psocoptera (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
psocoptera) wrote2019-04-02 10:04 pm
psocoptera) wrote2019-04-02 10:04 pm
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Vonda McIntyre
I'm sad to hear the news about Vonda McIntyre. Dreamsnake is excellent, as I recall, and I've read "Little Faces" and I'm pretty sure her Star Wars novel although I don't remember anything about that, and Starfarers has been on my to-read list for awhile and Barbary and Fireflood less while.
But what I really want to talk about is "Looking for Satan", her Thieves' World story, where she hooked one of her OCs up with MZB's character Lythande. I don't want to talk about Lythande or MZB, except that my copy of the Lythande collection is actually *signed* by MZB, so every time I interact with it now I have this little cringe of revulsion for this cursed object, but I can't get rid of it because it has "Looking for Satan" in it.
The thing about "Looking for Satan" is that it's about a polycule. Well, that's a word I wouldn't have until much later. It's about a group of close friends from a distant, magical land - a much nicer place than the Thieves' World setting - who have formed a sort of adventuring party to come look for one of them who has gone missing. And they all love each other and have sex sometimes in various pairs or as a group, we are told, but the POV character is also free to start an (intentionally temporary) relationship with Lythande, and, look, I don't know whether this was actually the first thing I ever read that said that love didn't have to be exclusive and relationships didn't have to be at least potentially permanent and sex could be something shared by beloved friends rather than lovers in the passionate-romance sense. There was Gossamer Axe, which I might have read earlier or later, not sure. And some of that in the Song of the Lioness quartet, which I definitely read earlier, although in both of those the relationships are more like sequential than simultaneous/overlapping, and do eventually end in permanent monogamy. And, I mean, I'm sure I had read Stranger in a Strange Land earlier, but there was always something off-putting to me in SIASL's construction of gender and sexuality, whereas "Looking for Satan" (and Gossamer Axe) blew my tiny little mind and had this huge impact on my assumptions about what love and relationships could look like, years before I would ever meet actual poly people or start making relationship choices for myself.
Am I saying that I owe Vonda McIntyre for my marriage, given the, er, backstory thereof? Well, maybe a little. ;) I would definitely give her some credit for certain recurring themes in my fic. So, thank you, Vonda McIntyre. I promise except for this one post I'll mostly just tell people to read Dreamsnake. :)
But what I really want to talk about is "Looking for Satan", her Thieves' World story, where she hooked one of her OCs up with MZB's character Lythande. I don't want to talk about Lythande or MZB, except that my copy of the Lythande collection is actually *signed* by MZB, so every time I interact with it now I have this little cringe of revulsion for this cursed object, but I can't get rid of it because it has "Looking for Satan" in it.
The thing about "Looking for Satan" is that it's about a polycule. Well, that's a word I wouldn't have until much later. It's about a group of close friends from a distant, magical land - a much nicer place than the Thieves' World setting - who have formed a sort of adventuring party to come look for one of them who has gone missing. And they all love each other and have sex sometimes in various pairs or as a group, we are told, but the POV character is also free to start an (intentionally temporary) relationship with Lythande, and, look, I don't know whether this was actually the first thing I ever read that said that love didn't have to be exclusive and relationships didn't have to be at least potentially permanent and sex could be something shared by beloved friends rather than lovers in the passionate-romance sense. There was Gossamer Axe, which I might have read earlier or later, not sure. And some of that in the Song of the Lioness quartet, which I definitely read earlier, although in both of those the relationships are more like sequential than simultaneous/overlapping, and do eventually end in permanent monogamy. And, I mean, I'm sure I had read Stranger in a Strange Land earlier, but there was always something off-putting to me in SIASL's construction of gender and sexuality, whereas "Looking for Satan" (and Gossamer Axe) blew my tiny little mind and had this huge impact on my assumptions about what love and relationships could look like, years before I would ever meet actual poly people or start making relationship choices for myself.
Am I saying that I owe Vonda McIntyre for my marriage, given the, er, backstory thereof? Well, maybe a little. ;) I would definitely give her some credit for certain recurring themes in my fic. So, thank you, Vonda McIntyre. I promise except for this one post I'll mostly just tell people to read Dreamsnake. :)