Recent reading
Aug. 8th, 2025 10:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glaurungI've been reading some old stuff lately.
1. Wild Angel (Pat Murphy)
This is a genderswapped mashup of the Jungle Book and Tarzan, set in gold rush-era California. Three year old toddler Sarah is orphaned when her parents are murdered, but instead of dying, she is adopted and raised by wolves.
The first question to ask, on encountering the above premise, is: how well did the author do in avoiding the racism deeply embedded into Kipling's and Burroughs's novels? An attempt was made (the first human to befriend Sarah and teach her human language is an Indian), but sadly it was not very successful. The Indian friend vanishes without a trace two thirds of the way through the book, and I flinched when I saw a line in the last third saying some circus show dogs were "nothing like the mangy curs that lived in the Indian village." Unexamined racism? check.
Given the setting, another question to ask might be: how well does the author avoid the tired and worn cliches of the Western genre in depicting mid-19th century California? How well do they depict real history, as opposed to bullshit myths? Not very well, and not that much. While some of the supporting characters and situations are unique, others slot very neatly into well-worn Western tropes.
That said, it was enjoyable. Between this and "There and Back again" (A delightful version of The Hobbit in space, with Space Bilbo going on an adventure with 13 women instead of 13 dwarves), I will be seeking out more by the author, but I will do so keeping in mind that she is, sadly, a white feminist author (with all the negative baggage that entails) rather than a feminist author who happens to be white.
2. The Pushcart War (Jean Merrill)
I first encountered this on my parent's bookshelf as a tween and enjoyed it. For some reason I found myself thinking of it again this year, and bought a copy. It's still just as delightful. Jane Jacobs urbanism meets traffic congestion (before the concept of induced demand was understood) meets an absurdist children's story: trucking companies, aware that they are being blamed for New York City's horrible traffic problem, decide to scapegoat the city's pushcarts. The pushcart owners fight back using peashooters to flatten truck tires. To the surprise of everyone, the pushcart owners prevail.
3. The Mouse that Roared, The mouse on the moon, the mouse on wall street (all by Leonard Wibberley).
The Mouse that Roared is another tween favourite that I re-acquired at the same time as Pushcart War (the two books are for some reason linked in my memory). I became aware that there had been multiple books in the Mouse series, so I added the others to my shopping cart on impulse.
The first volume has a plot that could only have been written in the recent aftermath of both the Marshall Plan and the H-bomb. The Duchy of Grand Fenwick is a tiny (fifteen square mile) backwater between France and Switzerland. Founded by English mercenaries who expropriated it from French ownership in the 1300's, it has somehow become, in the mid 1950's, an independent state whose language is modern English. Faced with a financial crisis, its leaders declare war on the United States, secure in the knowledge that a) they will lose and b) America will then give Grand Fenwick large sums of money for modernization and rebuilding (in order to prevent the defeated enemy from siding with the Communist bloc). They don't count on the Americans completely ignoring their declaration of war. Thanks to an hours-long citywide air raid drill, Fenwick's commander, unaware that he is supposed to lose, returns to Grand Fenwick with a prominent physicist and his prototype Q-bomb as booty. America is forced to sue for peace.
The later novels stick to the same formula: Grand Fenwick encounters an issue with finances, tries to fix it by pretending to seek to do something with the intention of not actually succeeding, only to unexpectedly succeed where no one expected them to. In the mouse on the Moon, the prime minister tries to get a loan to cover some infrastructure improvements under the guise of having a space program (they end up being the first country to land on the moon). In Mouse on Wall street, an unexpected windfall threatens to collapse Grand Fenwick's tiny economy. The Duchess tries to lose the excess millions by investing in the stock market (only to end up with her investment growing a thousandfold).
Three books in, I decided I had better things to read and consigned the entire series (there are two more, one a medieval prequel telling the origin story of Grand Fenwick in more detail, the other set during the OPEC oil crisis) to the library donation pile. The mouse that roared was amusing and fun to tween me. Adult, post-cold war me found it scientifically ignorant, sexist, proudly conservative in politics, and not actually funny. The later books did not improve on any of those metrics.
4. Rimrunners (CJ Cherryh)
This is a mil-SF space opera that is told entirely from the POV of the lowest ranked crew member, instead of from the POV of high ranking officers. It's a long detailed look at the life of Bet (Elizabeth), who is desperate to get off the backwater station where she's been unemployed and barely surviving, and back onto a star ship. We spend a lot of time learning about Bet's character, her background and shady past (she used to be a marine for the losing side in a war, and she has signed on with a ship of the winning side, where she has to lie about everything). Possibly too much time is spent on her more than a little dysfunctional sex life. Plus there are the usual things that happen among enlisted crew on a navy ship - hazing incidents, fights in the shower with a bully, and so forth.
