Or was, before limb regeneration went wild.

Ah, Japan. Without it, the internet would be a much less interesting place.

Or a Zygon. Whatever floats your boat.

But having such a big penis does have one drawback: it seems that co-ordinating eight legs, two feeding tentacles and a huge penis, whilst fending off an irate female, is a bit too much to ask, and one of the two males stranded on the Spanish coast had accidentally injected himself with sperm packages in the legs and body. And this does not seem to have been an isolated incident since two of the eight males that had stranded in the north-east Atlantic before had also accidentally inseminated themselves.

But fans of squid slash can take heart: “It is also possible that the sperm packages had come from other males that they had ‘bumped’ into, in the dark depths of the ocean.”

Fiction that unlike New Weird, Steampunk, or Slipstream, is at its core not only about squid, but about the symbolism of squid as color-changing, highly-mobile, alien-looking, intelligent ocean-goers. As a powerful ecosystem indicator, the squid is a potent symbol for environmental rejuvenation. Squidpunk is almost exclusively set at sea and must contain some reference to either cephalopods or to anything that thematically relates to squid, in terms of world iconography and tropes. Squidpunk is never escapist or whimsical. It is always serious and edgy. This combination of a hard punk aesthetic with the fluid propulsion system common to the squid has produced a unique literary hybrid beloved by Mundanes and Surrealists alike.

(Aside from noting that I have not posted or kick started the db in a long time, I have nothing of interest to say.)

I decided to eliminate books that won major awards of some sort, or that might reasonably appear on a college syllabus, or have been the basis of a film adaptation, or have “bestseller” plastered all over the cover. I also eliminated books published this millennium and authors previously mentioned (though I’ll also endorse On Stranger Tides as the best voodoo pirate puppeteer book ever penned, and you should also read Wintertide by Elizabeth Hand).

That still leaves a lot of worthy books. In the end, I decided to pick by cover.

C.J. Cherryh’s a prolific author, and she’s been lucky enough to have some fine Michael Whelan covers. (Let’s forget the Gates covers for the moment.) This has always been one of my favorite book covers, period. Absolutely adorable. Yeah, yeah, never judge a book by its cover. And it’s true, the infant on the cover matures, as infants are wont to do. But this is one of those rare and wonderful covers that works as art, marketing, and a representation of the story.

Cherryh’s novels often tackle themes of culture clashes and communication. In her recent Foreigner series, those questions have been explicit: her protagonist is a diplomat and linguist trained to take part in politics at the highest level. In Cuckoo’s Egg, it’s simultaneously more obvious and more subtle.

The book opens in a hospital, with the human baby on the cover handed over to Duun, described as general and lord and “another thing.” (Cherryh often defines alien concepts by talking around them.) It is clear that the human is the alien species, and that Duun is both outcast and venerated. The novel is devoted to Duun’s efforts to raise the boy—learning what a human requires, training his body and mind, and sheltering him from others for as long as possible—and Thorn’s efforts to discover why he is different, how he fits into the world, and how he should go about growing up.

The question of where the human came from, and how he came to be in Duun’s care, is not fully answered until the very end of the book. The answer works, an audaciously simple explanation in keeping with the characters involved, the backstory and recent history only hinted at. A tight focus on a few players keeps the story moving and allows Cherryh to sketch out a vibrant civilization in flux.

A few years ago, I was in the camp that believed that, in a perfect world, there would be a distinction between civil unions and marriages. You get your civil union (with all the legal benefits) from the state, after jumping through the applicable hoops. You get your marriage (with all the religious benefits) from your religious institution of choice, after jumping through the applicable hoops. Some people would have both. Some people would have only one.

I still think that would exist in a perfect world (e.g. one where we actually respect a separation between church and state). It might be workable in a less than completely perfect world (e.g. one in which things like civil unions exist as a meaningful analog to marriage), even if it gave bigots a semantic victory. But in a much less than perfect world (e.g. this one), it’s not a first step; it’s less than half a loaf. I am personally embarrassed that I ever thought it could be otherwise.

The California Supreme Court sums it up nicely:

Furthermore, because of the historic disparagement of gay persons, the retention of a distinction in nomenclature by which the term “marriage” is withheld only from the family relationship of same-sex couples is all the more likely to cause the new parallel institution that has been established for same-sex couples to be considered a mark of second-class citizenship.

Finally, in addition to the potential harm flowing from the lesser stature that is likely to be afforded to the family relationships of same-sex couples by designating them domestic partnerships, there exists a substantial risk that a judicial decision upholding the differential treatment of opposite-sex and same-sex couples would be understood as validating a more general proposition that our state by now has repudiated: that it is permissible, under the law, for society to treat gay individuals and same-sex couples differently from, and less favorably than, heterosexual individuals and opposite-sex couples.