Silica based lifeforms
Apr. 20th, 2021 04:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12After yesterday's exhausting conferencing, I collapsed into bed around 8.30pm and slept for close to eleven hours. With that sleep debt repaid, today has been a lot less tiring, and in between work, I managed to finish another book in my lunch break: Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold, edited by Carolyne Larrington. This anthology brings together various women writers from the UK and Ireland to retell folktales from around these island with an intersectional feminist twist. The stories have been compared in reviews to things like Carter's The Bloody Chamber, although for me they lacked the requisite bite and sharpness — they were well told, but had a kind of studied cautiousness about them. I found the 'forgotten' descriptor in the title something of a misnomer, given that I recognised most of the original tales from the folklore anthologies I used to read as a teenager — but maybe that's just my own weirdness!
Onwards to today's book meme prompt:
20. A frigid ice bath of a book
There can be no answer here but The Beast of Heaven, one of my favourite books by one of my favourite authors — the brilliant Victor Kelleher. Kelleher is mostly known in Australia as a writer of science fiction and fantasy stories for a YA readership (and as far as I can tell is entirely unknown outside Australia), but The Beast of Heaven is one of his few works for adults. I first read it for English class when I was fourteen, and it absolutely shattered my brain, and devastasted me.
The book imagines what I now recognise to be a fairly typical 1980s far-future dystopian scenario: a world so ruined by nuclear disasters that it is reduced to a blasted, post-apocalyptic landscape, where nothing lives or grows other than a very hardy breed of fungi. The world is inhabited by tiny communities of people, who eke out an existence in the wasteland, illiterate, itinerant, creating nothing, led by a shamanic figure who is the sole guardian of their history and memories. This fearful community is hunted at times by violent, shambling beasts.
Set against this (and here the very 1980s aspect comes into play) is an ongoing dialogue between two sentient computer programs, which were programmed in the past to participate in an endless debate about whether humanity is worth saving from destruction. If one program wins the debate (which necessitates convincing its interlocutor of the veracity of its argument), it will trigger a set of nuclear weapons to wipe out all sentient life on Earth, and if the other wins the debate the weapons will be deactivated.
Midway through the book, there is a huge plot twist/reveal which causes the two computers to abandon their respective arguments and start arguing from the opposite position, and this reveal is so bleak, and so shocking (although I suspect that its effect was thus in part because I first read the book as a teenager with less experience of the SFF canon) that it left me feeling genuinely horrified and despairing.
I love the book, and I've reread it several times, but unlike Kelleher's dystopian fiction for teenagers (which is still pretty pessimistic — he's not a cheerful writer and his books don't have a good opinion of humanity) there is nothing kind or redemptive about it. Some of his work has a kind of 'hope in the ruins' tone, but The Beast of Heaven is chilling, icily bleak, and as utterly devoid of hope as the dead sands and bleached skies under which its plot unfolds.
21. A book written into your psyche
22. A warm blanket of a book
23. A book that made you bleed
24. A book that asked a question you've never had an answer to
25. A book that answered a question you never asked
26. A book you recommend but cannot love
27. A book you love but cannot recommend
28. A book you adore that people are surprised by
29. A book that led you home
30. A book you detest that people are surprised by
Onwards to today's book meme prompt:
20. A frigid ice bath of a book
There can be no answer here but The Beast of Heaven, one of my favourite books by one of my favourite authors — the brilliant Victor Kelleher. Kelleher is mostly known in Australia as a writer of science fiction and fantasy stories for a YA readership (and as far as I can tell is entirely unknown outside Australia), but The Beast of Heaven is one of his few works for adults. I first read it for English class when I was fourteen, and it absolutely shattered my brain, and devastasted me.
The book imagines what I now recognise to be a fairly typical 1980s far-future dystopian scenario: a world so ruined by nuclear disasters that it is reduced to a blasted, post-apocalyptic landscape, where nothing lives or grows other than a very hardy breed of fungi. The world is inhabited by tiny communities of people, who eke out an existence in the wasteland, illiterate, itinerant, creating nothing, led by a shamanic figure who is the sole guardian of their history and memories. This fearful community is hunted at times by violent, shambling beasts.
Set against this (and here the very 1980s aspect comes into play) is an ongoing dialogue between two sentient computer programs, which were programmed in the past to participate in an endless debate about whether humanity is worth saving from destruction. If one program wins the debate (which necessitates convincing its interlocutor of the veracity of its argument), it will trigger a set of nuclear weapons to wipe out all sentient life on Earth, and if the other wins the debate the weapons will be deactivated.
Midway through the book, there is a huge plot twist/reveal which causes the two computers to abandon their respective arguments and start arguing from the opposite position, and this reveal is so bleak, and so shocking (although I suspect that its effect was thus in part because I first read the book as a teenager with less experience of the SFF canon) that it left me feeling genuinely horrified and despairing.
I love the book, and I've reread it several times, but unlike Kelleher's dystopian fiction for teenagers (which is still pretty pessimistic — he's not a cheerful writer and his books don't have a good opinion of humanity) there is nothing kind or redemptive about it. Some of his work has a kind of 'hope in the ruins' tone, but The Beast of Heaven is chilling, icily bleak, and as utterly devoid of hope as the dead sands and bleached skies under which its plot unfolds.
21. A book written into your psyche
22. A warm blanket of a book
23. A book that made you bleed
24. A book that asked a question you've never had an answer to
25. A book that answered a question you never asked
26. A book you recommend but cannot love
27. A book you love but cannot recommend
28. A book you adore that people are surprised by
29. A book that led you home
30. A book you detest that people are surprised by