thevampiremars's reviews
202 reviews

Nevada is something of a cult classic, a landmark of trans literature. Does it live up to the hype? Hard to say. I want to say something pithy like “Nevada walked so Detransition, Baby could run” but, while there is some truth in that, I feel like it undersells Nevada. It’s a good book in its own right. It’s not for everyone but it doesn’t have to be; I appreciate that Binnie wrote a book that’s a little unorthodox, instead of taking the radical idea of “trans fiction by trans authors for trans readers” and compromising to make it more palatable to a wider audience.

The stream of consciousness writing style and the abrupt ending may seem off-putting but they work. The POV characters, Maria and James, are stuck in their own heads, and they’re unable/unwilling to communicate effectively or to form meaningful relationships with others. They’re not irredeemably awful but they are certainly flawed, and they do make you want to grab them by the shoulders and shake them sometimes. I suppose that’s how Maria feels about James. Her plan to

tell James he’s trans because he reminds her of her younger self, and to essentially redo her twenties through him

is silly. It’s understandable on a purely emotional level but it was a doomed project from the start. Of course it doesn’t come together with a neat and tidy resolution.

Nevada is a book about failure. If you expect anything else, you’ll be disappointed.

CONTENT WARNINGS: sex, relationship issues, transphobia (largely internalised), dissociation, drug use 

“Would ya rather have loadsa people hate ya an’ loadsa people love ya, or not be hated by many people but also not be loved by that many people?”

Fucked up but presented in a “c’est la vie” kind of way. The memoir follows Lees throughout her adolescence, with higher highs and lower lows than most. She’s so naive to begin with. I suppose that only makes it all the more gratifying to watch her mature and figure herself out.

Charismatic. Sympathetic. I’d love to read a follow-up.

CONTENT WARNINGS: homophobia, transphobia, racism, child abuse, adult/minor sex, grooming, violence, drug use, psychosis, suicidality, death, imprisonment

I don’t have particularly strong feelings about this book. I can see what Nabokov was going for (taking the idea of an unreliable narrator to an extreme degree and using that to explore fiction within fiction), but the book just didn’t hold my interest. I considered calling it a DNF but I powered through and yeah, I don’t have much to say about it. I think maybe it’s a little too enigmatic? I don’t know how to read Pale Fire – the poem or the novel.

I don’t know. I want to like this book – and in some ways I feel like I should – but I just don’t care for it. Oh well.

CONTENT WARNINGS: death, murder, suicide, delusion, obsession, stalking, implied csa, homosexuality equated with pedophilia, the word n*gro used repeatedly

“if it weren’t for those boots, good grief / I’d bat-fly to bell towers easy.”

I liked some of the earlier poems, the ones detailing Henson’s childhood. They were morbid but with a sweetness to them. The book does lose steam later on (which kind of works? because it coincides with talk of depression and grief); the poems become less distinct and less interesting. Or maybe I just got bored.

CONTENT WARNINGS: death (including the deaths of parents and friends), suicide and suicidality, mental illness, body horror

An easy read – I can see this being studied in secondary schools. But it’s also a difficult read because there isn’t a plot to follow and invest in, just a collection of emotionally stunted characters who refuse to communicate with one another. It’s frustrating. And it makes the talk-therapy dialogue seem even more out of place. There’s this air of reflectiveness that isn’t backed up with real introspection or character growth. It’s surface level sentimentality that goes nowhere. The titular Panenka and the other maladjusted men he’s friends with don’t ever learn to talk about their feelings or take responsibility for their actions, they just wait around until someone (almost always a woman) comes along to take care of them.

While I’m on the topic of sexism I have to talk about Vincent. He makes my skin crawl. There’s a scene towards the end of the book that I’ll outline here:

Marie-Thérèse wants to break up with Vincent because she doesn’t love him any more. Vincent twists her words and reframes everything she says. He gets passive aggressive. He weaponsises their son, Arthur, using him to guilt trip her into staying. At the end of the book, Marie-Thérèse seems to have tricked herself into thinking she must still love Vincent, and they and their son go out for a meal like a Happy Family™.

