de Pierres, Marianne: Dark Space
Dark Space: Book 1 of The Sentients of Orion
Writer: Marianne de Pierres
Genre: Science Fiction
Pages: 416
Edit 8/20/09: If you're here because you found this review discussed in the article on The Galaxy Express, found here, then please jump to the edit at the very end of this post. Thank you. :) /edit
When in the hell am I going to learn to STOP buying books because I fall in love with the cover? I mean, really?
So here's the deal: somehow or another, I discovered this book online. This is the kind of cover I think I might KILL for when my own SF gets published. I mean, seriously. I love it that much. And because the book is SF and written by a woman, I saw no reason not to seek it out and devour it immediately.
But I could never, ever find the book in stores. What gives? Finally, after loads of detective work between Amazon.com and the author's website, I learned the truth: the book is not available in the US. Damn it.
But hey, Orbit's the publisher, the US will get it eventually, right? So I waited. And waited. And noticed that Orbit announced the sequel (which also has a gorgeous cover I would kill for, see?) to this book for the UK, but never one muttering about release in the US.
Fed up, I decided to get the book anyway. I went to www.abebooks.com and found a vendor in the US who was selling this title and promptly placed my order. I got it not too long ago, and was more than happy to start reading it as soon as I could.
I repeat: when in the hell am I going to learn to STOP buying books because I fall in love with the cover?
This book was such an irritating disappointment it wasn't even funny. I know, I know, I didn't have to finish it, but I did.
The premise: Baronessa Mira Fedor is on the run after she learns that her innate, inborn talent to fly ships (really? ANOTHER ONE? What IS it with women writers and this particular device?***) is going to be stolen from her. Her flight finds her in the middle of a planetary invasion, one that she isn't prepared to stop, not by a longshot.
Spoilers. Ranty, ranty spoilers.
Oh boy. Where to start?
Let's see: I'm really, really, really tired of reading about characters who are aristocratic royalty and are out of touch with reality. Save for Jo Jo Rasterovich, every single POV character is an aristocratic or scholarly snob who thinks his/her place is above the real world and expects to be treated as such. At least the scholar, Tekton, wasn't so bad. His subplot, odd as it was, at least had some direction. Everyone else is stuck on the planet Araldis, which is unfortunately stuck in some mind-fuck of a patriarchal society, where women are expected to be submissive and where men can beat and rape them repeatedly without any fear of repercussion.
Now let's talk about this: while at SHU, I read quite a few critical texts that focused on feminism in the genre. I get that this bullshit set-up is an excuse for the heroine to find her real place in the world and to maybe inspire some reform. But guess what, THAT'S NOT THE POINT OF THE BOOK. Sure, she learns there's more to life than bowing to the will of the man and aristocratic manners, and she even starts a movement to help the women refugees learn to defend themselves. What's so god-awful about all of this is that the women don't need help to defend themselves from alien invaders, but rather from the men who are SUPPOSED to be protecting them, as the men are bored, there's more men than women, and men need to let off a little steam once and a while.
My mentor used to cringe at all the smiling/eye/breathing verbs I would use as "gestures" in my own work. I can't imagine his reaction to this book, where every single male POV makes a point to notice erections all the fucking time, and when we're in Mira's POV, she's aware of the men's erections all the fucking time. It seems like she's always in danger of being raped, just because she's caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the men who find her have nothing else better to do than have a quickie because there's a WOMAN in their presence. Bastards.
Oh, but Mira does get raped. By one of the protagonists, no less. We're in his POV at the time, so at least we know he's SORRY, and we know his motivations, but for fuck's sake: unless I'm missing something, the only reason Trin rapes Mira is because she's the last woman of royalty around, and his line must go on to rule. LAME. The fact that through-out the entire book, Mira can accept this kind of behavior even though it infuriates her is even worse. She fights when she's absolutely FORCED to, not because it's a survival instinct. The rape is so unnecessary it isn't even funny, but then again, this is the first book of a trilogy, so maybe her child will figure prominently in later books, but you know what? I don't care to read the later books to find out, so there.
I think I hated pretty much all the characters. Mira, definitely. She might be a product of her world, but I'm sorry, when we're finally at the point in the book where the aliens have invaded and her whole world's been blown to hell and she STILL GETS PISSY over peoples' manners and lack thereof? She STILL BALKS at the fact she has to fight to survive? I want to reach through the pages and strangle her myself. Trin at least gets better as the book goes along. Sure, he's a spoiled brat, but at least he learns, and even though his snobbery lingers in some cases, at least he's aware of it.
And I'll be honest: I know it's SF. I know the whole point of SF is to create futures that often reflect the current struggles we face in the here and now. But can you HONESTLY tell me that in a far-future where sentients don't even REMEMBER THE NAME OF THEIR HOME PLANET is STILL so fucking patriarchal and backwards that they treat their women this way? There's some attempt to explain this (and mind you, this is only the society on the planet of Araldis), but I get the feeling that the women gave up or were forced to give up their rights as human beings, which is fucking ridiculous. I can't accept that. I won't. It's worse than any battle-of-the-sexes book I've read, because at least in those, there's a POINT being made. Here, there's none. And what's sad is there's references to women being controlled based on breeding, as in somehow, the men can control whether or not a woman gets impregnated. We see, before the rape, Trin doing something along these lines, and it MIGHT have been interesting if we'd had more preparation for it earlier in the book, but I'll be honest: if you're going to have a world that's so controlled, why not let THAT be the focus on the book rather than one complicated alien invasion story.
