Books: Sins, Rails, Alliances, Gundams, Batman, & More

[woodwardiocom]

The Sinful Ones by Fritz Leiber

An ontological fantasy, it which our hero discovers that most people are just automatons, then exerts his sexual privilege over the girl who revealed that to him, in vastly uncomfortable ways. Didn't finish, not recommended.

Railsea by China Miéville

This starts out as a pastiche of Moby-Dick, in which the sea is a vast railyard, and the whales are played by giant moles. Speaking as a former railroad brakeman, that premise is very silly, but Mr. M. made me not care. Along the way it stops being Moby-Dick and instead becomes a different quest, and a parable about capitalism run amuck, but you're mostly reading it because trains are cool. Recommended.

Defending Middle-Earth by Patrick Curry

I'm a big Tolkien fan, but this critical defense of The Lord Of The Rings is too shrill in both defense and its absurd attacks on "scientism". Didn't finish, not recommended.

Batman: Murderer and Fugitive by Divers Hands

An epic storyline from 2002, collected in two volumes. Bruce Wayne is found kneeling over the corpse of his girlfriend, and is arrested for her murder. He has what amounts to a psychotic break, and withdraws from his extended Bat-family, and from his identity as Bruce Wayne, until he re-learns that they are what make him whole. A pretty good storyline, with some fine chapters, especially "24/7", which is mostly about the good he does as Bruce, not as Bats. Recommended.

Mining The Oort by Frederik Pohl

I got partway into this Mars-terraforming book, and just lost interest, possibly because the teen protagonist was entirely uninteresting. Not recommended.

Captain Vorpatril's Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold

The latest chapter in the Vorkosigan SF saga, this one focuses on Ivan, dilletante military officer who much prefers wine, women, and song over any sort of responsibility. Here, he suddenly gets saddled with women and responsibility, and has to protect them from forces both external and in-. While it has some dramatic moments, this one definitely tends toward the comical. Recommended.

Gundam 00F by Kouichi Tokita

This manga volume came free with a 00 DVD, so I glanced at it. The back cover dissuaded me from reading more than a few pages: It features Hayana, who, as near as I can tell, is a Bondage Catgirl Catholic Schoolgirl Bare-Your-Midriff Reich-Cosplaying Computer Girl Rei Ayanami Clone. Putting that many tropes on one girl is just unfair. Did not read.

Blue Remembered Earth by Alastair Reynolds

In a colonized Solar System, a dead woman's will sends our heroes on a cross-system scavenger hunt, which largely seems to be there to give us a travelogue, because it felt like it led in circles. Still, it was an entertaining travelogue, but the final MacGuffin was a bit dull. Here's hoping the sequel is more solid. Recommended, ish.

Comments

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

then exerts his sexual privilege over the girl who revealed that to him

How does he do that? Is she one of the automatons? If not, what sort of "privilege" does he have, and how?

I got partway into this Mars-terraforming book, and just lost interest, possibly because the teen protagonist was entirely uninteresting.

I agree. None of the characters are particularly interesting, and there's an air of the whole world just existing for the hero.

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

How does he do that?

He goes on a date with a girl. He kisses her at the end of the date. She tries to pull away, but he forces her to continue kissing him, then guilts her into further sexual shenanigans.

The privilege he has is male privilege, of the "I'm entitled to sexual satisfaction because I'm male" sort. It's kinda yucky.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

This sounds less like "male sexual privilege" than "taking advantage of a sucker." This is icky, but is not some sort of right which has been awarded to him by somebody else -- it is something he chooses to do and with which she chooses to cooperate. Her counter would have been simply to go "No. You're icky. And if you keep doing this I will treat this as unprovoked physical assault and will hurt you."

I will agree that I would dislike a "hero" who behaved like this.

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

This is icky, but is not some sort of right which has been awarded to him by somebody else

I can imagine few things as pointless as two white guys arguing about privilege on the Internet...

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Being neither racist against whites nor sexist against men, I do not acknowledge any disability in this respect attaching to either of us.

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

I do not acknowledge any disability in this respect

Yup.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Stipulating that straight white men have privilege, it seems really perverse to argue that they should not talk about it. Is the work of raising the consciousness of the privileged to be done entirely by the disprivileged, or do the privileged themselves have some obligation to raise their own each other's awareness of the issues? And I don't see how they can do that if they don't talk.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

"Privilege" is a con -- it's just a way of trying to make other people shut up instead of challenging the logic of one's arguments.

In this case, woodwardiocom has managed to talk about the way in which the protagonist of the book has used a combination of force and guile to get an (obviously rather weak-willed woman) to first kiss him and then engage in some other unspecified sexual conduct with him while utterly failing to address the issue of why the woman made the decision to go along with this. He says

then guilts her into further sexual shenanigans.

which explains nothing about how the protagonist actually achieved his end. Why should the woman have believed that she was required to have sex with him? The dynamic between the sexes is normally the opposite -- women are more choosy than men about with whom they have sex, for a variety of very good reasons which (unlike woodwardiocom) I am quite willing to logically discuss.

The really funny thing is that it was probably an earlier version of political correctness which the man used upon the woman -- in the Counterculture, it generally was assumed that men had the right to demand sex of women and that the women were somehow lacking in self-awareness if they didn't give in. This obnoxious attitude in the Counterculture led directly to the formation of radical feminism in response.

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

Please feel free to continue this argument elsewhere, but not here.

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

You make an interesting point, which I will think about and ask around about.

In this particular case, there's a certain script used by white male SF fans who hate the word "privilege", and Jordan is so thoroughly on-script that I found the prospect of arguing with him exhausting and almost certain to fail.

Since I've also found him to be a bit of an asshole, I've banned him from commenting in my journal, for the moment.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

That's the response I was hoping to get.

I'm afraid that I often respond to the actual conceptual points that are stated in a discussion, without knowing the personal history of the participants, for which the conceptual points are often a shorthand. I've never been good at reading that sort of shorthand; it's a skill I learned in later adult life, and imperfectly.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed Ivan as a protagonist more than I have Miles for the past couple of novels; I really feel like Bujold has burnt out on Miles but is condemned to go on writing about him. It was kind of strange to see the new novel go from the kind of comedy where Dean Martin suddenly finds himself married to someone to a caper story, but each half worked in its own terms.