SEAL Book Club

[InspectorCaracal]

As a pedantic side note: the fact of the Station of the Twelfth being supposedly set on Mars completely fell apart for me with this line

We try not to look up at the moons, but they’re hard to ignore

y'all do you know how FRICKING TINY Phobos and Deimos look in the Martian sky?? They're like looking at Venus from Earth. They're tiny!!! THEY'RE SUPER EASY TO IGNORE ACTUALLY!!!!! If this is supposed to be some metaphorical comment about feeling watched it totally fell apart!!!!

man it is so ticking me off tho because like. omg. they're fricking tiny. this is not like fighting over the Earth Moon as a base y'all they're like. they're so tiny. if you're able to colonize fricking Mars you can build a better space station than fricking Phobos it's one of those things where as soon as I start thinking about the underlying premise it all falls apart and the more I think about it the more it falls apart

edit: okay Phobos in the Martian sky is bigger than the Earth-view of Venus but it's still a shitty satellite to try to "claim" as a "base".

[InspectorCaracal]

Also, especially after reading the exchange between the two of you, I made a mental analogy to Disney's Beauty and the Beast and I kinda can't unsee it lol. But it's like a horrifying inversion of it. Red Elsie is both Belle and the Enchantress, while George is both Gaston and the Beast. At the end, instead of Gaston leading a mob to assault the Beast, George/Gaston is led by the mob to the stag, and then Red Elsie turns him into the Beast. Or you could say the Stag is the Beast and that George/Gaston does wind up killing him out of his possessive jealousy and then is turned into a Beast himself but it's worse.

Ooh, wow, yeah, Red Elsie does feel like combination of Belle and the witch that cursed the beast and the same for George-the-Wolf being Gaston the town jerk combined with being cursed because of his misdeeds like Beast, but turned up to 11. That is a very apt comparison.

Right? I kinda wanna know how much of that is just Fairy Tale Formula or if it was at all deliberate.

[InspectorCaracal]

...Wait. No. I know what The Wonderful Stag is.

It's an inversion of Little Red Riding Hood.

[Bee]

I like how everyone liked A Better Way of Saying but it's like, the one that offers the least to engage with lmao. It's lovely and subtle, though.

...Wait. No. I know what The Wonderful Stag is.

It's an inversion of Little Red Riding Hood.

...yeah, that fits better than Beauty and the Beast, but it's a less interesting interpretation, too, if that makes sense?

The Station of the Twelfth was, I mean, maybe I've just read too much, but I thought it was boring. I felt kinda bad about think it's boring because it's supposed to be a metaphorical story about loss and World Wars and remembering sacrifices but y'all. I'm pretty done with stories celebrating imperialist warfare. The only points of the story I liked were the brief rambling about names of places at the beginning, and the detail of "Emperor of All the Russias" implying the existence of Multiple Russias which would indicate potentially interesting history that's absolutely not touched on anywhere else.

I had a hard time with this one too and it kind of killed the momentum for the others.

It should have been about the civil war between the Sultanate of Mexican Russia and Moon Russia, really.
Hmm, "Emperor of All the Russias" could be a EU4 goal...

I like how we all felt let down by this one

y'all do you know how FRICKING TINY Phobos and Deimos look in the Martian sky?? They're like looking at Venus from Earth. They're tiny!!! THEY'RE SUPER EASY TO IGNORE ACTUALLY!!!!! If this is supposed to be some metaphorical comment about feeling watched it totally fell apart!!!!

I DID wonder about that, good to know >.<


TBH though I think Araweilo was my favorite now that I have more background and have read it several times?

[Bee]

I'm going to read this week's texts by Thursday and do the research etc to start the conversation on Saturday evening (how does that sound as a compromise?)

[thiskurt]

Ok, this week's magazine is Clarkesworld and these are the stories, alas it's just short stories and no poems this time.

Short Stories (12.050 words total):

1. Mom Heart by Will McIntosh
Wordcount: 6880
Text version: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/mcintosh_11_21/
Audio version: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/audio_11_21

2. This Stitch, This Time by Anna Martino
Wordcount: 2480
Text version: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/martino_11_21/
Audio version: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/audio_11_21b

3. The Death Haiku of the Azure Five by L Chan
Wordcount: 2690
Text version: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/chan_11_21/

[Bee]

Ok, this week's magazine is Clarkesworld and these are the stories, alas it's just short stories and no poems this time.

aww I'm actually going to miss the poems this week

I was NOT expecting this development lmfao

[thiskurt]

Ok, this week's magazine is Clarkesworld and these are the stories, alas it's just short stories and no poems this time.

aww I'm actually going to miss the poems this week

I was NOT expecting this development lmfao

Ha. Same. I hardly read poems ever, and I did really like that there were some to read the last two times.

[InspectorCaracal]

...Wait. No. I know what The Wonderful Stag is.

It's an inversion of Little Red Riding Hood.

...yeah, that fits better than Beauty and the Beast, but it's a less interesting interpretation, too, if that makes sense?

ngl I know exactly what you mean, I had that sudden realization and immediately felt disappointed.

I like how everyone liked A Better Way of Saying but it's like, the one that offers the least to engage with lmao. It's lovely and subtle, though.

I actually just totally forgot to write up all my thoughts on it lmfao I realized that last night and was like "oh no! i gotta remember to post tomorrow morning".

I really loved him getting just slightly magical, plus the whole reality-bending nature of it. My favorite Ursula Le Guin short is the one where the guy's dreams become always-have-been-true and his power reminds me of that story, but more subtle. I also really liked how they handled the "question" at the end. It doesn't say whether or not that last "rewrite" took or not. It doesn't even ask if it took or not. It just says what happens and that he "wanted to see if he could", but the answer to that is left entirely up to the reader.

edit: I was rereading and realized I wasn't clear about this. I know the guy who got shot was fine, but the unanswered question is whether that's due to his attempted intervention or not.

And lastly, on a personal note, I particularly enjoyed the narrator being Jewish and a part of the Yiddish community and how the whole story was built on that framework without being about it.

[InspectorCaracal]

y'all do you know how FRICKING TINY Phobos and Deimos look in the Martian sky?? They're like looking at Venus from Earth. They're tiny!!! THEY'RE SUPER EASY TO IGNORE ACTUALLY!!!!! If this is supposed to be some metaphorical comment about feeling watched it totally fell apart!!!!

I DID wonder about that, good to know >.<

Yeah so Deimos is the further away and smaller moon, it orbits the whole planet once every 30 hours and is basically the visible size of our view of Venus or smaller. When it's opposite the Sun, at least, it's dimmer and smaller in view all the other times. So it's fast enough you can see it moving but it's super tiny and hard to see unless you're looking for it.

Phobos is bigger and closer and goes faster, taking about 7 or 8 hours to go around, so if you're looking close at night you can see it going pewwww across the sky. On the other hand, it's still pretty fricking tiny and it's also not very reflective so it's still not gonna be super visible.

And LASTLY, Deimos is only like 3km long and both moons are full of holes and would be super structurally unsound for building anything on.

edit: like y'all these moons are so small and light-weight that you'd probably fuck up their orbits if you tried to put anything on them and then you'd wind up crashing Phobos into the planet WHICH WOULD HAVE BEEN A MORE INTERESTING STORY ANYWAY