Books by authors whose earlier works I’ve liked better
Consider the title fair warning. I was not impressed by either of these, and if you liked them or haven't read them, you should probably skip over this. It may or may not help to know that my next post will probably be about 15 volumes of BL manga (all by the same author), which I accidentally read while writing my Yuletide story, and involve me attempting to justify this temporary obsession on somewhat shaky textual grounds.
Connie Willis, All Clear. The second half of Blackout; Michael Davies, Merope Ward and Polly Churchill, trapped in World War II Britain and trying to find their way back. I did actually like quite a few bits of this, especially the ambulance driving and the very minimal amounts of Colin (I could have done with a lot more), but the main problem with this book is that for all the pages of it there's very little actual *plot*. Most of the time people just worry a lot about the temporal continuum, and then have it all turn out to be needless, which is reassuring for them but not all that exciting to read about.
Lightreads pointed out in her review that Willis creates characters as protagonists who lack any context, and not only is it true, but once seen it’s impossible to unsee it. I have no idea if any of the historians in this book have families, or friends outside their studies, or hobbies, or even rent bills (how do you deal with flatmates and communal cooking nights if you’re over a hundred years in the past when it’s your turn). And, when you look back, that’s the case for the leads in To Say Nothing of the Dog, and (to prove it’s not some subtle point about historians) in Passage. Which is all the more bizarre given that Willis certainly can write characters with contexts, and do so very well, in her short stories - I’ve read “Even the Queen” a couple of times just to look at just how she sets up so much information about a group of characters, and their interactions, in such a little space. 22 pages, in fact, in contrast to the 1100+ of Blackout and All Clear, after which I know about as much about the context of the leads as I did before I started.
Part of the problem with lack of context is lack of communication, in that Willis’ characters, here as elsewhere, are forever rushing round failing to connect with each other. Messages go astray or are unreadable, conversations never get to the point before being interrupted, and no-one, ever, has a cell phone - this is hand-waved, but it's hard to believe that people being sent on such time critical missions don't have back up ways of getting in contact, or ways of checking (why not routine messages using the drops?). And part of it is the set-up, in that time-travelling historians are designed to be witnesses rather than participants, but part of the whole point of The Doomsday Book was about how that doesn’t always work out in practice; and it’s not that the characters don’t get involved, it’s more that it doesn’t seem to lead anywhere. The bits where the characters attempt to meet other historians in the same time period who've featured in earlier Willis stories were also oddly lacking in tension - they can't meet because they didn't, so why should I get concerned about this?
There are also issues with her research. Previously, when Willis’ work has touched upon one of my own specialist areas, it’s been consistently wrong with that particular sort of teeth-grinding near-accuracy level you get where the author has gone in with an idea and forced the science to fit, which is often more annoying than just making the whole thing up. I’d actually given her a pass on most of her other research, until I started doing the background reading for last year’s Yuletide fic (a post-To Say Nothing of the Dog) story, and discovered a number of discrepancies between history and fiction (for example, the idea that Baine can make a living appearing as an English butler in films at a time when there'd been approximately one feature film produced anywhere. And there are posts elsewhere about similar problems with these two, some of which I’d noticed (the Jubilee underground line running years before the actual Jubilee, a phone box that takes half crowns) and some I hadn't; I think there's another post out there about the actual geography of London, but I'm not sure where.
And yet I did like bits of this - the theatre group, for example, although I still feel they should really have been killed off in the first book, and getting to see Dunworthy again. I wish they'd been shorter or had more actually happen.
Lois McMaster Bujold, Cryoburn. Miles in his capacity as Lord Auditor investigates Kibou-Daini, a place where the main industry is cryopreservation, and finds, as usual, trouble. In this book I like Jin, the young boy who has run away from relatives who don’t like looking after his assortment of animals and who then rescues Miles and provides him with an entry into the plot, and I like his sister, Mina, and I like all the animals. Unfortunately I found the world-building massively irritating and the main plot unexciting (and obvious), and, just as with Diplomatic Immunity, this is all about Miles going off and having Adventures without any emotional commitment at all. Most of all, this book made me intensely dislike Mark. He’s previously been probably my favourite character, but Bujold has managed to wipe that out comprehensively with comparatively little effort, and it’s going to take me quite a while to get over that.
So. Kibou-Daini has a thin veneer of Japanese-ish-ness over it, but it never feels like it has any real depth to it (as opposed to, say, Cetaganda), and more annoyingly it’s wildly inconsistent. When Miles borrows Suze's comconsole he selects English as a language, out of a dozen local language options of which he cannot identify half, and Jin thinks about learning kanji at school, but the rest of the time (apart from one brief “ohayo gozaimasu”) we’re in English. Miles even gets snippy about any non-English elements - this is from his point of view; “Northbridge, or Kitahashi, as every place on this planet seemed to boast two interchangeable names, to ensure the confusion of tourists no doubt.” - which as “kita” means “north” and “hashi” “bridge” is somewhat like complaining that none of those French people can say Paris correctly. And yet Jin has no trouble with the initial “v” sound of Vorkosigan (instead stuffing up the middle), although this isn't a sound in Japanese, or communicating with any of the Barrayarans.
