Fic Alphabet

Oct. 28th, 2025 02:36 pm
minutia_r: (Default)
[personal profile] minutia_r

I did this meme when it was going around Tumblr about a month and a half ago, and since it's going around here now, I will simply shamelessly copy and paste my answers for those of you who didn't see it then.

Rules: How many letters of the alphabet have you used for a fic title? One fic per line, ‘A’ and 'The’ do not count for 'a’ and ’t’. Post your score out of 26 at the end, along with your total fic count.

A- Advice given by Attolia Irene to Eddis Helen on the occasion of the latter's coronation (and Eddis' response) (Queen's Thief, 261 words, what it says on the tin. Sestina.)

B- Bless You and Keep You (Murderbot Diaries, 65 words, Iris & her dads. Three-sentence fic.)

C- Came Back Wrong (Witch King, 83 words. Poetry (free verse))

D- Doubt (Lackadaisy, 330 words. Mordecai finds religion (sort of))

E- Equipment Fault (Murderbot Diaries, 111 words, Murderbot. Sonnet-ish.)

F- From the Depths I Called to You (Queen's Thief, 932 words, Costis & Eugenides the God (+ a little bit of Kamet). Missing scene)

G- greet your beast and let 'em streak into the fray (Enchanté (song by The Dirt-Poor Robins), 1032 words, original werewolf characters, slice of life if your life involves trying to take down the shadowy government agency who turned you into a living weapon.)

H- Happy Little Accident (Stand Still Stay Silent, 782 words. Reynir-centric. Exploring some crack theories, highly context-dependent.)

I- it's the rest of the world that looks so small (Critical Role, 22 words, Orym/Will. Mourning. Poetry (free verse))

J- Jester's Hymn to Gender (Critical Role, 94 words. What it says on the tin. Poetry (free verse))

K- Kallohonka (Stand Still Stay Silent, 1569 words. Ensi & Lalli. Backstory.)

L- Loose Every Knot (Cyteen, 319 words. Scenes from Ari I's childhood, featuring Estelle Bok II.)

M- Mother of the Silent (Raven Tower, 98 words. Zezume & Mawat. Rhyming poetry, I honestly don't remember if I was following a historically recognized form or not? It's certainly not one of the better-known ones, but it's got internal rhymes, so it might be one of the obscure Welsh ones.)

N- Not a Path, But All Paths (Hexwood, 389 words. The Wood/The Bannus. I am fairly confident that this is the only fic that exists of this particular pairing.)

O- Oh, it's you (Stand Still Stay Silent, 69 words. Michael/Signe. Poetry (free verse))

P- Peel Me an Orange (Queen's Thief, 111 words, Attolia/Eugenides, fluff. Three-sentence fic. Did you know I've got an improbable number of stories that start with P? I didn't!)

Q- The Queen's Favorite (Goose Girl, 1179 words. Warning: rape.)

R- Riot of Flowers (Original Work, 40 words. Post-Apocalypse. Rhyming poetry.)

S- so dizzy with the altitude (it's just too far) (The Man I Knew (song by Dessa), 1256 words. Original magic students (despite the title of the song, their genders are unspecified))

T- Tear Him for His Bad Verses (Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 112 words. Cinna the Poet/Cinna the conspirator. I'm fairly confident that this is the only fic of this particular pairing, too. Sonnet.)

U- Useful Crafts (Heroes of Olympus, 17439 words. Look, it's what some might consider an actual full-length fic! Leo, Annabeth, and Rachel go on a quest.)

V- Vermin (Hawk & Fisher, 694 words. Accidental pet acquisition. Warning: rats.)

W- Wrong-footed (A:tLA, 1412 words. Suki/Toph with background Suki/Sokka.)

X- I got nothing.

Y- You're My Wings (Wings (music video by Pixy), 1133 words. F/F dark fairytale.)

Z- Again, nothing.

Score: 24/26

So yeah, like pretty much everyone else, I'm missing X and Z.

