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lunasarielOK, I think this format is working out well: one item of life news (unfortunately generally of the waily-waily-waily variety these days), and then on to the fun stuff, generally books. :D
This entry's item of life news, of course, is Happy New Year! I hope 2026 brings kinder days for all of us.
2025 was A Year, to be sure. One of the biggest lessons I learned, best put by T. Kingfisher (I think?) is "outrage is not activism." Or, "bearing witness" (aka doomscrolling and feeling awful) doesn't change one single thing about the world; it just makes me a sadder and angrier person. I think there is a balance to be struck between being a well-informed person generally and not drowning in a sea of shit; that balance generally eludes me. That being said, Fix the News (thank you, Ada Palmer!) has been ENORMOUSLY helpful in counteracting that. I've found that most "good news" aggregators are generally of the "man saves puppy from drowning (but you still can't afford health insurance)" or "food pantry serves Thanksgiving dinner to record number of families (and also a record number of people are living below the poverty line because wages are stagnant and inflation is enormous)." Like, did you know that there's a twice-yearly HIV vaccine that's near 100% effective? Or that global hunger has fallen for the first time since 2020, with record harvests using less land? Or that child poverty has markedly declined, even accounting for global population increases? Or that there are now salmon in the Klamath River again? Or that there are now walking wheelchairs that can climb stairs? Seriously, it's some good shit.
Oddly (given the global aaaaaaaa), personally, this year was a pretty darn good one for me, although not unmixed with waily-waily-waily.
In the waily-waily-waily column:
The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley.
I'm a little surprised this one ended up nominated for a Hugo, tbh, let alone on the shortlist. It very much positions itself as a non-genre novel - all of the blurbs are from, like, NPR and Vox and Elle and New York magazine and so on, and it has all of the contemporary bestseller trappings - book club questions, chatty interview with the author, list of related "Literary Fiction" titles, and so on. I've actually noticed that many time travel novels do this, tbh. Outlander, The Time Traveler's Wife, and Time Was (which I liked very much until it a) muffed the ending and b) tried to explain the time travel - see below) all seem very adamant that they're non-genre ~literary~ novels... that just so happen to have a fantastical plot device at their hearts. Which is fair, I suppose, since at least MoT very much did not read like a SF novel to me.
The other reason I'm surprised MoT was up for a Hugo was that I never quite got over the feeling that this was glorified fanfic. I know I'm not alone in this (thankshamsterwoman andtabacoychanel for confirming!), but I very much get the feeling that it started out as thirsty, iddy curtainfic about one of the dudes from The Terror, and never quite grew beyond that. Which isn't a bad thing! In fact, approaching it as idfic about somebody's blorbo made it an enormously enjoyable & entertaining read - it's only when somebody told the author that there needs to be a plot and action and so on that it started to lose me. TBH, I hope the author publishes the serial-numbers-still-on version on AO3 or somewhere, because I would love to read that.
The plot only begins to show the faintest sign of stirring about 30% in and, if I recall correctly, doesn't actually get going until well over halfway in. The first good chunk, where the novel's heart truly lies, is a nameless British-Cambodian protagonist living in increasingly-sexy domestic bliss with an honorable, supposed-to-be-dead unwilling Victorian time traveler, and hanging out with his other unwilling time traveler buddies. I actually had high hopes that the novel would remember its fanficcy roots and end up with a sort of double-triangled polycule in which the narrator dates both Graham (honorable Victorian naval officer who was supposed to have died in the Franklin Expedition) and Margaret (a gloriously chaotic Tudor woman who was supposed to have died in the Plague, and who took to anarchist lesbian feminism with impressive ferocity), Graham dates the narrator and Arthur (sad gay WWI soldier that Graham befriends/has enormous UST with), and Arthur is platonic besties with the narrator and Margaret. All of which there was ample groundwork laid for in the novel, btw! Graham and Arthur had enormous amounts of wistful chemistry with each other, and the author set it up very deftly so that Arthur never confirmed that they weren't lovers, just as Graham never confirmed that he was 100% heterosexual. And the narrator apparently physically cannot stop herself from describing how beautiful Margaret is, protesting that it's meant completely platonically all the while. Like, she spends at least two paragraphs on Margaret's large and generally glorious breasts ("I note all this because I think male writers are often mocked for their lengthy descriptions of women's breasts, but I do think some breasts provoke them, even from me"), is way physically cuddlier than it's ever crossed my mind to be with my female/AFAB friends (plopping yourself down on your friend's lap - just gals being pals!), and pauses while fleeing for her life to note the beautiful opalescence of Margaret's skin. She even finds her acne cute! They're not just zits, they're a "bijou constellation" that "resembl[e] (charmingly) pink wafer crumbs" and are to be found "glowing with unprinted newness" (alongside the "sultry peach color of her mouth," mind you). Like, there is no possible way this woman isn't at least a little bit queer.
My favorite parts of the book were definitely the iddiest. I love me a good fish out of temporal water, and I could have cheerfully read 300+ pages' worth of a bunch of unwitting/unwilling time travelers bopping around near-future England with their increasingly flustered handler. It was all delightfully slice-of-life - Graham thinks TV is stupid (especially Sesame Street, aka "deformed monstrosities against the will of God") but everybody else loves it! Margaret gets Tinder! Arthur writes bad poetry, and knewand probably had a fling with Wilfred Owen! They have Opinions about modern art, and showers, and germ theory, and Cambodian food! There are two other "expats" (aka time travelers) who don't show up as much - Anne Spencer, who was supposed to die during the French Revolution alongside her husband, and basically pines away in the future; and Thomas Cardingham, a 17th century soldier whose purpose in the narrative seems to be to prove that most dudes from the past were actually sexist assholes, and that Graham and Arthur, who are both sweethearts, are the exception rather than the rule. But mainly, it's the narrator, Graham, Arthur, and Maggie bopping around.
(This seems like a good time to say: I can tell the author had enormous fun constructing historical names - Thomas Cardingham and Margaret Kemble from the 17th century, Anne Spencer from the end of the 18th, Arthur Reginald-Smythe from WW1, and... Graham Gore from 1847, who was a real person & therefore can't have a deliciously old-timey name, alas.)
