Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 5

This story looks at a different corner of the Hainish universe than usual. Too far for instant communication. Centuries of time dilation instead of decades. Completely cut off from anyone you might have known back home. What kind of person would willingly go so far beyond the known worlds that they could never even talk to anyone back home?

Much as Larry Niven suggests only someone who doesn’t need social interaction can be a solo ramjet pilot, Le Guin suggests only someone who can’t deal with society would be willing to take what’s effectively a one-way trip.

A crew made up of people with varying neuroses and phobias finds a planet full of plant life, but with no sign that animals ever evolved there. The center of it all is one crewmember who’s an empath, able to feel others’ emotions, but who doesn’t get along with anyone.

It’s an interesting psychological exploration of the crew, the relationship between empathy and fear, how they deal with each other and the planet, how they break down individually and as a group, how that changes from the confines of the ship to life on a forest planet, and how the planet reacts to them. And it’s an interesting take on large-scale plant (and planet) sentience, predating works like Bios (or Avatar) by decades and contemporary with the development of the Gaia hypotheis.

Wait, Autism?

But it’s hard to read it today because the empath’s abilities hinge on him having been “cured” of “autism,” and he’s also a complete a–hole when he’s around other people.

On the plus side, it’s probably the oldest thing I’ve read that posits autism can be a form of hyper empathy, with people withdrawing into themselves because they’re overwhelmed. In this case, he’s always been science-fiction-level empathic, but he no longer withdraws into himself as a defense against overstimulation.

On the minus side, his being so hostile aligns with an actual stereotype of autistic people that still causes prejudice against them (and gives some genuinely awful people a disingenuous excuse: “oh, I’m not really racist/sexist/whatever, I just have Asperger’s!”) And the term is consistently used in the old, extremely-withdrawn sense. Language changes, and the meaning has broadened since 1970, which is why we talk about an autism spectrum these days.

Reading in 2025, though, with RFK Jr. putting conspiracy theories about “autism” front and center in government health policy? It’s hard to ignore that this old sense of the word is what he’s pretending is on the rise (even though there isn’t) so he can blame vaccines, or Tylenol, or whatever supports his goals this week. Instead of accepting that there’s just a wider variety of human neurology than we used to be willing to admit, and that we’re getting better at recognizing it.

So it’s kind of like reading the “wicked as a woman’s magic” parts of early Earthsea, only without follow-up works to reconsider it.

Collected in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Buffalo Gals, and The Found and the Lost.

I like birds, but I’m not really a birder (checks page 135). Oh. Um. Yeah. Never mind.

*ahem*

It’s a delightful collection of comedic “definitions” of various terms one might encounter while watching birds or interacting with people who do. For instance “American Robin” refers to a machine that transforms worms into loud songs at 4AM right outside your window. Or identifying owls by their calls (the ones that sound like owls aren’t owls at all, they’re mourning doves.) It’s filled with the same style of humor and illustration that Rosemary Mosco brings to her occasional comic strip Bird and Moon, and worth keeping out after you’re done so you can always flip to a random page for a laugh.

The best piece of live-action Marvel I’ve seen in years, and the best Marvel TV since the first seasons of Daredevil and Jessica Jones.

The twists and turns, betrayals and tragedies grow organically through a (rightfully) mistrustful group that’s been forced to work together, first by Agatha’s bullying, then by necessity. The multiple variations on “The Ballad of the Witches’ Road” tie it all together, and it’s a gut punch when you finally learn where the song came from. And where the road came from, for that matter.

Agatha All Along is as effective as Poker Face and The Sixth Sense at showing you an accurate but incomplete view of what’s going on, letting you fill in or gloss over the gaps, and then flashing back later with more context that completely changes your understanding of what it meant. Especially in the episodes that focus on Patti LuPone’s character, who experiences her life out of sequence Billy Pilgrim-style, and on the teen who (for magical reasons) cannot be named, when you find out who he is and what was going on outside the illusions in the first episode. Lorna Wu’s 1970s rock version of the song is another great example: what she was trying to do with it, what happens with that goal, and the final twist of why it hadn’t worked.

The whole cast is solid, and Kathryn Hahn especially is fascinating to watch, giving Agatha a huge range. There are times when you feel sorry for her, there are times when you like her, and there are times when you want her to just die and go to hell already and give everyone else a break. I’d been apprehensive before picking up the first episode, since while I really liked her as “Agnes” in WandaVision, once she revealed herself she kind of turned into a one-note cackling Wicked Witch of the West(view). That’s shattered right from the start.

The series stands mostly on its own. You don’t need to have watched any other Marvel shows or films, and while it helps to have seen WandaVision, they recap the important parts. The season is a complete story, too, though there’s an epilogue that sets up a possible direction for a second season (which probably isn’t happening) with the surviving characters.

A rare find: A great adaptation of a great book.

Fred Fordham’s watercolor-style art is absolutely gorgeous. The adaptation plays to the medium’s strengths, allowing the visuals to tell the story when possible, keeping Ursula K. Le Guin’s prose when needed. Wide seascapes, rocky coasts, forested landscapes, people (not whitewashed!) and dragons…

There’s a preview featuring the first few pages and a few of the seascapes at Fordham’s website.

The printing is a bit dark for some scenes set at night or in dimly lit rooms (of which there are a lot, some pivotal). The first time through, I could barely see what was going on in the scene where Ged first summons the shadow in Ogion’s house. So you’ll want to read it by sunlight or with an actual reading lamp, not just ambient room lighting. (This isn’t a problem with the digital edition, though I suppose that might depend on your device’s display!)

I started using FeatherPad on a low-end Linux machine, and was impressed with its speed, stability, and a feature set with just enough to make it practical as my main text editor. (Search of course, but also syntax highlighting, sorting lines within a file, and quickly switching word-wrap on and off.) It’s more stable (and faster!) than GNOME Text Editor and more capable than Gedit. I’ve since set it as my default on my main Linux system.

There are a few things that still frustrate me. It doesn’t auto-switch between dark and light mode, for instance, and I switch between modes regularly depending on ambient lighting. Spell check is limited, and search is a bit jankier than I’d like. But it does the job, and does it fast, and I can always fire up another editor like Sublime Text when I do need something more elaborate.

Featherpad is available in most Linux distributions I’ve tried (including Fedora, Debian and Arch), but not on Alpine Linux unless you want to use the testing repo.