Fanfiction: Star Wars edition

Mar13 by Rebecca

It has been a while since I’ve posted, mostly because I’ve either been reading books already recommended on this site (wow, was Bone Gap awesome!) or mainlining a whole bunch of fanfiction. Thus, it’s time for another fanfiction post, this time all in the Star Wars fandom.

One of the things I really enjoy about fanfiction is that there are a lot of common plot ideas that different authors will try their hand at writing. So you wind up with these sets of stories that are variations on a theme.

One recent theme that came out of Star Wars: The Force Awakens is to look at how Finn’s escape from the First Order effected those Stormtroopers left behind. These are all amazing and in many ways deal with variations on stories themselves, since the Stormtroopers hear about Finn through rumor and word-of-mouth.

Cautionary tale by Aviss:
summary:
After the Starkiller, Finn becomes a cautionary tale among the troopers.
This doesn’t always work in the First Order’s favour.

Tomorrow (there’ll be more of us) by dimircharmer:
summary:
“FN-2187 was real, right?” She sounds very young again. “Please tell me he was real.”
“I’m real,” said Finn, who was on his first patrol since his back healed. “And my name’s Finn now.”
Her eyes widened. “You have a name?
*
Or: The resistance is starting to get stormtrooper defectors. Finn helps them out.

The Story of Finn by LullabyKnell
summary:
The story they hear is that of FN-2187.
He’s a defector – a traitor to the First Order. He’s not the first, nor will he be the last, and the First Order expects to retrieve him and end him quickly.
But that’s not what happens.
The only thing Stormtroopers own are stories.

have you heard by peradi
summary:
“I heard FN-2187 was a Stormtrooper.”
Finn Sparks a revolution

Explorations of how Stormtroopers react to the events of the movie is both awesome and very closely tied to canon. There’s no reason to believe that those stories couldn’t happen. And I really want have you heard to be the plot for the next movie because it is just that perfect.

In contrast, sometimes the themes that gain multiple writers trying it out are a lot more random: such as the idea that maybe Obi-Wan Kenobi could travel back in time and ensure the tragic events of the past-now-future don’t happen. It’s such a wonderful idea that really speaks to the foundation of fanfiction: let us fix this thing so the world is a better place.

Negotiator by Esama
summary: Obi-Wan dies, wakes up and decides to live a whole different life

Waking Dream by flamethrower
summary: A simple injury during what should have been a routine mission brings shocking changes to the lives of Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi, and may alter the future of the Jedi Order.
note: this is awesome, but also nearly 50K words long and the first in a series that runs 550K words long. Still worth reading!

this is unexpected by marbleglove
summary: a self-indulgent response to the many, wonderful time-travel Star Wars stories that send a more experienced and more knowledgeable Obi-Wan Kenobi back in time to change the many tragedies to come
note: this is quite short (little more than 1K words) and more playful than plot-ful.

As much as I love the variations on a theme that sometimes happen (and I really, really do love them!), I am also incredibly impressed with the authors who find a perspective or concept I haven’t seen before. Thus I am incredibly impressed with Fialleril who wrote a series of gorgeous short fic delving into the slave culture of Tatooine, into which Anakin was born and near which Luke was raised.

The Tatooine Cycle by Fialleril

Chosen: When Shmi Skywalker was thirty seven years old, she went out into the desert.
Seductio: He learns that he must be free of attachment.
Patriarchy: Fathers always desire the destruction of their children
Children of the Desert: They were the children of the desert, born for squalor and mystery
Amakurra: Tatooine wasn’t home for her in the way it was for Luke. But for Leia, who would never go home again, Tatooine – at least, this part of Tatooine – was strangely comforting.

The Shamer’s Daughter

Jan9 by Rebecca

The Shamer’s Daughter
By Lene Kaaberbol
2006

This was a good little book although it was a bit on the young side of YA for me. In an unrelated note, it’s actually really interesting how young the main character was. The main character, Dina, is old enough to be well into the age of reason but nowhere near pubescent so there’s absolutely no romantic plotline. I appreciated that.

I also hadn’t realized this book was the first part in a series so I thought the ending was particularly interesting as it resolved the immediate problem while leaving a much larger problem still there. While I now know that it was setting up for a sequel, at the first read, I assumed it was an aspect of Dina being young and focused on the immediate situation.