The plot starts to intrude between 30-50%, more or less, where it becomes less important that the narrator has enormous chemistry with Graham and Margaret, and more important that she absolutely sucks at her job, which is being a secret agent. Technically, she was supposed to have been helping Graham adjust to the 21st century/reporting to her shadowy masters on the effects of time travel, but aside from initial setup, this has mainly manifested in her delusitorily writing reports and being intimidated by her boss. ...Which is where the problems started, at least for me. It's blindingly obvious from fairly early on that she's actually working for either a Bond villain, a Lawful Evil government ministry, or both, and she's completely oblivious to this until about 2/3 through. Like, Graham stumbles across a handheld time travel device, or perhaps some sort of weapon? LOL, those wacky history people - he must have seen a cell phone, or possibly a gaming console, and gotten freaked out by it! She blabs about this to a colleague who freaks out and tells her that they've been bugged? Huh, he seems really paranoid; the job must really be getting to him! Better go report him to the higher ups! :D I'm sure the fact that he disappeared shortly thereafter and every trace of him appears to have been scrubbed from the digital record is a total coincidence. I mean, her mentor is clearly a time traveler with an honest-to-god black eyepatch! (I admit I wasn't expecting said scary mentor to actually be her from the future, though.)
I don't think it would bother me so much if the narrative didn't do that thing that bugged me so much in A Taste of Gold and Iron (which I dutifully gave 50-100 pages before deciding that the narrator bugged the shit out of me and DNF'ed), where the protagonist repeatedly informs us that they're bad at their jobs, thus reinforcing the idea that they're bad at their jobs. XD I know it's meant to create sympathy between reader and character, and (I think) meant to make the character appear endearingly lacking in self-confidence, but is the problem really a lack of self-confidence if the character is actually, demonstrably and quantifiably, bad at their job? I don't think it would have annoyed me so much that the narrator kept making spectacularly stupid decisions if she hadn't been quite so insistent on pointing out all the places she fucked up, and wondering if she could have prevented things from going to shit quite so spectacularly if she had acted differently. IDK, it's just sort of an anti-competence kink thing - competence squick.
Anyway, I like the narrator best when she was mooning over Graham, being kind to a clearly shell-shocked Arthur, and taking an absolutely normal level of heterosexual interest in Margaret. Not only the plot, but the character really started to fall apart when things started to kick into high gear. Most notably, I'm not sure to what degree some of the narrator (who is deliberately unnamed, btw - this isn't me being coy)'s less savory qualities are meant to be taken as a study in the corrosive effect of power, and which are actually meant as positive qualities but come across as Fridge Horror/Fridge Fascism. In fanfic terms, the narrator is absolutely a stand-in for the author - like the author herself, the narrator is an expensively-educated, white-passing British-Cambodian woman in her mid-thirties with a strong interest in the Franklin Expedition and languages, who lives in London and has complicated feelings about the British Empire. In the author interview at the back of the book, Kaliane Bradley says that the narrator is absolutely 100% not a stand-in for her, but... yeah. But the further the plot progresses, the more it becomes clear that the narrator is blind to the Bond villain shenanigans going on around her; it could either be naïveté, or it could be willful blindness/awareness of, but unwillingness to confront, increasingly sinister and authoritarian power structures. She (the narrator, but also the author, I guess) does comment frequently on how she (the narrator) has a complex relationship with power structures as a result of her heritage, particularly her mother's experiences in, and escape from, the Cambodian genocide. In particular, the narrator seems oddly clear-eyed about the fact that she's willing to truckle to, and even actively support, authoritarian regimes as long as she's personally in a prefect-like position of moderate safety and power. This is clearly not an aspirational position, let's say, but I'm not quite sure what the author's intent was here. If it was to flesh out and complicate her character, it sits very oddly against her utter lack of self-awareness in other regards.
Overall, MoT's heart is of a very fluffy fanfic, with bike rides across the moors and minor humorous domestic escapades (such as when Graham's immediate reaction to seeing a working toilet is to take it apart to see how it works, with predictable results). When it tries to get into Serious Big-Time Story Mode, with time travelers from a particularly Crapsack Future, arguments about whether the Chaotic Evil assassins from the future or Lawful Evil ministry of the present day is actually worse, some literal Kill Your Darlings moments (Arthur! T.T), and actually has to get into the nitty-gritty of time travel, the cracks start to show. In particular, there were some interesting ideas (namely, the concept that there could be only X number of time travelers in any particular timeline/point in time, and the admittedly very cool conceit that the "expats" don't show up on any sort of scanner or digital device - body scanners, MRI machines, etc.), but I think those needed some stronger genre infrastructure to really shine; they felt a little bit wasted here.
The language itself was... eh? There were some strikingly weird similes that I'm not sure if they were deliberately weird or not ("The ice outside shifts - the Arctic stammering its jaws as a cat does when it sees a bird."), and some clear new-ish author problems (including some very self-conscious attempts at a sort of Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett archly wry tone about bureaucracy - I'm betting PTerry, especially since she mentions him in her author interview), but I did highlight a lot of phrases. Graham, as the Designated Blorbo, is delightful, of course, and has tons of equally-delightful repartee with the narrator ("Am I to be idle for this entire year? You do still have a naval service?" "We expected you would need more time to adjust -" "Is the sea still wet? Can one still float ships upon it?"). The author clearly also has lots of fun with Margaret's proto-Shakespearean insults ("Mark your thatch!" "Sauce! I'll boil your ears." "Noddy! Heron-faced fool!" "I will mash you! Now bate your breath.") and Arthur's sort of Wodehouse/Biggles-ish dialogue ("I think the suffragettes did bally well.").
TL;DR: This is delightful iddy fanfic, except when it tries to grow a plot. I did enjoy the fanficcy bits thoroughly, and would happily have left kudos and an long, squeeful comment on AO3, especially if the narrator, Graham, Arthur, and Margaret had ended up in a polycule. I'm still not sure how it ended up on the Hugo ballot, though.
This entry's item of life news, of course, is Happy New Year! I hope 2026 brings kinder days for all of us.
