The Tyranny of Socks

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

I have finished Persepolis Rising and am now reading Tiamat's Wrath.

I commented in an earlier post that I was finding Singh an interesting villain as he persuaded himself that genocide was the right option for him; what I wrote to likeadeuce was that He's absolutely the guy who takes home movies of his wife and kid with the smoke from the death camps just over that line of trees. But he's also been left to sink or swim in his difficult job that as far as I can tell he has no real preparation for. Little did I know at the time that he was actually being set up by his own side to be that guy. Not that he was necessarily going to fall, but the temptation was being put in his path and a plan was in place for Laconia to benefit from it.

That this is also hypocritical for the Laconians, because their power absolutely relies on the threat of utter destruction, is of course the point. This is a book about the delusions of empire: when Trejo asks Drummer how many lives she is willing to sacrifice, what is left unsaid is that there is anonther answer that also leads to zero. The Laconians could just pack up and go home. They won't, because they are afraid of what the universe outside their control might become, but they could. (Someone described these last three books as "the rise and fall of Rome, but in space," but the model for Laconia is right there in the name. These are the Spartans, and violence and subjugation are the only things they know. Of course they're afraid.)

Tiamat's Wrath is going more slowly for me: I read a bit, then I read ahead, then I go back and read again. So I've read through the whole thing and am now going back to read it in sequence. I'm enjoying it, but I am also taking it more slowly. The focus is still on the old familiar characters (now including Elvi!) but we also have new people moving in, especially Teresa. I really like Teresa and hope she makes it out of Laconia OK.

So if Persepolis Rising was about empire, this is a book about humanity, and what makes us human. And on one level Corey's answer is the same of Tolkien's, and of all the classical authors before: to be human is to know that you are going to die. So this is a book that starts with a funeral, and is punctuated by death, and has lurking just beyond the shadows, Duarte and Cortazar's attempt to escape death, which has removed Duarte at least from the sphere of "what is human." At its heart is Bobbie, and the death she chooses, and next to her is Amos, who has almost certainly escaped death in some way, but at what cost? Will he live forever, like the children in Cortazar's lab? And what does that make them? Two things struck me: the moment Elvi notices Cara comforting Xan with a gesture she recognizes as "a moment that primates had been sharing back to the Pleistocene, deeper and more recognizable than mere humanity"; and the point where Amos decides, having met Teresa, that maybe blowing up the whole palace is not the way forward. Like Trejo in the previous novel and Cortazar in this, he has the ability to kill or not kill: unlike them, Amos can look at a child and choose not to kill that child. And of course hanging over everything, the ring-builders and whatever destroyed them, which are so far from humanity as to be unknowable: whatever Cara and Xan (and Amos) are, they are surely more human than that.

(Aside from all that book-specific thematic stuff, another thing I love about these books is Naomi's growth. Of course she has become the leader of the resistance: it's been a long journey for her, to learn that rejecting Inaros does not mean rejecting leadership, but she has been on this road for a while.)

...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 re-reading: Phineas Redux, by Anthony Trollope. For such an old book the political parts feel very current in many ways: there's a lot in there about the demands of party loyalty over ideological consistency, on the ability of a politician with sufficient support to push at constitutionality... I guess some things don't really change. Nonetheless I think this is one for my favorite of the Palliser novels.

I actually do like Phineas Finn as a protagonist even though sometimes he stretches the bounds of credibility -- he's both SO unlucky and SO lucky, and both in completely melodramatic ways. He is so talented! So many women love him! And yet he just cannot catch a break (until, of course, the end of the book, when everything works out for him.) There is something of the woobie Gary Stu about him, maybe. He's certainly not the worst male protagonist in Trollope, though -- and overall I feel like the characters in this book are pretty good. So far there has not been much dead weight. It helps I guess that Trollope had three novels worth of characters to play with, and a lot of the cast have returned especially from Phineas Finn and The Eustace Diamonds. And once he's introduced the new characters he puts the romance plots to the side for most of the first volume in any case to handle the election and the change of government.

I had forgotten how really dreadfully petty Glencora can be, but I love her anyway.

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.]

But I did read a book recently!

lizbee pointed me toward The Wolf Den, by Elodie Harper -- a book about an enslaved woman in Pompeii in the 70s AD, who is forced to work in one of the city's many brothels. (One thing about this book, is that many of the buildings in it are places you can see if you visit Pompeii or read about in books, and see illustrations of. So the brothel is a particular brothel in Pompeii.).

There are not a lot of books told from the perspective of enslaved people in the ancient world, which is a shame because there were a lot of enslaved people in the ancient world, especially the Classical world. One thing that doesn't come through immediately in this book is the extent to which the majority of people in a city like Pompeii would be no more than a generation or two out of slavery, if that; it's possible that it doesn't come through because the pov character herself isn't aware of that, though. ( spoilery observation )

I liked this book, although the subject matter is pretty grueling, obviously. Nothing is very explicit, but the main characters are enslaved prostitutes and so a lot of bad things happen to them. Harper focuses more on the emotional damage they suffer, and again, I don't know whether this is purposeful but it strikes me as an important point if you're writing a novel about enslaved people -- that they are really people, not only bodies who might be owned by someone, and might suffer this or that kind of abuse. The main type of first-hand testimony we have from slaves and freedmen in Roman society is from tomb inscriptions, so they are highly formulaic but within that there is a lot of emphasis on emotional ties and family bonds, I suspect precisely because the law doesn't recognise the families and emotions of enslaved people.

