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Books
Reading is one of the few things I have brainpower to do while recovering from the Cold Virus of Doom.
I finally got around to reading the first book of CJ Cherryh's Foreigner series and I really liked it.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
xparrot, you like that series, right? I remember bouncing off this book the first time I tried to read it in the late '90s because the alienness of the atevi and Bren's emotional isolation was too hard for me to deal with (although I apparently got farther along than I thought I had; there were vaguely familiar elements up to the middle of the book). This time, though, I really loved it! Younger Me stopped reading before all the good parts happened! (Also, wow, Cherryh really beats up on her characters. And she does good aliens.) Looks like the library has the rest of them, so I'll have to go pick those up!
And I read The Forever War on the general principle that I really need to read more of the influential sci-fi classics if I'm going to write in the field. Like a lot of older sci-fi, this book is more of a snapshot of its era than a vision of the future; not just because it's an undisguised Vietnam analogy, but there is also so much about the way that Haldeman extrapolated from '60s social trends into the future in a straight linear way that turned out to be just completely wrong. No, we don't have cheap, legal heroin, public nudity and massively relaxed sexual mores ... though I can see how someone who came of age in the '60s would think we'd have all of that by now! I found it really interesting, too, that in spite of some disconnect because of assumptions about people and society that made more sense in 1974 than in 2013, it actually felt a LOT less dated than I was expecting (for a book of its era) in terms of gender equality, racial equality and whatnot. Haldeman's future military is fairly diverse and gender-integrated, and while there are places where he totally missed the boat*, he doesn't really seem to handle female soldiers any differently from male soldiers.
*Like the way that male and female soldiers are required to pair off for daily sex in order to keep sexual tension from getting out of hand. On the one hand, it's a rather unique solution for what must have seemed like a problem to the author, who had only experienced a male-only military. On the other hand, what.
And I can't figure out how to feel about the way the book handles sexual orientation. As the Earth becomes increasingly overpopulated, homosexuality is encouraged and eventually mandatory, so towards the end of the book, EVERYONE except the protagonist (and the residents of a few heterosexual communes) is gay. Like the integrated-military stuff, it vacillates between "darn good for the 1970s" and "Wait, no, WHAT DID I JUST READ?"
Also, reading these books back-to-back made me kind of sad that there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of anthropological sci-fi being written nowadays -- sci-fi that's about encountering alien societies that are truly alien, or extrapolating ahead to wildly different future societies. Or maybe there is, and I'm just not reading it?
I finally got around to reading the first book of CJ Cherryh's Foreigner series and I really liked it.
xparrot, you like that series, right? I remember bouncing off this book the first time I tried to read it in the late '90s because the alienness of the atevi and Bren's emotional isolation was too hard for me to deal with (although I apparently got farther along than I thought I had; there were vaguely familiar elements up to the middle of the book). This time, though, I really loved it! Younger Me stopped reading before all the good parts happened! (Also, wow, Cherryh really beats up on her characters. And she does good aliens.) Looks like the library has the rest of them, so I'll have to go pick those up!And I read The Forever War on the general principle that I really need to read more of the influential sci-fi classics if I'm going to write in the field. Like a lot of older sci-fi, this book is more of a snapshot of its era than a vision of the future; not just because it's an undisguised Vietnam analogy, but there is also so much about the way that Haldeman extrapolated from '60s social trends into the future in a straight linear way that turned out to be just completely wrong. No, we don't have cheap, legal heroin, public nudity and massively relaxed sexual mores ... though I can see how someone who came of age in the '60s would think we'd have all of that by now! I found it really interesting, too, that in spite of some disconnect because of assumptions about people and society that made more sense in 1974 than in 2013, it actually felt a LOT less dated than I was expecting (for a book of its era) in terms of gender equality, racial equality and whatnot. Haldeman's future military is fairly diverse and gender-integrated, and while there are places where he totally missed the boat*, he doesn't really seem to handle female soldiers any differently from male soldiers.
*Like the way that male and female soldiers are required to pair off for daily sex in order to keep sexual tension from getting out of hand. On the one hand, it's a rather unique solution for what must have seemed like a problem to the author, who had only experienced a male-only military. On the other hand, what.
And I can't figure out how to feel about the way the book handles sexual orientation. As the Earth becomes increasingly overpopulated, homosexuality is encouraged and eventually mandatory, so towards the end of the book, EVERYONE except the protagonist (and the residents of a few heterosexual communes) is gay. Like the integrated-military stuff, it vacillates between "darn good for the 1970s" and "Wait, no, WHAT DID I JUST READ?"
Also, reading these books back-to-back made me kind of sad that there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of anthropological sci-fi being written nowadays -- sci-fi that's about encountering alien societies that are truly alien, or extrapolating ahead to wildly different future societies. Or maybe there is, and I'm just not reading it?
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I ALWAYS HAVE SHOUT-OUTS FOR ANYONE WHO MENTIONS FOREIGNER! ♥
I adore that series and am always delighted to find another fan!
vacillates between "darn good for the 1970s" and "Wait, no, WHAT DID I JUST READ?"
Haha, whoa, wow. Yeah, that's... special. I'm torn between boggling and amusement; I love sci-fi, but have read little of the 'classic stuff', so I'm always surprised by things like this. :D
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