We are at the half-way point, fellow readers! Here are the July stories, I hope you enjoy them! As always, feel free to publish spoilers in the comments, and if you haven’t read them yet just avoid looking at the comments section until you have 🙂
Moveable Beast, by Maria Dahvana Headley
Is this title a play on A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s posthumously published memoir? Which itself seems to reference a phrase written by Albert Camus: “…we’d had a very early lunch, but really lunch was a moveable feast, you had it when you felt like it.” I love that, for some reason. In this case, perhaps the beast is also moveable, and can be conjured whenever we feel like it.
The author, Maria Dahvana Headley, is described in Wikipedia as a “memoirist” which I guess is a fancy way of saying someone who writes a memoir.
The Flight of the Horse, by Larry Niven
Larry Niven is best known by me as the author of the Ringworld series. A ringworld is a gigantic ring with a radius of 93 million miles, constructed around a star similar to our sun, resulting in an earth-like world except that it’s 3 million times bigger. But that’s not what we’re reading this month, silly me! The Flight of the Horse was first published in 1969.
That’s it! Allons-y!
Well, silly me, I read the wrong story!! I accidentally skipped A Moveable Beast and read on to Prismatica instead. Good news – that puts me one up already on next month’s assignment, but a shame because I have some things to say about Prismatica. So, this comment is for The Flight of The Horse, and A Moveable Beast will follow in another comment after I’ve read it.
I really enjoyed The Flight of the Horse, I’d say it’s one of my favourites so far. I like the idea* that a thousand years from now we will still have entitled rich people demanding that they be allowed to possess rare artifacts and that we will still have poor people doing whatever it takes, regardless of the consequences, to obtain them. Classic. Next up, a story about how they want to colonize the past. It fits a pattern.
*To be more clear, I like the story-telling idea, not the actual idea that the world might still be like this a thousand years from now. That’s just depressing.
And I’m back on track! A Moveable Beast … so … there are many creative elements in this story. The trees uprooting and running to join the mini-forest, Peppy Ripple ice cream, the red helium balloon (that I don’t understand). But my favourite bit is this: “Virgins were never sacrifices. Virgins are collaborators.” I realize now that it has always irritated me that virgins (female virgins) have always been a sacrifice or a reward for some doofus man. I guess because once women are no longer virgins, they no longer have any value. Sigh.
A Moveable Beast: When I read this title I envisioned a beast that could be moved around and posed, for entertainment. Nothing at all to do with the actual story! I liked this one. I enjoyed the main character being miserable to customers. And I always like it when tropes are upended, particularly misogynist ones! A quick, fast-paced tale that was quirky and not predictable 🙂
Flight of the Horse: From the title, I imagined a horse on a quest to learn how to fly so it would be granted wings and become a pegasus. I’m really not good at guessing the story from the title! I enjoyed this story too, for the same reasons as Risa. And I thought it was a good way to address post-apolcalyptic climate themes in a somewhat light-hearted way. Totally agree that the next step is colonizing the past. Let’s not read that story though 🙁
Okay, I am late again.
I really liked the protagonist of “The Moveable Beast”, and I loved the fact that the beast was a forest (at least that is how I understood it but could be wrong). I had a challenging time with some of the other semi-magical details of the story, like her father living in the forest and singing Happy Birthday etc. Generally, I can only tolerate a very low amount of magical realism and this story exceeded that threshold.
Flight of the horse was totally unexpected and unexpectedly satisfying. Travels to the past, electric brooms, weird gems, unicorns and dragons… yet this story didn’t annoy me. I also liked the fact that they made up a new swear word: traj!
Okay, maybe I will catch up one day.
Love this! and being late is no problem! I had to rush through the second story myself, and I’m running the book club haha!! I totally forgot the made up swear word, and I loved it so much when they did it in Battlestar Galactica I’m surprised it didn’t stick better in my head.