Total number of works: 248

Seven Deadly Book Sins

Oct. 28th, 2025 09:59 am
osprey_archer: (books)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
[personal profile] sovay just posted this delightful meme, so I had to snag it.

1. Lust, books I want to read for their cover.

I just put a book on hold for this very reason: Sophia Gonzalez’s Nobody in Particular. Isn’t that a gorgeous cover? A bit suspicious of modern YA on principle, but I figured I owed it to the cover designer to at least give the book a try.

2. Pride, challenging books I've finished.

Lydia Chukovskaya’s Sofia Petrovna, in the original Russian, which I read for a class in my senior year of college. I got caught up in the story and spent an afternoon curled up before the fire, plowing through the remaining chapters. This apparently unlocked the next level of my Russian ability, because the next time I had to read aloud in class, I read so well that my professor asked me to read the next paragraph too, I think just to make sure that it wasn’t a fluke.

3. Gluttony, books I've read more than once.

Many! I’m an inveterate re-reader. Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books (as a child I always called them the “Laura and Mary” books, and have never quite accepted that the general name for the series is Little House), Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Changeling and The Headless Cupid and The Egypt Game, and so forth and so on… why buy books if not to reread? If I just want to read a book one time, that’s what the library is for.

4. Sloth, books on my to-read list the longest.

Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me is probably the one that’s been there longest, but honorable mentions to Elizabeth Kostova’s The Swan Thieves and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. There are just too many books! I can’t get to them all!

5. Greed, books I own multiple editions of.

I don’t think I actually own multiple editions of any books right now. I DID have two editions of Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Changeling at one time, because I found a signed copy (!) at Goodwill, but then I lent my unsigned copy out to someone who never gave it back (and can you blame them?) so I’m down to one again.

6. Wrath, books I despised.

Well, I did just finish a four-post series ripping The Amber Spyglass to shreds…

7. Envy, books I want to live in.

At this particular moment in world history, an awful lot of books look like a better place to live than reality. Anne of Green Gables and The Secret Garden are perennial choices, of course. (A Little Princess is dearer to my heart than The Secret Garden, but I wouldn’t want to live at Miss Minchin’s!) Betsy-Tacy’s Deep Valley. As a child I would have loved to live in any one of a number of fantasy novels, but as an adult I prefer to visit at a literary remove on account of the high degree of Mortal Peril.

Misc +++

Oct. 26th, 2025 09:11 am
yuuago: (Conclave - Benitez - Listening)
[personal profile] yuuago
+ Work has been super busy lately. And also there were quite a few days where I had to do everything by myself because my coworker was absent. It's not a big deal but I sure do feel Tired (TM). On the upside, my boss seems happy with my performance. We're heading toward my 1-year anniversary at my job, so it's good to know that she thinks I'm doing well.

+ Note To Self: Make a post about books when you have a moment. Because I do have some things to say about books. (Stuff read recently + library's upcoming challenge)

+ Went to a free yoga class yesterday. It was at a studio I've heard good things about, and was organized through our local pride org. It was quite nice! Very good facilities actually, and the instructor was great. I'm glad I went! Much less intense than what I would usually do at home, but giving it some thought, a gentle workout was probably what I needed after doing judo class that morning. Will have to see if I can shuffle the schedule to find a good time to try one of their other classes, because while I can do it at home as time allows, I think it might also be beneficial to me to do some in-person guided stuff.

+ I think I've been overscheduling myself again. I'm looking at my calendar and there are so many things on it, and they are all things that I want to do and am excited about, but at the same time I'm like "Nooooo :c". Over the next month I'm going to a lecture at the library, a pride coffee meetup, a different pride meetup, a pride craft session, a pride potluck, AND I'll be going to Edmonton for several days as well and doing a whole bunch of things there (including going to 2 concerts and 1 wine festival). ...Plus judo three times per week. I, uh, I think I'll need to cut back once all these events are finished. It's just kind of difficult to find a balance between "all these fun things are happening" and "I want to get out and Do Things More and exist in the community" and "I also need to rest and relax occasionally".

+ In light of the above, it's like, well shit. No wonder I haven't been writing much this year. I've been doing other stuff! (What a revelation.)

