octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

Well this is really just fucking depressing. Don't get me wrong - I was riveted, and read it all in a single sitting - but it's really, really depressing. There's a reason I haven't shelved this as romance, because there's no happy ending here.

It was an odd one to shelve, to be honest. Lots of people seem to have listed it as science fiction, but it's not really. I think the closest I can come is alternate history, although it's really more of an alternate present. Race relations if the races were reversed, and I was a little hesitant to read it because that has the potential to go so simplistically, spectacularly wrong. I write short fiction, and there's a reason a lot of the speculative fiction short story markets have "don't send stories like this" in their guidelines. But Blackman has really made it work here, and I think partly because so much of the plot has been clearly influenced by personal experience and historic events. A while back I read a memoir from Carlotta Walls LaNier, for instance, called A Mighty Long Way - it is excellent, you should read it - about her experiences as one of the first black children to attend the Little Rock High School, back when education was segregated in the United States, and her horrific experiences very closely resemble Callum's.

I think the real strength here, though, is the emotional reaction it evoked. I wasn't spoiled in advance - so I won't describe the ending here - but I can't say I was surprised, if that makes any sense. I'm white, and from the first few pages I had that horrible, gut wrenching flinch of a response to the story, precisely because - even though I haven't experienced racism first hand - I've educated myself to some level of awareness. It's an ongoing process. But knowing how cruel people can (and continue to be) over race... I could read and be sad and angry but not surprised, if that makes sense.

Anyway. This is the first book by Blackman that I've read. It won't be the last.

This novelette (novella?) is not quite as compelling as Noughts and Crosses, which I finished earlier today, but it's still an interesting read. The argument, I suppose, is one of destiny... that no matter your choices, fundamentally you end up with the same fate. In the world in which this is set, though, destiny is closely related to, if not absolutely indistinguishable with, racial prejudice. No matter what Callum chooses - and the story is an exercise in what might have happened had he made a different choice in the novel - the society around him, both Noughts and Crosses, will not tolerate his deviation from the expected behaviour. His romance with Sephy is anathema, no matter what path he takes, and it might doom him differently, but the doom is ultimately the same.

It lacks the sustained weight of the novel. Being so much shorter, it can hardly help it, of course. But without that weight, the misery isn't quite as affecting. I still liked it, but the novel was better.

This was fantastic, though the title is really a misnomer. I came into it expecting a general study of women and science, but it isn't that at all. The focus is much narrower - the collected essays here focus on women and medicine, with a very strong emphasis on women and reproductive health. A couple of chapters wander away from this: there's a fascinating one on the development of a rural Black clinic in apartheid South Africa (back when this book was written apartheid still existed) and an absolutely infuriating one on lead poisoning. The rest tend to focus on women's experiences with things like contraception and surrogacy. It's all very well researched and referenced, and the weight of evidence is clear: women's health is all too frequently almost irrelevant to the researchers tasked with promoting it. Economic and value-driven judgements about race and poverty are far more the drivers of research goals and policy, and the shoddy research done to support things like Depo-Provera is laid out clearly and is honestly shocking. I mean, this isn't the first book I've read that explores feminism and medicine, and frankly they all tend to be horrifying... this is no different.

Because it is a few decades old now, it's hard not to read this book and assess the validity of the predictions of some of the authors. Some have proved a little off the mark - though I suppose there's still time - but the concern that women from underdeveloped countries would be used increasingly as surrogates for wealthy first world families has been spot on.

There is no force on Earth that could ever get me to believe that Princess Leia would agree to elope to Hologram Fun World. That in itself is enough to merit the one star rating, as this series reverts to type... that type being perhaps the dumbest children's series I have ever read. Only one more of these terrible books to go, thank goodness, then I can get on to the rest of the tie-in novels.

I note, in an aside, that the authors themselves have become so bored with their twelve year old Jedi Prince Ken that he hardly appears in this volume. Maybe he fell into the Sarlacc. He can take this version of Leia with him. It would only be an improvement.

This is admittedly funny, but Bridget really is an idiot. I'm honestly surprised she's still alive at this point... but I suppose she's an object argument that stupidity isn't always fatal.

This is Jules Verne's first novel, and while it's only the third of his that I've read, there's a massive gap in quality between this and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, for instance. There are flashes of interest here, places where the characterisation very briefly sparks, but mostly I was only very mildly interested, and in some places it verged a little on tedium. There's a lot of detail on things I don't really care about - the mechanism of the balloon, for instance, plus Verne clearly enjoys showing off his knowledge about the history of European exploration of Africa - and the whole thing is very, very racist. And yeah, I know, product of its time, but I don't particularly enjoy reading that sort of thing, and I don't particularly enjoy Kennedy slaughtering every impressive or endangered animal he comes across either. The man's a dick; I wish he'd been eaten by crocodiles. I wouldn't have cared if any of them were eaten, frankly, and as for the murdered missionary... well, he sort of brought it on himself, didn't he? Some people don't know when to leave well enough alone.

No matter what you think of the idea of another culture evolving in parallel to Earth's, the central conceit of this book (and of the episode that inspired it) is that such has happened, so might as well swallow down disbelief at the thought of ancient Romans in Starfleet and make the best of it. Essentially, this civilisation has evolved as the Romans did, and became part of the Federation, and Picard and the Enterprise are assigned to work alongside the crew of the Centurion, who are from this Roman world. Credit where it's due, the authors do a decent job of integrating the cultural background of the Centurion into Starfleet. A lot of this integration comes across as anachronistic, but in a universe where Vulcan crews and Klingon crews are accepted as normal, for instance, it's one very short step to a crew defined by a history rather than a culture (they're both very much intertwined, of course, but you get what I mean).