2025 was A Year, to be sure. One of the biggest lessons I learned, best put by T. Kingfisher (I think?) is "outrage is not activism." Or, "bearing witness" (aka doomscrolling and feeling awful) doesn't change one single thing about the world; it just makes me a sadder and angrier person. I think there is a balance to be struck between being a well-informed person generally and not drowning in a sea of shit; that balance generally eludes me. That being said, Fix the News (thank you, Ada Palmer!) has been ENORMOUSLY helpful in counteracting that. I've found that most "good news" aggregators are generally of the "man saves puppy from drowning (but you still can't afford health insurance)" or "food pantry serves Thanksgiving dinner to record number of families (and also a record number of people are living below the poverty line because wages are stagnant and inflation is enormous)." Like, did you know that there's a twice-yearly HIV vaccine that's near 100% effective? Or that global hunger has fallen for the first time since 2020, with record harvests using less land? Or that child poverty has markedly declined, even accounting for global population increases? Or that there are now salmon in the Klamath River again? Or that there are now walking wheelchairs that can climb stairs? Seriously, it's some good shit.
Oddly (given the global aaaaaaaa), personally, this year was a pretty darn good one for me, although not unmixed with waily-waily-waily.
In the waily-waily-waily column:
- My dad's health has deteriorated startlingly, especially during harvest. My stepsiblings, Dad's ex-assistant and now co-winemaker, and I had a council where we discussed taking his keys away against his will, after an incident that started with me getting a call from the ER saying that he had slipped and fallen in the winery, and ended up with P and I trailing Dad home as he wove all over the fucking road. The council ultimately decided that forcibly taking his keys away would cause more problems than it solves, but I have a written agreement all drafted up and ready to go for next harvest - if he's gotten less than nine hours of sleep out of the past twenty-four, he hands over his keys to one of the aforementioned council, no questions asked. I like this because it's quantitative, and doesn't rely on qualitative metrics like "are you tired" or "do you feel that you are safe to drive?", which is less embarrassing for him and much less scary for us. Like, seriously, driving behind him was actually one of the scariest experiences of my life. He got home safe and didn't kill anyone, but he absolutely, absolutely could have. If this keeps up next year, we're definitely bringing out the big guns (P once got hit by an elderly driver who couldn't see the road properly, and Dad's first wife died following a hit-and-run), which I think will make Dad feel awful, but at least everyone will be alive.
- L-my-sibling (formerly A-my-sibling) got a diagnosis of ADHD as well as autism, which is actually great! But it's now virtually guaranteed that living independently will never be practicable for them, and I'm very afraid that they're going to end up living with me. I'm super glad that they're living with our mom right now, both so that L-my-sibling has someone to help them with daily tasks and emotional regulation and whatnot, and so that our mom has someone to help her out as more tasks become difficult for her (more on this below), but having lived with them (as adults) before, I can confidently say that we are not good housemates for each other. It makes me kind of feel like an enormous bitch/bad sister to say it, but I just don't have the wherewithal to handle their constant emotional storms - it's exhausting for me, and I just don't like having them around. I love them very much, obviously, but I just don't have what they need. ...But that still leaves the question, what will happen to them when our mom is no longer able to take care of them? P is a digital nomad, so it's not guaranteed that he'll have a place for them to live. My mom does own her house outright, so L-my-sibling could live there, but I'm not sure P and I can afford the taxes without another income source; the plan used to be to rent it out after my mom and her husband pass away. But it's also becoming clear that a full-time career for L-my-sibling, one that would take care of most or all of their financial needs, is also not in the cards. ...Which is another item in the waily-waily-waily column, since changing MediCal rules means that they have to have paid employment of some sort by the end of this year or they lose their health insurance, which allows us to afford their meds, which would be astronomically expensive otherwise. So I'm holding as hard as I can to "I'm your sister, not your parent," but idk how well that's going to go.
- I'm now a (co-)team lead for the first time at work, and I represented Cataloging during the library's search for a new ILS. It wasn't at all as daunting as I thought it would be (largely because I have A+++ support from my manager & division manager), but I did learn how to read contracts and evaluate software and all. It was kind of a weirdly nice feeling for another member of the team, who I am professionally in awe of, to basically say, "this is getting too technical for me; I'm going to step back & let you handle things from here."
- Basically, I feel like I've leveled up several times at work. There's still a LOT on which I need support/training/the ability to kick things up a level, but I'm appreciably a lot better than I was a year ago. I'm now managing the entire Local Authors database (and if I fuck something up there, I will hear about it) and doing 100% of our original cataloging, although GS is still doing most of the metadata creation and wrangling for photos, archival materials, and pretty much anything born-digital. It's becoming clear that he and I have seriously differing opinions (for the first time in my career, I think!) on the role of AI in the metadata/cataloging side of libraries. To him, it's all a brave new world with serious possibility and we should invest significant time and energy into it. For me, however, there is enormous potential in ML for the constant scourge of archives and special collections, which is an enormous backlog of unprocessed or minimally-processed material, but the "shit data in, shit data out" of genAI simply can't be overcome as things stand right now. If we supply the entire dataset used for training, then OK, but asking, say, ChatGPT or Gemini to produce MARC records or archival metadata is insidiously bad at best, laughably bad at worst. But I still feel like I've leveled up enough to have these opinions and feel like I can defend them on a level beyond "I personally think genAI is theft and its uses don't come close to justifying the environmental costs."
- My mom is aging like a fucking champ. She's well recovered from the aftereffects of breast cancer now (her hair is shoulder-length!), and may I just say: when I'm her age, I hope I can approach the aging process with, like, 1/10 of the emotional stability and good sense that she has. She's built an ADU in her backyard for an eventual in-home caregiver, and she has binders and binders of beautifully-enumerated and constantly-updated lists of medical info, account numbers, passwords, advance directives, etc. She's eminently sensible about her own physical capabilities, and is an absolute champ about asking for help with lifting things, installing anti-slip matting, etc. I know a lot of this comes from how frustrated and scared she felt with her own parents (who had a... much more typical response to aging, let's say), but it actually made me tear up a little during one of our planning conversations this year - she wants to have a good life herself, of course, but she knows firsthand what it's like to watch your parents age, and she didn't want me, P, and A-my-sibling to suffer through the same thing.
