The Republic of Thieves, by Scott Lynch

I am not really sure what I think of this one.

Miss Not-Appearing-in-the-Previous-Books finally appears in this one, and is a well-drawn character.

One thing that I found oddly endearing in both this book and the previous one is that every now and then, there'll be a mention of same-sex lovers. It's low-key, just "gay people exist in this setting, whatever" sort of thing. And it's nice to see a story where all the main characters are straight notice that not everyone in the world is.

Like the first book in the series, Republic alternates between a present-day story and one from the main characters' youth. For once, I didn't find the alternating of stories annoying. Both were engaging and I wanted to see what happened next in each, so there was no frustration from "get back to the INTERESTING stuff". I actually found the arc of the young-Gentleman-Bastards story better-constructed and more satisfying, in fact.

The present-day arc was less satisfying. Mostly it reminded me of PCs being railroaded by a GM: "you have to do this or the uber-powerful NPCs will smoosh you, and there's no other special motivation to go along." This extended to the main characters seldom seeming as clever as they're supposed to be. Possibly my standards for "clever" are unreasonably high. I know I don't write this sort of story in part because my own attempts at clever plans are never brilliant enough for me.

The stakes were generally lower in this book, which I appreciated; I find the constantly-increasing-stakes trend in many sf&f series to be rather tedious. I liked the romantic subplot running through both past and present story arcs, which ran con-trope in some interesting ways.

The setting, as is usual with Lynch's work, is well-drawn and described. I get a nice sense of place and the world from his work, with good imagery interspersed with the story so that it adds to the narrative and doesn't bog it down.

This may be my favorite of the three books, but has the curious effect of leaving me uncertain about whether or not I want to read the fourth. That's in large part because the aforementioned uberpowerful NPCs look like they'll be ever-more important to the future installments, and I really hate them. This is purely a personal preference: it's not that they're badly written, I just intensely dislike watching ordinary people grapple with and (almost always) lose to the whims of demi-gods.

Anyway, the fourth book isn't out yet, so I don't have to decide for a while.

I'll give this one an 8 overall -- it's something like "9 for the past story arc where they're putting on a play, and 7 for the current-day story arc."

Envy and the "Fake" Geek Girl

I rented a car and went to the local renfest with my friend Corwyn this past weekend. On the ride home, he was talking about being introverted, which made me smile because he'd spent much of the time at the festival walking up to stranger to talk to them about Figments & Filaments, the costume convention that he founded and that'll be in April 2015. This is typical of my renfest experiences with him: he knows a lot of people from his many years performing there, and he talks to them and also a lot of strangers to advertise the cons he's organizing. (He also runs Contra in the fall.) "You hide your introversion a lot better than I do," I told him.

"Well, I want to perform, too. It's hard to perform for an audience when you're hiding under a rock," Corwyn said. "And it's different for you. You can show up at a con in a slinky dress and guys will line up to talk to you. If I want to talk to people I've got to do something more to get their attention."

I smiled, and started to tell him about my post on playing dress-up in response to the fake geek girl kerfluffle, because yes, I do dress up at cons to get attention. And then it struck me that perhaps he had accidentally hit on the underlying reason for the animosity against "fake geek girls". Maybe it has nothing to do with being mad at women for not giving them sex, or misogyny, or protecting their fiefdom against sinister feminine wiles. Maybe they're envious -- not of the woman herself, but of the attention she gets.

Let me be clear: there was no rancor whatsoever in Corwyn's statement that 'all you need to do is show up in a cute outfit'. And it's completely accurate: I don't even need to work hard at assembling an outfit (although I have done so for some of them). I remember a half-dozen guys at one con wanting a picture of me in my $10 Walmart swimsuit. This is the privilege -- a sometimes-undesired privilege, but one nonetheless -- of being female in a male-dominated hobby. And to someone who's spent years volunteering at conventions or honing their art skills or even just getting all the l33t gear for the WoW character, it must be frustrating to see a woman walk in wearing a bathing suit patterned after a Wonder Woman costume, and have her be the person everyone's interested in. Isn't this supposed to be the space where their own skills are supposed to be important, supposed to be noticed and admired? And it's still not.

I certainly don't think this justifies the ill-will, or means that women ought not do cosplay (or even ought to put a minimum level of effort into their cosplay).

But it is sad and kind of messed-up, that it really is less effort for me to get attention than it is for Corwyn, through no virtue on my part or flaw on his.