[book post] Two novellas
Aug. 7th, 2022 10:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenlua17776 (What Football Will Look Like in the Future) by Jon Bois
and
This one's free to read on the web, and is more of a metafiction-y/webnovel-y/HTML-experiment-y thing, but I'm counting it as a novella because it's reasonably text-heavy and I read it all in a long evening.
I don't quite know how to pitch this one, y'all. I went in knowing (1) it went viral a few years ago, (2) people were very "woaaah" and "trippy" and "omg NOT WHAT IT SOUNDS LIKE" about it, and (3) it was both about football and "about" "football."
Item (1) is just an objective fact, item (2) was sort of off-putting to me, and item (3) is absolutely true. (I happen to be a lowkey football enjoyer, mostly through osmosis, but note that football knowledge is definitely not a prerequisite for this story.)
And unfortunately I can't say much more than that without ruining part of the story's pleasure. Not because it relies on twists or gimmicks (which is what I was afraid of), but because part of the satisfaction is the slow unveiling of how strange and mysterious the world of 17776 is (yet with enough 2000s in it to keep us grounded).
What I think would've gotten me to read/click through this one earlier was if I'd known it was basically speculative ambiguous-utopia scifi, and also really well-written, and there's football but it's mostly there for extremely charming flavor and an excuse to meditate on The Nature Of Games In General, which is a pet theme of mine (hello, Glass Bead Game.)
When I was only a little ways in, I considered sending it to my dad, who is both a very smart and thoughtful guy and also a lifelong football fan. I still think he might like it, but some of the humor/visuals are targeted at a younger, net-savvier audience, in a way that I think may fizzle with him.
I am told this story is "very Homestuck." I'm not sure if that's true in just a "they are both using internet-y metafiction-y techniques" kinda way, or in some deeper kinda way, and I don't have another n weeks of leave, so I sure as heck ain't touchin Homestuck to find out. But maybe that means something to any Homestucks in the audience?
Overall I was pleasantly surprised to discover this story was worth the hype, and pleasantly surprised by how elegiac and thoughtful it was, in ways that mostly relied on the strength of the ideas it was playing with + some genuinely wicked-charming humor, and not on gimmicks. Good stuff.
Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress
The opening of this novella is effortlessly intriguing: a wealthy couple in near-future suburban Chicago go to a geneticist to discuss modifications for the baby they're about to have. Some requests are on the tame side: they'd like a girl, they'd like her to have a disposition toward music, that sort of thing. Then the father announces a rather daring request: remove the biological need for sleep.
This isn't a "manmade horrors beyond our control" setup; it's established that removing the need for sleep is perfectly safe, just new, and mostly comes with social risks. (You'd better hire a night nurse; a baby that never needs to sleep is a baby that never needs to stop crying.) And the advantages are obvious: what could you achieve with an extra eight hours every single day?
The procedure is done, but they find out afterwards that they're actually having twins. One twin got the genetic modifications; one twin didn't. The father obviously favors his designer-brand baby; the mother obviously favors the "ordinary" daughter, and thus the story begins.
Kress's writing is crisp and compelling throughout. I was weirdly delighted by its depiction of "Yagaiism," this near-future's weird econ-y atheist-y cult belief—familiar in several ways, alien in others, a sort of Rand-y Musk-y industrial-y religion that slots in perfectly into this world. And it turns out, Kress directly cites Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and Le Guin's The Dispossessed as her influences*, describing this novella as her own attempt at reckoning with a utopia somewhere between those two poles. Which places her writing somewhere between Rand and Le Guin, which is obviously a vast, vast gulf, so rest assured this story is far closer to the Le Guin side of the gulf. But while it gains something Le Guin's writing often lacks, by having such a clear and tight focus on the two sister's characterizations, it also falters with a somewhat mawkish series of concluding incidents, and there's some characterizations of our main Sleepless characters that end up just a bit too much on the uwu/twee side for my tastes.
* aside: citing Lysator archives?? in this economy?? oh the nostalgia
But overall it was engrossing and had me thinking thinky thoughts for days afterward, which is one of the nicest things I can get from a good scifi piece.
Kress later expanded this piece into a full novel—no idea how that worked out. It feels perfect as a novella to me so I wasn't super-curious to go find out.
You ever wonder if this is Heaven now? You ever wonder if we're all just there now and we don't know it?
I've thought about that. All of us have. There's a lot less people who go to church than there used to be, because that's what a lot of people think.
But I don't think so. But I think about it. And I think, well, I can't be. Because I'm like you, I kinda look at the big long life ahead of me that stretches out forever and disappears. And I get scared. And I think, "this can't be Heaven if I'm getting scared, right?"
And then I think, "maybe I am in Heaven, and Heaven is scary." [x]
and
it was my attempt to remove a lot of the things we hate about this world and see how we feel about what’s left [x]
This one's free to read on the web, and is more of a metafiction-y/webnovel-y/HTML-experiment-y thing, but I'm counting it as a novella because it's reasonably text-heavy and I read it all in a long evening.
I don't quite know how to pitch this one, y'all. I went in knowing (1) it went viral a few years ago, (2) people were very "woaaah" and "trippy" and "omg NOT WHAT IT SOUNDS LIKE" about it, and (3) it was both about football and "about" "football."
