Christmas reviews!
Dec. 28th, 2019 04:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearThe only new game I played over Christmas was Set A Watch, which is a co-operative game where you play a set of adventurers, fighting off hordes of monsters attacking their camp. Each turn, the four adventurers have three dice they can assign as damage to specific monsters or to activate special abilities. And, each turn, one adventurer has to stay in camp, healing up or getting information about future monsters and locations. So, it's basically a logic puzzle to figure out the best way to assign the dice in order to defeat the monsters, but with unknown variables that scupper your plans along the way.
The first time we played, we defeated the monsters relatively easily, but then we discovered we'd been playing it wrong in a way that enabled us to see more of the monsters than we should. So, David and I played it again the following day, with the correct rules, and got overwhelmed by the extra horde in the last encounter. So, we still did pretty well and nearly made it to the end.
I'm not normally a massive fan of co-operative games, and usually don't feel like I can make much of a useful contribution. But this one appealed to my particular problem-solving skills and I really enjoyed it both times.
The book I read over Christmas was The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz, which was very interesting and really made me think a lot, but wasn't necessarily all that enjoyable. It's about a battle between two factions trying to alter the timeline - a group of men who are trying to reduce women's rights and a group of women and non-binary folks who are trying to stop them. The world isn't particularly well realised - the time machines have been around for millennia but it's never clear exactly what this means about how time travel affects things.
And the stance taken by the author is an extreme one - I understand that this is deliberate and that the novel is a thought experiment about radical politics, but I did find it off-putting in some ways. It felt like it was trying way too hard to make its points, and I wasn't sure I agreed with what all of those points were. I also thought it was telling that nearly all of the violence perpetrated directly on the page was by women (and mostly teenage girls) against predatory men (based on reported information about their activities). Towards the end, I was frustrated that the novel seemed to be presenting an "all men are bad" attitude, but that didn't last right to the end, which was good. However, the throughline that violence wasn't the answer also got flipped at the end, which I didn't like. The book has lots of layers and is very nuanced in places, and I was certainly interested enough to want to know how it ended up. But, as someone who is drawn to this kind of narrative, I actually found some aspects of it quite alienating, and I don't think it really worked as a story overall.
This afternoon, I finished listening to The Fated Sky, which is the second in the Lady Astronaut series by Mary Robinette Kowal. This is rare case where the author is absolutely the right person to narrate the audiobook and she inhabits the character of Elma perfectly. I loved the first book, and really enjoyed this one, though it was very sad in places (but with a satisfying amount of time dedicated to the aftermath of tragedy and people's need to process and grieve). It also involved a lot more unpleasant bodily functions than I would prefer (especially in space!), but maintained the interesting levels of discussion of racism, sexism, politics, scientific endeavour, relationships, etc, from the first book. The ending felt very rushed though. An hour before the end, I had no idea how it was going to manage to complete the arc of this particular book, and was assuming there would be at least one more in the series. Then it all got wrapped up really quickly and had a tacked-on epilogue with a time jump that essentially finished the whole plot. Which is a shame, because I would very happily have spent more time in this universe!
The first time we played, we defeated the monsters relatively easily, but then we discovered we'd been playing it wrong in a way that enabled us to see more of the monsters than we should. So, David and I played it again the following day, with the correct rules, and got overwhelmed by the extra horde in the last encounter. So, we still did pretty well and nearly made it to the end.
I'm not normally a massive fan of co-operative games, and usually don't feel like I can make much of a useful contribution. But this one appealed to my particular problem-solving skills and I really enjoyed it both times.
The book I read over Christmas was The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz, which was very interesting and really made me think a lot, but wasn't necessarily all that enjoyable. It's about a battle between two factions trying to alter the timeline - a group of men who are trying to reduce women's rights and a group of women and non-binary folks who are trying to stop them. The world isn't particularly well realised - the time machines have been around for millennia but it's never clear exactly what this means about how time travel affects things.
And the stance taken by the author is an extreme one - I understand that this is deliberate and that the novel is a thought experiment about radical politics, but I did find it off-putting in some ways. It felt like it was trying way too hard to make its points, and I wasn't sure I agreed with what all of those points were. I also thought it was telling that nearly all of the violence perpetrated directly on the page was by women (and mostly teenage girls) against predatory men (based on reported information about their activities). Towards the end, I was frustrated that the novel seemed to be presenting an "all men are bad" attitude, but that didn't last right to the end, which was good. However, the throughline that violence wasn't the answer also got flipped at the end, which I didn't like. The book has lots of layers and is very nuanced in places, and I was certainly interested enough to want to know how it ended up. But, as someone who is drawn to this kind of narrative, I actually found some aspects of it quite alienating, and I don't think it really worked as a story overall.
This afternoon, I finished listening to The Fated Sky, which is the second in the Lady Astronaut series by Mary Robinette Kowal. This is rare case where the author is absolutely the right person to narrate the audiobook and she inhabits the character of Elma perfectly. I loved the first book, and really enjoyed this one, though it was very sad in places (but with a satisfying amount of time dedicated to the aftermath of tragedy and people's need to process and grieve). It also involved a lot more unpleasant bodily functions than I would prefer (especially in space!), but maintained the interesting levels of discussion of racism, sexism, politics, scientific endeavour, relationships, etc, from the first book. The ending felt very rushed though. An hour before the end, I had no idea how it was going to manage to complete the arc of this particular book, and was assuming there would be at least one more in the series. Then it all got wrapped up really quickly and had a tacked-on epilogue with a time jump that essentially finished the whole plot. Which is a shame, because I would very happily have spent more time in this universe!
