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Shunas Reise ist zwar erst 2023 das erste Mal auf Deutsch erschienen, stammt jedoch im Original aus dem Jahr 1983 und wurde somit bereits vor der Gründung des Studios Ghibli veröffentlicht.

Die schlichte, aber doch fesselnde Geschichte zeigt bereits vieles, was wir in Miyazakis späteren Manga und Filmen wieder sehen. So erinnern viele Motive und die Welt an das Thal der Winde und die restlichen Landschaften aus Nausicaä, Shuna und sein treues Reittier selbst an Ashitaka aus Mononoke und unsere zweite Hauptfigur Thea wiederum vielen der späteren Frauenfiguren seiner Geschichten. Ich sehe viel von Sophie aus dem Wandelnden Schloss und Nausicaä in ihr.

Trotzdem ist die Geschichte auch sehr anders, als die meisten der späteren überbordenden Welten und Erzählungen. Sie ist langsamer, lässt sich durch die großen Bilder und den wenigen Text viel Zeit und brauch keine großen Worte. Dabei musste ich wiederum an Die rote Schildkröte denken. Auch schwimmt wie so oft die ganze Zeit Kapitalismuskritik mit und es geht um die Themen Ausbeutung und Sklaverei, aber es wird nicht in vielen Details gezeigt, wie Menschen einfach alles, auch ihren Planeten, kaputt machen. Da bleibt das Buch vager. Auch wenn die Botschaft wieder klar rüber kommt.

So viel Meta-Gelaber! Kurz: Ich mag das Buch sehr und auch die vielen Nachworte. 5 von 5.

When a novel feels like it strongly stands alone and ends with such closure, it's hard to imagine what a sequel would be like. This sequel to A Memory Called Empire is different, stranger. I like it a lot, but it is also not what I expected.

It grows a few more points of view, over the original's singular voice from Mahit. It's also a first contact military sf story in space as opposed to the first book's city-centered succession politics and poetry. It's a story about not being able to truly go home again after travelling, about disobeying orders that don't sit well in your heart, about the psychology of different kinds of consciousnesses (in some ways similar to the Ancillary series), and about what peace means to individuals and empires.

One thing I enjoy is that the book gets into the friction between Mahit and Three Seagrass. The first book is a whirlwind week of adventure, and ends with a smooch between them during a momentary pause before the climax of the book. There's no time for conversation or for feelings or for anything other than an emotional moment of connection. This book gives them more space and time, where feelings that were smothered in the first book about the complications of perception rear their head and have to be processed. This also makes it feel much different than the first book, where everybody, and especially Three Seagrass, feel more "on side", even when relationships and goals are complicated.

I don't think either of these books are creating larger worldbuilding that would extend out to a longer series. However, I do think they each are remarkably thematically tight books and both worth reading.

This book follows Mahit, sent as ambassador from the small space station Lsel to a large empire, in order to investigate what happened to her predecessor and to try to prevent the Teixcalaanli Empire from inevitably absorbing that home station.

As you might expect, it's a story about empires (being terrible), but what I like about this book is that it gets at reasons why empires can be dangerously appealing apart from just raw power. Mahit simultaneously wants to protect her homeland but also wishes to be part of larger Teixcalaanli culture that is eating her own. But also, no matter how much poetry she's memorized, she will never truly be a part of this culture.

The reader quickly learns that Lsel secretly has machines that implant the memories of their predecessors, and has sent Mahit off with one of these devices. The extra internal perspective of Yskander commenting or just providing emotional memory on Mahit's experiences adds a fun additional layer to all of the events.

I love the politics; I love the writing; I love the characters. Highly recommended.

This is the book version of the theme-and-variations composition structure used in classical music and sometimes techno. The first chapter is a lovely and sad story in its own right; it almost feels like what Chekhov might have come up with if he'd been writing with today's gender and sexuality sensibility. Each thereafter takes mostly the same set of characters but with progressively larger twists - at first it's very much "what if protagonist had made a different choice at this key moment?", but it gradually shades over into wilder sci-fi speculations.