+ [DW Icons rec] 200 icons by [personal profile] nowhere in [community profile] insomniatic. Some autumn stuff, some spooky stuff, some animals, some general stock. I don't know if I'll use any of these myself but I thought they were quite nice and wanted to share.

Database maintenance

Oct. 25th, 2025 08:42 am
mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
[staff profile] mark posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance

Good morning, afternoon, and evening!

We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)

I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.

Ta for now!

osprey_archer: (books)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
Swinging back around to my Newbery posts. [personal profile] hedgebird asked: Is the medalist usually the best of the nominees?

This is kind of hard to answer because it’s so subjective which book is best in any particular year, but my feeling is that overall the likelihood that the medalist is the best in any given year is only slightly greater than chance. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t, sometimes you could probably provoke a fistfight over which book is best.

It’s apparently a known phenomenon with award committees that they sometimes go with the compromise candidate that everyone could agree on, rather than the perhaps better but more divisive candidates. There are definitely years where I suspect that's what happened with the Newbery.

My original Newbery project only encompassed the Medal winners. I expanded it to include the Honor books because so many of my personal favorite books are Honor books, and I had a suspicion that I might find some new favorite books or favorite authors that way, which indeed I did. I might have missed Mary Stolz and Jennie Lindquist forever if it weren’t for the Newbery Honor project.

Whoops

Oct. 22nd, 2025 06:30 pm
yuuago: (Norway - Banana)
[personal profile] yuuago
Opened up an old, unfinished draft to take a look at it.

The opening paragraph has the main character answering a call on a landline.

Whew. This thing sure is old. But it's not that old; it's from 2015, and was supposed to take place around that time, so I don't really have many excuses for this.

Ah, well, I'll set that aside, it'll be easy to fix later.

Headcanons related to Hetalia characters and landlines, brought on by said fic )

Wednesday Reading Meme

Oct. 22nd, 2025 08:08 am
osprey_archer: (books)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I picked up Vivien Alcock’s The Cuckoo Sister intending to read a chapter or two, and then ended up mainlining the whole book. Before Kate was born, her older sister Emma was kidnapped from her pram. When Kate is eleven years old, a girl shows up at the door with a note saying that she’s Emma… but is she?

The focus of the book is not so much on the “is she or isn’t she?” detective work (it’s 1985, so they can’t get a DNA test, but they could at least get a blood test), but on the emotional impact primarily on Kate and Emma, who was raised as a Rosie and had no idea she might be the kidnapped Emma until Kate’s parents let her read the note she had unwittingly delivered. Totally absorbing. A fast read, highly recommended.

I also intended to take my time with D. E. Stevenson’s Young Mrs. Savage, in which a young widow and her four children return to the Scottish seaside town where she grew up, but instead I ended up taking it down in two gulps. One thing I really like about Stevenson’s work is that her children are always people: you never think she’s saying “How do six-year-olds act?”, as if six-year-olds were interchangeable, but “How would Mark and Nigel react to this circumstance?”

You would imagine that more authors could do this, as every author was at one point a child, but in fact this seems to be surprisingly difficult.

I also read Elizabeth von Arnim’s Elizabeth and Her German Garden, a memoir/novel about an Englishwoman married to a Prussian count who finds happiness through reviving the garden on his estate. Gorgeous garden descriptions, almost quit in the middle because I was so fed up with the narrator’s smug sense of superiority to just about everyone: peasants of course, Germans in general, people who want to live in towns and don’t think the idea of being snowed in all winter sounds just lovely. Persevered, glad I finished it, doubtful if I’ll seek out any of von Arnim’s other work even though I loved The Enchanted April, as I suspect now I’ll see traces of that selfsame smugness in it all.

What I’m Reading Now

I finished Among the Shadows, so I’ve swung back around to A Cavalcade of Sea Legends, which actually I think is more effectively spooky anyway. There’s just something eerie about the sea.

