Reading

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In which there are 52 times Our Heroine improves her habitat, week 29-30

- Current reading quote: "That’s why rich adults hate the sort of thing that Louisa paints on the walls of buildings, not because they love walls, but because they hate the fact that there are beautiful things that are free."

- [Unrelatedly] GNU Terry Pratchett

- FIELD TRIP!!1!! I won't be around for a few days over the weekend as, with luck and calm winds in a suitable direction, I'll be on a field trip to an island without personal coms. Access is occasionally a bit overexciting, and colleagues from A.N.Other Institution were once stranded there for a while (with emergency rations and evacuation by airlift if necessary, obv), so there's a teensy possibility I might be absent for a couple of weeks, lol, but the weather forecast seems as fair as we could hope and we have both a landing craft and a RIB (RIBs offer a more comfortable journey but are harder to un/load). Colleagues Emeritus and I have assured our team that if we are unable to ascend the rugged terrain we will supervise from the beach... with our flasks. Haven't asked Colleague Extremely Emeritus what's in his flask as it also attends his lectures, but am sure it's covered by the risk assessment. Have spoken sternly to them about referring to our very serious scientific endeavour as "a jolly". Had a minor nervous breakdown overnight when our before and after onshore accommodation arrangements were briefly in mild peril but hopefully that's sorted now. Onwards!

( Read more... )

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I don't know what the fuck is happening, but I would like it to stop

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

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In which a woman in Kent was threatened by armed police for lawfully being in public

- The nation state of Israel's genocide of Palestinians in Palestine continues.

- In the UK there continue to be large peaceful pro-Palestinian protests, including a march in Edinburgh attended by thousands of supporters.

- Led By Donkeys released a video explaining that the "charity" UK Lawyers for Israel hosted a far-right Israeli MP who has subsequently been sanctioned by the UK government for supporting genocide, and that the uncharitable wing of UK Lawyers for Israel continues to use vexatious legal bullying to attempt to erase Palestinian culture from multicultural Britain including shutting down a children's kite-making meeting by claiming it was akin to terrorism. Some people would call this "ethnic cleansing" and "cultural genocide" of Palestinians. A previous mention of vexatious claims by Lawyers for Israel that failed to remove a public art work.

- Led By Donkeys previously made a 6min video about intentional destruction of our right to peaceful protest in the UK by authoritarian politicians such as Keith Starmer (who is handing the next election to Farage on a plate complete with fascist garnishes).

- In the UK over 220 people have now been arrested and could be imprisoned for 14 years as "terrorists" for holding signs saying things such as, "genocide in Palestine, time to take action" and "I oppose genocide, I support Palestine action".

- One woman in Kent was threatened with arrest by armed police for standing in public displaying the sign "Free Gaza" with a Palestinian flag: "It’s terrifying, I was standing there thinking, this is the most authority, authoritarian, dystopian experience I’ve had in this country, being told that I’m committing terrorist offences by two guys with firearms." The police officers are on vid saying, "We could have jumped out, arrested you, dragged you off in a van." Kent Police issued a statement supporting the illegal actions of their armed fascist officers.

- Multiple legal British organisations with "Palestine" or "Palestinian" in their names have had their bank accounts frozen by multiple banks with no explanation. Some of these orgs send aid to Gaza, amongst other legal activities.

- Article, posted here for archiving purposes, from Scottish newspaper The National:

I'm a journalist covering Palestine Action arrests. This is all absurd.
By Laura Webster, 18th July

( archive )

None of it makes any sense to me, or our team.

The people doing the killing and destroying face no consequences. The people raising the alarm are taken away in handcuffs.

I wonder how many arrests our reporters will witness before the UK decides to take real action against Israel?

If this really is the new normal, Scotland shouldn't have anything to do with it.

I'm a journalist covering Palestine Action arrests. This is all absurd. (Link to The National)

( note )

Current Music: Beat Dis by Bomb The Bass

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meme

In which there is a post, such as it is

You can imagine this Friday Five set to the Thunderbirds theme if you like. :-)

5. Name five favourite movies.
Tremors. And then watching Tremors four more times.
I'm not rly into films, except film festivals that give me insights into Other people's lives. I'm more of a book person.

