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WoGF Review: Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin
M. Fenn (mfennvt) has been reading speculative fiction for so long, she can’t remember what her first taste was. It could have been The Hobbit; it may have been A Wrinkle in Time. There’s been a lot more since. Recently, she’s fulfilled a lifelong dream of getting her own speculative fiction published. She blogs about what she reads and writes at M. Fenn – skinnier than it is wide.
Editor’s Note: This review counts for October.
Suzette Haden Elgin published Native Tongue, the first book in this eponymous trilogy, in 1984. I was 22 in 1984.
I remember Reagan’s election and how many of us on the left (I was already quite at home way over on the left wing) were frightened by the possibilities, many of which have come to pass. I also remember the beginnings of the backlash on feminism, a backlash that just keeps growing 30 years later. So, I get where Haden’s coming from with her story of a dystopian future USA where women have lost all their rights and are now the property of men in worse ways then they were before the second wave of feminism. My 22 year-old self would have eaten this book up and looked for more.
I’m sad to report, however, that the book didn’t really do much for my 51 year-old self. The story immediately irked me with the premise that the constitutional amendments revoking the 19th amendment and turning women into minors under the law would have happened by 1991. I mean, okay, Reagan and his ilk scared me, too, but 1991? That seems awfully premature.
WoGF Review: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Clare Fitzgerald (thecynicalromantic) started reading feminist deconstructions of fairy tales in elementary school and grew up to major in literature and something called “discourse studies.” She reads a lot of teen fiction, gothic novels, and retold fairy tales, and is especially interested in feminist issues in fantasy and sci-fi. She reviews books at A Room of One’s Own because otherwise she is liable to forget what she’s read and what she thought about it. She currently works as a technical editor, but aspires to be a vampire witch queen pirate sorceress when she grows up.
Editor’s Note: This review counts for October.
Much like everyone else who has gone through the American school system in the past few decades, I have read Shirley Jackson‘s famously creepy short story, The Lottery. I think The Lottery is one of those pieces that I had to read multiple times at different grade levels; however, I had never read anything else by Shirley Jackson, until now. In honor of it being Halloween, the latest book for my Classics book club was We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a short but exquisitely creepy novel about the last living members of a wealthy family, who live in a big house overlooking a small New England village.
Our narratrix in this novel is Mary Katherine Blackwood, generally known as Merricat, who is eighteen years old. The other two remaining members of her family are her older sister Constance, and her Uncle Julian. Uncle Julian is very sickly, having survived the poisoning that killed the rest of the family six years earlier. We discover, eventually, that Constance and Merricat were the only family members not poisoned, Constance because the poison was in the sugar, which she never used, and Merricat because she had been sent to her room without dinner.
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug Trailer
The story of Thorin Oakenshield continues…. Oh, and there’s a hobbit in this one too.
Ender’s Game Film Review
There’s a lot to love and little to hate in Gavin Hood’s adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. I’ll keep this short because there’s not much to say except that this is an entertaining and worthwhile movie. Most people on WWEnd have read the novel, if our new list is any indication, so a rehash of the plot is probably unnecessary. It’s a classic for a reason, and far more memorable than its many sequels.
Hood’s most recent directorial work was 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine. This may not inspire much hope, but even apart from his recent disclaimers about the X-Men film, Hood proves himself many times over with Ender’s Game, for which he also wrote the screenplay. The film retains most of the novel’s central plot while dropping most of the earthbound intrigue of international politics exacerbated by Ender’s siblings. In fact, his brother Peter only appears once, and briefly, enough to ensure that the audience understands that he represents Ender’s dark side and capacity for cruelty.
Asa Butterfield (Hugo) is great as Ender, managing a strong screen presence despite sharing it with Harrison Ford and Ben Kingsley. His sister Valentine is played by Abigail Breslin (Zombieland, Little Miss Sunshine), and she gets plenty of screen time as the ideal person Ender wishes he could be. Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit) makes a great Petra, and one wishes she could have had more time on screen. The other child actors are also surprisingly good, considering how many of them there are.
The special effects often went beyond serviceable to hauntingly beautiful. What we saw in the trailer wasn’t much beyond the final simulations, which necessarily have an artificial feel to them. The battle room was especially well-conceived, in a way that makes far more sense than I was ever able to imagine while reading the novel. It’s a great thrill to see the battle room games realized so well on screen. The mind game sequences necessarily feel like a video game, but they are inventively stylized and would probably actually make for a great game.
