The Garden of Discordia

So, I just finished Paolo Bacigalupi's Windup Girl which Wiki describes as a biopunk novel. Good description as any

Set in the 23rd century and taking place in the Thai monarchy, it's about Anderson, a "calorie man" who has come to Thailand to find their seedbank (and steal it, basically); Emiko, a manufactured human abandoned by her Japanese owner and now an illegal immigrant forced into sex work; Hock Seng, Anderson's local factory chief and a refugee, and Jaidee and Kanya, the captain of the Enviromental Ministry's ground troops the "White Shirt" and his second-in-command. While the plot starts out in Anderson's corner, it moves more and more to focus on the other characters, with some of them growing quite surprisingly in importance and depth of personality.

Except for Jaidee and, in a way, Emiko they're all a pretty unpleasant, toughened bunch (that's what makes this book biopunk as opposed to just enviromental sf, I guess) but it's still hard not to feel sympathy for them. Because the world in is completely rotten: a constant lack of food - it's a "calorie culture" and if the concept doesn't make you shiver yet, reading this book will change that. Most of the plant and animal life has been extinguished, with calorie companies holding the majority of the world in food-dependant slavery with sterile GMO crops, there are tons of (originally bio-engineered (?)) plagues sweeping through the population, they've got severe travel and democracy deficits as we would see it, and basically the world has gone to hell and humanity still hasn't learned anything.

The plot is full of political intrigue, betrayal, self-discovery, discussions about trade vs. isolationism and more. It chugs along at a nice pace, without ever becoming too messy to follow and the characters are also distinct.

What Windup Girl is really about, though, is the future society and the enviromental issues. And here, I must admit, that I found it failing a leeetle bit. Yes, the calorie corps and the proprietary, sterile GMO seeds is scary as are the biological weapons that have been let loose and now ravage the world. But, in stifling hot Bangkok, under constant threat from the risen sea levels, people sit around burning methan gas and (if they're really rich) coal. There's also the kinetic forces: GMO elephants and pure human labour having made great returns into everyday life, as well as "spring-kinks", super-wound springs which store kinetic energy. But cooking seems to happen mostly on gas and cooling the houses is either by building them self-ventilating or having a hand-cranked fan, if you're a bit more wealthy.

Where is the solar power in all this? Wind? Even if rare metals are almost impossible to find and much knowledge was lost in the first shock of the post-oil world (they call it the "Contraction"), you can make simpler solar powered devices that, while they can't drive high-energy machines work exceptionally well when you want to cool down a building. Windmills are pre-steel and electricity technology, and of course there are things like wave-power and other as-of-yet mostly experimental green sources. I find the lack of these things weird, not just from a science fiction-y POV, but also from the whole stratified social texture of the novel. If solar panels are rare, would using them not be even more fancy than a personal servant? If coal is such a scarse product, how can the government allow the pumps critical to Bangkok's survival to run solely on them? Especially when we know that there have been even more isolationist governments before the novel.
And of course, who wouldn't want some kind of air-conditioning that doesn't include bribing every White Shirt who passes by so they don't shut off your illegal gas...

This part, alas, doesn't really make sense to me, which unfortunately drags the book down. It's still a very good reading experience, but I get less out of the message when I'm distracted by the logical holes. Good ride, not much left after.

Also a word of warning: There is sexual violence in this book. For instance a rape scene that I found highly unpleasant, and I tend to have a strong stomach for disgusting fictional scenes.

Windup Girl reminds me in tone of Zoo City that I read a while ago, though I think I prefered that one. Zoo City, however, has a bit of magic in it, which might not be for everyone.

Phew, tired & happy! I've walked around above Alexanderplats today, looking for the comic shop Grober Unfug which I thought was somewhere by the subway station Weinmeisterstrasse. Turns out they'd moved up a stop (I suspected as much when I began to see the very fancy stores that are all over the area now, not the kind of neighbours comic stores can usually afford. Alas). But! They'd left a sign behind and with some luck and a few helpful locals, I found them again. Larger store, but quite small manga department. There was many more titles in the Thalia bookshop in that big shopping senter at Alex.

I also had to stop at restaurant Transit for a somewhat too expensive, but amazingly tasty lunch. I honestly only gave them a second look because the waitresses were standing and giggling in the open window, they looked a bit too preppy for me. But, happy waitresses? And Asian food, of some kind of izakaya/tapas variety?
Weeell, I took the chance and don't regret it a bit. 3 small dishes, a bubble tea and a bowl of rice came to about 12 euro and it was among the best modern Asian I've had. Ever.
It was also plenty filling - each small dish cost 3 euro and I could honestly have skipped the rice, except as mouth soothener after the spicy beef salad. I warmly recommend it, and you can get every dish vegetarian too.

