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.
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.
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.