Monthly Archives: July 2017

Blog News, Weekend Links

State of the Blog and Weekend Links: July 30, 2017

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I wish I could say that this has been a week of recharging and plan-making and getting ready to turn over a new leaf, you know, productivity-wise. And it has been. A little bit. I’ve been trying to relax and plan and focus on happy things and stuff, but, honestly, the highlight of my week was finally getting the Nightfallen fox mount in World of Warcraft, and it feels pretty sad for anything about World of Warcraft to be a highlight of a week in 2017. So. You know. I wouldn’t say I’m doing great.

Drunken Game of Thrones watching went well tonight, though. I’ll have a post ready tomorrow once I sober up and put myself through that horror show again.

I didn’t read as much this week as I did last week, though I watched The Incredible Jessica James on Netflix (it was nice) and I just cracked open an ARC of the first of JY Yang’s Tensorate duology and I can already tell I’m going to love it.

HBO announced a new show in production from Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. Confederate is an alternate history in which the Confederacy didn’t fail and where chattel slavery persists as the law of [some of] the land. It’s obviously going to be a fucking disaster. Roxane Gay perfectly explains why she doesn’t (and we shouldn’t) want to watch slavery fan fiction. And you can chase that with this piece “On ‘Confederate’ and the Limits of White Creativity.”

I have written some here about my love for FIYAH Literary Magazine, and part of that love is for its cover art. FIYAH cover artist Geneva Benton is Kickstarting and art book, and it looks beautiful.

The boy who plays Hot Pie in Game of Thrones has an IRL bakery. It’s adorable.

McSweeney’s literary would-you-rathers just about killed me with laughter.

The Millions reminded me that short books are a thing that is good in the world. I know I read a lot of novellas, but there are enough recs in this piece to make me feel like I definitely ought to branch out a little more, genre-wise.

In actually good TV series development news, AMC has announced that Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom is in early production as a series.

Electric Literature looks at some of the history of the rise of dystopian fiction.

This talk with Tor’s Irene Gallo and artist Tommy Arnold about illustrating Fran Wilde’s Bone Universe is excellent.

This year’s World Fantasy Award nominees have been announced.

Read an excerpt from the introduction to Iraq + 100.

I definitely need to live to be at least 132 years old so I can read the Future Library. You know. If there’s still a future in ninety-eight-ish years.

Renay at Lady Business has some books you should add to your TBR.

Book Riot collects 100 Must-Read SFF Short Story Collections.

There’s a new Cassandra Khaw story at Tor.com, “These Deathless Bones.”

I haven’t drawn much in years, but I would love to illustrate this Hexarchate Tarot.

Uncanny Magazine‘s Year Four Kickstarter is live, and it includes a Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction issue. $25 gets you a subscription. Highly recommend.

Game of Thrones, Television

Game of Thrones Recap/Review: Season 7, Episode 2 “Stormborn”

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After a surprisingly enjoyable season premiere, Game of Thrones is back in form this week with “Stormborn,” an episode full enough of the show’s worst failings to more than make up for its predecessor’s relative inoffensiveness. There are a couple of decent scenes tucked in here, but it’s an overall disaster of deeply silly dialogue, baffling character motivations, ridiculous plot developments, a seemingly complete lack of understanding of (or commitment to) setting on the part of everyone involved in making the show, and a hilariously awful sea battle sequence to top it all off. I was not nearly drunk enough for this shit last night, and watching it entirely sober today did not improve the experience.

**Spoilers ahead, obviously.**

At Dragonstone

The episode opens in classic Game of Thrones fashion with a weather shot that’s so dark and gloomy it’s impossible to tell what’s going on, but that’s okay because the answer to what’s going on at Dragonstone is “not much.” After reintroducing the place last week with a gorgeously melancholy tour of the inexplicably empty greater Dragonstone area, this episode finds Daenerys already itching to get out of there, dully intoning, “I always thought this would be a homecoming. It doesn’t feel like home.” The thing is, it’s not clear what we’re supposed to be feeling here. Dany’s return to Dragonstone was the opposite of triumphant, what with the place being completely abandoned (which makes no sense, but whatevs), but it was quietly impactful and succeeded in communicating something approaching the ambivalence and apprehension Daenerys might feel at returning to the land of her birth. With no dialogue, however, it was easy enough to project onto the sequence a whole lot of feeling that in hindsight was likely not justified. At the very least, anything communicated by last week’s Dragonstone sequence is undercut by Dany’s impatience here.

Much of the Dany/Dragonstone material in “Stormborn” is dedicated to discussing the upcoming war against Cersei and the Lannisters, and it doesn’t make a ton of sense that none of this was planned in advance. While it’s not obvious in the show, Dragonstone isn’t far from King’s Landing, which makes it an unlikely staging place for the type of long and slow war Daenerys is envisioning. As Tyrion explains—because of course he does—they’re going to besiege King’s Landing using Westerosi troops from Highgarden (never mind that Olenna has no legitimate claim there; in a society that practices male primogeniture like Westeros does, the deaths of her son and grandson would have created a succession crisis and opened the lordship up to claims from more distant male relatives and ambitious lords) and Dorne (where Ellaria also has no legitimate claim to leadership) while for some reason sending the Dothraki and Unsullied to the other side of the continent to capture Casterly Rock, a place so irrelevant to the plot and strategically unimportant to anything that it hasn’t managed to be seen on screen even once in six seasons of the show (or on page in five novels). It’s a nonsense plan that will take months (at least!) to enact and completely sacrifice any element of surprise they might have been able to leverage to their advantage, all while Cersei’s new ally Euron has a fleet of a thousand ships basically a stone’s throw away from Dragonstone.

When the Dragonstone crew isn’t laying out one of the worst game plans in history, there’s time for Daenerys to randomly interrogate and chastise Varys for his past actions before coming to her service, for Melisandre to show up to preach the gospel of Jon Snow, and for Olenna and Dany to have some girl bonding time. The Varys conversation starts off well enough, addressing a major issue that’s been glossed over for a full season. Sure, Daenerys ought to have questioned Varys before now about his complicity with her father and Robert Baratheon and his early support of her brother, but better late than never I suppose. It’s too bad it’s ruined by Emilia Clarke’s deadpan delivery of every line, followed up by an equally deadpan threat to burn Varys alive if he ever betrays her. Dany’s interactions with Melisandre and Olenna are marred by a similarly robotic performance, which only works to compound the other problems with these scenes: the inexplicable orgy of Jon Snow love and Olenna’s bizarre lack of self-awareness, respectively. And this is without even commenting on the ways in which Dany’s authority is constantly undermined by Tyrion and the ways in which she increasingly functions as his puppet (even literally repeating Tyrion’s rhetoric at one point).

In the books (I swear I’m trying not to compare!), much of Daenerys’s journey and character growth have to do with internal conflict, but none of that comes across in the show. While some gestures are made that suggest the show’s writers have at least read the source material (like how Dany’s pensive walk through Dragonstone suggested her ambivalent feelings about the place and the concept of “home”), Dany’s dialogue is poorly written, she’s constantly deferring to her male advisors, and she moves and talks like a fucking fembot. This wooden delivery of bad lines is characteristic of other major characters on the show (I’m looking at you, Jon Snow), it’s especially pronounced in Daenerys, and I am increasingly certain that it’s entirely on purpose. Dany’s break-up with Daario last year seems intended to have been a major turning point for the character, and she’s now so completely emotionally shut down that it’s basically impossible to understand what she might be thinking at any given time. I’m pretty sure that this is what Benioff and Weiss think is the ideal of female empowerment: a broken soulless husk of a woman, capable of no emotions except vague magnanimity and ill-justified desire for vengeance. (#FEMINISM, #WOMENONTOP).

Missandei and Grey Worm

If there is a high point of “Stormborn,” it’s the consummation of Missandei and Grey Worm’s relationship when Missandei comes to say goodbye to him before he leaves for Casterly Rock. Jacob Anderson and Nathalie Emmanuel have a nice chemistry, and their characters’ relationship has been seeded over the last season in a way that few things on this show ever are. By comparison to all the other nonsense that happens in this episode, this scene feels wonderfully organic. It also helps that Missandei’s nudity is shot with a minimal amount of camera leering. While it’s not a flawless scene (What even is Grey Worm’s accent?), it’s a nice payoff on a relationship that many fans of the show have been rooting for.