Today I also got myself a Tip magazine, which contains info about events in Berlin. (On a side-note, I'm always positively surprised by how much actual written content German magazines have. Even Tip carries several editorials and a couple of readable articles)

Anyway, tonight there was apparantly a free Shakespeare play in a nearby park. ( Probably one of the more unusual Shakespeare versions I've seen, but a damn good one )

The play was entertaining, more engaging than I would've thought and the only downside was that it was a bit hard to hear what happened sometime, especially when prince Harry spoke, but otherwise I count is as a most successful experience.

There's another show tomorrow, same time and place, if anyone thinks it sounds like fun. And is in Berlin, ehe ;)

GERMANY! ON THIS DATE! I WILL BE LEAVING!!! WAAAAHHHH!!!!

(although ok I have to sleep some hours so "this date" actually becomes "today" but still)

What have I forgotten? I'm not gonna see people for so long ;_;

Argh, I have to ACTUALLY WRITE UNIVERSITY LEVELS ESSAYS IN FUCKING GERMAN. I'm a fraud, I only studied German for two years! Two years! And that was in another millenia, I don't remember any grammar are you nuts?

But! New city, new life, study literature without Strindberg =D Stuff! Excitement! I can haz packed 2 days ago (mwahahahahaha!!!)! Apfelschorle and hearing German all the time and omigosh



Think I'm gonna manage to go to sleep now? Uh-huh, me too...

The headline says it all, but oh-em-gee, how many forms do I have to fill out and what do they even mean? My adress, my former adress, my previous adress in-country, my adress in 1939* and then I have to hand it in and ~apparantly~ the only have a bookable time at 8.15 the morning after I arrive or after school has already started well thank you so much dear German bureocracy. At least we don't have to take the car for two hours out in the middle of some bloody field somewhere, as we did when I was living in land Brandenburg.

I want to believe it is a bit easier in Sweden, but I have the nagging suspicion that most of our ease is due to the personal numbers. And that foreign students are most likely required to jump through a billion hoops before they receive said personal number.

* obv. not relevant to me but still a little bit baffling to find. (ETA: No disrespect meant, it took me about 0.2 seconds to realize why that part was there but, y'know, first moment of bafflement) Also surprising was the place where I could fill in my "order" name. Good for all nuns, I guess?

All right, I admit it. Sometimes I buy so-so books because they look good and I want to complete my collection.

Case in point: Steelhands, part four of the Volstov/Ke-Han series, by former HP author Jaida Jones and Danielle Bennett. If their debut novel, Havemercy didn't get some award for prettiest fantasy cover of the year, something is clearly wrong. Especially since so many sci-fi and fantasy books are actually competing in Most/Least Fugly Cover of Any Given Year...

Steelhands isn't quite as nice, but it still looked good and the series was entertaining enough for me to buckle up and buy the hardcover. I do actually recommend one to read this series - it is one of the very rare modern fantasy books with several queer main characters (no lesbians as of yet, but I really liked the female lead in this one) that still feel like "mainstream" fantasy. Now, what do I mean there? These are rather simple, fluffy books. Compared to the Temeraire series by Novik, the plots are somewhat simpler, the dragons are both much more mechanical and have much smaller part in the plot (it's often -about- dragons, but it's not -with- dragons driving the story in the same way). However, compared to Novik's somewhat alarming lack of queer characters even in the border-enviroment of the Dragon Corps, where women can wear male dress and take on male roles (and the heavens have not yet fallen, omigosh!!) and to her increasingly flat characters, the much shorter portrayals of the Volstov/Ke-Han characters come off pretty good. Since Jones and Bennett's books alternate between diffferent first-person POV's and switch main characters pretty much every book, they don't have time to build up the kind of character growth arch that Lawrence and the others in Temeraire's universe can go through. Only, unfortunately, one of the few characters to actually grow and change after all he's gone through is Temeraire himself. Even Lawrence tends to stagnate at time

Oops, but now we're going OT. I found Steelhands entertaining with several quite funny scenes. The vaguely Rome-inspired setting makes it a bit less beset by the horrid tropes of "one-true-king" and "yay-feudalismdoesn't work that way btw", although there is still some slightly skeevy classification of people/nationalitites going on. Not as bad as the (overall quite dreadful) second book in the series which, Shadow Magic. Just skip that, unless you find yourself becoming extreme fans, because it's bad on pretty much all counts.