To me, it’s horrific. But I don’t think it’s meant to be read that way. Sometimes it can be hard to tell what’s deliberately uncomfortable and what’s an unfortunate oversight on the author’s part. I suppose that’s what you get when you’re so preoccupied with the feelings of men that your female characters get utterly sidelined.

So what is Panenka? It’s a book full of self-pity and teenage middle-aged angst. It’s a book that wants to talk about men’s mental health but isn’t sure what to say. It’s a book I had high hopes for and was let down by. I’m not going to tell you not to read it, but man... it’s sticking with me for the wrong reasons.

CONTENT WARNINGS: chronic pain (migraines), cancer, depression, guilt, grief, abandonment, cheating, men being generally useless and/or nasty, sexism 

Seeing Like a State drags. It easily could have been edited down to under 200 pages, and it would have been a better book for it. Scott gives multiple examples that demonstrate the same thing – it gets repetitive. There is such a thing as being too thorough.

That said, this is not a bad book. Scott gives some valuable insights into modernism and how it strives for legibility, and he clearly lays out the distinction between data and what he terms “mētis” (practical knowledge based on experience; wisdom, knack). The book got me thinking about utopianism; we often use the term to refer to any instance of naive idealism but perhaps it’s more effective in discussing statecraft/city planning, ie: attempts to artificially construct a “perfect” society, doomed by the fact that perfection is a myth and not a viable end goal.

Some quotes I liked:

“In dictatorial settings where there is no effective way to assert another reality, fictitious facts-on-paper can often be made eventually to prevail on the ground, because it is on behalf of such pieces of paper that police and army are deployed.”

“The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations.”

“The temporal emphasis of high modernism is almost exclusively on the future. [...] The past is an impediment, a history that must be transcended; the present is the platform for launching plans for a better future.”

CONTENT WARNINGS: surveillance, imperialism and colonialism, eugenics, references to racism, sexism and various other -isms based on categorisation and segregation (with mentions of apartheid and the holocaust), war, disease, famine, forced relocation, forced labour, police brutality

UPDATE DECEMBER 2024: I'm upping my rating for this book from 3.5 to 4.0. I haven't reread it, but still I want to tweak my review in recognition of the impact it has had on me. It has shaped my thinking and I reference it fairly often. Does it drag? Maybe. Perhaps I should revisit it to check, because I might have just been in a bad mood when I read it the first time haha. But yeah it's definitely a book I would recommend

“Disengage . . . disengage . . . disengage . . .”

Dune Messiah is difficult to rate as a story so I’ll start by rating it as a sequel. Is it a worthy successor to the original Dune novel? It had quite a legacy to live up to, but I’d say it more or less pulls it off. It’s not as good as the original – there’s no denying that – but it does its job of continuing the story and revisiting the central characters/worldbuilding premises while carving out an identity of its own.

There’s a twelve year timeskip leading into the events of this novel. On one hand a lot happens during those twelve years that the reader misses out on, but on the other I think this approach was necessary; the chaos and crisis that marked the final scenes of Dune could not be properly resolved yet also extended, so it’s best to let the immediate aftermath occur offscreen and return to Paul once there’s some distance between that moment and the present. The climax remains a climax, and this story starts with as fresh a slate as any sequel can be expected to have.

I said before that Dune is “sci-fi for history buffs” and this holds true. Dune Messiah explores themes of historicisation and dissociation. My interpretation is probably more meta than Herbert intended it to be: Paul and Alia are characters in a story – protagonists, no less – and as such they have very little agency when it comes to the trajectory of their lives. And they’re aware of this. Maybe not aware that they’re characters in a novel, but aware that they’re quasi-divine beings performing their roles in some cosmic saga. Alia, as she grows into a young woman, is just starting to become conscious of this invisible barrier against her autonomy. Paul, meanwhile, has had enough.

The political intrigue is not that intriguing. The conspiracy against Paul feels shoehorned and is tonally confusing – I love the sarcastic fish man, but... why is there a sarcastic fish man, exactly? This book is more bleak but also more surreal than the first.

For the most part, Dune Messiah is a series of disjointed vignettes, brief snapshots that really pinpoint the essence of each character. I want to talk about the characterisation of women in particular, since sexism has thus far been something of a sticking point in this franchise. I thought Alia was well-realised; Herbert did a good job of painting her as both an ordinary teenage girl and much more than that. She has some really strong character moments (like the fencing scene) but her arc gets cut off.

