in the forest of the night
Hi! Happy new year!
I've been thinking about aliens. After a relative drought year of reading, I've been consuming books like water thus far in 2022. A lot of those books have been science fiction--hence aliens. If you watch a lot of sci-fi, as I do, you're likely accustomed to seeing mostly humanoid extraterrestrials. Because, well, we're human(oid) and we mostly have ourselves to work from. Even Doug Jones must concede to the restraints of being bipedal. Puppetry provides other options, such as in Farscape's Pilot (below), symbiotically bonded with Moya (the show's spaceship and a living creature herself), but even so they are restricted by, you know. Earth gravity and such. Not to mention television budgets.
The last book I read last year was Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, the plot of which follows a human man and a very alien alien as they collaborate to attempt to solve the problem which is killing both of their suns. I liked a great deal about the alien and the extent to which Weir made him utterly inhuman--he's small, lacks eyes, is crablike, and lives in an atmosphere 29 times denser than ours which is primarily composed of ammonia. You don't see aliens like that in fiction very often (in my experience), because it makes interacting with humans so very difficult. The way that Ryland Grace and the alien, who he dubbed "Rocky," managed to communicate and even share a spacecraft in spite of those restrictions was my favourite thing about the book.
But the primary reason I'm thinking about aliens is Julie Czerneda's Species Imperative series, which I ripped through after a friend recommended the first one to me. The series follows Mac, a human biologist based on Earth in an unspecified future after which mankind has spread from the planet and joined a huge, sprawling intergalactic community. Mac is a wonderful protagonist through which to meet alien species because she has spent her life and career completely uninterested in anything beyond salmon, so you get a fresh startled look at every species she meets, but she is a biologist and, at heart, an empathetic person who can't help getting drawn into other people's problems. And there are a lot of problems in these books.
I loved Czerneda's aliens and the way she introduced them to the reader a couple species at a time, so you never felt like you were drowning in a fictional galaxy you had no stake in. And while she didn't go so far as Weir did with Rocky (the species were generally aquatic or land-based, oxygen-breathing or not), you could see her background as a biologist herself in the way she described how different aliens' home planets and evolutionary needs had informed their bodies and cultures. A favourite of mine were the Frow, which were described as vaguely bat-shaped and whose bodies were designed to easily move around on steep cliffsides but for whom standing on flat, solid ground was a fraught prospect. They preferred not to admit to the limitation and Mac discovered that it was generally not polite to mention it.
Ultimately, all of these books did what I go to science fiction in search of: described how very different people live and relate to one another across vast chasms of commonality. And while (sadly) none of them involved interspecies kissing, well. There are more books about aliens out there.
Dog Thing
Mixed Media
good reads: Every so often a book spreads through my friend circle like ripples on a pond as one after another we concede to peer pressure. Recently, that book was The Talisman Ring by Georgette Heyer. Not a new book by any means, but new to most of us and a sheer delight. It follows a romantic young woman who is determined to escape the arranged marriage set out for her and live a life of adventure. She doesn't have to get far to manage it, and what follows is a delightful screwball comedy of a story. Another old-but-new-to-me book I enjoyed was Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, a foundational text of the detective novel and a surprising (to me) wild ride of a book. Finally, I read The Missing Page, part of Cat Sebastian's series that aims to be "Agatha Christie but make it gay" but like the first book its strength was in queer people finding love and each other rather than the mystery. The Christie vibes are definitely present even if her mind for puzzles is not.
good film: On Christmas, for some reason we watched Uncovered, a thriller from 1994 starring Kate Beckinsale as an art restorer which is so little known that the only trailer I could find for it online is in German. It was not good, but it was wild and gay and delightfully 90s and sometimes that's all you really need.
good tv: I have been enjoying the return of Queens of Mystery, a British murder show with a very Pushing Daisies vibe. Bizarre and lovely.
good game: In the same vein of reading The Moonstone, I played Famicom Detective Club: the Missing Heir, a mystery-solving visual novel of sorts originally put out in 1988 which has been entirely remastered. It's a game which a lot of later mystery games (Hotel Dusk, the Ace Attorneys) were pulling from, and it was really interesting from that perspective! The story was excellent, while the game mechanics were at best frustrating. I ultimately played it with a walkthrough, which fortunately isn't something I mind doing.
good fic: If I'm Haunting You, You Must Be Haunting Me by mardia. Knives Out, Marta/Ransom. This is not something I would have sought out in a million years, but sometimes an AU is executed so well that it upends everything you thought you wanted from something. This is a soulbond au, in which Marta and Ransom discovered they're bonded, and then the murder happens.
automatic joy by dotsayers. Fandom for Robots, Computron & bjornruffian. The biggest yuletide delight was discovering fic for the Vina Jie-Min Prasad story "Fandom for Robots," one of my favourite things I read last year. This one sees bjornruffian visiting the museum where Computron lives.
Once & Future by spqr. The Witcher (tv), Geralt/Jaskier. Jaskier kisses a handsome statue. He could not have predicted what happened next.
Lastly
Two things which have brought me joy recently but which I do not have neat categories for are as follows:
The art installation "An Exercise in Violence" by Guillermo Ros.
The webcomic "Tiger Tiger" by Petra Erika Nordlund.
bye!