I mean, the books aren't all that great. Except for smart quips and a cast of constantly bantering characters, the world-building is pretty weak, the plots aren't super original or engaging, nor do the (nicely designed) dragons do as much in the story as they could. But for fluff fantasy, this is a very welcome change to the usual hack'n'slash male-dominated stuff I tend to find.

So. Looking for a light, funny fantasy? Give it a try, not perfect, but I'll give them plenty of cookie points for the mere fact that they are two female authors with a fandom background who still do positive shout-outs to their LJ community.

If nothing else, any modern fantasy books which manages to have a "spunky young girl" as a main character and does not: constantly undercut her decisions, have her wax poethic about her own fabulous looks and run around motivated solely by her love interest, deserves a mention. Heck, Laura and her poor OCD-plagued fiancé Toverre were probably my favorite characters. Oh, all right, together with Luvander because he's just the kind of jerk I like to read about

Call me perverse, but there is something immensely satisfying about having a huge messy heap of paper at the beginning of the day...

...and leaving behind filled binders, stamped papers and a tiny little sorted heap that my collegue will take care of tomorrow.

oursin posted the results from that silly "Vote the 100 Best SFF Works!" that some site had as a have read-meme. The results are really weird, quite skewed towards Gaiman and even contains unfinished (and currently in-progress) works, but what the heck - it's a book meme!

Filling that in sounded like excellent late night excersize to me, so here it comes!

( Books I have read, failed to finish & am planning to read )

Some of the old SF I read because my mother owned them, some because the selection of what was to be translated to Swedish & later bought in by my library was eclectic at best, pure insanity at other times... As for more current books, there are those I like (Pratchett, Gaiman, Miéville; plebian like I am) and those I read for work, more or less. Working in the geeky bookstore gives excellent access to a lot of smushed, cut, crushed or otherwise unsaleable books and with my reading speed, it is hardly a chore to skim the best-sellers and see what they're about, which I like and which I will only recommend to people who like what I hate. (Customer: I think Terry Goodkind is the best author evah! Me: Ah, right. Raymond Feist, Terry Brooks and Robert Jordan might interest you...?)

Of course, this whole "reading for leisure" thing kind of fell to the wayside this year, what with lit classes, trying to read in German and generall stress, but as soon as I'm done with that I will... actually, I'll probably be in Germany, reading lit class books in German so, eheheheh ^^;;;;

Late 2012, however, you bet you're ass I'll be reading like a [bleep]!!!

Ramble-rant ahead. Politics, frustration, media reflections...

Why let facts ruin the story? Norwegian comments on US coverage of the Norway terror

Fox News didn’t let that stop them: “Islamic terrorism is a problem in Scandinavian countries”, we were told, after we knew who the actual perpetrator was, "where they're just sort of turning a blind eye to it." And indeed it seemed we were. The proof? After a UN speech where former president George W. Bush had kept to his favourite subject "the War On Terror", the Norwegian PM was the next speaker and had focused on the threat of (gasp!) Climate Change. Such naïveté.

Except Norway has never been the victim of Islamic terrorism. There have been some examples of political violence in the last decades: hate killings and bombings of a labour day parade, a mosque, immigrant corner shops and a left wing book store. Behind all these were right-wing extremists; loathed, few in number, but willing to use indiscriminate violence.

A Norwegian citizen who was staying in a small US town during the Utøya shooting writes about the news reporting. Now, from what I recall of Swedish news, it began with reporting the terrorist attack against Oslo, with several people voicing suspicions that it was an attack originating with a group with similar sympathies to Al-Quaeda. Iirc, most news sourches I checked were rather clear on the fact that this was only speculation. As the events from Utøya began to be reported, the story turned more to clear WTF-is-happening reporting and the next day when we woke up enough to check the news, the (white) murderer was pictured in the newspapers.

I do however have a very clear memory of checking both BBC and CNN early on, in case they had picked up something that DN or Svt hadn't had time to update yet, and reading at CNN about a "extremist Muslim terror group" that had taken responsibility.

( Media musings, private vs. state )

Of course, our (not at all very free and damnded well not politically varied) newspapers all immediately began to dig through the bastards childhood etc as soon as this blue-eyed, blond-haired man was confirmed the cause of the worst political crime in Norwegian history. And, if we stay in modern times at least, the worst in the history of Scandinavia.

Anyway. I don't give much of a fuck if his father was absent (so what? mine too. and, hey, my brother's as well, seeing as how we share one. Yet we do not commit massive terrorism. A-fucking-mazing) but I do wonder at the fact that so much focus was made on psychologizing and medicalizing him - when I can't even recall reading about the men who where on the 9/11 planes in more than cursory detail. Now, this is probably much different if one is actually in the US, but lemme tell you, my local newspapers wrote LOADS about that terror attack too. Only then it was more about Usama bin Laden (whose psychosocial family background I also don't know much about, except that he's from Saudia Arabia and rich. Did he have a good father? Fuck if I know) and about the Muslim organized terror.