What I Plan to Read Next

Procrastinating on Interview with the Vampire, because I’m pretty sure that when I read it, it’s going to become my entire personality for about a month. Will that be because I love it or because I hate it? Well, it could go either way.
osprey_archer: (books)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
And now for a wrap-up of a few final Amber Spyglass thoughts that I couldn’t fit into my earlier posts.

First, beyond all the other reasons I hated the ending of The Amber Spyglass as a child, I also loathed it as yet another variation of the evergreen classic of the children losing the magic at the end of a children’s fantasy novel: Peter and Susan can’t return to Narnia because they’re too old, Fern loses interest in talking animals because a boy took her on the Ferris wheel, etc.

Upon reread, I discovered that this isn’t technically what’s happening at the end of The Amber Spyglass. Yes, the timing does happen to coincide with Will and Lyra falling in love, but technically Lyra loses the ability to read the alethiometer because that ability was given to her by grace (by the rebel angels, one presumes) and has been taken away now that her quest is over. And Will breaks the subtle knife (which gives him the ability to travel between worlds) because the subtle knife turns out to be releasing a soul-eating Spectre every time it opens a doorway between worlds.

So they’re not losing the magic because they personally have grown too old, which at least still leaves room for another child (for instance, the child reader) to have a magical adventure. They’re losing the magic because every magic doorway forever must be closed, because the magic portals are actually EVIL. The magic was BAD ALL ALONG.

***

And finally, swinging back around to Dust. In the first book, Dust is a big mystery: it settles on humans, especially adults, but not animals, not even the armored bears who talk and wear armor and have kings etc. The Magisterium thinks that Dust is sin, which, okay, the Magisterium and I clearly have a different understanding of sin (the bears clearly have the ability to knowingly do wrong, which is how I would define sin), but sure! Why not! The Magisterium is clearly supposed to be wrong anyway and the story is great, so I’m not getting bogged down in metaphysics.

Unfortunately, the story became less great and the metaphysics became more explicit. In The Amber Spyglass, we learn that “Dust came into being when living things became conscious of themselves.” Dust is like “the stars of every galaxy in the sky, and every one of them was a little fragment of conscious thought.” And the doorways between worlds are draining away the Dust, and without Dust, “Thought, imagination, feeling, would all wither and blow away, leaving nothing but a brutish automatism; and that brief period when life was conscious of itself would flicker out like a candle in every one of the billions of worlds where it had burned brightly.”

Well, first of all, this breaks Pullman’s own worldbuilding. We know that the armored bears are capable of conscious thought, feeling, and even imagination: we saw Iofur Raknisson with his doll daemon perched on his knee. They understand themselves to be bears, think about what it means to be bears, and understand death. Why don’t they get Dust?

I think the answer to the armored bears question specifically is that Pullman hadn’t fully thought through that aspect of his worldbuilding in book one. But unfortunately for Pullman, this issue is far wider than the armored bears. It touches on one of my pet topics of animal intelligence, and can I just say: Holy Descartes!

So animals are merely brutish automatons, incapable of thought, imagination, or feeling? I realize that research in animal intelligence has become more widely known since this book was published in 2001, but that was still decades after Jane Goodall did her pioneering chimp research. The general public may not have been up on the intelligence of cephalopods and crows, but we knew great apes and dolphins were smart. We may have even been vaguely aware of elephant intelligence.

And I simply feel that if you are writing a book series about the nature of consciousness, maybe you should, in fact, familiarize yourself with the latest research about the nature of consciousness.

It’s incredibly frustrating that Pullman is taking aim at the destructive impact of certain Christian teachings on Western society but straight-up recreates the belief that humans are different from animals not merely in degree but in kind. We are not simply the smartest animals, we are the only conscious animals at all, in fact not really animals but marked out by the cosmos as different by the way that we attract the glowing golden particles of conscious thought that are Dust.

AWS outage

Oct. 20th, 2025 10:11 am
alierak: (Default)
[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.
osprey_archer: (books)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
In my previous post, Lyra and Will cut a doorway out of the land of the dead so the dead can rejoin the living world and joyfully dissolve. They also accidentally killed God. Has Lyra fulfilled the prophecy that the fate of the entire multiverse hinges upon her actions?

