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After Sunshine, I'm returning to the McKinley writing I enjoy - her fairy tale re-tellings.

While I missed the darkness of Deerskin, it's a perfectly well done version of the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale. There's a bit of coming of age, there's a bit of romance. I liked that all three sisters had a really good relationship. It was enjoyable and there isn't much more to say about it. That may be because of the source material, of course. Beauty and Beast was written by Barbot de Villeneuve to educate young French noblewomen on virtue (as far as I know), while Deerskin comes from the oral tradition of German mothers telling terrifying tales so their children would stay out of the woods. And even within that category it is one of the Grimms' more horrifying fairytales. Disney isn't going to adapt that one, you can be sure. (I wonder if Beauty being a bookish girl, and the giant library inspired the Disney version, or if this was already a thing in the original story. I can't quite remember.)

McKinley also wrote another book based on this fairytale - Rose Daughter - which I'm learning from reviews is a little bit more complex. I loved reading Angela Carter's different versions of this tale in her story collection, and comparing them, so I'm super curious about that.

When King Leopold’s Ghost was published two decades ago, its only briefly blipped on my radar, leaving me with the vague impression that of the hells European colonisation created in Africa, Léopold’s (and subsequently Belgium’s) Congo was located in the deepest circles. Historical colonialism, however, beyond being bad on principle, was not an issue the liberal German Left was worried about at the end of the 20th century – in part because sympathy for the post colonial struggle was de rigueur, in part out of the entirely unfounded feeling that we Germans got out of that particular pickle just in time.

Fast forward 20 years, and Germany is beginning to acknowledge its colonial past, leaving no way to dismiss the story of the colonial Congo as some other nation’s problem. Colonialism, it turns out, was hellish everywhere, with the German colonies no exception (the chicotte, the rhino hide whip that became eponymous with forced labour and cruelty in Congo, had a name in the German colonies where it was in use, too: Nilpferdpeitsche), and much of Hochschild’s account of the horrific slaughter of about ten million people through, as a consequence of, or as an incidental of violent resource extraction feels like a shameful past we Europeans have in common. Léopold II, Roi des Belges, might have been a particularly greedy bugger, but he was not doing anything much other, less unsavoury, characters, didn’t.

All of which is to say that Hochschild’s book still hits all the right notes long after its original publication. Although not an academic work, it is thoroughly researched, well balanced, always aware of its limitations and blind spots, and so superbly written you will sometimes forget that the breathless yarn you are reliving is one of something that, half a century before the Nuremberg Trials, a prescient observer called “a crime against humanity“.

I've already written a review of another one of Robin McKinley's books, Deerskin. I loved that book, it was psychological, metaphorical, immediate, disgusting, cathartic and very introspective. Logically, I expected something similar from Sunshine. The premise seemed to promise that as well; A vampire and a human are locked together in a room. He hides in the shadows, she moves with the spot of sunlight falling through the window. But as night falls... I expected a tense, intense, slow thriller. Will she die? Will she convince the vampire to let her live? Who locked them in this room together and why? I looked forward to that story.

It wasn't that. It was that for like, the first chapter, and then it became something entirely different. In a sense, it isn't really fair to resent a story for not being what you wanted it to be. Sunshine isn't bad, it just really isn't my jam. Action-adventure urban fantasy isn't really my favorite to begin with, but when it's a monster mash like this... I'm never really a fan of the types of books that mix all the traditional monsters. Vampires and werewolves still works, but when you start adding demons and pixies and sorcerers... I don't know, it works for comedies (though, maybe this was more intended as a comedy?), but if you want your story to be scary, it's too unfocused. The creepiness of each monster doesn't add up and becomes greater than its parts, they each just kind of lose what makes them uniquely frightening, in my opinion. Few people are actually scared of vampires or werewolves, we tend to be scared of what they represent, our primal animalistic side, a toxic love... The underlying themes that suffuse a good monster story. And you can't properly build those themes when you mash your monsters together. I also didn't really like the main character's narration that much. Sunshine is very snarky, but either she, or Robin McKinley isn't quite funny enough to pull it off. Again, in my opinion.

Anyway, I tried to meet it where it's at. Hell, I finished it. But it wasn't what I was looking for, and I am still kind of sad I didn't get the gloomy, introspective, slow-paced vampire thriller I was hoping to read.

1) "All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. God Is Change. EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING"

2) "For whatever it's worth, here's what I believe. It took me a lot of time to understand it, then a lot more time with a dictionary and a thesaurus to say it just right—just the way it has to be. In the past year, it's gone through twenty-five or thirty lumpy, incoherent rewrites. This is the right one, the true one. This is the one I keep coming back to: God is Power— Infinite, Irresistible, Inexorable, Indifferent. And yet, God is Pliable— Trickster, Teacher, Chaos, Clay. God exists to be shaped. God is Change. This is the literal truth."

