Remembered almost nothing about the previous installments so there was some early whiplash. More fun ideas and world building, but ultimately I suspecRemembered almost nothing about the previous installments so there was some early whiplash. More fun ideas and world building, but ultimately I suspect this will be as forgettable as its predecessors. Did it make the slow creep toward the grave a little more amusing? Sure....more
Continuing a trend in Image lines that look real pretty but are mostly hollow. This mishmash of manga tropes didn't quite have enough story or charactContinuing a trend in Image lines that look real pretty but are mostly hollow. This mishmash of manga tropes didn't quite have enough story or character to keep me from falling asleep for several consecutive nights, but it was diverting enough for me to keep trying. The art is luscious, but the action was kind of hard to follow in parts. It does feature a nearly all-female cast and was made by two women, all of which are great, but winning the Bechdel Olympics is really just a good start. And yes, I mostly just bought this for the Neil Gaiman blurb. Weirdly, there's also a Cosmo blurb. Cosmo?!
Totally unrelated: while I was perusing this at my local comic book shop, the guy at the counter received an unmarked package of monkfish from a friend. He was quite pleased, and I was quite pleased that he was quite pleased.
Merged review:
Continuing a trend in Image lines that look real pretty but are mostly hollow. This mishmash of manga tropes didn't quite have enough story or character to keep me from falling asleep for several consecutive nights, but it was diverting enough for me to keep trying. The art is luscious, but the action was kind of hard to follow in parts. It does feature a nearly all-female cast and was made by two women, all of which are great, but winning the Bechdel Olympics is really just a good start. And yes, I mostly just bought this for the Neil Gaiman blurb. Weirdly, there's also a Cosmo blurb. Cosmo?!
Totally unrelated: while I was perusing this at my local comic book shop, the guy at the counter received an unmarked package of monkfish from a friend. He was quite pleased, and I was quite pleased that he was quite pleased....more
**spoiler alert** Lots of fun in this book with lots of pairs: Sophie / Bianca, Sophia / Mouth, day half of the planet / night half of the planet, Xio**spoiler alert** Lots of fun in this book with lots of pairs: Sophie / Bianca, Sophia / Mouth, day half of the planet / night half of the planet, Xiosphant / Argelo, human / gelet. The slow reveal of the gelet and their culture and Mouth's slow demystifying of the Citizens were the best parts for me. Bianca and Sophie were a bit of a stretch. Hard to summon much sympathy for a narcissist and her stan. Mouth's relationships had more potential, but I didn't feel like I'd gotten to know Alyssa very well by the end aside from her snarky badassery.
I wish some of the many ideas had been developed further. The inherent dualism of a tidally locked planet kind of just went to "find your person" which seems like a waste of a great set. The obsession with time in Xiosphant and the adamant rejection of time in Argelo could have structured its own commentary about over- and under-acknowledgement of universal constraints, but it too was left on the drafting table.
A friend recommended I skip the human chapters entirely, possibly good advice for some, but I didn't find my tetrapodal brethren quite that disappointA friend recommended I skip the human chapters entirely, possibly good advice for some, but I didn't find my tetrapodal brethren quite that disappointing here, even if they weren't terribly compelling. The spiders are the stars, though, and the main reason to give this book a try. I wanted to know what happened to the spitters, or any of the other sentient to semi-sentient arthropods in the book. Do I want to know enough to read another book? Not sure.
(view spoiler)[Is it worth asking if this adds anything to the uplift / exaltation idea that David Brin's books didn't already explore? I haven't read those in over a decade so my memory's fuzzy, but I feel like the second trilogy dealt with undirected uplift analogous to this book. Not unlike android / Pinocchio tropes, the main idea is that humanity's offspring are always wondrously similar and alien from us. Sometimes they want to kill us, sometimes they want to know us, sometimes they want nothing to do with us. I guess the idea here that they want to co-opt us is kind of novel, in a Borg-ian "add your biological and technological uniqueness to our own" kind of way, but I'm not yet convinced there's much more juice to squeeze out of parenthood metaphors. (hide spoiler)]...more
**spoiler alert** Not gonna a lie, I was disappointed that Kuang made Letty a traitor, like the one remaining white character. If Letty could have bee**spoiler alert** Not gonna a lie, I was disappointed that Kuang made Letty a traitor, like the one remaining white character. If Letty could have been convinced, nonviolence was still on the table, but without her, there was just violence, which, to her credit, is where Kuang went, and, you know, should not have been a surprise to me given the title. And I know, she set things up well, Letty acted in character and was not reduced to *just* a white traitor but a white traitor whose reasons for treachery were both personally understandable and representative of the flaws of whiteness sensu lato, but still, I felt let down not by Letty but by the author. I don't think nonviolent change is so easily dismissed. Anthony's incrementalism was not given a fair shake
Also, since identity is so central to this book, may I just say that I find the conceit of the tortured halfbreed annoying. Those of us with parents of different races / cultures / whatever are not, by definition, torn between them, always wondering where our allegiances lie. I don't feel that way, and almost never have, and I could list the reasons why, but I think it's enough to say that I and nearly every other person in the same situation I know don't dwell on these issues nearly as much as our fictional equivalents seem to. I'm not trying to devalue Robin here. His situation was f'd and he had good reason to feel conflicted, but he's unlike anyone I've met.
