Review – Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Science fiction is a genre that loves to speculate about first contact with alien minds. Science fiction is also a subculture that traditionally has a difficult time with inclusion of minds that belong to women, non-westerners, minorities, neurodivergents, and other sources of non-mainstream thought – without even getting into contemplating intelligence found in species right next to us, like octopi. 

The last thing I wrote before burning out on science fiction had to do with first contact and the last science fiction I loved – the Dungeon Crawler Carl series – is basically an extrapolation on first contact, in both instances with aliens that are greedier colonizers than we ever were. It’s an interesting subject, and I can’t quite figure out why I couldn’t engage with Tchaikovsky’s latest version, even though I’ve enjoyed his writing in the past and have felt for a long time that he deserves acclaim. 

Shroud is the story of some humans I couldn’t really tell apart, aside from one is a fat mean bastard who doesn’t survive first contact, and the alien hivemind then goes “whoops, these things might actually be smart” and gets friendly with the humans. 

I had to dive into various reviews for the summary. Interspecies misunderstandings occur until the corporates determine the aliens – who are from a lightless place and have a truly alien lightless culture – are not extractable enough and tries to take them out; the aliens outsmart them; humanity is mostly screwed but in the end it looks like communication is starting to happen.

In the Wikipedia entry, reviewer Zorica Lola Jelic summarizes this one as “whether we should create more sophisticated AI machines when we are morally so corrupt that we do not recognize the responsibility that goes with such an endeavor." Which makes it sound a lot like Dances With Wolves in space. 

Compare and contrast with Project Hail Mary, a current big hit that is seeding my social media feed with reactions, including people getting tattoos of the alien at the center of the “should I be selfish or should I go out of my way to help a space alien?” plot. I could even compare and contrast with my own novel, Star Language, which has history repeating itself in a completely predictable way while humans babble about inviting the aliens to A-list parties and demand they solve our problems centered around partisan politics. 

The novel itself is not a heavy-handed essay about moral corruption along the lines of the Wikipedia entry. It reminded me a little of Jeff VanderMeer’s work, and it’s definitely got the Tchaikovsky touch – his main interest seems to involve depicting hypothetical alien minds, which is something I very much enjoyed in a D&D romp he wrote where one party member was a magically enhanced spider. 

It didn’t grab me though. I didn’t get any particular impression of the two female lead characters, and only a fleeting one of their fat obnoxious boss. I didn’t want to keep turning pages, it was more like required reading. 

While I still kind of hope it wins just as encouragement to Tchaikovsky, who is a very good writer, and while I think the message about “we should think about inclusion as it relates to space aliens who are unlike us as scientifically plausible” is a decent one, I kept finding my thoughts returning to DC Carl, where altruism related to bizarre aliens is a winning strategy. 

I’m going to read Nnedi’s book next, Death of the Author (the only one I actually purchased before the nominations came out), and will get to the other novels time permitting. I had really high hopes for this one but maybe I’ll like Nnedi’s more. 

Review: A Parade of Horribles (Dungeon Crawler Carl, book 8) (spoiler free due to being unreasonably meta)

 I stayed up until 2am to finish A Parade of Horribles. Great jokes, tense situations, emotional moments, and I’m not even going to get into the plot due to spoiler prevention, other than to say these levels include a race game and an arena challenge, and Donut acquires some new hats. Nope, I’m zooming out to maximum meta level to review this. 

I said something unfair when I last wrote about the Carl books, that they might appeal to magas. That’s incorrect. The Carl story is the tale of a bodhisattva trapped in a cycle of hell worlds, trying to save others. The heroes in the story go to lengths to help their fellow beings in a world run by the cruel and greedy. 

What I meant to say was that Carl is a great story about a manly dude who loves fighting overbearing enemies in order to secure freedom for himself and his people. He likes videogames a whole lot too, and is familiar with various kinds, which is a major advantage in this world, and his gamer skill influences people to like and trust him. 

So a more accurate statement is that Carl manages to harness the “manly gamers fighting emasculating power trippers” energy that swayed a lot of people inclined along those lines to fight for the “please daddy more corporate overlords” side. The Carl series is self-aware enough to understand strategic distractions. As a strategy fan, that’s one of my favorite aspects of this series. 

It refuses to champion sexism or other kinds of structural violence though. The good guys in Carl cooperate, stand by their found families, and do their best to save others. And sometimes they drop the ball. Sometimes innocents meet their doom accidentally, or because they’re in the wrong section of the trolley puzzle, and sacrificing them will better someone else’s odds. 

The story is told in breakneck-speed inelegant prose that irritates readers who prefer prettier writing. Full of rapid cuts and catchphrases, inspired by someone who has seen plenty of action films. Chekov’s Guns are everywhere, and the plotting is tight and smart. In an alternate universe where GamerGate never happened, people would consider it yet another anti-corporate leftist dystopia. 

