Hugo Reading: Novels

Jun. 12th, 2025 12:28 am[personal profile] ase
ase: Default icon (Default)
Alien Clay (Adrian Tchaikovsky) (2024): Hugo nominee, audiobook read by Ben Allen. Ex-biology professor is shipped off to an extrasolar labor camp for crimes against the totalitarian Mandate, where he is first drafted as a (silently) grumbling lab assistant, then demoted to the Expeditions team that clears alien ruins for the "real" scentists to study. This would be great fun for a biologist, except for the part where the planet's flora think humans look interesting to colonize, ultimately a death sentence. Well, a faster death sentence than being sent to an extrasolar labor camp, anyway.

First person present tense. I forget how tense this makes the read until the story opens, and my reaction is "oh this again" with a little active untensing of the shoulders. Which probably didn't contribute to me taking the novel for what it is, rather than what I wanted it to be.

Revolution as narrow obsession. )

From this, I think I can conclude I'm not the target audience for Alien Clay.

A Sorceress Comes To Call (T. Kingfisher) (2024): More Hugo reading, again in audiobook, narrated this time by Eliza Foss and Jennifer Pickens. Dual first person PoVs from Cordelia, the daughter of the titular sorceress Evangeline, and Hester, whose brother is ensnared in Evangeline's plot to a.) marry into a little money, b.) marry off Cordelia into real money, c.) arrange the early deaths of both men to gain control of everyone's money.

The novel blurb online invokes the "Goose Girl" fairytale. It felt to me that Kingfisher used the fairytale as a springboard. )

...it's fine. If you are up for a spot-on depiction of child abuse, with magic, this is a novel that hits the marks it sets for itself. I'm not that interested in that much uncomplicated abusive parent energy.

The Ministry of Time (Kaliane Bradley) (2024): The Hugo audiobook run continued, now narrated by Katie Leung and George Weightman. The shortest summary would be "RPF, 21st C progatonist / Graham Gore from the Franklin expedition, because time travel," which is about the least helpful explanation of the combination of romantic tropes and 21st century anxieties.

If I namecheck HP with respect to The Incandescent, I have to invoke Kage Baker's Company novels when discussing The Ministry of Time. The unnamed protagonist is hired into a top secret British Ministry which has pulled five individuals out of what the Company series would call event shadows: points in history where the "expats" died, or were believed to have died. The protagonist and her fellow "bridges" are full-tme companions and acclimitization assistants to people pulled out of England and France from the 16th through early 20th centuries, who bring their experiences and expectations with them. The Company series vibes are probably a case of convergent evolution, but there is the protagonist's ill-advised romance with a Victorian adventurer to consider.

The execution of the premise is absolutely bonkers, and I will talk about it with massive spoilers. )

I don't know that this is a good novel, but it's the Hugo nominee that I was enjoyed enough to switch from audiobook to ebook, so I could stay up late reading it. (It always feels like I should be in motion - cleaning, or driving, or getting excercise - when I'm listening to an audiobook. Training from listening to audiobooks while in motion, probably.) It's also the novel that I want to turn over in my head, and make my friends read so we can talk about it. So props to Kailene Bradley for hugely entertaining me.

The Hugo nominees so far share the exploration of people treated as things, or ends to means. Cordelia as an extention of Evangeline, or as her tool; the Mandate's literal "work them until they die" labor camp; the Ministry's plans for their time travel expats. That might be one reason I was dragging my feet on Hugo reading this year.

Recent Reading, Not Hugos

Jun. 12th, 2025 12:22 am[personal profile] ase
ase: Book icon (Books 2)
All thirteen entries (so far) in Lois McMaster Bujold's Penric and Desdemona series, either first reads or rereads (2015 - 2024).

There are excellent "sick on the couch" reading. The stakes are "how will Penric and Des get out of this one?" (spoilers: mix of hiding and chaos), sometimes with added "should we give people second chances?" (spoilers: yes) though occasionally it's "has this person burned up their second, third, etc chances and needs a smiting?" (spoilers: often enough yes, occasionally with Des setting things on fire, sometimes with many witnesses to the smiting). The stories are pretty indulgent, especially once the reader gets to some of Desdemona's meddling (I say vaguely, avoiding spoilers) in "Demon Daughter" and "Penric and the Bandit".

