Santa letter received!
Nov. 25th, 2020 08:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyanmnemosyneA couple of days ago I went on a rather overdue walk to my mailbox (somehow despite being home pretty much all day, every day in These Times, I keep forgetting to go check my mail on a regular basis…) to discover two exciting things:
A Costco delivery that I had written off as lost because I expected it to be in a comically sized box on my doorstep instead of in a padded envelope wedged into my (rather small) mailbox, AND, more importantly:
A lovely letter fromambyr !! With delightfully over-the-top stationary, quite nice penmanship, and rainbow text, which I agree was an excellent touch. :D
Although I was initially immediately distracted by the lovely Avatar pins (with a … queer gingerbread person? I think that’s what I’m going to call it. To complete the set :D), as when I answered the letter survey I selected likes with a liberal hand and a thought towards getting recs; I hadn’t expected to get any actual objects besides the letter itself!
(And yes, I agree that probably trying to wedge in even a wallet sized game might have been too much – I’m still impressed that I managed to send a Jenga tile to another friend earlier this summer without it being rejected out of hand. The wallet games mentioned sound worth checking out, though!
… Although a member of my current game group just mentioned today that a new expansion of Spirit Island just dropped, so I suspect whenever we next meet up in person, there will be a couple of months of kicking colonizers off our new and improved island before we move on to other games. :D)
Speaking of games recs, Sagrada looks really cute! Building a soothing stained-glass window definitely sounds like potentially my jam :D And possibly even with low enough processor requirements that it won’t cause my computer to throw a fit, overheat, and shut down if I try to play it… 🤔
The Korra board game sounds cool; I may have to hunt it down once we can meet in person again, although I will cheerfully give a pass to the Darkover game (which I had no idea about, but somehow doesn’t surprise me that it both exists and is bad) per your anti-rec. :D
I no longer remember what I wrote exactly about Korra in my letter survey, which I filled out in a haze of “I should have known that this would be long enough and I would be long-winded enough that starting writing it at at 1 am would be a bad idea” so I think the 10 second summary is “had a lot of potential and I really wanted it to be more to my tastes than it was” + grousing about how all the hype from Korrasami shippers about the ending being CANON ruining the canon-only-if-you-squint-ness of the ending itself for me, as someone who’d been cheerfully shipping them with no expectations of canonicality since S3 at least. :D I’d heard good things about the Kyoshi novels but I haven’t checked them out yet, and … actually one of my biggest gripes with the last season of Korra (aside from the aforementioned grousing at the hype about the ending) was that I felt like Kuvira’s arc could have been so much more interesting if they’d just committed to her being a principled antagonist instead of having her jump off the slippery slope, so feel-good vibes AND more Kuvira both sound like excellent reasons for me to check the Korra spinoff comics. :D
I am also delighted at the recs for novels involving psychics! And in fact, the only one I’ve read before is the My Teacher is an Alien series. I loved them as a child but had completely forgotten that they involved telepathy at all; perhaps that’s part of why I enjoyed them so much. :D
I’m familiar with Scott Westerfeld via his Leviathan books, the first of which I’ve read and enjoyed, and the rest of which are on my perpetually lengthening “hey I should go back and finish that series I liked” list. The Midnighters books I just looked up on Wikipedia, and realized I had heard of them, but had initially laughed and dismissed them as “looks like someone’s writing Persona fanfic, good job getting it past the radar” – knowing a psychic is involved may yet tip me over into trying them. :D (Because I'm definitely not opposed to Persona fanfic with the serial numbers rubbed off, either...)
Joan Vinge’s Cat books also sound very RTMI but thanks for the tone warning! I’ve been slowly dipping my toes back into reading, and do generally have a lot more tolerance for whump than grimdark, but it’s good to know that that might be one to put on the “maybe a bit later” list.
