reviews: sf
C.S. Friedman, The Wilding: I had forgotten how much rape there was in this series, which should’ve been hard to do given that one of the two warring star-spanning cultures in it is violently misogynistic and requires all women to submit to any man at any time unless she’s the specific property of a sufficiently powerful man. That’s the Braxana (can’t be bothered to find the accents over the As, sorry), who fight the Azeans, and everyone hates and fears the psychics (who are either mythical or off on their own, until they inevitably go mad). An Azean mediator learns that she’s psychic, and has a twin sister who was stolen as an infant by the renegade psychic community; a Braxin rebel leaves Braxin territory to save his own life and in search of a woman of sufficient genetic value to buy his return; their paths intersect. I was creeped out by the way both sisters (including the one who’d been previously raped by a Braxin warrior and was psychically assaulted by the male protagonist) along with another woman who supposedly hated all things Braxin for their sexism, all found the male protagonist’s “masculine” and commanding behavior sexy despite themselves (he was culturally encouraged to become violent if a woman gave him orders, and constantly reminded them of that).
Iain M. Banks, The Hydrogen Sonata: A Culture novel in which an entire civilization is about to Sublime-leave our world for some indescribable other, as many but not all civilizations do after a while-and Culture ships are drawn in to intrigue, as a long-ago race left a message about the civilization’s treasured holy book that might interrupt the Subliming. Some people would rather that information stay very secret, and are willing to kill rather indiscriminately to keep it so. Banks can make even vicious deeds seem pleasant, presenting them as only logical according to the doer’s carefully rationalized perspective; the enjoyable stuff here is the banter between Ships and the descriptions of carefully customized environments in a post-scarcity universe. Does any of it matter? That’s a question each entity must answer for itself.
Ben H. Winters, Countdown City (The Last Policeman, Book II): Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. I enjoyed The Last Policeman, about a police officer investigating a murder mere months before an asteroid was scheduled to destroy humanity. It’s the ultimate noir situation: what do you do when what you do has no lasting effect? I didn’t realize it was going to be a trilogy, which draws a bit of the force away-the second book is another iteration of the same question, though society has deteriorated a lot further even in the short gap between the two books. Henry Palace investigates the disappearance of his old babysitter’s husband, a former cop himself, and encounters in the process a number of variously organized responses to the impending doom, including hope and nihilism but mostly about excluding some people in order to attend to others. Meanwhile, his sister has a plan to save the world; Henry doesn’t want to hear about it, but she prefers false hope to none. This was good, if depressing, and I will read the third book, but I almost want the apocalypse to happen, because I’m most interested in Henry’s iron determination to do small, orderly things no matter what else is going on.
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Iain M. Banks, The Hydrogen Sonata: A Culture novel in which an entire civilization is about to Sublime-leave our world for some indescribable other, as many but not all civilizations do after a while-and Culture ships are drawn in to intrigue, as a long-ago race left a message about the civilization’s treasured holy book that might interrupt the Subliming. Some people would rather that information stay very secret, and are willing to kill rather indiscriminately to keep it so. Banks can make even vicious deeds seem pleasant, presenting them as only logical according to the doer’s carefully rationalized perspective; the enjoyable stuff here is the banter between Ships and the descriptions of carefully customized environments in a post-scarcity universe. Does any of it matter? That’s a question each entity must answer for itself.
Ben H. Winters, Countdown City (The Last Policeman, Book II): Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. I enjoyed The Last Policeman, about a police officer investigating a murder mere months before an asteroid was scheduled to destroy humanity. It’s the ultimate noir situation: what do you do when what you do has no lasting effect? I didn’t realize it was going to be a trilogy, which draws a bit of the force away-the second book is another iteration of the same question, though society has deteriorated a lot further even in the short gap between the two books. Henry Palace investigates the disappearance of his old babysitter’s husband, a former cop himself, and encounters in the process a number of variously organized responses to the impending doom, including hope and nihilism but mostly about excluding some people in order to attend to others. Meanwhile, his sister has a plan to save the world; Henry doesn’t want to hear about it, but she prefers false hope to none. This was good, if depressing, and I will read the third book, but I almost want the apocalypse to happen, because I’m most interested in Henry’s iron determination to do small, orderly things no matter what else is going on.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.