Strangely, it was the wilder variations that really made the book click for me. Before things got really weird I was starting to question how the book was going to sustain interest for 11 chapters, but North answered that question very effectively. I don't think it would have worked to go directly to those, the smaller variations feel needed for the coherency of the whole, but I loved the effect of the whole set together.

#SFFBookClub

It's comfort reread season over here. This book has enough reviews and awards it doesn't need another general review from me on the pile, so mostly I'm wondering about what makes this book a comfort reread for me (and many others)?

Partially it's that thematically it hits really strong notes. It's a story about justice, and revenge against an empire. It's about not trusting empires, no matter who is running them at the time. But it's also about second chances, leaning on friends, finding new ways of being, and the value of small actions even when you can't solve everything.

And even if the tyrant’s protestations were insincere, which they ultimately had to be, no matter her intentions at this moment, still she was right. My actions would make some sort of difference, even if small.

The first time I read this book about revenge on an empire at war with itself, my expectations were that the next book would be some sort of escalation, but instead it went much smaller. In retrospect, I'm not sure the worldbuilding and the stakes could have been escalated without it becoming a heroic arc for Breq (or somebody else) defeating an empire and saving the universe. It just isn't that kind of story.

Instead, this book feels much more about the value of small and local actions. The mutiny at Ime is a news story in the background, but it carries so much thematic (and worldbuilding) weight and feels like part of a through line for the trilogy. In a world where I continually despair of my lack of leverage to make the world better, this message about doing what I can where I can is one I continually need to hear.

Twenty years of habit overtook me, and for an instant I despaired of choosing the right pronouns, the right terms of address. But I didn’t need to do that here. I could drop that worry, a small but annoying weight I had carried all this time. I was home.

I am always a sucker for a story with some gender in it, so I know this is part of why I come back to this book. I love the humor about Breq not understanding other culture's gender and getting it wrong. The quote above resonates for me in the trans sense of being in a space where you can drop the mental worry about people misgendering you; it's a reversed feeling of observer vs observee from the quote, but the mental relief at removing the mental gender work feels tangibly similar.

The first time I read this book, I could tell that my brain had to defend itself against bringing in extra gendered baggage for the she pronoun. I don't know if it's because this is a reread or if I've been tested by the much more gender adversarial Too Like the Lightning, but this time around my internal observation was that I didn't feel like I parsed "she" any differently than "they".

This feels like a book that needs two distinct reviews.

First, Emily Wilson's translation, which is wonderful. Just as Heaney moved Beowulf from "worthy work" to a fun read, Wilson's made The Odyssey eminently readable, while keeping it a formally structured long poem and apparently sticking scrupulously to the pacing of the original Greek. I had started reading other translations of this work but never actually finished them, so I'm delighted that this one now exists. And the maps, introduction, footnotes and dramatis personae all helped me follow a work that's heavy on reference and allusion.

But I have to say I didn't get on very well with the content. Some of it is delightful, from learning that Greeks have appreciated wine, olive oil and the sea for longer than much of the world's had written records, to all the descriptions that weren't about Odysseus himself. But there's a degree of repetitiveness to the language that grated--Wilson's introduction explains why it was so in a work written to be performed but it still took away from my experience of reading this as written text--a few too many passages that consist of just listing characters from other Greek myths to the point that they felt like the Torah's "begats", and by the end I found the character of Odysseus dislikable enough to not care about his fortunes.

I'm still glad to have read this. I didn't get anywhere near the exposure to Greek mythology that US schools seem to give, so much of the story was either new to me or connected dots that I'd picked up scattershot from English literature referencing them. And I have to say that I'm re-reading the Torah this year, which seems to be of approximately the same age, and found The Odyssey so much more sophisticated and compelling as a work of literature. But I can't exactly say that I like this story.