Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I was going to write a lengthy post on Armageddon Rag, but it's been sitting half-formed for a couple of weeks, so I'm combining it with some shorter book notes:

Armageddon Rag, by George R. R. Martin, is rock and roll, and fantasy, and feels a lot darker than War for the Oaks. (That's not a comparison other people seem to be making, and it's not in the books themselves, but "rock and roll" and "fantasy" put together reminded me of the Emma Bull.) The fantasy stuff--visions and possible magic--is secondary to writing about rock and roll, and the power music can have, and what music meant to a generation of people slightly older than I am, as part of the whole collection of things that are shorthanded as "the Sixties."

Martin almost makes me believe in the Nazgul, an incredibly popular rock and roll band that never was; he does make me believe in Sandy Blair, and how powerful the dream of a reunion tour can be, and Larry Richmond, who played in a cover band because he so much loved the old band's music, and wanted to be Pat Hobbins, the musician he grew up worshipping, and the way people believe in magic, good and bad, and the power of music. Thanks to rysmiel for the recommendation. The book is full of snippets of music, mostly Sixties and early Seventies, epigraphs on the chapters and sometimes quoted in the text; the long list of acknowledgements at the front was handy for identifying things I didn't recognize or couldn't quite place. (Martin also uses a lot of Yeats, slightly rearranged as rock lyrics, but that's out of copyright.)

Martin doesn't quote "Do you believe in rock and roll/Can the music save your mortal soul?" but he doesn't need to. Another song not quoted also seems apropos, from a different piece of the musical tradition that I grew up with: "Which side are you on, boys? Which side are you on?" Sandy Blair runs into both those questions, and his answers make sense--not necessarily as "this is the way the world is" but as "this is what he would do."

Who Goes Here,, by Bob Shaw, is rather a romp: someone joins the Space Legion to forget, and then tries to find out what it is he wanted to forget. Everyone in the Space Legion has joined to forget, in many cases because they appear to believe that if they forget something, they can't get in trouble for it. The Space Legion has access to memory-erasing technology, which usually removes only the specifics that the person feels guilty about, and in his case has left him with no memory at all. There turns out to be an explanation for why he's called Warren Peace, but there are lots of silly names like that: the next character met is a Capt. Widget. In the course of trying to find out, Peace runs into a variety of mad inventions and inventors; Shaw is playing with cliches, like the mad scientist's beautiful daughter, but he doesn't ask us to take it more seriously than he does.

The Rebirth of Pan, by Jo Walton, is the unpublished novel she put online as part of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, with commentary beforehand. And yes, the parts from the POV of the widowed boat are excellent. I found the plot easier to follow as I went along, as the strands came together. I like the ending, both in the sense that it's well-written and fits what came before, and that I like the mood and expansiveness of the last couple of chapters.

Tripoint, by C. J. Cherryh. I borrowed this from adrian_turtle, at her suggestion, because we were discussing Cherryh and she thought I'd like this one. (I read Cyteen ages ago, liked it, and wasn't moved to continue, and the first of the atevi books, which I didn't care for.) The world-building is good (and I gather is part of a many-book thing). I found myself putting it down every few pages near the middle, and then realized this was because there were lots of characters I disliked and almost none I liked (though the protagonist is sympathetic, albeit not someone I'd have wanted to be around). Also, partway through, I was saying things like "God, those are dysfunctional family dynamics." Adrian pointed out that it fits the world-building, and that this is exactly what could happen in that sort of society if one high-status person was that kind of crazy. And then I went on, and it turned out there was more than one likeable character. I liked this; it's coming-of-age in a context that's sort of cousin to space opera.