The Incandescent, Emily Tesh (2025): Insta-reaction: WOO MORE TESH. In audiobook, read by Zara Ramm. I was surprised how fast it went, and blame certain big fat space operas who clock in at, let's see, 19 to 21 hours per novel for making me think a 12 hour audiobook is short.

Summary: Saffie Walden, Director of Magic at posh Chetwood Academy, juggles her decidedly unromantic responsibilities as a teacher and administrator, until a magical incursion shakes up the school and Saffie's committment to the persona of Dr. Walden, Teacher, she inhabits with deliberation.

Thoughts cut for spoilers. )

wednesday reads and things

Jun. 11th, 2025 07:16 pm[personal profile] isis
isis: (boromir)
What I've recently finished reading:

Heartstone by C. J. Sansom, the fifth Shardlake book. Looking back at my reviews, I think the author must have got his feet under him better as he went on, or else he just shifted to things more to my taste, because I had said the fourth was my favorite so far, but I think I liked this one even better! This story is set mostly distant from court intrigue, though it comes in at the end; Matthew is given a legal case by Queen Catherine Parr, and it intertwines with his own interest in the situation that led to Ellen Fettiplace's commitment to Bedlam. I'm not going to mention my favorite thing about this book, because it is a spoiler, but - this book contains one of my favorite things. :-) Also I like the way the various plots and sub-plots wind around each other: the legal case, Ellen's history, Barak's relationship with his wife Tamasin (complicated by her pregnancy), Matthew's problematic new steward. Okay, I lied, this book contains two of my favorite things, and the other one is a fascinating and detailed endnote about the real historical events that this book is built around. I loved this in Bernard Cornwell's Last Kingdom books, and I love it here.

The Maid and the Crocodile by Jordan Ifueko, which is related to the Raybearer series, and which several people in my circle read and enjoyed, so I got it from the library despite my having been disappointed in the series. And as the other reviews said, it was rather heavy-handed issuefic (so was the Raybearer series), but also had clever worldbuilding, charming characters and, I thought, better pacing than the series. (Also was in past rather than present tense, which I prefer.) However, will someone please tell Ifueko that "monotone" is NOT A SPEECH VERB DAMN IT?!?!

What I'm watching now:

We've got three episodes left to go of Andor S2, and gosh isn't it ironic to be watching

Spoiler you can probably guess if you have seen the showa manufactured riot as pretext for government crackdown while a riot is being manufactured as pretext for government crackdown
I did read the interview with the showrunner about how no, he wasn't inspired by current events (that is, recent events, obviously the show was written well before current events!) but it's definitely inspired by historical fascist governments and fights against them, and wow, we are just proving that what goes around comes around, that human foibles are universal, etc etc, but still, holy shit, right? Yeah.

But as I have said before, this is the wonderful thing about SF, that it can recast real issues in ways that make them easier to understand than when you are right in the middle of them argh.
isis: (squid etching)
Paul Krugman talks with Ada Palmer about her new (nonfiction) book Inventing the Renaissance. I came at this from the Krugman side (he's a Nobel-winning economist who used to write for the NYT, and I subscribe to his substack) but I figured some of you would be interested from the Palmer side (I never got into Terra Ignota, though). I found it really interesting! I read the transcript, but there's a link to the video conversation as well.

Speaking of Nobelists, a v. v. srs study found that countries with greater per capita chocolate consumption produce more Nobel laureates - so eating chocolate makes you smarter, right? :-)

Fannish May

Jun. 7th, 2025 11:38 am[personal profile] tinny
tinny: Commandant Karadec from the French series HPI, looking perplexed (as always) in rose-brown soft colors, with the text "so hot when he gets angry" (hpi_karadec hot when he gets angry)

Movies


Not much... I saw a documentary called Ice Grave at the theater, at a festival. It's (another) version of the famous Swedish North Pole expedition in a hydrogen balloon in 1897. I can't honestly recommend it, but it was well done and pretty immersive, put together mostly from the photographs taken by one of the three expedition members. It has an absolutely beautiful saxophone score by Bendik Giske, who was there at the showing, and explained that he recorded it in one go, as one long piece through the whole movie. O_O His style is unique, here's a concert of his: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OQfk5HUN-Q. I couldn't find any more information on it online anywhere, and the version we saw looked kind of unfinished. I don't think it has an international release yet.

