#SFFBookClub

Moon of the Crusted Snow is a story about a small, remote Anishinaabe community surviving through the beginning of an apocalypse. Power goes out, communication is down, and they turn inward to try to take care of their community, through leadership struggles, limited food, and the chaos of taking in strangers. I read this as a part of July's #SFFBookClub book.

I quite enjoyed the smaller focused story of survival here, where the outside world is at the margins. It centers a small Anishinaabe community, and about its dread and uncertainty and adaptation as everything starts to slowly unravel when winter sets in.

For me, the part that set the tone of the entire story was the conversation that Evan Whitesky has with the elder Aileen Jones, about halfway through the book. She says that there's no word for apocalypse in Ojibwe. But more than that, she says that their world already ended much earlier when they were forced out of their original land, and ended again when their children were stolen. That they've seen disaster over and over and have always been resilient and survived.

To me, that conversation feels directly juxtaposed with Evan's musing a few pages later about the phrase the moon of the crusted snow--he remembers teachers having a disagreement about whether that phrase referred to the month at the peak of winter or a month where it alternated between freezing and mild temperatures. In the context of Aileen's conversation, it feels like the title itself is about ambivalent ways of looking at disaster--one perception of it being the worst thing that's ever happened, and another saying that this is not the first time this has happened, and providing some future-looking hope for milder times.

I suggested this for #SFFBookClub, and so I gave this a reread so I could enjoy it again. I love the way this novel takes Hollywood and its obsession with stars and all of its racism and homophobia, and mixes it with fey magical realism. Overall, it's definitely a book whose strengths are in its setting and its writing, rather than in a tight plot, but I still love the characters.

In particular, probably my favorite part of this book are the constant turns of phrase that bring in fey elements at unexpected times. You're just reading along and then you get hit with a line like "The cameras were better now, I told myself. They had tamed them down, fed them better." Silent movies steal people's voices. Film stars are (ambiguously but also maybe literally) stars in the sky and wield their star power. Names are sacrificed, or hidden for protection. These pieces give the story some extra teeth and a darker edge of danger that always feels present at the margins. The extra ambiguity over what's real in a story about movie magic is delicious.

I have mixed feelings about parts of the end, especially with the trip to San Francisco. I think this is probably the part where the novel loses me a little bit. The pieces work well, but the pacing is a little jarring. It's nice to have a moment to come full circle to Luli's sister, the reveal of art outside of Hollywood that Luli has been too tunnel-visioned to see, and the continuing contrast of the realness of Tara and other places with the fey world of movies. I like the depth that this journey adds, and I'm not sure where else arguably in the novel that it would go.

"What so great about being seen?" Tara demanded. "What's so important about that?"

She might have had the words for it, but I didn't. They locked up in my throat, about being invisible, about being alien and foreign and strange even in the place where I was born, and about the immortality that wove through my parents' lives but ultimately would fail them. Their immortality belonged to other people, and I hated that.

One thing I saw in this reread was how much the book played with "being seen": fey bargains to get seen in pictures; pressure about being seen in "wrong" ways; being mis-seen as Mexican instead of Venezuelan; being asked to make do things to be seen as straight and married; the fear of being seen as crossing class lines or being seen as queer and butch.

I read Remnant Population from the #SFFBookClub backlog. I had a lot of fun reading this. This is a first contact novel with the main character being an older woman in her seventies. At the start of the book, Ofelia is living with her only remaining adult son and his wife. When the colony she is on loses their contract and evacuates, and she decides to hide and stay. It turns out that the planet had undiscovered intelligent life, and these aliens come to investigate her. In the end, she's caught in the middle between these friendly aliens and returning humans.

I think what I most appreciate about this book is the wry internal perspective and character development of Ofelia. She is an old woman who has put in the work, and whose primary character trait is that she's just tired of putting up with other people's expectations and attitudes. Her daughter-in-law harangues her about how she dresses, and the fact that she will be free and able to live blissfully in solitude is the real motivating factor for her to not leave with the rest of the colonists.

When the aliens show up to curiously investigate her, Ofelia begins by treating them like irresponsible children; when they track mud in her house, she tries to teach them how to mop. The aliens certainly interrupt her solitude, but ultimately give Ofelia the community and respect that she never previously had, even despite the language and species barriers.

When more humans show up, they're a threat to the aliens, but they're just as much as threat to Ofelia's new-found independence. These new humans treat her more or less the same as the previous ones (via an ageist and ableist lens), rudely unable to take Ofelia or her experience seriously or believe that she can communicate in rudimentary ways with the aliens, let alone that she has an accord with them. In the end, it's an opportunity for Ofelia to come into her own and be able to finally ignore the people-pleasing internal voice that tries to keep her small.

Ofelia reminds me in some ways of the aiji-dowager Ilisidi from CJ Cherryh's Foreigner series. Ofelia is not crafty and maneuvering like Ilisidi, and instead leans on her own introverted stubbornness. That said, they're both irritated at all of these condescending youngsters who think they know better, who can't even bother with politeness or sharing some tea. And, when confronted with the unknown, they both treat it with kindness and courtesy.

I read The Core of the Sun because it was on the #SFFBookClub backlog.

This book is about a woman in a (gender-)dystopian Finnish society that puts public health above all else. Applying eugenics, gender stereotypes, applying science like the fox domestication experiments to humans, this society divides everybody into men and women, and further into H.G. Wells-esque eloi/morlock categories, all based on childhood appearance, behavior, and health. Eloi women especially are forced into extreme feminine stereotypes. The main character has been secretly educated but pretends to be eloi.

I think the most weird and delightful part of the book for me is the focus on chili peppers and capsaicin. It's been made illegal (along with alcohol and tobacco), and so a lot of the book is focused on the main character getting her chili fix, illegal pepper drug trade, and the transcendental experiences from having too many scovilles. The book takes this all quite seriously, interspersed with mostly true facts about peppers, but it's hard not to feel some unintentional comedy about it.

Not that every book has to be fresh and unique, but I'm not quite sure what the dystopian part of this novel was getting at here that hasn't been done elsewhere. Unlike other dystopian novels, this book doesn't seem to be a musing on abortion, or capitalism, or democracy, or even really a queer story about not fitting into gender roles and questions of passing (though it could have been). Maybe I just expect a dystopia to be playing with and exaggerating a particular idea; I never got the feeling this book was going for any of that, and so the dystopian worldbuilding mostly felt tiresome and well-trodden. (Maybe I'm just tired of gender stereotypes.)