Loftwings and Demons

So a while back I made a post on pillowfort asking for hard sci-fi recs that had a focus on characterization. One of the recs was for the novel Mickey7, which I've recently finished. Here's a spoiler-free review.

This novel not only fulfilled all the specifications I set out, but it was fast-paced and suspenseful enough for my capricious attention-span. There's also some great world-building, from both a technological and sociological standpoint. The latter is something that I feel many scifi stories are pretty weak on, especially hard sci-fi. The main character is a historian (a hobby, apparently his society doesn't have historians anymore, largely due to anyone being able to look up any historical knowledge they could want to know at any time).

There are some extended infodumps to fill out the worldbuilding, but they're all plot-relevant and actually pretty interesting stories in their own right, since you get to learn a bit about the history of this spacefaring society called the Union.

He's also an Expendable, which is a person whose physical and mental patterns are all uploaded so they can produce a perfect replica of him after they have him do whatever fatal mission-critical task they need to have done that can't be automated (the reasons for which are explained in the story).

The story starts when Mickey7 has fallen down a hole on the ice world of Niflheim. Theoretically this is no big deal, right? He's technically immortal, after all.

Practically, though, Mickey doesn't really like dying. He should know, too, since he's the only person on the Drakkar crew that remembers it happening to him. More than once, actually.

I enjoy that a major antagonist of the story, the colony commander, is someone who has personality traits and motivations rather than just existing as an obstacle to be brought out as needed for the plot. I really enjoy antagonistic relationships.

Though the friendships and romantic relationship in the story are also complex. I really enjoy the social dynamics between the characters. Mickey also has a certain amount of antagonism for his best friend Berto, both for reasons that become clear early in the story  and for reasons that are implied later on.

Mickey7 is a fast-paced, fun, frightening, and thoughtful look at the intersection of technology and society.

Well, I finally finished reading The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin.  I'd started it years ago and gotten perhaps 80 pages in before I stopped.  I had a much easier time getting into it this time around.  I found it interesting and thoughtful, though the over half-century between now and when it was written certainly shows.  I think that even stories that try to imagine cultures starkly different from their own as this one does still can never quite escape their own in ways that may be quite subtle to those in that time and place, but quite obvious to those outside it.  Though I will say that of the books I have read from LeGuin, she is the sci-fi and fantasy author I've seen make the most effort to reimagine culture.  

It's simply that I can still see the bones of that culture, that time and place, even here in this alien world and especially in this human who hails from what would still be an unimaginable society to us, seeking as it does only trade and companionship with other worlds, and not control or domination.  I think all stories are, to some extent, rooted to the culture they arise out of, as we can never entirely understand what we dwell within.  But this is a larger attempt to dwell outside that culture than other sci-fi I've seen, from any time period.

I don't know if it's supposed to be incomprehensible, but I never could understand why Genly distrusted Estraven for so long, and it meant I found him quite unlikeable for a good portion of the story.  Naturally my favorite character was Estraven.

I had also been under the false impression based on what others had said about this story  that there was sex in this novel. There is no sex in this novel. Just aliens who go into heat.  On a frigid cold planet. With a human who is always cold there, and sometimes must huddle, naked, with those aliens for warmth. Who is sometimes completely alone with their dearest friend, who is in heat.  This is, I think, a very important thing to understand about this novel. 

Anyway, I was glad to finally finish this story.  I found it much easier to read through on my second attempt.

I finished watching Kingdom last night.  I'm not a big fan of the horror genre but something about this interested me. I thought this story had a decently well-structured plot.  I think what drew me to this initially was a personal desire to engage with stories about pandemic, though I also had to stop watching this for a while for that same reason (given that I also have a strong desire to see stories that *don't* remind me strongly of real world problems).  

My favorite character was the physician Seo-bi and my favorite aspect of the plot was the medical mystery aspect.  I wasn't really expecting there to be a detailed background about 'how the undead works' in this story, but there was!  Seo-bi is the main character responsible for unravelling this mystery, and I really enjoy how her character develops.

This is a very tightly plotted story.  There aren't many episodes, only six per season, but a lot happens in a very short time period.  I think of each season as a movie in a sort of 'here's what would be possible with a movie if it could be made ridiculously long' kind of way.  

The other thing I really liked about this show was the lavish scenery and costuming.  Obviously there's plenty of gross scenes too but it's contrasted with this beautiful imagery.  Maybe it's shallow but I just like seeing pretty clothes!  Pretty outdoors scenes!  Even the scary flesh-eating dead people get to be aesthetic sometimes!

There's a fair amount of humor interspersed in this story which helps to offset its more grim aspects.  There's also a character who's very clearly a comic relief character, and while I often find such characters annoying, I appreciate the implementation here, and he certainly helps to offset the otherwise deeply somber tone.  There's also a lot of action, unsurprisingly, and I'm a huge sucker for action scenes.

There's a lot of aspects of the narrative where I just accept that 'it's not that deep' haha but there's definitely something more to this story than its surface level features.  I just looked up the work this is based on, The Kingdom of the Gods, and found out that that's a manga.  Also interesting is that while the writer of the manga is Youn In-wan, the idea for the manga was provided by the writer of the television show, Kim Eun-hee.  I've long had an interest in tracing the relationships between an original work and its derivative works, so I might want to see if I can read the manga sometime.  Though for some reason I have difficulty getting into a lot of the comics/manga/graphic novels medium, I definitely have an interest in comparing and contrasting these two works.

Anyway, this was a fun if often grim series and I'd definitely say it was worth watching!