4. Name four areas of interest you became interested in after you were done with your formal education.
Not after but aside from the usual primary to tertiary educational course:
Ethical philosophy, palaeontology, geology, botany, and entomology.
If we count school history as bleeding into archaeology, and English literature as a springboard to poetry even though we didn't study poetry beyond a couple of war poems.

3. Name three things you would change about this world.
Setting aside sensible answers, as everyone already knows we need to redistribute wealth through taxation, tackle climate change and environmental degradation, end wars, and improve human health....
Here are my spur of the moment trivial desires:
a. Clouds are fabulous but don't you get a bit bored with blue skies all the time? Isn't this why people enjoy transient optical phenomena such as rainbows and sundogs &c so much? Maybe one day a week the sky could be a random colour? Nothing too dark or bright, just pastel pink or patchwork greens or polkadots on the blue?
b. Compulsory feeding stations for blood-sucking insects. Honestly, I'd donate to a blood bank to stop the little menaces injecting me with their toxins and allergens. Also, no more mosquito or tick diseases for humans and dogs, which is surely worth the effort?
c. Everyone gets one disability redacted if they please, after a month of time for consideration. I just want to be able to eat food like a normal human. Also, you can give your one redaction away but it just disappears into a general pool which is infallibly distributed on the basis of need. This idea needs work but basically I just selfishly want to be able to go out or go away and eat whatever is put in front of me instead of having to fuss.

2. Name two of your favourite childhood toys.
The countryside. My friends.

1. Name one person you could be handcuffed to for a full day.
Are you 'king kidding me?! I can barely cope with a cannula!

0. And your good selves? Meme me, memsaabs.

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C.J. Cherryh bibliography

Sources: ISFDB, Wikipedia, my bookshelves

I collated this list for my Cherryh reread project. I didn't include magazine publications or omnibus editions, and only noted reprints where updated copyright dates or author's notes indicated substantial revision.

Italics = Probably not covering this in the reread.

( Cut for length )

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The Very Slow C.J. Cherryh Reread

Welcome to the Very Slow C.J Cherryh Reread! I will be rereading C.J. Cherryh's work in order of publication and posting about it on a weekly or fortnightly basis. Subsequent posts will be all spoilers all the time, but for this overview, I will stick to generalities.

Cherryh is pronounced "Cherry", because that is her name; her first editor thought people would assume Carolyn Janice Cherry was a romance writer. (Her brother, sf artist David A. Cherry, was not subject to similar strictures.) Since the mid-70s, she has written 77 novels and four short story collections (1); self-published three journal collections (blog posts); edited seven anthologies; and translated four novels from the French. Her shared world fiction, not included in the aforementioned collections, must amount to at least another four or five novels' worth of word count.

Notes towards an overview

It is so hard to know how to start talking about Cherryh's work. She is so foundational and yet so idiosyncratic and weird! She has a wide fanbase and has won three Hugos and been recognized with the Damon Knight Grand Master Award by the SFWA, and I, like many of her fans, am still convinced she is underappreciated. I blame a lot of this lack of recognition on sexism, though I think some of it is also due to the nature of her work. Cherryh belongs to what I think of, for lack of a better term, as Deep Genre: she makes almost no sense if you are not familiar with science fiction tropes and reading protocols. She is almost unimaginable as Baby's First Science Fiction, unless Baby has a heavy tolerance for getting thrown in the deep end and having to figure out oceanography and navigation pn the fly while also learning to swim by trial and error while also being shouted at by several different parties, some of whom are trying to rescue Baby and some of whom are trying to drown them, but good luck telling which is which. (This is, of course, my preferred mode of science fiction immersion, but it's impossible to say whether that is the cause of my deep love for Cherryh's writing or the result of my early exposure to it.)

Cherryh is an extremely immersive writer, and famously an expert at extremely tight unremarked third-person focalization; she expects you to pick up hints and asides and put together information by implication, or, if you can't do that, at least to be absorbed enough by what you do understand that you just keep going anyway. To this day, I have almost no comprehension of the plot of a Cherryh novel until my second or third reading.

