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Books: "Carnival" by Elizabeth Bear
Bear's "Carnival" is one of the books that generated a lot of interest in my book poll, and it's one on which I already have a lot of notes (in the form of emails to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
naye while I was reading the book), which makes it relatively simple to write up a reaction/discussion post. Whether you agree or disagree with me, all input is more than welcome, and feel free to mention this to your f'list if you think it's merited; the more, the merrier!
"Carnival", like all of Bear's books that I've read, is complex and multi-layered; the primary plot is a classic SF trope, the old "Planet of the Amazon Women" cliché, in which male explorers visit an isolated, female-dominated society. Here, though, the male ambassadors are both gay (which is the only reason why they're allowed on the planet at all), and the society of the women is neither a utopia nor a dystopia, but something more complicated, somewhere in between. This is a book about culture clash, and revolution, and a whole, whole lot more.
The following discussion contains massive spoilers for the book, and takes for granted that you've already read it.
This was an interesting book for me to read because, ten years ago, I wrote what might be considered a prototype version of the main plot. Mine was the story of a gay male diplomat and his lover, a spy who was trying (though an extremely complicated series of double-crosses) to break free of his socially repressive homeworld, on a formerly-isolated all-female jungle planet that had reluctantly consented to allow a gay man to visit as an envoy. They become caught up in a conflict involving a revolution/assassination by isolationists and an attempted invasion by outside expansionist forces. It's not "Carnival"; mine was much simpler, much more of a sensationalistic adventure story and much less of a political novel. It's still intriguing to see how convergent evolution of ideas can happen. (And there's another novel that I can never finish and sell. Damn!)
This is also not the first time that I've run into the exact same idea in published fiction; shortly before reading "Carnival", a year or so, I read Planet of the Amazon Women by David Moles, and I'm afraid it very heavily influenced how I saw "Carnival", and not in a good way. But I'll get to that a little farther down.
Okay -- the good. It's really a fascinating culture-clash story, and also a break in several ways from traditional SF demographics. In Bear's future, most of the population of Earth were killed by out-of-control nanites. The survivors are all from South America and Africa, so this is about as far as you can get from the all-white futures of Golden Age SF -- there are no white people anymore. The main characters are a same-sex couple, Michelangelo and Valentine, and the heart of the book is their story, their affection for each other and their struggle to get back together and stay together against a backdrop of dawning revolution. It's a spectacularly sad comment on the state of SF that these two factors (that none of the characters are white, and that the primary couple in the book are of the same gender) makes it unique and different -- but that is what we've got.
Possibly my favorite thing about the book is that neither society in the book are portrayed as inherently preferable to the other. They are both flawed and prejudiced in their own way. Earth is patriarchal and homophobic, staid and safe and tightly controlled; New Amazonia is a frontier, where every woman is armed and disagreements are settled via dueling, and, of course, men are little better than slaves. This is not a story of civilized outsiders bringing enlightenment to a "primitive" society, or pulling the veil off a dystopia; but neither is it a story of refugees from a dystopic dictatorship finding sanctuary among the utopians. The book is full of little culture-clash moments -- Angelo and Valentine's horror at the New Amazonians' casual use of animals for food; the Amazonians' equally casual assumptions that their male visitors are violent, incapable of rational thought and other stereotypes that they hold about the male gender. And I really loved how the characters from both cultures wanted to escape, subvert or deconstruct/reconstruct their societies' prejudices and excesses.
Bear is very good at seeding her books with casual references to futuristic technology and culture, then gradually letting the reader know what she's talking about from an insider's perspective. One good example of that is the references to "House", the city/entity that serves and protects the people of New Amazonia. My initial assumption, the first time that Lesa speaks to House, is that "House" is her name for the computer that runs her house or apartment's automatic functions -- a natural assumption to make in a science fiction book. The reality is far more complicated, interesting and alien, but I never felt lost or confused, even as the plot got more and more complicated.
