Author: Laura Conrad

Two pieces of science fiction criticism

I mentioned a few months
ago how difficult I found it to write well about Science
Fiction, although I enjoy reading it.

I realized this morning that this week I’ve read two really
good pieces of criticism that were science fiction related, so I
thought I’d pass them on to you.

  • Here’s the
    piece     Jo
    Walton     wrote about Mary Renault. You should read it for
    its description of why trying to sell her work as genre Romance
    is a doomed strategy:

    Romance makes assumptions about the value and nature of love that are very different from the assumptions Renault is using. Romances are set in a universe that works with the belief that love is a good thing that conquers all, that deserves to conquer all. Renault is starting from an axiomatic position that love is a struggle, an agon or contest—a contest between the two people as to who is going to lose by loving the other more, which certainly isn’t going to lead to inevitable happiness.

  • Here’s an interview
     with Peter
    Watts     where he explains why there’s so much torture in
    contemporary science fiction:

    Need to deliver a three-page neurophilosophical infodump at the climax of your first-contact novel? You could always have Spock and McCoy trading debating points in the med lab. Or you can have your protagonist assaulted so violently that his very consciousness shatters into profound autism, that he perceives all external input as a deafening disembodied voice from the heavens. (That was Blindsight.) Pretty much any infodump becomes more – immediate – when you sheath it in pain and jeopardy.

News of the week of September 9, 2014

[raw]

Meeting report

We played:

Schedule

We continue to meet as usual on Tuesdays at 7:45 pm at 233
Broadway, Cambridge.

Upcoming concerts

Jody Wormhoudt writes:

I don’t know the extent of Wellesley College’s publicizing,
so I wanted to mention to you (for yourself and for passing on) a
couple of events next month of interest to Renaissance wind players,
both at Houghton Chapel, and both free as far as I know — Google for
more info from the Wellesley website:

Bruce Dickey, cornetto with Liuwe Tamminga playing the Fisk Organ
Tuesday, October 7, 2014 – 7:00pm

Piffaro Saturday, October 25, 2014 – 8:00pm

[/raw]

News of the week of September 2, 2014

Meeting report

We played:

Schedule

We will be meeting as usual tomorrow, September 9, at 7:45 at
233 Broadway, Cambridge. David has agreed to open up and start
the rehearsal; I will be there as soon as I can after the polls
close.

We will continue to meet as usual on Tuesdays.

Playing opportunities

The Boston
Recorder Society is now taking registrations for the 2014-2015
season. They will be continuing their loud wind band, for those
who want a friendly place to play while learning a brass or reed instrument.

The West Gallery
Quire will be meeting as usual on the second Sundays of the
month, starting on September 14.

News of the week of August 26, 2014

Meeting report

We played:

Schedule

We will be meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 7:45pm, at
233 Broadway, Cambridge.

On September 9, there’s an election, so as usual we will meet
then only if someone else opens up or hosts.

Monte, circa 2001 — August 25, 2014

I am sad to report that Monte, my sister’s australian shepherd
mix, passed away on Monday. He was a great lover of music until
he lost his hearing. He especially liked singing duets with
cornettos, but long-time Cantabile members remember the
cello/serpent/Monte trio fondly.

The Prado

We had only three days in Madrid, so we planned to spend a big chunk of one of them at the Prado. Of course, it’s a big museum, so even in a whole day it’s impossible to see everything. For some reason, as I walked into the first gallery, I decided to limit my viewing to only pictures with dogs in them.

Of course, I wasn’t dogmatic about it, but it did seem to be a good thing to do. I walked into a room, looked at the bottoms of all the pictures, and went over and looked carefully at the ones with a dog. Of course, sometimes I ended up looking at one with a sheep instead. There were a lot of Adorations of the Shepherds, and a lot of hunting scenes, but my favorites turned out to be:

  • The Entry of the Animals into Noah’s Ark
    [loading Noah's ark]
    The Entry of the Animals into Noah’s Ark by Jacopo Bassano, ca 1570

    There are two pairs of dogs here. Three of them are looking at the pair of ducks as if they are thinking of them more as dinner than as fellow passengers, but one has gotten tired of waiting in line for the ark and has curled up to take a nap.

  • Easily the most disturbing dog in the museum is, unsurprisingly, Goya’s Half-submerged Dog.
    [goya's drowning dog]
    Half-submerged dog by Goya, 1820-1823

    This was especially upsetting to us because of how much the dog looks like my sister’s current dog, Monte.
    [Monte]
    Monte, June 2009

    I can’t find links, but there were actually several other Goya paintings of dogs — he apparently was a dog-owner, and we have lots of letters to his friends discussing his dogs.

  • I can’t find a link, but there was also a very nice Last Supper with a dog and cat fighting under the table.

Valencia Botanic Gardens

I’ll be writing more posts about this trip to Spain, but I’m putting this one up first, because I got the most pictures here.

