On growing old and curmudgeonly... |
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NYC Midnight Black Belt Joined: 17 Nov 2017 Location: C. of Letters Status: Offline Points: 5401 |
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Posted: 12 Aug 2019 at 9:57am |
I was about to bemoan how far off-topic (hard slice into the woods...doesn't matter how long your drive is if you need to punch it out of the trees) this has gone, but then you come up with this... (editor's note...the following is not meant in any respect as a personal attack, just a cultural observation) We're no different now than we were in the Victorian age; what we approve may be different, but how we perceive things that are not approved does not. We're still hide-bound and unwilling to allow a conflicting thought to exist in our conscious. It's worth noting her views were unacceptable then, too. She wasn't preachy, she just put it out there and let her readers notice to the extent they wanted to notice. I find myself doing the exact same thing; not making a big deal out of trivial things that aren't important, and I half wonder if I didn't learn that reading her extraneous 600,000 words...) |
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jennifer.quail
NYC Midnight Black Belt Joined: 07 Feb 2018 Status: Offline Points: 7931 |
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Well, Anne also passed away in 2011, so I doubt she cares what any of us think any more.
Let's NOT bring up the greens because let's just say Anne's views on how a green rider became homosexual were fair for her day but not precisely socially acceptable now. Really, I started with the books (Moreta first) when I was ten or so, and in retrospect they've got a lot of problems (not sociopolitical, or at least not for me as I don't care). Moreta ironically is probably the best in terms of plot, structure, and even logical behavior by characters in their setting instead of full-bore romance-novel outs: "Well, queen riders have to be ready to be with anyone who flies their queen...but if she's into teh sexy outside that she's a total ho and if you're an IMPORTANT character the plot will find a way around that so she can be a good little monogamous girl with her one true love." Moreta at least has relationships, isn't obsessed with them, and always puts the dragons and the Weyr first. As for consistency (Anne-consistencies), there I'll give her that she never said she planned a series, she wrote a short story where the opening line came to her waking up from a dream ("Lessa woke, cold") and the dragons were the good guys. 600,000 words later...
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NYC Midnight Black Belt Joined: 17 Nov 2017 Location: C. of Letters Status: Offline Points: 5401 |
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We could spend the next six months talking about that! Bear in mind the original trilogy and Harper Hall were all written in the decade between 1969 and 1979. I suspect you don't remember that era, but I do. 'Just a girl' was a problem for quite a few more people than Menolly. My impression is Anne was challenging old ideas and traditions in the real as well as the fictional world. Political satire as Sci-Fi/Action/Adventure/Drama/Romance. Did anyone else wonder what happened when greens flew? She never spelled it out, but it didn't take much imagination to figure it out in an age when being gay was not acceptable. When the queens flew you never knew, for sure, which bronze would be successful. She tackled a lot of stereotypes that nobody else would touch with grace and elegance. Might be part of the reason I like them so much. |
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Lisa_Who
NYC Midnight Addict Joined: 23 Jan 2019 Location: Washington DC Status: Offline Points: 702 |
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It was Teh Sexism of the culture that caused the delay--better to have no apprentice found than a girl apprentice, most everyone believed.
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Edgelords are a bore.
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ChillyToez
NYC Midnight Black Belt Joined: 06 May 2019 Location: North Pole Status: Offline Points: 2438 |
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I wouldn't dare do something so silly. The Harper series was such a childhood love that I know rereading it as a mature reader would destroy the magical memories. Besides, I'm still waiting for my own fire lizard.
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Random
NYC Midnight Black Belt Joined: 17 Nov 2017 Location: C. of Letters Status: Offline Points: 5401 |
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Anne is fuzzy in all kinds of ways (not to be confused with Little Fuzzy, another of my favorites when I'm looking for an easy read). The first time I got through the original three I was just a yout...I distinctly remember learning orbital mechanics a decade or two later and thinking 'Wait...the red star...that can't be right...' The big, earth-shattering event that breaks the logic, despite Elgion promising not to violate her brother's trust, is when he ends up at Benden after being rescued from fall (in the next chapter)...and says nothing to the Weyr harper...or anyone else. No messages back to his craft master, no comment, crickets. Not even a hint. Same fall that took Menolly to Benden, by the way. From a timing perspective it might have been better to leave that alone for a chapter. The means by which trade and communications happens among ordinary folk during a fall is never really covered, and that lack of coverage could be used to great advantage. That confidence with her brother was not so important he didn't break it in an instant to give us the end reveal, which wasn't much of a reveal since the reader had all the information. This is part of why that series is so easy to digest; the reader is never left behind, not for a moment. Here I am beta reading for poor Anne, who is established enough and dead enough not to care one tiny little bit what I think. I'd be willing to wager, however, that All the Weyrs of Pern was, in some ways, a response to the people who pointed out her story had gaping holes in technical matters. She tries to explain things...and still gets it wrong. All the Weyrs should have been subtitled 'Deus ex Machina'; I read it once, got disgusted, and never picked it up again. My favorites are still the original three, where this is how it is and just don't ask too many questions about technical matters. Let's talk about people who are so hidebound they can't let a new thought enter their consciousness... Time to get my head out of Pern. Started reading "The Mosquito" by Timothy C. Winegard. Since 2000 the average number of annual deaths worldwide vectored by mosquitoes is around 1,000,000. Humans (killing humans) is a distant second at 475,000. I had to stop after the second chapter and teach myself all about the life cycle of malaria, though. Fascinating stuff.
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jennifer.quail
NYC Midnight Black Belt Joined: 07 Feb 2018 Status: Offline Points: 7931 |
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Without being able to go hunting for it (Harper Hall is not something I keep readily to hand) how much time passes in those 80-odd pages, and is most of it Menolly's POV? Anne was somewhat fuzzy with how long between events.
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Random
NYC Midnight Black Belt Joined: 17 Nov 2017 Location: C. of Letters Status: Offline Points: 5401 |
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I read Dragonsong and Dragonsinger again. Not completely sure why, other than they're the literary equivalent of porridge. Quickly consumed and easily digested, and sometimes not needing to think is precisely what I need. Of course I keep getting tripped up by the lack of reasonable causal logic, so it's not just here that I run into this. Elgion figures out who Piteron's missing apprentice is on page 118, but he doesn't actually tell anyone until page 196. Given the urgency in finding said apprentice this is highly unlikely. Apparently I can't even eat porridge without examining every morsel. This dovetails perfectly with my personality, but it's getting harder to enjoy a story for the story's sake and not pick apart every unlikely event. I blame this on age. And spending too many decades reading non-fiction, where picking apart factual inaccuracies is part of the process. And curmudgeonliness. <edit> Speaking of factually inaccurate, I was off by eighteen pages on the discovery; it was 118 and not 136) </edit> Edited by Random - 10 Aug 2019 at 3:46pm |
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