Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Friday, April 19, 2013
Book Review: The Yiddish Policemen's Union
Michael Chabon
2007
Awards: Nebula, Hugo, Locus
Rating: ★ ★ – – –
The reason this book is considered science fiction – and one of the
reasons it probably got so much attention – is because it is set in a
provocative alternate history. Aside from that, it is really a murder
mystery, and not a very riveting one. And it has one major problem,
which I will get into in a minute.
The main character, Meyer Landsman, is a homicide detective. He lives in the Alaskan panhandle, in the district of Sitka, which was granted to Jewish refugees on a 60-year lease following the collapse of the state of Israel shortly after World War II. Ever since they began moving in, there has been a tension between the Jewish settlers and the already-resident Alaskans, both native and white.
When the book opens, it is 2007 and the 60-year settlement lease is due to expire in two months. This means that every Jewish person living in the region will need to either get Alaskan permission to stay or will have to move elsewhere. This weighs over everyone throughout the story, especially Detective Landsman, who has done zero preparation for it.
The mystery begins when a man is found murdered in the same fleabag hotel where Landsman is living. Landsman and his partner spend the book solving the case, along the way coping with sinister and corrupt religious fanatics, asocial chess club members, and a police hierarchy that wants to sweep all outstanding homicides under the rug so they can hand over a clean slate to the incoming Alaskan regime.
Sounds good, right?
The major problem, the downfall from which there is no escape, is the writing. Chabon gets a lot of kudos from reviewers for his “smart,” “inventive,” “funny,” and “sharp” style. But I have to say I found it obnoxious.
I have broken my stylistic complaints into three categories.
Complaint One: Tense
This book is told in the present tense. I always find that hard to get used to. Why do authors do that? Is it supposed to create a special mood or sense of heightened drama?
It doesn’t help that this book is full of flashbacks which are told in the past tense. I found it jarring to be coasting along in a nice past-tense flashback and then slamming back into the disconcertingly present-tense main story line.
Complaint Two: Terms
Chabon uses a lot of slang terms for Jewish people or culture. To use a relatively tame example, the Jewish characters all use the word “yid” a lot when referring to themselves or others. I’m sure that Chabon is trying to reclaim the term, the way other minority groups have reclaimed and co-opted derogatory names for themselves. But I don’t have quite the comfort level I need to have with it to read it without cringing a bit.
Complaint Three: Painfully Forced Cleverness
The writing is amazingly, annoyingly, self-consciously clever. He particularly likes to use deliberately quirky metaphors and similes, which are everywhere.
Occasionally it sort of works…
The worst part is that every time I encountered one of these gems, it was so distracting that it completely stopped the flow of my reading. In addition to just marveling at its audacity, I’d often have to interpret what the heck it meant. This made it very, very hard to remember what was going on, which in turn made it almost impossible to maintain interest in the story.
If I may use my own simile, it was like riding in a car where the driver keeps randomly applying the brake and then the gas, brake and gas, brake and gas, until you want to scream.
One recurring pattern was for smells to be described in ultra-witty sets of three:
About 100 pages in, it started to become a game: what self-consciously odd combination is he going to come up with this time?
One thing I will give this book is that the cover of the hardcover edition is awesome. It takes key elements of the story – a Verbover’s beard and ringlets, a menorah, a gun, a chess piece – and incorporates them into a Tlingit-style design appropriate to the region.
This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.
2007
Awards: Nebula, Hugo, Locus
Rating: ★ ★ – – –
The reason this book is considered science fiction – and one of the
reasons it probably got so much attention – is because it is set in a
provocative alternate history. Aside from that, it is really a murder
mystery, and not a very riveting one. And it has one major problem,
which I will get into in a minute.
The main character, Meyer Landsman, is a homicide detective. He lives in the Alaskan panhandle, in the district of Sitka, which was granted to Jewish refugees on a 60-year lease following the collapse of the state of Israel shortly after World War II. Ever since they began moving in, there has been a tension between the Jewish settlers and the already-resident Alaskans, both native and white.
When the book opens, it is 2007 and the 60-year settlement lease is due to expire in two months. This means that every Jewish person living in the region will need to either get Alaskan permission to stay or will have to move elsewhere. This weighs over everyone throughout the story, especially Detective Landsman, who has done zero preparation for it.
