The Tyranny of Socks

I picked up a copy of Leviathan Wakes, the first Expanse novel. My new-found appreciation for Holden carried me through it, but I just can't help wondering, maybe I am supposed to hate Miller and find him an unpleasant stereotype? He's a washed-up policeman with a drinking problem and an unhealthy fixation on a much younger woman he's never met! Oh, and a propensity for violence. At least in novel form I don't have to look at that stupid hat. And at least Holden dislikes Miller too, if not for the reasons I do.

Yet again, though, I am struck by my ability to absorb information in written form vs on TV. Like, it had literally never occurred to me that Protogen names the protomolecule after itself. How did I miss that?

Now working my way through the short story collection, out of order. A lot of the material in here made it into the TV show in one form or another, but not all of it.

... and I came across this song. It is a matter of eternal regret to me that no one ever made a Duncan/Methos vid to this song. I mean, "...he's drinking all my beer, he's wearing all my clothes, and if he winks at me again I think I'll take him home" and "he says he has a question, he starts tugging at my cloths -- would I be good enough to take him to his girlfriend's home?"

I mean, there's absolutely a barbarian in the back of your car. This is my "vid I would have learned to vid to make" vid.

And all I can say is, this stupid series made me love James Holden! I hate everyone right now! How? How did this happen?

My favorite Ides of March related clip:



Indeed, we should totally just stab Caesar.

I signed up for fffx this year -- this is an exchange for works of over 10,000 words. There is a very long writing period which is not great for me because I am a last-minute kind of person. But I did it! And I am fairly pleased with what I produced.

Sometimes It Rhymes (14528 words) by Vaznetti
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Duv Galeni/Delia Koudelka, Olivia Vorbarra Vorkosigan/Piotr Vorkosigan
Characters: Delia Koudelka, Duv Galeni, Piotr Pierre Vorkosigan, Olivia Vorbarra Vorkosigan
Additional Tags: Time Travel, Action/Adventure, Identity Issues, Period: First Cetegandan War, time travel by macguffin, archival research gone wrong, sexist language by sexist people, Piotr Vorkosigan you know I mean you, terrorism and resistance, no one hates time travel more than a historian, mixed marriages, Canon-Typical Violence
Summary: Delia and Duv travel back in time to the First Cetegandan War. The past is hard to change, even when you're in it.

Hunh. I thought I talked about Vorkosigan stuff enough to have a tag for it, but I guess I don't. ETA: fixed that.

...since I mentioned that I was reading it, and have now finished it. One thing that struck me when I was done with it, though, was about Murtry. I mean, I hate Murtry about as much as the text wants me to and maybe even more. But by the end of the book I also found his self-delusions really interesting, because on the one hand he believes that he is on The Frontier, and on The Frontier, Might Makes Right, and he is a Hard Man who makes Hard Decisions. And for that to be true, he has to cast the Belter colonists as the natives that he's going to drive out to make room for civilization, which you can kind of see. But he also has to cast Holden as the representative of the civilization that Murtry is preparing for, but present too soon, because he is Too Soft to make those Hard Decisions, etc. And one can see why he thinks so, because Holden puts on a face which about morality and equity and things like that.

But when the chips are down, that is not who Holden is. And you can just about see that Murtry might have figured this out -- every now and then he remarks on Holden keeping Amos around as something that doesn't fit his view of Holden. But he's so attached to his version of who he himself is that he has to reject that information. And it's true that Holden sees his purpose there as (at least in part) a conciliator, someone who is going to set up rules and relationships and not settle everything through violence. But when he wants to, Holden can jettison all that: he won't fire the first shot, but if anything happened to Naomi, or looked likely to happen to her, he would absolutely destroy the Edward Israel and probably every living person in the system. Whereas Murtry keeps escalating, because he really thinks that eventually Holden will just cave to him. And at the very end, when it's all settled, it's Murtry who tried to rely on the rules of civilization, claiming that everything he did was covered under the charter he was given, and was done to uphold the rule of law, and Holden who plan to use extra-legal means (his connection with Avasarala) to make sure that none of that matters. By the end he was so wrong I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

(Currently I'm a bit over halfway through Nemesis Games; I had to put it aside for a little while but I'm eager to get back to it.)

Currently reading: Caliban's War by the people who write the Expanse books. I have seen the show all the way through probably four times now, but this is the first time I've picked up one of the books. So far it's really, really good! I know this is the second book in the series but I started with it because (a) there was a copy in the used bookstore and (b) I have heard that the first one doesn't have Avasarala in it, and there's only so much time in the world for books that could have Avasarala in them but don't. In any case I don't have a problem figuring out what happened, although I get the sense that the protomolecure-related worldbuilding is much more detailed in the books than it was in the show. But it's a fictional universe I really love, and I'm very happy to be getting more if it. I don't know why I never thought of reading these books before, really.

And I'm still here. Which is something, overall. In any case, I have been doing some reading over the last week or so.

On paper, Persians: The Age of the Great Kings by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones. As far as I can tell this book was written in 2022, which amazes me because it is so obdurately old fashioned a work of history, even of political history. The discussion of the royal women (because this is not the kind of book which cares about women who are not the wives, mothers, or concubines of the Persian kings) is incredibly naive. But if what you would like is a rollicking narrative of the Persian kings from Cyrus to Darius III this is the book for you. When I lie awake at night and my thoughts start running away with me I sit up and read five or ten pages of it.

