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pomoblue · 6 years ago

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book review idk

Steampunk is not a genre. I think. It's an aesthetic and a setting that comes with a set of tropes, but not enough to really build a story. There are works that you could call "A Steampunk Work", but their genre would be better categorised as Dystopia or Fantasy or Alternate History. I like the aesthetic, but I feel like a lot of steampunk works just don't explore and use the setting in the way I want. The book I'm going to review is not a steampunk work. Sorry about that tangent.

*The Watchmaker of Filigree Street* is a novel that's probably best classified as some combination of Magic Realism and Historical Fiction, though to me that makes it sound like the kind of book for people who sneer at anything they can call "genre fiction" for being not proper Literary Fiction. As much as I claim that Magic Realism is Urban Fantasy for snobby people, I do actually like the genre, and this book is an instance where I think it's used very well. It's also far from the conservative romanticisation of the past that some historical fiction falls into, and it's a genuinely interesting setting that works well with the plot. More on that later.

A brief synopsis so you know what I'm talking about. Thaniel, a telegraphist working the graveyard shift at the Home Office, gets a bomb threat from an irish nationalist group. When he returns home, he finds a watch mysteriously left in his house. Months later, just before the bomb goes off, the alarm goes off on the watch and he leaves the room to try and shut it off. He goes to find the maker of the watch, who turns out to be Keita Mori, a supernaturally good japanese watchmaker living in london. As the story goes on Thaniel tries to find out more about Mori's past, and how he seems to have knowledge of the future. Also there's a cool scientist lady who ends up in an arranged marriage with Thaniel. And a clockwork octopus.

One of my pet peeves with steampunk works is how they tend to forget the cyberpunk roots of being about underdogs and nobodies. Which isn't objectively a bad thing, but I much prefer stories about minorities, people with barely any power in society trying to live their life. *Filigree Street* does this well with its three main characters. Thaniel is a nobody, a cog in the machine of the british government. Mori is a baron in his native Japan, but in London he's a foreigner and despite his powers he can't do much directly. Grace is a woman living in a time before women entered the workforce or were given the vote, a scientist who has to wear a fake moustache to study in her university library. And these characters don't do any grand political moves, but they change history in their own way through little accidents and coincidences. The butterfly effect is a trope I'm quite fond of, and it works really well in the hands of characters who wouldn't normally have ways to make an impact on society.

Another of my pet peeves with steampunk is that, once you get past the cool clockwork aesthetics, it gets kind of repetitive as a setting. There's only so much you can do with "vaguely victorian London", and as I mentioned before steampunk works often like to focus on rich white guys and forget the rest of the world. I haven't failed to notice that this book is set in victorian London, but it uses the setting and time period in a way I haven't seen before. The story centres around the rise of Irish Nationalism in the UK, and the Meiji Restoration in Japan, and briefly explores the concept of Nationalism in general. It doesn't portray nationalism as a particularly positive thing, but given that one event involved terrorist attacks and the other led to some pretty unpleasant imperialism, that's understandable.

This wouldn't be a bloom book review without going off on a tangent about an entirely unrelated work. The first author that sprung to mind for me was the childrens-ish author Frances Hardinge, for some reason. I jokingly called this book "Frances Hardinge for adults" but then that made me sad because it reminded me I'm a grown-ass adult who enjoys 9-12 fiction just a bit too much. Anyway, it definitely does seem to have some similarities with Frances Hardinge's books, though less than I expected. The first is its very subtle use of magic realism whilst keeping a focus on mundane character interactions and politics. The way Mori's clairvoyance is handled reminds me a little of the psychic people in *Gullstruck Island*, and how the politics and plot of that story carried on without feeling too much like a fantasy, despite its constructed setting. As much as I love speculative fiction, I also love conflicts and characters that feel really human, and magic realism has no shortage of those.

The other noticeable similarity with Hardinge's works is the slightly unusual historical setting with a ton of research thrown into it. It's worth noting that both this book and most of Hardinge's books have a notes page at the end detailing where and how the author researched the setting-it's a lot of museums and first-hand accounts and History degrees. If I had to pick a book that it was most similar to, it would me The Lie Tree, Frances Hardinge's award-winning victorian murder-mystery that I mainly liked because it had a sub-plot about fossils and I'm a big History of Science nerd. It's a fun mystery that twists and turns, exploring people's predjudices about gender and sexuality whilst still just being a good story. So is *The Watchmaker of Filigree Street*.