Item (1) is just an objective fact, item (2) was sort of off-putting to me, and item (3) is absolutely true. (I happen to be a lowkey football enjoyer, mostly through osmosis, but note that football knowledge is definitely not a prerequisite for this story.)
And unfortunately I can't say much more than that without ruining part of the story's pleasure. Not because it relies on twists or gimmicks (which is what I was afraid of), but because part of the satisfaction is the slow unveiling of how strange and mysterious the world of 17776 is (yet with enough 2000s in it to keep us grounded).
What I think would've gotten me to read/click through this one earlier was if I'd known it was basically speculative ambiguous-utopia scifi, and also really well-written, and there's football but it's mostly there for extremely charming flavor and an excuse to meditate on The Nature Of Games In General, which is a pet theme of mine (hello, Glass Bead Game.)
When I was only a little ways in, I considered sending it to my dad, who is both a very smart and thoughtful guy and also a lifelong football fan. I still think he might like it, but some of the humor/visuals are targeted at a younger, net-savvier audience, in a way that I think may fizzle with him.
I am told this story is "very Homestuck." I'm not sure if that's true in just a "they are both using internet-y metafiction-y techniques" kinda way, or in some deeper kinda way, and I don't have another n weeks of leave, so I sure as heck ain't touchin Homestuck to find out. But maybe that means something to any Homestucks in the audience?
Overall I was pleasantly surprised to discover this story was worth the hype, and pleasantly surprised by how elegiac and thoughtful it was, in ways that mostly relied on the strength of the ideas it was playing with + some genuinely wicked-charming humor, and not on gimmicks. Good stuff.
Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress
[. . .] Trade isn't always linear. You missed that. If Stewart gives me something, and I give Stella something, and ten years from now Stella is a different person because of that and gives something to someone else as yet unknown — it's an ecology. An ecology of trade, yes, each niche needed, even if they're not contractually bound. Does a horse need a fish? Yes. —from Beggars in Spain, emphasis mine
The opening of this novella is effortlessly intriguing: a wealthy couple in near-future suburban Chicago go to a geneticist to discuss modifications for the baby they're about to have. Some requests are on the tame side: they'd like a girl, they'd like her to have a disposition toward music, that sort of thing. Then the father announces a rather daring request: remove the biological need for sleep.
This isn't a "manmade horrors beyond our control" setup; it's established that removing the need for sleep is perfectly safe, just new, and mostly comes with social risks. (You'd better hire a night nurse; a baby that never needs to sleep is a baby that never needs to stop crying.) And the advantages are obvious: what could you achieve with an extra eight hours every single day?
The procedure is done, but they find out afterwards that they're actually having twins. One twin got the genetic modifications; one twin didn't. The father obviously favors his designer-brand baby; the mother obviously favors the "ordinary" daughter, and thus the story begins.
Kress's writing is crisp and compelling throughout. I was weirdly delighted by its depiction of "Yagaiism," this near-future's weird econ-y atheist-y cult belief—familiar in several ways, alien in others, a sort of Rand-y Musk-y industrial-y religion that slots in perfectly into this world. And it turns out, Kress directly cites Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and Le Guin's The Dispossessed as her influences*, describing this novella as her own attempt at reckoning with a utopia somewhere between those two poles. Which places her writing somewhere between Rand and Le Guin, which is obviously a vast, vast gulf, so rest assured this story is far closer to the Le Guin side of the gulf. But while it gains something Le Guin's writing often lacks, by having such a clear and tight focus on the two sister's characterizations, it also falters with a somewhat mawkish series of concluding incidents, and there's some characterizations of our main Sleepless characters that end up just a bit too much on the uwu/twee side for my tastes.
* aside: citing Lysator archives?? in this economy?? oh the nostalgia
But overall it was engrossing and had me thinking thinky thoughts for days afterward, which is one of the nicest things I can get from a good scifi piece.
Kress later expanded this piece into a full novel—no idea how that worked out. It feels perfect as a novella to me so I wasn't super-curious to go find out.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-08 03:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-17 07:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-09 01:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-17 07:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-21 06:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-10 07:10 am (UTC)had me thinking thinky thoughts for days afterward
That was exactly my reaction!
Sometime I felt a bit disconnected from the characters, especially the other non-Sleepers, but the whole concept and the way it was handled was absolutely fascinating.
Very interesting to hear that she cited The Dispossessed as a big influence. I don't immediately see the connection, and I thought Beggars in Spain was more of a dystopia (the Elon Musk-like cult, the attitude to the "beggars in Spain"...) Maybe she meant it was a reaction to Le Guin's ideas. I guess I'll end up thinking about this throughout my spare moments today! :D
no subject
Date: 2022-08-21 05:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-10 01:30 pm (UTC)Honestly having read HS I resisted reading 17776 because of the comparison, thinking "oh god how fucking long is this thing going to be, I cannot do that again." But if it's only like an evening's worth of reading I may have to actually check it out.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-21 05:57 am (UTC)and yeah if you're curious about it, it's a pretty low-commitment thing to try out; i think i spent like 4hrs total