In recent news, a videogame hired Anita Sarkeesian as a consultant, and was inundated with protest letters. Sarkeesian did a series of videos showing that a lot of early games relied on sexist tropes, because they drew a lot of inspiration from fairy tales with endings like “so then the brave hero was rewarded with a princess for a wife, and he lived happily ever after.” Which led to lots of games where one played a dude trying to save a princess, because that was a traditional and culturally appropriate happy ending.

I still have not seen Sarkeesian’s videos. I refuse to, because I’m a hypercritical fact-checker and don’t need to have both sides of GamerGate mad at me. I’ve summarized my secondhand understanding of the content, and here’s my summary of the reaction: a lot of feminists favorably inclined to Sarkeesian took the position that “many games contain retro pre-feminist tropes; therefore all gamers are anti-feminist.” Culture warriors reacting to this have been clogging up my social media, demanding these boycotters (who are probably not among their social media friends) apologize for disrespecting Sarkeesian. 

I'm seeing their posts because I sided with the feminists, because people opposed to women having rights have zero appeal for me. However, I frequently regret it. On this side you’re not allowed to enjoy books like Dungeon Crawler Carl without some youngster popping up in your face to scream about how according to her idiosyncratic splitter logic combined with her philosophical viewpoint that her authentic feelings outrank facts, evidence, and the authentic feelings of anyone who can’t scream as loud, liking a book about a gamer equates to patriarchial fascism. Instead I must read, and pretend to like, stories like that ghastly one about the grrrl couple fighting to save their fetus from its own DNA. 

Occasionally there’s some great art on this side, like an Octavia Butler or Ursula LeGuin story, but a lot of it’s just as bad as the unfortunate-trope-riddled pulp shlock that their ideological opponents enjoy. Which leads my cynical brain to conclude that a lot of this culture war saber rattling is actually stealth marketing for rancid art that wouldn’t get noticed without ideologues nagging people to consume it because it farts in the general direction of their enemies. 

The main reason I’m here is because I know a lot of admirable feminists and women of accomplishment in real life, and I applaud them. They never have screamed misogynist allegations at me for checking facts or liking videogames or reading the wrong books or complaining about AI slop, but that’s a frequent thing when I hang around with internet feminists, which is something I probably need to decrease. 

Meanwhile, here comes the Carl series barreling straight up the middle of most of that. The characters benefit from some tech and are oppressed by others. Women can be inspiring girl boss characters but they can also be villainous, slutty, ridiculous – just like the men characters. There’s plenty of diverse representation, with zero preachy speeches about the importance of diverse representation. 

That’s probably why Carl is such a big viral hit. And it’s also probably why Carl is not popular with the science fictional literati (as of yet, anyway). Or maybe it’s that inelegant prose that I mentioned. Or maybe it has too much fact checker appeal – personally, all those Chekov’s guns and interwoven plots and “hey, I didn’t know that!” trivia moments make my face light up with a big doofy grin. So do the dick jokes and poop humor. 

All of my favorite science fiction in recent years seems to come from writers outside the science fictional establishment hivemind. Ready Player One, Andy Weir, and now DC Carl. Books that get lots of scorn for being commercial, inelegantly written, appealing to base troglodytes who play videogames rather than refined intellectuals with credentials permitting them to theorize, because futurecrafting is Serious Business. 

What I know is that I picked up DC Carl 1 due to the buzz, read it on an airplane, laughed out loud in public. Bought the other seven books. Read them all in rapid succession, and THEN turned around to read them again. Just in time for book 8 to appear, which I finished last night. I read 45% through 75% while traveling to and from a five-star BTS concert, and then I came home and continued reading until 2am. 

I don’t experience a five-star concert and a five-star book every day mind you, and there was also some rather good chicken. It was quite a day. 

Now I’m ready to barrel through the rest of the Hugo nominees with all of that five-starriness lingering on my aesthetic tastebuds, and I have this feeling most of it’s going to fall way short of my most generous expectations, because my standards are a little bit higher having encountered DC Carl. 

I don’t recommend DC Carl to everyone. It’s full of grimdark humor a lot like Monty Python, or Dethklok, or South Park. This is juxtaposed with emotionally hard-hitting rip-your-heart-out moments (there’s a big one in Book 8 having to do with the idea we are all the main characters of our own story). Still, sensitive folks who quiver at the thought of train cars filled with blood and viscera should probably stick to the cozy stuff. 

I do recommend DC Carl to non-gamers. It helps if you know your way around Dungeons & Dragons and the “roguelike” videogames based on it, with later volumes branching out to cover trading card games, racing games, and team wargames. I’m not sure it’s essential though, as long as you’re clear on the concept that (a) humans create simulations of dangerous adventures to entertain each other; (b) some aliens decide to make this even more entertaining by including real danger alongside the simulation, but everyone still has to play by the simulation rules. 

