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flemmings ([personal profile] flemmings) wrote2024-02-05 07:04 pm
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When eholds come, they come not single spies but in battalions. I had to put off A Memory Called Empire for five weeks because I just started Ancillary Justice. Yes, late to the party, but generally I don't read science fiction. Even SF written by women, after the head-hurty show not tell antics of Cherryh. However, shall give these a whirl, though I'm looking dubiously at my other holds that promise me 2 to 4 weeks. Yeah, well, so were the Leckie and Martine supposed to be 2 to 4 weeks away. Either someone stayed up all night to finish them or someone bounced off them hard.

Ancillary Justice came out in 2013 which was also, according to the weather channels, the cloudiest January on record until this one just finished. I don't remember it as such, but I'm clearly thinking of February 2013.  Generally I don't mind cloud: most of the year it's my preference. Grey dry Octobers and Novembers are the weather of my soul. I have a distinct memory of being in some hot sunny place and visiting a museum where there was a painting-- Flemish, I'm almost sure-- of shepherds coming over a hill, and behind them the grey cloudy skies of a northern winter, and being so homesick for same I couldn'tstand it. I can't trace the painting and I can't remember the city. It's unlikely to be Florence or Vienna, but might have been Tokyo with one of those department store exhibitions from the Hermitage. (Not Breughel. The shepherd were facing the viewer and were the largest element in the picture, standing  in the upper left quadrant.)

Given that honto.jp will cease its paper book ordering service at the end of March, I'm greatly relieved that the next 100 Demons is coming out on March 10. Preordered and registered and y'know what, the yen is on par with the Canadian dollar, maybe I should buy the recent Rainy Willows as well? Or not. I don’t think she's as enthusiastic about them as she was thirty years ago. No rest for the mangaka.
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[personal profile] heleninwales 2024-02-06 10:30 am (UTC)(link)
I just didn't get on with Ancillary Justice and couldn't finish it. This made me sad because so many friends had raved about it.
lebateleur: A picture of the herb sweet woodruff (Default)

[personal profile] lebateleur 2024-02-06 09:00 pm (UTC)(link)
Ancillary Justice is a forever favorite, for the way Leckie plays with genre tropes, but more generally, for the characters and their relationships to each other and their world.
lebateleur: A picture of the herb sweet woodruff (Default)

[personal profile] lebateleur 2024-02-16 01:22 am (UTC)(link)
Hard SF was never a favourite of mine and, given that I grew up in the 60s, for very good reason.
Oh yes. My experience with genre "classics" is being told I have to read XYZ because it is an amazing book with mindblowing creativity and imagination. I forge ahead for 50 or 100 pages and go, "But the author seems like they have never interacted with a human woman? The characterization of female characters is terrible" and am then told with varying degrees of bafflement, impatience, or condescension, "Yes, but if you just ignore that it's an incredible book." And that is where I nope out permanently.

I love the worldbuilding in Ancillary Justice and Leckie's critiques of colonization and cultural imperialism. But the interpersonal relationships are a HUGE part of the draw for me; they're well-written and hit on so many things my id enjoys.