I needed to have an emotion in private
hi hi there
This past Christmas, I gave my best friend a copy of The Future is Female, an anthology of science fiction stories written by women from the 1920s-1960s. I hadn’t read it myself, but it seemed like it would be up his alley, and I was correct–he dove into it right away, and I got periodic updates on his progress over the next couple weeks. His main takeaway from it was that a lot of the writers seemed to be working through social issues which were taboo at the time of their writing through the relatively freeing medium of speculative fiction. Not a new idea for science fiction–it’s basically the original idea–but coming from an era with a fair amount of social upheaval and from the points of view of women specifically, it gave him a lot of food for thought, some of which he passed on in take-out containers to me.
I’ve been reading almost exclusively speculative fiction thus far this year, and have been doing so with those leftovers still sitting in my fridge (have I taken this metaphor too far? you be the judge).
As a result, I’ve been hyper aware of the issues that the current writers whose works I’ve been reading are playing with and commenting on, in a way that’s sort of new to me. Not that I haven’t previously been aware of these themes in sci-fi, but more that I’m seeing the ways they’re reflecting real-world issues. Gender is a big one, in frequency of use, as well as relevance to my own life, but body autonomy, sexuality, family structures, and climate change are other themes I’ve been seeing and chewing on. An unexpected one? Compost.
I started reading Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers, the final book in her Wayfarers series, right around the same time as my housemate started a compost pile in our yard. This was relevant because one of the protagonists in Record is a Caretaker, whose task is similar to that of a mortician, except that the final resting place of all people who inhabit the Exodus Fleet is compost. All are destined to become part of the dirt, feeding and nurturing the plants which both provide oxygen and green space to the inhabitants of colony ships, hulking metal constructs floating in the vacuum of space–about the least natural place one can imagine. There’s a poetic beauty to that, as there is to most aspects of Chambers’ works, and it’s something I think about whenever I add a banana peel to the compost pail in our kitchen.
Working in a bookshop, I hear a lot of people’s opinions on books, and a lot of them are bad! The people who I see complaining about boredom with science fiction, for example, are largely only pulling from the same shelves. Branch OUT, discover the new voices telling new stories, stop reading the same 3 white guys. PLEASE. One of my favourite resources for new sci-fi and fantasy is Tor’s line of novellas, which I would honestly sign up for a subscription service of, if one existed. Start with Binti, or All Systems Red, The Haunting of Tram Car 015, or The Black Tides of Heaven. Or all of the above.
Dog Thing
Mixed Media
A Good Movie: The Favourite. I was surprised by how much I loved this movie, as I don’t generally enjoy stories about unpleasant people being unpleasant to each other, which is unquestionably what this is. But I do love Rachel Weisz, and Olivia Colman is a treat, so I dutifully went to the cinema. I loved it.
A Good Book: The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark. I mentioned it above but it bears repeating. Clark’s alt-history, gaslamp fantasy, turn of the century Cairo is so cool and so interesting that I desperately want to read a whole series of books about it. If you want a taste, help yourself to his novelette, “A Dead Djinn in Cairo,” which is a great introduction to the universe and it’s free!
A Good TV Show: Umbrella Academy. I never read the Umbrella Academy comics, and it was fun to go into a comic adaptation with no expectations or baggage. I liked it! It was a fun, stylish show to watch. GREAT music.
A Good Fic: time like a river by twigcollins. This is a beautiful telling of Breath of the Wild which focuses on Link & Sidon, and what living with the kind of memory loss Link has at the beginning of the game might be like. It’s also one of the only fics in which Link can speak that I genuinely enjoy. (Link doesn’t speak in the Legend of Zelda games, though characters respond as though he does, so nailing a voice for him can be tough!)
Lastly