TV ongoing


HPI season 5!!!! This fandom is my whole world at the moment and I'm loving it. I've made a French friend with whom to talk about it, and I've managed to rope two friends into the show, and both are on their way through season one and love it so far. \o/

The first three episodes aired in May. My new friend and I agreed to follow the weekly French airing schedule instead of watching all four episodes at once, to really be able to dig into each episode separately. So I've seen the first three and they are brilliant! Half of it is excitement about a new season - premieres tend to do that to me - and half of it is that the end of the first episode is just so very good omg. I'm very happy that I have the means to watch it at all and don't have to wait for months for a German release. (It will be on Disney+ in June, so that's something.) My rewatch is now in season 4, and I suspect if we want to keep going with that, I will have to translate the subs myself. At least I've found French subs by now, so it's less work than it could have been. The first episode was quite a trial for me, watching it without any subs at all. I think I watched it at least five times, and there were still scenes where I didn't get everything.

I had the crazy idea to make a comm for it ([community profile] hpi_tv) and posted all my icons to it so far. I'm thinking of adding ep discussion posts, and articles/photos, but haven't gotten there yet.

I finished The Pitt in one big rush. Phew! So good! I still maintain that the one-day format detracts from my enjoyment of character development, but they did a really good job letting us get to know the characters despite that restriction. I liked all of them in the end, even Langdon. I think my faves were the abrasive women, Santos and McKay. I was happy (not happy) to have predicted what was going to happen in the evening eps, as I'm usually not good at picking up on foreshadowing. I blame it on them being very very obvious. :D I quickly scanned the fic that's there about the show, but nothing snagged me so I've basically put the show behind me. It was good.

Doctor Odyssey finished airing, and the thing I had been afraid of happening did happen, so I'm likely out of there. I don't think they'll get a second season anyway, but... yeah. I might change my mind by September, but I am pretty miffed at where they took it in the end. It was very good in the middle there. The fandom suspects network interference, which probably explains the lack of a renewal. Moving on.

Having been ill for a bit this month, I opted for watching something random and landed on Remington Steele. Oh my, it only holds up part of the time. It's quite funny in places, but a lot of the jokes are more misogynistic than they should be, considering the premise of the show, and Pierce Brosnan's acting is still cringe. (I love him anyway.)

TV new


Murderbot! I watched the first ep, and then started rereading the novella, because I'd forgotten most of it. I finished that (and two more novellas) before I continued with episodes 2 and 3. Definitely a good decision, because I can now relatively confidently tell what follows the book and what they changed. Fwiw, I don't like the fact that murderbot sounds and looks so decidedly male, but I liked it despite that. It's really well done, great visuals, fun book-accurate narration. I think all of it is really close to the book, except for some sex/romance/pining that wasn't in the book. Which confuses me, because Murderbot explicitly says it doesn't care for sex, so why did they think they had to add that? To annoy Murderbot (and its fans) more? I guess it's a valid trade-off between the existing Murderbot fans (who are going to watch it anyway, lets not kid ourselves) and trying to attract new fans by adding more sex. Anyway, that's a minor complaint. I like it so far.

I tried two eps of Etoile, and while I adore the pervasive bilingualism - every character speaks both English and French and some of them codeswitch wonderfully - I actually don't like a single one of the characters. Some of them actively annoy me to a point I never want to see them again. A pity.

Through the whole "where do I get HPI from" stress, I've found more French tv streaming sites and got my hands on more Mehdi Nebbou things:

Another Mehdi Nebbou thing! Tout Va Bien (2023) (English title "Everything is Fine"). It's a French drama about a family whose child has leukemia - basically it's a study on how people deal with grief. I'd originally intended to watch this over the summer, but then it sucked me in and I watched all eight eps this week. (I knew if I stopped, I wouldn't finish it, because the subject matter is so dark.) I only watched this because Mehdi Nebbou is in it (and he's cute and dead sexy in it so totally worth all the tears), and I liked 90% of it very much and have many thoughts about it, so I'll write up a review. It's on hulu.