There was one thing that did confuse me, though. And that is the first of my big gripes with the book -- I couldn't tell Valentine and Angelo apart. I had to keep flipping back through the book, trying to remember which names and traits went with which character. For a while I was thinking it was just me, but I wasn't having that problem with most of the major Amazonians (I adored Lesa to no end), and I came to the conclusion that the two characters are virtually identical in their behavior and their narrative voice. They shouldn't be -- from the backgrounds they're given, and the traits we're told they have, they're supposed to be fairly different people -- but I didn't feel that from reading about them. I kept forgetting who I was reading about, or thinking that something had happened to one of them when really it happened to the other. I started getting a clearer idea of who they were close to the end, when they were separated for a while, but they still didn't really feel like they were clearly differentiated as characters. Maybe that's why I had trouble connecting to them -- I didn't feel nearly as much of an affinity for them as I did for Lesa and her family. Maybe that's one reason why the ending felt like a cop-out ... since I really wasn't particularly attached to Vincent and Michelangelo, the last-minute (off-camera!) stay of execution felt more like a deus ex machina cheat than a "Yay! He lived!" moment.
I found the ending a little less of a major let-down after reading a comment that Bear wrote somewhere at her journal -- I'm almost positive that it was in one of the mega-long comment threads to the Racefail posts, and I don't think I'm up to wading through those trying to find it, but it really struck me because this was one of the big problems that I had with the ending of the book. After all the trials and darkness of the earlier parts of the book, it seemed like things fell into place much too easily for them. Not that I hated the characters or wanted things to end unhappily for them, but it felt like they didn't have to work for their happy ending. (This phrase, having to work for your happy ending, is one that I ran across some time ago -- I think it was in a comment that a reader left to the story that I co-wrote withnaye -- and it immediately became part of my fannish lexicon, because I believe it's a perfect summation of why some endings really feel right, and others feel like they're being shoved into the book by authorial fiat. And in this case, after everything they went through in "Carnival", it felt to me like their happy ending was handed to them by coincidence and outside forces, and that felt like a total cheat to me.)
But what Bear pointed out was that she'd intentionally wanted to avoid the cliché of the dead/tragic/separated gay couple -- the dead gay trope (warning: Link leads to TV Tropes, the most addictive website ever devised by the evil geniuses of the Internet!). It's a gigantic cliché (and a harmful and pervasive one) that gay characters never get a happy ending; they tend to end up dead, or, at best, alone, while the hetero characters generally get their happy ending. As Bear said, paraphrased since I can't find the comment, if she'd killed off Angelo at the end, she would have been a grade-A asshole. Okay, true. I will give her that, and I feel more forgiving towards what I saw as a big cop-out of an ending. But I still wish that she'd worked harder to sell the ending, rather than simply handing it to us (literally, in a way, in the form of a letter to Valentine). Granted, I'm not a romance fan, so I really need to have my couples justified rather than just ending up together for no particular reason other that True Love; take this, therefore, with a grain of salt.
Characterization is the first of my two big problems with the book; the other is world-building. This is where Bear's book really suffered from me having read Moles' short story first.
I really liked how the Assessment had wiped out the industrialized nations and left a non-Caucasian world. The thing about Moles' Amazon Women story (and others in the same 'verse), however, is that he does a really fantastic job of writing a future where Islam is the primary religion, where non-Western cultural forces dominate, and the whole place just feels subtly different from most SF -- the way people dress and talk, the foods they eat, their behavior. The universe of "Carnival" still felt like it had been colonized by Europeans even though all the Europeans were dead. I know that Bear was juggling a whole lot of different themes in the book, and if she'd added a religion and culture that's rather foreign to most Westerners on top of everything else, it might have become overwhelming -- but it's very odd to be told that most of the survivors were Muslims and Catholics from the southern hemisphere, but to see little sign of that anywhere ... except perhaps in the homeworld's attitudes towards women and gays. This perhaps skirts the border of stereotype, but I don't consider it necessarily unrealistic, except that it seems to be the only area in which Earth is not rather explicitly coded European/American/Western in culture. There is even the detail that the survivors of the great purge took on European names, which struck me as odd in the extreme; I can see no reason at all why someone whose ancestors and family had never been anywhere near Europe -- had, in fact, been killed, marginalized and oppressed by people from Europe -- should choose European names as a tribute to the dead. It seemed gratuitous and odd. I honestly don't know if I'd have noticed it quite as strongly if I hadn't just been reading Moles' stories of burka-wearing coca-leaf traders and Muslim Russians, however; his future just feels so much more believable for a universe with a reduced and minimal North America and Europe that it really made the failings of Bear's world-building stand out sharply for me.