The culture is similarly thin. People wear “hakama-like trousers” and sleep on futons, and at one point eat with chopsticks, but the food itself is either not all that Japanese (boiled eggs and bread for breakfast) or minimally described (Miles has a meal that looks like sculpture, but the only taste reference is “odd-tasting” for the wine). Jin calls his pet falcon Gyre, which sounds like a bad Western pun, but the wolf spider he adopts is Lady Murasaki. And the honorifics are all over the place - Jin uses them the most, but not consistently, other locals often not at all - and there’s a teeth-grindingly awful bit where Miles thinks about getting them to call him “sama” or “dono”. The locals have their Eurasian looks described (almond eyes etc), but even in Jin’s point of view he just sees Miles as short and Roic as huge, with no racial tags. James Nicholl suggests that the planet was settled by cosplayers, but I think cosplayers are generally a bit more obsessive about detail.
Anyway. As I said earlier, Miles doesn’t really have an emotional stake in this story (until the final line, and that's more about his story). Jin does, and his bits usually work for me, especially where he and his sister are thinking about the possibility of Miles adopting them and Miles then tramples all over this hope without realising it ever existed. This is done well. When Mark shows up, however, and forces a group of desperate people into agreeing that a large group of unconscious individuals will be subjects for his medical experiments, with no regard for consent, and then takes advantage of an arson attack to make sure that they get as little money as possible for it… then, there is absolutely no awareness in the text as far as I can tell that this might, just possibly, be a bad thing. No-one points out that, regardless of consent, any decent trial needs a control group (so they’re going to revive people and tell them they won’t be treated?), and although there is a doctor asking about the poor, the general impression is that everyone should be grateful to Mark for this amazing offer (which is basically buying people).
This leads to my broader problem with Bujold’s universe. In it, enlightened, powerful individuals are the best ones to make decisions for all those lesser than them, and they are rewarded for doing so. When a governmental structure shows up, it’s wrong - the police, here, for taking Jin back to his relatives, or the counsellors on Beta in Shards of Honor, and corporates can’t be trusted. But Emperors or their relatives can decide what to do. Maybe they’ll agonise a bit over some of the costs, but they’ll be right, and honoured for that.
I think this is bad from a fictional point of view - since Miles became Lord Auditor it’s been very hard to give him a meaningful plot, because he can just ride over everything - and from an external point of view as well, because I’m fond of democracy and judicial process and a lot of things that take decisions away from just one person, no matter how exceptional they are. Obviously I'm not going to be a Bujold lead anytime soon, but I think I'll be okay with that.
Connie Willis, All Clear. The second half of Blackout; Michael Davies, Merope Ward and Polly Churchill, trapped in World War II Britain and trying to find their way back. I did actually like quite a few bits of this, especially the ambulance driving and the very minimal amounts of Colin (I could have done with a lot more), but the main problem with this book is that for all the pages of it there's very little actual *plot*. Most of the time people just worry a lot about the temporal continuum, and then have it all turn out to be needless, which is reassuring for them but not all that exciting to read about.
Lightreads pointed out in her review that Willis creates characters as protagonists who lack any context, and not only is it true, but once seen it’s impossible to unsee it. I have no idea if any of the historians in this book have families, or friends outside their studies, or hobbies, or even rent bills (how do you deal with flatmates and communal cooking nights if you’re over a hundred years in the past when it’s your turn). And, when you look back, that’s the case for the leads in To Say Nothing of the Dog, and (to prove it’s not some subtle point about historians) in Passage. Which is all the more bizarre given that Willis certainly can write characters with contexts, and do so very well, in her short stories - I’ve read “Even the Queen” a couple of times just to look at just how she sets up so much information about a group of characters, and their interactions, in such a little space. 22 pages, in fact, in contrast to the 1100+ of Blackout and All Clear, after which I know about as much about the context of the leads as I did before I started.
Part of the problem with lack of context is lack of communication, in that Willis’ characters, here as elsewhere, are forever rushing round failing to connect with each other. Messages go astray or are unreadable, conversations never get to the point before being interrupted, and no-one, ever, has a cell phone - this is hand-waved, but it's hard to believe that people being sent on such time critical missions don't have back up ways of getting in contact, or ways of checking (why not routine messages using the drops?). And part of it is the set-up, in that time-travelling historians are designed to be witnesses rather than participants, but part of the whole point of The Doomsday Book was about how that doesn’t always work out in practice; and it’s not that the characters don’t get involved, it’s more that it doesn’t seem to lead anywhere. The bits where the characters attempt to meet other historians in the same time period who've featured in earlier Willis stories were also oddly lacking in tension - they can't meet because they didn't, so why should I get concerned about this?