I have one more complaint: in a book so fixated on language, in which all characters speak British English, by an author who lived in Britain while writing this, how was the phrase "stepped foot in" allowed not once but several times? I guess there's some controversy regarding its usage, and I don't have access to the full OED, but my abridged OED mentions "set foot on" under "set" and "foot" but there is no mention of "step foot on" under "step" or "foot." Maybe this was done intentionally to anger prescriptivist snobs and if so, touché, Kuang. A master stroke. Or maybe I'm just plain wrong and someone will point out that I have forgotten to wear pants today.
Ok, ASIDE from all that, I had a grand time reading this and loved all the etymologies. The characters were individuated and the author's adoration of and discomfort with her subject matter was rich and propulsive. Fantasy lovers with even a hint of the word nerd gene will probably feel the same.
[Note to self and others: idiomatic's review operates on a higher level and is very, very sharp]...more
Many reviewers seem to describe this book as prescient, but I finally picked it up because it was mentioned in Mike Davis's Ecology of Fear, a book abMany reviewers seem to describe this book as prescient, but I finally picked it up because it was mentioned in Mike Davis's Ecology of Fear, a book about the many natural disasters that beset Southern California and our society's enthusiasm for exacerbating their destructive effects, and in that context, and in the context of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Parable doesn't read as prophetic so much as sensible planning. From the perspective of the 2020s, I view the 1990s as a pre-9/11 utopia of economic growth, bountiful resources, and contained global conflict, but I suspect that's just present bias. Readers in the Trump era probably latched on to the fictional President Jarret's use of "Make American Great Again," but Butler would have heard those words from the lips of Goldwater and Reagan. In her all-too-short 1993 interview with Terry Gross, she says she'd finished the book months before the LA riots and thus they weren't a direct influence, but that means the book incubated in the same milieu as the riots. Maybe her rigorous, sensible extrapolations were the same thing as prescience, but I feel like that word is often synonymous with Cassandra-like prophesy, predictions that none but the supernaturally gifted could make. Butler wasn't a prophet. She did the work.
And as a result of that work, it is impossible to read this book in California in the 2020s and not feel its world is just a few mega fires, pandemics, and violent political actions away from us, like we too might be walking a highway toward Canada in a year or two, like we're seeing that world through a ripped curtain. Now is a great time to read this book and Butler generally, not just because we need to understand and pay homage to minority authors that laid the groundwork for today's flourish of diversity in SF, but because Butler not only helped shaped the way we think today, she looked at today's problems with a determination that we struggle to summon. We don't want to genuinely contemplate society's fall unless it's a melodramatic hero fantasy, but Butler did.
