u/bantamreturns

Every Gene Wolfe book is my favorite right after I finish reading it, but the Latro books are sublime. The cast of characters is wonderful. As a hero, Latro is terribly endearing. Although he cannot remember who he is, he acts who he is.

One of my favorite moments was him trying to buy milk and a porcelain dish. Mytsereu won't let him because there are porcelain dishes and milk at home. He wants to feed the snake in the temple "because snakes like milk." The snake, of course, is Uraeus, and Latro does not remember Uraeus but he remembers to bring him milk.

Another thing I liked about these books is the way that Latro encounters the divine. There is no attempt to rationalize it. It's wild and terrifying and alien and real and familiar all at once.

Probably one of the most inventive fantasy series I've ever read. What is your favorite thing about the Latro series?

Latro encounters many mythological characters, gods, nymphs and heroes during the story. Because of her age and the time the story is set in, I assumed that Io's name was a coincidence - that she was a girl named Io but not the mythological daughter of Inachus, kidnapped by Zeus, nor the princess of Argos kidnapped by the Phonecians, whose abduction began the cycle of abductions that led to the Persian war. (This is Herodotus's possibly tongue in cheek rationalization of the myth.)

But every other character with a familiar name seems to have a mythological analog, including Europa. Then I thought - who is the Shining God that gives Io to Latro? Apollo? Why is Io so insistent that she is Latro's slave and than she cannot and does not want to go home? Well, she says she has been charged by the god with the task of looking after Latro. She has a crush on him, and she also can rely on him to treat her well. Her relationship with him is portrayed rather like a vassalage and she doesn't hesitate to claim the help Latro is responsible to provide for her.

Anyhow, the mythological Io was the daughter of a river god or a priestess of Hera or the princess of the Argives. She was - depending on the version - pursued, seduced, abducted or raped by Zeus, changed into a cow by either Zeus or Hera, hidden either by Zeus using darkness or guarded by the Hundred Eye as charged by Hera; went down to Egypt and became the goddess Isis.

There's nothing that definitively suggests that the girl Io is the Io of myth. But since all the other mythical named characters that Latro meets are those characters, I have no reason to assume that Io is not also Io, despite the time line not exactly lining up.

So I wonder if Io's time with Latro fits into one of the lacunae in Io's myth - perhaps during the time that she is hidden in darkness - under the cover of cloud - in the mist. She belonged to the temple of the Shining God, but is given to travel with Latro. Early in their journey Io and Hilaeria are raped by soldiers. Then they travel in relative anonymity, moving from place to place. And apparently she ends up with Pindaros who intends to return to his own seven gated city - Thebes. Yes it's the Greek Thebes, not the Egyptian one. But it's the Greek house of Thebes that Io is the great ancestress of. And the Persian War is the war ongoing during the novel. So this would all be rather Wolfian, wouldn't it?

About 20 years ago I sometimes wore sandalwood essential oil. I remember it being soft, woody, subtle, a little salty sometimes, a skin scent. Lately anything labeled with a sandalwood note is sharp, harsh, almost metallic with a lot of sillage. It goes right up my nose and ends up in the back of my throat.

The Dossier Woody Sandalwood (Le Labo Santal 33 dupe) is all this note. It is in the Cremo body wash that my neighbor uses. It's not in my husband's deodorant (he's been wearing the same old spice deo for 20+ years). It is in almost any candle labeled with sandalwood. I can smell this note on people from 3-5 feet away, on the bus, at work, at the grocery store, etc.

What is this? Is it a new type of sandalwood? Was the oil I had before not real sandalwood? Is it some type of note commonly paired with sandalwood? Is it a new fragrance chemical? It's mostly in men's/unisex fragrance but sometimes I smell it in fragrances that aren't marketed as being sandalwood heavy, including sweet/fruity/floral women's fragrance. It's in so many things that when I recently decided to look for a new bottle of perfume, I stopped looking at anything released in the last 20 years and ended up with a bottle of CK Eternity.

Thanks in advance for your knowledge.