At Winterfell

We arrive at Winterfell this week at the same time as Tyrion’s message to Jon Snow does, which should be weeks later than the events of last week’s episode but which feels like pretty much the same afternoon. Jon and Sansa have a nice talk about how cool Tyrion is, and Davos points out that Daenerys’s dragons could be useful for dealing with their imminent ice zombie problem, but Jon initially refuses to entertain the idea of actually travelling to Dragonstone. This changes when he receives another message, this time from Sam Tarly, who sends word about the mountain of dragonglass that lays beneath Dragonstone. It’s now imperative that Jon leave ASAP to meet Daenerys himself—because “only a king will convince her” for some reason—even though the other Northern and Vale Lords and Sansa all think this is a terrible idea. In any case, Jon is leaving, and, after giving a speech about how he never wanted to be king in the first place so the other lords only have themselves to blame for Jon’s bad decisions since they practically made him do it, he’s leaving Sansa in charge while he’s gone. But not before roughing up Littlefinger, who follows Jon down to the crypt beneath the castle to try and talk to him about… something? Basically, Littlefinger starts off talking about how much he loved Catelyn Stark, then moves on to needling Jon about how Cat never liked her husband’s bastard child, and then makes a gross creepy remark about Sansa. For a guy who is supposed to be a master manipulator, Littlefinger sure doesn’t seem capable of keeping his foot out of his mouth by not saying exactly the most awful things he can think up at any given moment.

At King’s Landing

Cersei is still Queen in King’s Landing, and she’s called together the remaining loyal-ish lords from the parts of the Seven Kingdoms that are still at least nominally under control of the crown for a sort of white nationalist rally where she threatens them with the specter of Daenerys’s foreign hordes coming to destroy them all. Because the several years of wars that have already wrecked the country under Lannister rule were no big deal, but an army of brown guys is what the people of the Seven Kingdoms should really be afraid of. Jaime is completely recovered from whatever misgivings he might ever have had about his sister being Queen, and he’s game to spout the same white nationalist rhetoric in order to try and convince Randyll Tarly to join the Lannister, well, not cause, but something like that.

This is an exceptionally lazy writing decision that feels calculated to capitalize on real-world current events for ratings without actually being a meaningful commentary on those real-world events. It’s not edgy or insightful, and it doesn’t have any foundation in any of the political or cultural dynamics the show has shown us so far. It’s possible to infer or assume white supremacy from the demographics of Westerosi nobility, but the in-world explanation for the overwhelming whiteness of Westeros is simply that it’s a remarkably homogenous place and the ugliness of sentiment that Cersei and Jaime use here to try and sway the lords to their side reflects a sort of xenophobia and hate that hasn’t been expressed before now in the world of the show. Rather than a part of coherent worldbuilding, the decision to have Cersei and Jaime go full-on white nationalist feels like a cheap shorthand to paint them as definite villains, which is jarring after six seasons of pretending as if this is a show about moral ambiguity and the grayness of these characters. It could be that the writers don’t consider white nationalism to be unambiguously evil, and I don’t think we can rule that out as a possibility, but that doesn’t make any of this any less problematic.

At Oldtown

Last week it looked like Jorah was being kept prisoner at the Citadel in a sort of asylum for those who have greyscale. This week we learn that he’s only kind of a prisoner and there because he was hoping to find some treatment for his well-known incurable and deadly affliction. Archmaester Broadbent examines him nonetheless, but the prognosis isn’t good; Jorah may live another ten or twenty years with the disease, but it’s only a matter of months before he’ll lose his mind. If Jorah was a poor, the Archmaester would ship him off to Valyria right away, but since Jorah is a knight he’s got a whole extra day to get his affairs in order and—**looks meaningfully at sword**—stuff. This is convenient, since Sam recognizes Jorah’s name and decides he must find a way to save him. Sam uses the extra hours to research a potential cure that he is definitely going to try even though the Archmaester says it won’t work, and he shows up to Jorah’s room in the middle of the night to cut away all the greyscale skin and apply a kind of medicated ointment. Considering that a solid quarter of Jorah’s body is covered with the disease and there are no antibiotics in Westeros, this seems like a horrible idea, but it’s mostly just boring. The most notable thing about any of this sequence is that the medical gross-out of Sam cutting away the greyscale transitions into a shot of someone digging into a bowl of food, which is probably the most viscerally disgusting thing this show has ever done. It was truly vile.

Arya

I almost added “Arya runs into Hot Pie again” to my list of Season 7 predictions as a joke, but I thought better of it because I genuinely considered it too absurdly silly to happen and too obvious as a joke to be more than groanworthy.

In this episode, Arya runs into Hot Pie again.

And Hot Pie is better informed about current events in Westeros than literally every other character on the show. Somehow, Arya managed to be in a castle full of scheming Freys and then have dinner with a group of Lannister soldiers and then travel some more towards King’s Landing without even once hearing any news from the North. Okay.

Obviously, Arya turns her horse Northward as soon as she learns that Jon is now the King and ruling from Winterfell. Before she teleports the rest of the way there to find out that Jon is gone and Sansa is in charge, Arya meets her dire wolf, Nymeria, in the woods. After a tense moment of Arya asking Nymeria to come with her, Nymeria doesn’t say anything (because she’s a wolf, natch) and just turns around and goes back into the woods. This was surprisingly effective—like, I legit cried a little and not just because I was two thirds of my way through a bottle of wine—but then Arya says, “That’s not you,” as Nymeria leaves, and it’s a somewhat baffling line until you hear the showrunners’ explanation for it in the supplementary material after the credits roll.

So, back in season one, there’s a scene where Ned Stark is blue-skying for Arya what her life as a great lady might be like, and Arya responds to him, “No. That’s not me.” And this line to Nymeria is supposed to echo that. Because Arya couldn’t be tamed into a lady, an identity that she was ill-suited for at best, and Nymeria isn’t supposed to be a wild wolf, even though she’s literally a wild animal, and Arya knows Nymeria’s true soul or something. It’s a specious justification for the line, which is just different enough from the original to not quite be a recognizable reference without it needing to be explained. In the moment, it’s just baffling and somewhat ruins the poignancy of the moment as one is forced to wrack one’s brains trying to figure out what Arya is even talking about.

At Sea

The beginning of the end of “Stormborn” starts off with the Sand Snakes bickering amongst themselves about who gets to murder which of their various enemies when they get to King’s Landing, which makes me wonder if these women know what a siege is. We then get a scene of Ellaria and Yara drinking together with Theon, which quickly devolves into Ellaria trying to seduce Yara because two bisexual women can’t possibly be in a room together without being overcome by lust. Ellaria is trying to coax Theon into an incestuous threesome when they find themselves under attack. Yara runs out of to the deck of the ship, where we find out that it’s the middle of the night, and everything is completely black so it takes a few moments to figure out that Euron has already caught up with his errant niece and nephew.

What ensues is one of the worst, most poorly lit, deeply silly and extremely boring battle sequences on the show to date. Euron arrives being theatrically crazy. There’s fire falling from the sky and destroying everything, although it never manages to provide enough illumination for a decently-lit shot of the action. Obara and Nym are both killed with their own weapons. Ellaria and Tyene are captured. Euron himself manages to subdue Yara. Theon supposedly has the opportunity to try and save his sister, but he instead drops his weapon and leaps into the ocean in such a perfunctory way that it’s every bit as unintentionally hilarious as Tommen’s suicide last season. The episode ends with Euron’s ship sailing away into the night while Theon watches, floating on a piece of wreckage in the wake of the carnage.

I’m not sure which part of this sequence I hate most, but the random total incompetence of all the female characters is probably the worst thing about it. There’s so much else that’s wrong here, though. How did Euron even find them? It’s possible that he could have caught up with them if he knew where they were, but there’s no way he would have known. Why would Euron wantonly destroy the whole fleet instead of capturing the ships? The Ironborn (and Euron in particular) are basically pirates, and ships are expensive. Plus, the Ironborn tend to follow strength, so it seems likely that many of the ships’ crews would transfer their loyalty to Euron if given half a chance once he’d captured Yara. Or, if Euron has a thousand ships and Cersei has a dragon-killing weapon, why don’t they just head straight to Dragonstone to wipe Daenerys out immediately?