Nope! The actual fulfillment of the prophecy comes when… drumroll please… Lyra and Will fall in love!

I cannot express how much I hated this development as a child. Not only did I generally hate romance in books, but I had pegged Pullman in my mind as “one of the good ones,” an author of complex and interesting children’s books that did NOT involve romance. So I felt incredibly betrayed when Will and Lyra not only fell in love, but this romance with the central linchpin the story.

Since I knew it was coming this time, I couldn’t feel betrayed by it in the same way, but I still think it’s just silly that this is the fulfillment of the prophecy. Whatever you may think theologically about letting the dead out of the land of the dead or killing God, you have to admit that these are both momentous and prophecy-worthy actions. A couple of pubertal kids falling in love? This is happening in five thousand middle schools as I type. Why should it have gigantic multiversal consequences when Will and Lyra do it?

Pullman offers no explanation. I think we’re just supposed to accept that it’s so because Lyra is the most special girl in the world, and listen. I agree that Lyra is the most special girl in the world. It makes total sense to me that character after character becomes willing to die for her within about fifteen minutes of their first meeting. [personal profile] littlerhymes and I started to call this “getting Lyra-brained” because it happens so often, and I too am completely Lyra-brained.

But I am not so very Lyra-brained that it makes sense to me that Lyra falling in love would have cosmic consequences not just for her own world but for the entire multiverse, especially given that, let’s face it, Will is not the most special boy in the world. Pullman can tell me as many times as he wants that Will is such a fierce warrior that Serafina Pekkala can’t meet his daemon’s eyes, but at the end of the day, Will is just some guy. Sorry Will. It’s not his fault that he’s boring, but he is in fact just boring.

However, even though I hated Will and Lyra getting together, I also hated that they get torn apart more or less immediately thereafter. It turns out that gateways between worlds drain the Dust out of worlds (Dust, by the way, turns out to be stuff of conscious thought, and we’re going to return to this in a final post), and because the gateway out of the land of the dead has to remain open, it’s impossible to keep a doorway open for Will and Lyra to visit each other. And also they can’t decide to live together in just one world because if you live outside of your own world, you sicken and die in about ten years. Sorry! Those are the rules!

If Pullman had established these rules earlier, then okay MAYBE, but he basically pulls them out of his ass in this book to ensure this tragic end, especially the bit about “there can only be one doorway.” Really? Really? There isn’t enough Dust in the whole multiverse to keep two doors open? You couldn’t keep a second doorway open for the boy and the girl who LITERALLY SAVED THE MULTIVERSE?

Also, for a series that is about rebelling against Authority, the characters are awfully quick to buckle down and renounce happiness when an authority figure tells them to do so. Will and Lyra, have you considered saying “Fuck you” to Xaphania when she tells you a second door is out of the question?

(no subject)

Oct. 19th, 2025 10:33 pm
yuuago: (B5 - Londo - Working)
[personal profile] yuuago
I found myself thinking that I really miss NaNoWriMo. It's not so much a Thing any more for various reasons; a lot of people have tried to cook up replacements, but of course it's not quite the same.

There used to be in-person write-ins here in Fort Mac, and they were pretty fun while they lasted. Bummer that they aren't a thing any more. (Not that I'm going to put the effort into starting that up again.)

:Va I was kind of thinking about making a Writing Goal for November, but I think it might be more achievable to aim for finishing at least one thing, rather than a specific wordcount. We'll see!

(no subject)

Oct. 18th, 2025 10:12 pm
yuuago: (Norway - Banana)
[personal profile] yuuago
Apparently one of my fics was recced in a comment on Pinterest. Not sure which post specifically, mind you.

I wasn't aware that place even had a comment section.

(no subject)

Oct. 17th, 2025 09:37 pm
yuuago: (Conclave - Benitez - Smile)
[personal profile] yuuago
I'm kind of thinking that I want to rewatch Conclave. Just in the mood. There's something about watching a Good Film that I've already seen a couple of times that makes me appreciate it even more. You know, the costuming, the composition of thoughts, the set dressing. Stuff like that.