Cherryh, more than almost any other sf writer, feels like she is writing history: her books don't cohere into a single grand narrative, but are each snapshots of different collisions between nature, nurture, chance individual encounters, and overwhelming social forces. Very frequently, conflicts are upended or balances of power shifted by the sudden intrusion of a player that was never mentioned before, or that got mentioned in a tossed-off subordinate clause in a passage focused on something else entirely, and it doesn't feel like a deus ex machina or an overcomplication; it feels like panning out of a zoomed-in map and realizing you should have been thinking about how those close-ups or insets fit into a bigger context all along.

Cherryh writes so many different kinds of books—big anthropological novels told blockbuster-style with multiple POVs, with a Victorian devotion to including people across every sector of society and class; weird slender thought experiments about the nature of reality and the definition of humanity; and alien encounters, so many alien encounters, humans encountering aliens, humans encountering humans who might as well be aliens, humans and aliens encountering other aliens who make the "alienness" possible to other humans seem facile and trite. (I am very much looking forward to getting to the weird body horror of Voyager in the Night and the multi-way alien encounter extravaganza of the Chanur books.)

I have heard Cherryh's prose style called dry; in a recent podcast Arkady Martine called it "transparent"; I remember Jo Walton once in a blog post saying it read like something translated out of an alien language. I personally love its distinctive rhythms and find it extremely chewy and dense, the very opposite of transparent; I think it gets a lot of its peculiar flavor from the deliberate deployment of archaic vocabulary—not words that have fallen out of use, but words where she relies on the older rather than the present connotations. Vocabulary and grammar become tools of estrangement; the style itself tells you that you are not reading something set in the present day and you cannot assume you understand the personal or social logic shaping this narrative by default.

Series and other groupings

I do not have a single good way to divide up Cherryh's oeuvre, so here, have a mishmash of setting, genre, and production history:

The Union-Alliance universe
Most or all of Cherryh's science fiction takes place in a vast future history known as the Union-Alliance universe for two of its major political powers. Union-Alliance is less a series than a setting; most of the books grouped under it stand alone, or belong to short subseries (often later published in combined editions) that are independent of each other. Outside the subseries, the books can be read in any order, and publication order generally does not reflect internal chronology.

In this future history, habitable planets are rare; extrasolar colonies are initially space stations built out of slower-than-light transports sent from star to star. After FTL (dependent on sketchily explained "jump points") is developed and new (though still rare) Earthlike exoplanets are settled, trade is dependent on family-owned and operated Merchanter ships, each one in effect its own independent small nation.

The books themselves vary widely in focus: some depict an enclosed society, a ship or a space station or a single, sparsely populated planet; some encompass vast spreads of space or time and major historical events. Cherryh has a welcome tendency to produce books whose characters all share a common background and then to go on to write others from the perspective of the other three or four sides of any given conflict. (Conflicts in Cherryh seldom boil down to as few as two sides.)

Although author timelines and republished edition front matter puts all the sf Cherryh produced in the twentieth century into this background, when people speak casually of the Union-Alliance books they often mean the subset of books clustered around the time period of the Company Wars, when Earth is attempting to exert control over its extrasolar colonies. (None of the books take place on Earth; only two take place in the solar system. Probably one of the clearest signs that Cherryh is American is that her sympathy defaults to the colonies attempting to break away.)

The atevi series
In the atevi series (also known as the Foreigner sequence, for the first novel in it), a lost human ship settles on a world already inhabited by an intelligent native species called atevi.

The humans and atevi get along great for around twenty years, which is when the humans find themselves in the midst of a catastrophic war they don't understand how they started. The surviving humans are displaced to a single large island, with a peace treaty that declares no humans will set foot on the mainland except the official interpreter.

The series takes place a few hundred years later and focuses on the latest official interpreter, whose job duties are soon to expand drastically and include cross-planetary adventures and fun poisoned teatimes with local grand dames.