Don’t answer that.

Miscellany:

  • Also lazy: Cersei getting to shoot a huge crossbow. It’s a heavy-handed and far too on the nose callback to Joffrey’s crossbow obsession.
  • Where is Ghost?
Blog News, Weekend Links

State of the Blog and Weekend Links: July 23, 2017

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If you’ve been following this blog for very long, you probably know that this year–especially the last couple months—I have struggled to keep up with, well, pretty much everything. A series of life setbacks and a serious bout of depression have caused me to shut down in a way that I’m not proud of, and my work here has definitely suffered. I’m hoping that this past week is the nadir of this shit, though I obviously can’t be certain. I’m feeling better right now, and my daughter is out of town this week so I should have plenty of time to try and rebuild some kind of routine, which will, ideally, stick long enough to snap me out of the funk I’ve been in.

That said, expect some changes here at SF Bluestocking. Something I’ve been putting a lot of pressure on myself to do (and that has been pretty much nothing but a source of guilt and shame for some time now) has been to write a lengthy review of everything I read. Inevitably, I end up with a backlog of stuff that I don’t have that much to say about but that I nonetheless feel awful for not writing anything about. From now on, long book reviews here will appear strictly as inspiration strikes. However, I will be replacing them with weekly (at least) posts with short takes on what I’ve been reading and what I’m excited about. I also expect to start doing more news posts. Soon, I hope to have posts on each week’s notable new book releases, movie trailers, new show buzz, and so on.

Mostly, though, I’m planning to focus more on things like the Gormenghast project. That kind of literary criticism and analysis is what I enjoy doing most, and trying to do too many other things has only hurt my productivity in that area. I’ll still be writing about Game of Thrones and about whatever books and movies and so on strike my fancy, but I will be focusing more, from here on out, on revisiting more classic and influential works. I’m also planning to spend more time writing more general essays on topics related to SFF, and I’m looking to get back into writing fiction, though that likely won’t appear here on the blog. In general, you can expect a somewhat less regimented but theoretically much more productive SF Bluestocking going forward. I think these are going to be good changes for me and for the blog, and I hope to be able to roll out even more changes later in (or at least before the end of) the year.

My favorite new release this week was Cassandra Khaw’s Book Smugglers novella, Bearly a Lady. It’s a delightfully sharp and funny bit of paranormal romance, and I highly recommend just buying it outright, but if you aren’t convinced you can read about Khaw’s Big Idea at Whatever and learn more about her inspirations and influences at the Book Smugglers.

Ken Liu joined Fran Wilde and Aliette de Bodard in a new episode of Cooking the Books.

I don’t know if you know this yet, but I love Ada Palmer, so I was thrilled to see this interview with her in the Sandusky Register.

The Prey of Gods author Nicky Drayden was interviewed at Read to Write Stories.

Kay Kenyon wrote about her Favorite Bit of At the Table of Wolves.

Alison Tam wrote about the queer utopia she’d like to live in over at Queership.

The Millions asked if historical fiction can be feminist.

The Manchester Review collected 21 stories of African speculative fiction that are free to read online.

Sarah Gailey’s is the only explanation of the 13th Doctor casting that anyone should need.

You want to read Mari Ness’s “The Witch in the Tower.”

I’m pretty excited about Atomic Blonde, but I CAN NOT WAIT to watch it as a double feature someday with Proud Mary:

I don’t know how historically accurate this is going to be, but I am moderately interested in Professor Marston & the Wonder Women:

I love Guillermo de Toro, and The Shape of Water looks gorgeous:

I haven’t been paying a TON of attention yet to the stuff being shown at SDCC, but I did watch the new Star Trek: Discovery trailer. I have a lot of questions about it, and I’m pretty apprehensive about just how much it doesn’t feel like Star Trek and instead feels like it’s influenced by more “prestige” programming, and not necessarily in a good way. Still, I’m cautiously optimistic about it.

 

Game of Thrones, Television

Game of Thrones Recap/Review: Season 7, Episode 1 “Dragonstone”

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After the total shitshow that was season six (and seasons four and five) of Game of Thrones, my expectations heading into last night’s premiere were low. I ended up being pleasantly (-ish) surprised. There are some Game of Thrones storylines that are well beyond salvaging at this point, and I’ll get to those soon enough, but there’s also some decent writing in “Dragonstone.” If some of the episode’s more emotional moments only work in isolation, divorced from the context of the previous several seasons, I’m feeling magnanimous enough halfway through this garbage year to be forgiving of some of the show’s sins in the interest of being able to enjoy it with a bottle of wine each week.

**Spoilers ahead, natch.**

Arya Stark

It seems like it’s been a while since Game of Thrones used a cold open, but they did for this season. We begin the episode with what appears to be Walder Frey addressing a room full of his nearest and dearest male relatives and quickly turns into, well, whatever a bloodbath is when it’s done with poison. Because—surprise!—that’s not Walder Frey! It’s Arya in disguise, which anyone who watched even just the last episode of season six will guess by the time Walder’s face appears on screen, so I’m not entirely certain who is supposed to be surprised by any of what happens in this scene.

David Bradley, in one last turn as the Frey patriarch, looks like he’s having the time of his life playing Arya-as-Walder, and his dialogue is clever enough, but it relies too heavily on uninspired wordplay (“Leave one wolf alive…”) and overused catchphrases (“The North remembers,” “Winter came…”). Visually, the whole thing recalls the Red Wedding, but this was already true of Arya’s original murder of Lord Walder last year. It’s a scene that feels mostly redundant, covering thematic and visual ground that the show tread in literally the last episode, but it’s nevertheless an entertaining scene to watch, with an overall feel to it that suggests something designed by committee to be crowd-pleasing for exactly the crowd of people who are still watching this terrible show.

Similarly, Arya’s second scene, later in the hour, feels calculated to achieve broad appeal, down to its Ed Sheeran cameo as a singing Lannister soldier, one of a group of men that Arya meets in order to learn a lesson about remembering the humanity of her enemies or something. On the one hand, such a lesson would be consistent with the themes of the episode’s Jon and Sansa material. On the other hand, it’s so totally at odds with the celebratory tone of the Frey massacre scene that it’s hard to imagine that any such lesson is what is intended. That said, it’s pretty par for the course on this show to frame a hate- and vengeance-fueled mass murder as a girl power moment and then undercut it within half an hour.

Bran Stark

Directly after the opening credits, we get an update on the Night King and the army of the dead that’s marching south to the Wall and the Seven Kingdoms. After lasting a good twenty seconds too long (not helped by the trouble my television had processing all the mist and snow effects), this turns out to be another vision of Bran’s. He and Meera (who is much the worse for wear) have finally made it to the Wall, where they’re met by a suspicious Dolorous Edd who questions whether they’re Wildlings—I’m not sure why this matters since the Wildlings are allies of the Night’s Watch now—and then is bizarrely easily convinced of Bran’s identity after Bran tells Edd’s fortune—even though Bran Stark has been presumed dead for all this while and there’s no reason for Edd to know that Bran now has psychic powers. It’s a strange, short scene that seems intended to be tense but lacks any legitimate source of the intended tension, so it feels more like a perfunctorily executed update scene about characters who almost certainly will have little of import to do until later in the season.

At Winterfell

Jon is settling into his new role as King in the North, and he’s full of ideas and commands and sweeping social reforms. First on his checklist is to find a way to get more dragonglass for making weapons to fight the White Walkers that he sees as the most immediate concern faced by the people of the North. He asks Tormund and the Wildlings to garrison the castles along the Wall, starting with Eastwatch-by-the-Sea. Because Jon is Super Feminist™, he also wants to ensure that all the Northfolk are being trained to fight and defend themselves, and he’s backed up by Lyanna Mormont, whose only discernable personality traits are supporting Jon Snow and sternly talking down to men old enough to be her grandfather.

