CHAOS CHOREOGRAPHY open thread!

[seanan_mcguire]

To celebrate the release of Chaos Choreography, here. Have an open thread to discuss the book. Judging by the comments I'm seeing, some of you have had time, and I'd really, really rather book discussion (sometimes including spoilers) didn't crop up on other posts.

THERE WILL BE SPOILERS.

Seriously. If anyone comments here at all, THERE WILL BE SPOILERS. So please don't read and then yell at me because you encountered spoilers. You were warned. (I will not reply to every comment; I call partial comment amnesty. But I may well join some of the discussion, or answer questions or whatnot.) I will be DELETING all comments containing spoilers which have been left on other posts. No one gets to spoil people here without a label.

You can also start a discussion at my website forums, with less need to be concerned that I will see everything you say! In case you wanted, you know, discussion free of authorial influence, since I always wind up getting involved in these things.

Have fun, and try not to bleed on the carpet.

Comments

[tylik.livejournal.com]

That was truly excellent.

I am very struck by the image of Covenant analysts (I assume the Covenant has analysts) going over all of "Valerie's" video's, but especially those of that last show... and there she is, doing a dance routine that in her mind is enacting at least one aspect of her and Dominic's courtship, and in their mind has got to be confirming every preconception the Covenant has about Healy women. I mean, damn. (I also one how good the audio pick ups were - because as charmed as I was by Dominic's exhortations for Verity not to die, I'm not so thrilled with them being broadly shared.)

Alice. Put me down for the Alice appreciation club, though I found myself less struck by her charming and quirky persona than by all the negative space it framed. There isn't a lot of use being impatient for more story, but... (tries not to fidget) I knew I was going to like Thomas, and now, having gotten a glimpse of adult Alice (if rather from the other side of things...) argh. That is a whole lot of shit ahead. And I have absolutely no idea how much Early Life we will see before we see Alice's Book.

[jenfullmoon.livejournal.com]

It's probably not likely, but it'd be a really interesting story if after all of these years, Alice does find Thomas. What condition would he be in, is he 107 while she's 22, is he sane, can he be brought back to the bosom of the family or does he quietly have to be shot in the head....who knows?

[tylik.livejournal.com]

I came out of this pretty thoroughly a member of Team Alice, and have just been kind of sitting with it, and letting the quotes from her and, even more, the quote from other members of the family about her, percolate through those impressions. I don't feel like I know very much yet why other members of her family consider her less than sane or stable... and I kind of get the impression that there might be a variety of opinions there. (Or, maybe just an awful lot of uncertainty. There certainly appears to be uncertainty.)

Time, and age, are something else. The first reference to her age being younger than expected was attributed to time running at a different rates in other worlds - which is likely part of the story. That it sounds like it's been changing, though... and I wonder a bit, with how routewitches trade for distance, if age (and, horrors, perhaps experience, though I suspect she'd have to be in dire need of a trade) is something she might also be trading in.

Since Thomas, assuming he is... well, let's call it not dead, is somewhere at least as strange as where Alice has been hanging out (and probably on the stranger side of that) I wouldn't be putting any bets on how time has been affecting him, either. (Or what trades he's been making, though he's probably been in less of a position for commerce, at least, for any variety of commerce.)

(Certainly, if you're going to declare war on the Covenant, it would be an awfully nice time for senior members of the family to find their way home.)

[bree-ramsey314.livejournal.com]

I think, maybe, that much of what Verity and the rest interpret as instability, and perhaps a less than complete hold on sanity, is simply a generation gap, of sorts. All they know of Fran is stories, so they can't see just how much like her mother Alice is. Fran was always in favor of the direct, guns a-blazing and knives a-flying approach to solving problems, and that's something Alice seems to share.

Then there's the fact that she's spent much of the last few decades, not out of touch with reality, but rather in touch with a much different, darker reality. Also I'd imagine that what Verity and her siblings feel about Alice has to have been influenced greatly by Kevin, who has ample reason to feel some serious resentment towards his mother. Even with that influence, however, it's clear that Verity loves Alice very much.