I did like the book; I liked it a lot as a story of dueling dystopias, with some intentional subversion of SF tropes. Tough women in a quasi-old-West frontier setting with guns are pretty nearly a bulletproof kink for me (Lesa! ♥). But I really wish that it hadn't fallen down so hard on the characterization and world-building; I can't figure out if she tried too hard (and therefore ended up handling her main characters and her setting with kid gloves, and not managing to make either one come alive), or if she didn't try hard enough, or if the book just suffered from having too much information crammed into too few pages to really do justice to all of it. Whatever combination of factors were at work, I wish her main characters had been able to stand out as individuals the way that her secondary characters did, and I wish that her setting, her world-building, had been more sharply drawn and less of a sanitized pseudo-European backdrop on which to hang the events of the story.
I haven't really addressed the aliens -- the Dragons, the khir. Honestly, though I found the revelation about Kii an unexpected and pleasant surprise, I thought that everything with the Dragons was more of a distraction from what I saw as the main plot (the culture clash between New Amazonia and Earth and Valentine's planet; the Assessors; the revolution; the human cultural stuff, basically) than an aid to it. All of it just felt like a bit too much -- like it would have been a stronger book, a more focused book, if some of the many plot elements had been dropped out to bring out the rest more powerfully.
naye while I was reading the book), which makes it relatively simple to write up a reaction/discussion post. Whether you agree or disagree with me, all input is more than welcome, and feel free to mention this to your f'list if you think it's merited; the more, the merrier!"Carnival", like all of Bear's books that I've read, is complex and multi-layered; the primary plot is a classic SF trope, the old "Planet of the Amazon Women" cliché, in which male explorers visit an isolated, female-dominated society. Here, though, the male ambassadors are both gay (which is the only reason why they're allowed on the planet at all), and the society of the women is neither a utopia nor a dystopia, but something more complicated, somewhere in between. This is a book about culture clash, and revolution, and a whole, whole lot more.
The following discussion contains massive spoilers for the book, and takes for granted that you've already read it.
This was an interesting book for me to read because, ten years ago, I wrote what might be considered a prototype version of the main plot. Mine was the story of a gay male diplomat and his lover, a spy who was trying (though an extremely complicated series of double-crosses) to break free of his socially repressive homeworld, on a formerly-isolated all-female jungle planet that had reluctantly consented to allow a gay man to visit as an envoy. They become caught up in a conflict involving a revolution/assassination by isolationists and an attempted invasion by outside expansionist forces. It's not "Carnival"; mine was much simpler, much more of a sensationalistic adventure story and much less of a political novel. It's still intriguing to see how convergent evolution of ideas can happen. (And there's another novel that I can never finish and sell. Damn!)
This is also not the first time that I've run into the exact same idea in published fiction; shortly before reading "Carnival", a year or so, I read Planet of the Amazon Women by David Moles, and I'm afraid it very heavily influenced how I saw "Carnival", and not in a good way. But I'll get to that a little farther down.
Okay -- the good. It's really a fascinating culture-clash story, and also a break in several ways from traditional SF demographics. In Bear's future, most of the population of Earth were killed by out-of-control nanites. The survivors are all from South America and Africa, so this is about as far as you can get from the all-white futures of Golden Age SF -- there are no white people anymore. The main characters are a same-sex couple, Michelangelo and Valentine, and the heart of the book is their story, their affection for each other and their struggle to get back together and stay together against a backdrop of dawning revolution. It's a spectacularly sad comment on the state of SF that these two factors (that none of the characters are white, and that the primary couple in the book are of the same gender) makes it unique and different -- but that is what we've got.