Having read Kindred, Sower, and Talents, I feel like Butler shared Le Guin's interest in scifi as sociological experimentation and expression, but Butler seems like more of a realist, a "hard sociological SF" author if you will, always grounding her work in our world. Comparisons between them seem necessary, but I wonder, did they talk? Read each other? Review each other?...more
I've enjoyed El-Mohtar's run as the New York Times scifi reviewer, so I was curious to learn what her own work was like. Alas, I feel none the wiser hI've enjoyed El-Mohtar's run as the New York Times scifi reviewer, so I was curious to learn what her own work was like. Alas, I feel none the wiser having finished as there wasn't much to chew on aside from an unconvincing epistolary love affair and some excessively gilt prose. I was rather fond of the turn "apophenic as a haruspex" as I'd only recently learned the word "apophenic" and "haruspex" was quite new to me. Fun enough to finish, at least....more
I think this is what I wish Always Coming Home was like, a narrative ethnography. It works: you learn about life in the Fleet, food, sex, death, familI think this is what I wish Always Coming Home was like, a narrative ethnography. It works: you learn about life in the Fleet, food, sex, death, family. It's charming, like the first book in the series, but also like the first book it doesn't seem to reach far enough, create stakes on par with what to us seem like its extraordinary context. That may be Chambers' point: to keep the narrative on a human scale, because real people don't spend their lives explicitly wondering what it means to be human. But I think as a reader I want a broader theme like that. I loved the recollection of the Fleet's first encounter with aliens and that everyone's attempts to roll out the red carpet was sort of shabby even by human standards, and deeply offensive to the extremely visually attuned aliens. At what point does something like that become a point of shame for all of humanity, or does it even? The alien ethnographer's occasional conflicts with humans also revealed some of these shoals, but I kind of wanted the ship to crash, if you will. Narrative explosions don't seem to interest Chambers that much, though, which is certainly interesting. I'm eager to read more of her work....more
My favorite of Chambers' so far, perhaps due to the closer focus on just two characters. Like the other books I've read in this series, there aren't aMy favorite of Chambers' so far, perhaps due to the closer focus on just two characters. Like the other books I've read in this series, there aren't any bad characters, and yet there is evil lurking around the corner, in this case in the people who enslaved Jane (or rather created her to be a slave), and the society that permits sentient AIs to be slaves. Chambers is more directly concerned with these forces here than in The Long Way or Record, and had more opportunity and perhaps even reason to embody them in characters that could be addressed or judged. In Record the problems are generational trauma and cultural decline, pretty tough to stuff into an avatar, but here she could have easily added a politician or academic advocating for AI control (or an evil AI), or an actual member of the society that created Jane, but these forces remain dispersed or distant. Why? Does she not want to give them space on the page? Are they best perceived indirectly through their effects?
I also find it weird that there is absolutely no question about the sentience of the AIs. I guess that's in line with all of the GC sentient species: they could all be humans in suits. But it does simplify what could be a more involving ethical conundrum. I feel like Chambers took a few steps in this direction by making Jane more machine-like, both in the fact that she was designed to perform a task and performing related tasks is an unquestioned comfort for her, but maybe it would have been a more fruitful mental stretch if Owl and Sidra took more work to empathize with.
These are pretty tiny nits, though. I should read something more recent by Chambers. I definitely feel like I've got the feel for what she wanted out of the Wayfarers, maybe her other books go off in different directions....more
**spoiler alert** Diverting, but pretty much the entire book concerns the slaughter of sentient aliens, with a single chapter devoted to some hand-wri**spoiler alert** Diverting, but pretty much the entire book concerns the slaughter of sentient aliens, with a single chapter devoted to some hand-wringing that was resolved by the gruesome death of the one guy who idiotically tries to, you know, talk to the aliens. Glad I wasn't that guy, but wow, now I feel much better about murdering all those people! The love story was moronic and unearned. Really? She's a clone of your wife but, shock, she still loves you because, I guess, reasons? And ugh, the names. Like, dude, I can see in the acknowledgments that you know people with a smorgasbord of names, names like Koncz, Larbalestier, Mohanraj, and Zorn (Zorn!), and yet almost every single character has the blandest American names imaginable (John Perry, Harry Wilson, Sam McCain, Sarah O'Connell, occasionally with Ruiz or Gonzales thrown in). Mix it up! The future is not American, and America is not Leave it to Beaver.
There were a lot of ways this could have been more than some loud noises and chest thumping. Could you be a better young person after living a full life? What would it mean for an ancient civilization to inhabit the analog of a younger body? Can you have an actual human relationship with the alien-hybrid clone of your dead wife and what would be like if it wasn't just wish fulfillment? What if humanity is the alien-hybrid clone of another sentient species and the originals want to get to know us?
This definitely made me want to read Heinlein's military scifi, because there are actually some thoughtful ideas there right? Squeezed in between the misogynism and splattering aliens?...more
Only for the diehard Le Guin fan, which maybe I am, but not to the extent of reading poetry. I actually read much of the ethnographic material since iOnly for the diehard Le Guin fan, which maybe I am, but not to the extent of reading poetry. I actually read much of the ethnographic material since it concerns a landscape I live in, but even I have my limits. The narrative elements are more compelling ways to explore the world, but not in the sense that the characters or the writing are at all interesting, just that reading a story about a bunch of dudes who travel south to haggle over some cotton is a little easier than reading a treatise on inter-ethnic economic relationships....more
Impossible-to-resist cover, plus I love Canticle for Leibowitz, but the naked misogyny was too much to finish. In one story a man and a woman realize Impossible-to-resist cover, plus I love Canticle for Leibowitz, but the naked misogyny was too much to finish. In one story a man and a woman realize they can read each others thoughts so he decides to rape her to propagate their unique gifts and she telepathically causes him to get hit by a bus, but the conclusion is that she's lonely without him.
Is it worth reading "The Darfstellar"? It won a Hugo, but that was in 1955......more
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