3) "Sometimes naming a thing—giving it a name or discovering its name—helps one to begin to understand it. Knowing the name of a thing and knowing what that thing is for gives me even more of a handle on it. The particular God-is-Change belief system that seems right to me will be called Earthseed. I've tried to name it before. Failing that, I've tried to leave it unnamed. Neither effort has made me comfortable. Name plus purpose equals focus for me. Well, today, I found the name, found it while I was weeding the back garden and thinking about the way plants seed themselves, windborne, animalborne, waterborne, far from their parent plants. They have no ability at all to travel great distances under their own power, and yet, they do travel. Even they don't have to just sit in one place and wait to be wiped out. There are islands thousands of miles from anywhere—the Hawaiian Islands, for example, and Easter Island—where plants seeded themselves and grew long before any humans arrived. Earthseed. I am Earthseed. Anyone can be. Someday, I think there will be a lot of us. And I think we'll have to seed ourselves farther and farther from this dying place."

4) "I have read that the period of upheaval that journalists have begun to refer to as 'the Apocalypse' or more commonly, more bitterly, 'the Pox' lasted from 2015 through 2030—a decade and a half of chaos. This is untrue. The Pox has been a much longer torment. It began well before 2015, perhaps even before the turn of the millennium. It has not ended."

5) "Jarret condemns the burnings, but does so in such mild language that his people are free to hear what they want to hear. As for the beatings, the tarring and feathering, and the destruction of 'heathen houses of devil-worship,' he has a simple answer: 'Join us! Our doors are open to every nationality, every race! Leave your sinful past behind, and become one of us. Help us to make America great again.'"

6) "Partnership is giving, taking, learning, teaching, offering the greatest possible benefit while doing the least possible harm. Partnership is mutualistic symbiosis. Partnership is life. Any entity, any process that cannot or should not be resisted or avoided must somehow be partnered. Partner one another. Partner diverse communities. Partner life. Partner any world that is your home. Partner God. Only in partnership can we thrive, grow, Change. Only in partnership can we live."

7) "'We need the stars, Bankole. We need purpose! We need the image the Destiny gives us of ourselves as a growing, purposeful species. We need to become the adult species that the Destiny can help us become! If we're to be anything other than smooth dinosaurs who evolve, specialize, and die, we need the stars. That's why the Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars. I know you don't want to hear verses right now, but that one is... a major key to us, to human beings, I mean. When we have no difficult, long-term purpose to strive toward, we fight each other. We destroy ourselves. We have these chaotic, apocalyptic periods of murderous craziness.'"

8) "Dreamasks—also known as head cages, dream books, or simply, Masks—were new then, and were beginning to edge out some of the virtual-reality stuff. Even the early ones were cheap—big ski-mask-like devices with goggles over the eyes. Wearing them made people look not-quite-human. But the masks made computer-stimulated and guided dreams available to the public, and people loved them. Dreamasks were related to old-fashioned lie detectors, to slave collars, and to a frighteningly efficient form of audiovisual subliminal suggestion. In spite of the way they looked, Dreamasks were lightweight, clothlike, and comfortable. Each one offered wearers a whole series of adventures in which they could identify with any of several characters. They could live their character's fictional life complete with realistic sensation. They could submerge themselves in other, simpler, happier lives. The poor could enjoy the illusion of wealth, the ugly could be beautiful, the sick could be healthy, the timid could be bold..."

9) "'I wonder whether it was your abduction that made your father give up on Jarret.' 'Give up on him?' 'On him and on the United States. He's left the country, after all.' After a moment, she nodded. 'Yes. Although I'm still having trouble thinking of Alaska as a foreign country. I guess that should be easy now, since the war. But it doesn't matter. None of this matters. I mean, those people—that man and his kids who you just fed—they matter, but no one cares about them. Those kids are the future if they don't starve to death. But if they manage to grow up, what kind of men will they be?' 'That's what Earthseed was about,' I said. 'I wanted us to understand what we could be, what we could do. I wanted to give us a focus, a goal, something big enough, complex enough, difficult enough, and in the end, radical enough to make us become more than we ever have been. We keep falling into the same ditches, you know? I mean, we learn more and more about the physical universe, more about our own bodies, more technology, but somehow, down through history, we go on building empires of one kind or another, then destroying them in one way or another. We go on having stupid wars that we justify and get passionate about, but in the end, all they do is kill huge numbers of people, maim others, impoverish still more, spread disease and hunger, and set the stage for the next war. And when we look at all of that in history, we just shrug our shoulders and say, well, that's the way things are. That's the way things always have been.' 'It is,' Len said. 'It is,' I repeated. 'There seem to be solid biological reasons why we are the way we are. If there weren't, the cycles wouldn't keep replaying. The human species is a kind of animal, of course. But we can do something no other animal species has ever had the option to do. We can choose: We can go on building and destroying until we either destroy ourselves or destroy the ability of our world to sustain us. Or we can make something more of ourselves. We can grow up. We can leave the nest. We can fulfill the Destiny, make homes for ourselves among the stars, and become some combination of what we want to become and whatever our new environments challenge us to become. Our new worlds will remake us as we remake them. And some of the new people who emerge from all this will develop new ways to cope. They'll have to. That will break the old cycle, even if it's only to begin a new one, a different one. 'Earthseed is about preparing to fulfill the Destiny. It's about learning to live in partnership with one another in small communities, and at the same time, working out a sustainable partnership with our environment. It's about treating education and adaptability as the absolute essentials that they are. It's...' I glanced at Len, caught a little smile on her face, and wound down. 'It's about a lot more than that,' I said. 'But those are the bones.'"

10) "To survive, Know the past. Let it touch you. Then let The past Go."