Last, Jon must figure out what to do about the castles and lands left leaderless after the deaths of the lords who sided with the Boltons last season, and he apparently forgot to prepare that part of his presentation. When he hesitates over how to handle the situation, Sansa suggests that the Umber and Karstark holdings be given as rewards to some of the lords who remained true to the Starks, which elicits cheers from the room. Jon’s not Super Feminist™ enough to defer to his sister, however, and he doesn’t believe in punishing children for the sins of their fathers, so he makes actual children Alys Karstark and Ned Umber publicly declare their allegiance to House Stark. This would be fine if Jon had just decisively done this to begin with, but his uncertainty left room for suggestions, which Sansa gave.

It also makes no sense that the Northern and Vale lords would so quickly shift from supporting Sansa’s idea to unquestioningly supporting Jon’s decision, and this, combined with Jon’s dressing down of his sister afterwards, ends up feeling like a contrived public humiliation for Sansa. She spoke up—and perhaps it was the wrong timing on her part, but Jon hadn’t consulted her prior to his meeting and didn’t seem to know what he was doing during the meeting—only to be immediately shut down by Jon and then inexplicably ignored by a roomful of people who agreed with her moments before. To add insult to injury, the writers have put an additional obsequious speech in her mouth where—after just having publicly disagreed with Jon about a major policy matter, largely in an attempt to cover for Jon’s own ineptitude—Sansa praises Jon’s leadership abilities.

It’s weird, and it’s an obvious ploy to humiliate Sansa to the show’s audience as well, only topped by Jon going on to accuse Sansa of admiring Cersei about a minute later. The seeds of a real conflict between Jon and Sansa are already growing, which is about what I expected coming into the season, but I’m somewhat surprised at how decisively the audience is being led to take Jon’s side, especially when he’s so clearly in the wrong. Jon isn’t a confident leader, and he seems out of his depth already, but he’s also baldly sexist in his refusal to even consider taking advice from Sansa, scoffing at the idea straight to her face. So Super Feminist™ of him.

Fortunately, this is all the Jon we see this week, though we return to Winterfell later in the episode for brief updates with Brienne, Tormund, Podrick, Sansa and Littlefinger. Brienne is “training” Podrick, mostly, it seems, by brutally hitting him, but she’s distracted by Tormund leering at her. Sansa is watching this when Littlefinger comes over to try and conspire with her, but Sansa shuts him down relatively quickly. Still, Sansa defends Littlefinger’s presence to Brienne a moment later, citing the man’s usefulness and their indebtedness to him after his support helped win back Winterfell. Okay.

At King’s Landing

Cersei and Jaime have a boring talk while walking all over an unfinished painting of Westeros. It’s a rather on the nose bit of symbolism, and the conversation isn’t particularly illuminating. They are sort of talking strategy, but things are looking pretty bleak for the Lannisters. They have enemies on all sides (described by Cersei in colorfully misogynistic terms), and the arrival of winter doesn’t improve things for their military forces, who depend on other parts of the Seven Kingdoms for supplies, which will presumably not be forthcoming now that Cersei has destabilized the whole country by killing most of its leaders and pissing off the rest. The biggest piece of information to come out of this whole talk is that Cersei has no idea what a “dynasty” is.

What Cersei does have, however, is a new ally: Euron Greyjoy, who slouches into the throne room looking like a refugee from circa 2000 Hot Topic. He’s brought a thousand ships—which is a lot (the Spanish Armada, for example, was only 130 ships in 1588)—and a proposal for Cersei. Even though the Lannisters surely need Euron and his impossibly enormous fleet of ships far more than he needs them, Cersei refuses the proposal until Euron has proven his loyalty. He promises to leave and return to her with a gift; I’m guessing the gift will be people, likely Tyrion or the Sand Snakes if Euron can catch them.

In Oldtown

Though Sam was sent to Oldtown to train to replace Maester Aemon at Castle Black, it’s not clear what his training consists of other than a sort of humiliating and profoundly dull general-purpose drudgery. There’s a whole sequence of what is obviously some time passing with Sam spending his days cleaning chamber pots, serving food and shelving books. Some time is spent with the Archmaester, played by Jim Broadbent, who gives Sam a fatalistic speech about how they at the Citadel are the world’s memory and that the world isn’t going to end because of the White Walkers. In the end, Sam decides to steal a key to the restricted area of the library so he can study up on the White Walkers and dragonglass. He stays up late one night to go through the books he’s stolen, and he helpfully finds a very simple map that indicates a whole mountain of dragonglass underneath Dragonstone. Thank goodness. We wouldn’t want finding this information to be genuinely challenging or suspenseful or anything.

In the Riverlands

In the best-written segment of the episode (and it’s genuinely excellent), Sandor Clegane and the Brotherhood Without Banners are traveling north through the Riverlands when they stop at the night at the home of the man and child Clegane robbed a couple seasons ago. Sandor tries to urge them on, to go past the house, which is obviously now abandoned—no livestock, no smoke from the chimney—but it’s getting dark and the other men want shelter. While I don’t think we’ll be seeing a true redemption arc for Sandor Clegane, we are seeing him having real, compelling and sustainable character growth. His attempts to externalize his guilt and shame by insulting and arguing with Beric and Thoros are unsuccessful, and instead Clegane ends up having a bona fide religious experience when he finally agrees to look into the flames in the hearth and sees a vision of the army of the dead heading towards Eastwatch. This makes me doubly certain that we won’t be seeing any Cleganebowl this season, and it certainly raises the odds of this group dying tragically in the upcoming war against ice zombies.

Sandor burying the man and child whose deaths he’s somewhat responsible for was nicely done. While I’m still by no means a great fan of the Hound, I like that he did this small act of kindness. It also feels notable that the moment wasn’t ruined by the writers’ cynical streak. Sandor’s eulogy for the man and girl—“I’m sorry you’re dead; you deserved better”—is simple and heartfelt, and Thoros’s helping Sandor finish isn’t played for laughs or marred by any argument between the two men. It’s a sad, quiet moment that’s allowed to just exist in the show as a short bit of earnest and powerful thematic commentary in a show that is otherwise devoid of any sincere meaning.

Daenerys

Daenerys and company have arrived at Dragonstone, where we get a lengthy sequence of Daenerys discovering and exploring her birthplace in silence as her entourage hangs back respectfully. It’s almost too much, to be honest, and the whole thing goes on just shy of too long before Daenerys arrives in the map room, lovingly caresses the length of the table best known as the place where Stannis banged Melisandre that one time, and then turns to her advisors to say, “Shall we begin?” as if they haven’t started their invasion already. I liked this sequence in spite of myself. It’s almost silly in its self-importance, but Dragonstone is stunning and we get to see Daenerys’s dragons wheeling overhead looking as beautiful and impressive as they ever have. As ridiculous a line as “Shall we begin?” is, it’s also full of promise, and I enjoyed this episode enough that I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next. After a somewhat slow start to the season, hopefully the pace will pick up next week.

Miscellany:

  • Why is Arbor Gold a red wine?
  • Why is Alys Karstark a redhead? I’m sure it’s because they’re supposed to be Stark cousins, but Sansa got her hair from her Southron mother; it’s not just a trait that all Stark relations have.
  • Arya is going to try and kill Cersei, exactly as I predicted.
  • Jorah is in a cell at the Citadel, and his greyscale has progressed. He’s still obsessed with Daenerys, though.
  • How is Dragonstone so completely empty, though? Stannis didn’t literally take every man, woman and child with him when he went, right? The big, empty space makes for a neat image, sure, but there’s no way everyone would be gone like this.
  • I am actually slightly alarmed by how many of my predictions for the season are already coming true.
Blog News, Weekend Links

State of the Blog and Weekend Links: July 16, 2017

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I don’t know what I will ever do if I ever have a week that goes unequivocally well for me, with nothing bad happening in the world and no personal or financial crises in my own life. Obviously, of course, this week was not that week.