Your last comment is very tantalizing. This would be an excellent time for Thomas to reappear, wouldn't it? His knowledge of the Covenant is many decades out of date, but in this case I don't see that as being a big issue, as the Covenant seems to be very set in its ways. The technology they employ may have changed but the basic tactics haven't, which is ultimately why they'll lose. The Price family, and the cryptids they work to protect, know nature's most basic rule quite well ... the inability to adapt leads to only one end, extinction.

[dragonsong.livejournal.com]

I feel that Alice knows her kids resent her somewhat. My heart broke when she said she'd promised to be better than her mother, but the only thing she was better at was leaving. Just... Oh Alice.

[bree-ramsey314.livejournal.com]

That was a heart wrenching moment, especially because of how Fran left. She didn't make a choice, she just got careless. That was what hit me so hard about her death, it was so pedestrian. She was a fearsome, capable woman but she didn't die facing some great threat but rather in familiar territory she had traversed countless times. In the end it was that familiarity that did her in, I think.

What really hit me about it was what she told Mary at her grave, "I just didn't look where I was goin'." It brought back memories of something that happened to me several years ago. I was jogging along a highway I had jogged on hundreds of times, dressed in bright, high visibility clothes and running against traffic, which was sparse. The car was traveling in the same direction I was, and crossed the center line and struck me from behind. I don't remember the accident, just waking up in the hospital in a lot of pain. I'm sure I must have heard the car coming, and since it was on the opposite side of the road I didn't worry about it. If I had just turned to look behind me, maybe I would have noticed it was behaving erratically. But I didn't, so I spent most of the next year in a wheelchair. I was very fortunate I didn't die, because the driver never stopped, and to this day I don't know whether it was a result of intoxication, fatigue or distraction, because they were never caught.

So I can well imagine what Fran thought in her final moments, "Why didn't I just look?" I'm sure she must have felt, profoundly, that she had failed everyone she loved, especially Alice, but I think the bravest thing she ever did was choosing to move on. As she said, if she stayed, she'd have been doing it for herself, not for them. Alice, however, was very much alive when she chose to leave her children in the care of others. I love her, and I'm not going to judge her decision, but I think Kevin and Jane have a right to feel some resentment. That doesn't mean they don't love her, and the fact that Kevin sent her to back Verity up shows that he isn't afraid to entrust the safety of his children to her.

[dragonsong.livejournal.com]

Wow, thank you for that. There's SO much heartbreak in this family, and so many hard choices that have been made. Seanan does an amazing job making them so... Real. These are decisions and events that real people face that are made so much harder by their family's situation.

[tylik.livejournal.com]

And whether it's time dilation or whatever, they've seen Alice failing to find Thomas for their whole lives. It'd be hard not to draw the conclusion that he's just gone.

I wonder a little bit about framing with a war with the Covenant. I mean, okay, we're kind of dealing the Verity's framing at the moment... but a substantial part of the family history has been about winning members of the Covenant over. If there's any way to re-frame things as a less adversarial issue... hell, there have been times when the Covenant has done a fair bit of good (and been a fairly good organization to be a member of.) I don't see this as turning into puppy and rainbow land, but... there just aren't enough Prices for a Price / Covenant war to make sense. They have a lot of allies, but then, there are plenty of Cryptids who'd be happy to see the Prices and the Covenant all dead, just to make sure. They can go underground again, but that doesn't seem like the most viable long term strategy at this point.

[bree-ramsey314.livejournal.com]

I think what transpired in Midnight Blue-Light Special made it pretty clear the Covenant isn't interested in a less adversarial relationship with the Price family. It's true, there are plenty of Cryptids that would be glad to see the Price clan dead, the majority of the Cryptid community in fact, but they have never met them. Malena is a prime example; when she found out who Verity was, she was initially hostile, but like most who have gotten to know her, she came around. I'm confident that, if the Covenant does choose to ignore Verity's warning (And let's be honest, does anyone really think they are going to stay away?) that there will be plenty of Cryptids who will stand by the Price family. As you say, going underground isn't a viable long term strategy for the Cryptids at this point, so they really have a vested interest in keeping Verity and her family alive.