ladybusiness | Short Story Long: Hugo reading, and cannibals (28/06/19)

1. Nine Last Days on Planet Earth by Daryl Gregory [Top]
I think I liked Nine Last Days on Planet Earth, but I also think I read it three times and only barely have a grasp on what it's about. The story follows L.T. from childhood to old age on an Earth that has been seeded with alien plants, with the differences in LT and the world growing together. I liked a lot of it! The wheels within wheels of each day described – the way things from LT's past are carried through into his future, along with the questions of what the alien seeds are and why they're here. The answer LT finally comes to is interesting, but I only recognised it on my third read through so clearly I should not be trusted on these things. But the descriptions of the alien plants are cool, and I like the way that the world adapts to them instead of the other way around – although I'm kinda "Of course this makes life harder for countries that already have it hard, and OF COURSE there's a weird paternalistic undertone to the way the characters talk about people living in non-US countries, why WOULDN'T there be." (If you have an issue with American couples travelling to other countries to adopt children there, fair warning: that happens here too!) I did like LT's family, especially once he'd gotten to the stage where he could choose who was in it.

So yeah, I'm not a hundred percent sure of how I feel about this, because I definitely came away convinced that I'd missed something but no idea what. But on the other hand, I do really hope that

fangirlpod reads this for the show, because I think anything involving discussion of SPACE BEES has to be on their radar.

[Caution warning: mentions of abuse and homophobia]

2. The Last Banquet of Temporal Confections by Tina Connolly [Top]
The Last Banquet of Temporal Confections has two of my favourite things: baking and time shenanigans. We all knew I was going to be weak for this. It centres on Saffron, who volunteered to be the food taster for a villainous duke who kidnapped her husband and put him to work making pastries that force the eater to relive specific memories.

The thing that I keep circling around in this story is its depiction of resistance – especially the way that Saffron does resistance. Her sister resists in direct ways; her husband resists through food as magic. Saffron's resistance is set-up as caretaking – by providing people with what they need and what will help them – and by the end explicitly becomes about performance and control. Her performance of appreciating the memories she relives, and the way she has to manipulate the court (and especially the duke) through that performance. It's really well done, but raises questions about whether all of these forms of resistance are given the weight they deserve. I think that the characters at least struggle to appreciate the value of caretaking as part of the resistance – even Saffron, who would be fine with direct action if it wasn't her sister doing it, doesn't seem to appreciate how vital caretaking is, and reads to me like she's linking it to passivity and the way she froze when faced with danger.

(I have to say that her feelings are really relatable, and her freezing and getting it wrong felt familiar. It's not a pleasant thing to identify with a character on, but that's what the Darkest Timeline brings us.)

I did like the way that the memories were done – Saffron relives her memories strongly enough that the emotions come through clearly, but with enough distance that she can analyse and contextualise them in a way that I think might have annoyed me if it had been done in regular narration, but due to the way the memories work, it didn't here. It was an interesting way to handle it! And the last pastry was narratively fascinating.

(

forestofglory has smart thoughts about The Last Banquet of Temporal Confections in a thread over here, including critique on the use of food in the story. (Much to my sadness, the food is mainly described in terms of what the characters remember rather than as food) As always I recommend checking out her thoughts! Even moreso than usual because she didn't like The Last Banquet of Temporal Confections! I have the opposite opinion, but I do agree that the idea that the status quo can be restored by taking out one person to be unbelievable. ... I think that as we're in the Darkest Timeline I'm willing to take that as wish-fulfilment.)

[Caution warnings: References to torture]

3. The Thing About Ghost Stories by Naomi Kritzer [Top]
The Thing About Ghost Stories is great – the protagonist is a folklorist returning to the study and collection of ghost stories after the death of her mother, and possibly finds a ghost story of her own.

I really liked this one – I love the way that Leah talks about the ghost stories she's collected and classified, and the way that the story weaves organically between ghost stories, talking about ghost stories, and talking about Leah's mother. It feels like listening to someone tell their own story, which is perfect for a story about stories. I'm not going to lie to you though; the part about wanting a dead parent to be proud of you and what you've achieved got me where I live. Yes, I absolutely cried when I realised that my dad never saw

ladybusiness exist, let alone win a Hugo. Yes, I found the end of the story, and the way the story talks about grieving and love to be bittersweet and cathartic. I keep wanting to go back to it and read it over again for all of the little stories it contains. Definitely recommended.