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pomoblue · 7 years ago

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Some cyberpunk anime recs, with extra added waffling about tropes.

Cyberpunk is both an aesthetic and a genre. And I’m not really sure if it counts as a genre, it’s just a collection of themes to explore in Science Fiction. I think the best way of describing the themes is “how will advances in technology interact with (usually exacerbate) current issues facing the world today?”. Sometimes the technology is something as futuristic as time travel, sometimes it’s just slightly advanced space travel. Sometimes the issues it explores are as grand as geopolitics and war, sometimes it’s as mundane as how we interact with each other. Since getting back into anime I’ve found some series that explore these themes really well, even if some of them don’t seem like cyberpunk at first glance.

Since any attempt at making a mind map of this turns into a mess of lines, I’m just gonna go alphabetically down my MAL. The first one I come to is Kiznaiver, a kind of obscure trigger series from 2016. The premise really drew me in, seven unique teenagers can all feel each others’ pain as part of an experiment, and have to learn to get along. It definitely explores friendship and relationships in a really interesting way, but the fact that it was only one cours meant it didn’t really develop the entire ensemble enough and left me a bit disappointed. Looking at the character development in trigger’s other 2-cours series, I think it would have been perfect if it were twice as long. It definitely has its moments though, and the animation is consistently gorgeous.

A series that does the “ensemble driven cyberpunk” a lot better is Steins;gate. It uses its complex time travel plot to explore its characters and it does it incredibly well, it’s often comedic but the characters still feel very human. It’s a bit of an unintentional period piece (especially the dub, those memes have not aged well) but it’s got its charm. The sequel-ish, Steins;gate 0, seems to be exploring a similar theme but with AI instead of time travel.

The 2011 anime No. 6 is more of a general dystopia than a cyberpunk work (the novels get a lot more into the cyberpunk themes but this is anime recs not light novel recs) but it’s still a really thought provoking series. The core message I got from it was how inequality is so often maintained by people just not paying attention to the suffering that their sheltered life is built on, and how being aware of this and not just accepting it can make a huge difference, a theme that I would like to see a lot more of in cyberpunk. I’m gonna write a whole essay raving about this series some day, it’s really quite an uplifting story. Also it’s absolutely beautiful, 11 episodes and not much action meant studio bones could put a lot of effort into making the animation as soft and fluid as possible (and filling it with nausicaa references).

The last series I can be bothered to write a paragraph on is Planetes, a 2003 series about garbage collecting in space. It’s a subgenre of cyberpunk that I like to call halfpunk, where the setting isn’t as futuristic and the issues it explores are very contemporary ones. It hits a lot harder than traditional cyberpunk because it just feels so real, like you can genuinely believe that this is going to happen. Yeah, advances in space travel are going to leave developing countries behind and this will lead to conflict, because developing countries are being ignored today and the space travel shown in the series is not that advanced. Unfortunately, the series focuses a lot more on characters than the background issues and these themes are kind of out of focus for much of it. It’s still a great series and the characters are genuinely likeable, it’s just not really what I wanted.

There are some other series that explore some cyberpunk themes without making them a core element. For all its faults, Code Geass has some really good dialogue about the ethics of science, as does Fullmetal Alchemist. Both are a sort of related genre that I call Military SF, an exploration of how conflict is different in speculative fiction. Shinsekai Yori explores the same themes as No. 6, but with psychic powers and dying. Girls' Last Tour is a weird post-apocalyptic SoL, and cyberpunk themes come up occasionally in the cute moeblob conversations. Neon Genesis Evangelion also has some interesting character interaction and thought provoking themes wrapped up in the fake deep mind screw that it is.

This isn’t an exhaustive list and I’ve probably missed out some obvious series. But whatever.

#anime reccomendations #oh jeez I had a tagging system at one point

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pomoblue · 7 years ago

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I realise when I’m analysing stuff, I make up a lot of words, or make words mean different things.