She and the rest of the enlisted crew keep the ship running, but are never told much of anything about what's happening, where they are, what they are doing, or why. About two thirds of the way through the novel, she gets in trouble thanks to the bully, and the truth about her past becomes known to the captain and his officers. Three quarters of the way through, they're docked at a space station, and the officer who has been most unfair towards her and who has treated her the most cruelly reassigns her to to get two captured suits of enemy space marine armour back in working condition ASAP (this ship is a spy ship rather than a war ship, with little in the way of infantry weapons). And then the enemy arrives, and Bet (who has, by now, switched allegiances) takes part in a battle against her former comrades aboard the station and the docked ship.
An enjoyable, but claustrophobic read. And I am dubious that a post-sexism future (in which it's taken for granted that ships will be crewed by both men and women equally) will still suffer from the exact same patriarchally toxic workplace management styles that you find in dysfunctional companies today.
5. Sassinak (did not finish), by Elizabeth Moon and Anne McCaffery:
A few chapters in, I realized that this is just a genderswapped version of Citizen of the Galaxy, only with much shallower characters and much poorer writing. At which point I put it back on the shelf. (In the words of blogger Jamie Zawinski: "What's the first rule of cover songs? Don't remind me of a better band I could be listening to instead.")
I had it because Morgan kept her Elizabeth Moon books through multiple culls, and I pulled it down and checked it out because I wanted to see if I'd enjoy Elizabeth Moon. But after reading a review or two, I can confirm that my 50 pages in judgment was correct: it really is just the "former slave joins the space navy fighting slavery" parts of Citizen of the Galaxy done much more poorly.
So it's gone to the upstairs shelf where I keep various favourites of Morgan's which I am pretty sure I am never going to read. The only question I have now is: was it typical of Elizabeth Moon, or can I blame McCaffery for how bad it was? I'll find out soon, as the Paksenarrion and the Senarro series are waiting on the TBR shelf - the former were Morgan's, the latter I got after reading a glowing review by Jo Walton.
1. Wild Angel (Pat Murphy)
This is a genderswapped mashup of the Jungle Book and Tarzan, set in gold rush-era California. Three year old toddler Sarah is orphaned when her parents are murdered, but instead of dying, she is adopted and raised by wolves.
The first question to ask, on encountering the above premise, is: how well did the author do in avoiding the racism deeply embedded into Kipling's and Burroughs's novels? An attempt was made (the first human to befriend Sarah and teach her human language is an Indian), but sadly it was not very successful. The Indian friend vanishes without a trace two thirds of the way through the book, and I flinched when I saw a line in the last third saying some circus show dogs were "nothing like the mangy curs that lived in the Indian village." Unexamined racism? check.
Given the setting, another question to ask might be: how well does the author avoid the tired and worn cliches of the Western genre in depicting mid-19th century California? How well do they depict real history, as opposed to bullshit myths? Not very well, and not that much. While some of the supporting characters and situations are unique, others slot very neatly into well-worn Western tropes.
That said, it was enjoyable. Between this and "There and Back again" (A delightful version of The Hobbit in space, with Space Bilbo going on an adventure with 13 women instead of 13 dwarves), I will be seeking out more by the author, but I will do so keeping in mind that she is, sadly, a white feminist author (with all the negative baggage that entails) rather than a feminist author who happens to be white.
2. The Pushcart War (Jean Merrill)
I first encountered this on my parent's bookshelf as a tween and enjoyed it. For some reason I found myself thinking of it again this year, and bought a copy. It's still just as delightful. Jane Jacobs urbanism meets traffic congestion (before the concept of induced demand was understood) meets an absurdist children's story: trucking companies, aware that they are being blamed for New York City's horrible traffic problem, decide to scapegoat the city's pushcarts. The pushcart owners fight back using peashooters to flatten truck tires. To the surprise of everyone, the pushcart owners prevail.
3. The Mouse that Roared, The mouse on the moon, the mouse on wall street (all by Leonard Wibberley).
The Mouse that Roared is another tween favourite that I re-acquired at the same time as Pushcart War (the two books are for some reason linked in my memory). I became aware that there had been multiple books in the Mouse series, so I added the others to my shopping cart on impulse.
