I persevered all the way to the end of this very, very long book. Not just physically long, it felt long. There's a lot of landmarks and players, but the plot in the end is pretty ordinary galactic fantasy. It is modernized with sapphic romance, but we've had that around long enough for it not to be an automatic qualifier. Space in this series is a very pure metaphor for the ocean--the battles give the book a lift but not really enough. Elliot has fallen in love with Sun, I think--the book tends toward hagiography for Sun, especially toward the end. Lots of hyperbolic descriptions of royal responsibility and honor. If you're pushing the boundaries in speculative fiction now, you're pushing back on the very colonial ideas of empire and royalty that Elliot uncritically embraces. Having the conquerors have an Asian, as opposed to European/Celtic origins, does not let this off the hook. The length just isn't justified--it's mostly a chronicle of Sun's conquests, with some clever interludes from her companions. I kept on, looking for a story, and I'm not sure that really ever happened--just a collection of incidents with Sun at the center.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Semiosis, by Sue Burke
I think I liked this better than most reviewers. What I got out of it was an exploration of how human colonists would communicate and share ...
-
There are some interesting theories out there on what Gene Wolfe's "The Ziggurat" short story means . Indeed, Wolfe is heavil...
-
Michael Swanwick is an inspired author, and has some brilliant work out there. He has a series of very short stories called The Sleep of Re...
-
The introduction to Slow Tuesday Night is by Gardner Dozios, the great editor, and he tells us that "only those stories that were the ...
No comments:
Post a Comment