Has anyone else read this? I found a copy in a thrift store but it's also available on Bandcamp as an audio book. I'm about 3/4 of the way through.

It's narrated from the point of view of a single father raising five children in a radically changed future society, possibly a post collapse Seattle. The Inland of the country is no longer inhabitable. Manned warfare is a thing of the past but drone warfare is not. There are rich people and poor people. There is some sort of digital ground overlaid atop physical reality that most people interact with and treat as real. Glitches open and you can get lost in them.

The narrator's family lives in a sort of interstitial community that is not fully integrated into the more affluent aspects of the remaining, highly digital society. It's a community where people still use money and physical locks (compared to a digitally monitored "cadence" of resource allocation and digital security measures which seem to influence physical space).

There is no compulsory public education system but there are three different schools in the area. One ("Valley") is a type of cooperative that sounds a bit like Sudbury school - kids do what interests them and interested adults facilitate. Attendance is voluntary and the materials are basically scavenged. Another ("Mrs Bates") is an art school run by the eponymous Mrs Bates, because she saw a need for it. Sounds like anyone can go. And then there is Davidoff, an expensive private institute that comes to play a big role in shaping the digital infrastructure of the city. They collect both talented students (by scholarship if need be) and open source technology which they then privatize in order to regulate it.

The characters spend a lot of time doing things they find interesting for its own sake. They make music and build giant catapults and tear down buildings and go scavenging and browse open air markets for the detritus of our own civilization. Life moves at a slow pace. If you've ever spent a lot of time around hippie commune unschooling types or urban art scene weirdos that's the vibe. The characters are people that could exist in my own city/community. The kids have a great deal of autonomy, maybe too much, but then again maybe not. The beginning of the book is post collapse yet pastoral in tone.

The world is richly imagined. The narrator comes across as sincere, if a bit self-deluding, a bit of a creep, and neglectful as a parent. I'm intrigued by the fact that this is a speculative fiction book about parenting and about fatherhood, which is not a very common theme. The narrator works as a locksmith as well as in a lab developing these little tiny personal surveillance and control drones that play a big role in the novel. In another book there would be a lot more about the development of that technology but it's taken as matter of fact. The most important part of the narrator's life is as a parent.

The book starts with the narrator getting his own surveillance and control drone (the "minder") which connects to other drones P2P. We never know him without it. He grows to love the minder. Eventually everyone gets a similar type of drone which he finds repugnant. Lots of stuff happens... I'm not quite done with the book yet.

It's good, well written and absorbing. It is packed full of ideas. I do recommend it. I mainly posted this to find out if anyone else has read it, and if so, what did you think about it?

edit - I finished the book this afternoon and enjoyed it even more than I expected to!

The podcast is called 2 Rash 2 Unadvised. It's a book read along podcast that has covered Terra Ignota by Ada Palmer, Just City by Jo Walton and a couple other books and series. Most pertinent for me, they read through Cyteen and Regenesis by CJ Cherryh. I just finished Cyteen and will be reading Regenesis when I get my copy in the mail.

It's very charming! I've only listened to the Cyteen episodes so far. Each episode is over an hour long and covers 1 chapter at a time. One host has read the book before (Waweru) and one has not (Liam). Liam doesn't seem to have familiarity with the rest of the Alliance-Union universe and approaches the book very differently than I did after having read mostly Alliance side novels and 40,000 in Gehenna and Port Eternity. So it is super fun hearing someone engage with the material for the first time and in a way I would not have thought of. Waweru is very dry and funny and restrained since he knows what is coming and Liam does not.

They do have guests. They stick to talking about the book without long digressions on things like what they ate for lunch etc. It's exactly what I was looking for in a book podcast about a CJ Cherryh novel and I thought others might enjoy it too.

It's on the major podcast services but also has a page on buzzsprout where you can listen without having an account. That is where I am listening.

I just read *The Book of Atrix Wolfe* and really did not enjoy it as much as I wanted to. If you are a McKillip fan, what do you like about her work? It may be that I wasn't going about reading this book the right way.