Don’t worry if you’re fuzzy on the details. Most DC Carl readers are, and there are plenty of internet discussions to help you sort out the Expanse references from the ‘80s music trivia and Gossip Girls easter eggs. 

Lately I'm into Labubu fashion design, because YES my tastes are THAT TRENDY!
Here's my Labubu Tribute to DC Carl

Reading, Reflecting, DC Carl, and BTS

 I just started book 8 in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, and I’m not sure if I’ll zoom through it or consume it gradually, but I’ll likely finish it next week and move directly to Shroud, then the YA novels, then the novellas and more novels time permitting. 

At the same time, I’m about to go see BTS. I fell in love with K-Pop during the pandemic, when my music computer inexplicably died a month into lockdown. Re-uploading all my CDs onto the new computer was a major chore, so I got into a whole new genre of music while doing that, and then I got spoiled rotten by all that state of the art audio in surround. 

While that was happening I was working on the dinosaur novel and trying to get into the main character’s head, so I was participating in K-Pop fandom in various ways. That led me to being interested in Korean art and culture in general, so I found Squid Games and Extraordinary Attorney Woo and Han Kang. Then I found Korean feminism and one particular aspect of it strongly appealed to me – the idea of encouraging women to have their own intellectual and social life that isn’t focused on men, such as enjoying musical performances together, where men are there as entertainment, and the point of the evening is more about bonding with your friends than finding romance. 

Then when Parasite won Best Picture, and media like Squid Games and K-Pop Demon Hunters, took off, I felt vindicated in my future-predicting skills. Yes, indeed South Korea has been tapping into the zeitgeist. 

I’ve always been fascinated by the more superficial aspects of the future. Which music will be trendy. Which movies will be blockbusters. What people will be wearing. What kind of novels they’ll read. Right now a lot of people are reading Dungeon Crawler Carl.

And they’re listening to BTS. Cities are decorating buses and trains to celebrate the three BTS shows at Stanford, the first time they’ve played here since the pandemic. I couldn’t even get a ticket when they initially went on sale – they were gone in the blink of an eye, only to reappear on resale sites at ridiculous prices. Three hundred for a nosebleed. Thousands if you want to sit on the floor. 

So I lined up for the Las Vegas show, and got a ticket for Wednesday. And then a few of my friends scored Thursday tickets so I got another nosebleed for Thursday.

And then, Ticketmaster cancelled a bunch of those resold tickets for Stanford, and offered interested fans the chance to sign up for a lottery to win the chance to get them at face value, and I was fortunate enough to get one for Saturday, making a total of three BTS shows I’m seeing in the next couple of weeks. 

I love BTS a lot. They’re not my favorite K-Pop group – that would be SHINee, who is streaming their anniversary concert right after I get back from Vegas, so I’ll be staying up until 4am watching the livestream. And I followed their ace dancer Taemin on his first US tour, catching him in Brooklyn, Los Angeles and Honolulu. But I have traveled for BTS before. 

When we all went into lockdown in 2020 I was holding a ticket to see BTS here in Northern California. It morphed into a chance to see their four LA shows during the Permission to Dance tour, and I won one of those. Up in the nosebleeds at SoFi stadium in LA, where I had never been before. 

So after more than a year of solitary confinement I found myself stepping onto an airplane, checking into one of those disinfectant-smelling hotels near LAX and heading to this massive futuristic stadium where I watched the guys sing, dance, and raise energy for thousands of cheering fans. Waving my lightstick. Enjoying that “fuck yeah finally an Asian band” kind of energy from the Asian-Americans around me. 

Afterwards I walked several blocks coasting on energy before sitting down on a curb to call a rideshare, watching all the happy energized music fans drifting down the sidewalk. Thinking “well that’s it, they just won music, we’re diving into a scene where music is a thing for upper middle class girls with indulgent daddies, but the South Koreans are taking it to that next futuristic stage, and I’m down with it. 

I’m hoping to get lots of my Hugo reading done on the plane to and from Vegas. Transitioning from a place where I’m absolutely rolling around in media that Smells Like The Future – DC Carl and BTS – to one where I’m judging art for being future-y enough to step into those Next Big Thing pants. 

A lot of art claims to be future-y but in a dishonest way, where the music of the future is exactly the same kind the author enjoyed in high school, and the plot is riffing on themes from episode twelve, season three, of something that last aired on a date beginning with 19. And it’s more of a comfort read about past futures than anything redolent with the legit whiff of tomorrow.

I was reflecting on the time I voted more out of political partisanship than appreciation of the work in question – and it did occur to me that, like it or not, the book I voted for did indeed have that “legit futurism” kind of aura, like this is definitely the sort of thing people will want to read more of. I feel that about some music, like Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish – this is music people are going to be appreciating tomorrow, even if I’m not among them. 

