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.