[Caution warning: dementia, death of a parent]

4. If At First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again by Zen Cho [Top]
If at First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again is the story of Byam, an imugi, who is caught in a comedy of errors as it repeatedly tries to become a dragon only to be foiled at the last second – until it tries to take revenge on the human it blames for one of its failures, and accidentally ends up with a girlfriend instead.

I thought this was really sweet, once the inevitable failures were over with. The narrative voice is so straightforward about things to do with the human world (like hiking and rent and assigned reading) that it becomes funny, and the way that Byam and Leslie support each other is lovely even when Byam is deliberately hiding pieces of itself from Leslie. (Leslie is the epitome of the friend who loves you but will kick your ass when you need it, A+ work.) Byam's failures feel somewhat predictable, although they are funny, but I genuinely loved its relationship with Leslie and her family, and the depiction of how reminders of a dream that you've convinced yourself to give up can still hurt no matter how kindly they're meant. I did really like the change from the macro view to the micro when Byam finally gets to see the world at a smaller scale and taking into account years instead of centuries. I reccomend it!

[Caution warnings: sentient being with "it" pronouns, mention of suicidal thoughts]

5. Miss Violet May From the Twelve Thousand Lakes by Tina Connolly [Top]
Miss Violet May From the Twelve Thousand Lakes is an odd piece of flash fiction about a woman from an area rumoured to be full of ghosts and spirits, and what happens when she marries a cruel man in a small town.

I'll be honest, I didn't like it. I think part of it is that I don't understand the metaphors – she is constantly referred to as having eyes like pats of butter, which baffles me as an image – and part of it is that making the protagonist someone who's outside Miss Violet May's marriage makes sense as a way of keeping the secret of what's happening going, but also it means that it feels like a story that I was expecting to be about her becomes about a nameless narrator and his feelings about what's happening to her, which just leaves me cold. The build-up of the mystery worked fine, and I liked the imagery of her child, but apart from that I'd give it a miss.

[Caution warning: spousal abuse]

6. Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island by Nibedita Sen [Top]
I really like the format – I've mentioned before that I like it when stories use non-traditional forms for their narrative, and the "excerpts" feel like a perfect fit for the story being told. Each one feels like a plausible excerpt (and look at that mix of primary sources and secondary sources!), and they all felt believable! Especially the Bitch magazine one. (Listen, the citations are possibly my favourite part, I can't lie to you about this.) I really love the depth of story and suggestion that's implied here, where each excerpt builds on the ones before to give a fuller picture of what happened, and the way it manages to talk about colonialism and diaspora in such a small space. The story does really cool things, and if you're okay with mentions of cannibalism I definitely recommend picking it up.

[Caution warning: cannibalism]

7. Okay, Glory by Elizabeth Bear [Top]
Elizabeth Bear's Okay Glory is a nightmare scenario for the Internet of Things; the AI-controlled house of a reclusive billionaire is taken over by ransomware, which leads to his house locking him in and hiding him "for his own safety." It was... Fine? The narrative voice was pretty solid, and I was somewhat interested in what was going on with Glory (the AI controlling his house), but somehow in 2019 I couldn't muster any enthusiasm about a billionaire tech guy learning that maybe he wasn't a very nice person through the medium of being forced to keep his own company for too long.

8. Truth Plus by Jamie Wahls [Top]
Truth Plus by Jamie Wahls is a story about the end of the world – no heroics, no take-backs, a comet half the size of the moon is scheduled to crash into the Earth and there's no way to escape. The protagonist isn't anyone who can help solve this crisis; he's a speech writer, a spin doctor, specifically there to try to make things look favourable. (His example of spin involves police shooting protesters, so caution warning for that!) I didn't necessarily like him as a character, but I found his narration about his work to be fascinating. The character I liked was Sara, the scientist who is our window into the end of the world, although I feel like the story was trying to be coy about her queerness and I am exceptionally not here for that.

Despite being about a professional liar, the way that the story talks about finding or creating hope, of lies that are almost preferable to the truth, is really cool and I like the way it still manages to give the story a sense of victory even though we know from the first moments that the end of the world can't be averted. I think I liked Truth Plus, although if it hadn't been for Sara that might have changed.

Reading Goals

Reading goal: 80/200 (8 new this post) Prose: 26/100 (24/26 short stories) Nonfiction: 2/12
#ReadMyOwnDamnBooks: 34/100 (0 read this post)
#unofficialqueerafbookclub: 27/75 (2 new this post; Nine Last Days on Planet Earth and If At First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again)

Lady Business

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Short Story Long: Hugo reading, and cannibals (28/06/19)

Short Story Long: Hugo reading, and cannibals (28/06/19)

Reading Goals

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