the LJ dewey decimal system
Sep. 17th, 2004 01:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabSurfing on Burger King's wireless today; tomorrow the deluge! (Thanks to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lizlet, who put the pal in PayPal, and now I've used that joke twice)
I read a book this year and it's lost in my brain so I'm counting on you to help me get it out. Here's what I recall.
I feel like it was a mass-market SF novel, possibly of the set sent to me bycoffee_and_ink, but possibly not. I remember neither the author (nor whether it's someone big and prolific a la your Greg Bears and your Kim Stanley Robinsons or your Orson Scott Cards or someone I'd never heard of before) nor the title (nor whether it was part of a series or not; I'd say no). There were, as I recall, no Mormons in.
Here's what happened.
A girl (?) of a small outpost family on a small outpost planet is happily living with her whiskey-exporting (?) mother and father and her boyfriend of a sort. The town's got a school and some Indian (?) wise women, and you get the idea that the outpost's complement and infrastructure was left behind by human (?) colonizing forces from years past; in other words, they have computers, raincoats, radios, supplies -- but things like cotton and paper are unimaginable luxuries to these folks.
Then some bad guys (wolves?) come along, slaughter the nice Indian wise people and the whiskey-exporting parents, and the girl and her boyfriend saddle up (after leaving pants in the graves of the dead -- does this ring a bell,runpunkrun?) and go on the lam, hoping to outrun the raiding bad guys.
They hit some small communities on their trek, places where the wolves (?) have struck before; eventually they join a band of refugees in exodus, trying to find a safe haven. The boyfriend dies (?) or turns into a mouse (? here I'm very fuzzy, and seem to recall that the girl had some sort of...mouse powers?) and the girl carries on, gets to a friendly outpost community and rests for a while.
There she poses as a boy (?) and meets a wise seer-slash-transsexual (?) who teaches her...cross-dressing? Farming? Both. And then she leaves him/her and heads for the Big City, where she gets a job in a factory (?) and meets another boyfriend of a sort, and falls prey to the...human capitalist system?
And the transsexual wise seer comes to visit the girl in the Big City, only to be supremely disappointed in the fact that she's sold out to the human (?) capitalist system...and then...something else?
I swear, I can't even remember if I've finished this book. I'd sure as hell like to.
Help? And if you know of this book, I do, I believe, RECOMMEND it, as I seem to recall, if my memory doesn't deceive me, that it was FASCINATING. One hopes.
And expect real live internet from the HollywoodBrothel Hostel come this weekend.
lizlet, who put the pal in PayPal, and now I've used that joke twice)I read a book this year and it's lost in my brain so I'm counting on you to help me get it out. Here's what I recall.
I feel like it was a mass-market SF novel, possibly of the set sent to me by
coffee_and_ink, but possibly not. I remember neither the author (nor whether it's someone big and prolific a la your Greg Bears and your Kim Stanley Robinsons or your Orson Scott Cards or someone I'd never heard of before) nor the title (nor whether it was part of a series or not; I'd say no). There were, as I recall, no Mormons in.Here's what happened.
A girl (?) of a small outpost family on a small outpost planet is happily living with her whiskey-exporting (?) mother and father and her boyfriend of a sort. The town's got a school and some Indian (?) wise women, and you get the idea that the outpost's complement and infrastructure was left behind by human (?) colonizing forces from years past; in other words, they have computers, raincoats, radios, supplies -- but things like cotton and paper are unimaginable luxuries to these folks.
Then some bad guys (wolves?) come along, slaughter the nice Indian wise people and the whiskey-exporting parents, and the girl and her boyfriend saddle up (after leaving pants in the graves of the dead -- does this ring a bell,
runpunkrun?) and go on the lam, hoping to outrun the raiding bad guys. They hit some small communities on their trek, places where the wolves (?) have struck before; eventually they join a band of refugees in exodus, trying to find a safe haven. The boyfriend dies (?) or turns into a mouse (? here I'm very fuzzy, and seem to recall that the girl had some sort of...mouse powers?) and the girl carries on, gets to a friendly outpost community and rests for a while.
There she poses as a boy (?) and meets a wise seer-slash-transsexual (?) who teaches her...cross-dressing? Farming? Both. And then she leaves him/her and heads for the Big City, where she gets a job in a factory (?) and meets another boyfriend of a sort, and falls prey to the...human capitalist system?
And the transsexual wise seer comes to visit the girl in the Big City, only to be supremely disappointed in the fact that she's sold out to the human (?) capitalist system...and then...something else?
I swear, I can't even remember if I've finished this book. I'd sure as hell like to.
Help? And if you know of this book, I do, I believe, RECOMMEND it, as I seem to recall, if my memory doesn't deceive me, that it was FASCINATING. One hopes.
And expect real live internet from the Hollywood
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no subject
Date: 2004-09-17 02:10 pm (UTC)1. I have no idea what it is.
2. I want to read it.
3. You make me giggle. :D
no subject
Date: 2004-09-17 02:21 pm (UTC)Spoilers!
Date: 2004-09-17 02:41 pm (UTC)It's a scifi book, and the young girl is part of a small community on a large planet, where the community leaders are activists from Earth(?) and want to teach all the people there how to live on this alien world using only resources found there and without relying on handouts from the government; it's why they were so isolated. The usual scifi elements, whenever they showed up, weren't really emphasized except in how they affected the characters. It was a very people-oriented book.
um. There were no mouse-powers as far a I remember. The girl had been given a special technology/drug/thingy by a community leader before everyone was killed by the raiders. The tech allowed her to hibernate and call for help (I think). I liked all the gender stuff the best, but my favorite thing was how wandery it was. I thought it was very cool.
I'll try to find it on the school library system.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-17 02:43 pm (UTC)The scary thing is that I *know* I've read this book. I have a strong mental image of a map from the beginning of the book, depicting a type of delta that the girl had to cross to end up in this very industrialized city. "Freehold" comes to mind, but I sincerely doubt that that's the name of the book.
So you're not dreaming, although I have no memory of wolves in the book. Or pants, for that matter.
Here we go!
Date: 2004-09-17 02:48 pm (UTC)Re: Here we go!
Date: 2004-09-17 02:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-17 03:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-19 10:32 am (UTC)That one I've read, and highly recommend.
trouble staying on-topic
Date: 2004-09-20 09:55 am (UTC)