Aaaaand another Mehdi Nebbou thing! Mann|Frau, a German 2014 webseries of 40 5-minute eps. The title implies that it's about differences between men and women, but that's not at all it. It's just a cute, quirky, slice-of-life, growing-up thing told from two povs, where the protagonists turn into a group of friends/lovers. By the end, I very much loved all the main characters. I never noticed that none of them have names, until I watched an interview with producer Christian Ulmen at the end. :D There's lots of casual drinking and casual drug use (not my thing), and lots of sex and funny dialogue and surprise polyamory (very much my thing!). It's a quick watch, I recommend it. Youtube playlist here (only German, no subs).
philomytha: image of an old-fashioned bookcase (Bookshelf)
The Royal Navy: a history from 1900, Duncan Redford and Philip Grove
I read this in preparation for our Portsmouth trip, because I know nothing about naval history other than what can be gleaned from watching Hornblower and reading Alistair Maclean. This was a general overview of the 20th century, one book from a twelve-volume history of the Navy, very dense, but surprisingly readable for all that. I never lost interest even when deep in discussion of relations with the navy's one true enemy: Whitehall. Or the other great enemies, Churchill, and the RAF. It was quite clear that the French, Germans and so forth are all incidental to these long-lasting and deep emnities. To be fair, I'll give them Churchill, especially after Gallipoli.

As well as the details of battles and events and so forth, the book somewhat inadvertently told me a lot about the navy's biases and beliefs about itself: the Senior Service, it's known as, and they very much identify with that name. So much outrage at the RAF wanting to be in charge of airplanes, and getting funding that should really all go to the navy because the navy is the true defender of the realm. Which is not entirely false: anyone who wants to get here has to cross the sea, and anyone who wants to get here in large numbers has to cross the sea in boats, and stopping them is very much the navy's reason for existence. And they did it once, spectacularly, defeating the French invasion fleet at Trafalgar, with their great heroic admiral organising the battle brilliantly and dying at the moment of victory, and wow have they spent the next two centuries obsessed by this, clinging to it as a reason for their existence, and trying to find an opportunity to do it again to gain equal glory a second time around. And it was very clear that especially in WW1, this warped their thinking and their planning, which is why their attempt for a repeat at Jutland was, at best, a stalemate, and very far from the glorious triumph they thought was their due - but didn't have the training, strategy or skills to make happen, owing to being heavily mired in the past.

They did learn this lesson by WW2, where they did not attempt to replay Trafalgar, and instead they do their best to claim the triumph of the dog that didn't bark: the argument runs that the real reason the Nazis didn't invade is nothing to do with the RAF's Battle of Britain, but because the Germans didn't want to face the Royal Navy - and it's a fairly strong argument. But their main work in WW2 was grinding, difficult and focused on the economics of war rather than the drama, protecting shipping from U-boats across the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean so that food and the materiel of war could reach the UK at all. And they got pretty good at this after a while, due to throwing lots of effort at the technical and strategic ideas involved. Which was mostly convoy work. There's a whole rather dismaying thing about convoys in both wars: the navy hates convoy work because you sit around and wait to be attacked and it's not dashing and heroic and dramatic at all and you just go very slowly - for a warship - back and forth like a bus driver shepherding a lot of fractious cargo ships until someone attacks you. In WW1 the RN really didn't want to do it even though it was very clear that convoys work amazingly well at protecting merchant shipping compared to letting them go on their own and the navy just wandering around looking for trouble, and it took them a long time to agree to do it. In WW2 they did go straight to convoys, though they had an equally hard time persuading the Americans that they also needed to use convoys once they joined the war; there seems to have been a frustrating period after the US joined in when the RN would escort ships up to American waters and then leave them, and since the Americans didn't convoy them the rest of the way, the U-boats immediately sunk hundreds of merchant ships that had been safely convoyed across the rest of the Atlantic; eventually the US navy agreed to convoy the ships, though it wasn't clear whether they ever agreed to black out coastal settlements (this is important because otherwise the silhouettes of ships are clearly visible against the coastal lights). Anyway, there was that and then the business of getting everyone back into Europe for D-Day and onwards, but again, the navy are obviously a little frustrated that this was clearly the army's moment of glory rather than theirs.

