insta!rec - Scheherazade by in-wintertime

Scheherazade by in_wintertime, rec stolen from 2naonh3_cl2

I really--I mean, *really*--want to devote a few hours to talking about this, but it's one twenty in the morning and basically I'm already screwed to zombiedom tomorrow at work.

But.

This and samdonne are the reason the lure of the gen side of the force is so fucking *powerful*. ltlj, pentapus, and miss_porcupine gave me a taste for it, and in_wintertime and samdonne have just helped it along. This story is amazing.

And for our next assignment: compare and contrast Your Cowboy Days Are Over by samdonne with Scheherazade. Mull on character-based plot and truly alien species. When you get done, thank God this is our fandom and we get to *read these*.

Fifty five thousand words, give or take. Bring coffee and some food. You won't be getting back up anytime soon.

Comments

[lydiabell.livejournal.com]

GAH, I want to read this *so badly* -- I've been watching for months as the chapters were added, vowing not to start reading yet another WIP. And now I have homework to do. ::sob::

[seperis.livejournal.com]

You'll love when you start.

[2naonh3-cl2.livejournal.com]

*g* so freakin' good.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

*nodnodnod*

[2naonh3-cl2.livejournal.com]

i hate to admit it, but i have yet to read "cowboys." i just can't get though it. is there anyway that you can spoil me somehow so i can just get through the first section?

sort of a spoiler

[pentapus.livejournal.com]

I have to admit I had a lot of trouble getting through the first section because it was so down and I didn't want to read a story with so much despair, but just keep reading until you get to the case worker, who offers them a deal. That's the point when plot starts happening.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

I promise you, get past the beginning--it only *looks* depressing, but wow, it picks up pace and power very soon after. Promise promise promise.

[2naonh3-cl2.livejournal.com]

i read it. took me a while and i needed coffee breaks but i read it. ronon and rodney and teyla...god and john...*sighs* oh my god john. O.O damn...

[slythhearted.livejournal.com]

I lost a day earlier this week reading Scheherazade. It's so good, I'm setting aside a chunk of Saturday to reread and savour it

[seperis.livejournal.com]

I think I might this weekend. God, so good.

[cpt-untouchable.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes, yes. I started reading Scheherazade way back when she first began it on Wraithbait, and performed an extremely embarrassing and involuntary chair dance with every update. It went in a direction that I didn't expect at all after the first several chapters, and I'll admit that there are a few in the middle that lose me. But the piece in its entirety is just this sweeping rhapsody on the theme of identity, and really, how cool is it to find that lurking among the Mary-Sues and misspelled porn? zomg ♥ the end

[seperis.livejournal.com]

*g* Yeah, that must have been surreal finding it there.

I am so glad I didn't know about it until it was done. Would totally not have survived between updates.

[palebluebell.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm so pleased you put this on your recommend list. It's so very good, and I've been fretting over people missing it since I read it. I keep going back to see who's commented (because I'm odd and strange) and wondering anxiously if it's one of those stories that slid under the radar because everyone was having a busy week when it was posted. It seemed such a shame that this sort of quality work wasn't enjoyed by the whole community.

Now I'm running off to read the first rec - thank you for bringing all these works to our attention. People who rec stories totally *rock*.

[akacat]

It would have slid under my radar; I tend to read gen in a pretty hit and miss fashion and this week I'm just too busy to do anything but 'miss'.

But now I have to read it.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

*sighs happily* It just--so *gorgeous*. Yes. Happy place.

[shusu.livejournal.com]

Do you know about stargategenrec?

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Huh. No. Must check out.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

yes, the cowboy connection really is strong, b/c it addresses so many similar issues (and i tried to address that in a rambling comment yesterday but am not sure i was clear to anyone but myself :-). And you're right! I haven't read this much gen in a long, long time (and my 3 must read on my rec list at the moment turn out to be 2 gen and freedom, which could be defined like that in the right light.)

[seperis.livejournal.com]

God, between Cowboy and Scheherazade, all the connotations of memory have been explored amazingly, and in such completely different ways. I just feel *high* from reading it. Probably going to go back and read Cowboy again this weekend and thsi one right after to catch the feeling of both together.

God. Amazing.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

It really is! I taught a class a couple of years ago with all the typical cyberpunk/dick stuff and the accompanying philosophy...this wold so have fit in there!!!

(and now i want to write an essay on the two but...nooo...have work to do!)

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Oh come on. How can *you* resist an essay?

Though--my total darkest secret right now--is I really, really want to do an Atlantis/Neuromancer crossover. No clue *why*, but my sci-fi roots keep coming out and trying to worm their way in.

Argh. You. *points* Essay. For the good of fandom!

