I mean, it’s pretty decent for 1974 for most of the book. During the whole first half, gay soldiers exist openly and sleep around just the same as all the others, and nobody has any issue with it. I actually liked that quite a bit, how incidental and not relevant it was that some of his fellow soldiers were homosexual.
But yeah, then you get to this homolife thing and it’s pretty clear that the main reason Haldeman introduced gay characters at all was to show that they were in the minority at the start, then became the majority by the end, for the purposes of further alienating the main character.
One of the big horror-ey moments near the end of the book is his good friend accepting the homolife treatment from the government and turning himself gay, just so he can fit in with the rest of society.
I get that his overall desire is to show that the world at the end of the book is unrecognizable to the main character, it’s just a bizarre idea to use for that purpose - that the government would have a sinister plan to make straights a minority for population control reasons. It’d be funny if times weren’t what they were and ridiculous anti-lgbt conspiracy shit like this is all over the place.
If I recall correctly the conclusion puts a very weird cherry on the “uh…” sundae of that whole thread (I reread it pretty recently after reading it (and the comic adaptation with slightly updated dates that we’ve still caught up with by now?) as an adolescent): he and the other soldier who survive the whole war retire to some resort planet/habitat for The Straights to be a Couple Unit and some other veterans decide I Think We’ll Be Straight Too! And go with them. They all live happily ever after in their segregated space, cause how could they ever fully adjust to homoworld?
Haldeman’s method for humanizing his characters has always been Okay But How Do They Fuck? so of course What If the Whole World Fucked Different Than You?! is the most alienating thing a young him could think of?
Still like the way he concieves of a lot of shit? He manages to encode the “long stretches of boredom punctuated by brief spikes of terror” rhythm you always hear about re: combat into the cludgy interplay of his tech and setpieces. But then there’s that other thing always simmering in the background.
I guess it is now time for me to read The Society of the Spectacle.
It’s me, the guy who made a documentary with a scene about Situationism, but has not read their most popular text. Here’s hoping I didn’t get it ALL WRONG!
I’m almost done with the second book of the Demon Cycle that started with the Warded man. I enjoyed the first book as mild power fantasy about trying to systems of complacency and having the courage to explore the world but the second book started to make some patterns apparent and not very good ones. The worst is its getting to casual with using sexual violence as a narrative tool. Right now I think any major female character has suffered these “trials” before getting to be baddass in their own rights. Because of this I do not want to reccomend them at all but it’s been ages since I sat down and tried to enjoy reading for the sake of reading. The yarn itself is serviceable but it leaves a very bad taste. Fell free to offer suggestions for other trashy fantasy reads to read before bed.
Society of the Spectacle update: Been slowly making my way through it. I tried to read it once several years ago and completely bounced off it, but this time I’m coming to it with a knowledge of marxist theory and terminology that’s making the book far more digestible.
It’s still a very difficult read. Debord himself once said that he threw red herrings and smokescreens in the book on purpose because the authorities can read the book too and he didn’t want to give them all the answers. But I’m mostly tracking the book so far. It makes a lot more sense once you escape the first chapter, which is mostly pithy catchphrases and provocative abstraction.
So far I think my film did not get it all wrong, so that’s a relief!
Had a short beach vacation and finally managed to read (in a single day) the rather short The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, which has been sitting on my bedside table for like 18 months. It was good.
Then needing more reading material I bought this massive volume of all the Earthsea books collected. Never read any Ursula LeGuin, to my shame. Got through the first four books. It is fantastic.
Introduction is all “I meant to write a two page aside and wound up writing a book” and “so few of my sources are available in English translation that I felt compelled to include quotes from my own in unusually large volume for this kind of work.”
The author of Warrior Churchmen of Medieval England, 1000-1250 is in the list of Special Thanks I may soon locate the center of the academic circlejerk.
i’ve not read it in like half a dozen years which is a lifetime ago for me, i don’t remember the details that well! always keen for a story where the scarred disfigured character isn’t a midboss-tier baddie though. plus yes the trauma stuff Wow
Uh, I don’t remember the criticisms so much now. I started back at work and my brain refilled with work.
Oh! I remember thinking: I understand the point she was trying to make with Ged, to make him wilting and pathetic having lost his magery which was his identity, but I thought it went a little too far and didn’t really encompass all the growing he had done as a character.
Also, I had a fundamental distaste for the inherent reactionary nature of the world. This isn’t specific to Tehanu, actually it’s more of a problem in the third book, but the idea that “with the True King on the throne we’ll have a centralized moral and political power which will make everything good again” chafes me. I understand that she was working within a folktale framework and partially subverted/enriched this narrative (how partially depends on how you read some subtleties I think), but still.
Oh, and lastly I was kind of bored of the whole chosen one thing by Tehanu. First Ged is a chosen one, then the King kid, and then finally the girl. Three Great World-Historical Inborn Talents is probably three too many. Again she was working within genre and did a lot of work to partially subvert. But still.
I want to emphasize how minor these complaints are against the absolutely beautiful wonders contained in these books, they are so good.
I am taking a break from my usual diet of flighty literary fiction to read the book of the new sun and while I see what you mean about marinara cribbing from it, I still think that the game’s facility with vignettes is hugely underappreciated in that case. I know this was a consistent point of criticism for many of the early reviewers while I was going through it, but I still admire how much they packed into five or six sentences about any given NPC who you knew wasn’t going to be important but who still contained multitudes; it was possible with that game to be a fairly quick and careless reader and still appreciate the range of imagery it threw at you without worrying you were missing something.
A few months ago I read one of the first sf (!) novels by a local author (!!) that I’ve really liked in a very long time, if anyone can find a copy of The Tiger Flu (I think it was a fairly small printing) and you trust my tastes in a genre that I like far less than most people here, then I recommend it!
Most appreciated in Wolfe’s fantasy is an understanding of religion and respect for ritual, profundities, fear, destiny that read as alien to our modern eyes but still form our deepest inheritance. It’s obvious in almost any given pullquote from BotNS and the care in describing objects, and placing them in the world and cosmos.
We’re doing heavy world-building at work and the most frustrating aspect is a disconnect from structures of belief. We spend hour constructing rules for how it is and mechanistic ramifications and power-structure outcomes and I always end with, ‘how do people X interpret this? Is this different from what it means to people Y’? And the jump to how it lives in hearts and minds is just blank. We can talk about what it actually is, and we can talk about things hidden to different groups, but nobody else wants to talk about how that informs a metaphoric world people live in.
And I think it’s the insanely positivist mindset game development requires. It literally is laying down a world atom by atom, Law by Law, and a mind is trained to shape these interactions towards direct, intended results, and stamp out unintended consequences, the heresies which bloom in bugs and exploits.
playing dnd in a mostly improvisational mode has been liberating in this regard. The starting point is always “this is what these characters believe” with the question of “well is it true” being secondary to character perceptions.
