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I don’t often say this, but I regret reading this book, a collection of short stories by Lindholm (aka Hobb). Not only did I dislike nearly all of them, but many of them were creepy and unpleasant, full of child abuse, animal abuse, preachiness, and despair. In particular, two stories were largely centered around cat corpses. There’s a theme I can do without!
I got the book from the library because I love Lindholm’s Ki and Vandien series, and enjoyed almost all her novels written as Lindholm. (I see cheap used copies of Harpy's Flight
here.) I also liked Hobb’s first two “Assassin” and “Ship” books enough to read most of her other novels, even though the rest ranged from okay to terrible.
But I had forgotten, or traumatically repressed, that of the two Lindholm short stories I’d previously read, one was the charming Ki and Vandien adventure “Bones for Dulath” (not reprinted in this volume, probably because it’s too much fun,) but the other was the awesomely depressing lizard messiah story (which was reprinted, probably because it’s so full of DOOM.) It also contains my new nominee for the ultimate Never befriend a person with problems story.
“Silver Lady and the Fortyish Man” is an exception to the doom parade. It’s a cute urban fantasy romance – a bit too cute for my taste.
“Finis” is a vampire story with a predictable twist ending.
“Drum Machine” is an annoying, preachy sf story about genetically engineered babies, the Horror of Sameness, and how if we eliminate mental illness, we will eliminate creativity. SIGH.
“Cut” is an annoying, preachy sf story in which the price of allowing girls to get abortions without their parents’ permission is that anyone over 15 can now make any bodily alteration without their parents’ permission, but parents can do anything to their children if they’re under 15. The heroine’s grand-daughter is going to voluntarily undergo female genital mutilation, and make her infant daughter do the same. This story was effectively manipulative, but when I’m being manipulated, I’d like it to be little less obvious. The foreword notes that “Cut” isn’t supposed to be an anti-abortion polemic, which is surprising given how exactly it reads as one.
The Inheritance
“A Touch of Lavender” is the one where everything sucks and Earth is descended upon by lizard alien refugees who are covered with slime whose least touch hopelessly addicts humans and then makes them go deaf. The hero’s sole source of happiness is his family of his mom, his mom’s lizard-alien boyfriend, and their half-lizard-alien baby. But the mom, whose greatest joy was music, gets accidentally addicted to the alien’s slime and becomes a brain-damaged and completely deaf junkie, the lizard-alien boyfriend is murdered in a hate crime, and the baby turns out to be the lizard messiah and departs Earth with the rest of the lizard-aliens, leaving the hero to face his life on a devastated Earth, in wretched poverty, loneliness, and despair.
“The Fifth Squashed Cat” is an awesomely depressing story in which the heroine learns the secret of immortality and eternal youth… and that she can’t access it because she is a rationalist for whom magic won’t work, even once she’s so convinced that it will that she grovels by the side of the freeway, desperately sucking on the bones of a squashed cat. EW.
But wait! I saved the most depressing for last! “Strays” is about a middle-class white girl who befriends a horribly abused, half-starved Native American girl who loves cats. The white girl’s mom is so afraid of poverty and abuse contamination that rather than, say, reporting the abuse, she merely gives the abused girl a can of pepper spray, then forbids her daughter to ever associate with her friend again. The abused girl’s cats are all poisoned and her abusive mom’s abusive boyfriend murders her before her ex-friend’s eyes. But it’s okay! She’s resurrected as a cat. W. T. F.
Of the Hobb stories, “Homecoming” is pretty good if you can get over the heroine apparently forgetting that two of her babies died 10 pages ago and never mentioning them again. “Cat’s Meat” has more child and animal abuse, and a “happy ending” undercut by an awesomely depressing tag of "You killed someone to save my life, so I hate you forever."
At that point, I thought, “Why in the world am I still reading?” And stopped.
I got the book from the library because I love Lindholm’s Ki and Vandien series, and enjoyed almost all her novels written as Lindholm. (I see cheap used copies of Harpy's Flight
here.) I also liked Hobb’s first two “Assassin” and “Ship” books enough to read most of her other novels, even though the rest ranged from okay to terrible.
But I had forgotten, or traumatically repressed, that of the two Lindholm short stories I’d previously read, one was the charming Ki and Vandien adventure “Bones for Dulath” (not reprinted in this volume, probably because it’s too much fun,) but the other was the awesomely depressing lizard messiah story (which was reprinted, probably because it’s so full of DOOM.) It also contains my new nominee for the ultimate Never befriend a person with problems story.
“Silver Lady and the Fortyish Man” is an exception to the doom parade. It’s a cute urban fantasy romance – a bit too cute for my taste.
“Finis” is a vampire story with a predictable twist ending.