Possibly my favorite thing about the book is that neither society in the book are portrayed as inherently preferable to the other. They are both flawed and prejudiced in their own way. Earth is patriarchal and homophobic, staid and safe and tightly controlled; New Amazonia is a frontier, where every woman is armed and disagreements are settled via dueling, and, of course, men are little better than slaves. This is not a story of civilized outsiders bringing enlightenment to a "primitive" society, or pulling the veil off a dystopia; but neither is it a story of refugees from a dystopic dictatorship finding sanctuary among the utopians. The book is full of little culture-clash moments -- Angelo and Valentine's horror at the New Amazonians' casual use of animals for food; the Amazonians' equally casual assumptions that their male visitors are violent, incapable of rational thought and other stereotypes that they hold about the male gender. And I really loved how the characters from both cultures wanted to escape, subvert or deconstruct/reconstruct their societies' prejudices and excesses.
Bear is very good at seeding her books with casual references to futuristic technology and culture, then gradually letting the reader know what she's talking about from an insider's perspective. One good example of that is the references to "House", the city/entity that serves and protects the people of New Amazonia. My initial assumption, the first time that Lesa speaks to House, is that "House" is her name for the computer that runs her house or apartment's automatic functions -- a natural assumption to make in a science fiction book. The reality is far more complicated, interesting and alien, but I never felt lost or confused, even as the plot got more and more complicated.
There was one thing that did confuse me, though. And that is the first of my big gripes with the book -- I couldn't tell Valentine and Angelo apart. I had to keep flipping back through the book, trying to remember which names and traits went with which character. For a while I was thinking it was just me, but I wasn't having that problem with most of the major Amazonians (I adored Lesa to no end), and I came to the conclusion that the two characters are virtually identical in their behavior and their narrative voice. They shouldn't be -- from the backgrounds they're given, and the traits we're told they have, they're supposed to be fairly different people -- but I didn't feel that from reading about them. I kept forgetting who I was reading about, or thinking that something had happened to one of them when really it happened to the other. I started getting a clearer idea of who they were close to the end, when they were separated for a while, but they still didn't really feel like they were clearly differentiated as characters. Maybe that's why I had trouble connecting to them -- I didn't feel nearly as much of an affinity for them as I did for Lesa and her family. Maybe that's one reason why the ending felt like a cop-out ... since I really wasn't particularly attached to Vincent and Michelangelo, the last-minute (off-camera!) stay of execution felt more like a deus ex machina cheat than a "Yay! He lived!" moment.
I found the ending a little less of a major let-down after reading a comment that Bear wrote somewhere at her journal -- I'm almost positive that it was in one of the mega-long comment threads to the Racefail posts, and I don't think I'm up to wading through those trying to find it, but it really struck me because this was one of the big problems that I had with the ending of the book. After all the trials and darkness of the earlier parts of the book, it seemed like things fell into place much too easily for them. Not that I hated the characters or wanted things to end unhappily for them, but it felt like they didn't have to work for their happy ending. (This phrase, having to work for your happy ending, is one that I ran across some time ago -- I think it was in a comment that a reader left to the story that I co-wrote with
naye -- and it immediately became part of my fannish lexicon, because I believe it's a perfect summation of why some endings really feel right, and others feel like they're being shoved into the book by authorial fiat. And in this case, after everything they went through in "Carnival", it felt to me like their happy ending was handed to them by coincidence and outside forces, and that felt like a total cheat to me.)But what Bear pointed out was that she'd intentionally wanted to avoid the cliché of the dead/tragic/separated gay couple -- the dead gay trope (warning: Link leads to TV Tropes, the most addictive website ever devised by the evil geniuses of the Internet!). It's a gigantic cliché (and a harmful and pervasive one) that gay characters never get a happy ending; they tend to end up dead, or, at best, alone, while the hetero characters generally get their happy ending. As Bear said, paraphrased since I can't find the comment, if she'd killed off Angelo at the end, she would have been a grade-A asshole. Okay, true. I will give her that, and I feel more forgiving towards what I saw as a big cop-out of an ending. But I still wish that she'd worked harder to sell the ending, rather than simply handing it to us (literally, in a way, in the form of a letter to Valentine). Granted, I'm not a romance fan, so I really need to have my couples justified rather than just ending up together for no particular reason other that True Love; take this, therefore, with a grain of salt.