This series has been the bulk of Cherryh's work since the mid-nineties. It is twenty-two volumes and still ongoing. Unlike the (other?) (2) Union-Alliance books, these form a single continuous narrative; by the late teens, they are more or less a roman fleuve. Cherryh initially breaks down the longer series into sets of three, possibly with the hope each new trilogy could serve as a new entrypoint, but this pattern is abandoned after the first fifteen books. She does still valiantly attempt to summarize the important points of the previous books within text, but in my opinion this straight-up does not work. You really do need to read these books in chronological order for them to make sense.

The series is popular and well-beloved and has been cited as a major influence by both Ann Leckie and Arkady Martine, and I nevertheless blame it in part for Cherryh's failure to receive the attention and respect she deserves. Long ongoing serials do not tend to receive as many award nominations or reviews as work that requires less background reading, not helped in this case by the weakness of the latest books. The atevi books have always been less dense than Cherryh's earlier work, but in the past decade they have sometimes narrowed down to an excruciating microfocus. (I am especially cranky about Book 19, which takes place over a single weekend and is entirely concerned with the logistics of securing a hotel room from infiltration or attack.)

Fantasies
Cherryh's fantasies are all traditional medievalish works, most of them very Tolkien influenced. The majority of them are in ahistorical, vaguely Celtic settings (the Ealdwood books, Faery in Shadow/Faery Moon, the Fortress series, possibly Goblin Mirror); one trilogy is set in land-of-Fable Tsarist Russia; one magicless standalone is set in a kind of China-Japan analogue that feels a lot less Orientalist than that combination should because of the determined lack of ornament and exoticization (YMMV).

Like her science fiction, Cherryh's fantasy tends to feature protagonists who are terrified, desperate, paranoid, and in desperate need of a bath and a good night's sleep. Also like her science fiction, somehow or other her fantasy invariably ends up being about thought control and social conditioning and infinite regresses of self-conscious thought.

Shared-world work
The eighties saw an explosion in shared-world fantasy, something like professional fanfiction and something like the work of television writers' rooms: groups of writers would collaborate on stories set in a background they developed together. One of the earliest and most influential was the Thieves' World series edited by Robert Lynn Asprin and Lynn Abbey, set in a sword & sorcery venue most notable for its exponential urban deterioration with each volume, grimdark avant la lettre. Cherryh was a frequent contributor, her stories featuring a particular set of down-on-their-luck mercenaries, street kids gone hedge magicians, and the extremely powerful vampirelike sorceress Ischade. This series set the pattern for her most significant later shared world works, both in terms of her frequent collaboration with Abbey and writer Janet Morris and in the tendency to treat each story more as a chapter in an ongoing serial than as a complete episode in itself.

For Janet Morris' Heroes in Hell anthologies, set in a Riverworld-inspired afterworld where everybody in all of recorded history seemed to be in the underworld, Cherryh relied on her college major and Master's degree in Classics to write about Julius Caesar and associated historical figures, producing nine or ten short storie; some of the short fiction was incorporated into the two novel collaborations with Morris and Cherryh's solo Heroes in Helll novel. The world-building and general theology are frankly a mess, but I would still 100% go for a historical novel of the Roman Republic or early empire if Cherryh felt like writing one.

Cherryh launched her own shared world series, Merovingen Nights,with the solo novel, Angel with a Sword, and then edited seven subsequent anthologies. She described several of the anthologies as "mosaic novels", and they do indeed show an unusual amount of close coordination and interdependence among the stories penned by different authors. Despite the novel title, the series is science fiction, set on an isolated planet in the Union-Alliance universe. Neither novel nor anthologies were reprinted during DAW's early 2000s phase of repackaging most of the older work Cherryh originally published with them, which is a great shame; they are very solid.

Full disclosure

This isn't 100% a reread project. There are three books in the 2000s I've never read. I'll let you know when we get there.

I also expect Cherryh to have published more books by the time I finish, but let's be real, I'm going to read those as soon as they come out.

