Brain Droppings

 Hi I am very tired.

Give a listen to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff's entire last few weeks, which has been about the alter-globalization movement, but especially to this week's episodes, "Bread and Puppet: The Dawn of Giant Protest Puppets." (Part I | Part II). This is one of my special interests, stemming from how I used to teach at a puppetry camp, and I've actually been lucky enough to visit Bread and Puppet in Vermont on a road trip, albeit not quite lucky enough to see one of their shows. I am always in favour of more theatricality in activism and these episodes trace the evolution of one particular brand of theatricality that I'm especially a fan of.

I bet you will be surprised to learn that the personal stories of the two founders of the theatre are also especially interesting. Also, since Jamie Loftus is the guest, there is a tragic hot dog connection.

 Just finished: Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Yeah, I think this is my Hugo best novel pick. It was really good, really timely, fucking gross, and gave me nightmares. It's very much a confluence all of Tchaikovsky's quirks—rather darkly funny narrator, alien minds, and the particular type of resolution he goes for. All of those things happen to work for me quite a bit. This one reminded me quite a bit of Jeff Vandermeer but less nihilistic and I liked the characters more.

Currently reading: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett. This was the only novel on the Hugo list where I'd never heard of the author or the book. I'm loving it so far though. It's a murder mystery set in a city where only engineered seawalls stop the things from Attack on Titan from demolishing the place every wet season. A noble is murdered in a mansion (not his mansion) via a tree growing through his body. The person charged with investigating the murder is an old autistic woman who doesn't leave her house so she gets a young man to be her eyes and ears. The murder mystery structure makes it rather different from not just this batch of nominees but the other award lists in general, which is also intriguing.

Just finished: A Sorceress Comes To Call by T. Kingfisher. I ended up really loving this one. Reading all these award-nominated books has been a fascinating experience tbh, because (with a few notable exceptions) it's all pretty high-quality, but it's just off enough from what I'd normally read that I get to speculate about where my taste deviates from other people's. Also, because this has the worst book cover I've seen in awhile—to be clear, I've seen three covers for this and they all suck—but imo is much better than the other things I've read by her so far.

Anyway, as to the actual content. This is a dark retelling of the Grimm Brothers' "Goose Girl," which I had never heard of before, and which is already quite dark, seeing as it features the severed head of a murdered horse. It actually doesn't have much to do with the original story beyond involving a horse, a flock of geese, and some unfortunate marriage proposals. But the fairy tale frame and vaguely Regency setting is one of its strengths—Kingfisher is free to do a lot of interesting character work within that structure.

Case in point: Hester. I mentioned that the story was about Cordelia and her mother Evangeline, the aforementioned sorceress, but Cordelia is really a decoy protagonist, and the heroine of the story is Hester, the sister of the man that Evangeline intends to marry. Hester is 51 with a bad knee and a cane and has refused marriage to the man she's loved for years because she values her independence. She plays cards with a group of other badass middle-aged ladies and takes zero shit. I love her. The story is really the story of solidarity between women, from Hester and her friends, to Cordelia pushing back in any way she can against her mother's abuse and expectations of marriage for her, to the maids and servants of the household. Also it has the right level of darkness for something like this—there was a genuine sense of peril that I haven't seen in a lot of the horror-adjacent works I've read lately.

Currently reading: Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I think (unless the last book I have to read is amazing), this is going to end up being a Tchaikovsky-vs-Tchaikovsky decision for me with the Hugos. So far this one is edging out Service Model on concept alone, but I'm under halfway through, so we'll see. It's about a dissident scientist exiled to one of three newly discovered exoplanets, called Kiln. Earth is ruled by the Mandate, which believes in strict social control and scientific orthodoxy. Arton is an unreliable first-person narrator, so while he initially seems to have been exiled for following the scientific method to is logical conclusions, he quickly reveals that no, he was also a political revolutionary.

The journey from Earth to Kiln takes 30 years and is one-way for the prisoners sent to work there, which means that the Mandate is able to tightly control information about it—namely, that there are alien ruins on the planet, so not only does it have life, but it had at least at one point sentient life. Also, the life that they do find is Jeff Vandermeer-level fucked—each organism is made up of a bunch of other organisms that live in parasitic relationships, making taxonomy a nightmare. Arton occupies a difficult position where, as a biologist, he has a certain level of privilege amongst the prisoners and is exposed to less danger than most, but also he's linked up with the more revolutionary elements and has nothing to lose but a nasty death by rebelling.

Anyway, this is really cool and I'm into it.