Over all, the book reminded me a lot of Sharon Shinn’s series with The Safe-Keeper’s Secret, The Truth-Teller’s Tale, and The Dream-Maker’s Magic. Like those books, The Shamer’s Daughter is set in a world in which some people are born with semi-magical talents that give them careers even as it sets them apart from society at large.

Dina, the titular Shamer’s daughter, has inherited her mother’s skill of being able to see (and force others to see) everything that they are ashamed of by looking into their eyes. No one really wants a Shamer as a neighbor, but they have a social role in identifying criminals.

As one might expect, when a crime involves the death of the ruling family of a kingdom and competing heirs to the throne, being a Shamer who can actually see the truth is a bit fraught. Especially since the ability is built on shame and thus doesn’t work on people who don’t feel shame.

While this book simplifies the world and the complexities of people’s emotions in general, it still does a really good job of presenting some very clear answers to traditionally complex questions about guilt and responsibility and the strength to do what’s right.

Also, apparently there’s a movie, but it doesn’t look good.

The Gods of Tango

Dec19 by Rebecca

The Gods of Tango
By Carolina de Robertis
2015

This is a switch from my usual reading in that it’s general literature rather than genre, but I ran across some recommendation for it that I can no longer recall and decided to give it a shot. I’m glad I did because it’s really very good.

The writing is very lush. Very poetic. And generally a style that I enjoy a lot and Anna dislikes to the point of finding it unreadable. But it’s an appropriate style, too, for a story set in Beunos Aries in the early 1900s, as the immigrant communities ballooned and the tango developed as a music style, a dance, and a culture in the cross cultural whore houses that catered to that population.

The story line follows Leda, who at seventeen marries by proxy her cousin Dante and sets out on her own from Italy to join him in Argentina. The marriage and trip is entirely by her own decision as she longs to escape the small, traditional Italian town where everything is proper and no one acknowledges the horrors that happen behind closed doors. Upon reaching the massive immigrant city of Buenos Ares, Leda discovers that her husband died at a union strike just days before she arrived. She is now a widow in a city overrun by male immigrants from around the world, where women are divided into two groups: pure women supported by husbands or fathers and whores.

In her new city, refusing to return to her family in Italy, Leda considered her options along with her growing passion for tango music (and the thought of playing on the violin her father gave to her husband) and makes the dangerous decision to avoid both paths available to women, and to dress herself as a man instead.

I particularly liked how, while Leda is the main character and the story line follows her experiences, periodically there’s sections that show the events from another character’s perspective – and that perspective includes whole histories of who that person is and what they have experienced to bring them to this point. Even as the characters may have shallow views of one another, we the reader see how much the actions and interactions of the characters are driven by their pasts.

It is all very literary. Which is not something I generally say as a compliment. Normally I find “literature” just tries too hard to be “real” and misses both realism and story line, but this was actually really well done.

One warning though, is that the book is extremely graphic in its discussion and presentation of sexuality. The Buenos Aires culture is full of machismo, the demographics have many more male immigrants than female immigrants, and prostitution is the only job priced without the assumption that a woman is merely supplementing her husband or father’s income. Sex is discussed and had in a variety of permutations on a regular basis and described with physical, mental, and emotional detail. In addition to this, one of the driving themes throughout the book is Leda’s struggle to come to terms with what happened to her girl cousin but never acknowledged when she was twelve and her cousin thirteen.

But that said, it is a really good book that I almost skipped reading, but instead stayed up way too late finishing three days after I started.

The Bible: Chronicles 1

Dec12 by Rebecca

This broke me. Not the book itself, although it took an audiotape and a long drive to get through it, but the write up. I had originally planned to illustrate it with a family tree. Except that the first four verses of the first chapter are a vertical family tree through thirteen generations from Adam to Japheth. The fifth verse lists Japheth’s seven sons. Verses six and seven list the sons of two of Japheth’s seven sons, one of whom had three sons and the other four. And it just keeps going.

There are more than a hundred names (although only approximately 75 unique individuals because of course every father is listed twice, once as a “son of” and then again as a “father of”) within the first 26 verses of chapter 1, at which point we get to the sons of Abraham: Isaac and Ishmael, who at least are names I recognize. After that, there are a lot more names that I don’t recognize at all. A lot.

The first chapter has 54 verses. The book as a whole has 29 chapters. And it’s the first of two scrolls that make up Chronicles 1 and Chronicles 2 respectively.