Things started off well, with a good writing day and a 2k word Gormenghast post on Monday, but by Tuesday my car was acting up again. I dropped it off at the auto shop Wednesday afternoon, and it is still there as of this writing. It’s either something probably moderately expensive to have fixed or it needs a whole new engine; hopefully I’ll get the final word on it tomorrow. Either way, I’m torn between being glad to be on the verge of finally getting to the bottom of months of car trouble and being furious that whatever this problem is wasn’t diagnosed at the beginning of this whole saga before we’d spent thousands of dollars on other car repairs.

As you might imagine, this made for a stressful week. My partner was working from home, which is a distraction. Fortunately, we live within walking distance of most necessities, but having to walk everywhere means simple things like grocery shopping take extra time. Being without a car also derailed later-in-the-week plans. I’d hoped to see a couple of movies this week (The Big Sick, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, maybe Wonder Woman) and I wanted to see a free outdoor performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor this weekend, but none of that was possible.  It’s been just a big, boring, financially stressful mess of a week, and that’s never a good way for me to stay on task and productive.

In the coming week, my number one goal is to find some better ways to not allow depression and anxiety to cause me to shut down quite so completely. Game of Thrones is back tonight, and I’ll be writing about that tomorrow. I’ve already read my next section of Titus Groan (Chapters 32-35), so that should be in the works for late tomorrow or sometime Tuesday. I’ve got outlines for a couple of essays I’d like to work on this week, and I’m thinking of trying a different, shorter sort of round-up style for book reviews for when I don’t have at least 500 or so words to write about things. I’ve been reading a lot lately, and I’d like to share more about what I’m reading and enjoying without the pressure of trying to write a full, lengthy, spoiler-free review.

Just when I needed it this week, Chuck Wendig shared this essay: “So, You’re Having a Bad Writing Day.” It helped.

I finished reading Issue 17 of Uncanny this week, and the first have of the issue’s content is already available online. My recommendations:

I love this Meghan Ball essay at Fireside: “The Importance of Being Monstrous”

Coming soon at Fireside: new serialized fiction by Sarah Gailey.

A series based on Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death is in early stages of production at HBO with George R.R. Martin executive producing:

There’s another new story at the Book Smugglers this week. Their Gods & Monsters series continues with Tonya Liburd’s “A Question of Faith.” You can also read about Liburd’s inspirations and influences.

There’s a new Darcie Little Badger story at Strange Horizons: “Owl VS. the Neighborhood Watch”

JY Yang’s Tensorate series is high on my to-read list for later this summer, and their new story, “Waiting on a Bright Moon,” only helped to whet my appetite.

Be sure to check out Michelle Ann King’s “15 Things You Should Know Before You Say Yes” at Daily Science Fiction.

I read all of Margaret Killjoy’s Tor.com novella, The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion, this week, and I am telling you right now that you want to pre-order this title. If you aren’t convinced, you can read the first chapter (and part of the second) right now.

Andrew Neil Gray and J.S. Herbison wrote about their favorite part of their novella, The Ghost Line.

Sarah Kuhn wrote about the Big Idea in her new novel, Heroine Worship.

Emma Newman has another novel coming out in 2018 that takes place in the same universe as Planetfall. Watch for Before Mars in April of next year.

The first trailer for Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time came out, and it’s wonderful. I wasn’t in love with the stills shared in the last week or two, but everything looks great in the trailer, and I’m glad to see that this production is embracing some of the weirdness of the book:

Christopher Brown wrote about “The Persistance of American Folklore in Fantastic Literature” at Tor.com.

Yoon Ha Lee talked about 6 Books at Nerds of a Feather.

This behind the scenes footage from the production of Star Wars Episode 8 has enough Carrie Fisher in it to break my heart. I am still not okay about her death.

George Romero passed away. And so did Martin Landau.

Finally, it doesn’t completely redeem this garbage week, but the BBC revealed the Thirteenth Doctor today, and it’s Jodie Whitaker.  Reader, I wept.

Game of Thrones, Television

Game of Thrones: Season 7 Predictions

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It’s that time of year again, where I try to guess, in broad strokes at least, what might happen on the new season of Game of Thrones. In the past, I have only had very mixed success at this, and last season was a shitshow that defied all expectations, but I’m back. Again. Still. Always. Because I have a weird, fierce love for this stupid, bad show. Also, two bottles of cheap Moscato for tonight.

This season, I haven’t been following Game of Thrones news the way I have in the past, though I have watched the trailers and looked at some of the promo posters and so on. However, I haven’t bothered with the endless parade of cast interviews and spoiler-free speculation and so on as it’s just gotten boring at this point. HBO likes to keep the show heavily under wraps in order to maximize our “surprise” at the show’s senseless violence and nonsensical storytelling, and that’s fine. It just means I’m pretty much basing my predictions on what I remember from season six, what little footage I’ve seen in the trailers for season seven, and six years’ worth of knowledge of the respect with which David Benioff and D.B. Weiss treat their source material and the audience.

Here’s what I think we might see this season:

Sansa Stark
We left Sansa at the end of season six watching her illegitimate half-brother/cousin Jon Snow accede to the titles and honors that she is both more legally entitled to and better qualified for, but there were some ominously foreshadowing shots of her seeming discontent with this situation. I fully expect this season to find Sansa segueing into the role of antagonist to Jon. With trailers and promo images indicating that Jon Snow will be heading past the Wall again, I think we’ll see Sansa left in charge of Winterfell in his absence. My concern is that this will end up with her having nothing of particular interest to do for the majority of the season, with her own antagonist dead and the Lannisters in King’s Landing likely to be busy with more immediate existential threats.

Jon Snow
It’s already been mentioned somewhere or other that Jon Snow will be heading to Dragonstone to meet Daenerys, and there are images of Jon beyond the Wall as well, so I predict that Jon is going to be doing some teleporting. There’s no way that, with just seven episodes in the season, the show is going to even try to convey the months-long journeys all this stuff will necessitate, and they’ve shown in the past that they care very little about maintaining anything like a coherent timeline.

Bran Stark
In trailers, it looks like Bran and Meera make it to the Wall and the Night’s Watch. I suspect that Bran’s new magic powers are going to be of use in defeating the zombie hordes of the North, but I don’t think we’ll see that actually accomplished this year. Instead, I think we’ll see a late-season reunion between Bran and Jon as Jon heads North to fight the zombies and finds his brother already there.

Arya Stark
Arya was last seen at the Twins, checking Walder Frey’s name off her infamous list, and I think this season will see her trying to make some more progress on those goals. It’s likely that she doesn’t know yet that any of her other siblings are alive in the North, so it seems logical that she would head south to King’s Landing. With the recent news that Gendry is back this season, and knowing how small the show likes to keep its world, I could see her reuniting with him somehow when she gets there.

Littlefinger
He could stay at Winterfell with Sansa as either a new antagonist for her or as Sansa’s co-conspirator against Jon Snow, either of which would be consistent with where the show left things last season. Alternatively, he could return to King’s Landing to hedge his bets with Cersei. He could even teleport to Dorne and/or Dragonstone, you know, as one does, and get up to some plotting there as well.

Brienne and Podrick
Something tells me that Brienne is going to head south again this season, perhaps for a reunion of some kind with Jaime Lannister. They’re also on my shortlist of characters I don’t expect to live out the season.

Davos Seaworth
Davos is still going to be on Team Jon, but he’s going to die beyond the Wall.

Melisandre
Banished from the North, Melisandre will either teleport to Dragonstone immediately or be completely absent until a late episode, when she’ll show up just in time to provide a magical solution to a problem.

The Hound
Promo material places the Hound in the North with Beric Dondarrion and the Brotherhood Without Banners. We won’t be getting Cleganebowl this year, if ever. Most of the Brotherhood will die, and this might include the Hound.

Cersei Lannister
True to her straw feminist form, Cersei will be day drinking and making terrible decisions. With almost every other character in King’s Landing dead, she’ll finally think about what’s going on in the rest of the kingdom, and it’s going to shock her. She is going to lose her shit when she finds out about Daenerys, but she’ll be even more concerned when she learns that Tyrion is still alive.

Jaime Lannister
Jaime is going to feel conflicted about Cersei, but not so conflicted he won’t still bang her. I predict/hope that this is the season we get to see Nikolaj Coster-Waldau go full frontal nude.