I should start a dictionary for shit I just made up. I should probably make this a page rather than a post but whatever.

"lonely” space opera/sf/scifi: that sort of atmosphere of loneliness and emptiness in a science fiction series, usually one that takes place in spaceships. Think FTL. I think it’s a really cool atmosphere, and I like looking at the simple things that make it feel more immersive.

Base SF: I think the best way to describe this is sort of like cosmic horror, only less cosmic and more sort of dreamlike. People randomly disappearing, things turning into other things,lots of unexplainable stuff. I find it kind of fascinatingly creepy because a lot of my nightmare-y dreams involve that, where things are scary because they’re inherently Wrong.

Heavy Urban Fantasy: Urban Fantasy that uses a lot of heavy lit fic themes alongside the fantasy stuff. Often goes into the moral implications of stuff like the masquerade, as well as the psychological effects. I think supernatural (or possibly buffy idk I haven’t seen either) made this a popular tv show subgenre. If it’s also YA I give it the beautiful acronym YAHUF. Poetic.

Continental Fantasy: oh god I need a better name for this. Similar to urban fantasy, but the “Urban” part of the setting is also a constructed setting, usually based on 20th century earth. Think Legend of Korra, or FMA. It’s fun and political and there’s also magic

Halfpunk: A genre so called because it’s halfway to cyberpunk. Halfpunk works take place A Little Bit(tm) in the future and are A Little Bit(tm) more dystopian. What makes a halfpunk setting work is that the issues in the world are the same issues as in the contemporary world, but worse. The oil crisis worsening, a current conflict turning into an all-out war, whatever. Doctor Who had a couple of good halfpunk episodes, but the quintessential example of this is Black Mirror.

Eclectic Fantasy: I think this is similar to new weird? Eclectic fantasy is any kind of fantasy work which specifically doesn’t take a lot of its influences from Tolkein or any other influential fantasy, and takes a lot of influences straight from other mythologies and folklore. I really like this kind of fantasy. Think Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, all that lot. This may or may not be the same thing as new weird.

YAD: Usually said in a derogatory way. “Ugh, it’s YAD”. Stands for young adult dystopia. You know what I mean. For the record I don’t hate YAD, I just think 80% of it is a bit shit.

My Thing: Young adult gay shit with heavy themes and wacky sci-fi.

There’s more but I can’t remember them at the moment and this post has been in my drafts for aaaaaages.

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pomoblue · 8 years ago

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A book review by bloom, that will undoubtedly turn into rambling about tropes

Yankee Girl by Mary Ann Rodman.

I’d like to have like, a really detailed account of what happened when I read this book and how it opened my sheltered, middle-class white eyes, but it was a loooong time ago and to be honest I can't remember that well. My mum got it for me for christmas one year, I can’t even remember what year. I think I was either 9 or 10. Probably.

Do book reviews need a synopsis? You could just like, read the blurb. In fact, I’ll make you read the blurb.

Valerie’s voice is as sweet as honey. She’s the obvious choice to star in the Nativity. But this is Mississippi, 1964. Things are far from simple. There is uproar when Valerie is picked to play the angel... because she’s black. As one of the first black children to attend Parnell School, she has to face violent protestors outside and vicious bullies inside the classroom.

Alice is torn between standing up for Valerie, and being popular with the in-crowd. Nicknamed “yankee girl” for her accent and attitudes, Alice has found it hard to make friends since moving to the deep south. Struggling between guilt and fear, it takes a tragedy for Alice to find the courage to act.

Yankee Girl is a truly resonant story about racism and doing the right thing, based on the author’s own eperiences.

As blurbs go, it’s not bad. It doesn’t really misrepresent the story too much. The story is told from Alice’s perspective, and focuses mainly on her choices and opinions. It’s very slice-of-life, and takes place over an entire school year (and a little bit more).