Oh, and let me TELL you about this plot: you remember Ursula K. Le Guin's THE DISPOSSESSED? If you don't, or haven't read it, let me explain: you have two timelines: both are told from the POV of Shevek, but one is the past and one is the present. Le Guin alternates every chapter so that these stories weave in and out of each other, and at some point, they finally meet. It's beautifully done, and it doesn't take long to realize what Le Guin is doing.
Apparently, de Pierres is trying to do something similar. Instead, she just pissed me off. All the storylines for Tekton and Jo Jo are revealed to be in the PAST about 100 pages from the end. FROM THE END. What is the POINT of that? Yeah, I was WONDERING how their story tied into the current invasion, but when I discovered what de Pierres was doing, I just wanted to drop the book and kick it somewhere. I didn't, because I still love the cover, but DUDE. What's the POINT?
Oy. There was so much that pissed me the hell off about this book. Getting through the Italian-based worldbuilding was hard enough, but all the stuff listed above was just more and more to distance, annoy, and irritate the bloody snot out of me. Oh, de Pierres does have some nice moments or two, but for the life of me, I can't remember them.
My Rating
Wish I'd Borrowed It: it's not quite a waste of time, but I understand why, at least as of now, the book hasn't been cleared for American audiences. The characterization, especially of the heroine, was a far cry from believable, let alone practical, and I'm not sure how many US readers would be able to parse through all the Italian mumbo-jumbo. Not that I have any disrespect for the language--I was an opera singer once, and Italian was my favorite to sing in. I just don't like how de Pierres is using it to build her culture and its language. It's clumsy and annoying, and only distances the non-Italian speaking reader more. And for readers who like strong heroines in their SF, don't be fooled by the cover. Just put the book down and back away slowly. I promise, you won't regret it.
Next up: I honestly don't know. Something I know I'll like.
Moonshine by Rob Thurman
*** = Not that I haven't enjoyed the ones I've read. But I never paid attention to this plot device until someone told me how overused it was when Grimspace was released, and then I realized that Catherine Asaro uses it, as does Kristin Landon, and now I see it everywhere. Every time I consider an SF written by a woman, it uses this device. So you have my permission: if I EVER resort to this device in my own writing, please shoot me. No offense to those wonderful writers who USE the device: I'm just tired of seeing it and at this point in my reading, I'm finding it a cliched convention.
EDIT 8/20/09: Thanks to the article, "Heroine Pilots in SF: Too Many or Not Enough?" that used this review as the basis of its argument, I need to make a few things VERY VERY CLEAR:
1) The idea that there's too many heroine pilots in science fiction is ABSURD. So absurd that I'm shocked and actually insulted that anyone would think that, let alone read a remark I made and then draw that conclusion. I'm also insulted because the writer of said entry never asked me to clarify what I meant, and also ignored what I thought explained my peeve at the time, which was "innate, inborn talent to fly ships." If I'd been tired of heroine pilots, I would've just said, "Another female pilot? Jeez, haven't we had enough already?" But I didn't. I clarified it, but it wasn't clear enough, which is my fault.
However, had the writer of the article asked me to clarify, she wouldn't have had her article. Is that why she didn't ask?
2) I also did not and have not thought at any time that the writers mentioned who use this device are copying each other. There's a collective conscious we all draw from, and writers often draw the same seeds of an idea, and as luck would have it, they either get published at the same time or a reader reads them round about the same time. They're not copying each other. I know that, you know that, so move on to:
3) The formula I was actually talking about that bugged me at the time of this review:
a) Female SF writer writes a story about
b) male and female pilots (often in the female POV, but not always) who
c) have the innate, genetic ability to fly spaceships and/or navigate hyperspace. This isn't the Force enhancing the abilities already there, nor is this having a ship that's genetically keyed so that only you, or a certain species, can fly it. Nor am I referring to having a natural epitude for flying.
This is an innate, genetic ability that DOES NOT EXIST in nature, but allows special pilots do to things that regular pilots without this ability cannot do. This can be enhanced by various forms of technology, but that ability is something you're born with, an ability that's beyond the norm of what current pilots experience today.
4) The term "cliché" or "clichéd" (which is a word, an adjective, and in the dictionary) was a product of my ranting and the wrong term. Trend would have been better, especially since I was seeing a lot of it all at once. But I was ranting, and when ranting, you tend not to say what you mean. Given this review is nearly A YEAR OLD, I've done my darnedest to get away from ranting.
5) This is a topic that I'd really, really like to sink my teeth into, from a writing standpoint, talking about why certain types of writers tend to draw similar ideas independently of each other and what it means for writers who aren't yet published. But that is an entirely separate post, which may or may not happen. Also, I'd love to learn/find fiction where men used this same device. Right now, I've only seen women do it, but that doesn't mean men haven't done it either. If you know of any examples, please, let me know.
Does this help? Clarify? Make any sense at all or was the author of the article right in her interpretation of my quotes, no matter how I try to explain it? Let me know. I'd love to engage in a discussion, especially if I'm still not being clear.
/edit