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Mar. 10th, 2018 02:12 pmSo I just finished Nicole Kornher-Stace's Archivist Wasp, which I had told myself going in was almost certainly not going to be a book which had anything to do with actual archives, and indeed about this I was correct: this is set in a post-apocalyptic future in which Archivist is a ritual title for a teen girl priestess/sacrifice who hunts ghosts and records observations about them in various notebooks which are never seen by anyone until she is killed by the next Archivist-to-be in ritual combat.
(Wistfully, I asked the book: but do the notebooks have metadata even? An index? A finding aid? No, apparently just twenty notebooks of disconnected jotted observations. FIELD RESEARCHER WASP.)
Anyway the actual plot of the book isn't even about the notebooks, it's about our Archivist heroine making a deal with a particularly coherent ghost to go to the underworld and find the ghost of his former partner from a time pre(?)-(or during(?))-apocalypse when they were the last surviving human experiments from a terrible superweapon facility. All of which is fine if a little disconnected, and it takes quite a long while for the journey to wend back into relevant non-underworld plot developments for Wasp, but if you enjoy stories about traumatized human weapons reluctantly bonding with each other under stressed-out questing circumstances and don't mind a fair degree of bleakness this might be your jam.
However, I can't stop thinking about the hilarious co-opting of my job title to mean 'tragic ghost hunter.' There are a lot of archivists in fiction whose day-to-day work bears very little resemblance to my own, because not many people actually care about what archivists do and definitely nobody cares about what digital archivists do (except the people who wrote Rogue One, who understood PERFECTLY, thank you Star Wars franchise) but this is probably the most dramatic example. Which is fine! Words can mean anything in the post-apocalypse! It's just also ... very distracting ......
What about you guys? Tell me about the fictional character with the same job title as you whose job least resembles yours!
(Wistfully, I asked the book: but do the notebooks have metadata even? An index? A finding aid? No, apparently just twenty notebooks of disconnected jotted observations. FIELD RESEARCHER WASP.)
Anyway the actual plot of the book isn't even about the notebooks, it's about our Archivist heroine making a deal with a particularly coherent ghost to go to the underworld and find the ghost of his former partner from a time pre(?)-(or during(?))-apocalypse when they were the last surviving human experiments from a terrible superweapon facility. All of which is fine if a little disconnected, and it takes quite a long while for the journey to wend back into relevant non-underworld plot developments for Wasp, but if you enjoy stories about traumatized human weapons reluctantly bonding with each other under stressed-out questing circumstances and don't mind a fair degree of bleakness this might be your jam.
However, I can't stop thinking about the hilarious co-opting of my job title to mean 'tragic ghost hunter.' There are a lot of archivists in fiction whose day-to-day work bears very little resemblance to my own, because not many people actually care about what archivists do and definitely nobody cares about what digital archivists do (except the people who wrote Rogue One, who understood PERFECTLY, thank you Star Wars franchise) but this is probably the most dramatic example. Which is fine! Words can mean anything in the post-apocalypse! It's just also ... very distracting ......
What about you guys? Tell me about the fictional character with the same job title as you whose job least resembles yours!
