“Grail” Elizabeth Bear

Grail is the final book in Elizabeth Bear’s Jacob’s Ladder trilogy. I’ve posted about the previous two here and here. The first time I read the book I read the first couple of pages, then double checked I had the right book – the start is completely different from what I was expecting! (I should’ve been a bit more trusting, it’s clear by halfway down page 3 that it’s the right book …)

As with Chill it’s a bit hard to talk about the plot of this one without spoilers for the plot of the previous ones. The overall structure of the trilogy is that book one is about beginning (resuming) the journey, book two is making the journey and now book three is arrival. Well, one of the overall structures 🙂 So in Grail the generation ship Jacob’s Ladder arrives at the destination planet they picked out, only to discover that in the meantime humanity has spread and overtaken them. There’s a colony on the planet already, and it’s not clear if they’ll be welcome. Both from the perspective of the amount of resources needed to absorb a sudden increase in population, and from the perspective of how much both cultures have changed since their common origin many centuries ago. The story isn’t just about the meeting and interaction of these two cultures – the antagonists from books 1 & 2 are still present and have their own answers to the question of whether the population of Jacob’s Ladder should settle on this new planet.

Bear again uses the narrative trick I mentioned when I talked about Carnival several months ago (post). Both cultures have things that are familiar to us and things that are not, and the things that the current point of view character regards as Other are often the familiar things. But the stuff they take for granted is often the things that feel alien to us. Of course in this case it’s also a chance for Bear to remind us that these characters we’ve got comfortable with across the last two books would look and feel very very alien if we were actually to meet them.

I find myself unsatisfied with the ending. I can see how it grows organically out of the story so far, and I can see how it mirrors the ending of the first book of the trilogy (a choice made in extremis to save the population by changing them into something else, perhaps against their will). I can even see how it fits in with a central idea of the trilogy – sometimes all the choices suck, but you still have to choose and accept the consequences of that choice. And all three books have endings that involve finding a way to shift the paradigm to improve your choices (however this doesn’t contradict my previous sentence!). I just find it unsatisfying, somehow. I guess perhaps I’d prefer to imagine the two cultures co-existing uneasily and having to deal with each other, than a solution that avoids that?

There’s also a narrative thread that felt like it went nowhere much. The existence of other intelligences than the human ones in this book felt like it was only present to highlight how both human cultures had blindspots and a somewhat hubristic approach to their place in the greater universe. This is as opposed to book 2 where I felt the alien life form gave a sense of a wider and more wondrous universe outside the confines of the Jacob’s Ladder.

Overall, I enjoyed the book, don’t be fooled by the last couple of paragraphs!

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“Chill” Elizabeth Bear

Chill is the second book in the Jacob’s Ladder trilogy by Elizabeth Bear – the first one was Dust (post). I read this on the plane back from Egypt immediately after finishing Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Sword (post) which definitely influenced the thoughts I was having while reading it.

It’s pretty much impossible to talk about the plot of Chill in any way at all without spoilers for the end of Dust – but given these are four or five years old now I shan’t put a spoiler cut, just don’t read the rest of this paragraph if it bothers you 🙂 At the end of Dust the generation ship, Jacob’s Ladder, has started moving again. Now that the immediate danger of exploding stars is over the occupants of the ship need to deal with questions like where their destination is. The plot of this book reminds me in some ways of Sherri S. Tepper’s general plot – there’s an Awful Truth waiting for our protagonists about the foundations of their world & society. There are also the remnants of some of the antagonists from last book to deal with, and the repercussions of the decision Perceval et al took at the end of Dust in order to save the lives of the Mean population of the ship.

So one of the themes of the book is consequences, and grief. Living with the result of a decision you or someone else made, because even if it was the best choice there’s always a price to pay. Which also ties into the theme of identity that I picked out in my micro-review last time I read this (post on Livejournal). Where you are now, who you are now, depends on the choices you made and the prices you were willing to pay – and the choices available depend on who you are and where you came from. I think everyone in the story has done things they’d rather not’ve done. Either because who they’ve become changes the choice they would make if they faced that now, or because there were no good choices and now they must live with the consequences of the lesser of two evils.