What do you even do with this?

Although as a baby name book, it’s pretty excellent. If you can get over some of the names themselves. I do feel like no one should be named after Ham (1:4), but then there’s Tilgathpilneser (king of Assyria, listed in 5:6 and again in 5:26 because why make things easy to keep track of?), since that is a bitching name.

“I wanted to give my son a biblical name, but also a unique one.”

“So, little baby Tilgathpilneser?”

“We call him Tilgy.”

(Also, rather than just a name in a list, like so many are, we learn that God roused Tilgathpilneser’s spirit in order to punish the Israelites – even the Reubenites! – so… there’s that? 5:26)

The family trees just keep going, but we do occasionally get some few verses dotted here and there giving a few details about what’s actually happening with and to at least some of these people.

There’s also the occasional woman mentioned, such as Hammoleketh who bore three children of unspecified gender (but certainly not unspecified name!) listed in 7:18. And then there’s Sherah (7:24) who makes me grin because Shera! Princess of Power! which was a favorite cartoon that dates me horribly (and also aged horribly.)

We also get to a few parts where the people don’t always have names, but do have hereditary positions of employment such as porters of various quarters, overseers of vessels, cooks, and singers. Of course, sometimes they do have names, and those many, many names are listed. (chapter 9.)

And, sometimes there isn’t familial connections, just being in the same battle but still needing a chapter devoted to the roll call of those valiant warriors. (chapter 11).

By chapters 15, it became too much for the original writer apparently because it breaks down into numbers rather than lists of names, or at least lists of names associated with the number of children rather than lists of names associated with lists other lists of names.

Chapters 16-22 actually get back to story telling with King David and the ark of the covenant, a list of rules of behaviors, and the temple that David really wants to build and has very specific ideas about but that can’t be built within his lifetime because God says so and thus needs to be described to his son Solomon for him to do later.

After that break, chapters 23-27 are back to genealogies and employment records.

Chapters 28-29 are a rousing speech that King David gives, somewhat about the greatness of the Lord but mostly about exactly what the temple he wants built after he dies to look like, described in extremely excruciating detailed instructions. It all finally ends with a quick summary of King David’s reign (good) and his biographies (three of them) and mention that King Solomon is the next king.

Summary: There are a lot of people and population increases geometrically over time if couple has more than two kids. They’re mostly employed being porters, priests, singers, cooks, warriors, and kings. And wow, does King David want to be in charge of building his temple even if it can’t be started until after he dies.

Moral: As time goes by, being one more name in a long list of names is not a great legacy, in my ever so humble opinion.

Next up: Chronicles 2

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

Dec5 by Rebecca

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing
By Marie Kondo
2014

This book was amazing. I have now recommended it to virtually everyone in my family and am passing it around so they can all read it and you should read it too. It’s joining The Art of Learning as one of now two nonfiction self-help books that I really enjoyed and was impressed by.

Marie Kondo is kind of crazily obsessed with tidying and organizing. (Her family members are clearly saints for having put up with her trying out different methods.) But it makes the book pretty funny in addition to useful and interesting as she writes about what methods she’s tried and the ways in which they did and did not work.

Kondo’s actual method, the one she’s describing in the book really does work, and I love that she takes the time to show how she came up with the method and how and why it works. Not only is the theory something I find generally interesting, it also makes it possible for me to modify the method for my own use. Because I don’t have the time and energy to implement her massive 6-month reorganization bonanza, but working bit by bit, as I feel inspired does work.

Despite it not being a particularly long book, it took a while to get through because I would get inspired to just start tidying. It’s surprisingly fun to do and the results leave me feeling all pleased and happy with myself.

While there are a lot of specific suggestions about how to really work her system (so go and read the book!), the basic premise is that you should keep the stuff you love and get ride of the stuff you don’t. The first part of her method is to spend time looking through your possessions and identifying all the things that you love. It’s amazing how much stuff I had because I had it and had no reason to get rid of it. I had a lot of clothing due to inertia rather than enjoyment. While reading this book, I wound up with several large bags and boxes of clothing and books to donate and now am left with a room with a much higher concentration of things I love, because there’s less dilution with things that I just sort of have.

I highly recommend this book. You don’t have to follow her advice, but at least read the book and see if you’re interested in trying it out. Because I have been working through my stuff and it has been fun to do and I love the results.

