Deep Sea, Black Tides, Chelsea Embankment, Ghost Ships and, um, Chess...

[alobear]

Last week, we met up with a couple we made friends with on the JoCo Cruise in February, and they introduced us to a fun game, which is very easy to play in the pub. It’s called Deep Sea Adventure, and it’s a ‘push your luck’ game, a bit like Celestia. As players, you are diving for treasure, with limited oxygen. The deeper you go, the more valuable the treasure, but the more oxygen you use up lugging it to the surface, and the longer it take you to get back. As you roll dice to move, it’s more luck than judgement, though you can make informed decisions about how likely you are to make it back to the submarine alive. It was lots of fun, and a very good way to round off a convivial evening of drinks and catching up.


One of the people in my online writing group posted a piece earlier in the year about how to deal with differently gendered characters, and recommended several books as good examples. I decided to try The Black Tides of Heaven, a novella by J.Y. Yang, a non-binary author from Singapore, and I read it in a couple of hours yesterday. It tells the story of twins born into the royal family of a fantasy realm called The Protectorate, where children are born ungendered and get to choose whether to become male or female any time up to the age of eighteen. That's actually fairly incidental to the plot, though, which revolves around the fate of the twins, whose mother is the supreme dictator of the realm. One of them has visions of the future, and tries to undermine their mother's power from the inside, while the other joins a resistance faction and attacks the power structure from the outside. I liked the world and the characters, but felt quite removed from the story and didn't really engage with it emotionally. The significance of the gender selection was never really explored, the magic system was never fully described, and the narrative kept jumping forwards several years, which made it difficult to connect to the story. There's an accompanying novella called The Red Threads of Fortune, which is set in the same world and features the same characters, so I'll probably read that too, since it won't take very long, and may add more depth.



The other book I read this week was Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd, which is in a genre I’ve never come across before - a literary thriller. From reading some of Boyd’s other work, I was expecting the leisurely pace, the importance of place, the densely descriptive language, and the exploration of the human condition. I wasn’t expecting the protagonist to get mixed up in a murder and end up on the run from both the police and a military assassin. It was both baffling and fascinating, though I eventually came to the conclusion that it didn’t really work. The blending of action elements and literary pacing derailed any sense of urgency in Adam’s predicament, and leaving several of the plot threads unresolved made for a rather unsatisfactory conclusion. Still, it was an interesting read, from the point of view of studying an attempt at something unusual, even if I can’t say I really enjoyed it.


Today, I finished listening to The Ghost Brigades, by John Scalzi, the sequel to Old Man’s War. It’s strange, because I remember the first book from reading the series many years ago, and I remember the third one, but I had no memory of this one at all. It’s more of an offshoot than a sequel, since there’s only one common character, and she serves a supporting role in both books. This one starts off with a prologue from the point of view of an alien scientist, who is eventually captured by the humans, and the protagonist, Jared, doesn’t come into it until quite some way through. So, it takes a while to get going, but Jared’s story is compelling, involving complex questions about personhood, consciousness and personal agency. There’s also quite a lot of running around and blowing stuff up, and a surprisingly emotive conclusion. The next in the series, The Last Colony, is the one I particularly remember enjoying, so I’ll definitely continue on to that one soon.


Lastly, we went to the theatre on Saturday night, to see a new production of Chess. The background summary from a review I found online is spot on: “1984 hit Chess the musical builds a story of romance and Cold War intrigue, set against the backdrop of an international chess championship tournament. Despite a sketchy book, some crude characterisation and uncomfortable racial stereotyping, it was one of the defining musicals of the 80s.” The music is generally really good, and it was a very showy production, with committed performances from all the leads. But the presentation of the different nations involved in the story (USA, Russia, Britain, Thailand, and the Tyrol) were painful, and the relationships left rather a lot to be desired in terms of gender politics. It was good to see Michael Ball on stage, though, still with a lot of presence and a great voice.