It works here because the captain and crew of the Centurion may not be the heroes of the story, but they put forth a valid viewpoint regarding their assignment to protect a planet from invasion. They're arguing in good faith, and if that good faith doesn't last, exactly (I'm trying not to give away too many spoilers) then it's certainly credible while it does last. Also, there's a junior security officer, one of Worf's cohort, who is likeable and given a central role that is not one of redshirt, which doesn't often happen with security officers in this franchise.

Unfortunately, it's let down by the conclusion, which is absolutely weak. It's like the story ran out of puff... several storylines are wrapped up in bare paragraphs, and the final scene is entirely unearned. Picard may muse about how much of the Centurion's captain is reflected in himself, but the text goes out of its way, many times, to show the exact opposite. It's as if this reflection has been tacked on to end the story on a thoughtful note, and it really doesn't.

This is more like it - the best of the TNG tie-ins I've read for a while. Which is surprising, as the central problem of the story, in which several Enterprise officers are kidnapped and have their memories wiped, is not generally one that appeals to me. I don't dislike memory-wipe stories, exactly. It's just they never seem to really focus on character work as much as they should, which makes me think of them as a bit of a let down. That's not the case here - well, maybe it is with Geordi and Picard, a bit. But Friedman does a particularly good job with Worf, who finds himself brainwashed into taking part in endless battles... and who doesn't like it. The easy thing would have been to say "He's a Klingon warrior, he's going to fit right in," but Friedman doesn't do that. Instead he has Worf struggle with an aversion for conflict that he doesn't understand, but which is a product of his well-established dislike of dishonorable acts. It's actually done really well, and I would happily have read a whole book where Worf was the only one kidnapped, if the treatment of Pulaski hadn't come in a decent second.

Also, the focus on roles aboard the starship, and what it means to hold them, puts me in mind a little of Diane Carey's Ghost Ship, which remains the best of the TNG tie-ins for me thus far.

Four and a half stars, rounding up to five. If I must be perfectly honest, honest to the point of nitpicking, I think it dragged just a little bit in the middle and the poetry - with the exception of one which seems to be heavily inspired by Mary Oliver's Wild Geese - is not that great. However, the conclusion is really wonderful - one of those sad, happy, hopeful conclusions in which everyone's story, and all the relationships, are tied up perfectly. That ending covers a multitude of sins, and there aren't many sins here to cover. It's such an imaginative, emotive novel, full of fantastic images in both senses of the word. I was thoroughly delighted, and it's one of those library books which is going on my must-get-copy-of-my-own list, because I can see myself reading this again and again and never getting tired of it.

Two and a half stars, rounding up to three. Oh, I wanted to like this better than I did, and there were some good things about it, but there's one thing, above all else, that's dropping it down from a solid three star rating. This book's full of statistics, of numbers and data, and none of them are sourced. There's no references, no bibliography. There's not even a damn index! I'm sorry, but that's no longer good enough even in non-academic non-fiction. It just isn't. If I want to double check any of their claims, there's no easy way to locate the source. Look, the point of referencing is that if someone's trying to slip something dodgy in, or to massage the data to make it seem supportive of a particular viewpoint, the source can at least be checked. Bloomberg and Pope are very likely being honest, and I have no reason to think that they're not being so, but that's beside the point. People who believe everything they read swallowed down the fact the oil companies buried climate data for years, precisely because they lacked any critical or lateral reading skills, so you'll excuse me if I don't just go along.

That being said, there is some good stuff here. I do think cities are some of the real battlegrounds of climate, and I really appreciate the focus here on what cities can do, and have done, when national governments prove too hidebound to react appropriately to science. The use of concrete examples, such as those described in New York, seem both achievable and hopeful. However, I do think that the focus on the potential of cities to act as bulwarks against climate change has been seriously muddled, here, with the apparent wonder of the market.

Bloomberg, especially, is guilty of panegyric. He admits to being a devoted capitalist, but at least half of his examples and suggestions undermine this supposed approach. Most of them seem to rely on government intervention and I'm all for that, but don't tell me you need government to subsidise and legislate and that the resulting successes are all down to the free market, because they're not. There seems to be a lamentable tendency to ascribe success or failure to the market based on results valued in advance. The base idea here is good, and simple enough: that people will act in their own interests when it comes to the market. Jobs over polar bears, and so forth. But it seems to come down, over and over, to this: if companies are doing dodgy things with regard to climate, then it is government interventions (such as giant subsidies given to oil companies) that is stifling the market (poor market!) and preventing it from working as intended. To fix this, government intervention should make the desired results more competitive (by, for instance, increasing subsidies to renewable energy companies) thereby causing the market to work as intended, and properly.

It all seems a bit arse-ended, if you ask me, though nobody has, and takes away from the very useful focus on what cities can do. I am quite prepared to believe that cities can utilise market forces in order to help mitigate the effects of climate change (several examples of them doing so are well described in this book, so it's foolish to prevaricate on that point) but the desired private-public collaboration so promoted by the authors has more than a whiff of socialise-the-costs-and-privatise-the-profits. Indeed, one of Bloomberg's three major suggestions, in his conclusion, is that the publicly owned Tennessee Valley Authority should "put miners back to work rehabilitating the land that the coal companies have left so scarred" (259). I'd suggest making the coal companies pay for it, given some of the no doubt massive profits they made in their market-driven pursuit of best possible outcome for all, except, wait.

Capitalism can certainly help provide some of the solutions for climate change, but let's not pretend that it hasn't caused the whole problem in the first place, frequently and gleefully unrestrained by things like, oh, clean air and human dignity and regulatory oversight.

Anyway, that's enough ranting from me. In a nutshell: great basic idea, some fantastic examples, muddled by a devoted death grip on capitalism as a solution to all ills, and absolutely no fucking referencing, oh my God.