Finished The Novice by Trudi Canavan. The second book in The Black Magician trilogy.
Found the second half to be more interesting than the first half, but that is probably just me.
Started Carl’s Doomsday Scenario by Matt Dinniman, book 2 of Dungeon Crawler Carl.
What about all of you? What have you all been reading or listening to lately?
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Re-reading the Foundation trilogy by Issac Asimov. Just got to the part of Foundation and Empire where the Mule shows up. It’s fun to see the new anachronisms jump out at me. Last time I read this, printed newspapers were still a thing, and reading about the massive printing press network that prints paper newspapers for the forty billion residents of the Imperial capital jumps out at me like it didn’t before. And obviously, everybody smokes.
The starkest difference for me (37 years old) so didn’t grow up with the stories, was some of the verbiage used. It’s gone out of most media nowadays though. But yeah the commonality of smoking was weird, even though I grew up as it was phased out in Canada.
Queer, fag, retard (not the modern acceptable slowing something down), and I’m sure there’s more, but I read those 2 years ago, and I read a lot of old scifi, so maybe not all was Foundation, but it’s definitely a thing of the times.
I don’t think I’ve seen any reference, derogatory or otherwise, to queerness in Foundation so far. Everybody is midcentury straight and there’s no question about it. There’s definitely a lot of midcentury slang though. Asimov does regional dialects, or at least makes reference to them, and it’s hard to work out which parts are Asimov trying to sound provincial and which parts are just a product of Asimov’s time.
Queer would be used as happy/weird back than. Wasn’t derogatory yet.
I guess the point is, the words are before the times it was used against people, so it was common vernacular at the time.
Fag is a cigarette.
Edit, maybe it was the Galactic Empire series
“queer” is usually properly defined as strange or unusual, “gay” as happy or merry, and both had become slang for homosexual by the mid-20th century (OED’s first reference to that slang usage of “queer” in the US is from 1914, well before Asimov’s writing). Slang usages overlap with non-slang usage, so if Asimov used the word “queer” he could have been using either definition.
Slang words for culturally taboo topics like sexuality generally rely on that ambiguity because it allows people to circumvent the taboo, and so that discussion of sexuality could be plausibly denied if challenged. You see a similar thing happening today in socially conservative circles, discussing a family member’s “roommate”.
With all that said, “queer” was a much more socially acceptable slur for gay folks back in the 40’s, and I thought that’s what you meant. Asimov might well have used “queer” to mean strange or peculiar, I’m working with a paper copy so I can’t easily search for usages, but I think the word itself pops up a couple of times with that meaning.
I don’t think the use of “fag” as synonym of cigarette ever really caught on in the US, and I don’t think I’ve seen it in Foundation, so you may be remembering some other work.
That’s right, I was combining them, but also knew there was another common one.
I’ll check digitally later, but it was probably the Robots series, which is all part of his broader Foundations universe. There’s detectives and cigarettes galore in those ones.
The later foundation novels tie the universe together, so could be some words come back up again.