Characterization is the first of my two big problems with the book; the other is world-building. This is where Bear's book really suffered from me having read Moles' short story first.
I really liked how the Assessment had wiped out the industrialized nations and left a non-Caucasian world. The thing about Moles' Amazon Women story (and others in the same 'verse), however, is that he does a really fantastic job of writing a future where Islam is the primary religion, where non-Western cultural forces dominate, and the whole place just feels subtly different from most SF -- the way people dress and talk, the foods they eat, their behavior. The universe of "Carnival" still felt like it had been colonized by Europeans even though all the Europeans were dead. I know that Bear was juggling a whole lot of different themes in the book, and if she'd added a religion and culture that's rather foreign to most Westerners on top of everything else, it might have become overwhelming -- but it's very odd to be told that most of the survivors were Muslims and Catholics from the southern hemisphere, but to see little sign of that anywhere ... except perhaps in the homeworld's attitudes towards women and gays. This perhaps skirts the border of stereotype, but I don't consider it necessarily unrealistic, except that it seems to be the only area in which Earth is not rather explicitly coded European/American/Western in culture. There is even the detail that the survivors of the great purge took on European names, which struck me as odd in the extreme; I can see no reason at all why someone whose ancestors and family had never been anywhere near Europe -- had, in fact, been killed, marginalized and oppressed by people from Europe -- should choose European names as a tribute to the dead. It seemed gratuitous and odd. I honestly don't know if I'd have noticed it quite as strongly if I hadn't just been reading Moles' stories of burka-wearing coca-leaf traders and Muslim Russians, however; his future just feels so much more believable for a universe with a reduced and minimal North America and Europe that it really made the failings of Bear's world-building stand out sharply for me.
I did like the book; I liked it a lot as a story of dueling dystopias, with some intentional subversion of SF tropes. Tough women in a quasi-old-West frontier setting with guns are pretty nearly a bulletproof kink for me (Lesa! ♥). But I really wish that it hadn't fallen down so hard on the characterization and world-building; I can't figure out if she tried too hard (and therefore ended up handling her main characters and her setting with kid gloves, and not managing to make either one come alive), or if she didn't try hard enough, or if the book just suffered from having too much information crammed into too few pages to really do justice to all of it. Whatever combination of factors were at work, I wish her main characters had been able to stand out as individuals the way that her secondary characters did, and I wish that her setting, her world-building, had been more sharply drawn and less of a sanitized pseudo-European backdrop on which to hang the events of the story.
I haven't really addressed the aliens -- the Dragons, the khir. Honestly, though I found the revelation about Kii an unexpected and pleasant surprise, I thought that everything with the Dragons was more of a distraction from what I saw as the main plot (the culture clash between New Amazonia and Earth and Valentine's planet; the Assessors; the revolution; the human cultural stuff, basically) than an aid to it. All of it just felt like a bit too much -- like it would have been a stronger book, a more focused book, if some of the many plot elements had been dropped out to bring out the rest more powerfully.
no subject
Then again, I'm not a big fan of books with more than two or three POVs at the most, and she likes to go down the route of more like six or seven at least. That makes her Promethean Age books so hard for me to read, because at least two of those POVs I don't care about at all (one I actively dislike). And yeah, while Carnival was a nice change to read because it was mainstream science-fiction featuring a gay couple, I had the same problem you did: difficulties both in telling them apart and caring about what happened to them.
/utterly pointless comment
no subject
no subject
The dragons bored me. They took away from the focus on the compare and contrast of the two cultures, which was fascinating. The ideas behind the dragons and the deliberate mental crippling of their young were also intriguing, but almost out of left wing in regard to the rest of the book. One two many ideas mishmashed together and just as I get interested, it switches to one of the other viewpoints and I never got the depth I wanted.
