Books mentioned at WisCon

[badgerbag]

From notes I took on laptop and paper, books people were talking about - at parties or lunch or otherwise not in panels

Companion to Wolves. Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette.
Carhullan Army. Sarah Hall. Is there "a" moment when Sister goes too far, goes crazy? (General agreement round the table that she went crazy. Except... when I read it I did not see that at all. Instead I thought she was hitting the point of deciding on violent revolution. To many at wiscon maybe that point = insanity!)
Damming the Flood, 2004 book on overthrow of Aristide in Haiti. "the cleansing flood" explained
Carnival. (Lots of discussion about things people liked and didn't and why. "gentles" - Gate to Women's Country - all the referentialness to fsf -
Ken MacLeod, The Execution Channel. Nuke going off, disinformation. Sounded good.
Some long giant thread on alt.poly about shrill feminists
Gentle Art Verbal Self Defense, Suzette Haden Elgin (teenager book specifically)
Charlotte's Web (people talked about this all weekend, from the Narrative Politics panel)
Catalyst, Nina K Hoffman
Space Traders, Derek Bell
Space Traders (movie)
Whipping Girl, Julia Serano
Susan Wright books
Love's Appalling Adverbs
The World Without Us
"Shelter", Susan Palwick
Lonely Planets
Dream(?), Dreamquake. Elizabeth Knox. 2 book YA fantasy, good world construction, not typical. Dream Regulatory Body. Super messed up
Cyteen
Glasshouse
Bone Doll's Twin
Cult of Personality (non fiction book about history of personality tests)
Little Brother (though it was only me mentioning this; no one else had read it yet. I wanted to ask sdn what she thought, since I figured she might have read it. I pointed out to many people that ARGs as in Maureen McHugh's Guest of Honor speech feature heavily in Little Brother as a method of resistance to oppression. That made people want to read it...)

Comments

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

General agreement round the table that she went crazy. Except... when I read it I did not see that at all. Instead I thought she was hitting the point of deciding on violent revolution.

Oh, wait. That wasn't what I was saying. Or maybe I explained myself badly. I didn't think she'd gone crazy; like you, I grokked her transformation into violent revolutionary.

But I did wonder if I was supposed to think that she had gone crazy. Especially around the Chloe scene. I found myself wondering if people wouldn't be able to read that scene without thinking that things had gone too far.

[badgerbag.livejournal.com]

ohhhh goody. I did not remember it was you specifically who said that! So you did not mean "go crazy" for real but more like, situation went over the line for you, super out of hand? Or to where you realized you were not following along and identifying any more, maybe?

I think that a nearly identical conversation happened in the context of a panel, too, about the torture scenes. Then again in another panel, I think I heard someone describe the first "dogbox" scene as "testing" and the 2nd one as Sister choosing to subject her body to extremes which seemed like an odd yet interesting way to describe what I thought it was, which was torture.

Anyway, I found that hours after that conversation at lunch with y'all I was wondering, "Am I awful, because I can imagine some part of myself going yeah, shoot Chloe, she's going to fuck up our revolutionary guerrilla attack on the town?"

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

*nod*, you're right, I'm using "crazy" too loosely. I think I'm influenced by something that Mark Rudd says in the movie The Weather Underground: that people are taught from a very early age that all violence which is not sanctioned by the government is either criminal or mentally ill. (He goes on to say that the only way that people could read the violent acts of the Weather Underground was as both criminal and mentally ill).

So I guess I'm a bit amazed that the book was able to be clear about Sister's hero-worship of Jackie, and even about the Jackie used Sister to present certain arguments in certain ways. It didn't gloss over any of the ugliness to make it palatable.

And I guess I'm a bit surprised, in light of what Rudd talks about, that people are reading that and not thinking, "this is too much; these people have gone too far."