The best Hereville yet!

There's a lot to talk about in this book, although the first thing I have to say is that I meant to read this months ago, except I have a policy of always listening to Emma Newman's books because I love the way she reads her own work. So it was a matter of finishing the audiobook rather than simply sitting down and reading.
It was really good. And it was strange and interesting and, in some ways, the plot is the least interesting part of the narrative because Newman sets her reader up immediately to recognize that this is a story about things falling apart. So the anticipation is not in finding out what happens or even in how, but in watching the ramifications and their effects on the main character.
A couple of months ago, I was complaining about a particularly bad case of "anxiety, but not really" in a different book. The main character had some of the hallmarks of anxiety, but it never seemed to get in his way or matter. He had just enough anxiety to (attempt to) make him sympathetic without dealing with the real ramifications of thinking that way. I really hated it. This book is the opposite of that. Newman writes her character's disorder with compassion, letting it be a part of her life and having its severity unfold organically.

Because we're in Ren's head, it takes a while before we know she's not merely nervous, but has a full blown anxiety disorder and even more time after that to recognize her hoarding.

The ending is...frustrating, in the way of such endings, because the story is clearly over and yet I wanted to know what happened next anyway. I wanted all the details Ren couldn't provide. But that's the hallmark of a good book - the sense that if you could just get a little further into it, there's a whole world there for you to learn about.

This book was brilliant! (Seanan's work and my tastes don't always get along—see my ongoing attempts to get into urban fantasy before getting halfway through a book and remembering I hate it—but omg this!)
The story itself was one of those narratives that are blindingly obvious once someone writes them, but also wonderfully innovative. And the characters are gorgeous and their heartbreak is real. But its also a great mediation on fantasy as escapism and what escapism and going home means.
The end...argh, I don't know what to do with the end. I understand why it frustrates, but at the same time, I can't think of a way to have done it better.

The point of the book was never to validate staying in the real world and just going on as best you can. The point was to validate the pain and experiences of having been elsewhere. The door had to open again and it had to open at the moment Nancy accepted staying in the real world because second best was the best she could have. There is no other happy ending that matches the rules of the halls of the dead. So it was abrupt, but in retrospect, it worked perfectly
Anyway, yes, this book was gorgeous.

So this was brilliant and hilarious and lovely and I kinda wanted to hug it by the time I finished. I see why it keeps turning up on awards lists. It's so well done!

The problem with trying to read a book of short stories is that, if they are good, you need to stop after every story and process it and then you end up taking way longer than you expected.
Tiptree is brilliant! I'd say I can't believe I haven't read her before, but given how I basically skipped the entire golden age of sf, it's not all that surprising. But she's so good. Her stories lean towards the tragic and beautiful, and they get...odder over time, but I'm so glad I got to read her and can't wait to teach her this summer.

I rage-finished this book. No, seriously, I finished it by dreaming of the angry Goodreads review I would write when I was done because it wasn't enough to be angry silently, I had to explain what was so wrong with it.
And I wanted so badly to like it. I loved the idea of deconstructing the tropes of fantasy by merging book and reader, by bringing in the "real" to analyze the text and it's all there, but it's all wrong.
Also, where the hell did Pip go to university where she could write about trope laden, contemporary fantasy as her dissertation without moving into a larger feminist or new historicist reading of fantasy as such?
But I digress. The biggest problem I had, the character that fundamentally ruined the book for me, was Forsyth Turn, whose point of view I had the distinct displeasure of sharing. He's the worst.
In attempting to deconstruct the trope of the uncouth adventurer—one version of masculine supremacy—Frey introduces us to the intellectual polymath who embodies the other main expression of masculine supremacy that has dogged society for ages. Instead of the entitled asshole, she gives us the man child for whom women exist as balm to his lack of self esteem. Instead of the jock, we get Forsyth Turn, male nerd extraordinaire.
In the beginning, he's written as a character with serious anxiety, but without the actual emotional and situational ramifications that having anxiety brings. It is never disabling. There are so few protagonists with actual mental disabilities and you could have given us one.
But no, instead we get another variation of the man for whom women exist only insofar as they better his life. He wants to love, but he had an amazingly hard time of conceiving of love as anything beyond "you make me feel good". Love is broken when it hurts him and only acceptable when it makes him feel good. His low self esteem is fixed by falling in love, which is NOT how that works in the real world.
Which brings me to Pip. In an attempt to deconstruct the treatment of women in fantasy, Frey subjects her female protagonist to EVERY SHITTY FEMALE TROPE in the genre. And Pip points this out, but a bit of acknowledgement does not a deconstruction make. The text doesn't do anything with those moments and the really insidious ones, the way that women in fantasy lack narrative agency and are treated as the prize for the protagonist, remain integral to the story.
There are lots of moments, but there is one in particular I HAVE to call out

After it's revealed that Pip has been under mind control, Forsyth the ever-entitled is unable to step back and appreciate why she doesn't want him near her. He kisses her without her consent and she flips (I cheered). To cope, he then sacrifices his love for her to move along the quest, which she also finds hurtful and the goddamn narrative sides with him!!! Her refusal to open up to him after she's been grossly violated is equated to his pain at being rejected. The narrative privileges the experience of male rejection over her experience of rape and violation and later has her FUCKING APOLOGIZE for hurting him and then demanding he not hurt her. No. Just no. Context matters. Experience matters. Her trauma is not the same as his and it's one of the most dangerous expressions of patriarchy in our culture that rejection is considered as bad as if not worse than coercion.

The Untold Turn entirely fails in its project to upend the tropes of misogynist fantasy. It leaves behind the overt misogyny of the jock and revels in the misogyny of the geek, creating a character whose worship of women as unattainable and inability to love her beyond how she makes him feel makes me want to vomit. By the end of the book, I was so disappointed that Frey couldn't have managed the really radical story and had Pip just punch him in the face and leave with naught but the cry of good riddance. Or just given her a voice at all.

Delany is fascinating, I can't believe it took me so long to get to his fiction. He's one of the masters of thoughtful sci fi.

I would like to give this book a hug and then give the entire series to my daughter. But she's not yet one, so that might have to wait.

Oh man, I can't even with this book. It's so brilliant and interesting and chock full of goodies if you know anything about the 18th century and it ends on a cliffhanger, which is just the outside of enough.
I can't believe how amazingly it pulled off everything, from the critical utopia to the science in the science fiction to the sheer exuberance to the style of the 18the century novel. Seriously, the only thing missing is the sequel!

It's about time I went back to the classics of the golden age. Also, I'm teaching it this summer.
It shows some of its age (not just in the chronological setting), but overall it stands up pretty darn well.