From 1945 onwards, the navy's big enemy has been Whitehall, trying to persuade the government to disgorge enough money to build ships and crew them even though there is nobody particular they're intending to fight, and Redford and Grove make a lot of arguments that you can tell have been made in government offices about how if you want to do anything military anywhere what you need are ships, not airplanes or armies, and so please give the navy more money. Watching the story slowly approach to discussions I hear on the news now, about the point of aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines, was interesting: naturally the navy is always on the side of more ships and more money. An interesting read all around. The funniest bits were where the author interrupts his usual fairly dry style to explain that in this particular operation, everything the navy did was perfect but unfortunately the army/the RAF/Churchill/Whitehall/the Americans/someone else who was definitely not the navy fucked up their part of it so the operation wasn't a success. One of those I'll grant them, but apparently every time an operation involving the navy went wrong it was someone else's fault!


And I also reread The Cruel Sea, which remains THE book for the Battle of the Atlantic and also for adorable levels of shippiness between the captain and first officer of the ship. Every bit as good on a reread, and it was great fun to see models of the Flower class corvettes in the Navy museum after that.


Berlin: Imagine a City, Rory Maclean
I picked this up thinking it was an ordinary history book. It really wasn't, but once I got used to what it was, I enjoyed it a lot. It's a biography of Berlin as told through the fictionalised life stories of a couple of dozen Berliners over time. Unsurprisingly, it's very 20th-century heavy: the book is 400 pages and we get into the 1900s a little past page 100. The individuals who make up the book are mostly real people, though a couple are fictional or semi-fictional (ie people for whom history has left a name and not much else, or people invented as a stand-in to fill a particular category Maclean wants to explore).

The author's presence is quite strong in this book, there are parts that are fictionalised versions of his own Berlin experiences over the years, and the authorial voice and choices and decisions are all very prominent in the book - though oddly there were times when it felt like he was doing himself down. He includes Marlene Dietrich and David Bowie because in various capacities he worked with both of them and was evidently utterly starstruck by both, especially Bowie, and I was not so interested in his hero-worship, if that makes sense; if I'd wanted to find out about David Bowie I'd be somewhere else, I was here wanting this author's voice. His account of Kathe Kollewitz's life was particularly poignant and I am now looking forward very much to seeing her statues in Berlin - though I was moved to tears dozens of times in reading the book, the history of Berlin is the history of horror upon horror and people making their lives in the midst of that. The early chapters in particular did bring home to me just how war-ravaged central Europe was in relatively recent history, compared to the UK; I hadn't actually registered that Napoleon had occupied Berlin, and I also learned a lot about the Prussian kings and Frederick the Great. Absolutely a book to make me even more excited about our upcoming trip.


Olive Bright, Pigeoneer, by Stephanie Graves
The cover of this depicts a young woman, pigeons, a Lancaster and a Spitfire: there was no chance I wouldn't pick it up. It was a frustrating book, alternating between very good bits and rather weak bits and with a heroine whose essential personality was much less defined than any of the other characters'. But I enjoyed reading it anyway, because it had a WW2 setting, spies, a murder mystery and pigeons, so it was not hard to persuade me to like it. Our heroine runs a prize-winning pigeon loft and is hopeful that the National Pigeon Service is going to show up any day now to recruit their pigeons for war work. But instead her pigeons are recruited by the SOE who are training at a nearby stately home. spoilers for the plot )


In Love and War, Liz Trenow
A sweet read about three women heading to Ypres in 1919 to find the graves of their loved ones. This was also a bit on the sentimental and predictable side, but fairly well-researched and did a decent job evoking the return to the battlefields and the start of battlefield tourism. The author clearly did her homework about Toc H - complete with an extended cameo from Rev Tubby Clayton - and also about some of the process of identifying graves. And I liked all the main characters and the way their experiences of travel to the battlefields changes them. Workmanlike and well done.

Things learned in May

Jun. 1st, 2025 02:40 pm[personal profile] tinny
tinny: Something Else holding up its colorful drawing - "be different" (Default)
Wow, this month really worked well with the writing down of things! I'm not sure I can beat that anytime soon.

20 things! Lots of them colloquial French vocab :) )

Icon Drop March and April 2025

May. 31st, 2025 03:13 pm[personal profile] tinny
tinny: Something Else holding up its colorful drawing - "be different" (Default)
Here are all the icons I made for various small challenges in March and April. Most are HPI, and most are for iconcolors. And there's an HPI songset for icontalking in there, too. Enjoy!

Teasers:


43 total )


Concrit and comments very welcome! Take and use as many icons as you like, credit is appreciated. If you want to know whose textures and brushes I use, take a look at my resource post.

Previous icon posts:

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