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

Nov21 by Rebecca

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street
by Natasha Pulley
2015

I got the automated email from my library letting me know that a book on my hold list had finally come in, but I only vaguely recalled putting a request in and no real memory of why I had done so. But, wow, am I glad I did!

The book is set in 1884 London, although with a significant section of backstory set in 1870s Japan. Our protagonist is Thaniel, a telegraph clerk at the Home Office in London at a time when Irish nationalists are trying to instigate a revolution and are throwing bombs at government buildings. It’s also about ten years after Japan underwent a revolution, and they still have their own set of nationalists vs modernists, and have a significant immigrant population in England. One of those immigrants is Mori, the titular watchmaker of Filigree Street. Another main character is Grace, a female physics student at Oxford college. Then there are dozens of other characters who are all interesting and quirky and suspicious in their own ways.

It reminded me a bit of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore but better. It’s unclear for a significant portion of the book whether or not there’s a magical/supernatural element to the world. Is this book fantasy, science fiction, or straight up literary fiction? The answer to that would be a spoiler, so I’m not going to answer.

The plot, such as it is, is to discover the mystery of a particular watch that came into Thaniel’s possession and saved his life from a bombing. The vagueness of the plot does not stop it from being amazingly suspenseful. The tension really comes from Thaniel trying to figure out just what is going on, and who he should be trying to help versus who he should be trying to hinder. I stayed up way too late finishing this book, the day after I picked it up from the library.

The climax wobbled a bit with Pulley trying to add more traditional plotting and tension in unnecessary ways, but I still really enjoyed the book and highly recommend it.

Newt’s Emerald

Nov14 by Rebecca

Newt’s Emerald
by Garth Nix
2015

This was a fun book, but I went into it with high expectations and it never matched them. I’ve read a lot of really good, fun regency romance adventures, with and without magic, and this one feels like what it is: a fan of that genre wrote his own take for fun, but without really going all out.

Regency romance is fun genre over all, with complex manners and dresses and marriage missions, and Georgette Heyer is the clear founder and leader of the genre. Her characters are quirky and her plots of romance and manners are complex, and it all defines a time and culture of arbitrary rules that make so little external sense and yet have perfect internal structure. Garth Nix is clearly a fan, but his characters are a too flat and caricatured while the rules of society don’t have the same clarity and internal consistency.

For regency romance with magic, Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer with their Sorcery & Cecilia series or Patricia Wrede alone with her Mairelon series have brilliantly added layers of magical realism to the rules of society and it all really works well. Despite how amazing the world building was in Nix’s Old Kingdom series (a series I definitely recommend), the rules of magic in Newt’s Emerald are mostly vague and hand-wavy while occasionally contradictory.

The book that Newt’s Emerald was trying to be would have been awesome. Unfortunately, it just never quite developed enough–not the characters, the plot, or the world. None of this means that the book is terrible. It just… wasn’t great.

Heather Wells Mysteries

Nov1 by Rebecca

Heather Wells Mysteries
by Meg Cabot

Size 12 Is Not Fat
2006

Size 14 Is Not Fat Either
2006

Big Boned
2007

Like all of Meg Cabot’s books, these are delightful romps with crazy characters. The plot is, more or less, there to keep the characters focused and give the books a defined ending. I love her characters so much! And one of the many things that makes Cabot a great author is that she clearly loves her characters, too, every insane little bit of them.

I’m particularly pleased with these books, because unlike her 1-800-WHERE-R-YOU series or her Mediator series, both of which I also loved, the Heather Wells mysteries have an adult protagonist. Most of Cabot’s books are set in high school and I am (very belatedly) aging out of the time when I can really empathize with the high school drama. But it’s wonderful to know that Cabot writes for adults as well, because there are times in life when I need to read something with her warm-hearted fake-it-till-you-make-it-even-when-it’s-really-very-fake-right-now approach to life. None of these characters have it all together, even though they’re adults, but that’s okay. They can still try and they can still succeed. And I will still laugh (mostly with them, but sometimes at them) as they do so.

The protagonist of this series, Heather Wells, is an ex-pop star who, in quick order before the first book begins, lost her recording contract, her pop-star fiance, and all of her money, as well as her mother/manager who ran off to the Bahamas with the money. There’s surprisingly few hard feelings about any of this, c’est la vie. The books start with Heather renting a room from her ex-fiance’s brother (who’s a private detective) and getting a job as assistant dorm manager at a local college campus.