Because that’s really what’s at stake with regard to the Hugos. I’m not selecting art I personally like. I’m voting for whether I want more cozy stories about space aliens making found families, or whether I’d prefer blasphemous grimdark, or futuristic society tales, or vampire romance. Based on a prototype.

Sometimes this does intersect with art I personally like. I liked two of the short stories, about society adjusting to disability as well as to “digital people” because those seem like plausible conundrums of tomorrow but also because I liked the way the narrative unfolded. I loved both K-Pop Demon Hunters and Sinners, but the former stepped into brand new territory as far as cultural cachet, while the latter was an intersection of familiar stories grafted together in a novel way. In my mind, a Hugo selection should say “this is what we were concerned with at the time” to future generations, or maybe “this was viral” or “everyone thought this is what would happen.” 

As far as the other direction, I definitely have lots of friends who love their comfort media, and enjoy re-watching TV shows while listening to music from their teenagerhood. That’s one of the main problems with awards like the Hugos, I’m convinced – the average human will usually prefer nostalgic comfort to future-y things. Such as music – most people are only receptive to new music during their peak fertility years, and I’m kind of a mutant who would rather go see BTS than listen to old white people music like most of my peers. 

So that’s going to be my main Hugo criteria: does this art smell like the future? Would the people sitting near me at the BTS show like it? If so, vote yes.

Or does this art smell like some geriatric desperately trying to summon some stale aesthetic from the 1900s? Would it play better to that asshole in the viral comment complaining about whippersnappers paying through the nose for BTS when he only paid twenty bucks to see Genesis and he liked it, by golly? If so, vote no. 

But first I’m going to finish DC Carl, book 8, and write a spoiler-free review.

Hugo Voter’s Packet Highlights

I haven't started voting yet but as of right now, Wire Mother and KPop Demon Hunters get my vote. 
EDIT: I forgot all about ranked choice somehow, so I added Laser Eyes as my runner-up short story and Sinners as my runner-up film. 

I’ve been downloading Hugo nominees this morning, and here’s what I got:

NOVELS

Two of them provided excerpts only: 
A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett
Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The other four provide either the whole novel or links: 
Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow
The Incandescent by Emily Tesh
The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson

This is annoying since Tchaikovsky is the one I’m interested in and it looks like I’ll have to buy it. I do have Nnedi’s already, I just haven’t read it. I will get to the Harrow, Tesh, and Hodgson novels time permitting but I reserve the right to do my mystery-bounce after the first several pages if I’m not intrigued.

NOVELLAS

Everything was provided EXCEPT The Summer War, by Naomi Novik.
Here’s the AI summary I got when I googled it: 
The Summer War is a 2025 fantasy novella by Naomi Novik about a young witch, Celia, who accidentally curses her brother to a life without love, leading her to uncover secrets about an ancient war between mortals and immortal "summerlings" to break the spell and heal the land. The story, told in a fairy tale style, follows Celia as she grows into her powers and tries to undo her mistake, which is tied to the ongoing conflict with the summerlings.

I’ve enjoyed Novik’s writing before but I’m skipping this one, absolutely does not sound like something I’d like. I guess I will be slogging my way through the rest, and preliminarily I like T. Kingfisher a whole lot; can’t say that about any of the others. 

Automatic Noodle, by Annalee Newitz
Cinder House, by Freya Marske
Murder by Memory, by Olivia Waite
The River Has Roots, by Amal El-Mohtar
What Stalks the Deep, by T. Kingfisher

NOVELETTES 

“Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy” by Martha Wells 
Is provided and is the main one I’m interested in.

With regard to the others: 

“Kaiju Agonistes” by Scott Lynch – read it, lukewarm, this is a story for people age 65+

“Never Eaten Vegetables” by H.H. Pak – robots that raise babies: a standard sci fi trope useful for colonizing distant planets or abhorrent misogyny? It really depends on who you ask. Today a lot of writers on my social media are talking about RF Kuang getting cancelled for having a sympathetic Israeli character, and some people are even talking about the cancellation mob’s hair trigger when it comes to women/minority writers while letting lots of people like Neil Gaiman get away with all kinds of bad behavior before raising some limits. I can’t review a story about this impartially because I’m still annoyed over a conflict I had with regard to the subject matter. 

“Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy” by Martha Wells – woohoo, a free copy! Looking forward to this. Really like the Murderbot stories and am glad Martha’s achieving some success.

“The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For” by Cameron Reed – the more I think about this story, the more I loathe it. Silly action scenes, dorky soapboxing, the main character only seems to be trans in a clickbait sense, like if you added the line “I, the main character, am trans by the way” into any random novel without ever referring to it again you could game awards by claiming you’re doing representation. Like since Moby Dick is public domain, I could download it, change the first sentence to “My post-transition name is Ishmael, so call me that” and claim it’s my inclusive retelling. I will probably think of more aspects of this story to dislike if I devote more mental energy to it, so I’m going to head into avoidant denial mode. When they announce the winner of this award I will probably be enjoying a Dole Whip at Disneyland. 