And in case this long bulletpointed letter-in-LJ-post-format hasn’t made it clear, thank you so muchambyr for such a lovely and thoughtful letter! I very much look forward to trying the things you’ve suggested, and I hope you have as lovely an experience in this letter exchange as you’ve given me. <3
A Costco delivery that I had written off as lost because I expected it to be in a comically sized box on my doorstep instead of in a padded envelope wedged into my (rather small) mailbox, AND, more importantly:
A lovely letter from
ambyr !! With delightfully over-the-top stationary, quite nice penmanship, and rainbow text, which I agree was an excellent touch. :D Although I was initially immediately distracted by the lovely Avatar pins (with a … queer gingerbread person? I think that’s what I’m going to call it. To complete the set :D), as when I answered the letter survey I selected likes with a liberal hand and a thought towards getting recs; I hadn’t expected to get any actual objects besides the letter itself!
(And yes, I agree that probably trying to wedge in even a wallet sized game might have been too much – I’m still impressed that I managed to send a Jenga tile to another friend earlier this summer without it being rejected out of hand. The wallet games mentioned sound worth checking out, though!
… Although a member of my current game group just mentioned today that a new expansion of Spirit Island just dropped, so I suspect whenever we next meet up in person, there will be a couple of months of kicking colonizers off our new and improved island before we move on to other games. :D)
Speaking of games recs, Sagrada looks really cute! Building a soothing stained-glass window definitely sounds like potentially my jam :D And possibly even with low enough processor requirements that it won’t cause my computer to throw a fit, overheat, and shut down if I try to play it… 🤔
The Korra board game sounds cool; I may have to hunt it down once we can meet in person again, although I will cheerfully give a pass to the Darkover game (which I had no idea about, but somehow doesn’t surprise me that it both exists and is bad) per your anti-rec. :D
I no longer remember what I wrote exactly about Korra in my letter survey, which I filled out in a haze of “I should have known that this would be long enough and I would be long-winded enough that starting writing it at at 1 am would be a bad idea” so I think the 10 second summary is “had a lot of potential and I really wanted it to be more to my tastes than it was” + grousing about how all the hype from Korrasami shippers about the ending being CANON ruining the canon-only-if-you-squint-ness of the ending itself for me, as someone who’d been cheerfully shipping them with no expectations of canonicality since S3 at least. :D I’d heard good things about the Kyoshi novels but I haven’t checked them out yet, and … actually one of my biggest gripes with the last season of Korra (aside from the aforementioned grousing at the hype about the ending) was that I felt like Kuvira’s arc could have been so much more interesting if they’d just committed to her being a principled antagonist instead of having her jump off the slippery slope, so feel-good vibes AND more Kuvira both sound like excellent reasons for me to check the Korra spinoff comics. :D
I am also delighted at the recs for novels involving psychics! And in fact, the only one I’ve read before is the My Teacher is an Alien series. I loved them as a child but had completely forgotten that they involved telepathy at all; perhaps that’s part of why I enjoyed them so much. :D
I’m familiar with Scott Westerfeld via his Leviathan books, the first of which I’ve read and enjoyed, and the rest of which are on my perpetually lengthening “hey I should go back and finish that series I liked” list. The Midnighters books I just looked up on Wikipedia, and realized I had heard of them, but had initially laughed and dismissed them as “looks like someone’s writing Persona fanfic, good job getting it past the radar” – knowing a psychic is involved may yet tip me over into trying them. :D (Because I'm definitely not opposed to Persona fanfic with the serial numbers rubbed off, either...)
Joan Vinge’s Cat books also sound very RTMI but thanks for the tone warning! I’ve been slowly dipping my toes back into reading, and do generally have a lot more tolerance for whump than grimdark, but it’s good to know that that might be one to put on the “maybe a bit later” list.
And in case this long bulletpointed letter-in-LJ-post-format hasn’t made it clear, thank you so much
ambyr for such a lovely and thoughtful letter! I very much look forward to trying the things you’ve suggested, and I hope you have as lovely an experience in this letter exchange as you’ve given me. <3
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Date: 2020-11-26 05:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-11-28 04:03 am (UTC)And the content was excellent; our Santa overlord chose well. :D
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Date: 2020-11-26 06:06 pm (UTC)The fifth pin is a meeple.