Bronn
Bronn will “hilariously” say some gross shit about women. I could see him getting to kill a Sand Snake or two this year.

The Greyjoys
Last time we saw them, Yara and Theon had joined up with Daenerys, but I don’t think this is going to turn out well for them. I think we’ll find out early in the season that Euron Greyjoy is throwing his support behind Cersei, and I think by midseason he’ll have caught up with his errant niece and nephew for a final showdown. If I was a betting woman, I’d put money on them all killing each other in a strategically silly naval battle of some kind because it would look cool. Yara’s queerness is going to be played for laughs at least once.

Sam and Gilly and Baby Sam
Gilly will still be waiting in that vestibule where Sam left her. Baby Sam is going to be like five years old. Sam is going to hang around the Citadel for the whole season, presumably learning something that we won’t actually find out about until season eight.

Olenna, Ellaria and the Sand Snakes
They’re going to join Daenerys, obviously. I don’t think we’ll see much, if anything, of Dorne this season, however. Instead, the Dorne crew will meet Daenerys at Dragonstone, and I think they’ll be significant in whatever battles with the Lannisters we get to see this season. However, I also think they’re likely to die in those battles as the show is surely looking to further cull its cast and storylines by the end of the season in preparation for the final few episodes next year.

Varys
Varys had teleported from Dorne straight onto Daenerys’s ship at the end of season six, so he should be with her when she makes it to Dragonstone. There’s no obvious role for him in any storyline at this point, so I think he’ll be more of a background advisor for Dany for most of the season. He could potentially come into conflict with Tyrion if they disagree over how Daenerys’s invasion of the Seven Kingdoms should be carried out, which would inject some drama into the situation, but I think it’s more likely that he’ll be around just enough for the show to include a joke or two about him being a eunuch.

Missandei and Grey Worm
There’s about a second of footage in one of the trailers for the season that looks like Missandei and Grey Worm getting ready to do it. So I guess that’s happening. I hope they run away together and live happily ever after, but I think it’s more likely that one or both of them will die tragically in service to someone else’s (either Daenerys’ or Tyrion’s) storyline.

Jorah Mormont
Jorah will die this season, almost certainly in battle, fighting for Daenerys.

Tyrion Lannister
Tyrion will mansplain everything to everyone. And he’s still going to be a fan favorite and critical darling, completely unearned.

Daenerys
We know for sure that Daenerys will make it to Dragonstone, and that will probably take up most of the first episode. I think the majority of whatever fighting she’s going to do in season seven will be in the last couple episodes and that most of her time will be spent holding court at Dragonstone and looking pensively off the battlements. I don’t think she’ll get a romance plot this year, but there’s going to be a bananas amount of new Daenerys/Jon fanfic after they meet.

Tits
We will see some.

Dragons
We won’t see as many as we’d like, but they’re going to be gorgeous.

Books, Gormenghast

Let’s Read! Gormenghast: Titus Groan, Chapters 27-31

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In a book full of strangeness, perhaps the weirdest part of today’s reading is how disparate its chapters are. Previous sections have had unifying themes or dealt with the same characters throughout or with a short period of time, but these chapters each stand apart from the others. They also each advance the story in the most linear fashion that has occurred so far in Titus Groan. There’s still a lot of worldbuilding exposition, but in this section that is accompanied by copious character work and not just one but several actual events. It’s the most normative section of the book so far, in terms of construction, but it’s a weird turn that I’m curious to see is sustained. After waiting all this time for a proper plot to develop and finally giving up on that ever happening, I’m obviously leery of getting my hopes up.

The section begins with a chapter that feels somewhat out of place and is something of a speedbump. Chapter 27, “While the Old Nurse Dozes,” is primarily devoted to Keda’s story, and we learn something about her life before coming to Gormenghast. A forced marriage according to the customs of the people of the Mud Dwellings, a dead husband and child, and two men in love with her at the same time are the stuff of high drama, but the tale is told quietly and calmly by Keda herself to Nannie Slagg, who falls asleep during the story. It’s an interesting background for Keda and some fascinating exposition on the lives of those who live in the Mud Dwellings and the culture built around the veneration of the Bright Carvers, though it’s also a very generously favorable portrayal of forced marriage and rape. Keda seems more affected by the anxiety of being involved in a love triangle than by being treated like chattel and married off to a much older man.

To be honest, there’s very little about Keda’s characterization in this chapter that feels true. Though Keda makes a somewhat impassioned speech to Nannie Slagg—“I feared my future, and my past was sorrow, and in my present you had need of me and I had need of refuge so I came”—even that is delivered “quietly,” a word used both at the beginning and end of the paragraph that contains this speech. In fact, words like “still” and “quiet” are used many times in Chapter 27 to describe Keda, and she even describes herself in such terms, which is at odds with her more general passion and the impulsiveness of her decision to come to the castle as Titus’s nurse. It’s possible that in the seventy years since its original publication, the book has become dated; perhaps women like Keda were more numerous in the 1940s. However, I’m more inclined to think that an eccentric and often isolated male author just didn’t have enough interactions with real women to convincingly write an adult woman’s pathos.

Keda’s stoicism rings false, and her final, definitive (albeit whispered) statement, “I must have love,” feels hollow in a book that consistently depicts love as anything but desirable. Love in Gormenghast, to the degree that it exists at all, can be fierce and obsessive and often violent, but the only particularly positive example of love that we’ve seen so far is Keda’s own tenderness for the infant Titus. Nannie Slagg’s love for Fuchsia and Titus may be seen as positive, but it’s also self-serving; she loves their nobility and the position that grants her (such as it is) in Gormenghast, which she uses her inflated sense of self-importance to lord over Keda and to imagine herself as superior to the other servants, with whom she rarely interacts. Fuchsia has been shown to love things fiercely, but inconstantly; she’s young and strange and self-absorbed enough that she doesn’t know what love even is, as evidenced by her own fantasies in the previous chapters. This is certainly explicable in light of Fuchsia’s parents’ cold marriage, which is no kind of example for a young girl, but there’s an altogether cynical and unromantic tone that suffuses the whole book and all Mervyn Peake’s depictions of its characters. Keda isn’t treated with quite the same satirical eye as the rest of Peake’s cast, but the earnestness of her portrayal only serves to highlight the ways in which Peake doesn’t really understand her.

Chapter 28, “Flay Brings a Message,” begins with the advent of autumn in Gormenghast. Autumn—or just the change of seasons more generally—is often symbolically significant, and that is the case here as well. Fuchsia is, at least ostensibly, on the verge of running away. Keda has gone. Nannie Slagg is worried. Flay is anxious. Sepulchrave, at long last, wants to see his son. The real star of this chapter, though, is Gormenghast itself and Peake’s superbly beautiful prose as he describes it:

“Autumn returned to Gormenghast like a dark spirit reentering its stronghold. Its breath could be felt in forgotten corridors—Gormenghast had itself become autumn. Even the denizens of this fastness were its shadows.”

And:

“The crumbling castle, looming among the mists, exhaled the season, and every cold stone breathed it out. The tortured trees by the dark lake burned and dripped, and their leaves snatched by the wind were whirled in wild circles through the towers. The clouds moldered as they lay coiled, or shifted themselves uneasily upon the stone sky-field, sending up wreaths that drifted through the turrets and swarmed up the hidden walls.”

And:

“From high in the Tower of Flints the owls inviolate in their stone galleries cried inhumanly, or falling into the windy darkness set sail on muffled courses for their hunting grounds.”

I am a total sucker for alliteration, and I’m further enamored of anthropomorphic metaphors, so I adore these descriptive passages. But in addition to being lovely in isolation, these passages also reiterate some of the earliest motifs I identified when I first embarked on my reading and further develop some more recently introduced ideas about Gormenghast the place. The emptiness and the sense of haunting and unholiness are palpable, and early motifs are evident in Peake’s word choices. The profane is succinctly contained in terms like “dark spirit” and images like those of the “tortured trees” that “[burn] and [drip]” and in the inhuman voices of Gormenghast’s owls. The whole place comes alive with words like “become” and “exhaled” and “breathed,” while the pathological weirdness of the castle is shown in word choices like “moldered” and “swarmed” that suggest illness and infestation.