“The Millay Illusion” by Sarah Pinsker – this is the one I glanced at earlier, Victorian magic and a trans character. I read something sort of like that before that I vaguely recall, about a girl-who-wants-to-be-a-boy helping a stage magician with a medium act where she’d hide under the table and do ghostly stuff during staged seances. I might go back and give this one another chance. 

“When He Calls Your Name” by Catherynne M. Valente – she’s extrapolating on a Dolly Parton song and I found it kind of eye-roll-inducing; this is a dad joke that will mystify future readers. 

LODESTAR YA

Everyone provided novels except Suzanne Collins, but I already bought hers. Margaret Owen even included the two previous books in the trilogy and I kind of like that. 

Among Ghosts by Rachel Hartman
Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe by C.B. Lee
Holy Terrors by Margaret Owen
Oathbound by Tracy Deonn
Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins
They Bloom at Night by Trang Thanh Tran

To recap, I’m going to get stuck buying the Tchaikovsky book but I hope I get a couple hundred bucks worth of entertainment from the rest of these so I can render a vaguely intelligent vote.

Meanwhile, I am halfway through book five in my Dungeon Crawler Carl re-read, which I hope to finish before book 8 drops on Tuesday, so all of these lesser works are going to have to just wait in their holding pattern for a little while as I wait to see what happens to Samantha, and Prepotente. 

Schroedinger’s Identity, or Why I Identify Mostly As Adjacent

I’ve mentioned Hawai’i a few times, and being from there, although I am not Hawaiian. This is kind of my official statement of ethnicity or lack thereof. 

My birth mother wanted to be an anthropologist. My birth grandfather said no, you are a girl and they just get married, you will be a dental hygienist and that’s the education I am paying for. My birth mother said screw you, parent, I do what I want (an important tradition in our ancestral line), and moved to Honolulu where she got a job at the Kamehameha School, as a dental hygienist, to pay for her anthro degree that she was trying to get at U of HI, Manoa. 

The Kamehameha School is a unique institution set up by Hawaiian royalty for educating Hawaiian people. It’s currently being sued by conservative types upset because white people can’t go there. There’s really nothing comparable on the mainland since colonization worked a lot different there. My birth mother was in a very unique situation; the school had an in-house dentist who would fix the students’ teeth and she assisted, one of a very few haoles (white people) working there. 

When she got pregnant and decided to adopt it (me) out in her second trimester, assumptions were made as far as the child’s father. I didn’t learn the truth until I was over thirty – that she got knocked up having unsafe sex with my attractive womanizer of a birthdad at a romantic Waikiki party whilst drunk. And she moved in with him and tried to make it work, but somewhere in the second trimester she concluded he was a drunk womanizer and she didn’t want to raise a child with him, so I was handed off. To people who assumed that she got knocked up at work, whether or not it was consensual, because she wasn’t talking.

I grew up doing lots of weird things which were often attributed to my heathen nature. I’m a green-eyed blonde, true, but lots of Pacific people are mixed. I was given a Hawaiian middle name, which is a thing that came about when haoles were trying to eliminate the culture and the language, so all Hawaiians were required to have an English first name, and usually they gave their kids Hawaiian middle names. I have one too, Leilani, which was inspired by a Bing Crosby song and is more common among white girls than Hawaiian ones. My white parents did that just in case I turned out to be part of the diaspora, per their suspicions.

When I was in my thirties DNA testing came about, and I located the drunk womanizer. Or actually my half-siblings, since he died young (from drinking) after siring a bunch of us. He was very white, although there’s an intriguing “weeaboo gene” thing happening in that my half-siblings are all fascinated with some aspect of Asian culture. 

But until it was confirmed I’m a very whitish shade of white, and most of the DNA I got is associated with the greater London area, I lived in a headspace where anyone could be my relative, so being a bigot would be pretty stupid. And since I didn’t have an ancestral culture I learned a lot about the culture where I was born – not the Scots-Irish culture of my adopted parents so much as the stories and customs of the people around me, whose ancestors were mixed just like my own were assumed to be. And the music, which sometimes gives me a Hawaiian sucker punch right in the parts of my brain associated with nostalgic homesickness. 

My experience as a Schroedinger’s haole might have ended, but I’ve tried to carry those sensibilities around with me, and sometimes translate them for others, with varying degrees of success.

For one example, there was an asshole named Max Long who was a theosophist that created his own new age religion (“Huna”) based on Hawaiian vocabulary in one of the most audacious acts of cultural appropriation I’ve ever heard of. Occasionally I still run into disciples of Huna passing along memes about how the indigenous Hawaiians want you to know about their cosmic wisdom which just happens to mesh with the cosmic wisdom in all the other Blavatsky-derived new religions. And doesn’t have much in common with the religion of indigenous Hawaiians. When I see that kind of junk I usually try to link people to actual Hawaiian activists and hope they keep their feet on the path that’s about accumulating wisdom rather than power tripping others by representing oneself as a super-evolved guru.

