The Stars are Meh

The Stars Are Legion was given to me as a gift for last Christmas, and I was very excited to get it.  I had been following Kameron Hurley on Twitter for some time and was looking forward to seeing her work.  In addition, my friend got me the joke cover that Hurley had made, where the original title was replaced in the same dramatic font with “Lesbians in Space.”  What was not to love?!  My wife and I have been reading a bunch of science fiction novels by female authors, and this immediately went to the top of the list.  I’ve been reading aloud every night for 10-30 pages when we go to bed, and so as soon as we finished the Ursula K. Le Guin novel we were reading, we dove into this one.

We made it about 20 pages in before we had to switch to another book.  We were both put off by the writing pretty quickly.  The prose itself was serviceable but not enjoyable.  The dialogue was flat and without subtext.  Things that felt like they were supposed to be clever weren’t.  Somewhere in the third chapter, I realized that my reading was only agitating Ann rather than giving her something to enjoy before we slept.

But the book was a gift, and I was interested to know if it got better, so I read on to myself over the next couple of months.  It took me a couple of months because I had other things I wanted to read more, and making progress in the book, in spite of what an easy read it is, was difficult.  Now that I have finished it, I can say that there are no brilliant turns or innovative revelations that lifts the book above the average contender for a reader’s attention.

Sometimes when I finish a book I did not enjoy, I flip through others’ reviews to see if anyone can help me put a finger on what I found unsatisfying.  Whew, the reviews here were not helpful.  People who hated it were either grossed out by ickiness of biological fluids or were just confused and irritated by that confusion.  The people who loved it loved the grossness, the all-female cast, and what they saw as the innovativeness of the worlds Hurley created.  Personally, I was excited by the all-female world, but I was disappointed that nothing particularly interesting was done with it.  The main reason in terms of plot that everyone seems to be a woman is that they all need to be able to birth things that the worlds require.  The worlds have no use for men since they can’t contribute positively to the ecosystem.  That’s a cool idea.  But it wasn’t an idea that was explored or played with; it just was.  In fact, I didn’t know why whatever words they used to describe people in this world were gendered at all, given that there was only one gender.  In a world where the people only know humans who can give birth, why would those people be called anything but “people”?  The word “women” exists for us in our culture in relationship to its binary “men,” so a translation from whatever language the characters speak into English would naturally seem to only have one non-gendered word: people.  That the book is set up as a translation is established from the first chapter when Zan struggles with the word whose meaning is both “world” and “ship.”

As for the ickiness and grossness, I’m good with it.  In my limited reading it seems to me that biotechnology is a hot topic at the moment.  So the biological aspect of the ship didn’t feel innovative to me so much as in the moment.  And Hurley’s interest in that biological structure seems to have been as a backdrop for fluids and flesh rather than, again, something to explore or mine for narrative richness.  Most of the second section of the novel is Zan’s movements through the lower levels of the ship, and each level gave us a new biological horror or oddity, like Odysseus moving from island to island in the Aegean seas.  We were there long enough to see something new, overcome a challenge, and then move on.  The characters we meet and the challenges they face don’t lead to interesting revelations of world or character.  For example, the hot-air-balloon-pulley-system escape from the lake level to the amber-light level doesn’t give us readers anything to chew on. Casamir is clever to create a hot air balloon, and there is supposed to be some tension in the pulleying up of the characters, but in the end it’s a flat event without insight, like a scene in a summer blockbuster full of light and spectacle, but not much else.

In my own final analysis, the book skims across the subject of its surface without ever penetrating into the world or the characters.  The first-person perspective is on the one hand necessary for keeping us readers in the dark about who Zan really is, but it also limits what Hurley can explore.  Zan is a woman of action and not one to explore her own feelings and motivations, or even the world around her.  As a result, she dwells on nothing, introduces us to no insight, and does not have the curiosity to tell us anything of value beyond the movements of the plot.

So what is the book about?  When you strip away all the science fiction trappings and biological goo, you have a story about 3 women who are trying to save their world from extinction by the most brutal means.  Relationships are all negotiations and posturing with everyone trying to come out on top as lord.  Only Zan has the best interest of others at heart.  And what is Hurley saying about this?  Is it an examination of friendships between women?  A look at the nature of power?  A study of the tension between self-interest and communal-interest?  A tale about the cycle of birth and death and how women’s bodies are at the center of it all?  Maybe.  I don’t know if it looks at any of those things enough to ever be anything more than a passing observation.

Obviously what I’m describing is an aesthetic difference between the way Hurley wants to tell her story and the way I like to be told a story.  I think it’s awesome that Hurley has a lot of avid fans for whom this book rocked their world.  I can get what I want from other authors.