It'd be kind of fun to watch it with somebody else, but nobody I know in person is into it. Bummer.

And of course, a rewatch would be yet another chance to stare at the most beautiful brown eyes the world has ever seen (according to me, at the moment). Bloody hell I sure do hope Carlos Diehz will be in more movies in the future. He was so good in Conclave! And also he's very handsome!

Gotta' hand it to him, he sure does prove that it's never too late to try something you've always wanted to do, and also have a great time doing it. And also make Quite An Impression to tons of people, apparently. That last bit is outside reach for most and not what everyone's aiming for anyway, but points one and two are very achievable and always good to remember as a Possibility.
osprey_archer: (Default)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
In my previous post about The Amber Spyglass, I wrote about the Lord Asriel, Child Killer. The child Lord Asriel killed, Lyra’s friend Roger, is now in the land of the dead, and Lyra and Will are headed to the land of the dead post-haste because Lyra would like to apologize for accidentally causing his death by bringing him to Lord Asriel. (Times Lord Asriel has wanted to apologize to Roger or indeed ever remembered his existence: zero.)

Will would also kind of like to talk to his father, but as usual Lyra’s goals are the ones that actually drive the plot. She’s the protagonist, and although the narrative feints toward the idea of Will as co-protagonist, really he’s just a sidekick. Would I find him more compelling if he had goals of his own that weren’t entirely centered on Lyra? Maybe. (Maybe not.)

But returning to Lyra, who after all is the reason we’re all here. Having come to the land of the dead to apologize to Roger, Lyra realizes that the dead are miserable in this unchanging underground existence, and decides that the thing to do is to cut a doorway into another world to let them out. Roger is the first to go, and he evanesces into the air, “leaving behind such a vivid little burst of happiness that Will was reminded of the bubbles in a glass of champagne.”

As a child I had a deep horror of the idea of death and oblivion, so I simply couldn’t get on with the dead joyfully dissolving into nothingness. And Pullman, like many a didactic writer before him, wants to make absolutely sure that you know not only what is happening but what your emotional attitude toward it ought to be. Mary Malone also witnesses the dead coming out of the underworld and joyfully dissolving. The alethiometer tells the Magisterium alethiometer-reader that the dead are now escaping the land of the dead and dissolving, and this is “the most sweet and desirable end for them.”

Okay, Pullman, I get it! You believe that when we die we dissolve into nothing and this is a GOOD and JOYFUL end that we should WELCOME. You may be right that this is what happens after death, but you CANNOT force me to be joyful about it no matter how many times you repeat that I should.

Having saved the dead from the horrors of eternal life, Lyra and Will emerge into the Republic of Heaven, where the forces of the Authority (God) are attacking Lord Asriel’s rebel fortress. Lyra and Will stumble through the battle searching for their daemons from whom they were separated when they entered the land of the dead (and again, this separation scene is SO powerful, curse you Pullman for being such a good writer).

While they look for their daemons, they accidentally kill the Authority. He is a very old angel who was being carried away from the battle in a crystalline litter when cliff ghasts attacked. Lyra and Will drive off the cliff ghasts and try to help this ancient, creaky, dementia-stricken angel, but when they help him out of his litter, the breeze blows him away.

Meanwhile, in the same world, the Authority’s right hand man (who seems to be the guy actually in charge, given that the Authority’s general mental state) is going mano a mano with Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter. They drag him into the abyss.

I’m sure these scenes were both super fun for Pullman to write, and they’re both powerful and memorable set-pieces. But this is a pretty classic example of making the weakest possible strawman out of your opponent’s argument and then punching it to death.

Pullman famously wrote His Dark Materials as a reaction against Narnia, because he so disliked the Christian didacticism of Lewis’s work. Not that he’s against didacticism, mind, he just thinks that Lewis is being didactic in the wrong direction, and he’s going to fix this by being even more didactic in favor of atheism. If he just repeats “Death is dissolution and this is JOYFUL” often enough, everyone will have to agree, right?