The only part of the film that didn’t quite work for me was the ending, which was slightly rushed and which collapsed a few plot elements. I’m unsure if this is a real problem with the pacing of the film, or if I’m just insisting on having things the way the novel told them, but it didn’t feel entirely right to me. In any case, all of the major themes remain intact throughout.
Ender’s Game is still a timely story about the cruelties of war that often flow from our insistence on war’s necessity–the cruelties towards our enemies as well as the cruelties visited upon our own.
2013 World Fantasy Award Winner!
The winners of the 2013 World Fantasy Awards have been announced at the 2013 World Fantasy Convention in Brighton, England. The Best Novel winner is Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson (Grove; Corvus).
The other nominees in the Novel category were:
- The Killing Moon by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
- Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce (Gollancz; Doubleday)
- The Drowning Girl by Caitlín R. Kiernan (Roc)
- Crandolin by Anna Tambour (Chômu)
Our congrats to G. Willow Wilson and all the nominees! What do you think of the result? Alif beat out The Drowning Girl and The Killing Moon to take top honors which seems a pretty impressive feat. Have you read Alif the Unseen?
Ender’s Game Alive Winners!
We were supposed to announce our winners last Friday but real life got out of hand on us over the weekend. So, a few days late, here are our winners. After the rather lack-luster reviews for the Ender’s Game movie this audio play may be the best medicine for anyone let down by the film version.
Ender’s Game Alive Winners:
MrXtacle
Derek Armstrong
Tonya
Patrick Hockenson
Congrats to all our winners! If you are one of our prize winners please send your full name and email address to us at “info [at] worldswithoutend [dot] com” so we can send you your prize right away. Our thanks to Audible for the prizes!
WWEnd Most Read Books of All-Time
We’ve just added a new list to WWEnd that we think you’re going to enjoy. It’s such an obvious list that it took a request from one of our members to make us realize we had missed it. Thanks, Oaks Lab! So check out the WWEnd Most Read Books of All-Time list. On the list you’ll find all the books that has been marked as read at least 100 times by our members sorted by number of reads along with the number of reads for each book. The list is 264 books long and will keep growing and changing as we get more members and more books tagged.
At the top of the list are some of the books you would likely expect to see with Ender’s Game (733 reads) edging out Frank Herbert’s Dune (701) for the top spot with a pretty strong lead over the rest of the pack. Neal Gaiman’s American Gods comes in third with 523 reads followed closely by the single volume The Lord of the Rings (512). We have LoTR as 3 separate books as well and you’ll find all three of them in the top 40 not to mention The Hobbit at number 9.
Here are the top 10 most read books on WWEnd with the number of reads for each:
- Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (1985) 733
- Dune by Frank Herbert (1965) 701
- American Gods by Neil Gaiman (2001) 523
- The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien (1954) 512
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979) 495
- Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984) 486
- The Forever War by Joe Haldeman (1974) 480
- Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949) 477
- The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien (1937) 476
- Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke (1972) 469
Nothing really surprising in the top 10 of course, though I had expected to see Harry Potter in there. For the record, the Potter books come in at 11, 13, 19, 40, 50, 51 and 53 which is pretty impressive. You’ll have to check the list to see the order.
It’s an interesting list to peruse and serves as a pretty good snapshot of what we read as a community within the larger genre community. If you’re a member you can see right away how many of the most read you’ve read yourself and your total will show on your reading stats page too. The stats page tells me I’ve read 78 (30%) from the list which is not too bad.
So what do you think of this list? Any surprises for you on down the list? What kind of info can you glean from it? How many have you read from the most read?
New Voices: Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone
Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone
Published: Tor, 2012
Series: Book 1 of The Craft Sequence
Max Gladstone (his website is here) published his first novel, Three Parts Dead, in October of last year, and his second novel Two Serpents Rise has just come out on October 29th! Two Serpents Rise appears to be set in the same universe as Three Parts Dead, but this review will only cover Three Parts Dead, as I haven’t had a chance to read it just yet. Three Parts Dead is impossible to sum up in a few quick sentences, both because there is so much going on in the novel and because there are so many fascinating characters! The story was always brimming with energy, fresh ideas and cleverness.
In the world of Three Parts Dead, humans have learned to use godlike powers, resulting in a war against the Gods that almost destroyed everything. Since then, Craftsmen and Craftswomen, who are trained in the Hidden Schools, draw power from earth and starlight to effect amazing feats of magic. I was surprised by the mechanical and matter-of-fact tone of both Craft and deific power—they are described mostly in terms of law and economics. For instance, a God’s power is managed and increased sort of like a finance portfolio, with investments and returns. Of course, if a God were to go ‘bankrupt’, it would have some more direct personal effects, like death.