The ideas about identity were interesting to read straight after Ancillary Sword. Bear and Leckie both explore the idea of putting a different personality into a body, replacing the one that grew there. But they seem to come to different conclusions about how it would work, or more accurately I think they start with different premises about how minds and bodies function. Leckie’s ships have personalities not just in the ship, but distributed throughout ancillaries – human bodies with the mind replaced by the ship’s mind. And the ancilliaries are to a large extent interchangeable – if the ancillary-making process “takes” then each unit is a part of the whole mind. Even the failure that we see leaves a fragment of the mind that isn’t a part of the whole, the original person is still gone. So the premise seems to be that body and mind are separate and putting a mind into a new body doesn’t alter the mind. (I keep saying “seems to” because I think there are hints in the books that whilst the Radch might think it works like that it actually doesn’t but I don’t know yet if Leckie’s going anywhere with that). Bear believes the mind and body to be much more closely intertwined (and I’m inclined to agree). So the multiple cases in the Jacob’s Ladder trilogy where we have a mind put into a new body the resulting person is no longer quite the person they were in their original body. Who you are, determined not just by the choices you’ve made but also by the meat your mind wears.

I seem to’ve ended up only really talking about what’s underneath the surface (in part because it’s a re-read not a first time read), but it also has a good surface. I’d be hard pushed to pick whether this series or the Promethean Age books are my favourites of Bear’s work.

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January 2015 in Review

This is an index and summary of the things I’ve talked about over the last month. Links for multi-post subjects go to the first post (even if it’s before this month), you can follow the internal navigation links from there.

Books

Fiction

“Ancillary Sword” Ann Leckie – space opera, sequel to Ancillary Justice. New.

Total: 1

Non-Fiction

“Plantagenet England 1225-1360” Michael Prestwich. Part of the New Oxford History of England.

Total: 1

Trip

Egypt Holiday 2014: Temples and Tombs (Index).

Egypt Holiday 2014: Temples and Tombs (Overview: 14th-17th November).

Total: 2

“Plantagenet England 1225-1360” Michael Prestwich (Part 13)

The Peasantry

The bulk of the population of England during the period this book covers were peasants, who are the subject of this chapter of the book. Peasants generally lived in small two-generation family households – i.e. a couple and their three or four children. They lived in villages, and as well as farming their own plots would either work for or make cash payments to the owner of the manor on which they worked. They worshipped at their local parish church. In some areas the village, manor and parish were the same thing but in other areas there might be multiple villages per manor or vice versa. The same could be true for the relationship between parishes & villages.

Peasants were not all the same. One important distinction was between free and unfree peasants. The latter, also known as villeins, were liable to perform labour services for a lord and had many restrictions on their lives – effectively they were their lord’s property or chattels. They had to pay fines to their lord on a variety of occasions (such as when inheriting their father’s land or marrying). Although in practice many of the restrictions were more theoretical than actual there was still a great social stigma attached to being unfree. The labour services owed varied by manor, and might be to do particular work or to do a particular number of days work. It didn’t necessarily have to be done personally – a wealthy villein might be obliged to provide so many men to do the work. Often, and increasingly over the period, these services were commuted to cash payments – it was better for all sides of the agreement for the lord to hire willing labourers rather than force the villeins to do the job themselves. The labour services weren’t without recompense – generally the lord was required to provide food for the days when the men were doing labour for him.

Peasant landholdings weren’t static. Inheritance was generally by primogeniture or ultimogeniture (first or last son inherits all respectively). So this meant that the other sons had to be provided for somehow – and this was often done by buying and selling land (even by villeins although technically this was forbidden to them). This was also profitable for the lord – they charged entry fines when someone took over a landholding whether by inheritance, buying it or leasing it.

Most of the records that survive about the peasantry concern those who have land. As such women are proportionally under-represented. It’s clear that widows and single women had more legal independence than married women. Some information about the lives of women can also be gleaned from records such as coroner’s rolls recording accidental deaths. Women tended to be more involved in domestic matters than men – ie more women died drawing water, more men were involved in carting accidents. Gender played a huge role in determining occupation – agricultural work was primarily for men, baking and butchering were also male jobs. Brewing, however, was dominated by women. Landless peasants also don’t show up in the records much and Prestwich says that the existence of such people is a matter of deduction by historians. One source of information is records kept by the nobility about almsgiving.