- R2's employment has been kind of up and down, but generally up. The temp agency he contracts for has been very good to him, especially his agent. Between this and unemployment, something always comes up before things get *too* too lean, but there have been some nail-biters in there. Overall, though, hopefully this seems pretty sustainable for us. We are super duper lucky that my job not only gives us both pretty fucking awesome health, dental, and vision insurance, but my salary actually covers almost 3/4 of our living expenses as long as we're careful! And, given a choice between that and R2 getting a lucrative job that he hates, I will absolutely take this. One of the key ways that we're different is that he thrives on variety and constantly learning new things in his professional life (which sounds like a nightmare to me), so a new place, with a new group of coworkers, and a new skillset (or at least a variant on an old one) to learn every few months, has actually been working out great for him. He gets universally great feedback, and has had apparently genuine "we would really really really love to hire you, since you've improved our workflow in X, Y, and Z ways, but we just don't have the budget for it" conversations at least four times now. Which isn't entirely a bad thing, since he's worked at enough places that a pattern has become evident: if a business is in enough hot water to justify hiring a temp at R2's rates ($25/hour for him, on top of what the employment agency charges), then it's likely that there are institutional problems that go a lot deeper than just "unforeseen circumstances have led to an untenable paperwork backlog". R2 generally manages to dig them out of whatever hole/backlog they're in, but a lot of them go under either while he's working there or shortly after he leaves. Which is a shame, because some of them have been great places with very nice people, and most of them have been incredibly kind to him.
- After living with us for about 2 years, P has found a place of his own! in Sebastopol!!! I definitely had mixed feelings on him moving out - he's a spectacular housemate as well as my brother whom I love, but looking at it from his point of view, it would definitely be nicer for him to have his own space. In particular, I definitely try not to pry into his love life, but if it were me, I would definitely want a place of my own to bring people home to. But now he lives in our hometown, Sebastopol, which really is the dream for both of us. He lives in the second oldest house in town, three doors down from the library, and about a block off of the main street. I really miss Sebastopol and its interconnectedness (for example, P's next-door neighbor is the environmental consultancy firm where GS's wife works, and who throw an absolutely bangin' Halloween party every year, and every year we still get our Christmas tree/wreath from my elementary school classmate's family farm), but it's gotten so much more expensive, idk whether it will ever be a financial reality. And at least we get to visit him all the time to stock up on Sebastopol-only goodies like ice cream from Screamin' Mimi's, The One Good Apple Bread, fancy chocolates from the fancy chocolate place that GS's neighbor runs, and tartlets from the second-best bakery (after the first-best bakery moved to Santa Rosa [and appears to have gone downhill since then, sadly], and the other first-best one I try to avoid since H-my-stepsister used to work there and had a flaming row with the owner).
- R2 and I got to go to WorldCon in Seattle this year with 4/5 of Bestchat! I was astonished at how well our geo-dispersed bash managed to work together in each other's physical spaces, even under at least somewhat trying circumstances (nothing dramatic; just run-of-the-mill con hectic-ness). This was another time I actually teared up a little - we absolutely refuse to shut up while talking online, but having almost everyone together under one roof (with cafemassolit joining us in spirit from across the pond) had me very "I love everyone in this
barbash'houseVRBO and/or AirBNB so much!" And then, of course, the con itself was wonderful and overwhelming in the best way possible. Some highlights included:- Man, cons are a small world! I literally ran into one of my grad school cohort-mates in the sign-in line, and while we were chatting, Seanan McGuire and Ada Palmer just walked by. I think every member of Bestchat, plus R2, randomly ran into a friend or a friend-of-a-friend during the con, especially since cyanmnemosyne was also there with their MLP crew (the nucleus of whom are also R2's college buddies, go figure). And then there were the friends we made during the con - people we started to recognize from going to the same panels/meetups, and started having friendly "hey, it's you!" greetings with.
- I don't remember much of my 2018 WorldCon outside of specific panels and hangouts; my sharpest con memories are of the massive San Diego Comic-Con in the late aughts/early 2010s, and while that is definitely the place with the most big names and announcements (while at WorldCon, Dune: Part 2 won the Hugo for best dramatic presentation - long form and didn't even send a message, much less a representative), I really love the more intimate, less corporate feel of WorldCon. Instead of everything being big IP juggernauts like Marvel and Disney, we got Temeraire and Terra Ignota cosplayers.
- Speaking of which: I GOT TO MEET ADA PALMER!!! R2 is currently working his way through TI, which is reminding me just how much I love her writing. And it turns out that she's an utter fucking delight in person; hamsterwoman described one of her events as "a firehose of erudition," which is exactly how it is. We always joke that Ada Palmer is, in fact, a set-set, because how else could one person teach full-time, write award-winning novels and works of nonfiction (with two more plus a shared essay collection coming out over the next couple of years), and still have space in her brain for LARPing, disability activism, and approximately eight thousand tidbits of information scattered across several disciplines? Some highlights-within-highlights:
- I was surprised by how great of a mod she was, even when someone else was officially modding a panel (more on this below). She did a great job of directing the conversation, and seemed really genuinely excited about bringing together a lot of disparate viewpoints/areas of expertise.
- We got to go to a secret after-hours fan meetup! hamsterwoman and tabacoychanel got to go to another one, but alas, by that time R2 and I had to catch our flight back to CA. It really is wild what a diversity of opinions there are within the fandom, which I found enormously refreshing - a lot of people identified heavily with J.E.D.D. and felt incredibly seen and validated by his (literary) existence; others thought that he was fucking terrifying. Some people felt strongly that Carlyle is a trans woman; others felt that he is a cis man who was manipulated into using she/her pronouns; still others (myself included) felt that they are a non-binary person who was manipulated into using she/her pronouns. There's just so much in these books - for some people, it was clearly all about the Conversation, but for others, it was about specific characters and their relationships, or about the Utopians, or about the Hive system in general, or about historiography, or war, or gender, or, or, or! And the glorious part is that it's all there; each and every one of these readings is a fair one in itself. It just has so many complete threads; I've said before that it's at least two or three complete novels in one.