I remembered another, more recent novel with psychics like a day after mailing this letter and thought, Oh, I should tell Cyan about this! Did I write the name of this novel down? No. Do I remember what it is now? No. If it comes back to me, I know where to send it :-).
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Date: 2020-11-28 07:27 am (UTC)Btw, I think I figured out how to fiddle the image to be publicly visible, but also you are welcome to friend me, if you'd like. :D (My journal this past year or so has not been terribly interesting, I admit, but I keep thinking I'll eventually catch up on my backlog of book and trip posts ...)
The fifth pin is a meeple.
Oh! That makes perfect sense. :) Now I just need to figure out which game, once we can in-person game again, has a big enough board that I can sub it in instead of using one of the normal meeples. 🤔
Did I write the name of this novel down? No. Do I remember what it is now? No. If it comes back to me, I know where to send it :-)
Yes, please do! :D And I know that feeling. XD As soon as I posted, I was kicking myself for forgetting to mention the art (except in the image alt text, which apparently my brain thought was sufficient? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) -- especially the Stephanie Law piece is really pretty, and after briefly browsing her website, I'm now eyeing tote bags. :D
I'd also meant to comment in more detail on your aside re: why psychics as a trope are less of a thing now, because I thought you had a really interesting point about it being perhaps related to the advent/spread of modern communications technology and people being more aware of privacy issues etc.; I'd personally been assuming that it was more of a case of it being a trope that took over the zeitgeist for a while -- like urban fantasy's big boom a while back, or zombies increasing in popularity more recently -- sparking a lot of people wanting to riff on or deconstruct the theme, before gradually fading to a much duller roar, but I could definitely see the dynamics you mention having an effect.
I also ended up going "wait, what if I just google this?" earlier this evening, and stumbled across this interesting bit of historical discussion: 'Telepathy' entry in the SF Encyclopedia which ties one of the roots of the boom in stories about psionics to John Campbell's obsession with superhuman powers, which ... I feel like I've heard about that obsession before, and also in hindsight it aligns unfortunately well with his fascist inclinations too, so. Glad to see the subgenre spiraled out from there into much more interesting and less terribly motivated places. XD
But also to your other point, near the end of the article it asserts that the decline was partially due to the rise in cyberpunk/modern tech providing other, more "scientific" ways to have instant communication between people, making telepathy-as-plot-device less prevalent.
(The article also cites nothing more recent than 1998, and Anne McCaffrey's Pern novels are one of the only references to a female writer, so it's also clearly not an exhaustive review of existing literature, but certainly an interesting view on the question that mentions a lot of older works, in case I ever want to go digging around in the Golden Age stuff; e.g. I've heard good things from elsewhere about Bester's The Demolished Man too.)
... And since I happened to discover this article while on a video chat with some friends and had to grouse about Campbell warping everything, another friend brought up another potential aspect I hadn't considered: telepathy also became pretty popular in romance for a while, so there might have been some "well if the girls like it, it's clearly not Real Science Fiction anymore" social dynamics going on as well. I'm not sure how one would go about demonstrating that, though, and personally the advent of more technological solutions postulated in the article above feels like it would have been a bigger draw towards non-psionics than "ew cooties" would have been away from it. Or since this is all generalizations and trends, could be a bit of everything. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(Speaking of psychics and romance, I continue to be on the fence about whether to give Nalini Singh's Psy/Changeling series a try; on one hand, the psy is right there in the title, but I've also heard that the shifter side of things leans hard into Asshole Dudes and alpha dynamics, both of which I'm Not A Fan Of, so. Maybe someday. :P)
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Date: 2020-11-28 07:06 pm (UTC)And oh, yeah, I did know how much Campbell was at fault for the pervasiveness of psychic powers as ~science~ in the early days of the field, but I suppose I didn't think about how his influence waning would affect things. (Although how much he's at fault for its popularity in YA, I dunno . . . still, I guess many of those authors grew up reading Campbellian science fiction.)