“Drum Machine” is an annoying, preachy sf story about genetically engineered babies, the Horror of Sameness, and how if we eliminate mental illness, we will eliminate creativity. SIGH.
“Cut” is an annoying, preachy sf story in which the price of allowing girls to get abortions without their parents’ permission is that anyone over 15 can now make any bodily alteration without their parents’ permission, but parents can do anything to their children if they’re under 15. The heroine’s grand-daughter is going to voluntarily undergo female genital mutilation, and make her infant daughter do the same. This story was effectively manipulative, but when I’m being manipulated, I’d like it to be little less obvious. The foreword notes that “Cut” isn’t supposed to be an anti-abortion polemic, which is surprising given how exactly it reads as one.
The Inheritance
“A Touch of Lavender” is the one where everything sucks and Earth is descended upon by lizard alien refugees who are covered with slime whose least touch hopelessly addicts humans and then makes them go deaf. The hero’s sole source of happiness is his family of his mom, his mom’s lizard-alien boyfriend, and their half-lizard-alien baby. But the mom, whose greatest joy was music, gets accidentally addicted to the alien’s slime and becomes a brain-damaged and completely deaf junkie, the lizard-alien boyfriend is murdered in a hate crime, and the baby turns out to be the lizard messiah and departs Earth with the rest of the lizard-aliens, leaving the hero to face his life on a devastated Earth, in wretched poverty, loneliness, and despair.
“The Fifth Squashed Cat” is an awesomely depressing story in which the heroine learns the secret of immortality and eternal youth… and that she can’t access it because she is a rationalist for whom magic won’t work, even once she’s so convinced that it will that she grovels by the side of the freeway, desperately sucking on the bones of a squashed cat. EW.
But wait! I saved the most depressing for last! “Strays” is about a middle-class white girl who befriends a horribly abused, half-starved Native American girl who loves cats. The white girl’s mom is so afraid of poverty and abuse contamination that rather than, say, reporting the abuse, she merely gives the abused girl a can of pepper spray, then forbids her daughter to ever associate with her friend again. The abused girl’s cats are all poisoned and her abusive mom’s abusive boyfriend murders her before her ex-friend’s eyes. But it’s okay! She’s resurrected as a cat. W. T. F.
Of the Hobb stories, “Homecoming” is pretty good if you can get over the heroine apparently forgetting that two of her babies died 10 pages ago and never mentioning them again. “Cat’s Meat” has more child and animal abuse, and a “happy ending” undercut by an awesomely depressing tag of "You killed someone to save my life, so I hate you forever."
At that point, I thought, “Why in the world am I still reading?” And stopped.
From:
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I live in Minneapolis, which has the largest population of Somali immigrants in the U.S. When this group first started arriving, I believe there was a child protection case where a family took a child back to Africa and had it done; on their return to the U.S., the child was taken away and the parents were charged with abuse. Since then, so far as I can tell (and I have a RL friend who is a pediatrician and treats a lot of Somali children; she would not talk about her affection and respect for her Somali parents if they were doing this to their daughters) the Somalis coming in the U.S. simply accepted that if they wanted to live in the U.S., they were going to have to discard that part of their culture. Period.
Anyway. This is where I am coming from, geographically and culturally, and I looked at that basic premise -- no one looked at this law and said, "are you fucking kidding me? have you ever heard of female genital mutilation? NOT OKAY" -- and rolled my eyes. Adult women embracing FGM as some sort of extreme bodily modification thing? Ew, but OK, I can buy it. Senators not seizing on the chance to bash Muslims? HAHAHAHAHAHA.
From:
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It could have never mentioned abortion or FGM, but been, say, about a mother whose daughter has a compulsion to remove her own limbs, in a world where anything you do to your own body is legal. Then it still would have been gross, but been a lot less smug.
As it was, it read exactly as if the point was, "So, you pro-choicers think a woman should be able to do whatever she wants with her own body, huh? Well, how would you feel if what she wanted to do was FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION? And how about if she also wanted to GENITALLY MUTILATE her infant daughter? Not so sure now, are you?"
As you say, too, the entire premise was so unlikely. Laws emerge out of real cultural concerns, not as "spherical cow" thought experiments. Allowing FGM comes out of a specific environment; so does allowing abortion. Just because both involve physical alterations doesn't make a culture likely to see them as morally and legally identical.
From:
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And it's a total fallacy anyway, because by definition, she would not be doing it TO HER OWN BODY. She'd be doing it to her daughter's. And unless we're doing the whole "fetuses are people!" thing, she'd be doing it after the child was born, at which point pretty much everyone agrees that the child is an individual. So it STILL makes no sense.
From:
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Of course, as you say, while the personhood of fetuses is debated, the personhood of infants, in general, is not.
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