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Notes -
The wife and I decided that instead of watching 3 hours of TV a night, we should read together, which has been a nice change. The wife suffers a bit from literary narcolepsy. Which is to say, reading puts her immediately to sleep. So the night turns into 10-20 minutes of us reading together, and then me reading for another 2 hours while she's asleep on the couch next to me. Which is fine by me.
I finished A Princess of Mars and Day of the Oprichnik this week.
I gotta admit, A Princess of Mars left me underwhelmed. All the descriptions were just so perfunctory and staid. You'd think it would be difficult to describe the fantastical flora and fauna of a living mars in a boring manner, but he pulled it off. The characters are frankly tedious and boring as well. Even the action is so-so. Possibly the most interesting part of the book is the fact that it came out in 1912. Which means the main character, a former confederate cavalry officer and southern gentlemen, is generally esteemed and presented as a noble and moral person. It also heavily features the canals of mars, which were believed to exist at the time he wrote it. Has some fun airship battles, which play out like naval battles since the era of flight, or aerial combat, was so new when he wrote it.
Was also interesting to read on wikipedia how the book influenced Heinlein, Arthur C Clarke, Ray Bradbury, James Cameron, Flash Gordon and Carl Sagan. But ultimately, I can't really give it a recommendation.
Day of the Oprichnik was wild. Really pulled me along, and I finished it in about two days. Checking the wiki for this book, something like 70% of it is analysis, so I'm sure most of the subtext of the book went over my head. But I enjoyed it all the same. Honestly I don't want to spoil anything about it, since going in completely blind was half the fun for me. I will say, it's a bewildering and perversely charming slice of life story in a dystopian Russia. It's also 100% from the first person perspective and an enforcer of the regime. So that's fun.
S.M.Stirling wrote IMO an amazing riff on the Barsoom books called "In the Courts of the Crimson Kings" . For those who don't know Stirling, he's a 1776 (luv me liberty, luve me small government, luv me common law etc) Canadian, who is, also, at the same time a hardcore HBD/biodeterminist guy but keeps very quiet about it to not upset the Boomers who are most of his readership.
It takes place in an alternate timeline where someone (or something) terraformed Mars & Venus to support life and transplanted humans there. Cold war kind of fizzles out into a huge space race when it turns out both places are habitable and in fact inhabited. Venus is a jungle planet with primitive tribes, Mars is very cold and quite dry but its engineered ecology supports a slowly declining civilization despite its inhabitants being almost Ivy League material of 125 average IQ. Why Mars isn't in space and colonizing Earth is handwaved in the book with a "no uranium on Mars" claim.
It's amazing how much heresy you can pack into what looks like and is a fun adventure book and get away with it if you package it sa "fiction". There's even some obvious applause bait with mild subversiveness of the male human hero getting rescued by a princess etc. Meanwhile, it seems the reviewers completely avoided mentioning why "hero getting rescued by a princess" makes perfect sense in context. (my metaphorical sides are hurting)
One can also tell that Stirling is uneasy with things as they are for us, because somehow, Martian biology is precisely of the kind that liberals like him would like ours to be. Little in the way of sexual dimorphism, due to an average lifespan of ~250 years, childbirth and child-rearing doesn't hurt women's vocations or careers much.
Meanwhile, within the book, it's made clear that Martian biotechnology works flawlessly and that Martians at their apogee routinely engineered themselves for various desirable character or physical traits. (E.g. the imperial bodyguard caste are almost as strong as earth humans and have psychology similar to that of special forces soldiers. Ultimately obedient to lawful, competent authority but never quit and independent of mind..
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