The first volume has a plot that could only have been written in the recent aftermath of both the Marshall Plan and the H-bomb. The Duchy of Grand Fenwick is a tiny (fifteen square mile) backwater between France and Switzerland. Founded by English mercenaries who expropriated it from French ownership in the 1300's, it has somehow become, in the mid 1950's, an independent state whose language is modern English. Faced with a financial crisis, its leaders declare war on the United States, secure in the knowledge that a) they will lose and b) America will then give Grand Fenwick large sums of money for modernization and rebuilding (in order to prevent the defeated enemy from siding with the Communist bloc). They don't count on the Americans completely ignoring their declaration of war. Thanks to an hours-long citywide air raid drill, Fenwick's commander, unaware that he is supposed to lose, returns to Grand Fenwick with a prominent physicist and his prototype Q-bomb as booty. America is forced to sue for peace.
The later novels stick to the same formula: Grand Fenwick encounters an issue with finances, tries to fix it by pretending to seek to do something with the intention of not actually succeeding, only to unexpectedly succeed where no one expected them to. In the mouse on the Moon, the prime minister tries to get a loan to cover some infrastructure improvements under the guise of having a space program (they end up being the first country to land on the moon). In Mouse on Wall street, an unexpected windfall threatens to collapse Grand Fenwick's tiny economy. The Duchess tries to lose the excess millions by investing in the stock market (only to end up with her investment growing a thousandfold).
Three books in, I decided I had better things to read and consigned the entire series (there are two more, one a medieval prequel telling the origin story of Grand Fenwick in more detail, the other set during the OPEC oil crisis) to the library donation pile. The mouse that roared was amusing and fun to tween me. Adult, post-cold war me found it scientifically ignorant, sexist, proudly conservative in politics, and not actually funny. The later books did not improve on any of those metrics.
4. Rimrunners (CJ Cherryh)
This is a mil-SF space opera that is told entirely from the POV of the lowest ranked crew member, instead of from the POV of high ranking officers. It's a long detailed look at the life of Bet (Elizabeth), who is desperate to get off the backwater station where she's been unemployed and barely surviving, and back onto a star ship. We spend a lot of time learning about Bet's character, her background and shady past (she used to be a marine for the losing side in a war, and she has signed on with a ship of the winning side, where she has to lie about everything). Possibly too much time is spent on her more than a little dysfunctional sex life. Plus there are the usual things that happen among enlisted crew on a navy ship - hazing incidents, fights in the shower with a bully, and so forth.
She and the rest of the enlisted crew keep the ship running, but are never told much of anything about what's happening, where they are, what they are doing, or why. About two thirds of the way through the novel, she gets in trouble thanks to the bully, and the truth about her past becomes known to the captain and his officers. Three quarters of the way through, they're docked at a space station, and the officer who has been most unfair towards her and who has treated her the most cruelly reassigns her to to get two captured suits of enemy space marine armour back in working condition ASAP (this ship is a spy ship rather than a war ship, with little in the way of infantry weapons). And then the enemy arrives, and Bet (who has, by now, switched allegiances) takes part in a battle against her former comrades aboard the station and the docked ship.
An enjoyable, but claustrophobic read. And I am dubious that a post-sexism future (in which it's taken for granted that ships will be crewed by both men and women equally) will still suffer from the exact same patriarchally toxic workplace management styles that you find in dysfunctional companies today.
5. Sassinak (did not finish), by Elizabeth Moon and Anne McCaffery:
A few chapters in, I realized that this is just a genderswapped version of Citizen of the Galaxy, only with much shallower characters and much poorer writing. At which point I put it back on the shelf. (In the words of blogger Jamie Zawinski: "What's the first rule of cover songs? Don't remind me of a better band I could be listening to instead.")
I had it because Morgan kept her Elizabeth Moon books through multiple culls, and I pulled it down and checked it out because I wanted to see if I'd enjoy Elizabeth Moon. But after reading a review or two, I can confirm that my 50 pages in judgment was correct: it really is just the "former slave joins the space navy fighting slavery" parts of Citizen of the Galaxy done much more poorly.
So it's gone to the upstairs shelf where I keep various favourites of Morgan's which I am pretty sure I am never going to read. The only question I have now is: was it typical of Elizabeth Moon, or can I blame McCaffery for how bad it was? I'll find out soon, as the Paksenarrion and the Senarro series are waiting on the TBR shelf - the former were Morgan's, the latter I got after reading a glowing review by Jo Walton.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-08-08 07:17 pm (UTC)The company I worked for was spun off from a much larger company, truncating the management hierarchy just below the glass ceiling. For a time, leadership was largely women. Sadly, it was still toxic. I don't know if it would have changed over time, as the glass ceiling recrystallized as key shareholders slotted friends into top management.