summer reading
Jul. 9th, 2002 01:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mamajoanThis year, as each year for the past several, I decided to read all the novels nominated for the Hugo. The Hugo Award is to science fiction novels what the Oscar is to movies; there are numerous categories (short story, artist, magazine etc.) but the Best Novel category is the big one. The Hugos are given out at the World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) each year, and anyone who has pre-purchased a Worldcon membership can vote. Which means me! In previous years I have not actually managed to read all the nominated novels by the voting deadline. But this year the deadline is July 31st and I may actually make it.
The six nominees this year are:
Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold (already read it)
Cosmonaut Keep by Ken MacLeod (read it; see below)
The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson (read about a third of it thus far)
American Gods by Neil Gaiman (ordered it from bn.com)
Passage by Connie Willis (ditto)
Perdido Street Station by China Mieville (got it from the library)
The rest of this post is basically my review of Cosmonaut Keep, along with assorted feminist-type ranting. You have been warned.
Cosmonaut Keep follows in alternating chapters the lives of two men, one of whom we eventually find out is the great-grandfather of the other. On 21st-century Earth, one man, Matt, is discovering a political conspiracy surrounding the discovery of alien life on a nearby asteroid. And on another planet many years in the future, the other man, Gregor, is discovering stuff that may enable his people to regain the power of space flight.
I have to confess that much of the world-building and setting-the-scene in this book confused me greatly. I am still not entirely sure how the various planets interrelate; it seems that the people inhabiting each planet all came from Earth at some point, but it's never made really clear how and when each planet was colonized. On Gregor's planet, the people coexist mostly peacefully with another race of beings called saurs, which I think we're supposed to believe were descended from Earth's ancient dinosaurs. But the saurs are enigmatic and prefer not to talk much about themselves. The colony of humans is fairly primitive by 21st-century Earth standards; they have little technology and basically live off the land, or more accurately off the sea. Gregor's people live in a port town where fishing and shipping are the main industries.
Anyway, a ship arrives from another planet, which is far away but also inhabited by humans. There's mention made of the fact that the government of this other planet has only just found out about the existence of Gregor's people on their planet, although they have been there two hundred years. Gregor's grandfather and the older people in the colony, we discover, are secretly trying to figure out some equations that will supposedly help them recover their spaceship, which is orbiting the planet empty and abandoned because no one knows how to work it.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, Matt comes into possession of a data-disk containing instructions for building an alien spaceship. The data supposedly came from an Earth space station that is located near the asteroid where aliens were discovered. Through a convoluted and improbable sequence of events, it is decided that Matt should take the data disk back to the space station. So he does, and various plot developments ensue. A bunch of other stuff happens, and Matt and Gregor save the day, basically. I don't want to give away the entire plot.
Although this book was well-written and an interesting concept, there were a lot of problems with it. First, as I mentioned above, the scene-setting stuff was very confusing. And not just on the future side, but also on the past side, narrated by Matt. I gathered that all of Europe in the 21st century was communist/socialist, and all of America was considered the Big Evil by the rest of the country, but the affiliations and interrelationships of the various agencies and governments was very difficult to sort out. Essentially, a good deal of the underlying mythos and background to the plot is missing. Much of this stuff comes out in fits and spurts, as tossed-off comments by the characters, but overall it was very frustrating trying to figure out how these various communities were structured, what their history was, and of course, why I should care.
Second, the characterization of the non-human species in the story is inconsistent. Through the first two-thirds of the book there are occasional references to other beings besides saurs and humans, but they don't get actually introduced or shown until the story is almost over, and then in a fairly throwaway fashion, leaving one to wonder, what was the point? Also, there are beings called "gods" which I gather are some form of alien life, but they are never really explained or given a narrative purpose either. Even the saurs, the creatures that get the most exposure, are inconsistently portrayed. Much is made of their secrecy and reluctance to let humans know anything about them, and yet when one saur brings Gregor and another human into their city, where no human has ever been, none of the other saurs even seems to look twice. At the very end of the novel, again in throwaway fashion, we learn that a fundamental piece of saur philosophy has been wrong all along, but since we hadn't yet been shown how that was affecting their behavior, the revelation lacks punch.
Third, the fact that Matt's narration is in first person and Gregor's in third is jarring and seems to make no sense, except *maybe* to signal to the reader that we have switched perspectives. Especially as Gregor is a moderately more sympathetic character. Personally, I found them both to be fairly annoying, but Matt more so.
Fourth, the book suffers from a malady that seems all too common in the scifi world these days: the author spends too much time setting things up and developing the plot, and then, as if he suddenly realized he was almost to his word limit, wraps it all up in a few too-quick, unsatisfying pages. I can't even express how much I hate this. If you're going to take the time to set up a plot, take the time to resolve it!