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

noooo... !!!

no time! kant - schlegel - fichte - schelling

i have all kinds of neuromancer issues, but i think that could be really interesting! as i said, i'm more a dick fan... but, yes, sf allows you to explore all these amazing issues that are otherwise much more difficult to address, b/c you can literally transplant memories, take minds out of bodies and place them else where...

i realized a while back that most of my plot kinks all come down to questions of identity and the role of the environment: amnesia, time travel, multiverses and what ifs. All of them compare who we are versus who we might be. And the memory devices in both novels address similar issues, just more literally: can we divorce our experiences from ourselves? Are we our memories (I was reminded of the story that was the base for Total Recall and the one where the guy's body gets lost while his mind's downloaded into a lion...)?

What I love, however (beyond the clear canonicity and the way both were just so SGA rather than random cyberpunk) was the way it addressed not a generic response but the particular one: this was *John* in Cowboys, trying to figure out which memory to let go; it was John with all his fucked up parent issues, who had to deal with his cloned children and the questions raised as to whether they were or were not *his* son...it was John suddenly fighting like Rodney in Scheherazade, Rodney whose memories were mixed and contaminated and...

My very first diss topic (that quickly got shot down :-) was going to be on sf and psychoanalysis, on stories that addressed the intersection between psychosis and fantasy (like lots of Doris Lessing's later work, Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown, heck, even Slaughterhouse 5, and, of course, lots of Dick). I was fascinated by the insanity/really something alien...conundrum. And I think we see that play out quite a bit in sf (just think of Buffy's Normal Again, where it throws the entire premise into doubt...)


OK, shutting up now! Sorry!!!

[seperis.livejournal.com]

HA! YOU META'ED!

realized a while back that most of my plot kinks all come down to questions of identity and the role of the environment: amnesia, time travel, multiverses and what ifs. All of them compare who we are versus who we might be.

My strongest one--and this is because it's so freakishly flexible--is the choice between who someone is and who they could become, when someone makes the choice to becomes someone else--or someone better, or worse. And yes, time travel, amnesia, all of them totally cater to that.

And the total attraction is the sci-fi plot *personalized*, you totally have that. Both authors nailed it very close and very, very personal, so the implications felt very, very real.

it was John suddenly fighting like Rodney in Scheherazade, Rodney whose memories were mixed and contaminated and...

That moment was chilling as heck for me. Still is.

And short version: what you said.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

It now makes me wonder yet again about the appeals of fanfic, i.e., what do the two novels achieve that a random cyberpunk novel with random characters might now. how can our background knowledge, our strong familiarity with these characters *enhance* the impact of these issues...in other words, just like I argue that AUs ultimately do the comparing thing, b/c we have canon as the point of comparison, these stories can play with identity, b/c we already have a solid grasp on the characters' identity!!!

see, for me it can be about choice, but it doesn't have to be. the amnesiac doesn't have a choice but simply becomes this tabula rasa...though you're right, he goes back to having *all* the choices, *all* the possibilities, *all* the roads not taken (i just read aithine WIP and am thinking of bunches of amnesia fic in other fandoms, and you get both the established pairing where he forgets (!) as well as the amnesia as the opportunity to suddenly go for it....and now i want to read the NCIS season finale first time story with that premise!!!

and don't feel *rtoo* guilty keeping me from work...you actually got me excited again about trying to plan this course i'd promised to put together on cyberspace, identity, and...they want feminism...hmmm...off to look at Michael Heim...

[in-wintertime.livejournal.com]

I get recced *and* I get meta? This is probably my favorite journal ever.

cathexys showed me over, and God, this is just *interesting*. The mental deconstruction is fully half, I would think, of good hurt/comfort anyway - - when we're not being shallow about how pretty they all look in pieces, there's something genuinely ticking beneath on the subject of who we are, once we're whittled down to the basics. And I got to play in the sandbox that wasn't just hurt/comfort but included the big identity issues, and the memory exploration, and who these people *are*. Because Midran thought that he understood everything, even though he didn't; and John was afraid that he had everything, even though Rodney, in the epilogue, explains that that isn't all of it.

And yes, I think that, to a certain extent at least, it does work better in a preset environment - - fanfic! - - because we already understand the everyday lives of these people that we're going to methodically tear apart. That's why I adore AUs and mirror universes. It's a chance for us to see who they could have been and, in the twist I like even more, it's a chance for *them* to see who they could have been and to then be wonder what they are *now*.

When you cut through the incoherency above, I'm pretty sure this boils down to thank you so much for the rec and I'm really, really flattered to see there being actual meta.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

It's a chance for us to see who they could have been and, in the twist I like even more, it's a chance for *them* to see who they could have been and to then be wonder what they are *now*. YES!!! That's exactly it!!! The reason I like multiverses (and the time travel/amnesia scenarios) better on a theoretical level is that the comparison doesn't remain with us the reader (b/c *we* can compare, John, FBI agent to John flyboy, but *he* doesn't have a real sense of his alternate self). In a multiverse, both versions exist within the same diegetic space; he gets to confront and face who he could have been, who he'll never be...