I admire Bear for avoiding the cliché gay tragedy, but I really dislike the cliché she uses to avoid it: the genius hacker child. I loved that Lesa wanted her son to be able to use his brain; I absolutely hate that he's brought in as a deus ex machina to separate Kii from the consensus. That's aside from finding that action to be a major ethics fail. No one addresses the skeevy aspects of that; I think the author's bias shows through, Westerners see free will/independence as always 'good' and anything else as compulsion/tyranny/non-consensual.
I never felt any real connection between Michelangelo and Valentine (is it really Valentine? I have a good memory for characters I like and the fact I can't remember is an example of how cardboard I found these two.) Plus, despite them being (oooh, shocking, so transgressive - insert your own sarcasm here) gay, there wasn't a thing about the characters or their relationship that distinguished from if she'd written that it was a society that prized body hair clashing with one that had everyone depilated at puberty. She didn't sell me on the gay in that respect. Which I think the book needed to do, considering the premise is both of these men are transgressing against the mores of their own society; being gay is not unremarkable for them.
I had difficulties reconciling the repression and demonizing of religion in the service of making the Earth culture so dystopic. I didn't buy it in the context of post Assessment. With distance from the book, I don't even buy that Assessment as she postulated would have left any kind of technological society in place within fifty years. Civilization on any level requires constant maintenance just to retain the infrastructures.
On a personal basis, I found the lack of feeling and emotion in the book disappointing. Full of ideas, but if that's all I'm getting, then I'd rather get a non fiction book on those subjects or ideas, yanno?
Actually, Carnival is sort of like some of the crappy SF genre shows on TV that I write fanfic for: way more potential in the premise than there is pay-off. You know the reaction: I'd love to see what someone else did with this plot/idea/set of characters. In this case, the plot.
Comment part one
*nods* Like we talked about in that other thread, this seems to be a general thing with Bear's books. It's hard for me to figure out how much of it is just my personal taste; I've enjoyed sprawling epics with casts of thousands, but in general I prefer my books tightly focused with one or two major viewpoint characters. There are a few authors who can still pull off rapid POV shifts -- Terry Pratchett, I think, is a master of juggling large casts and complex plots that still play off each other and tie up satisfactorily at the end. Bear ... it's definitely her individual style (since all the books of hers that I've read have been like this) but it's a style that doesn't particularly resonate with me.
Actually, a lot of modern SF and fantasy feels kind of sprawling and unfocused to me, compared to the genre fiction from a generation ago. Tobias Buckell's books are like that to some extent; so are a number of the other books I've picked up over the last couple of years. Even short fiction -- I've been reading quite a bit more of that (online) than I used to, and I still see a lot of rapid scene or POV shifts. It's really noticeable to shift from that to, say, Le Guin or Butler or Zelazny and see how much more control the past generation of SF writers exercised over POV.
I admire Bear for avoiding the cliché gay tragedy, but I really dislike the cliché she uses to avoid it: the genius hacker child. I loved that Lesa wanted her son to be able to use his brain; I absolutely hate that he's brought in as a deus ex machina to separate Kii from the consensus.
I hadn't even thought about the genius hacker trope in this book -- my god, there's so much in the book that it doesn't even seem to have registered. I agree with you, though, about what they did to Kii; I remember feeling disturbed by it, though maybe not as much as you did (since it didn't register strongly enough that I remembered it when I was doing the above write-up). But it did feel very unethical -- a sort of mind-rape, actually. And you've got a good point about the unquestioned Western view of free will. Actually I found it interesting how the Amazon planet has kind of an Old West vibe to it in general -- the gunslingers, the overall "living on the frontier" mentality that they seem to have. If this had been brought out a little more in the book, I might think she was making a meta point about that sort of mentality, but I didn't get the impression that we were supposed to view what was done to Kii as a bad thing (though I could be mistaken).
