Click here to read everyone else’s replies to this week’s question and here to see the full list of topics for the year.
Quick! Imagine a carrot.
What colour is it?
I’m going to guess you all picked the colour orange.
One of the weirdest and most interesting things I’ve learned from a book is that carrots weren’t originally orange. Up until the late seventeenth century, they were nearly always purple. You might see a rare one that was white or yellow, but those colours weren’t encouraged by carrot farms.
How did that change? Some Dutch growers began cross-breeding different types of carrots in the late 1600s. It’s thought that they probably crossed purple carrots with white ones to eventually create the orange carrots we all know.
They also selectively bred this crop to make carrots bigger, juicer, and sweeter than the ones that people ate in previous generations.
I wasn’t able to find the book that mentioned this, but this article has more information for anyone who is interested.
If you ever meet me in real life and want me to blab without stopping, bring up human evolution, ecology, zoology, or climate change. I would happily discuss any of those topics with anyone for ages!
I was the sort of kid who adored the original, sometimes gruesome versions of fairy tales. Some of those stories were incredibly politically incorrect at times, so I’m very interested in revisiting them from a social justice angle.
Since this is a Canadian novel, I don’t expect most Top Ten Tuesday participants to already be aware of it. I’m excited about it because it tells stories set in the same setting in four different eras: 1934, 1974, 2008, and 2034. I love it when authors do this. It makes the universes they create feel so expansive.
I was the sort of girl and am the sort of woman who dislikes dresses, high heels, and wearing makeup because of how physically uncomfortable they all are to wear for me. High heels are painful, lace is unbearably itchy, and I’ve had many allergic reactions to makeup.
I totally respect the fact that folks from many different genders enjoy this stuff today, but the thought of anyone donning all of those things at once and on purpose both horrifies and fascinates me. It’s going to be interesting to see how it was handled across various eras and cultures in the past.
I don’t usually make references to politics on this blog, but I’m a U.S. citizen who is deeply concerned about what’s going on in my birth country. My reasons for being interested in this book are pretty self explanatory, I think.
From noted short story writer Nisi Shawl comes a brilliant alternate-history novel set in the Belgian Congo.
What if the African natives developed steam power ahead of their colonial oppressors? What might have come of Belgium’s disastrous colonization of the Congo if the native populations had learned about steam technology a bit earlier?
Fabian Socialists from Great Britain join forces with African-American missionaries to purchase land from the Belgian Congo’s “owner,” King Leopold II. This land, named Everfair, is set aside as a safe haven, an imaginary Utopia for native populations of the Congo as well as escaped slaves returning from America and other places where African natives were being mistreated.
Shawl’s speculative masterpiece manages to turn one of the worst human rights disasters on record into a marvelous and exciting exploration of the possibilities inherent in a turn of history. Everfair is told from a multiplicity of voices: Africans, Europeans, East Asians, and African Americans in complex relationships with one another, in a compelling range of voices that have historically been silenced. Everfair is not only a beautiful book but an educational and inspiring one that will give the reader new insight into an often ignored period of history.
Review:
Content warning: Racism and sexism. I will not be discussing these things in my review.
Strap in for a wild ride.This book has a bit of everything!
Ms. Shawl did a very good job of explaining the political and historical landscape of the setting. I didn’t know a lot about how Belgium colonization of the Congo went so horribly wrong in our world, so I was grateful for all of the details the author provided about why Belgium made that decision and how they expected to make it work before she imaged how things could have turned out much differently for the Congo if they’d already had steam technology when this conflict boiled over.
The cast of characters was massive. Rather than telling this tale from the perspective of one or even a few different people, there were dozens of narrators and other protagonists to sort out as I read. Given the fact that each chapter was written in a form that was pretty similar to a short story and that previous characters often weren’t revisited until many years after their previous entry, I had lots of trouble keeping up with everyone and the plot at the same time. This felt like something that really should have been separated out into several novels or many more novellas. There was so much going on in the plot that nobody got all of the attention they deserved.