Because Midran thought that he understood everything, even though he didn't; and John was afraid that he had everything, even though Rodney, in the epilogue, explains that that isn't all of it. Yes, that's really the central philosophical conundrum of the novel, isn't it? Do our memories make *us*? I took a class years ago where we read Hans Moravec's Mind Children where he suggested that in the future we'd download ourselves into computers. And I kept on thinking "Where's the unconscious?" Are we still who we are if we simply add up all our memories? Or, said differently, are facts the truth? [Now, in a way, you went the opposite way, b/c the memories *are* selected and inflected via Rodney's emotional state, but even that is not sufficient, is it? There's still a surplus...and please stop me, b/c i'm catching myself saying rem(a)inder of the Real and having Zizek thoughts...runs off to her recovering Lacanian support group :)

[seperis.livejournal.com]

I had my guilt surgiclaly removed.

That is part of the appeal for fanfic--you can pull off much more extreme AUs than you can anywhere else, with a baseline already established.

Re: identity

See, that's where the amnesiac is cool, but works best for me when the amnesia itself is by choice--or someon'es given the choice to take back their life or start over. God, did you ever read RivkaT and MustangSally's multiverse AU, where Mulder and Scully were slowly slippign between dimensions, almost but never fully assimiliating into each one? That was a kicker--seeing the echoes of the original with the altered.

Back on track re Schehezarade--god, cannot spell that yet without looking...

What really did this for me is the fact that memory here is treated--by the Atlanteans--as sacred. Someone *scrwed with Rodney's head*. They took a copy of the core of him, and it just--God, that hurt *me*. And wrecked him in the process. Samdonne had a completely different but the same idea--John gave up memories willingly, but it was teh same feeling of violation.

I loved how in Schehezerade is that the implications of what this means, of someone else *having* Rodney's memories, is carefully spelled out. That shouldn't work, but it *does*, and John's assimiliation of those same kind of makes it uttelry clear what *Rodney* must have gone through, if only in seconds John absorbed so much.

*sighs* And I kind of wonder if the fact that John didn't pull the trigger on Renell was that McKay couldn't have either. I wonder.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

And I kind of wonder if the fact that John didn't pull the trigger on Renell was that McKay couldn't have either. Oh, I love that!!!! And at what point become those contaminations *you*? I mean, we are, effectively, our memories, our sense experience...

I am utterly fascinated with that from both ends...yes, the cyber and sf stuff, but also through my (previous) actual work, where it's all about eyewitness testimonies and how memory can or cannot access reality. There's a great book called Holocaust Testimonies where the author differntiates between different forms of memory, only one (the "deep memory") breaking through the various layers of language and remembering previous rememberings and the way we tend to narrativize experience.

So, yes! There's all these crucial ways in which memory and identity are intersecting and reality kind of circles around that but does it always? How often are we not sure if we remember something, dreamed it, read it, were told... I think part of the horror of Rodney's condition is the ever presence of *all* the memories and the intensity (going back to the NCIS finale, it almost broke me to see him having to relive the loss of his family, more than a decade later!)

Eh...sorry, I'm all over the place but yes, you're right that the choice to be violated is almost more intense...it invokes a level of freedom that the singularly violasted doesn't have (I think that's why we love the get raped to save your friend's life so much...it's the ability of humans to submit to suffering for a larger good kind of thing...)

And like you, i found the scrambling of rodney's memories and the violation interesting but the situation John was in even more so...and the alien culture where *knowing* someone is a form of knowing them...the way he keeps on introducing himself by using Rodney's memories!!!

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Oh, I love that!!!! And at what point become those contaminations *you*? I mean, we are, effectively, our memories, our sense experience...

Exactly. And the parameters of the memory crystals were *intense* experiences. So it's not that he got an entire McKay--he got the *adrenalinized McKay*. Every one of those memories was intense and powerful and that's got to be, in some ways, kind of the memory equivalent of a speedball.

Eh...sorry, I'm all over the place but yes, you're right that the choice to be violated is almost more intense...it invokes a level of freedom that the singularly violasted doesn't have (I think that's why we love the get raped to save your friend's life so much...it's the ability of humans to submit to suffering for a larger good kind of thing...)

I'm a *junkie* for that. Junkie. And in both stories, both of them do it--John's in a more controlled, drawn-out manner, Rodney all at once.

And like you, i found the scrambling of rodney's memories and the violation interesting but the situation John was in even more so...and the alien culture where *knowing* someone is a form of knowing them...the way he keeps on introducing himself by using Rodney's memories!!!

God, it so was. And totally not getting the sheer horror of the Atlanteans, calling them selfish--argh.

[saturnalia.livejournal.com]

Though--my total darkest secret right now--is I really, really want to do an Atlantis/Neuromancer crossover.

Oh, my. I would so totally read that crossover. (We studied the book at Uni this year, and while I really enjoyed it, most of my seminar group hated it. We had countless conversations along the lines of, "You actually liked that book? For the love of god, why?" Heh.)

[sinquepida.livejournal.com]

Man, your rec and all the comments are so persuasive, but I'm gun-shy: Your Cowboy Days Are Over broke my heart. I'm not sure I would make it!