I say I don’t like slice-of-life stories very much, but that’s not really true. Some of my favourite books are SOL, they just also have a solid overarching plot and an interesting setting. One of the most important things in a book like that for me is to develop everything, including the setting. Make the main characters have learnt something by the end of the book, and crucially make society as a whole have changed in some way by the end of the book. One of my favourite examples of this is Anita & Me, where as well as Meenah’s coming-of-age story there’s also the general decline of the small town she lives in. Spud does it well too, though the political changes in South Africa in the early 90′s take a back seat to the lighthearted boarding school hijinks it’s still present. It makes the story feel... more real and connected, and is a very subtle way of fleshing out the setting. Yankee Girl does this really well in my opinion, the start of every chapter has a news headline. A really important moment (to me) from the end of the book is when Alice hears a song by The Supremes (A black singing group) on the radio and notes that though it’s small, it’s a sign that something has changed.

I guess it’s probably time to mention the elephant in the room, which is the theme of racism. A sheltered white girl is... probably not the best person to talk about that, so this is just personal opinion. There’s a trope called “white man’s burden”, where allies’ struggles are treated as bigger than those of the minorities they’re trying to help, and it’s a trope that Yankee Girl could easily fall into. Personally, I think it manages to avoid it. It never really portrays Alice’s struggles as worse than Valerie’s, it just so happens that Alice is the main character so we see her thoughts more. And Alice is the main character because the story is based very heavily on the author’s personal experiences in the same situation, not because “white main characters are better”.

When you say “book about historical racism in the US”, most people think of To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. It’s a pretty famous book. I read it a few years later, and I really enjoyed it. It’s well written and fascinating. But you know what? I think Yankee Girl is better, in some ways. What I remember from GCSE english (which I failed) is that the central theme and message of it is the idea that predjudiced people hurt and destroy innocent people. Which is nice, but it’s often used simply as a book to start people thinking about racial injustice and societally ingrained racism. Which is something it does well, but in my opinion it’s something that Yankee Girl does better. One of my favourite things about Mockingbird is how theatrical and crafted the story feels, every character and every event feels tailored to tell the message. Unfortunately that kind of makes it struggle as an educational book for me. Tom Robinson’s trial is so black and white that it feels contrived and unrealistic as a plot, it’s a great story (and the trial being exaggerated is kind of the point), but it doesn’t really feel like a genuine slice of 1930′s life. Yankee Girl, on the other hand, is much messier. The plot still has a climax, but the characters and events are much less crafted, it feels a lot more... lifelike. Life doesn’t always make for good stories, but it’s something that helps a story feel realistic, like it could actually happen. I can believe that what happened in that book really was something that happened, whereas Mockingbird feels like a performance, a well crafted play.

There’s another way Yankee Girl feels realistic, and it’s something that I think is really useful when writing in historical (or just non-contemporary) settings. The characters act like modern kids. Alice’s struggles to get into the popular crowd are something that wouldn’t really be out of place in a modern story, and it’s something that would be understandable to a young audience. The constant reference to music and fashion and celebrity gossip really helps this, it makes the characters feel like genuinely real people who exist, and helps the message that even normal people can be complicit in racism. The little things that keep the characters relatable go a long way to making the story work, and I think that’s the most important thing about this book.

While I’m criticising school-study media, I might as well compare it to Noughts & Crosses, gven the whole racism thing. Noughts & Crosses is... fucking heavy. I could write a whole other review on it, but it’s a book that aims to portray how racism and opression can be complicated on both sides (I never read it in school, my class did silas marner that year). Does it do that better than Yankee Girl? I’m not sure. Does the flipped setting really bring anything to that message, or does it ignore the potential of it in favour of the rest of the plot? Does the gut-punch naure of the plot just turn off readers and make it harder to understand the real context, or am I just saying that because I cried a lot reading it? Am I always going to be critical of it because I blame it for the popularity of YA dystopia? Does the romance work or is it unnecessary, or has the hunger games trilogy made me hate any straight romance in YAD? Is it even YAD? I... really don’t know how to feel about it as a book, maybe one day I’ll read the rest of the series and sit down and write something on the setting.

So all in all, it’s a really good book. I probably missed a lot of the stuff you’re supposed to have in a book review but hey, I talked about some other stuff and din’t get lost in tvtropes once. It’s not awful, it has an engaging story, and I may or may not have considered writing a shippy fix fic because Alice and Valerie’s friendship was very relatable to my useless bi heart.

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