Over the 13th Century the economy expanded and so did the population. Prestwich poses the question of whether living standards went up for the peasantry over this time or not – and comes to the conclusion that there is no single answer. Some areas did well overall, some did not. And within an area there were winners & losers at the individual level. One trend is that there is increasing social differentiation between peasants during this period. In general, however, the peasantry didn’t do as well out of the economic boom as the aristocracy did. In the early 14th Century the economic good times came to an end – the weather got worse, there were more famines. The peasants bore the brunt of this.

There is surprisingly little organised or successful resistance to the demands of the aristocracy on the peasants. What there was was generally pursued through the courts – the peasants normally lost, but clearly they felt they had the right to justice from the courts rather than needing to take things into their own hands. The peasants also seem generally litigious – Prestwich discusses village life by drawing out several anecdotes from legal cases between villagers. Lots of petty neighbourhood disputes go to the courts, and causing problems and stirring up trouble in the village could eventually lead to expulsion from the village.

Prestwich finishes the chapter by thinking about the effects of the wider world on the peasants – in the form of war and politics. In a lot of cases the wider world had little impact on any given peasant’s life. But the demands for fighting men and for food to support the armies would have a significant impact. These lead to a degree of resentment against the Crown, but this still did not boil over into outright rebellion – Prestwich suggests this is through a lack of leadership.

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“Ancillary Sword” Ann Leckie

Ancillary Sword is the sequel to Ann Leckie’s debut novel (Ancillary Justice – post – which won all the awards this year). I really loved the first book so was looking forward eagerly to the second one, and it didn’t disappoint. I read it on the flights to & from Egypt last November, so I devoured it in a couple of large gulps rather than with pauses for thought. Due to that, and wanting to avoid spoilers for both this book and the first one, this post is just going to touch on some general points rather than go into any details.

One thing that struck me is how easy it was to get back into the lack of gender identification of Leckie’s protagonist’s point of view. In the first book it was something I was paying attention to in particular, as it was one of the things everyone was talking about in connection with the book. But it was easy to just roll with it this time round. I’m not sure if there were fewer places where Leckie was deliberately setting out to disconcert the reader (with “she” closely followed by a description that made it clear it was a man being referenced); or if I was just expecting it and so less disconcerted by it. I did default to imagining all the characters as women (due to the “she” pronouns used throughout) unless it was mentioned someone in particular was a man, which does give the book a different flavour to other books.

Generally this book didn’t seem to concentrate on the gender stuff, instead it took the theme of identity and what it means to be a person (rather than a thing) from the last book and put that even more at the centre. We have Breq, an ancillary/former ship (and our point of view) pretending to be a “real person”. We have her ship’s crew pretending to be ancillaries, as a point of pride that they are keeping up an old transition. We have a failed conversion to ancillary, leaving the character in question neither one nor the other. And there’s a lot of tension about who thinks who is a person (including their ownself) which dovetails in with more usual racism, classism and xenophobia, using the prejudices that are alien to the reader to illuminate the ones that are more familiar.

The Empire of the Radch in this book feels very like the British Empire – in particular it made me think of the way the British ruled India, and the way they talked about their Indian subjects. We watched an episode of a series about First World War soldiers from the various Empires (The World’s War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire), and it was talking about the theories of “Martial Races” that the British Empire had. So some tribes/ethnic groups/political divisions/arbitrary divisions of Indians were thought to be suitable for infantry, some for officers, some not for the army at all. All depending on whether they were stereotyped as clever, or courageous, or peaceful, or whatever. And this concept resonates strongly with the way the Radch tea plantation owners treat their slavesemployees.

A good book, and good continuation of the series. I think there’s a lot of stuff here that will reward a re-read too – perhaps when the next one comes out I’ll read the first two again.

December 2014 in Review

This is an index and summary of the things I’ve talked about over the last month. Links for multi-post subjects go to the first post (even if it’s before this month), you can follow the internal navigation links from there. (TV shows without full posts will not be linked, but will be listed.)

Talks

“Times of Transition: Herihor and the High Priests of Amun at the End of the New Kingdom” Jennifer Palmer – talk given at the December meeting of the EEG.

Total: 1

Television

Fiction

Doctor Who: Last Christmas.