There are also issues with her research. Previously, when Willis’ work has touched upon one of my own specialist areas, it’s been consistently wrong with that particular sort of teeth-grinding near-accuracy level you get where the author has gone in with an idea and forced the science to fit, which is often more annoying than just making the whole thing up. I’d actually given her a pass on most of her other research, until I started doing the background reading for last year’s Yuletide fic (a post-To Say Nothing of the Dog) story, and discovered a number of discrepancies between history and fiction (for example, the idea that Baine can make a living appearing as an English butler in films at a time when there'd been approximately one feature film produced anywhere. And there are posts elsewhere about similar problems with these two, some of which I’d noticed (the Jubilee underground line running years before the actual Jubilee, a phone box that takes half crowns) and some I hadn't; I think there's another post out there about the actual geography of London, but I'm not sure where.
And yet I did like bits of this - the theatre group, for example, although I still feel they should really have been killed off in the first book, and getting to see Dunworthy again. I wish they'd been shorter or had more actually happen.
Lois McMaster Bujold, Cryoburn. Miles in his capacity as Lord Auditor investigates Kibou-Daini, a place where the main industry is cryopreservation, and finds, as usual, trouble. In this book I like Jin, the young boy who has run away from relatives who don’t like looking after his assortment of animals and who then rescues Miles and provides him with an entry into the plot, and I like his sister, Mina, and I like all the animals. Unfortunately I found the world-building massively irritating and the main plot unexciting (and obvious), and, just as with Diplomatic Immunity, this is all about Miles going off and having Adventures without any emotional commitment at all. Most of all, this book made me intensely dislike Mark. He’s previously been probably my favourite character, but Bujold has managed to wipe that out comprehensively with comparatively little effort, and it’s going to take me quite a while to get over that.
So. Kibou-Daini has a thin veneer of Japanese-ish-ness over it, but it never feels like it has any real depth to it (as opposed to, say, Cetaganda), and more annoyingly it’s wildly inconsistent. When Miles borrows Suze's comconsole he selects English as a language, out of a dozen local language options of which he cannot identify half, and Jin thinks about learning kanji at school, but the rest of the time (apart from one brief “ohayo gozaimasu”) we’re in English. Miles even gets snippy about any non-English elements - this is from his point of view; “Northbridge, or Kitahashi, as every place on this planet seemed to boast two interchangeable names, to ensure the confusion of tourists no doubt.” - which as “kita” means “north” and “hashi” “bridge” is somewhat like complaining that none of those French people can say Paris correctly. And yet Jin has no trouble with the initial “v” sound of Vorkosigan (instead stuffing up the middle), although this isn't a sound in Japanese, or communicating with any of the Barrayarans.
The culture is similarly thin. People wear “hakama-like trousers” and sleep on futons, and at one point eat with chopsticks, but the food itself is either not all that Japanese (boiled eggs and bread for breakfast) or minimally described (Miles has a meal that looks like sculpture, but the only taste reference is “odd-tasting” for the wine). Jin calls his pet falcon Gyre, which sounds like a bad Western pun, but the wolf spider he adopts is Lady Murasaki. And the honorifics are all over the place - Jin uses them the most, but not consistently, other locals often not at all - and there’s a teeth-grindingly awful bit where Miles thinks about getting them to call him “sama” or “dono”. The locals have their Eurasian looks described (almond eyes etc), but even in Jin’s point of view he just sees Miles as short and Roic as huge, with no racial tags. James Nicholl suggests that the planet was settled by cosplayers, but I think cosplayers are generally a bit more obsessive about detail.
Anyway. As I said earlier, Miles doesn’t really have an emotional stake in this story (until the final line, and that's more about his story). Jin does, and his bits usually work for me, especially where he and his sister are thinking about the possibility of Miles adopting them and Miles then tramples all over this hope without realising it ever existed. This is done well. When Mark shows up, however, and forces a group of desperate people into agreeing that a large group of unconscious individuals will be subjects for his medical experiments, with no regard for consent, and then takes advantage of an arson attack to make sure that they get as little money as possible for it… then, there is absolutely no awareness in the text as far as I can tell that this might, just possibly, be a bad thing. No-one points out that, regardless of consent, any decent trial needs a control group (so they’re going to revive people and tell them they won’t be treated?), and although there is a doctor asking about the poor, the general impression is that everyone should be grateful to Mark for this amazing offer (which is basically buying people).
This leads to my broader problem with Bujold’s universe. In it, enlightened, powerful individuals are the best ones to make decisions for all those lesser than them, and they are rewarded for doing so. When a governmental structure shows up, it’s wrong - the police, here, for taking Jin back to his relatives, or the counsellors on Beta in Shards of Honor, and corporates can’t be trusted. But Emperors or their relatives can decide what to do. Maybe they’ll agonise a bit over some of the costs, but they’ll be right, and honoured for that.
I think this is bad from a fictional point of view - since Miles became Lord Auditor it’s been very hard to give him a meaningful plot, because he can just ride over everything - and from an external point of view as well, because I’m fond of democracy and judicial process and a lot of things that take decisions away from just one person, no matter how exceptional they are. Obviously I'm not going to be a Bujold lead anytime soon, but I think I'll be okay with that.