Review: Foxhunt
So I read this book. It was on a list of solarpunk novels made by the people at Tor. Finished it a few weeks ago but am writing up the review now.
My rating is "Not terrible, but okay."
Like, okay. It's certainly solarpunk. The premise is intuitively interesting--woman gets targeted by bounty hunter and tries to figure out why they're after her. Problem is the rest of the plot.
Orfeus, our protagonist is a musician who's life is shattered when aforementioned bounty hunter, a member of the Order of the Vengeful Wild, targets her. They chase her around a few towns, and eventually she decides to join them because she hopes to figure out why the fuck they're targeting her. Ultimately turns out that the boss of the Order of the Vengeful Wild made the contract to target her, in the hopes of luring her in as his replacement. Which requires that she kill him, rather than that he just retire. This is dropped at the end of the book without much explanation or dealing with the consequences.
There is a subplot about disappearing people and medical experiments which is frankly irrelevant for my review.
Anyway, at multiple times, I found myself wondering why the Order was organizationally incompetent, and feeling that they didn't fit with the setting.
Here we've got this band of self-appointed vigilantes. They are, it's made clear, feared by the populace as a whole but enough people think well of them to do them favors and give them stuff for them to continue operating. In otherwords, we're supposed to think of them as Batman. You wouldn't invite Batman over for dinner but you're glad he exists.
This poses something of a problem because literally everyone in the Order seems to be nuts.
They are apparently incapable of following a leader unless they kill the old leader, which seems like a poor idea imported from modern werewolf urban fantasy rather than a logical thing for a band of vigilantes to think. Despite their official purpose being to protect society and nature from harmful individuals--by killing them if necessary--they take bounties, and they won't tell the public who called in the bounty (reasonable, I suppose) or why they're doing it. This is, of course, an excellent way to utterly destroy trust: Kill or hurt people for unstated reasons.
They seem to be rather uninterested in the actual cause they're supposed to be championing, and more interested in fighting.
Apparently they will take in people who were their targets and train them as members. The main requirement seems to pass trial by combat, which is done with live weapons and apparently occasionally leaders to fatalities. That is how you lose perfectly good members of your organization and make people not want to join. There does not appear to be that much effort paid to making sure they actually agree with the ideas of the organization, which I suppose would explain the rest of their issues.
Oh, and their leader felt that the best replacement for him was an untrained musician whose most notable talent is that (for some reason) she has access to a rare form of nanotechnology.
Now, to be fair: The book and Orfeus both treat the Order of the Vengeful Wild as being flawed. The problem is that the book (and our protagonist) not only massively understate those flaws, but that they don't seem to be aware of the fact that many of those flaws are fatal flaws that would destroy an organization.
The book's characters are mildly interesting, but ultimately not good enough to redeem the multiple issues with the plot.
It's not offensively bad. It just isn't very good. Three out of five, and I'm probably being generous.
Oh, and this is cool.
My rating is "Not terrible, but okay."
Like, okay. It's certainly solarpunk. The premise is intuitively interesting--woman gets targeted by bounty hunter and tries to figure out why they're after her. Problem is the rest of the plot.
Orfeus, our protagonist is a musician who's life is shattered when aforementioned bounty hunter, a member of the Order of the Vengeful Wild, targets her. They chase her around a few towns, and eventually she decides to join them because she hopes to figure out why the fuck they're targeting her. Ultimately turns out that the boss of the Order of the Vengeful Wild made the contract to target her, in the hopes of luring her in as his replacement. Which requires that she kill him, rather than that he just retire. This is dropped at the end of the book without much explanation or dealing with the consequences.
There is a subplot about disappearing people and medical experiments which is frankly irrelevant for my review.
Anyway, at multiple times, I found myself wondering why the Order was organizationally incompetent, and feeling that they didn't fit with the setting.
Here we've got this band of self-appointed vigilantes. They are, it's made clear, feared by the populace as a whole but enough people think well of them to do them favors and give them stuff for them to continue operating. In otherwords, we're supposed to think of them as Batman. You wouldn't invite Batman over for dinner but you're glad he exists.
This poses something of a problem because literally everyone in the Order seems to be nuts.
They are apparently incapable of following a leader unless they kill the old leader, which seems like a poor idea imported from modern werewolf urban fantasy rather than a logical thing for a band of vigilantes to think. Despite their official purpose being to protect society and nature from harmful individuals--by killing them if necessary--they take bounties, and they won't tell the public who called in the bounty (reasonable, I suppose) or why they're doing it. This is, of course, an excellent way to utterly destroy trust: Kill or hurt people for unstated reasons.
They seem to be rather uninterested in the actual cause they're supposed to be championing, and more interested in fighting.
Apparently they will take in people who were their targets and train them as members. The main requirement seems to pass trial by combat, which is done with live weapons and apparently occasionally leaders to fatalities. That is how you lose perfectly good members of your organization and make people not want to join. There does not appear to be that much effort paid to making sure they actually agree with the ideas of the organization, which I suppose would explain the rest of their issues.
Oh, and their leader felt that the best replacement for him was an untrained musician whose most notable talent is that (for some reason) she has access to a rare form of nanotechnology.
Now, to be fair: The book and Orfeus both treat the Order of the Vengeful Wild as being flawed. The problem is that the book (and our protagonist) not only massively understate those flaws, but that they don't seem to be aware of the fact that many of those flaws are fatal flaws that would destroy an organization.
The book's characters are mildly interesting, but ultimately not good enough to redeem the multiple issues with the plot.
It's not offensively bad. It just isn't very good. Three out of five, and I'm probably being generous.
Oh, and this is cool.