Total: 1

Doctor Who: Last Christmas

The blog’s on a little bit of a hiatus at the moment – as might’ve been apparent. A combination of being very busy in December and wanting to get some posts written so I have a buffer between writing and posting! It will return properly in a couple of weeks or so. However, I wasn’t going to not write up and post about Doctor Who in a reasonably timely fashion! We watched it on Christmas Day at J’s parents place – the toddler in the house kindly (well …) let us have the telly before he went to bed 😉

SPOILERS AHEAD! Hover mouse over text to read, or read on entry page:

I liked the episode a lot – less cutesy than the Christmas episodes often are, whilst still being Christmas themed. And even quite dark in places, with an unsettling ending. I did find the comedy elves tedious, tho – particularly the “that’s (not) racist” string of jokes.

Having the film references be not just obvious but also part of the storyline was quite cool. I’ve seen someone elseweb say they didn’t like the reveal at the end of Shona’s film viewing list for Christmas Day as they thought it was too heavy handed, but I thought it was a nice touch – another reinforcement that everything before was part of a shared dream state. I found the references particularly fun this time too as we’d just finished watching Tomorrow’s Worlds: The Unearthly History of Science Fiction (an interesting series, recommended) which had talked about the isolated-science-base-wakes-something-horrific theme in science fiction as one of its topics.

Of course the film reference they didn’t explicitly mention was Inception, which wasn’t so much a passing reference as the underpinning of the plot (tho I haven’t seen Inception to really draw parallels I just have a pop-culture awareness of it). Not just with the popping in and out of dreams within dreams, but also the ways you know it’s a dream – Santa obviously was one here, but also the orange which we see again at the end … That and the whole “second chances being rare” thing do make it a trifle unsettling at the end. I’m again wondering about the dreamlike/fairytale nature of some of the stories from last season – but again I don’t think they’d actually go there. Probably.

The return of Danny worked for this episode – but hopefully that’s done, bringing him back over & over would cheapen the ending of the previous season. Another thing I saw in passing elseweb was someone noting that the Clara/Danny relationship worked better in this episode than it often seemed to in the previous episodes – perhaps a sign it was always better in her dreams than the reality (and hence the constant lying). It was also an interesting counterpoint to the Amy/Rory relationship – Amy’s choice in a dream where Rory died was to die herself; Clara’s dream resurrection of her boyfriend had him persuade her to wake up and live.

Long wait till the next season now!

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November 2014 in Review

This is an index and summary of the things I’ve talked about over the last month. Links for multi-post subjects go to the first post (even if it’s before this month), you can follow the internal navigation links from there. (TV shows without full posts will not be linked, but will be listed.)

Talks

“New Discoveries at Hierakonpolis” Renee Friedman. Talk given at the November meeting of the EEG.

Total: 1

Television

Fiction

Doctor Who: Dark Water.

Doctor Who: Death in Heaven.

Total: 2

Doctor Who: Death in Heaven

The last Doctor Who before Christmas! Which isn’t that long a gap, to be honest but I’m trying not to think about that as I’ve not even begun to consider Xmas shopping yet 😉

SPOILERS AHEAD! Hover mouse over text to read, or read on entry page:

I thought that was a good end to this season of Doctor Who – for a change a Moffat written finale that actually hung together without becoming too clever for its own good.

The scene I talked about last time as having been in the trailer but not in the story yet was the bit with Clara announcing that “Clara Oswald” had never existed. Which was misdirection, so I completely fell for that. It worked well in context – a lot of the arc of this season has been about Clara thinking of then putting into practice the answer to “What would the Doctor do if he was here?”. And announcing she was the Doctor was certainly worth a try.

It is presumably no coincidence that this season’s story revolved around soldiers and their actions and sacrifices, with the finale airing the day before Remembrance Sunday in the centenary year of the start of WW1. And once I’d thought of it like that, it’s made me think of the Kipling poem “Tommy”, here’s a verse from it:

Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap.
An’ hustlin’ drunken soldiers when they’re goin’ large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin’ in full kit.
Then it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an` Tommy, ‘ow’s yer soul? ”
But it’s ” Thin red line of ‘eroes ” when the drums begin to roll
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
O it’s ” Thin red line of ‘eroes, ” when the drums begin to roll.

Which casts the soldierphobia and persistent mockery of Danny Pink by various characters in the show in a bit of a different light – he’s Tommy, he’s the un-appreciated veteran, and he’s the saviour that stands between the people of Earth and destruction when the time comes.

