Hello, all.
Sep. 26th, 2014 04:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kraitI've been fannish lately, but not gregarious. It seems hard to write for some reason, be it fic or blog entries. Sorry.
What have I been doing lately? Mainly reading a lot of Homestuck fic (though right now I have two HP fics queued up as my next entertainment) and rereading Cherryh's Foreigner series (starting from the second book). A couple of weeks ago, I read Protector, and found that I couldn't stand the wait to discover what happens next, so I went into the bookshop a couple weeks ago and bought Peacemaker in hardback and devoured it the same day.
The sign of a great author: she gets me to pay hardback prices to follow a plot that I normally wouldn't touch with a stick! :D A plotline heavily involving children would normally send me running, but not in this case; I adore Cajeiri and his human associates and their shenanigans. Give me more!
It's always interesting rereading a series; it gives one time to notice things that went unnoticed before, both good and bad. This read-through, I've been surprised to see how many of the plot elements of later books (Murini's rebellion, and the politics within the Guilds) are foreshadowed all the way back in the early books! Very clever advance plotting, or else a deft skill for drawing up stray details and turning them into something deliberate.
I've also been catching myself noticing keenly the female characters, and the presentations or lacks thereof. So far Ginny Kroger is hands-down the most positive one to appear, beyond Ilisidi, but the competition is pretty limited. I find I'm rather disappointed in this, and I sure hope Kroger turns up in future books, because I enjoy her (and her no-nonsense refusal to be charmed by Bren's diplomatic veneer) rather a lot. Somewhat disappointing: humans in this universe have no artificial gestation technology. I'd forgotten all about Foreigner's lack on this front, till I hit Precursor and it comes up: Women are almost sacred to the ship-humans, because of their reproductive capabilities... so much so that they apparently had to fight for the right to keep working jobs at one point. Meh to that. But good on you, ship-ladies! Fight those bastards! Don't go the way of Barrayar, or Grayson, or Heorot, or any of the far-too-many sci-fi worlds I've encountered that takes defaulting to patriarchy as a given!
So: what have you been doing lately?
What have I been doing lately? Mainly reading a lot of Homestuck fic (though right now I have two HP fics queued up as my next entertainment) and rereading Cherryh's Foreigner series (starting from the second book). A couple of weeks ago, I read Protector, and found that I couldn't stand the wait to discover what happens next, so I went into the bookshop a couple weeks ago and bought Peacemaker in hardback and devoured it the same day.
The sign of a great author: she gets me to pay hardback prices to follow a plot that I normally wouldn't touch with a stick! :D A plotline heavily involving children would normally send me running, but not in this case; I adore Cajeiri and his human associates and their shenanigans. Give me more!
It's always interesting rereading a series; it gives one time to notice things that went unnoticed before, both good and bad. This read-through, I've been surprised to see how many of the plot elements of later books (Murini's rebellion, and the politics within the Guilds) are foreshadowed all the way back in the early books! Very clever advance plotting, or else a deft skill for drawing up stray details and turning them into something deliberate.
I've also been catching myself noticing keenly the female characters, and the presentations or lacks thereof. So far Ginny Kroger is hands-down the most positive one to appear, beyond Ilisidi, but the competition is pretty limited. I find I'm rather disappointed in this, and I sure hope Kroger turns up in future books, because I enjoy her (and her no-nonsense refusal to be charmed by Bren's diplomatic veneer) rather a lot. Somewhat disappointing: humans in this universe have no artificial gestation technology. I'd forgotten all about Foreigner's lack on this front, till I hit Precursor and it comes up: Women are almost sacred to the ship-humans, because of their reproductive capabilities... so much so that they apparently had to fight for the right to keep working jobs at one point. Meh to that. But good on you, ship-ladies! Fight those bastards! Don't go the way of Barrayar, or Grayson, or Heorot, or any of the far-too-many sci-fi worlds I've encountered that takes defaulting to patriarchy as a given!
So: what have you been doing lately?
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Date: 2014-09-27 01:49 pm (UTC)Yes yes yes. Why don't we get to see, say, Geigi commenting on that? That'd be fantastic.
You know what else would be great? Irene trying to get Geigi to invite her mother to tea, so Irene can show her mother that atevi aren't terrifying, and then we could see Irene's mother being awesome. Or even reacting badly, I mean, I just want to see more of Irene's mother. (I especially wanted it when Irene rather than Bjorn was the friend of Cajeiri's whose skin was as dark as an ateva's. Alas.)
Yolanda really feels like a character Cherryh didn't know what to do with, and so she just shuffled her away because it was taking time away from the Beating Bren Up Show. I really, really hope that atevi don't have a custom of the mother retiring into seclusion with the infant for a year or anything, or if they do that the sequel to Peacemaker starts with Damiri's re-emergence.