- Ada (who apparently prefers "Ada" to "Dr Palmer," at least in con/fandom settings) apparently got a lot out of it, too. I admit I was kind of worried about her, since she was clearly going HARD - a wall-to-wall packed schedule during the day, and extracurriculars at night - but she posted afterwards that she found the whole thing, and the fan meetups in particular, "incredibly healing" after "a very tough year." And there was an incredible outpouring of Good Vibes(TM) - joy and curiosity and good fellowship - but I'm just glad that she didn't feel pressured to give more of her time and energy away than she had to give.
- It also helps that tabacoychanel , our resident Utopian, decided to go above and beyond (of course) by not only feeding us, but Ada Palmer, too. She (tabacoychanel /L-my-friend) made us all some extremely baller fried rice (which R2 has been making at least every couple of weeks since), and when she noticed that Ada Palmer was often turning up to panels without having eaten, started supplying her with said fried rice, as well as some equally-baller apple cider caramels that she made at home and brought to share. We started joking that Ada was going to start thinking L-my-friend was a Cousin, given how well she was feeding people. <3
- It also helps that
- We also got a lot of great fandom tidbits from the meetup - including "so what is Bridger's deal anyway? And why does he look exactly like Apollo Mojave?" (which was asked twice, once by me), the writing process for the Second Battle of the Almagest (which Ada confirmed was the emotional heart of the novel, and she wrote it over the course of two weeks while wandering around the house sobbing [which is fair, tbh, since that's how I read it, although ofc over a much shorter time span], and only eating when her bash'mates/housemates put bowls of pasta on her keyboard), Felix Faust (who is "always right about everything" *evil cackle, steepling fingers*), bits that got left on the cutting-room floor (apparently the art gallery scene in TLTL originally included a lot more info on art movements between now and then, all of which Ada still has), Mycroft-as-narrator (I was going to ask when his incredibly distinctive narrative voice clicked for her, but apparently he sprang into being fully-formed, like an extremely fucked-up Athena; she also immersed herself deeply enough into the source material [Homer, Voltaire, etc.] that she feels it changed her as a person, much to the horror of hamsterwoman , our resident Brillist), and the audiobooks (a lot of folks thought that Sniper's VA was miscast; apparently it was very important to Ada to get a non-binary VA, and she chose to go with a less-skilled but more-authentic one since the audiobook company's stable of non-cis VAs was disappointingly small).
- Ada (who apparently prefers "Ada" to "Dr Palmer," at least in con/fandom settings) apparently got a lot out of it, too. I admit I was kind of worried about her, since she was clearly going HARD - a wall-to-wall packed schedule during the day, and extracurriculars at night - but she posted afterwards that she found the whole thing, and the fan meetups in particular, "incredibly healing" after "a very tough year." And there was an incredible outpouring of Good Vibes(TM) - joy and curiosity and good fellowship - but I'm just glad that she didn't feel pressured to give more of her time and energy away than she had to give.
- R2 and I got two books signed! I got PtS, signed with "For [my name], [Signature]. We will." Aaaaaaahhhhhhhh. I dunno if this was just me being star-struck or what, but weirdly, I really feel like I needed to hear that. August was a pretty dark time, nationally and globally, and it was unexpectedly heartening to have a reminder that we will make it through. R2 was feeling kinda icky during Ada Palmer's book signing slot, and he asked me to ask her to sign TLTL in character as Mycroft, since she mentioned missing writing as him, which made her laugh. Apparently Mycroft would sign a book as "The gentle Reader's most humble and unworthy servant, Mycroft Canner."
- This con taught me the absolute importance of having a good moderator for a panel. I've seen very able mods turn an otherwise lackluster panels into something special, and some laughably terrible ones absolutely bomb a panel. The best was, of course, Ada Palmer, who was an A++ mod, even saving some panels where she wasn't the official mod but stepped in when it became clear that the actual mod didn't know what they were doing. She gently but firmly made sure that nobody got talked over, everybody got a chance to speak, and generally stayed on topic - I think it comes from her classroom experience, which not a lot of other panelists had. One of her best innovations was what she called the asterisk - to avoid the panel getting derailed by questions mid-flow, she instituted a system where an attendee could hold up their hand, opening it and closing it like an asterisk, for brief technical questions/clarifications, of the "how do you spell that?" or "the title you're think of is [X]" variety. This avoided a lot of frustration, and handily (har!) saved more in-depth questions for the actual Q&A section.
- The worst however... hoo boy! I attended an absolutely fascinating panel on the history of Star Trek fandom, and the mod was an absolute hot mess. A male panelist for a panel made up entirely of women (some OG fans, some newer ones), and my god I have never seen the gender divide in fandom illustrated so clearly. He talked over the panelists, couldn't stay on topic, clearly had several axes to grind, and, for the cherry on top, "um, actually"ed one of the panelists about something that she saw with her own eyes. It went kind of like this:
- Panelist: [elderly OG fan, talking about the episode of TOS with the Kirk/Uhura kiss that caused an incredible furor at the time] "Oh yes, it was a huge deal! It got banned on a lot of networks, including my local one in Texas -"
- Mod: [interrupting] "That's actually a common misconception! That episode was never censored."
- Panelist: [clearly feeling the dual pulls of "I will be polite" and "Fucking excuse me?"] "Um, yes it was? It was broadly censored across the South and Midwest."
- Mod: [smugly] "Could you cite your sources for that?"
- Panelist: ["Fucking excuse you" has clearly won out] "The source is me. I was there. I saw it."
- Mod: "But how could you see it if it wasn't on air?"
- Panelist: "
Because I didn't live under a fucking rock, that's how.People talked. We talked about it in the community, and it was in the newspapers." - Other panelist (younger woman): "OK, we've established that. Could we move on, please?"
- ...And the mod fumed quietly for the rest of the panel.
- There were library panels!
- There was one delightfully data-heavy panel on nerd culture's perception of libraries viewed through the lens of every Hugo winner since the award's inception. The panelists were both academic/research librarian, and their description of their methodology was a pure joy to behold.
- There was another one on digital archiving/archival preservation, particularly community archives; I got to ask a question in this one! I prefaced my question with, "I'm a cataloging, metadata, and special collections librarian at a public library in California, squarely in fire country..." and got a lot of sympathetic/understanding nods. My question was about (digital) data recovery following not just bitrot or inevitable degradation over time, but sudden and catastrophic events such as fires or floods. And I got some really interesting answers! One of the panelists was a data recovery specialist, and his answer was basically that, if we don't expect miracles, if we have something that's not an actual lump of carbon, they would probably be able to pull *something* off of it. Not everything, certainly, and probably not even an awful lot, but at least something. Which was heartening to hear!
