meet Charlaine Harris: misogynist, racist, talentless

It’s always been obvious to me reading through some Sookie Stackhouse that Charlaine Harris is a giant misogynistic, racist, and possibly homophobic dipshit but man, in All Together Dead she goes for broke.

 

Ian McDonald’s RIVER OF SUCK AND CULTURAL APPROPRIATION

So wtf was I missing in Ian McDonald’s River of Gods? I don’t think I’ve seen anything approaching a negative opinion of this novel, going by a quick look on google, except a few reviews on Amazon. Nearly everyone seems to agree that it’s literary or almost literary. Nearly everyone seems to think it paints an authentic portrait of India.

I don’t know about authentic portrait, never having been to India, but I thought the entire time that this is a novel written by a very British, very white, very male author. As for its literary value, I’ll let the scarf-up-the-ass sex scene speak for itself.

Marianna Fusco is professional and roused enough not to coo at the size of Vishram’s penthouse as they stumble through the door, quaking with lust. He just about remembers to undress the proper way, the gentleman’s way, from the bottom up; then she whips off her silk sarong and comes for him across the room, twisting the translucent fabric into a rope and tying it into a chain of large knots, like a thugee… He tries to push into her vagina, she rolls away saying no no no, I’m not letting that thing in there. She let him get three fingers in both orifices and blasphemes and thrashes on the mat by the foot of the bed. Then she helps him fold the silk scarf knot by careful knot up inside her and she straddles him… handing him until he comes and after he’s come she rolls onto her back and makes him wank her clitoris with the ball of his big toe and when she is swearing and beating her fists off the carpet she rolls into the yoga plough position and he wraps the free end of the scarf around his hand and slowly pulls it out, each knot accompanied by a blaspheme and a full-body thrash.

The novel’s crammed with hilariously written sex: everyone is an enthusiastic contortionist (“yoga plough” position while thrashing and having a scarf “lovingly pulled” out of your colon, hanging from your lover’s waist upside down and all) and everyone practices Tantric sex (including or even particularly the western characters. One character’s French boyfriend ties a string or a rubber band around his cock and shoves it up her vagina while chanting–apparently this keeps the thing erect for an entire hour or something). I mean, hell, some of them could have been interesting, but instead you have a nute–a non-gendered–who acts like a weepy uke: lower lip trembling at the slightest social embarrassment, physically fragile and effeminate. What the hell is up with that? Apparently, all the nutes in McDonald’s futuristic India are girly, work in the fashion/media industry, are walking fashion plates and are every single one unironically faaaabulous.

 

SILVER PHOENIX quotespam: like herpes it keeps giving

Quotespam! Special edition; includes things I didn’t quote in my article at Ars Marginal. Yes, this is how much this book offends me and I want to share my misery. If I had to suffer through so much of it, then by god SO WILL EVERYONE ELSE.

 

SILVER PHOENIX and the Asshat Plot

So! We now know that–well, you now know that I consider–Silver Phoenix a horribly problematic book that brims with internalized misogyny from cover to cover. Like, the more you look, the more of it there is. A hundred thousand little things. Several big things. There’s no end to the horrible fauxminism that fuels Silver Phoenix.

But maybe you don’t really care about all that; maybe you don’t even agree with me that Silver Phoenix is about as feminist as Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter or a WH40K manual. That’s fine! Maybe you just want to know, is this a good book? Does it feature lush, evocative prose like everyone says? Perhaps the characters, sexist or not, are well-drawn portraits of living, breathing people? Why, Cindy Pon’s fake China Kingdom of Xia might just be the most interesting, most vivid setting this side of Bas-Lag!

Hahahahaha. As if.

(And by the way this is a fucking hideous cover and the dress is made of what, pink vinyl? Pretty sure people in feudal China didn’t wear vinyl. This cover should be textbook definition for “cheap exoticization.”)

 

Sheri S. Tepper’s BEAUTY is incredibly ugly

Sheri Tepper’s Beauty could have been an interesting fairytale retelling. Instead, the author seems determined to make it a shrill, sanctimonious soapbox-straddling public masturbation session.

 

Keith Brooke’s THE ACCORD

The key to understanding Keith Brooke’s The Accord is this: fuck.

Wait, let’s try that again: FUCK!!!

This isn’t me swearing a lot in yet another review; this is Keith Brooke’s prose in his pathetic soap opera masquerading as cyberpunk. I don’t know if it’s just Brooke or an unspoken agreement between certain sci-fi writers (Charles Stross, to a lesser extent M. John Harrison and Richard Morgan) that characters in a futuristic world must never, ever speak naturally. The symptoms vary: most of the time it’s meaningless technobabble describing technology that isn’t probable and backed up by a form of science known to no man except maybe the gnome mages in Dungeons & Dragons, sometimes it’s people talking in a manner writers think super-geniuses would but which resembles nothing in reality. In Brooke’s case, it’s a mix of both plus a liberal use of “fuck” as the be-all, end-all outlet for emotion. Happy? FUCK. Sad? FUCKING FUCK. Angry? FUCKITY FUCK FUCK.