After, of course, he has his heart ripped out of him by Clara’s defence of the Doctor “her best friend, the one man she’ll never lie to”. Poor Danny. And he probably doesn’t realise that’s another lie – Clara lies to the Doctor just as much as she lies to everyone else. I’m glad they didn’t cheapen the story by making Danny decide to live – they’ve been building up his sense of honour throughout the season so it wouldn’t’ve felt right for him to come back from the dead. Poor Clara, nonetheless.

I was a bit shocked by Osgood’s death though, and by the fact that it stuck – just after the Doctor noticed her enough to hint he’d take her on the TARDIS. Which meant that the Brigadier’s daughter being saved by the Brigadier was even more startling. The Brig wasn’t one of the old Who companions I imprinted on particularly, most of his stories were a bit long ago for me to remember. So those scenes didn’t have quite the same impact on me as on other people, but it was still a pretty neat way to say farewell to the Brig after his actor’s death.

(I do, however, find the “you can resist cyberconversion by the power of love” thing a bit crap. Barring a few sociopaths most people love somebody so how on earth do cybermen ever convert anyone for heaven’s sake??)

The lies between the Doctor and Clara at the end and the appearance of Santa Claus on the TARDIS presumably mean we’ll get Clara back for at the very least a proper farewell. My friend Tash pointed out that Clara is presumably pregnant with Danny’s kid so that Orson Pink can exist, and I’m inclined to agree. Although it is possible they’ll just dodge all of that with a handwave about “time can be re-written”, but “Danny didn’t come back and I’m pregnant” would make sense for the news Clara wanted to tell the Doctor.

I haven’t mentioned Missy yet – I did like her as the next incarnation of the Master. And the scheme whereby she invents an afterlife to harvest minds to in order to create the cybermen was just the sort of ludicrous over-the-top and nutty plan I associate with the Master. And I was amused by the evil-Mary-Poppins costuming & mannerisms, too 🙂

Looking back at the season as a whole I think I was wrong about most of the links between the individual stories and the season arc. But despite the hit & miss start I really enjoyed the season in the end.

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Doctor Who: Dark Water

Writing this up a little late, as we ended up extremely busy this weekend & at the beginning of the week, so I’m sure some of the things I thought of to say at the time we watched it have vanished from my head. Oh well.

SPOILERS AHEAD! Hover mouse over text to read, or read on entry page:

Wasn’t expecting that opening sequence at all. Danny goes from being mostly irrelevant (and not well treated by Clara) to fridged. I liked the way Clara reacts – felt very true to character, and a good pay-off for several “don’t make threats you won’t carry through” moments through the season. And there’s more than one pay off to that in this episode – in retrospect it’s been a theme of the season but I don’t think I’d consciously realised that till just now. Clara is definitely a woman who doesn’t make threats, she makes promises … even when sometimes the result is akin to cutting off her nose to spite her face, as with switching off communication with Danny later in the episode.

Another recurring thing this episode was about “missing the headline” – commenting on/talking about one thing when another thing is more significant. So I’m pretty sure there’ll be pay off to that next episode. There’s a scene from the trailer for the finale that we haven’t had yet and I reckon either what Clara was saying in it was total misdirection or that fits in here with missing the headline in her opening conversation with Danny (despite her insistence she’s started with the headline). Being vague because J doesn’t watch trailers and doesn’t want spoiled for it.

We did find out quite a lot of what’s going on here though – Missy == the Master as speculated. And she’s taking backups of dead people and convincing them to delete their emotions prior to re-downloading them into cyberman bodies inhabited by corpses. There’s a lot of resonance here to the opening episode with Clara (modern-Clara that is) – The Bells of Saint John (post) – can’t claim credit for thinking of it myself, I read someone else’s hope that the current story wouldn’t save Danny whilst writing off all the other dead minds in the same way that first story saved Clara but not all the rest. But definite reminders of that episode now I think about it. I’m presuming that Missy is the woman who gave Clara the phone number that gets her in touch with the Doctor. There are also minds that are uploaded in some fashion, with dead bodies left behind. Tweaking of the emotions once the mind is digitised too – I remember sliders to move emotion/intelligence etc up and down. I’m not suggesting a direct link of any sort here, just that there’s a lot of resonance and it feels to me like we’re maybe supposed to be reminded.

Definitely looking foward to the next episode and finding out the answer to what’s going on! 🙂

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