- Our very last panel, which i was adamant that we would stay and see even though it was late enough that we caught our flight back to CA with a whole 30 seconds to spare, was Ada Palmer talking about libraries. As the kids these days say: crying screaming throwing up etc. It was incredibly heartening, as well as a lot of fun - it was great to see so much whole-hearted support for libraries and banned books, especially since that was in August, which was right at the heart of a huge surge in book-banning/challenges. I'm very lucky to live in a place with vigorous support for the kind of books that come under fire so often (Maia Kobabe is from Santa Rosa, baybeeee! E designed our staff t-shirts, which are fucking rad if I do say so myself), but the topic was clearly at the forefront of everybody's minds. But I got to learn about the Malatestas (who created one of the first libraries in Europe - which was comprised mainly of banned books, and which pissed the Church off so much that the Pope created a special ritual to excommunicate the Malatestas' souls directly to hell), and hear a lot of "I love libraries!" stories.
- Man, cons are a small world! I literally ran into one of my grad school cohort-mates in the sign-in line, and while we were chatting, Seanan McGuire and Ada Palmer just walked by. I think every member of Bestchat, plus R2, randomly ran into a friend or a friend-of-a-friend during the con, especially since
- I got a tattoo! I need to do a photo post sometime soon - it's not a complex one; I'm just extremely proud of it. It's the Tengwa parma, on the inside of my left wrist, which means "book" as well as standing for the letter P, and being the first character that makes up the title of the Parma Eldalamberon, the linguistic journal dedicated to the study of Tolkien's conlangs. I thought about this for a long time - it had to be a word or letter, of course, since that's one of Tolkien's main foci, and one of the things I love best about his work. For a while I was thinking of "I will not say the day is done / nor bid the stars farewell" in Tengwar going up the inside of one forearm and down the other, since that's about as close as you can get to an encapsulation of Tolkien and everything I love about his works, but A) I came to realize I would need the real estate for other tattoos, and B) it would be much more difficult to explain. The tattooing process didn't hurt near as bad as I thought it would, and I'm a huge baby about pain - various folks I've talked to described it as "a really hard pinch" or "a cat scratch," both of which were about accurate, leaning more towards the former. But I've been thinking about the whole concept a lot, and I would really like to get several more. I've found body art/tattoos to be really beautiful for a long time now, and there are some things that are important enough to me, and that I find beautiful enough, that I would like to have them permanently on my body. Parma was a small, simple one, but I have some more complex ones planned:
- The owl and crescent moon of Athena, with her laurel sprig replaced by a rosemary sprig, on my left bicep. Probably mainly black linework, like my parma, although maybe some green on the rosemary? IDK, I still need to discuss that bit with my tattoo artist (Jen Untalan at Valkyrie Tattoo, who is awesome). I did some long, hard research into Athena, both to make sure I wasn't just working off of a pop culture understanding of everything she stands for, and because I'm still Wiccan enough to think real hard before I go tattooing a god on my body. And what I found mainly jived with my preexisting understanding - she's the goddess of wisdom and good sense (to a certain degree). She rewards faithfulness, cleverness, good judgement, and "work smarter, not harder." She always finds a way to back the winning play. She's kind and compassionate, at least as far as Olympians go - she's not exactly a pacifist, but she does seem to abhor waste and wanton destruction. The crescent moon is both for Athena and a nod to my witchy roots. And rosemary is a healing herb with antiseptic properties, as well as one of my favorite culinary herbs. (It's also the source of a joke I remember being extremely proud of when I was about five, having to do with the fact that my name and my grandmother's name, who I was very close to, together make up the word "Rosemary.")
- Some California poppies on my right bicep. I love me a good sorting system, and the TI one made me realize that I would be a member of the European hive, California nation-strat (Northern California nation-strat?). Wherever I go, it's my home; it has shaped me indelibly, and, in general, for the better, I think. I also think that it's the most beautiful place in the whole entire world, from the Pacific Ocean to the redwoods to the golden hills (when they're not on fire, ofc XP) to the Sierras; Luther Burbank called it "the chosen spot of all this earth as far as Nature is concerned." Like everywhere in the world, I think it deserves loving and protecting, but this place in particular is special to me. This will be my first mainly-colorful tattoo; they need that pop of color! Which is a little weird, given that in general orange is my least favorite color, but seeing the orange of poppies never fails to make me smile.
- A Gravenstein apple on my left shoulderblade. This will be another colorful one, with those pretty red and green streaks Gravensteins have. Related to the above, I'm a Californian, and particularly a Northern Californian, but even more particularly I'm a Sebastopol girl (hotly-contested demonym: Sebastopudlian). When I was a kid, I got so sick of Gravensteins, a rare varietal once thought to be extinct, but strongly associated with Sonoma County, and Sebastopol in particular, since the mid-19th century. Gravs are very particular about their climate and soil needs, and they do not keep well at all, but for my money they're the most delicious (and best-smelling) apple in the world. Starting about mid-August there's an abundance of apple bread, apple cider, apple pie, and general apple-related goodness that is Extremely Sebastopol.
- Something Terry Pratchett-y. Right now I'm leaning towards a shamble, but I have to figure out what it's actually going to look like, and how best to incorporate my body into it, since the required living thing would be, in this case, me. :D At first I was leaning away from a shamble, since they're supposed to be constructed spontaneously, in the moment, given whatever the witch has in her pockets or easily to hand, and static or pre-made shambles can't be as effective. But isn't our skin constantly replacing itself anyway? That's in-the-moment enough for me.
- Terry Pratchett is another author whose language and words I also love, so I'm also contemplating one or more quotes from him, but I can't think of anything quite pithy enough. "Evil begins when you start treating people as things" is a quote that fundamentally changed how I look at the world, but I don't necessarily want it on my body. And then there's "TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY," or maybe just "ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY," which is another bit where I felt the world turn on its axis a bit. It very handily put into words something I had been grasping at for a long time, about how there are things with no physical existence, things that don't, technically exist, and yet are vitally important and very definitely real nevertheless. Idk, something about how things thought into being are powerful nevertheless.