There was a list of characters, their relationships to each other, and approximately when and where they lived included before the story began. I was glad to have this information and would highly recommend taking a look at it before beginning the first chapter. As I mentioned earlier in this review, the cast of characters is humongous. Having a basic idea of everyone’s identity and when they lived is crucial in order to understanding the plot, and this list did help with that even though I still believe the plot would have been better served if it were divided into a series and no more than three or four narrators were included in each instalment.
Anyone who loves alternate history speculative fiction should check this book out.
Content warning: death of a parent, police violence and gun violence. I will be discussing the last two items in this list in my review.
See You Yesterday is a 2019 science fiction film about C.J. and Sebastian, two high school students who are best friends, fellow science enthusiasts, and inventors.
Their latest invention is a backpack that allows the person wearing it to travel back into time. The technology wasn’t perfect. It could only go back into the recent past and could only be used a certain number of times. They were still figuring out how to change those limitations when the events of this film took place.
After C.J.’s older brother, Calvin, was murdered by the police, she and Sebastian decided to use their unfinished invention to travel back in time and save her brother before time ran out for him for good.
Characters
Eden Duncan-Smith as C.J. Walker
C.J. was the protagonist of this tale. As an incredibly intelligent and driven young woman, she believed she could solve any problem that came her way by seeking the scientifically correct answer to it.
Danté Crichlow (left) as Sebastian Thomas
Sebastian was C.J.’s best friend. He was just as intelligent as C.J. but tended to be more cautious about trying new things until he’d gathered all of the date he needed about how they worked.
Michael J. Fox as Mr. Lockhart
C.J. and Sebastian’s science teacher
Mr. Lockhart was C.J. and Sebastian’s supportive science teacher. He didn’t believe in time travel, but he did believe that his two smartest students would do incredible things with their lives. Supportive teacher, but doesn’t believe in time travel.
Anyone who is a fan of this actor’s previous work will find a delightful Easter Egg about it at some point in this tale.
Brian “Stro” Bradley as Calvin Walker
Calvin was C.J.’s overprotective but loving older brother. He admired his sister’s intellect and believed that she’d one day make life better for their entire family because of it.
My Review
This was such a good story that I’m planning to watch it again!
Obviously, there were strong social justice themes in this movie. The blurb and trailer for it will give that fact away immediately to anyone who somehow missed it. C.J.’s invention was really cool in and of itself, but the thought of it being used to right terrible wrongs only made me more curious to see if and how she’d reach her goal of saving her brother’s life.
C.J.’s character development was beautifully handled. There were excellent reasons for her sometimes stubborn behaviour and unshakeable belief that science can be used any problem if one works hard enough to understand what happened and how it can be changed. I’ll leave it up to other viewers to discover these things for themselves, but it was delightful to see how her past and present shaped who C.J. was and who she was becoming.
There were a couple of fantastic plot twists later on in the storyline. They made perfect sense given everything C.J. had gone through earlier. While I did see them coming due to how familiar I am with tropes in the young adult and science fiction genres, I’d be pretty curious to find out if other audience members had the same reaction to them. Either way, they enhanced the viewing experience nicely.
My brain is beyond eager to discuss the ending in this post, but I’ll need to carefully dance around what actually happened in it in order to avoid spoilers. What I can say is that it fit the themes of this tale well and it had a powerful message for audience members about how we should respond to police and gun violence.
Ending on such thoughtful terms was such a great decision. I’ve read that the director isn’t planning to make a sequel, so it looks like the audience will have come up with our own theories about what might happen next.
A Note on the Violence Tags in My Review
Some of the violence was implied. Other acts of violence were shown directly to the audience, albeit in a sensitive and thoughtful manner. There were the briefest hints of blood in a couple of scenes, but in general this was a pretty blood-free story (especially given the subject matter).
See You Yesterday is something that I’d recommend just as highly to adult viewers as I would it’s original young adult audience.
Click here to read everyone else’s replies to this week’s question and here to see the full list of topics for the year.
My response to this week’s prompt can be summed up in one word: programming.