She doesn’t get to have a fully fleshed-out relationship with Duncan, she gets to become the regent because that’s what the story requires of her.

I can’t tell whether this is bad writing or brilliant, linking back to the divinity-vs-autonomy idea.

And then there’s Irulan. There’s an interesting paradox wherein her childlessness prompts her to conspire against Paul and her conspiring is what makes him refuse to let her have his child – he doesn’t want her to be the mother of the heir because he doesn’t trust her with that power. But Chani’s desire for a child weakens Irulan’s characterisation; instead of playing her cards right in an attempt to gain power and influence, Irulan’s motive is dulled and reframed as her being yet another woman with baby fever. She’s such a wasted character. She should be far more central since vast swathes of the plot revolve around her.

All in all, Dune Messiah is everything a sequel to Dune needed to be. Instead of rehashing old themes it approaches with a new angle, distinct yet in keeping with the general feel of the first novel. The reason I’m giving it a relatively low rating is that it never quite reaches the same heights as Dune. It handles the familiar elements well but the new ones are so-so. I liked it well enough, but it will forever dwell in the shadow of its predecessor.

CONTENT WARNINGS: themes of imperialism and genocide but mostly abstract/at a distance, violence and (eye) injury, sexual exploitation, incest, copious drug use, dissociation, suicidality, death, grief

I’m not a fan of The Dispossessed. I didn’t find the protagonist, Shevek, compelling at all. He’s infuriatingly naive and unobservant – and I’m supposed to believe he’s a genius?

Around the 25% mark, it is revealed to the reader via narration that

Anarres is, in fact, a mining colony owned by Urras.

It’s an interesting idea, but why casually mention it so early in the novel? Surely this should have been something Shevek gradually realised as the story went on, thereby incorporating the reveal diegetically and giving the protagonist something to do besides sitting around waiting for the plot to happen to him. And it goes nowhere – it’s mentioned, and it never comes up again.

I suppose you could argue the capitalist/colonial influence of Urras explains the coercive nature of this supposedly anarchistic society, as workers are forced to maintain high levels of productivity in order to meet a quota. In essence, the Odonians never escaped their capitalist oppressors, they just moved elsewhere and conned themselves into thinking they were free. But only a class reductionist could attribute all the failings of Anarres to its economic ties with Urras.

There’s a misogyny problem. A really bad misogyny problem. I think the only female character that wasn’t immediately sexualised was Odo, and she’s a) dead, and b) characterised as rather frigid. The Anarresti love to point out Odo as their founder (Weyoun-like) and yet they always speak of “brotherhood” and refuse to treat women and men with equal respect. The objectification of women borders on incel rhetoric at times.

Here’s the thing: if this is intentional and we’re meant to see that misogyny is just as prevalent on Anarres as it is on Urras, with implications that it’s just a result of human nature, is that not outrageously anti-anarchist? Does that not suggest that anarchist organisation is impossible, that oppression is inevitable, that leftist/progressive philosophies are fundamentally incompatible with reality? And if that’s not what Le Guin is trying to say, what am I supposed to take away from this? There’s “ambiguous utopia,” and then there’s this.

There’s even a scene in which Shevek

sexually assaults a woman. Why? Is it supposed to make him seem fallible, human? Is it supposed to demonstrate the corrupting influence of Urras? In either case, these goals could be (and are!) achieved in other ways. Shevek succumbs to Urrasti fashion so he can fit in, and he eats food he doesn’t even like just because it’s there. It is a gratuitous rape scene; nothing more, nothing less. The victim, Vea, isn’t seen or even mentioned again. Shevek is embarrassed about making a fool of himself and while he does very briefly acknowledge that what he did was “abominable,” he quickly gets over it and moves on and that’s that.

I’m just... baffled, honestly. Disgusted, yes, but also baffled.

In general, The Dispossessed isn’t particularly well-written. The temporal physics/philosophy was half-baked and its links to anarchism were tenuous at best. The anarchist theory itself was pretty basic and frequently (unintentionally?) undermined. I like the idea of painting these evocative word pictures when talking about the desert landscapes of Anarres, but switching to simply listing commodities when describing the sights on Urras. That said, it makes for dull reading.

