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Robin Hobb, Shaman’s Crossing: I wish I liked this book as much as I appreciate it. Hobb introduces a new universe in this volume – labeled the first of a trilogy – and spends her time on worldbuilding. Nevare is the second son of a new noble; his father was elevated by the king as a reward for war service on the frontier, expanding into new lands and subjugating the nomadic inhabitants thereof. In this culture, sons inherit their fathers’ professions, except for nobles, whose first sons are heirs, second soldiers, third priests, etc. So Nevare is the soldier son of a former soldier, and his reasonably good position in life allows him to accept his father’s values – including contempt for the ways of other cultures and a deep-seated belief in women’s inferiority – without much question.
What I appreciate is that Nevare has some standard fantasy-type encounters with discrimination against and abuse of the disfavored groups, and yet he doesn’t achieve enlightenment. Instead, he accepts his father’s wisdom that there are unfortunate incidents and exceptional cases, but really the received social order is the right one. That’s so rare in fantasy, and so common everywhere else. Likewise, he encounters the magic of the despised forest people, but manages to rationalize it and ignore its profound effects on him, rather than admitting that he has a Destiny. All this makes Nevare not particularly likeable from my perspective, which is why my emotional reaction diverged from my aesthetic one. Notably, the forest people Nevare’s race is trying to exterminate are not obviously superior; they engage in biological warfare and seem to hold Nevare’s people in reciprocal contempt. But, unlike Nevare’s nation, they’re not destroying the carrying capacity of the land for short-term returns, so maybe I ought to root for them.
Diane Duane, High Wizardry: In this installment of Duane’s Young Wizards series, ten-year-old Dairine snoops into her wizard sister’s book of magic and acquires some wizardry of her own. Bratty and overconfident, Dairine takes off across the universe and gets into a dangerous confrontation with the Lone Power, the source of entropy and suffering. I’m too old to enjoy this, so I don’t know if it would really work for the age-appropriate group, but Duane’s idea of entropy as the enemy is at least different from the usual Evil that good wizards fight. Entropy doesn’t need to be evil, and the wizards’ project is one of redemption rather than victory. It makes for less conflict – it’s a squishier enterprise than defeating Sauron – and I’m left wondering what the world looks like if the wizards win. But maybe that’s exactly the right question.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars: Over half a century after the first Mars rebellion, terraforming continues, and the longevity-enhanced remnants of the first hundred colonists work in the underground towards varying dreams of a free Martian future. As usual, Robinson’s strength is in the scientific depiction of landscape, and the characters are basically talking heads for various philosophical viewpoints. Which doesn’t mean they’re not believable – the type of people who do the type of things Robinson writes about are often talking heads – but it makes their personal angst sort of weirdly uncompelling. I have the final book in the trilogy and the book of Robinson’s collected short stories about Mars, which I will read because I’m a completist, but I’m in no hurry.
Christopher Buckley, Florence of Arabia: Thank You For Smoking was a really funny book, and Z. is a huge Lawrence fan, so I tried this. The eponymous heroine starts in the State Department, but leaves her job to work with a shady guy known only as Uncle Sam to reform the Middle East by encouraging a women’s liberation movement. Setting aside the gleeful stereotyping, which is part of the point of a satire like this, and even setting aside the cheerful imperialist idea that what Arab women really need is an Italian-American to explain what’s wrong with their cultures, I just couldn’t be amused. Forget “responsibility in fiction,” it’s a matter of skill: If your satirical plot involves several instances in which women – characters we’ve met as well as nameless, faceless generic “women” – are stoned to death, you’d better be freakin’ Jonathan Swift. And Buckley isn’t; he can’t successfully pair very real horrors (such as schoolgirls forced back into a burning building by religious police so men wouldn’t have to see uncovered limbs) with exaggerated ones. Political and religious affairs in the Middle East are, concededly, awfully hard to satirize – how can you tell what’s exaggerated? But, as Buffy said, I’m not grading on a curve. In the end, the oil potentate’s solid gold baby crib, and the apparent narrative stance that the only reason Middle Eastern women might not endorse Western feminism is that they like female genital mutilation, seem like crude and flat caricatures rather than humorous extrapolations.
What I appreciate is that Nevare has some standard fantasy-type encounters with discrimination against and abuse of the disfavored groups, and yet he doesn’t achieve enlightenment. Instead, he accepts his father’s wisdom that there are unfortunate incidents and exceptional cases, but really the received social order is the right one. That’s so rare in fantasy, and so common everywhere else. Likewise, he encounters the magic of the despised forest people, but manages to rationalize it and ignore its profound effects on him, rather than admitting that he has a Destiny. All this makes Nevare not particularly likeable from my perspective, which is why my emotional reaction diverged from my aesthetic one. Notably, the forest people Nevare’s race is trying to exterminate are not obviously superior; they engage in biological warfare and seem to hold Nevare’s people in reciprocal contempt. But, unlike Nevare’s nation, they’re not destroying the carrying capacity of the land for short-term returns, so maybe I ought to root for them.
Diane Duane, High Wizardry: In this installment of Duane’s Young Wizards series, ten-year-old Dairine snoops into her wizard sister’s book of magic and acquires some wizardry of her own. Bratty and overconfident, Dairine takes off across the universe and gets into a dangerous confrontation with the Lone Power, the source of entropy and suffering. I’m too old to enjoy this, so I don’t know if it would really work for the age-appropriate group, but Duane’s idea of entropy as the enemy is at least different from the usual Evil that good wizards fight. Entropy doesn’t need to be evil, and the wizards’ project is one of redemption rather than victory. It makes for less conflict – it’s a squishier enterprise than defeating Sauron – and I’m left wondering what the world looks like if the wizards win. But maybe that’s exactly the right question.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars: Over half a century after the first Mars rebellion, terraforming continues, and the longevity-enhanced remnants of the first hundred colonists work in the underground towards varying dreams of a free Martian future. As usual, Robinson’s strength is in the scientific depiction of landscape, and the characters are basically talking heads for various philosophical viewpoints. Which doesn’t mean they’re not believable – the type of people who do the type of things Robinson writes about are often talking heads – but it makes their personal angst sort of weirdly uncompelling. I have the final book in the trilogy and the book of Robinson’s collected short stories about Mars, which I will read because I’m a completist, but I’m in no hurry.
Christopher Buckley, Florence of Arabia: Thank You For Smoking was a really funny book, and Z. is a huge Lawrence fan, so I tried this. The eponymous heroine starts in the State Department, but leaves her job to work with a shady guy known only as Uncle Sam to reform the Middle East by encouraging a women’s liberation movement. Setting aside the gleeful stereotyping, which is part of the point of a satire like this, and even setting aside the cheerful imperialist idea that what Arab women really need is an Italian-American to explain what’s wrong with their cultures, I just couldn’t be amused. Forget “responsibility in fiction,” it’s a matter of skill: If your satirical plot involves several instances in which women – characters we’ve met as well as nameless, faceless generic “women” – are stoned to death, you’d better be freakin’ Jonathan Swift. And Buckley isn’t; he can’t successfully pair very real horrors (such as schoolgirls forced back into a burning building by religious police so men wouldn’t have to see uncovered limbs) with exaggerated ones. Political and religious affairs in the Middle East are, concededly, awfully hard to satirize – how can you tell what’s exaggerated? But, as Buffy said, I’m not grading on a curve. In the end, the oil potentate’s solid gold baby crib, and the apparent narrative stance that the only reason Middle Eastern women might not endorse Western feminism is that they like female genital mutilation, seem like crude and flat caricatures rather than humorous extrapolations.
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