(Actually I’m not sure even Pullman fully agrees, because when Lee Scoresby’s ghost dissolves Pullman talks about how his atoms are going to join the atoms of his daemon Hester, which is not how atoms work, but a pretty good approximation of meeting your loved ones in heaven if you don’t believe in heaven.)

Unfortunately for Pullman, this is not how to teach readers a lesson through fiction. The reason Narnia works (to the extent that it does work in the “teaching a lesson” way) is that the stories are so strong. In The Golden Compass, Pullman shows that he can write a children’s fantasy as compelling as Lewis at his best. In The Amber Spyglass he shows that he can be as clunky as Lewis at his worst, as in That Hideous Strength, another work with some great setpieces that is basically spoiled because the author shunts the story aside in favor of venting his animosity toward something he dislikes but doesn’t really understand.

But Lewis has the advantage that all his books are basically standalones, even if they are also part of a series. You can hate That Hideous Strength and still like Out of the Silent Planet, or loathe The Last Battle and blissfully ignore it as you reread The Voyage of the Dawn Treader five hundred times. Pullman’s His Dark Materials, however, doesn’t work like that. It’s one big book that happens to be split into three pieces, and although the first piece is still exquisite, you can only reread it with the knowledge that the subsequent parts won't live up to the beginning.
osprey_archer: (books)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
I’m sure you’ve all been waiting with baited breath for my account of rereading Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass. Would I still hate it as much as I did when I first read it at the age of twelve?

Well, no, but largely because when I was twelve I hated The Amber Spyglass with the fiery passion of a thousand deeply betrayed suns. It’s impossible to feel betrayed in the same way upon rereading a book, since after all you basically know what’s coming and have decided to inflict it upon yourself again of your own free will.

I still hate it enough that it’s going to take at least two posts to pour out all my loathing, though.

But before I begin to tear this book to shreds, I must give it a couple of kudos. First: my god can Pullman write an amazing setpiece. He’s so goddamn talented and that’s part of what makes this book so infuriating; it couldn't be so maddening if it wasn't in some ways strong. I read this book one time as a kid and never reread because I loathed it so much, but some of the scenes were so powerful that they’ve never left my head. Roger leaving the land of the dead. The ancient angel that is the Authority blowing away in the breeze. Lyra touching Will’s lips before they admit their love.

(Okay, I remembered that one partly because it caused me such outrage, and I remembered it slightly incorrectly: I forgot that Lyra actually touched Will’s lips with a succulent red fruit because of COURSE Pullman is going full Garden of Eden with this. But still.)

Second, although I’ve spent decades complaining about the wheeled elephants in this book, they’re actually pretty cool. Mary Malone is having her own little portal fantasy adventure/first contact story, meeting these elephant/antelope type creatures who manipulate objects with their trunks and ride around on giant seedpods shaped like wheels. I love that for her. It’s very fun.

The problem is that Mary Malone’s portal first contact story continually mucks up the pacing of a book that already has big pacing issues. We’ll be at a moment of high tension, and then suddenly in the next chapter we pop over to Mary Malone having a chill time learning about mulefa culture, and in itself it’s interesting – but as a chapter that is interrupting the flow of the narrative, it’s maddening.

This is especially true because this book takes so darn long to get off the ground. Lyra spends the first twelve chapters in a drugged sleep under Mrs. Coulter’s watch, and the story remains in a holding pattern until Will finally arrives to wake her up.

While asleep, Lyra has been having a chat with her old friend Roger in the land of the dead, and she wakes up with a mission: she needs to go apologize to Roger! Right this very minute! Sure, the tiny Gallivespian spies who helped save Lyra from Mrs. Coulter want Will and Lyra to head off to help Lord Asriel in the war against God post-haste, but apologizing to Roger in the land of the dead has to take precedence.

This is one of the parts of the book I remembered incorrectly, and what I remembered made more sense, frankly. In my memory, Lyra promised Roger that she and Will would release him from the land of the dead, which would indeed have given an urgent reason why Lyra needs to go to the land of the dead right away, as “I want to apologize” does not.