And speaking of power trippers … I get a lot of people who immediately come up with some kind of sexual objectification whenever I mention I’m from the islands, or when I mention enjoying Asian and/or Polynesian style music. It’s usually other white women, telling me “ooh I dated an Asian guy once” or “there’s a hot Asian guy working at the sushi place.” Like the only reason I might be interested in non-white culture is because I’m chasing after sex in an objectifying sort of way. 

The absolute worst was this editor I worked with once, who told me she roleplayed in Second Life as a hapa boy. Like she wanted me to applaud and go “gosh you’re so multicultural” or something other than going "eww" or asking her if she would like to beef. Which is probably what the hapa boys/men/mahu/transwomen/women/girls/etc. I grew up with would say, although I’m speculating and would no more speak for all people of an ethnic background, than I would add ketchup to my poi. Not a done thing, as the haoles say. 

Speaking of people who like to beef, there are lots of mean folks in Hawai’i, and plenty of nice ones too. I was a weird kid like Lilo so I got bullied by my own people, and most of my friends were other introverted nerds of various backgrounds, all of us united by our fondness for numbers and our sensibilities derived from the local mishmosh of cultures, like cleaning up your trash when you go to the beach. I have quite a few people in my life who aren’t Polynesian at all but spent enough time living there to develop those kinds of sensibilities, so we share that bond, growing up watching anime alongside Disney and having super diverse classmates, and lots more familiarity with Asian culture than the average mainland kid. 

It makes me slightly askew in a lot of cultural discussions, because no, I didn’t grow up with the same standards as people growing up in North America. Most people my age lived in a world with far more racial and cultural segregation. I grew up where the prejudices and the colonizing attitudes worked differently. Some of my classmates were actually forbidden by law from speaking the Hawaiian language, which is why the Kamehameha School was such a big deal. 

But my mom wanted to be Indiana Jones, so yeah. I’m adjacent. Sometimes I try to advocate or educate, as part of the responsibility I feel for growing up there. 

I’m Schroedinger-y with respect to other identities too. I still identify as asexual, which puts me in the queer section, except I’m the kind who isn’t interested in queer sex, which isn’t a big part of the queer community, which is already small. I'm adjacent to it though and have had some amazing queer friends throughout my life, and I tend to stick up for them. 

I’m Schrodinger’s neurodivergent too. I went through a period of identifying as autistic, but these days I am more inclined to say I have a few autistic traits and am generally familiar with autism and other forms of neurodivergence. The only one that’s been documented is “gifted” and I see no point in paying perfectly good money to determine whether I’m officially on one side of a border that seems to fluctuate a lot. And gifted is a form of neurodivergence, and I share the experience of weird cognition with my fellow NDs, so I'm proudly adjacent there too.

I just wasn’t built for the identity politics era, personally. Too amorphous and nebulous, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be supportive and occasionally educational or entertaining. 

How Far Do You Need To Go Before Bouncing?

I was thinking about how I “bounced off of” (failed to engage with) (didn’t find intriguing) a story, and then when I guilt tripped myself into going back to try reading it again, I wound up actively disliking the story and writing a bad review. 

Then, later, I got mad at myself for writing that bad review, since the author’s probably one of those exquisitely sensitive people, so I almost took it down, but at the same time, I spent some time thinking about how my dislike for the story seems to keep growing larger. Especially in the context of wondering why the DC Carl books are completely absent from the Hugo ballot. So in light of that, I let it stay up. 

Bad reviews are very unusual in a realm where everyone is constantly giving their pals five-star reviews to game the marketing algorithms. Even if you don’t like a work, you’re well aware that you need to give five-stars if you want people to return the favor and five-star you, and talking smack about fiction has become one of those “just not done” type of activities. I was eagerly playing the five-star game at one point but then I sort of dried up, with no more stars left to give. 

Now I’m wondering if it’s better to nope out after reading a few paragraphs, while my opinion is still rattling around in the “not for me but you might like it” bin. 

So I looked at the movie nominees for inspiration. Besides Sinners and K-Pop Demon Hunters, which I already wrote at length about, we have Andor (Season 2), Frankenstein (del Toro), Mickey 17, and Superman (James Gunn). 

I had to look up Mickey 17, a South Korean film which didn’t do very well over here about clones disagreeing with their other editions. It sounds like an intelligent take on clone tropes so it’s on my inner “maybe if I feel like watching a movie” list. I used to be a big old cinema nerd but lately I only seem to watch a few movies a year, so you might say I’m bouncing off this entire category, although I did see two of the entries. 