I’m fascinated by the various programming languages that have been developed in order to create websites.
There’s something incredible about seeing how the right commands can create eye-catching sites with enough patience and work.
A few months ago, I took a one-day introductory HTML course to this topic at my local library. It was fascinating to get that taste of that world. I’m dabbling with the idea of continuing my studies in this area (whether in HTML or in another programming language entirely).
What can I say? Computers are cool, and I want to learn more about how to build nice-looking websites for them.
My first impression of this week’s prompt was that it would be an easy one. It turned out to be trickier than I assumed. In my experience, some people misinterpret social media as a place to sell books or draw traffic to one’s latest blog post.
While I love seeing what authors have recently created, having a fun social media account requires effort, creativity, and, most importantly, regularly engaging with your followers. All of the authors I’m about to share do just that. I’d recommend checking out their creative, thought-provoking status updates regardless of what your personal feelings are about poetry, horror, science fiction, or any of the other genres they represent.
This post is divided into two sections: Twitter and Instagram.
Please be advised that I only talk here about writing-related topics, which means just politics, media, science, food, charity, cartoons, volcanoes, gardening, space, cats, health care, cats, fanfic, Afrofuturist music, human nature, video gam
Stephen is like that cool uncle everyone hopes will show up at the next family reunion. You never quite know what he’s going to say, but you know it will always be worth listening to.
A few days ago, Toronto learned that someone who was diagnosed with COVID-19 had taken several trips on the TTC, our public transportation system, after they began coughing and showing other symptoms of that disease.
Our local media has been publishing many stories on the Coronavirus outbreak these winter alongside their regular winter features on cold and flu season. While I have some mixed feelings about how they’ve reported on this new outbreak in particular, it’s difficult to ignore all of the new information pouring in about COVID-19 and how regularly new cases have been diagnosed in Ontario lately.
Like the rest of the world, Toronto is nervous about this topic. There have been so many folks stocking up on toilet paper and other supplies that some stores here have actually put limits on how much of those items you can buy at a time.
I happen to be part of an age bracket that is at very low risk of developing complications from Coronavirus, much less dying from it. I also don’t have any pre-existing medical conditions that would make it harder for my body to fight this illness. If I were to develop it, chances are excellent that it would be no worse than a bad cold or the flu for me if I even developed symptoms at all.
Still, I’ve found myself staying home more often these days. I’d hate to accidentally spread this illness around to people at high risk of complications if I’m one of those young, healthy people who have it while showing few to no symptoms of it.
When I do go out, I’m noticing that our libraries, stores, and malls feel a bit quieter than usual. My guess is that other folks are cutting back on spending time in large crowds when possible as well.
Since most of my favourite places to visit are outdoors and I’m trying to reduce my time spent in crowds, reading seems like the perfect solution.
March is a chilly, sloppy time of year in Ontario anyways. Might as well read until the weather improves and the spread of this disease is hopefully slowed down while scientists work on a vaccine for it.
This means that you may be seeing more book reviews on my site over the coming weeks. I love writing them, but they take up so much time and energy that I generally can only get through a certain number of them in the average month.
There are only so many TV shows I can watch and hours of Minecraft I can play before needing to do something else with my free time, though, so reading it is.
I already have my first review of this semi-quarantine season ready to go for next week! Thank goodness I still have a big pile of library e-books to plow through as well.
How have your daily routines changed this cold, flu, and coronavirus season? How are your countries and communities reacting to COVID-19? Are you all staying home and getting more reading time in than usual these days, too?
Click on the tag “hope” at this bottom of this post to read about all of my suggestions for hopeful science fiction. If you have recommendations for future instalments of this series, I’d sure like to hear them. Leave a comment below or send me message about it on Twitter.
Recently, I discovered the Better Worlds series, a science fiction anthology of short stories and films about hope that was published at The Verge two years ago. This is the second story from this anthology I’ve covered here, and I will eventually blog about all of them.
There are mild spoilers in this post.
Online Reunion
Leigh Alexander’s “Online Reunion” was about a young journalist chronicling a vintage e-pet reunion who gets more than she expected.
