{"id":2016,"date":"2010-02-28T22:27:16","date_gmt":"2010-03-01T06:27:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/?p=2016"},"modified":"2010-02-28T22:27:20","modified_gmt":"2010-03-01T06:27:20","slug":"still-playing-catchup-on-my-2009-material","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/2010\/02\/28\/still-playing-catchup-on-my-2009-material\/","title":{"rendered":"Still playing catchup on my 2009 material"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On the plane to Kentucky for Christmas last year, I read Maureen McHugh&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.librarything.com\/work\/23052\" title=\"'We are small, governments are large, we survive in the cracks.  Cold comfort.'\">China Mountain Zhang<\/a>.  For the first half of this reading, I was under the vague impression that it had been published in 2008.  I found it tremendously enjoyable, and contemporary&#8211;a gay protagonist of color and strong female characters, China as the sole world superpower, a mundane and difficult life on a lunar colony&#8211;but with some irksome anachronisms, like the way the characters used their wrist-implant cyberjacks to make calls from pay phones.<\/p>\n<p>Eventually I flipped back to check the copyright page.  It came out in <i>1992.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Jesus Christ, Maureen McHugh, you were on top of this shit while the rest of the field was just starting to get boners for steampunk?  I will be reading more of your books.<\/p>\n<p>This is an easy test for determining premillennial science fiction from the postmillennial, by the way:  the ubiquity of cell phones (and how big a deal the author makes about them).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On the plane to Kentucky for Christmas last year, I read Maureen McHugh&#8217;s China Mountain Zhang. For the first half of this reading, I was under the vague impression that it had been published in 2008. I found it tremendously enjoyable, and contemporary&#8211;a gay protagonist of color and strong female characters, China as the sole [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52,42,77,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-naivete","category-shame","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2016"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2018,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2016\/revisions\/2018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}