I did watch some of Andor, because I really liked Rogue One and was interested in the Cassian character’s backstory. I got all the way through a couple of the Star Wars series, like the first one about Yoda Jr., and I’m usually neutral or positive about the new improved extended universe. I bounced off of Andor after watching a few episodes because it seemed really heavy-handed and plodding. Cassian gradually becomes radicalized while other characters slide towards fascism in kind of an Afterschool Special about the very important issue of fascism and resisting it. 

And it came out in a world that was actually sliding into fascism, so it was kind of like putting the “dare to keep kids off drugs” lion in a time machine and transporting him to late ‘70s Studio 54 to deliver his abstinence message to Liza Minelli and Bianca Jagger. And that lion probably had even more success than most preachy lecture type entertainment. These days whenever I see any of those “hey kids, don’t snort fascism” propaganda messages from the pre-fascism era, I shake my head sadly. Totally ineffective use of moralizing. Although in the case of Andor, you can also file it under “troubling foreshadowing.” 

I had a hard time with the shame and harangue stuff when I was attempting to slot myself into the creative writing subculture. It felt almost like they were chasing all the strategy-minded people away (the ones who might be giggling at Carl’s adventures) and trying to do some kind of Cathar-like death spiral. I put up with it pre-fascism because I really didn’t want fascism to happen, but now that it has, I have even less regard for the preachy lectures that didn’t do jack to forestall it. STFU Becky, you just wanted to bully Heather and when disinfo gave you that chance, you seized it with both fists. All that glazing about the power of programming to shape mass opinion when, under field conditions, it actually seems to inspire people to say “fuck all this programming including the counter-programming, I’m voting for the evil guy because I’m tired of preachy lectures.” So much for preachy lectures, one might hope. 

(I do feel a lot better now that I’m not trying to run a wholesome YA-writer persona, thanks for asking.)

A lot of my friends loved Andor, for its preachy lecture qualities, but I backed off for the same reason.

Which is also behind the reason I haven’t seen Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein yet. I’m mixed about del Toro. I thought his stop-motion Pinocchio was wonderful and brilliant. I did not like his acclaimed Pan’s Labyrinth because I thought it was yet another grimdark story for kids, baiting audiences with the promise of a magical fairyland and then exiling them in a land of disturbing nightmares. With a light coating of preachy lecture, but del Toro is much better about keeping that part balanced with the story he’s telling. I thought the amount of Grimdark in Pinocchio was just perfect -- nightmarish for sure, but the stop motion decreases the threat. Pan's was more like sadistically getting a rise out of this particular girl and the audience members identifying with her.

So I haven’t seen the film, but I know it probably has opulent period costumes and pays more attention to inclusion themes than prior editions of Frankenstein, because that’s how del Toro rolls. It’s on my maybe list with Mickey 17. I did actually connect the TV to the media services so I can watch things like YouTube on it now instead of just having it run as a spare monitor. Slow progress. 

And finally there’s another Superman. I guess people still need to say new things about Superman. I have no real need to witness this. In fact, I’m bouncing off the entire subject of superheroes. During the pandemic I forced myself to catch up with the MCU and that was plenty, thanks. 

Superheroes reflect a philosophy that bounces me, in fact, like I did with the story I heartily disliked about the moral dichotomy between one’s authentic self and one’s DNA. They’re a good metaphor for musing on the gap between the gifted/talented/rich kids and the kids whose parents let them watch grimdark movies and then beat them for having nightmares. 

I looked up the reviews for this latest Superman and learned it represents the first step in the brand new DCU (shrieking violins), and that it focuses on Superman as moral paragon, so it seems likely to have a high preachy lecture quotient, and I’ve already examined how I feel about that. 

So that’s a bounce based on (1) sounds intriguing but unsuccessful and awarding it in the year of KPDH seems bizarre; (2) familiar enough with the director to be neutral about wanting to see more of his films; and (3) likely to contain themes (superheroes, preachy lectures) that tend to inspire me to write horrible reviews, and the world doesn’t need more of those. 

Even if I try to keep my disses aimed at big corporate media with thick hides rather than small creators who have a few opinions that differ from mine. I’m not always successful though, and I’m going to both leave my bad review standing (and any future ones I feel moved to compose) and respect my inclination to bounce early in the media consumption phase. Before I get the urge to reach for the sarcasm. 

Just A Statement Regarding Reliigion

I just thought I’d nail something to the door. For the heck of it. Since I've mentioned religion a few times.

I grew up with lukewarm Southern Baptists who didn’t force me to go to church but were happy when I did. I hated the clothes and preaching but enjoyed the singing. At one point I decided to lie about being born again just to see if I’d get struck by lightning or whether the adults would notice; following the results of this experiment I decided to stop going to church.