The other maddening thing about this section is that, although Will and Lyra never do end up going to Lord Asriel, they never actually give or even think a reason why they don’t want to do this, even though there is a VERY OBVIOUS reason for them to avoid Lord Asriel. Last time that Lyra took a friend to Lord Asriel, Lord Asriel ended up killing that friend to rip a hole between worlds.

In my review of The Subtle Knife, I pondered whether Pullman would ever unpack the fact that his good guys are “catastrophically failing at the Kantian maxim to treat people as ends not means.” Having finished The Amber Spyglass, I can say definitively that the answer is no.

At the end of The Golden Compass, Lord Asriel kills an innocent child to rip a hole between worlds. This hole unleashes a horde of Spectres in the world of Cittagazze (a consequence Lord Asriel almost certainly doesn’t know about) and also causes the rapid melting of the arctic in his own world, leading to massive floods with (one presumes) the usual massive death that attends large and sudden floods.

But let’s leave aside the Spectres and the floods for the moment. Let’s go back to the murder of Lyra’s friend Roger. Lord Asriel’s stated aim is to defeat the Kingdom of Heaven and build the Republic of Heaven in its place, and his first action toward this goal is murdering a child. Is he building the Republic of Heaven or the city of Omelas?

No one ever asks this question. Even Lyra, who spends a certain amount of time obsessing about accidentally leading Roger to his death, spends no time thinking about who actually caused his death (Lord Asriel) or whether a man who would, I repeat, kill an innocent child to further his own ends is a man who is worth following.

Pullman, I think, is the kind of atheist who sees that the belief in God can be very destructive, but somehow has failed to notice that any kind of fanatical “ends justify the means” belief can be just as destructive, whether there’s a god involved or not.

Wednesday Reading Meme

Oct. 15th, 2025 10:02 am
osprey_archer: (books)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
An irregular installment of What I’ve Quit Reading: Maud Hart Lovelace’s Early Candlelight, a historical fiction novel about life at Fort Snelling in Minnesota in the 1930s. In between the lackluster Early Candlelight and Gentlemen from England I think I have to accept that I just don’t particularly care for Lovelace’s adult fiction. (But she does have one more picture book that I want to read.)

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

A couple of months ago, I commented to [personal profile] skygiants, “I think I’m going to give up on Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend.”

“You can if you want to BREAK MY HEART,” said [personal profile] skygiants, or words to that effect, so meekly I returned to the book, and at long last I have finished! And I am glad that I stuck with it (even though I also believe in my heart that Dickens maybe didn’t need a full eight hundred pages to tell this story) just because it’s nice to see how things play out for everyone. Special props to the dolls’ dressmaker, Jenny Wren, the real star of the show.

I had Monday and Tuesday off for fall break, so on Tuesday I hit up the archives and read Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Good Wolf (a very slight fairy tale about a little boy who meets a magical wolf who takes him to a magical Snow Party which all the animals shrink down to the size of kittens to attend) and Alice Dalgleish’s A Book for Jennifer: A Story of London Children in the Eighteenth Century and of Mr. Newbery’s Juvenile Library.

This latter book I read because it was illustrated by Katherine Milhous, of The Egg Tree fame, and indeed the illustrations were charming. I particularly liked the one of the street with Mr. Newbery’s bookshop, with all the little detailed shops all around.

What I’m Reading Now

The stated purpose of Among the Shadows, the collection of L. M. Montgomery’s “darker” stories, is to show that Montgomery did indeed have a dark side, but actually I think the stories are mostly showing her melodramatic side: the man who falls in love with a magnificent but ruined woman only for her to die in his arms a week later, the girl who falls in a dead faint at the very moment her far-distant lover dies, etc. Now I enjoy a bit of good melodrama as much as anyone, but let’s face it, if you want to bolster Montgomery’s reputation as a serious writer, you need to showcase her Rilla of Ingleside aspect rather than the Kilmeny of the Orchard side.

What I Plan to Read Next

Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.

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