One of the things I found most interesting about this tale was how little time it spent on the world building.
The Internet had changed society in some pretty profound ways over the decades, but this wasn’t something I fully appreciated until I read it for the second time. I’d definitely recommending reading this slowly in order to catch every hint about what’s really going on here.
Human Nature
Fashions may come and go, but human nature remains constant from one era to the next. The best portions of this story were the ones that quietly highlighted what has changed, and even more importantly what hasn’t changed, over the past few generations since people began using the Internet heavily.
Jean, the main character, thought she had a good idea of what to expect when she went to Mrs. Marchenstamp’s house to interview her. I was amused by the assumptions she made about the first generation who used the Internet heavily, especially once Jean realized that she might have underestimated her interview subject.
There was also something comforting in the thought of people finding new ways to connect with each other in a futuristic world where something similar to Internet Addiction Disorder is much more common and dangerous than it is today.
I can’t go into detail about that topic without wandering into serious spoiler territory, but I was pleased with how familiar this tale felt. Yes, the characters had access to technology that you and I can only dream of, and there were plenty of social problems the plot hinted at that seemed to have grown worse over time instead of better.
But I still felt as thought I could sit down and have a cup of tea with any of the characters. Other than the occasional slang term that would be used differently in their world than in ours, they seemed like people I already knew. There was a familiarity with their problems and their triumphs that made me want to get to know them better.
As much of a cliche as this is to type, people are people everywhere. I loved seeing all of the similarities between them and us.
It made me look forward to the future. What could be better than that?
Click here to read everyone else’s replies to this week’s question and here to see the full list of topics for the year.
I’m a quiet, gentle, shy person who has a mischievous streak that occasionally surprises people. Here are some characters who remind me of myself.
Matthew Cuthbert from L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series.
I adored Anne, but kind and gentle Matthew was the character who really won my heart. I understood him on such a deep level and was thrilled by the way he warmly welcomed Anne into the family.
Beth March from Louisa M. Alcott’s Little Women.
She was the only March sister that I think I could spend time with regularly while coming away from those visits with an invigorated spirit. Don’t get me wrong, I liked Meg, Jo, and Amy quite a bit. But Beth had one of those mellow, easygoing personalities that both attracts my attention and reminds me of how I am, too.
There’s something to be said for peacemakers who try to find the good in everyone.
Remember when I told you all I had a mischievous streak? I wasn’t joking.
90% of the time, I’m that calm, unassuming person who peacefully sits in the corner and finds amusement in the simple things in life.
The other 10% of the time, I’m quietly getting into mischief without giving anyone advanced warning. Only folks who know me incredibly well will be able to predict these moments before they happen.
If I make my childhood goal of living to see my one hundredth birthday, you just might catch me climbing out of a window at the retirement home on that day.
I kept things simple for this week’s prompt. Most of these books are ones I haven’t read yet, but all of them grabbed my attention with their short, snappy titles. It’s harder than you think to come up with a single word that will do that!
How did that change? Some Dutch growers began cross-breeding different types of carrots in the late 1600s. It’s thought that they probably crossed purple carrots with white ones to eventually create the orange carrots we all know.
Title: Everfair
Content warning: death of a parent, police violence and gun violence. I will be discussing the last two items in this list in my review.
My first impression of this week’s prompt was that it would be an easy one. It turned out to be trickier than I assumed. In my experience, some people misinterpret social media as a place to sell books or draw traffic to one’s latest blog post.
A few days ago, Toronto 
Still, I’ve found myself staying home more often these days. I’d hate to accidentally spread this illness around to people at high risk of complications if I’m one of those young, healthy people who have it while showing few to no symptoms of it.
Leigh Alexander’s “
I’m a quiet, gentle, shy person who has a mischievous streak that occasionally surprises people. Here are some characters who remind me of myself.
I kept things simple for this week’s prompt. Most of these books are ones I haven’t read yet, but all of them grabbed my attention with their short, snappy titles. It’s harder than you think to come up with a single word that will do that!