Then in my 20s I thought it was intellectually lazy to dismiss religion without doing a thorough investigation, so I started studying it, and that is what led me to being in a social circle adjacent to people like Helen Parsons Smith and Marion Zimmer Bradley, as well as a whole lot of non-droppable names who represent the people I actually hung out with rather than people I met a couple times who probably glanced at me and thought "that young woman certainly is inebriated, I hope she gets home okay." The fact I’m not originally from North America helped inspire me to learn about religions other than monotheism, and Dungeons and Dragons played a part too.

Eventually I resumed not going to church, but these days I describe myself as an agnostic, because “I dunno” is a better answer than “affirmatively yes, let’s fight!” or “affirmatively no, let’s fight!” in my opinion.

 A lot of people in my generation stopped going to church, but some went back. The singing is pretty awesome, and so is the opportunity to spend time with one’s family and community sharing good vibes and looking at art. To my mind, that’s the main draw behind religion: a place where people can socialize outside of work and school. Most of the time people do not socialize outside a narrow group consisting of co-workers and immediate family, and religion gives them a place to mix, as well as formal rules against fisticuffs or arguing over competing worldviews.

 These days I find myself mostly aligned with Pope Leo. Which is not where I expected to be in my senior years, but I also thought there would be universal healthcare, and more trains, and look what life handed us instead. There is a loophole in the Christian religion that allows for one to get away with a lifetime of sin as long as we sneak in a confession and a few rap performances prior to expiring, and that’s what I’ve been aiming for.

 I consider myself culturally Christian in that I’m familiar with the scriptures, the idioms like rich men passing through needle eyes, and not throwing stones, I know a handful of Christian hymns and can hum along with several others. I went to church when I was a kid. Lots of people would classify me as Christian based on that experience, regardless of what I currently believe (or claim to).

 Despite admittedly lying about being born again, the fact I was not struck by lightning and in fact went on to have a life that has been perfectly delectable in certain aspects although certainly not all of them, I don’t consider myself Christian in the evangelical sense; those people support too many liars and I refuse to stand next to them. At the same time, I lead kind of a modest humble life with a low carbon footprint that doesn’t include a lot of lust or gluttony or other deadly sins, like some kind of nun from an order that’s mostly about reading books with occasional treats of almond-sprinkled yogurt and J.S. Bach. 

 I have a lot of alignment with the current flavor of secular humanism which is popular with my political faction as an alternative to formal religion, but it’s not complete. I will separate my recyclables, and I am willing to switch to vat grown cruelty-free chicken nuggies as soon as they appear on the market, and also my carbon footprint is likely lower than yours because I don’t drive. Plus recycling’s kind of a scam, and so is shifting the burden of climate change onto individual consumers.

Sometimes my beliefs and opinions clash with the status quo. For instance, there are many types of feminism, and I’m down with the one about how people should have the same rights regardless of what’s between their navel and their knees, and whom they wish would touch it (which I do not wish to know details about).

There have been lots of flavors of feminism over the years, all basically agreeing it’s better if women have rights and are not oppressed. That thought could probably be extended to liberalism – it’s better for us all if we don’t enforce structural barriers related to things like race, class, gender.

I really can’t deal with a few variants, such as the extreme subjectivity kind though in which people are encouraged to shriek their idiosyncratic spin on truth at me. Screw that. I’m also not in favor of the “organics versus tech bro” conflict because I think there will soon be advertisements for robots with 100% organically-sourced fake skin (I will bet you cash that’ll happen by 2050 if not sooner). 

I’m a pedantic sourpuss raised by math nerds, trial lawyers, and godless heathens, and the quest for accuracy is part of my innate nature. If there’s an endeavor where my innate nature disqualifies me from participation, such as pro basketball, so be it. I owe no intersectional duty to beliefs which conflict with this drive. 

And that pedantic thing so far keeps me out of religions both traditional and secular, because there’s always a shaky belief or two that one is required to lip service or be flayed by one’s peers, and I seem to have a broken filter with regard to figuring out where those limits are, let alone how to code switch between crowds.

I do have a hard time judging people by their religion, since I've known both good and bad people who subscribe to various religions (including secular worldviews that aren't technically religions but resemble them in certain aspects). That's what my investigation really brought me to: a place where I can't say "all the people in that religion are bad" and remain honest with myself. The person I was previously was a lot less tolerant. 

If there’s anyone around who embraces the religious-type belief structure that inspired me to do my whole Lucifer-like rebellion from religion, I just want to say that reading my words isn't sinful because I have had believers like you stand next to me and pray, and also I can say the Lord’s Prayer and go inside churches without bursting into flames or having ghosts spurt out of my eyeballs. So if I was ever possessed by demons, I got better. I realize I’ve listened to an awful lot of heavy metal with secret encoded devil messages in my time but I usually also play a lot of angel music like J.S. Bach which cancels it out by encouraging angels to come over and mosh with the devils so they can’t lead anyone into sin. And I think your worldview is a little basic but as long as you don’t go around bullying others over it I’m pretty tolerant.