Anyway, in sum, a decent book, but with many problems and an unsatisfying ending.
While reading Cosmonaut Keep, I began to realize something that has been niggling at me for a while, but is really starting to come into focus lately. And it is this. I am getting pretty tired of all the sci-fi out there without any decent female characters. Needless to say, the vast majority of such books are written by men. Why is it that women can write very interesting, compelling, complex male characters, but men can't write a good female character to save their lives?
In Cosmonaut Keep, each of the two male protagonists has two women in his life. Of those four women, one serves no plot purpose except for the man to fall irrationally in love with her; one serves no plot purpose except to have an unrequited crush on the man; and two serve plot purposes that could just as easily have been served *without* the extra element of her falling into bed with the man. Let's get this clear from the get-go, people: Just because your female character has a job and a life, just because she is a member of (for example) the military and can fly fighter planes/build spaceships/program computers, does not make her a strong, interesting, complex female character. And if she winds up in bed with / in love with / married to the male character, she loses whatever cool points she might have had. There are so many cases where the romance part could have been left out and the book would have been MUCH better (Cosmonaut Keep is an example); and there are *very* few examples of the reverse.
Don't get me wrong, there are certainly some men writing very interesting and decent female characters. And there are lots of male authors who seem to be trying very hard to make their female characters complex and interesting, with varying degrees of success. (Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear is a great example. I felt that he was making an honest and commendable effort to create an interesting and strong female protagonist -- he didn't succeed, IMO, but he did try.)
It's funny, because I don't mind reading books by women where the main characters are men; but when the author is a man, and almost all the main characters are men, it irks the hell out of me. ESPECIALLY if the only female characters around are a) people's wives, mothers, sisters, or b) ball-breaking butch lesbian types, or c) only there to provide the main character with a love interest. And you know, even in this day and age, and even in a genre so historically progressive as sci-fi, that kind of thing is WAY too common. It just really fuckin' pisses me off, dude.
Right now, as stated above, I'm partway through Robert Charles Wilson's Hugo nominee. His main character is a man as well, with already a pissed-off ex-wife and a lesbian boss. However, I'm not passing judgment just yet; ask me again after I finish reading the book. At least, if neither this nor the Mieville nor the Gaiman pans out female-character-wise, at least I know I have a Connie Willis to look forward to. I may save hers for last. I love Connie, and she never fails to restore my faith in the potential of feminist sci-fi writing.
Enough. My wrists are killing me, and making me even more cranky. That was enough ranting for one lj entry anyway. ;)
The six nominees this year are:
Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold (already read it)
Cosmonaut Keep by Ken MacLeod (read it; see below)
The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson (read about a third of it thus far)
American Gods by Neil Gaiman (ordered it from bn.com)
Passage by Connie Willis (ditto)
Perdido Street Station by China Mieville (got it from the library)
The rest of this post is basically my review of Cosmonaut Keep, along with assorted feminist-type ranting. You have been warned.
Cosmonaut Keep follows in alternating chapters the lives of two men, one of whom we eventually find out is the great-grandfather of the other. On 21st-century Earth, one man, Matt, is discovering a political conspiracy surrounding the discovery of alien life on a nearby asteroid. And on another planet many years in the future, the other man, Gregor, is discovering stuff that may enable his people to regain the power of space flight.
I have to confess that much of the world-building and setting-the-scene in this book confused me greatly. I am still not entirely sure how the various planets interrelate; it seems that the people inhabiting each planet all came from Earth at some point, but it's never made really clear how and when each planet was colonized. On Gregor's planet, the people coexist mostly peacefully with another race of beings called saurs, which I think we're supposed to believe were descended from Earth's ancient dinosaurs. But the saurs are enigmatic and prefer not to talk much about themselves. The colony of humans is fairly primitive by 21st-century Earth standards; they have little technology and basically live off the land, or more accurately off the sea. Gregor's people live in a port town where fishing and shipping are the main industries.
Anyway, a ship arrives from another planet, which is far away but also inhabited by humans. There's mention made of the fact that the government of this other planet has only just found out about the existence of Gregor's people on their planet, although they have been there two hundred years. Gregor's grandfather and the older people in the colony, we discover, are secretly trying to figure out some equations that will supposedly help them recover their spaceship, which is orbiting the planet empty and abandoned because no one knows how to work it.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, Matt comes into possession of a data-disk containing instructions for building an alien spaceship. The data supposedly came from an Earth space station that is located near the asteroid where aliens were discovered. Through a convoluted and improbable sequence of events, it is decided that Matt should take the data disk back to the space station. So he does, and various plot developments ensue. A bunch of other stuff happens, and Matt and Gregor save the day, basically. I don't want to give away the entire plot.