Like a lot of popular histories the book has no proper citations within the text, and since I am not a specialist on Persia I have no way of knowing how well-grounded these lurid stories of court intrigue are but I am not strongly inclined to take them at face value. I guess Ctesias is the source for a lot of it but I feel like the author underestimates his prejudices about women and barbarians just because he isn't as bad as Herodotus.

On the internet, The Winter of Widows (524008 words) by laughingnell, an ASOIAF self-insert (or maybe more properly isekai? I'm not always clear on the difference) about a modern person born as the second daughter of a very minor Riverlands house; the story is set in the immediate aftermath of the Dance of the Dragons. It's really lovely: it's an uplift story but the uplift is about being humane and caring about other people. There is a little agricultural and technological development (four fields, glassworks and a spinning jenny) but none of the focus on military technology and political power that often overwhelm SI stories. Magic is real in this universe, as one would expect of something that takes the SI premise seriously, but not a panacea. The main character and her inner circle are all wonderfully-written, good people, even if they have some flaws. This is a very hopeful work, and I needed that this week.

It's a WIP, currently on chapter 62 of ???. Even if there's never another chapter written, I would recommend it.

No, I know, but on Wednesday we were traveling from Aachen back to Oxford, with a stop for some tourism in Brussels. All perfectly straightforward until some kind of typical Paddington chaos caused a mass cancellation of trains and a complication of the penultimate leg of the trip. At least we got home in time to see The Goal.

But I have been reading and am in the middle of two books.

Fiction: Jack the Bodiless, Julian May. This is the first book in May's less-good second series which is a prequel to her first, but I read the whole trilogy in a rush when it came out and recently thought it would be interesting to revisit it. I vaguely remembered it as set in a semi-dystopia but also that the rebellion against the system was very clearly in the wrong, and I also vaguely remembered that May is an author whose weird complexes about sex and Catholicism are on display at all times. The second thing is very true -- I am obviously not a Catholic but I think this is a strongly Catholic book but in a weird fringe way as opposed to a how Catholicism normally operates way (unlike, say, Russel's The Sparrow which is also very Catholic but in a different way; for one thing in May everybody else thinks Catholicism is great.) And May has some strong ideas about sex and reproduction, that is for sure; I had forgotten her thing about incest, but that is also present here. May's incest-and-reproduction thing in a nutshell: character learns that they and their sexual partner have fewer than the recommended number of grandparents between them, and respond by insisting that at least those grandparents were genetically superior so it's really important for them to have children. Really. I do like these books but they are so bizarre and sketchy.

The setting is... I guess I'd say its a utopia with dystopian features? Some of the complaints the rebels have are reasonable to my eye but a lot of them are just humans being cranky and paranoid and over-ambitious; the book hasn't actually engaged with the parts of the system that seemed really dystopian to me (like assigning colonies based on "ethnic dynamism," whatever that is supposed to be.) Maybe it will do so in the later books? But I also think that there is a huge gap between what May thought she was doing in these books and what I think she's doing, so who knows?

Nonfiction: How the World Made the West, by Josephine Crawley Quinn. So far I'm still firmly in material that I already know a lot about (it's the 7th century BCE and things are great if you're an Assyrian) but my observations at this point is that this is an excellent book and I recommend it highly. It's engagingly written and erudite at the same time -- Quinn never simplifies the evidence but her presentation of it is always clear. This is still Mediterranean history, at least as far as I've got, but Quinn puts the Phoenicians in the central place where they belong, and reminds the reader throughout that the ancient world was a world of connections, not isolated cultures. I am never certain whether it's common knowledge that the Phoenicians were involved in lots of the things we give the Greeks credit for "inventing", but that is very much the case. So my impression that the "civilisational theory" that Quinn is arguing against is kind of a straw man may be mistaken.

As always, there are details of Quinn's interpretation that I don't agree with but overall I think this is a really stunning work of history, pulling together a lot of different threads into a lively and coherent narrative and showing how all the details she brings in matter and contribute to the whole. I hope I keep enjoying it as the narrative moves forward; it also makes me want to read her history of the Phoenicians. [obligatory disclaimer, I guess, that I have chatted with the author.]

Hey! It's Wednesday!

I actually meant to write about this book last week, or even the week before. I picked it up as part of a birthday present along with some other books.

I felt much less divided in my thoughts about this book as opposed the the second in the series: I felt much more secure as a reader that this was a... I'm not sure of the precise generic term, really. It's a book about a woman overcoming some kind of difficulty and finding happiness, with an element of romance. So for Amara, that difficulty is her present and past as a slave, but it isn't a book about slavery, or the experience of slavery, except insofar as her experience of slavery creates the internal obstacles Amara has to overcome in order to achieve her own happiness. (She does, of course, with the help of Mount Vesuvius.)

Someday someone will write a historical novel which is really about slavery in the classical world, and I'll probably nitpick that to death too. This isn't that book, but it was an enjoyable book anyway. One day someone will also write a book in which Domitian is perfectly nice, at least as a younger man -- this is also not that book. That book, I will do my best not to nitpick.

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All in all, though, this was a satisfying conclusion for the character. But I really do want the revisionist novel about Domitian someday.