In Chapter 29, “The Library,” we get even more description of Gormenghast—further expanding upon the off-kilter feel of the place and with sumptuous paragraphs about the castle’s Gothic architecture. The main focus of the chapter, however, is Sepulchrave. In a slightly surprisingly modern turn, it’s made clear that Sepulchrave’s malaise is in fact a “native depression” with a history that stretches back to his youth. We learn something about Sepulchrave’s unhappy (albeit fruitful) marriage to Gertrude, which certainly doesn’t improve the earl’s state of mind, but ultimately Peake writes that “…compared with the dull forest of his inherent melancholy it was but a tree from a foreign region that had been transplanted and absorbed.” In today’s terms, of course, it seems obvious that what Peake is describing about Sepulchrave is a clinical depression, with no cause and no easy cure, but what feels most surprising about the portrayal of Sepulchrave’s depression is how sensitively-crafted it is. Sepulchrave’s depression is certainly extreme, and it’s his defining trait, but it’s treated seriously and humanely, without the satirical gaze Peake turns on so many of the book’s other characters. That said, Sepulchrave’s depression is still pathologized in the text: “His dejection infected the air about him and diffused its illness upon every side.” Throughout the book there has been a sense of sickness about Gormenghast, and it would be easy to interpret Sepulchrave—Lord of Gormenghast and the theoretical head of the Groan family and their household—as the source of that sickness based upon passages like this if there weren’t so many other competing potential sources of rot in the place. The next couple chapters explore several of these possibilities.

At the end of Chapter 29, Flay takes a short detour on his journey to request Titus’s presence in the library, and he’s appalled to observe Swelter doing, well, something. Chapter 30, “In a Lime-Green Light,” elaborates a bit upon what Mr. Flay finds so horrifying about the cook. There’s something almost Lovecraftian about the nameless, inarticulable fear and antipathy Flay has for Swelter, the scenes of Flay spying on Swelter as Swelter seemingly plots Flay’s murder see Gormenghast at its worst and most hellish. The green light of Swelter’s underground room and the descriptions of his honing the cleaver and practicing stealth are positively demonic in tone, and Flays utter terror by the end of the chapter feels entirely earned.

Finally, Chapter 30, “Reintroducing the Twins,” returns to Steerpike and the Prunesquallors, who have sat down to a dinner of—perhaps significantly, given the ongoing bird motifs in the novel—chicken. Steerpike’s social climbing has been as successful so far as he could have hoped, and he seems to have made himself quite indispensable to the Prunesquallor siblings, especially Irma, whose vanity has only increased in light of Steerpike’s solicitousness of her. After this dinner, the Prunesquallors are visited by Cora and Clarice Groan, who take an immediate interest in Steerpike, who, for his part, jumps at the opportunity to advance himself still more. He listens to the twins’ grievances (mainly that “[Gertrude] steals our birds”), strokes their egos, and escorts them home with the suggestion that he may be able to serve them and return them to their former glory. The chapter ends with a monologue-ish account of Steerpike’s scheming and a hopeful and powerfully symbolic image of the sky clearing: “…the sky had emptied itself of cloud and was glittering fiercely with a hundred thousand stars.”

Miscellany:

  • Fuchsia’s eccentricity has taken an interestingly almost-scientific turn. I love the idea of her as a collector and cataloguer of the natural world, though I also think this may be verging on an almost Hardy-esque ideal of the girl as a sort of pure nature or earth spirit, untouched by the corruption of the world around her, especially in the way Fuchsia’s innocence and wildness is set in opposition to the strictures of life within the castle. She seems ripe for corruption or tragedy, and I don’t know if I can bear it if anything terrible happens to her. Still, she remains a fascinatingly trope-defying character. There could be something manic pixie-ish about her in other circumstances, but Fuchsia’s narrative so far is in service to nothing and no one but herself.
  • I’m going to riot if I don’t get to read at least one chapter about Gertrude that’s as informative about her as Chapter 29 is about Sepulchrave.
  • So far, though at least some of Peake’s influences are obvious (Shakespeare, Gothic romances, Dickens, Carroll, Poe), he’s steered clear of any direct literary allusions, but he alludes to Washington Irving in Chapter 29 when he writes of the east wing past the Tower of Flints as “an Ichabod of masonry that filed silently along an avenue of dreary pine whose needles hid the sky.” I was so surprised I had to Google it just to make certain it wasn’t a more obscure Biblical allusion instead. The Irving allusion makes me wonder how much American literature Peake was familiar with. There are definite shades of Poe, but perhaps Peake also read Hawthorne. And Peake’s fixation on the pathology of place and the quiet horror of ancient spaces suggests he might even have read some Lovecraft, but the book is so far free of any of Lovecraft’s virulent prejudices. Indeed, Peake’s interest seems to be particularly in the foibles and failings of the antiquated system of English nobility, a peculiarly English sort of introspection that doesn’t have much in common with the oeuvres of popular early American writers.
  • I guess Steerpike is going to wear black after all.
Blog News, Weekend Links

State of the Blog and Weekend Links: July 9, 2017

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This week, the holiday took a lot more out of me than I expected it to, so I didn’t get as much writing done as I’d hoped to. However, I did read a great novel (An Oath of Dogs by Wendy N. Wagner), and after a few days of relative restfulness I’m feeling recharged and ready to make some real progress on some things in the coming week.

I finally got another Gormenghast post out the other night, covering Titus Groan Chapters 22-26, which was less than I’d hoped to get to this week. I’ve already finished reading for the next post in the series, though, which should be out tomorrow, and I’ve begun reading past that with the goal of getting back on track with two or three Gormenghast posts a week. I’ve got two more Gormenghast novels and a biography of Mervyn Peake to get through before I can move on to what is likely to be my next Let’s Read project: Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun. Realistically, I expect Gormenghast to take most of the rest of 2017 to finish, but I’m already slightly excited about what’s next.

ICYMI, I’m giving away a copy of The Guns Above by Robyn Bennis.

Next up on my reading list is Issue 17 of Uncanny Magazine. The first half of the issue content is free online already, but it’s never a bad time to just subscribe to the publication.

After that, I’ll be reading the new issue of FIYAH, built around the theme of “Sundown Towns.” Look at that gorgeous cover by the wonderful Geneva Benton, listen to the awesome Issue Three playlist, and don’t forget to buy the issue (and maybe a poster or mug or beach towel).

There’s change afoot at Fireside Magazine, where Brian J. White is stepping down. It’s still going to be awesome though, and for just $2/month, you can get a convenient monthly ebook of Fireside content.

The 2017 Chesley Award winners were announced.

Tor.com’s fall lineup is going to be amazing.

Also at Tor.com, all the book releases you should be looking for in July:

The B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy blog has their own list of the best new releases coming out this month.

Also, also at Tor.com, a nostalgia rewatch of The Craft.

Junot Diaz interviewed Margaret Atwood about The Handmaid’s Tale.

Ava DuVernay is bringing the story of the Central Park Five to Netflix.

I laughed far too hard at “Indiana Jones and the Lobby of Hobby,” but we all, frankly, need every laugh we can get these days.

Wendy N. Wagner wrote about her Favorite Bit of An Oath of Dogs.

And Sarah Kuhn talked about her Favorite Bit of her second book, Heroine Worship.

At the Book Smugglers, Kuhn wrote some more about writing a sequel (with a giveaway).

The Book Smugglers also revealed the cover for the next installment in their Gods & Monsters line of short fiction: “A Question of Faith” by Tonya Liburd.

Sarah Gailey wrote about bread and circuses for B&N.

Fantasy Faction interviewed Auntie Fox (aka Adele Wearing) from Fox Spirit Books.

Of all the weird places to find compelling sci-fi, check out “17776” by Jon Bois at SBNation.