I’ve been spoiled by some excellent literature, and I miss reading them.  I seem to be living in a 3-star world lately, with books that are competently written but not especially rewarding to read, not for me at least. 

The Barrow Will Send What it May--more Danielle Can adventures

The Barrow Will Send What It May is the second book in Margaret Killjoy’s Danielle Cain series.  For me, it has the same strengths and the same weaknesses as the first book.  I’m about to spoil everything in the book, so read on at your own caution.

I really love the way Killjoy approaches the fantastic in these novels.  Her joining of small-town American life to supernatural has a flavor and look that is all its own, and that quality of freshness is not to be underrated.  Part of that uniqueness is the limited scope of the story told.  Here we have a necromancer who is raising the dead for a very specific and personal reason, and his plans affect two households in the whole town.  There is nothing earth-shattering going on here, and I like that restraint.  Similarly, Killjoy uses the tradition in detective fiction of the detective who encounters a pre-existing tangle of relationships and then has to navigate and untangle them to lay bare what is happening, if not solve it.  Crossing that detective fiction with supernatural investigation is a wonderful idea.

I admire Killjoy’s determination to create a pro-anarchy book with characters everywhere in the gender, sexuality, and romance spectrums.  She creates a world in which all these differences coexist matter-of-factly, and that’s just cool.

Finally, I like the thematic content of the book, the contrast of possessive and generous love.  Sebastian’s love for Gertrude is selfishness that disguises itself as generosity.  Vasilis has to face the fact that he too is powered by a selfish love for Heather and needs to confront that head on before he can progress.  Danielle’s sleepless night of jealousy over Brynn and Heather’s conversations is the point on contrast, in which she has to realize that her jealousy is about herself, not Brynn.  Thursday helps her come to this realization, so not all dudes are bad.  Thursday is of course held up for criticism when he is part of the dude-collective bringing firearms into one of the climactic scenes instead of contributing to the de-escalation effort that Danielle lead.  That’s when Brynn delivers the dismissive line: “Cis men.”

The politics of the book are front and center, and I enjoy that.  I also admire that Killjoy seeks to model good and open communication between characters, but it can read a little didactic at times.  When Danielle is talking to Isola in the library, she is careful to note that she doesn’t tread on Isola’s feelings: “I didn’t say any of that to Isola, though.  Because . . . me even pretending to understand where she was coming from?  That was bullshit.  I didn’t know shit about shit.  I’d never been kidnapped and murdered.”  She is, of course, absolutely right, and were that the only occurrence of such an exchange, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it.  Many of the conversations, though, show this kind of thoughtfulness.  I know I should be celebrating its existence, but something about it has the faint odor of after-school-specialness to it, to which I find myself reacting negatively.

And that leads me to the observation that there are some bad lines of dialogue in the book.  When there is a standoff in front of Sebastian’s gift shop, Danielle says to him that he doesn’t want to shoot Vasilis, and he responds “I don’t even know what I want anymore.”  Oof.  I read the entirety of the book aloud to my wife, so I was aware of every klunker.  That line, there is no good way to deliver it out loud so that it sounds believable.  Most lines of dialogue in the book are of course inoffensive, but there are very few that are noteworthy.

I like that cast of characters that Killjoy has assembled, but she doesn’t have a great way to handle all the characters in the team.  My complaint at the end of the last book was that we didn’t know anything of real meaning about anyone other than Danielle, and that doesn’t really change here.  Part of the limitation is that this is a first-person narrative, so we never get into the heads of anyone else, which raises the question: why is this a first-person narrative?  In detective literature, the first-person is necessary to limit the reader’s knowledge so that they can discover things with the detective.  In other literature, the first-person is necessary for the reader to be able to call into question what they are being told, which obviously doesn’t apply here.  In the first book, the first-person narrator made sense, since it was really about her discovering this world.  Now that we are a Scooby gang of five in their mystery van, it feels like the narrative naturally wants to broaden.  We didn’t learn anything new about Danielle in this book, and we didn’t learn anything about anyone else.

Finally, I’m not stoked about the magic feds.  Actually, I’m not stoked about the construction of magic in this world.  Apparently you can just pick up a book and do your thing.  Everyone learns from books, and they can apparently learn fast.  Doomsday has become something of an expert in short order.  It’s unclear what the magic draws on or what it costs.  I suppose both the magic feds and the shape of magic will be developed in later books, but I’m not seeing the groundwork or suggestions here.

I wish Killjoy and Cain the best in the books to come.  Unless something amazing happens, I think this will be the last book in the series I read.  The book was okay, but who has time for books that are just okay?