- The quote "not perfect, not finished" from Seven Surrenders, from Vivien's speech in Romanova about not tearing down everything they've built up. Firstly, I think it's a great encapsulation of TI and everything I love about it - a generous and big-hearted, yet very clear-eyed understanding that nothing is perfect, but is constantly changing and evolving; even the things one loves the best have flaws (Spain, a fundamentally kind and honest man, loved and enabled a staggeringly cruel person, whose actions led directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands; Cato, a gentle and wise teacher, was an assassin who murdered completely innocent people; the Hive system itself allowed staggering abuses on a massive scale even as it arguably improved life for humanity at large), but that's no reason not to keep trying to make things better. It's also a useful reminder for me, since I have, um, a slight tendency towards perfectionism. XD The reminder that things aren't set in stone, you can always try again, and you are a work in constant progress is a good one for me.
- After that, who knows! I was thinking Aragorn's sword on one forearm, Legolas' bow on the other, and Gimli's axe down my spine for almost-certain, and then symbols of the rest of the Fellowship - Boromir's horn, Gandalf's rune, Sam's box of salt (or box of soil from Galadriel), Frodo's Red Book, and I'm not sure what for Merry and Pippin; at first I was thinking the flag of Rohan for Merry and the flag of Gondor for Pippin, and I do definitely want the white horse on the green field in general (ROHIRRIM 4 LYFE!), but I think they need something... hobbit-ier. Maybe a pipe and a bag of pipeweed (maybe Longbottom Leaf?). And then something for Bilbo as well - a pocket-handkerchief doesn't feel quite right, so maybe Sting? And I would love Éowyn's helmet as well, and maybe her extremely badass "...if living or dark undead you be..." quote. But at this point I think I'm starting to run out of real estate. XD
The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley.
I'm a little surprised this one ended up nominated for a Hugo, tbh, let alone on the shortlist. It very much positions itself as a non-genre novel - all of the blurbs are from, like, NPR and Vox and Elle and New York magazine and so on, and it has all of the contemporary bestseller trappings - book club questions, chatty interview with the author, list of related "Literary Fiction" titles, and so on. I've actually noticed that many time travel novels do this, tbh. Outlander, The Time Traveler's Wife, and Time Was (which I liked very much until it a) muffed the ending and b) tried to explain the time travel - see below) all seem very adamant that they're non-genre ~literary~ novels... that just so happen to have a fantastical plot device at their hearts. Which is fair, I suppose, since at least MoT very much did not read like a SF novel to me.
The other reason I'm surprised MoT was up for a Hugo was that I never quite got over the feeling that this was glorified fanfic. I know I'm not alone in this (thanks
hamsterwoman andtabacoychanel for confirming!), but I very much get the feeling that it started out as thirsty, iddy curtainfic about one of the dudes from The Terror, and never quite grew beyond that. Which isn't a bad thing! In fact, approaching it as idfic about somebody's blorbo made it an enormously enjoyable & entertaining read - it's only when somebody told the author that there needs to be a plot and action and so on that it started to lose me. TBH, I hope the author publishes the serial-numbers-still-on version on AO3 or somewhere, because I would love to read that.The plot only begins to show the faintest sign of stirring about 30% in and, if I recall correctly, doesn't actually get going until well over halfway in. The first good chunk, where the novel's heart truly lies, is a nameless British-Cambodian protagonist living in increasingly-sexy domestic bliss with an honorable, supposed-to-be-dead unwilling Victorian time traveler, and hanging out with his other unwilling time traveler buddies. I actually had high hopes that the novel would remember its fanficcy roots and end up with a sort of double-triangled polycule in which the narrator dates both Graham (honorable Victorian naval officer who was supposed to have died in the Franklin Expedition) and Margaret (a gloriously chaotic Tudor woman who was supposed to have died in the Plague, and who took to anarchist lesbian feminism with impressive ferocity), Graham dates the narrator and Arthur (sad gay WWI soldier that Graham befriends/has enormous UST with), and Arthur is platonic besties with the narrator and Margaret. All of which there was ample groundwork laid for in the novel, btw! Graham and Arthur had enormous amounts of wistful chemistry with each other, and the author set it up very deftly so that Arthur never confirmed that they weren't lovers, just as Graham never confirmed that he was 100% heterosexual. And the narrator apparently physically cannot stop herself from describing how beautiful Margaret is, protesting that it's meant completely platonically all the while. Like, she spends at least two paragraphs on Margaret's large and generally glorious breasts ("I note all this because I think male writers are often mocked for their lengthy descriptions of women's breasts, but I do think some breasts provoke them, even from me"), is way physically cuddlier than it's ever crossed my mind to be with my female/AFAB friends (plopping yourself down on your friend's lap - just gals being pals!), and pauses while fleeing for her life to note the beautiful opalescence of Margaret's skin. She even finds her acne cute! They're not just zits, they're a "bijou constellation" that "resembl[e] (charmingly) pink wafer crumbs" and are to be found "glowing with unprinted newness" (alongside the "sultry peach color of her mouth," mind you). Like, there is no possible way this woman isn't at least a little bit queer.
My favorite parts of the book were definitely the iddiest. I love me a good fish out of temporal water, and I could have cheerfully read 300+ pages' worth of a bunch of unwitting/unwilling time travelers bopping around near-future England with their increasingly flustered handler. It was all delightfully slice-of-life - Graham thinks TV is stupid (especially Sesame Street, aka "deformed monstrosities against the will of God") but everybody else loves it! Margaret gets Tinder! Arthur writes bad poetry, and knew
(This seems like a good time to say: I can tell the author had enormous fun constructing historical names - Thomas Cardingham and Margaret Kemble from the 17th century, Anne Spencer from the end of the 18th, Arthur Reginald-Smythe from WW1, and... Graham Gore from 1847, who was a real person & therefore can't have a deliciously old-timey name, alas.)
