Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 16

An indie* coffee shop that opened in a space vacated by CBTL a few years back. I’ve only been there a couple of times so far, but I’ll definitely be back! I’ve been “working” through their signature drinks. So far my favorite is the Cardigan (coffee with cardamom, a few other things and salt). One of these days I’ll get there early enough to try their pastries.

It looks small from the outside, but there’s actually quite a bit of room inside. Multiple booths and tables for socializing (though it gets echoey), and a counter for solo coffee drinkers and computing. Free WiFi. A few small tables out front.

The Word for World is Forest is infuriating to read…and that’s the point.

It makes an odd counterpoint to Little Fuzzy: In this case the humans from Earth recognized the natives’ sapience right away – barely – but decide to enslave them and clear-cut their world anyway.

The novella bounces between several viewpoints: one of the native Athsheans who has escaped from slavery, a sympathetic Terran scientist…and the villain, a gung-ho military type who’s also racist, misogynistic, totally on board with the enslavement, backstabbing, double-dealing, always jumps straight to violence first, has a terrible case of tunnel vision but thinks he knows better than everyone, and anyone who disagrees with him mush be insufficiently masculine, etc. Of course the natives can’t be fully human because they don’t even have villages, never mind cities (they do, he’s just not looking for them), and they’re so lazy (no, they have a different sleep cycle than Terrans, and a dual waking/dreaming consciousness), they’re barely even good enough for slave labor…And they’re wimpy pacifists to boot, they won’t even stand up for themselves (they have other ways of resolving conflicts than just hitting each other, but they don’t work against aliens who don’t understand their signals)…

I mean, it really lays it on thick.

And of course he thinks he represents the best of humanity.

In the 90s, conservatives would have complained about him being a straw man caricature. These days, they’d celebrate him as a pundit or run him for office.

What starts as a single raid to free slaves and retaliate for murder turns into an extended guerrilla conflict. It’s a tragedy, a train wreck, a slow-moving avalanche, and yet every time there’s a chance to pause and maybe resolve the situation, Davidson chooses to escalate things instead. Even when the higher-ups tell him not to, he convinces other soldiers to go rogue along with him.

Meanwhile, Selver and the Athsheans start losing themselves in the new experience of war. Even if they succeed, they’ll be changed forever.

Still Going On

While it’s directly a response to America’s actions in the Vietnam War, the themes of colonial exploitation, dehumanization, psyops, asymmetrical warfare and environmental degradation are still very topical. Pebble Mine. The Dakota Access Pipeline. Running freeways through disadvantaged neighborhoods. Conflict palm oil. Ongoing deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. Those are just off the top of my head, and not even getting into outright military conflicts.

I don’t know whether to be angry or sad that we’re still dealing with the same issues 50 years later.

It’s not nuanced. It won’t make you think about new ideas like The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, or The Lathe of Heaven. (The dream state is interesting, but not explored deeply and not the point of the story.) But it will make you angrier at the people who are still doing the exploiting.

Regarding the Title

It’s a contrast to the way we Terrans from Earth with places like England use words relating to dirt to refer to the place we live. (Even the Principality of Sealand, an offshore platform miles from the coast and claiming to be a sovereign state, has “land” in its name.) The Athsheans’ focus on forests and tree ecosystems instead of land provides a different perspective.

I don’t remember whether I read The Last Unicorn when I was younger. I know I saw the animated movie, but I don’t remember much of that either (and some of what I do remember is mixed up with fragments of Flight of Dragons). Sometime in the last decade or so, I stumbled upon the author at a comic convention* and bought a signed copy directly from him, intending to read it when I finished whatever I was in the middle of at the time.

Then, to my shame, it got lost in my to-read box.

I finally found it again!

And it’s well worth the read.

Whimsical and Melancholy

The world Beagle creates is in an in-between state, one where legends and magic are fading and the world is becoming the mundane one we know. Unicorns themselves are timeless, preserving a bit of that magic and fairy-tale reality wherever they live, or wherever they go…but with them almost gone, and the last traveling on her quest, we see the world shifting between one in which butterflies sing everything from Shakespeare to advertising jingles to a more ordinary one and back again. And then there are a few characters who understand the structure of stories, and what it means for the spells, prophecies, and other challenges they encounter.

The characters are well-drawn, too. The unicorn herself has such a different perspective on life and time, and it’s hard to fault her trustingness (it isn’t quite naivete) during the early part of the journey. The incompetent magician Schmendrick manages to shift by turns between pitiful and insufferable. Molly Grue, a character I don’t remember at all, is in some ways the most relatable: She’s an ordinary human, no magic, no expectations on her, but she sees things as they are, sees what needs to be done, and does it. And after the unicorn is transformed into a human woman, and they find themselves in King Haggard’s castle, it’s heartbreaking to watch Amalthea lose her true self bit by bit. Haggard himself is an odd villain, one whose success has broken him, causing him to sink into despair long before his castle will sink into the sea.

But in a sense neither Haggard nor the Bull is the real villain: it’s despair itself, and the desire to capture and hoard wonder. Because holding wonder captive destroys it.

Imagine the Scooby-Doo gang encountering a Lovecraftian horror in Hill House. They manage about as well as you might expect – which is to say, not very well at all.

It’s an interesting mashup of tropes. The teenage detectives are used to traveling around, busting “supernatural” frauds, though they have more serious issues. (The stoner who loves dogs also has severe anxiety, for instance, which is why he avoids people and self-medicates.) And they’re just aging out of the demographic when one of them convinces the rest to take on one more case before the band breaks up.

Naturally it’s a creepy old haunted house on a cliff above a small, dying coastal New England town that’s slowly being eaten away by the sea. And the families disputing ownership of the house both have old claims, and they all seem just a bit off somehow…

You know from the start that they’re not all coming back from that last case before retirement as everything falls apart (or falls into place, depending on perspective). It’s not a question of if so much as how…and how badly.

To call The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport a cyberpunk version of Aladdin would be a disservice. It takes that as a starting point and gleefully launches into a tale of political upheaval, prize-fighting robots, kaiju and mechs, unwanted legacies, family secrets, betrayal, loyalty, a Not-Prince, oppression, opulence, AI rights, pervasive surveillance, masking who you are, and of course sufficiently advanced technology that can grant wishes (only three for the trial period, but unlimited wishes can be unlocked for…well, you get the idea), all set in a crumbling spaceport slowly sinking into the mud on a backwater planet where everyone’s sure the world is ending soon, but no one’s sure how or why, and it hardly matters because no one can afford to leave anyway.

It’s a glorious mishmash of all this and more, wrapped around the human Lina and her monkey-bot brother Bador, filtered through a storytelling bot who has just woken up from being factory-reset and is trying to make sense of the totally illogical humans and bots, not to mention the city itself.

Great fun, highly recommended.