel at one remove to Children of the Jedi. That one I liked; this one had one redeeming feature, and the rest can go to hell.

So for any completists out there, the intervening book between Children of the Jedi and this one in the loose sequence is Darksaber, which I skipped because I remember it and also it was written by a dude and I'm not reading books by dudes at the moment. Kevin J. Anderson, no less. You guys have fun with that shoot-em-up.

Anyway, in this book, a lot of deeply boring stuff happens, culminating in a boring and entirely predictable conclusion that has been done at least three or four times in every major science fiction continuity ever, yawn. Rendered rather intolerable by Luke Skywalker, who is being a super creepy stalker ex-boyfriend who does not understand the word "no" at all, what the fuck. His obnoxious inability to deal with being broken up with sort of makes sense if you realize he's in his early thirties and that was, like, his first relationship ever, so yeah, he reacted like a thwarted teenager because in romantic terms, he's still basically fifteen. But ugh so so so gross, and the book expects us to have massive sympathy for him, which, uh, wait, let me think about it, nope. Get a fucking grip, Luke.

The one bright spot: Threepio and Artoo have a marvelous roadtrip subplot in which they bounce around a sector together, from smuggler ship to impound facility to warzone. At one point they attempt to earn passage by making themselves into a band. Artoo is the drummer. Obviously. At another juncture they are sent by bulk mail. It's great, basically. Two stars for Threepio and Artoo.

Pirate King by Laurie R. King

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

So this is Laurie R. King writing a book about fictional Mary Russell who has written another memoir of an adventure with Sherlock Holmes, this one about the time she went undercover as an assistant to a crew making a silent movie about a crew making a movie about The Pirates of Penzance.

By all rights, you should need to diagram out the layers of narrative and meta narrative, but you don’t. As usual, King passes but lightly over these points, and in fact pauses briefly to make fun of critical readings of narrative and identity constructs.

No, basically, this is a romp from Portugal to Morocco, with real pirates and fake pirates and a lot of actresses and a parrot. Don’t bother hoping for a classic mystery, or anything more than a desultory and deliberately silly bit of plot frippery. These aren’t critiques, mind you. I mean, this book thinks it is somewhat more hilarious and charming than I thought it was, but it was pleasingly diverting. There just isn’t much besides the frippery, and a definite lack of Holmes. And I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this is not my Sherlock Holmes. He is hilariously functional, just for starters.

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