This response is extremely late because of reasons, but this is a superb review thoughtful, incisive, balancing but not isolating book-as-artform and book-as-message. It doesn't make The Best of All Possible Worlds particularly appealing to me, in large part because of what it does that is conventional but also because plot/setting/style don't grab my interest, but the review itself is a pleasure to read and tells me I should keep an eye out for Lord's novels, even if this one holds no particular appeal.
Thank you so much! I had a hard time with this review -- there was just so MUCH I wanted to talk about with this book, and I was especially afraid that I was talking too much about the book-as-message and not enough about the book-as-artform, so I'm really glad to hear that the balance worked for you!
Lord is definitely an author I'm excited to watch develop -- neither of her books has quite gotten me raving about it, but they're both so very promising that I have hope she will eventually write one that does manage to hit all my buttons at once.
(Though I'm a little worried she won't -- both of her novels have the *same* conventional core, the bog-standard heterosexual romance, so I'm kind of hoping she writes a novel without a romance sometime soon. I really quite like romance! But heterosexual monogamy leading to marriage and babies is something that, at this point, I only have a limited supply of patience with.)
I never got the impression that pan/bi-sexuality was the norm, though I did get the impression that society was far less encumbered with the heteronormative norm. I got the impression, more or less, that society instead pretty much embraced all paths in that regard, and that one wasn't any better or worse than the other. I guess, too, that everything's really told through the heteronormative lens: Glinda is the co-worker who talks about her sex-capades all the time (I thought they were male, but I could've been making a wrong assumption), then there was the Dr. who replaced the heroine while she was on the mission, and that Doc hooked up with HER Sadiri counterpart, and the narrator was heterosexual herself, so...
(It is particularly galling, given that this is a science fictional setting, that Lord never addresses any potential technological fixes to the problem of a small, male-dominated survival group: no mention of genetic engineering, cloning, uterine replicators, anything beyond "get boy and girl to have sex, make babies".)
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Somebody else said that too, that they didn't perceive pan/bisexuality as the norm. For me, the reason I thought it was, was that even though all evidence pointed to the protagonist being straight, her friend and her mother, when they mentioned her love life, said something like "he -- or she of course". Characters always seemed careful to *not* make the heteronormative assumptions, which granted could just be from a greater acceptance of non-hetero romantic relationships, but it felt like it was more indicative of a world where there just aren't that many strictly straight people. Like in this world sexuality was on a bell curve, where most people are somewhere in the middle of the Kinsey scale and only a few outliers are either strictly gay or straight, rather than current statistical assumptions about queer people being <10% of the population
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Lord is definitely an author I'm excited to watch develop -- neither of her books has quite gotten me raving about it, but they're both so very promising that I have hope she will eventually write one that does manage to hit all my buttons at once.
(Though I'm a little worried she won't -- both of her novels have the *same* conventional core, the bog-standard heterosexual romance, so I'm kind of hoping she writes a novel without a romance sometime soon. I really quite like romance! But heterosexual monogamy leading to marriage and babies is something that, at this point, I only have a limited supply of patience with.)
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(It is particularly galling, given that this is a science fictional setting, that Lord never addresses any potential technological fixes to the problem of a small, male-dominated survival group: no mention of genetic engineering, cloning, uterine replicators, anything beyond "get boy and girl to have sex, make babies".) ( ... )
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