Books, Gormenghast, Let's Read

Let’s Read Gormenghast! Titus Groan, Chapters 22-26

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These chapters begin with yet another flashback in the story, this time to focus on Fuchsia Groan’s reaction to her brother’s birth before setting her on a trajectory that has her meet Steerpike, who talks her into introducing him to Doctor Prunesquallor, who eventually takes Steerpike into his service. To the degree that Titus Groan has any plot at all, this constitutes a significant development, and these chapters seem to mark the end of the introductory saga of Titus Groan’s birth and christening, the immediate reactions to those events, and Steerpike’s rebirth as something other than a kitchen boy. The overall impression of the first two hundred pages of Titus Groan is of a season of change within Gormenghast, but within these few chapters, the story is focused on the contrasts between Fuchsia, the scion of a strange and ancient nobility, and Steerpike, the ambitious interloper who might as well have sprung fully formed from the bowels of Gormenghast itself for all we know of his history.

Chapter 22, “The Body by the Window,” finds Fuchsia absolutely distraught over her brother’s birth, and this offers us some insight into her psychology. Fuchsia is passionate in her hatred, which extends to everything: “I hate things! I hate all things! I hate and hate every single tiniest thing. I hate the world!” In her next breath, Fuchsia expresses a desire to live alone: “Always alone. In a house or in a tree.” And she fantasizes about a man who will come and rescue her from her exile. She sees herself as separate and different from the rest of those around her, and she hopes for “someone from another kind of world—a new world” who will fall in love with her because she lives alone, because of her differentness and, she says, because of her pride. Further requirements for this imaginary lover include great height—“taller than Mr. Flay”—strength and yellow hair “like a lion” and big feet—to make Fuchsia’s own big feet seem smaller. Fuchsia’s fantasy man is also clever, and he must wear dark clothes to enhance the brightness of her own.

On the one hand, Fuchsia’s outburst and her fantasies may be typical of a spoiled and sheltered fifteen-year-old. On the other hand, they are the beginning of a great deal of work in these chapters to show us who Fuchsia is and explain her place in Gormenghast and its narrative. Fuchsia’s place in the story of Gormenghast—both in her understanding and the reader’s—is deeply tied to her sense of self, which is in turn deeply tied to her connection to the place of Gormenghast. For all that Fuchsia verbally expresses feelings of alienation and a desire to be left alone, she doesn’t fantasize about leaving Gormenghast. Indeed, just a page after she dreams of a lover who will come fall in love with her where she lives alone, she writes herself onto the very walls of the castle: “I am Fuchsia. I must always be.” We’ve already had an inkling of Fuchsia’s feelings about her hidden attic rooms, and in Chapter 23, “Ullage of Sunflower,” there is even more evidence of the way that Fuchsia’s identity and sense of self are intimately connected with the places she considers her own. Her feelings of violation when she finds Steerpike in her rooms are palpable and vividly conveyed; Fuchsia has a visceral reaction to Steerpike and his transgression on her space, which is only a couple uses of the word “penetrate” away from being an obvious rape metaphor.

Instead, the interactions between Fuchsia and Steerpike in Chapters 23 and 24 (“Soap for Greasepaint”) could perhaps generously be interpreted as a seduction of sorts, as the cold, calculating Steerpike tries to charm Fuchsia into helping him rise above his present station. At the same time, there’s something decidedly unsexual—certainly unsexy—about all of this. While Fuchsia is a girl who has entertained romantic ideals, there’s no evidence that Steerpike ever has, and it’s quickly revealed that Steerpike’s grasp on the workings of Fuchsia’s mind is shaky at best. They are set up as opposites—Fuchsia’s imagination and passion versus Steerpike’s base cunning—but not in the way of opposites that attract. Fuchsia in fact finds Steerpike repellant; though she’s charmed by his clowning, she never trusts him and has an almost instinctual suspicion of the boy, who she pegged immediately as cleverer than herself. Steerpike’s instincts serve him well enough, however, as he does manage to achieve his objective of an introduction to someone who might give him different employment. In a different novel, I might suggest that Steerpike’s failure to fully understand Fuchsia—and his subsequent failure to even suspect that he might have failed—might be the seeds of his undoing. In this novel, peculiarly non-linear and plotless as it is, it’s hard to say.

What seems most important about these chapters is the illustration of contrasts between Steerpike and Fuchsia and the way these contrasts serve as an illustration of the class and station dynamics within Gormenghast. In the absence of a strong plot, it’s easier and more rewarding to interpret Titus Groan as a book about Gormenghast the place rather than as a story about Gormenghast’s people. Rather, the characters are all simply ancillaries to the setting, which actually has very few characters when you think about it. The Groans and their servants inhabit vast empty spaces within the walls of Gormenghast, even going years without seeing each other at times. The Mud Dwellings outside the castle are inhabited by unnamed crowds, and Swelter’s kitchen, while a veritable hive of activity, is a hellish place and once again mostly filled with nameless masses.

It’s an emptiness that is both literal—there just aren’t very many people in Gormenghast—and metaphorical—the lives of the family of Groan and their closest retainers are variously empty of employment or meaning, filled with nonsense and absurdity and hollow traditions. It’s this world that alienates Fuchsia, who escapes into a fantasy world in which she imagines being rescued through marriage, perhaps the only ambition a sheltered and neglected girl of her station can imagine or, perhaps, the only ambition the author could imagine for her. It’s also this world that the outsider, Steerpike, wants to infiltrate, but one can’t help but feel that he is going to be sorely disappointed by what he finds. In the end of this section, it’s this empty, lonely world of Gormenghast that leads the Doctor and Irma Prunesquallor to employ Steerpike at all; they’re educated, relatively lively people who are hungry for intelligent and stimulating society of a kind that doesn’t exist within Gormenghast, and they hope that Steerpike will fill that void in their lives.

Miscellany:

  • There are some lovely turns of phrase in these chapters. Personal favorites include Steerpike’s “clever imitation of a smile” and the description of the Doctor’s gift to Fuchsia as “a ruby like a lump of anger.”
  • I would be fine, just fine, if I never had to read another description, ever, of the awakening of an adult man’s sexual interest in a barely-pubescent girl. Just saying.
  • These chapters were almost entirely devoid of most of the descriptive and thematic motifs I’d identified so far, but the bird motif comes back at the end of Chapter 26 when Irma Prunesquallor is describing her plans to dress Steerpike in grey: “the hue of doves.” With Steerpike having been both specifically described as predatory and then shown to have a rapacious ambition, the connotations of this description are clear. Within the broader bird motif, if Steerpike is a predator, then to dress him in “the hue of doves” paints him as the avian equivalent of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Book Reviews, Books, Fantasy

Review + Giveaway: The Guns Above by Robyn Bennis

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The Guns Above is a whip-smart, fast-paced, and surprisingly funny military fantasy. I didn’t think that I was interested in reading stories about a woman having to overcome systematic sexism anymore, and I was double not interested in reading anything like a redemption arc for that woman’s sexist antagonist, but Bennis manages to breathe some new life into both of those stories. I’m very glad that I was interested enough in airships to read this book despite my misgivings, as it turned out to be a wonderfully readable, remarkably fun and ultimately optimistic (but not cloyingly so) take on its subject matter.

After an act of combat heroism, Josette Dupris gets a promotion that makes her the first woman to captain an airship in a military with strict limits on women’s service. This would be a tough enough challenge on its own, but Josette is also saddled with a spy, Bernat, a spoiled nobleman with no military or airship experience to speak of, but whose job is nonetheless to report back to his powerful uncle on any of Josette’s failings, real or imagined. It’s definitely the sort of thing that one needs to be in the mood to read, especially since there aren’t easy answers to Josette’s problems, but it’s also definitely worth reading. This isn’t a book about one woman smashing the patriarchy single-handedly, and in fact Josette is largely unconcerned with doing so; she just wants to do her job like she knows she’s capable of. The Guns Above is about the way in which an ambitious woman can exist and find ways to thrive in a sexist society, and it’s about the incremental changes and personal fights that slowly push the needle of progress forward. It’s also about gritty, action packed airship battles and snarky humor, which makes it a perfect light-ish summer read.

You need this book for the beach or next to the pool or out on the porch or inside an air-conditioned building or wherever else you’re reading this summer.

Luckily, courtesy of the publisher, I have a hardcover copy of The Guns Above that I’m giving away.

CLICK HERE ENTER THE GIVEAWAY – Ends July 16