The whole thing seems rather clumsy in its execution. Maybe if you’d never heard of anarchism before this might have been a game-changer? Otherwise, I just don’t get the hype.

CONTENT WARNINGS: lots of excrement, lots of sex and general horniness, sexism and misogyny, classism, a sexual assault scene, pregnancy and birth, miscarriage, death, massacre, violence, injury, police brutality, imprisonment, forced institutionalisation, isolation, and suicidality 

“Why can I never set my heart on a possible thing?”

The Left Hand of Darkness is difficult to evaluate. I have to remember that the book came out in the 1960s; I can appreciate that it must have been groundbreaking in its own time while acknowledging that it seems quite limited by today’s standards.

Le Guin takes the premise of gender politics and pulls from it the central question of this book: what would politics look like in a world without gender? But her exploration of this idea is constrained by her own biases, namely misogynist, misandrist, bioessentialist, and cisnormative assumptions. Some of these biases may be Genly’s rather than Le Guin’s; if so, I don’t think enough was done to interrogate and deconstruct such notions as men being defined by conquest and women being either sweet or shrill – they’re taken for granted. Genly did slowly learn to accept Estraven for who he is instead of trying to categorise him as male or female, despite initially struggling to understand Gethenian “ambisexuality.” That’s something. I just wish Le Guin had gone further in using this opportunity to really dig into gender as a social construct and the associated social roles and stereotypes. It also would have been nice to see her use neo(/xeno?)pronouns, or even singular they, rather than defaulting to he/him. Honestly, the argument that masculine pronouns are actually more gender neutral than gender neutral pronouns because we use them to refer to God was ?? ludicrous. Divine Cisness crops up again in Genly’s genetic experiment theory, which positions cis people as both normal and godlike. You can’t just throw that in without examination. Am I meant to assume he’s right or is this just Genly’s ego on display? Maybe it’s a meta reference to the Gethenians being a thought experiment? I’m not sure what I’m meant to take from this. I don’t think it was meant to be so thought-provoking, at least not in this way.

I also have to note the queerness that emerges from this insistence on masculine gendering.

I’m not sure I’d call Genly and Estraven’s relationship homoerotic since it’s surprisingly chaste. There are some cute moments between them. But sometimes it did feel as though Le Guin made her Gethenians quasi-gay just so she could bury them. So many of their relationships end in death and tragedy.

Apart from the gender philosophy, the setting stands out as well; a stark, hostile environment dominated by ice and snow. Bleak. Le Guin’s prose is as evocative as usual, though the facts and figures do spoil her descriptions somewhat (seriously, I don’t need to know the exact temperature in Fahrenheit – tell me about icicles or whatever).

The Cold War parallels are obvious in the tensions between Karhide and Orgoreyn (representing the USA and the USSR respectively). I suppose they also tie in with the Taoist dualism recurrent throughout the book; two sides of one coin. I can see a lot of thought went into their cultures, particularly the ways in which they spoke,

with one being perhaps overly mindful of pride and honour while the other seems direct but is actually adept at subterfuge.

Tibe should have played a bigger role and should have had more screen time (page time?)

A seminal work, no doubt, but did I like it? I feel like I’d enjoy this book more on a second reading, knowing which characters are important and being assured that everything comes together in the end. I can see myself giving it four stars in that case. As it stands, I’m not sure I can rate it that highly, but I certainly can’t give it a low rating. I’m glad I read it, and my opinion does generally skew positive. That this book exists is a feat in itself, even if it does have its flaws.

CONTENT WARNINGS: descriptions of sexuality and sexual anatomy but no sexually explicit scenes, sexism, homophobia, suicide, death, murder, violence, (impending) war, human trafficking, imprisonment, prison labour, forced sterilisation, drugging, mentions of rape, and incest 

Rocannon’s World – 3.0☆

“What I feel sometimes is that I . . . meeting these people from worlds we know so little of, you know, sometimes . . . that I have as it were blundered through the corner of a legend, of a tragic myth, maybe, which I do not understand . . .”