Considering that Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and the European Union all have brown parties in their parliaments (and what is happening in Denmark IDK but it's pretty much all horrible to read about); considering that the fucking xenophobic bastards in SD are spouting the exact same shit that got the "New Democrats" booed out of politics in the nineties, only now the bloody liberals are falling over themselves to agree with their more polished ideas before they've been voiced; considering that we have a rising wave of hateful xenophobic, misogynist, homophobic and white's first parties in all of Europe - I WANT THE NEWS TO TALK ABOUT THIS! I do not care about that man's sad family history, that's what we have court specialists for. I do not care about how comforting the idea of "the lone monstruous killer" is - I would very, VERY much like it if people could open a history and statistics book and realize that the extreme right is currently the most violent organization we have in northern Europe, that they are gaining power and that they are really fucking nasty, fucking scary and by giving in to their ideas step-by-step we are only giving them the ownership of the societal debate and that this is dangerous.

Ugh. So tired of everything sometimes.

In conclusion: There does not need to be a grand conspiracy behind things, for extreme voices advocating violence to influence dangerous people. Sarah Palin did not shoot anyone, but her "target" rethorics did not fly into a vacuum. The ideas of a "white Europe" or the (false) "pre-Muslim invasion" Nordic homogenity and subsequent harmonic history are directly related to the bombing and shooting that directly attack the Norwegian democracy and political youth.

And that the media is still spinning the same old story, helping us repeat the same old mistakes, it's horrifying.

Packed up the last books going to grandma's today; or so I thought, because then I found the little shelf of cookbooks. Drat.

I have also managed to finish Katherine Kerr's Deverry Cycle!! That only took, what, 10-15 years? In my defence, most books were not published when I began, never mind translated into Swedish.

Fittingly enough for a book that jumps back and forth through time and reincarnations, I also did not read it entirely in the correct order. I got the two final books out of the "torn, smushed or otherwise wonky" heap at work (and thought that I had actually read all upp to The Shadow Isle. Which I obviously had not) and first thought I'd stick with that, until the "torn etc" heap turned up the remaining two. Only then I read about how Salamander had a prominent role in The Spirit Stone and since Salamander has been my favorite Deverry character since I was around 15, wellp, the decision was pretty much made for me.

Do I like it? Of course I like it! Most other series I started at around that time and couldn't finish in ~5 years are long abadoned. Jordan's Wheel of Time has been relocated to my mental "check the spoilers at Wikipedia" list years ago and unless I end up with a lot of time and the fantasy world goes up into a collective fangasm at the conclusion of A Song of Ice and Fire I fear that it too will end up there.

Despite Ms Kerr's confusing reincarnations, lack of proper who-is-who tables and endless tossings of heads, however, I have always known that I wanted to keep reading these to the end. It helps that I do not despise all the female characters that appear *cough*Jordan*cough* nor is the plot so twisty and the prose so thick that I have to re-read every book every time a new one deigns to appear *cough*Martin*cough*

The Deverry series has it's fault - an overabundance of reincarnations and names mostly, but I still prefer the characterization, the world and the general plotlines.

I år valde jag att skippa NärCon för Pride i Stockholm. Jag har i flera år velat gå på Pride, men aldrig haft möjlighet än möjligen glutta på en enstaka sak p.g.a. 1) jobb 2) NärCon 3) ingen att gå med.

I år flyttar konventet till en ny stad, jag har varit för stressad och jag har avsagt mig en massa ansvar i föreningen - det känns helt enkelt inte som om jag har så mycket att göra på Närcon! Dessutom har jag fått eminent Pride-besökarsällskap i form av marshtide och valborg! Först velade jag lite, eftersom det är många jag vill säga hej då till på NärCon, inför mitt Tysklandsår. Men de flesta av de personerna dyker ändå upp på Gackt-konserten och, jag vet inte, jag orkade helt enkelt inte.

Nu, när jag fått höra att Närconstaben muppar runt och bara vill ge ut sex fribiljetter (fast det var de som bad om två karaokerum) och ingen reseersättning (om vilket de sagt "jomen, ordnar sig nog" sen i mars), känner jag bara att jag har tröttnat på fasonerna hos en hel del konventsarrar.

Att läsa artiklar om Pride däremot, gör mig riktigt glad <3

Det är bra när man känner att man valde rätt ^_^