Some thoughts on Elementary

Having heard good things from various sources in Elementary's regard, I hied myself off to watch it.

I haven't seen a pilot that did this much right for me in a donkey's age. It has mostly good pacing - with a few wobbles - and the actors are giving it socks, in a marvellously understated way.

( Lucy Liu. Still fucking awesome )

Conclusions: Definitely promising.

Dead white women: one. People of colour apart from Lucy Liu with speaking parts in this episode: ...maybe one? I am unconvinced that "cop who appears to be of Mediterranean/mestizo extraction" is sufficient to tick any diversity boxes.

But Lucy Liu is still fucking awesome.

Two interesting links

Kameron Hurley on Boys with babies and women with knives: rethinking gender-assumptionist power structures.

Linda Holmes at NPR on Women, men, and fiction: notes on how not to answer hard questions.

Books 2012: not to be overlooked

Books 2012: 182-183


182-183. Susan R. Matthews, Avalanche Soldier and Colony Fleet. Eos, sometime between 1999 and 2001.

Two interesting, compassionate standalone SF novels - the first set on a planet, dealing with religious conversion and social unrest; the second set around a generation fleet as it approaches its first planetfall. Character-centred, not unflawed but mostly solid: recommended.