This was Le Guin’s debut novel and let’s just say I’m glad it wasn’t the first I read. Rocannon’s World is not as sophisticated as some of her later works, and it lacks that feminist and anarchist philosophical underpinning she’s known for. I kept wanting to read some profundity into it, interpreting the story’s assumptions as some sly commentary on patriarchy and colonialism. Why, for example, is it called “Rocannon’s World” and not “Semley’s World” or “Yahan’s World”? I don’t think it was intended to be subjected to such scrutiny, though.

The writing style is distinctly Le Guin’s – imaginative and eloquent. I like the combination of sci-fi and fantasy, and I like how scientific concepts such as time dilation are given an almost mythic quality. The prologue establishes truth as a central theme, specifically the contradiction/interplay of facts and legends. I wish more had been done with that. While I’m talking about the prologue, I should note that it was originally a standalone short story called The Dowry of Angyar, which explains why it feels so separate from the rest of the narrative. It’s the strongest part of the story by far, and is probably weakened by the more conventional SF/F quest that follows it.

Overall Rocannon’s World is a fairly dull story framed by interesting worldbuilding. In that way it’s similar to The Farthest Shore, which I gave three stars; I’ll give the same rating here. Decent, but a shadow of what Le Guin was capable of.

Planet of Exile – 3.5☆

I’m not sure what to make of this one. There’s a lot to chew on, though; it seems to have a lot more to say than Rocannon’s World did.

Prejudice is a major throughline, with the indigenous Tevarans and the “farborn” colony constantly butting heads and casting aspersions about each other. The relationship between Rolery and Agat seems, at first, to be an age-old tale of star-crossed lovers, but it becomes clearer as the story progresses that it may not be so romantic after all.

Well, I say that, but I’m not sure how it was intended to come across. As in Rocannon’s World, it can sometimes be unclear which aspects of her worldbuilding and storytelling Le Guin wanted the reader to interrogate and which are supposed to be taken at face value. Maybe we are supposed to believe the two of them are truly in love. The way I see it, however, Rolery’s anguish at having no prospect of marriage and motherhood and Agat’s fixation on their native/coloniser dynamic cannot be overlooked. It doesn’t seem healthy.

There’s a tension between Rolery and Agat in the narrative itself. Rolery seems to be the protagonist but then the perspective keeps snapping back to Agat and the story ends with him and his feelings. Rolery becomes more and more passive until she’s essentially an object, a prize.

The pacing is quite uneven and Le Guin relies a little too heavily on telling instead of showing. Still, the prose is evocative. There’s some really interesting stuff relating to time and people’s experience of it. I think Le Guin is starting to find her feet here.

City of Illusions – 3.5☆

The final instalment of the collection complements the first quite nicely; a story about truth vs a story about lies. It’s a shame gender nonconformity was used as shorthand for deception but hey, I must admit “grotesque and frail in her transvestite clothes” is a mood.

I feel like there’s a lot to dissect but also not a lot. The first half of the narrative is a slog, a series of occurrences along a journey with only an abstract destination in mind. It feels aimless, episodic. But the story does pick up in the last few chapters. The ending plays with some fascinating ideas but could have handled them more skilfully, I think.

The protagonist, Falk, isn’t particularly compelling. He’s too passive, simply travelling from one location to the next.

The existence of Falk-Ramarren – the perseverance of Falk’s consciousness even after being brainwashed and having his previous identity reinstated – would make more sense if Falk had been characterised as assertive and tenacious up to that point. As it stands, it’s a neat idea but it’s just not consistent with the rest of the narrative.

Between the copious drug use and the weird gender stuff and the

plurality

right at the end, City of Illusions is somewhat reminiscent of Dune. This similarity only highlights its shortcomings, however; Dune works, but this story just never quite clicks.

I appreciated this glimpse into Le Guin’s origins as a novelist – you can see she’s already growing and learning and honing her craft. Ultimately, all three stories were unrefined but not bad for a debut author. I look forward to reading The Left Hand of Darkness.

CONTENT WARNINGS: colonialism, racism, sexism, eugenics, violence, war, fires, death, animal death, mindprobing, brainwashing, unreality, amnesia, drugging and drug use (medical and recreational), some blood and gore, mentions of miscarriage, mutilation, rape, slavery, and suicide, also some transphobia?