Aya Vandenbussche

Like the absolute maverick that I am, I read this Christmas story during a heatwave.

Once again, Terry Pratchett was playing on my heartstrings with all the emotions. This is the first Discworld book that introduces a genuinely uncomfortable villain. Pratchett really knows how to write evil villains, but like, really evil. Right from the start, Teatime felt eerie and so creepy. Pratchett's talent was, among everything else, in writing villains that get under your skin.

With Hogfather Pratchett continues to explore the idea of belief and its importance. As it turns out, if you take away a belief in something big, i.e., the Hogfather, a space is created for some smaller, excellent beliefs that have been suppressed and pushed aside, which in turn breeds some wonderful manifestations of beliefs.

I love that Death understands the importance of the belief in the Hogfather, and I he's love how unsubtly subtle he's trying to be about solving the situation, and definitely not recruiting Susan.

The book is full of different kinds of imagination and it's quite wonderful.

There is a bit too much of this book that details the different books of the Strugatsky Brothers. I could have done with a bit more in-depth discussion about their influences, the history, folklore, and politics that went into the brothers' books.
That said, there's so little written in English about the Strugatskys that I'm grateful for all that does exist. I learned a lot about soviet science fiction, and it's fascinating. This book opened a door to a whole lot of literature I wasn't very familiar with, and for that I loved it.

A small book that contains so much. I wanted to revisit Kurt Vonnegut searching for a bit of humanity in these unsettling . So it goes.
As promised at the beginning, there are no villains in the book, which is an incredible achievement. It's what makes this book quite beautiful.
The language is so sharp and to the point, and fits the laconic tone of it. It's a craft. I still think about this book occasionally.

In the third book of Earthsea, Sparrowhawk and his young companion go on a quest to save magic. Magic is dying because the door between the world of the living and the world of the dead has been opened, and appreciation, the joy, and the sanctity of life are disappearing, and if life and death become meaningless, the magic will disappear.

Though it didn't have quite the same impact on me as the first two Earthsea books, it is an incredibly powerful and poignant book. The book touches on themes of depression, but interestingly, it's not Ged who suffers it. It is everyone around him who has become dead inside, and has given up on life. Arren is young, and he has hope for the future, he finds the magic, he sees a dragon.

I especially love the dragons. I love how Arren manages to communicate with the dragon despite not speaking the language, and Sparrowhawk is in no condition to translate. Arren and the dragon understand each other because they need to.

The magic was still very much alive for Ursula le Guin when she wrote this beautiful story.

I previously read Monday Starts on Saturday by the Strugatsky, which is quite different in tone. Picnic is a lot more serious, bleak, more obviously political.

The premise is so unique and sadly still so poignant this day. Aliens visited Earth and left it leaving their mess behind, a mess that we don't understand. Some try to understand if, to learn from it, some try to profit from it, whether they understand it or not, and others want to get rid of it. It's a book about the decay of capitalism, about our inability and often reluctance to understand, to accept that the aliens might not be interested in communicating with us. We try to create meaning, to exploit and milk every last drop of someone else's junk. I'm reminded of Ursula K Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness.

The structure of this book is unique and the language, though translated, is obviously precise and thought of. The story of how the brothers introduced and coined the word 'stalker' into the Russian language. A word that has made such an impression that Tarkovsky called his film based on the book, Stalker. This is the 'profession' of one of the main characters, to go into the zone where the aliens left their trash at a great risk to his life, and salvage alien artefacts. The Strugatskys have taken Stalker from a Rudyard Kipling character named Stalky. In Russian it's pronounced Stullky/Stullker, but according to the Kipling story, it's actually meant to be pronounced Stawky and therefore should really be 'stawker'. I absolutely love this kind of language development.

It is a beautiful book.