The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2024, pt. 16: Margaret McBride

 

 2024 Book list

by Margaret McBride

 

I read a lot again this year but not in as random a fashion as usual. We are planning to move next year so I am rereading a lot before selling books. Three that I particularly liked: 

 

China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh–a Tiptree/Otherwise Award winner. The plot organization is unusual; the story of three people is given. Each is interesting and gives details about a future culture in China, the U S, and Mars. Only a slight connection exists between the three, but I find the overall effect satisfying. 

 

Remnant Population by Elizabeth Moon–if you have ever commented about the small number of older women characters in SF, you need to read this novel. An older woman decides to hide and stay on a planet when the other humans are forced to leave. She is delighted with the chance to wear fewer clothes, eat what she wants, etc. but after a while aliens show up and she has to figure how to communicate and ends up helping them with a birth and acting as ambassador for peace when humans come back.

 

Color of Distance by Amy Thomson–top of my list whenever I’m asked for novels about really alien aliens. A human is assumed dead and left on a planet but kept alive by the aliens. Some of the book gives their perspective and also the problems the human woman has trying to understand how their culture and environment work. She finds some of their actions repulsive but the underlying needs to sustain the environment are well presented.

I reread eleven books by Samuel Delany and six by Theodore Sturgeon before going to the Sturgeon Symposium at KU with Delany as guest. If you have not read Delany (or it’s been along time), I suggest Babel 17. The scenes where the poet Rydra tries to figure out a new language including how to communicate certain concepts to a man whose language does not have terms for I or you are wonderful, plus the descriptions of how some humans have changed their bodies and their family and sexual arrangements are more alien and interesting than many non-humans in other novels or tv.

 

For Sturgeon, I recommend More than Human or any of his short story collections. Some bits seem a bit outdated but the characters and the plot are interesting enough to keep me reading. Particularly noteworthy, especially for fiction written in the 50s and 60s, is the frequent comment about the need for male/female interaction in work, education, marriage, etc. to be equal, and the plot bits about getting rid of domestic abuse to women and children and sexual harassment in the workplace.

I read as many as I could from the February Locus Best of the Year list and my favorite was To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, a first novel by Monique Blackgoose. It’s an alternate history where people from Norse countries have settled North America and done multiple awful things to the natives living there. After years with the beginning of cars and towns, there are still dragon species which bond with humans upon clutching and are very important to the society. The main character is told she must leave her “primitive” family and culture and go to school to become “civilized” after she bonds with a dragon. Some characters are bi and lesbian (although not accepted as civilized.) One character is on the spectrum, and how he is perceived and manages to fight against the biases is depicted well. I will definitely read more by this author.

Three other books stood out when I reviewed my reading list from 2024:

 

A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher. Horror genre rarely works for me, but this novel has humor and great characters and believable family connections along with the Gothic elements: “Real or not, monsters don’t bother you while you’re peeing. (This is one of the lesser known laws.)” There is a vulture who looks more like it would ask the dead to play fetch than escort them to the afterlife. I enjoyed it.

 

Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon is amazingly well researched (pages of bibliography) and quite readable for a layperson. I appreciated the political/feminist bits as well as lots of paleo/fossil information.

 

Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslamp Fantasy edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling with eighteen totally original stories–all kinds of funny and scary stories  including young Victoria learning how to do magic and others coping with fairies or becoming the monsters themselves.

 

 Margaret McBride is retired from the University of Oregon where Gender and Sexuality in Science Fiction and Fantasy was her favorite class to teach. She is the editor of the tenth volume of the WisCon Chronicles, Social Justice (Redux). She has been the chair of the Tiptree/Otherwise Award two times, has participated on over forty panels at WisCon and hopes to do so again.