The Memory Librarian
Oct. 28th, 2022 12:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraThe Memory Librarian and other stories of Dirty Computer, Janelle Monae and cowriters, 2022. Anthology project writing spinoff/tie-in stories to the Dirty Computer 2018 album/film. Five stories. I was excited for this project but got really bogged down in the first one, "The Memory Librarian", cowritten with Alaya Dawn Johnson, which bummed me out - Johnson is so great! Monae is so great! How was this somehow less than the sum of its parts! I almost gave up entirely, and in fact did skip the second story, "Nevermind", written with Danny Lore, because I ran out of time on the library loan and it looked long. I am pleased to report, though, that I enjoyed the remaining three stories, most particularly the third, "Timebox", written with Eve L. Ewing (who also seems to have written for Marvel, specifically Ironheart and Ms. Marvel), which I actively recommend as a short story that will be showing up on my eventual 2022 shortlist. Tight, thought-provoking, strong character work. The other two, "Save Changes" with Yohanca Delgado and "Timebox Altar(ed)" with Sheree Renee Thomas, were enjoyable, but less sharp. The former didn't quite hang together for me and the latter was super feelgood wish-fulfilly which was a fine note to want to end the collection on, but just wasn't that compelling to me.
(On the topic of musicians writing prose fiction, apparently Josh Ritter has another novel out as of 2021. There's something very interesting to me about musicians experimenting with stripping away all the music and just doing things with pure words. Like, especially Monae, who is doing so much with not just music but with video, but both of them I think of much more as performers than as songwriters, like they are both high-charisma people whose personal stage presence is part of what sells their work, and in text they can't employ that at all. Which I suppose is probably part of why Monae wanted to partner with people who are prose professionals. Vaguely thinking also about Andrea Hairston's Master of Poisons and how some of my frustration with that book came from my feeling that Hairston's mental version of the story was more like theater than prose, and the coolness of it wasn't all quite making it to the page, vs, like, Gaiman, who's always seemed to move smoothly between comics, prose, and screenwriting/showrunning. Maybe it's interesting that my favorite of these stories was written by someone who's done comics work, maybe that's relevant to her success in collaborating with an artist from a different primary medium, in doing the best job of the batch to really get the pacing and scope of the story to work as prose?)
(On the topic of musicians writing prose fiction, apparently Josh Ritter has another novel out as of 2021. There's something very interesting to me about musicians experimenting with stripping away all the music and just doing things with pure words. Like, especially Monae, who is doing so much with not just music but with video, but both of them I think of much more as performers than as songwriters, like they are both high-charisma people whose personal stage presence is part of what sells their work, and in text they can't employ that at all. Which I suppose is probably part of why Monae wanted to partner with people who are prose professionals. Vaguely thinking also about Andrea Hairston's Master of Poisons and how some of my frustration with that book came from my feeling that Hairston's mental version of the story was more like theater than prose, and the coolness of it wasn't all quite making it to the page, vs, like, Gaiman, who's always seemed to move smoothly between comics, prose, and screenwriting/showrunning. Maybe it's interesting that my favorite of these stories was written by someone who's done comics work, maybe that's relevant to her success in collaborating with an artist from a different primary medium, in doing the best job of the batch to really get the pacing and scope of the story to work as prose?)