And then there’s a death in the dorm!

And the police think it was an accident!

And Heather Wells must solve it!

Not to spoil anything but (A) she solves the mysteries! and (B) by book number three the dorm has gotten the nickname “the death dorm” since people keep on dying in it and needing Heather Wells to solve their murders.

Anyway, these are wonderful, comfort books. I read these first three and am all happy and satisfied and ready to read something else for a while. But I’m also glad to know that there are two more books in the series waiting for me when I next feel the need for some Meg Cabot.

World War Z

Oct24 by Rebecca

World War Z
By Max Brooks
2007

So I “read” this as an audio book that was marked as unabridged, but does appear to have lacked a few sections from the original book written in 2006. I now need to go back and read that whole book, because this was AMAZING and there are still parts I haven’t read!

Just, wow! So, so good!

The audio book was particularly good for an audio book because it was read by a full cast of voice actors, not just a single reader, and it really highlighted the way that this book was presented as an oral history.

For the rare person who doesn’t recognize it, it’s a fictional book inspired by the nonfiction book The Good War: An Oral History of World War II. In World War Z, though, the war in question is the zombie war, but for all the fantasy element, it’s addressed in a serious manner. I love the world building that went into figuring out how a zombie war could start, how different people would react, and how it would eventually end. I also loved the characters, who were all faced with this impossible conflict and did the best that they could.

I may very well be the last person to have gotten around to reading this book, so it hardly needs me to recommend it, but if you happen to have been living under a rock for the last decade, you really should read this!

The only thing that could have made it better is if it were longer, and apparently that wish got granted since there’s more for me to read once I get a text copy to read. (I really want to know more about the blind Japanese mountain man! But I’ll also take anything else.)

As a side note: ignore the movie. They took a really unique book essentially consisting of dozens of epic interlinking short stories and tried to shoehorn it into a traditional movie plot.

A Net of Dawn and Bones

Oct17 by Rebecca

A Net of Dawn and Bones
By C. R. Chancy
2015

This is a self-published book available on Amazon, written by one of my favorite fanfic authors, who described it as:

Urban fantasy for anyone who’s stared at the latest vampiric/werewolf/whatever supposed “love” interest, and prayed the main character would have the common sense to set them on fire.

It really was a joy, with a great deal of awesome world building, and wonderful characters and interesting plot. In addition to the general fantasy elements, it also has a lot of religious exploration, which is something I enjoy a great deal. Plus a significant amount of interesting historical information is inserted into the story, too, to the extend that there’s a bibliography at the end of the book with recommended non-fiction books.

One bit of lovely backstory is the premise that a lot of people wind up in Hell –- via original sin or being cursed or whatnot — who don’t really deserve it. Our main character is a “Hell raider”, who breaks into Hell and then back out again, carrying souls with her to be released to face a more fair judgment. The book starts with our main character in Hell, discovering a rather worrying link to Earth that will need to be fixed from the Earth side of things.

Meanwhile, on Earth, the backstory is more like that of the Anita Black series: that various supernatural creatures have revealed themselves to the public and are now granted citizenship and legal protections. And the police are struggling a bit to figure out how this all works out. This is an awesome premise, and I’m still somewhat bitter about how awful the Anita Black series got after a really wonderful start. Chancy is doing something similar, but doing it right.

And thus our Hell raider and our local police attempt to work together to stop a supernatural evil. Yay!

It’s fun and relaxing while also being fascinating and surprisingly informative, and addresses a lack in the vampire/werewolf fantasy genre, for heroines who aren’t going to fall for beautiful monsters.

My one caveat to a positive review is the presence of a few casual anti-Islamic descriptions which threw me off, both for the prejudice and for it’s offhandedness, given that most of her other statements tend to be more backed up with either research or world-building. The anti-Islam sentiment had neither, alas, and I honestly think her editor should have removed them for literary as well as ethical reasons.

That said, I have a lot of experience reading and enjoying problematic things and it only came up twice and I, at least, was able to easily put that aside and enjoy the rest of the book for what it does right.

The first chapter and a half are readable in a preview on Amazon if you’re interested.

Biblio-therapy

Author Archives: Rebecca