u/pwnedprofessor

The UCLA Asian American Studies Center released a free massive online textbook on Asian American history and culture. It's authored by a rather jaw-droppingly impressive list of Asian American studies academic all-stars, and I highly recommend this resource for anyone wanting to learn more about Asian American history, issues, and cultural production. AND AGAIN, IT'S FREE!!!

https://www.foundationsandfutures.org/

Check it out yourself, send it to your friends. It's beautiful, it's multimedia, it's accessible, and it's extremely well researched and written by some of the top scholars of the field.

I've got a bit of a heretical opinion on the Culture novels--or is it? I don't know.

I first read Iain Banks maybe around 2012; I got randomly interested during a long vacation, and I decided to read Consider Phlebas, Player of Games, Use of Weapons, and Look to Windward rather quickly. I tried Inversions but couldn't get into it. Then, I took a long hiatus, distracted by a number of other things, and then very recently picked up Hydrogen Sonata and am currently getting through it.

Anyway, as I read Hydrogen Sonata, after having read a ton of other science fiction by different authors recently, I'm consolidating my opinion of the Culture novels, which, frankly, isn't too different from my opinion from over a decade ago. I think that the Culture is one of my favorite fictional societies, and I very much enjoy the ongoing literary problem that Banks tackles: how do you have interesting stories in/about a genuine honest-to-God utopia? I love the worldbuilding, and the hopeful and fantastical possibilities the Culture provides.

But here's where you might strongly disagree with me: I really don't know if I like Banks' prose.

To be clear, Banks is not a bad writer, not by a long shot. He's much, much better than the average SF writer. And yet... Something about his writing annoys me. There are two aspects that I have a lot of trouble with. First, I think he is overly descriptive. And the way that he describes, in his first person omniscient voice, most of the world, it's largely in the assumption that the reader is someone foreign to that world. There is, I believe, too much over-explanation, in a way that prevents an immersive seal into this wonderful universe of his. It is written in such a way that I am constantly reminded that I am not a part of his universe, because it is being explained to me as if I was a foreigner. This, of course, happens to be true, but it does a poor job of drawing the reader in to engage in the fantasy of living in a universe with the Culture.

Second--and this might simply be because I'm not Scottish or British and don't have the same tastes--I regularly find the humor/"wit" more irritating than entertaining. There's something I find unpleasant about the Douglas Adams-esque jokes, and the near-universal snark of most of the characters. There's a smugness to it, an arrogance to it, that I find off-putting in a utopian setting. I contrast this to, say, Ursula Le Guin's writing. The Dispossessed is full of a kind of lush poetical sensibility and earnestness, which, to me, feels so much more appropriate in sketching out a utopian society. The rawness of emotion makes society more approachable, while I find the ongoing evasion through wit in the Culture exhausting. Utopia might actually be nightmarish if it's full of a bunch of AIs who think they're Oscar Wilde or W. S. Gilbert (note: Look to Windward was my favorite Culture novel partly because the Mind was experiencing grief rather than spouting snark).

Anyway, I'm not sure why I felt the need to write this out, but I guess I wanted to see if anyone felt the same way? Or is my opinion more common than I thought? Am I being ridiculous?

I’ve heard people say that Tainted Grail gives “Skyrim vibes,” which sounds great, but what I want to know is if it also provides more than combat and survival? Is there any society to interact with? Interesting decisions to be made? Basically, I enjoy open world games that are sandboxy but not so sandboxy that they lack characters and societies (so, Bethesda games work for me because they have just enough of the latter, but No Man’s Sky is harder to grab my attention because its interactions with interesting NPCs are too rare in my experience). And on the sandboxy side of things, does Tainted Grail offer a good degree of creativity?

Scholar Christopher Fan: “Nowhere are Boynton’s many talents and longstanding thematic commitments more pronounced than in The Going to Bed Book. Its title announces the reliable routine ahead: no real story, just a sequence. A scrum of animals aboard a boat are getting ready for bed. Baths are taken, teeth are brushed, pajamas are donned, exercise, controversially, is done right before jumping into bed. It all seems so repetitive, if off-kilter. But the book’s final verse, never far from my mind, is one of the most devastating I have ever read.

“It’s not as dark as Beckett’s “They give birth astride of a grave,” but the point is similar. The key to its delicate tone is that it’s not depicting death but something more primordial. Something like the state of zero stimulus that, for Freud, is the aim of all life. This may be Boynton’s master theme: “Stasis, disrupted by trouble, resolved by bedtime*,*” as a Public Books encomium to Beverly Cleary put it.”

I would love to find one. There are very specific questions about being a leftist and a parent that I’d love to kick around, but I feel like this specific intersection is hard to find on Reddit or social media in general. Best I can find so far is r/progressivemoms, but I’m not sure how strict they are about being moms (I’m a dad), and it generally fields left of center rather than left. If anyone has any leads, I’d appreciate it!