The plot starts to intrude between 30-50%, more or less, where it becomes less important that the narrator has enormous chemistry with Graham and Margaret, and more important that she absolutely sucks at her job, which is being a secret agent. Technically, she was supposed to have been helping Graham adjust to the 21st century/reporting to her shadowy masters on the effects of time travel, but aside from initial setup, this has mainly manifested in her delusitorily writing reports and being intimidated by her boss. ...Which is where the problems started, at least for me. It's blindingly obvious from fairly early on that she's actually working for either a Bond villain, a Lawful Evil government ministry, or both, and she's completely oblivious to this until about 2/3 through. Like, Graham stumbles across a handheld time travel device, or perhaps some sort of weapon? LOL, those wacky history people - he must have seen a cell phone, or possibly a gaming console, and gotten freaked out by it! She blabs about this to a colleague who freaks out and tells her that they've been bugged? Huh, he seems really paranoid; the job must really be getting to him! Better go report him to the higher ups! :D I'm sure the fact that he disappeared shortly thereafter and every trace of him appears to have been scrubbed from the digital record is a total coincidence. I mean, her mentor is clearly a time traveler with an honest-to-god black eyepatch! (I admit I wasn't expecting said scary mentor to actually be her from the future, though.)
I don't think it would bother me so much if the narrative didn't do that thing that bugged me so much in A Taste of Gold and Iron (which I dutifully gave 50-100 pages before deciding that the narrator bugged the shit out of me and DNF'ed), where the protagonist repeatedly informs us that they're bad at their jobs, thus reinforcing the idea that they're bad at their jobs. XD I know it's meant to create sympathy between reader and character, and (I think) meant to make the character appear endearingly lacking in self-confidence, but is the problem really a lack of self-confidence if the character is actually, demonstrably and quantifiably, bad at their job? I don't think it would have annoyed me so much that the narrator kept making spectacularly stupid decisions if she hadn't been quite so insistent on pointing out all the places she fucked up, and wondering if she could have prevented things from going to shit quite so spectacularly if she had acted differently. IDK, it's just sort of an anti-competence kink thing - competence squick.
Anyway, I like the narrator best when she was mooning over Graham, being kind to a clearly shell-shocked Arthur, and taking an absolutely normal level of heterosexual interest in Margaret. Not only the plot, but the character really started to fall apart when things started to kick into high gear. Most notably, I'm not sure to what degree some of the narrator (who is deliberately unnamed, btw - this isn't me being coy)'s less savory qualities are meant to be taken as a study in the corrosive effect of power, and which are actually meant as positive qualities but come across as Fridge Horror/Fridge Fascism. In fanfic terms, the narrator is absolutely a stand-in for the author - like the author herself, the narrator is an expensively-educated, white-passing British-Cambodian woman in her mid-thirties with a strong interest in the Franklin Expedition and languages, who lives in London and has complicated feelings about the British Empire. In the author interview at the back of the book, Kaliane Bradley says that the narrator is absolutely 100% not a stand-in for her, but... yeah. But the further the plot progresses, the more it becomes clear that the narrator is blind to the Bond villain shenanigans going on around her; it could either be naïveté, or it could be willful blindness/awareness of, but unwillingness to confront, increasingly sinister and authoritarian power structures. She (the narrator, but also the author, I guess) does comment frequently on how she (the narrator) has a complex relationship with power structures as a result of her heritage, particularly her mother's experiences in, and escape from, the Cambodian genocide. In particular, the narrator seems oddly clear-eyed about the fact that she's willing to truckle to, and even actively support, authoritarian regimes as long as she's personally in a prefect-like position of moderate safety and power. This is clearly not an aspirational position, let's say, but I'm not quite sure what the author's intent was here. If it was to flesh out and complicate her character, it sits very oddly against her utter lack of self-awareness in other regards.
Overall, MoT's heart is of a very fluffy fanfic, with bike rides across the moors and minor humorous domestic escapades (such as when Graham's immediate reaction to seeing a working toilet is to take it apart to see how it works, with predictable results). When it tries to get into Serious Big-Time Story Mode, with time travelers from a particularly Crapsack Future, arguments about whether the Chaotic Evil assassins from the future or Lawful Evil ministry of the present day is actually worse, some literal Kill Your Darlings moments (Arthur! T.T), and actually has to get into the nitty-gritty of time travel, the cracks start to show. In particular, there were some interesting ideas (namely, the concept that there could be only X number of time travelers in any particular timeline/point in time, and the admittedly very cool conceit that the "expats" don't show up on any sort of scanner or digital device - body scanners, MRI machines, etc.), but I think those needed some stronger genre infrastructure to really shine; they felt a little bit wasted here.
The language itself was... eh? There were some strikingly weird similes that I'm not sure if they were deliberately weird or not ("The ice outside shifts - the Arctic stammering its jaws as a cat does when it sees a bird."), and some clear new-ish author problems (including some very self-conscious attempts at a sort of Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett archly wry tone about bureaucracy - I'm betting PTerry, especially since she mentions him in her author interview), but I did highlight a lot of phrases. Graham, as the Designated Blorbo, is delightful, of course, and has tons of equally-delightful repartee with the narrator ("Am I to be idle for this entire year? You do still have a naval service?" "We expected you would need more time to adjust -" "Is the sea still wet? Can one still float ships upon it?"). The author clearly also has lots of fun with Margaret's proto-Shakespearean insults ("Mark your thatch!" "Sauce! I'll boil your ears." "Noddy! Heron-faced fool!" "I will mash you! Now bate your breath.") and Arthur's sort of Wodehouse/Biggles-ish dialogue ("I think the suffragettes did bally well.").
TL;DR: This is delightful iddy fanfic, except when it tries to grow a plot. I did enjoy the fanficcy bits thoroughly, and would happily have left kudos and an long, squeeful comment on AO3, especially if the narrator, Graham, Arthur, and Margaret had ended up in a polycule. I'm still not sure how it ended up on the Hugo ballot, though.
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Date: 2026-01-16 10:22 pm (UTC)I like the narrator best when she was mooning over Graham, being kind to a clearly shell-shocked Arthur, and taking an absolutely normal level of heterosexual interest in Margaret
same tbh. i see you what you're getting at with your comment on Bradley's language, and I would put it that on a sentence level I had very little to quibble with but when you looked at whole passages, scenes, chapters, I did not feel like she had a clear notion of what all that breathtakingly fancy language was supposed to accomplish.