Bester is on my to-read list! (Particularly because I know he's a big influence on Terra Ignota, and I'm a big fan of that.) Pay/Changeling, uh, not so much, although we do get that the library where I work so I see them crossing my desk periodically.
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Date: 2020-11-30 06:02 am (UTC)Helped by the fact that I tend not to take many trips to begin with :D or at least, not ones prominent in my mind enough to blog about; the yearly trip to my parents for Christmas might be worthy of note the first time around, but otherwise "we once again walked around the block and admired the century plant that someone had attached Christmas ornaments to, then after a trip to the grocery store came home and played some video games" is a pretty fair summary of most years.
(Although how much he's at fault for its popularity in YA, I dunno . . . still, I guess many of those authors grew up reading Campbellian science fiction.)
Yeah, I'd guess that's secondary or tertiary effects at best, in most cases -- IIRC YA didn't really emerge as a recognized genre until relatively recently? And while I know there were books before that (Heinlein's juveniles, e.g.) that fit the same general target audience, they still had a different "feel", imo.
(Particularly because I know he's a big influence on Terra Ignota, and I'm a big fan of that.)
Ooooo interesting! That's a definite plus. I became aware of Bester/The Demolished Man via someone on Twitter mentioning wanting to write a book with a psychic detective (?) and namedropping both Babylon 5 and Bester. Since I'm a fan of the 4-and-a-bit seasons of the former I've seen, the latter also piqued my interest. :D
Speaking of Terra Ignota, I don't remember whether
Psy/Changeling, uh, not so much
I'm curious if there's a specific reason why? Purely for my own purposes in collecting additional data points. :D
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Date: 2020-11-30 06:43 pm (UTC)I alas have no detailed liveblogs of Terra Ignota, aside from one chapter that I wrote up as a paid blog pitch, but I do enjoy talking about it! I should really do a reread at some point (although my hardcopy of TLtL is on loan indefinitely due to the pandemic . . . not that I don't have a perfectly good ecopy I could read instead). I can totally understand bouncing off it, though. It's a pretty divisive book.
As far as Psy/Changeling goes, I generally bounce hard off depictions of het romance in fiction. I can handle it as a subplot (...mostly I can ignore it as a subplot), but anything where it's a main plot thread tends to be a no-go for me.
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Date: 2020-12-01 06:27 am (UTC)My eyebrows definitely just did a thing at the thought of Eddings being rebranded as YA. :D Though ... yeah, I can see it, thinking of especially the first parts of the Belgariad, given Garion's Farmboy Chosen One status and how much they revolve around him figuring out his place in the world. I feel like it moves on, either towards the end of the Belgariad/certainly by some point in the Mallorean, to being more oriented towards adult concerns (don't he and Ce'Nedra have a kid?) than I tend to think of YA being, though.
On the other hand, it certainly wouldn't be the first or last time that something got mis-categorized as YA. :D
Likewise with a lot of Lackey's books ... I'm not sure if it's just because I was reading most of them as a young-to-mid teen, but most of the characters in most of them seemed clearly "adult" to me; perhaps younger adult than my now 30-something self, but definitely mostly out of their teens.
It's a pretty divisive book.
Heh yeah. I think I could make my way through it now, after having chatted enough about it to have a lot more solid intellectual appreciation for the things I have visceral reactions to, for doing what they were clearly intended to do. But it's easier and more fun to get second-hand reactions from people who enjoy it instead. :D
I can handle it as a subplot (...mostly I can ignore it as a subplot)
Lol relatable. :D That would be the other part of the experiment, is whether/to what extent I can enjoy capital-R Romance; I know I'm very anti-love triangle and tend to find a lot of examples of het-by-default subplots in the wild somewhere between inoffensive and useless, but maybe there are exceptions ...
(I'd also like to explore queer romance/Romance in more detail as well, but the problem with not reading much lately is that I haven't been making it through any of my TBR piles. XD)
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Date: 2020-12-16 11:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-17 10:28 am (UTC)Thank you for doing 2x the work this year to host the letter exchange as well! It has been a lovely time indeed. :3
(And hopefully my recipient will think the same whenever my letter arrives. 😂)