Currently I'm not planning to cover Cherryh's translations, her journals, or most of her shared world work. I'm not sure how I'll handle the Foreigner books, which suffer from diminishing returns; I may cover the first few and stop, I may skip around to only the volumes I find particularly interesting, I may bundle together multiple volumes in a single post.

I am going to cover the Lois and Clark tie-in novel, because I find it hilarious that Cherryh (a) wrote a contemporary novel; (b) wrote a tie-in novel; (c) wrote a Superman novel. (Her first short story ever, the Hugo Award winner "Cassandra", was also set in the then-present day, but I think that's it.)

Other Cherryh reading projects

The single tag for Jo Walton's Cherryh rereads has been lost to the Reactor Magazine reorganization, but you can find them pretty easily by going to the oldest Cherryh reviews on the site and reading forward

Ian Sales' SF Mistressworks project has multiple Cherryh reviews by multiple reviewers

The Three Hoarsemen podcast, The Works of C.J. Cherryh

sholio's Read All the Cherryh tag

james_davis_nicoll is reading a Cherryh a month for 2025; to find his earlier Cherryh reviews, use a keyword search

Endnotes

1 This count includes the collaborations with Janet Morris and Jane Fancher, but excludes The Sword of Knowledge series, which was written entirely by her collaborators (Leslie Fish, Nancy Asire, and Mercedes Lackey) from Cherryh's outline. [back]

2 It's not clear from the text itself whether or not these books also fall under the Union-Alliance umbrella. Cherryh has sometimes said they do, but the humans in the Foreigner series are so isolated that the events of the Union-Alliance books have effectively no bearing on them. [back]

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In which there are 52 times Our Heroine improves her habitat, week 28

- "Terrorism": having difficulty comprehending that I live in a time when Labour leader Keir Starmer and his starmtroopers have decided to crimialise peaceful protest as "terrorism", including 100 or so people from across the UK arrested and facing 14 years in prison each as "terrorists" because they held up marker-pen-on-cardboard signs reading "I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action."

People holding handwritten cardboard signs reading, "I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action."

- Decided to celebrate something I love everyday.
9: The clouds I saw from a peak hour traffic jam were fabulously fluffy cumulus sky-sheep.
10: Wizo the Fleming. His name. And his son Walter fitzWizo. Both C12th. That is all. P.S. Pembrokeshire Council have wisely decreed the creation of a Wizo Trail for cyclists.
11: 7.30am tuneful recorder playing in an otherwise silent neighbourhood (no cars). I'm imagining an enchanting Good Neighbour of the faerie folk, but around here it was probably a bearded old hippie, lol.
11: a female Large (Cabbage) White butterfly, Pieris brassicae, flew across in front of my face then perched on the hedge next to my head so I could observe it about a hand length away, and note its wing patterns and antennae colours in detail.
11 bonus: my front lawn was suddenly full of happy, laughing, shrieking, playing people (mostly young). Get ON my lawn! Curtains were closed so I didn't twitch them to find out if anyone was in dress-up but there are usually one or two.
12: brief visitation in my home by a large patterned brown moth that was one of those "why aren't day-flying moths called butterflies?" beauties.
13: just laying in bed very early this morning, half-awake, and knowing I didn't have to get up. Mmm.

- Birb log: whenever I see the new taxonomy for Jackdaws I think about that redditor who people mocked for years for saying Jackdaws weren't crows / Corvus or whatever it was they said.

( Birb log )

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In which there is The pinch of Salt Path by Sally "Raynor Winn" Walker

The real Salt Path (link to The Observer): how a blockbuster book and film were spun from lies, deceit and desperation.

( The Salt Path-ological liar, The Wild Lies, and Landlies )

Most importantly, to me, disabled people suffer collateral damage from both aspects of her fraud: firstly by being told they could do x or y if only they had as much willpower as Walker's fictional character with CBS/CBD, then secondly from the assumption that many disabled people are frauds like Walker. I'm betting she'll continue to profit from her crimes while her victims, intended and indirect, suffer for her choices. (I also feel sympathy for the Walker children and hope they avoid being dragged into this.)

ETA 13 July 2025: Observer article about a further Walker scam I've quoted salient extracts in a comment below.