Comment part two
Oh, interesting! I hadn't thought about that, but you're right -- I wonder if part of the reason why they're so hard to empathize with is that their backstory is such a blatant violation of "show, don't tell"? We're told that things were hella difficult for them back on Earth, but during the entire book they are on New Amazonia, where their relationship is perfectly fine, and that's all that we see. Besides, the characters themselves are so privileged in their society in pretty much every other way (they're both very well off, in both money and prestige; one is the son of the most important woman on his planet, for pete's sake) that it's hard to see their separation as the grand tragedy that it's apparently supposed to be -- I hope this comment doesn't come across as dismissive of the struggles of RL gay men and women, but that's just the thing: there doesn't seem to have been a whole lot of struggle. From what I remember of the book's description of their backstory, their lot in life was more like that of a couple of gay 19th-century noblemen than a couple of gay steel mill workers in 1950 -- about the worst thing they had to face was social disapproval, not, say, having the crap beat out of them.
I had difficulties reconciling the repression and demonizing of religion in the service of making the Earth culture so dystopic. I didn't buy it in the context of post Assessment.
I hadn't really thought about it until I was writing the above post, which really got me thinking about the world-building and realizing that the only area in which we see the influence of the characters' supposed non-Western cultural heritage is that their society is very repressive towards women and gays. The implication that knocking out Western society also knocked us back a few centuries in gender relations is kind of repugnant to me, especially since it seems to directly contradict the book's (commendable) main subtext that you can take all the white people out of the picture and the world keeps going along just fine. Except it doesn't, apparently, since all the feminists and gay-rights activists were in the West? I think it would be less odious if their culture were better developed; as it is, the only thing they really seem to have gotten from their cultural heritage is prejudice.
With distance from the book, I don't even buy that Assessment as she postulated would have left any kind of technological society in place within fifty years.
Well, she did say that most of the people who survived Assessment were intelligentsia of one sort or another, scientists and artists and such. Actually, though, this raises another interesting point with regards to the book's shaky world-building -- it's likely that most scientists and engineers and such types, in the near future of our world when Assessment occurred, would have been educated largely in Western modes of thought, either actually in the U.S. or Europe, or in universities in their own countries that had been founded mostly by Westerners and used Western modes of instruction. I'm not sure if this makes things a little better, by helping to provide a sort of backwards explanation for why the world seems so culturally Western when it's not supposed to be, or if it makes things worse. The adopting of Western names, in particular, rubbed me the wrong way in a major way -- there's a weird feeling that Earth society in the book worships the West, in a way, which is really bizarre in a book that is supposedly about pointing out that the world could do just fine without the white folks.
I do feel that a lot of the problems with the book could have been avoided with deeper and more detailed world-building and character development -- that its problem is not that it's inherently flawed, but rather that it just wasn't given enough space to adequately develop the concepts that were introduced. There are too many ideas packed into the book to give any of them enough room.
Re: Comment part two
Mmm, yes, I agree. I know lately there is a lot of criticism of the overblown five book mega opus science fiction series out there, but some ideas need to be developed in detail, context illustrated, rather than summarily reported in a paragraph or two. There's a difference between implying a greater world with a throw away line and telling the reader 'there's a greater world'.
I wouldn't spend this much time figuring out what was wrong with the book for me if it had been an utter failure - I'll keep buying Bear's books. Interesting though flawed is better than smug routine, after all. I just wish she'd delve a little deeper in the world building and the character building.
I've been reading science fiction for almost thirty years (that's a scary thought) and I can say it's the character interaction and world building that bring me back for a reread ten years later, because one decade's mind blowing new idea is the next's ho-hum.
no subject
Oh, certainly. Actually, flawed but interesting makes for some of the best discussions -- the next book that I'll be writing up is probably Kindred, a book I adored and have nothing but praise for, which makes me a little nervous about actually finding enough to say. I love picking over a promising but flawed canon; it's very fascinating. Something that is just bad -- there would be nothing to say about it.
I've been reading science fiction for almost thirty years (that's a scary thought) and I can say it's the character interaction and world building that bring me back for a reread ten years later, because one decade's mind blowing new idea is the next's ho-hum.
It's going on 25 years for me, and yeah, me too. SF (especially the sort I grew up on, Farmer and Niven and Bradbury and such) is a literature of ideas, and a lot of times character falls a distant second to those ideas, but the books that I've kept through all my moves, that I keep re-reading, are my happy place because of their vivid characters and fascinating worlds that I can fall into.