The main character, Amara, is a Greek woman who was sold into slavery when her father died and her mother ran out of money. She suffers a but from protagonist syndrome in her singleminded focus on (re)gaining her freedom -- at points it seems like she feels this more strongly than the other enslaved characters, which I'm not sure is realistic. But she's also a real grifter, and there are some interesting parallels between her and Felix, the pimp she is determined to escape from. I think it's the determination, and the active role she takes, that seem to set her apart in the narrative -- she feels other things in the course of the book, but that's what stays with me about her. The other characters -- especially the other prostitutes -- are really well-drawn and sometimes feel more human than Amara, I'm not sure why.

(As an aside, about 20 years ago there was a scholarly debate on the main sources of enslaved people in the Roman Empire, and it was interesting to see all the main sources represented here: exposed children, the children born to enslaved people, people sold by family members, people kidnapped and sold as slaves, people captured during Roman military operations...)

Anyway, this is a good book, and I'm going to read the sequel as soon as I get it.

I saw that Patricia McKillip died last week, and was unexpectedly saddened; she is (was? but the status hasn't changed) perhaps my favorite author. My tattered copies of the Riddle-Master trilogy have moved between three countries and across the Atlantic twice, and the piece of fanfic I wrote for it one Yuletide is one of the things I'm fondest and proudest of. I haven't read all of her more recent books; they're more difficult to find here. But perhaps I will look for them, or do some re-reading this week. She had a unique voice; sometimes it made her books seem a bit samey, and sometimes it made them hard for me to follow (I reread the Cygnet duology recently, and I finally, finally, think I understand what happened there, maybe.) But I really loved the way she centered women of all ages in her stories, and often relied on communication and negotiation rather than violence to resolve the conflicts in them.

I have been reading some of the earlier Rivers of London novels (and I have a lot of thoughts, especially about the Rivers and Beverly and Beverley & Peter, but I won't go into them here and now); I was going to re-read Moonwise, by Greer Gilman, but I think I will put it off in favor of some McKillip just now. Maybe Ombria in Shadow; maybe The Book of Atrix Wolfe.

I have just about finished Warleggan, which is just as well since the library wants it back tomorrow. This is the one where ( cut for spoilers, and also sexual violence )

Overall I think I like the TV show better than the books I've read, but both of them are really melodramatic and contrived. In a good way! But the show has George's A+ conflicted pining for Ross.

We finished watching Domina. It remained really delightful, although I wonder whether someone who didn't know all about the Primus trial would have enjoyed it quite as much as I did. (I have to admit that Primus' fate in this makes much more sense than his historical fate.) I am really really enjoying their Tiberius and Drusus, and also Tiberius' relationship with both Livia and Antigone; I love how everyone admits that Tiberius is brilliant, but that there's something inexpressibly creepy about him (and of course this eventually comes to the surface in a disturbing but predictable scene.) I also really like that I was never entirely sure what, if anything, Livia feels for Gaius.

It was spectacular to look at and I really really hope they make a second series. It's sort of doing "How did Livia become the Livia of I, Claudius," except just to the left of that.

In other news, I have signed up for crossworks, and am wondering whether I should sign up for auexchange too. It would mean two stories at once, plus the next round of multifandomdrabble. But I am just about at the end of my teaching and marking responsibilities, and having a lot of fanfic to write sometimes actually encourages me to get my own work done. So I don't know.

Today is cold and damp: I taught Spartacus the family chili recipe, which is now making thr house smell good.

Recently finished: Fly by Night, by Frances Hardinge. I enjoyed this a lot! I loved the wordplay and the worldbuilding. It was part of a set of books handed down to Spartacus -- he is nearly finished with it as well. We appreciated its crossover potential: it might not be a beautiful day in the village, but you are a horrible goose.

Currently reading: a lot of fanfic, and stuff for work. Currently, Cicero's letters to his brother Quintus. I have a lot of time for Quintus, as it can't have been easy being the other Cicero; he does actually carve out a good career for himself as a governor and military commander (and poet). He was Pompey's legate in Sardinia and one of Caesar's in Gaul; he stays on an extra year with Caesar as well, perhaps looking to gain more experience and connections. Perhaps in some happier (for the Ciceros) version of Roman history he would have been able to run for a consulship in the 50s. But instead the system fell apart, and took him and his son with him.

In any case, the letters are good, except for the first which is actually a treatise on provincial governorship disguised as a letter, and is truly horrid (but useful to the historian!) I only hope Quintus rolled his eyes and took it in good faith for what it actually was.

My habit of posting once or twice a month tops and entirely at random continues. Here is what I'm reading:

I am reaching the end of Anthony Trollope's Orley Farm, which I have liked very much even though (a) many of the characters are really annoying and (b) it suffers from a tragic lack of Pallisers. In fact it's set on a lower social level entirely, being mostly about local landowners caught up in a court case and the barristers, solicitors and witnesses involved in the case -- but being Trollope this obviously includes everyone's families and a random assortment of travelling salesmen. As always Trollope is good at writing people, but one of the characters I find most interesting, the daughter of one of the barristers, is sadly too hard-hearted and self-aware to be a proper ingenue and thus her story is left almost completely unresolved.

But I didn't want to pick it back up this afternoon, so instead I started a new-to-me Alan Furst book, Under Occupation, which I got out of the library during its brief window of openness and which is thus now mine until whenever they reopen. I used to really like Alan First but after a while the books all got too samey: he's a melancholic journalist! he's caught up in espionage! there's an undermotivated romance with a sexy French or mayve Russian woman, who is also melancholic and caught up in espionage! But this one started well because now the character is even moe clearly actually the wish-fulfillment version of Alan Furst, writer of espionage novels -- the novels that the character writes have a certain similarity to the novels Furst writes. He has sad green eyes, and women find him irresistible! If Alan First doesn't himself have green eyes I shall be very disappointed.

In any case, having taken a break from Furst for a few years, I am enjoying the start of this one even though the plot seems even more flimsy than usual -- but self-consciously so.