This was Tuesday, August 12, my last full day in Spain and the day on my own in Valencia. I had considered going to the cathedral, or taking the bus to the beach and saying hello to the Mediteranean Sea. But I had seen several cathedrals and museums, and decided that a walk to the river and a stroll around the was the right thing to do.

[mother, with carnivores]
My mother, in the last year of her life, at an exhibition of carnivorous plants.

<a
It was unexpectedly sad — my mother, who died last year, would have really loved it. It was the best cactus collection I've ever seen, and she loved cactuses. There was also a very nice greenhouse, which reminded me of the one at Kew Gardens which I spent a lot of time in with her in 1984.

So since I can't show her my pictures, you have to look at them instead. Here they are:

News of the week of August 19, 2014

Meeting Report

We played:

Schedule

We resume our regular weekly meetings on Tuesdays at 7:45pm, at
233 Broadway, Cambridge.

On September 9, there’s an election, so as usual we will meet
then only if someone else opens up or hosts.

Note that if you aren’t
registered to vote where you want to vote, today, Wednesday,
August 20, is the last day to do so. Most towns will have their
offices open late for this.

News of the week of July 29, 2014

Meeting report

We had an all-Dowland
meeting this time:

Schedule

We will not meet either on August 5 (when you should go to the
West Gallery
workshop) or on August 12.

The August 19 meeting will be dedicated to working on the
program for the August 22 performance, so if you aren’t planning
on performing, you should count on being a test audience some of
the time if you come.

After that, we resume our regularly scheduled meetings on
Tuesdays at 7:45pm at 233 Broadway, Cambridge.

2014 Hugo Award votes

Novel

This category was difficult this year — they nominated the 14
volume sequence “The Wheel of Time” in it’s entirety. It’s about
6 times the length of War and Peace. I only had time to read 2
times the length of War and Peace between when they sent out the
voter packet and when I had to vote.

It’s possible that when (if, but I’m sort of enjoying it) I
finish it, I will be bowled over and wish I had voted for it over
the three I ranked ahead of it, but really, if anyone had ever
said anything about it that made me want to read it, I would have
read some of it by now. The first volume was imitation Tolkein
by someone with a tin ear for language. I’m sort of glad I pushed
on — it improves pretty fast after that. But I’m not finding
reading the online summaries is anything like reading the books,
so I’m going to just continue reading them in order.

So my choices are:

  1. Neptune’s Brood by Charles Stross
  2. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
  3. Parasite by Mira Grant
  4. The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan and Brandon
    Sanderson
  5. Warbound, Book III of the Grimnoir Chronicles

The first three of those are what I consider “normal” science
fiction — examinations of the impact of some kind of technology
on the lives of the characters. The Stross got first place
because I thought both the technology idea (how do you do banking
over interstellar distances?) and the characters were a bit more
interesting than the Leckie and the Grant.

I voted for “The Wheel of Time” over “Warbound” because if it
does turn out to be a good fantasy series, it will be much more
the kind of thing I want to read than the “Grimnoir Chronicles”.
(I should mention that in addition to the 14 volume series
nominated as a whole, the publishers of Warbound also gave us all
three volumes of this series, and I’m not sure I’d have wanted to
read Volume III on its own.) It seems to be SF for the video
games generation, and in spite of some good writing in between the
action scenes, I found it difficult to slog through.

I considered voting for “No Award” ahead of “Warbound”, but I
decided that it was well enough written to justify an award if
that’s the kind of SF the voters really want.

Novella

  1. “Equoid” by Charles Stross
  2. Six-Gun Snow White by Catherynne M. Valente
  3. “Wakulla Springs” by Andy Duncan and Ellen Klages
  4. “The Chaplain’s Legacy” by Brad Torgersen
  5. The Butcher of Khardov by Dan Wells

The top three of these are all excellent stories. The other
two lack characterization. I voted for the Stross over the
Valente and the Duncan because I thought the Science Fiction (a
proposed life cycle for the Unicorn) was better. “Wakulla
Springs” is a well-written story, but really not SF at
all. “Six-Gun Snow White” is brilliant in spots, but doesn’t
really hang together at the end.

Novelette

  1. “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” by Ted Chiang
  2. “The Waiting Stars” by Aliette de Bodard
  3. “The Lady Astronaut of Mars” by Mary Robinette Kowal
  4. “The Exchange Officers” by Brad Torgersen
  5. “Opera Vita Aeterna” by Vox Day

Again, any of the top three would be a good award winner. I
didn’t remember until I’d filled out my ballot that the Vox Day
was controversial, but I figure it doesn’t matter because I didn’t
like it without any political motivations.

Short Story

  1. “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere” by John Chu
  2. “Selkie Stories Are for Losers” by Sofia Samatar
  3. “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love” by Rachel Swirsky
  4. “The Ink Readers of Doi Saket” by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

Here, I do feel strongly that my number one vote is better than
the others, although I certainly won’t be surprised if something
else wins. I don’t feel strongly about the ranking of two and
three.