Although this book was well-written and an interesting concept, there were a lot of problems with it. First, as I mentioned above, the scene-setting stuff was very confusing. And not just on the future side, but also on the past side, narrated by Matt. I gathered that all of Europe in the 21st century was communist/socialist, and all of America was considered the Big Evil by the rest of the country, but the affiliations and interrelationships of the various agencies and governments was very difficult to sort out. Essentially, a good deal of the underlying mythos and background to the plot is missing. Much of this stuff comes out in fits and spurts, as tossed-off comments by the characters, but overall it was very frustrating trying to figure out how these various communities were structured, what their history was, and of course, why I should care.
Second, the characterization of the non-human species in the story is inconsistent. Through the first two-thirds of the book there are occasional references to other beings besides saurs and humans, but they don't get actually introduced or shown until the story is almost over, and then in a fairly throwaway fashion, leaving one to wonder, what was the point? Also, there are beings called "gods" which I gather are some form of alien life, but they are never really explained or given a narrative purpose either. Even the saurs, the creatures that get the most exposure, are inconsistently portrayed. Much is made of their secrecy and reluctance to let humans know anything about them, and yet when one saur brings Gregor and another human into their city, where no human has ever been, none of the other saurs even seems to look twice. At the very end of the novel, again in throwaway fashion, we learn that a fundamental piece of saur philosophy has been wrong all along, but since we hadn't yet been shown how that was affecting their behavior, the revelation lacks punch.
Third, the fact that Matt's narration is in first person and Gregor's in third is jarring and seems to make no sense, except *maybe* to signal to the reader that we have switched perspectives. Especially as Gregor is a moderately more sympathetic character. Personally, I found them both to be fairly annoying, but Matt more so.
Fourth, the book suffers from a malady that seems all too common in the scifi world these days: the author spends too much time setting things up and developing the plot, and then, as if he suddenly realized he was almost to his word limit, wraps it all up in a few too-quick, unsatisfying pages. I can't even express how much I hate this. If you're going to take the time to set up a plot, take the time to resolve it!
Anyway, in sum, a decent book, but with many problems and an unsatisfying ending.
While reading Cosmonaut Keep, I began to realize something that has been niggling at me for a while, but is really starting to come into focus lately. And it is this. I am getting pretty tired of all the sci-fi out there without any decent female characters. Needless to say, the vast majority of such books are written by men. Why is it that women can write very interesting, compelling, complex male characters, but men can't write a good female character to save their lives?
In Cosmonaut Keep, each of the two male protagonists has two women in his life. Of those four women, one serves no plot purpose except for the man to fall irrationally in love with her; one serves no plot purpose except to have an unrequited crush on the man; and two serve plot purposes that could just as easily have been served *without* the extra element of her falling into bed with the man. Let's get this clear from the get-go, people: Just because your female character has a job and a life, just because she is a member of (for example) the military and can fly fighter planes/build spaceships/program computers, does not make her a strong, interesting, complex female character. And if she winds up in bed with / in love with / married to the male character, she loses whatever cool points she might have had. There are so many cases where the romance part could have been left out and the book would have been MUCH better (Cosmonaut Keep is an example); and there are *very* few examples of the reverse.
Don't get me wrong, there are certainly some men writing very interesting and decent female characters. And there are lots of male authors who seem to be trying very hard to make their female characters complex and interesting, with varying degrees of success. (Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear is a great example. I felt that he was making an honest and commendable effort to create an interesting and strong female protagonist -- he didn't succeed, IMO, but he did try.)
It's funny, because I don't mind reading books by women where the main characters are men; but when the author is a man, and almost all the main characters are men, it irks the hell out of me. ESPECIALLY if the only female characters around are a) people's wives, mothers, sisters, or b) ball-breaking butch lesbian types, or c) only there to provide the main character with a love interest. And you know, even in this day and age, and even in a genre so historically progressive as sci-fi, that kind of thing is WAY too common. It just really fuckin' pisses me off, dude.
Right now, as stated above, I'm partway through Robert Charles Wilson's Hugo nominee. His main character is a man as well, with already a pissed-off ex-wife and a lesbian boss. However, I'm not passing judgment just yet; ask me again after I finish reading the book. At least, if neither this nor the Mieville nor the Gaiman pans out female-character-wise, at least I know I have a Connie Willis to look forward to. I may save hers for last. I love Connie, and she never fails to restore my faith in the potential of feminist sci-fi writing.
Enough. My wrists are killing me, and making me even more cranky. That was enough ranting for one lj entry anyway. ;)
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no subject
Date: 2002-07-09 12:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-07-09 02:51 pm (UTC)Neil wrote something about books and genders on his website, for what it's worth.
I ought to get a copy of Stardust...
no subject
Date: 2002-07-09 02:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-07-09 02:56 pm (UTC)Something to expand for
no subject
Date: 2002-07-09 03:00 pm (UTC)