The mystery begins when a man is found murdered in the same fleabag hotel where Landsman is living. Landsman and his partner spend the book solving the case, along the way coping with sinister and corrupt religious fanatics, asocial chess club members, and a police hierarchy that wants to sweep all outstanding homicides under the rug so they can hand over a clean slate to the incoming Alaskan regime.
Sounds good, right?
The major problem, the downfall from which there is no escape, is the writing. Chabon gets a lot of kudos from reviewers for his “smart,” “inventive,” “funny,” and “sharp” style. But I have to say I found it obnoxious.
I have broken my stylistic complaints into three categories.
Complaint One: Tense
This book is told in the present tense. I always find that hard to get used to. Why do authors do that? Is it supposed to create a special mood or sense of heightened drama?
It doesn’t help that this book is full of flashbacks which are told in the past tense. I found it jarring to be coasting along in a nice past-tense flashback and then slamming back into the disconcertingly present-tense main story line.
Complaint Two: Terms
Chabon uses a lot of slang terms for Jewish people or culture. To use a relatively tame example, the Jewish characters all use the word “yid” a lot when referring to themselves or others. I’m sure that Chabon is trying to reclaim the term, the way other minority groups have reclaimed and co-opted derogatory names for themselves. But I don’t have quite the comfort level I need to have with it to read it without cringing a bit.
Complaint Three: Painfully Forced Cleverness
The writing is amazingly, annoyingly, self-consciously clever. He particularly likes to use deliberately quirky metaphors and similes, which are everywhere.
Occasionally it sort of works…
“Scraps of newsprint, leaves, and dust get up impromptu games of dreydl in the archways of the houses.”
“His thoughts are a tattoo needle inking the spade on an ace. They are a tornado going back and forth over the same damn pancaked trailer.”
The village is “a row of steel roofs along an inlet, houses jumbled like the last ten cans of beans on a grocery shelf before the hurricane hits.”But most of the time… not so much. If I may give you just a tiny sample.
“His teeth are like the pipes of an organ made of bones. His laugh sounds like a handful of rusty forks and nail heads clattering on the ground.”
“The knot of his gold-and-green rep necktie presses its thumb against his larynx like a scruple pressing against a guilty conscience.”
“An invisible gas clouds his thoughts, exhaust from a bus left parked with its engine running in the middle of his brain.”
“The Sitka Saturday afternoon lies dead as a failed messiah in its winding rag of snow.”
A woman’s snoring “has a double-reeded hum, the bumblebee continuo of Mongolian throat-singing. It has the slow grandeur of a whale’s respiration.”
A motorcycle sounds like “The hacking cough of an old man. A heavy wrench clanging against a cold cement floor. The flatulence of a burst balloon streaking across the living room and knocking over a lamp.”These are often piled one after the other after the other.
The worst part is that every time I encountered one of these gems, it was so distracting that it completely stopped the flow of my reading. In addition to just marveling at its audacity, I’d often have to interpret what the heck it meant. This made it very, very hard to remember what was going on, which in turn made it almost impossible to maintain interest in the story.
If I may use my own simile, it was like riding in a car where the driver keeps randomly applying the brake and then the gas, brake and gas, brake and gas, until you want to scream.
One recurring pattern was for smells to be described in ultra-witty sets of three:
The saunas smell like “chlorine and armpit and a ripe salt vapor that might on second thought have been the pickle factory on the ground floor.”
A sofa gives off “a strong Sitka odor of mildew, cigarettes, a complicated saltiness that is part stormy sea, part sweat on the lining of a wool fedora.”
Standing on the top of his apartment building, “Landsman can smell fish offal from the canneries, grease from the fry pits at the Pearl of Manila, the spew of taxis, an intoxicating bouquet of fresh hat from Grinspoon’s Felting two blocks away.”Whoops, that last one had four witty smells.
About 100 pages in, it started to become a game: what self-consciously odd combination is he going to come up with this time?
One thing I will give this book is that the cover of the hardcover edition is awesome. It takes key elements of the story – a Verbover’s beard and ringlets, a menorah, a gun, a chess piece – and incorporates them into a Tlingit-style design appropriate to the region.
This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.
Friday, April 12, 2013
Book Review: Parable of the Talents
Octavia Butler
1998
Awards: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –
SPOILER ALERT (For Parable of the Sower)
A few years ago I read Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which is a prequel to this book. I liked Sower's premise but much of the time I was pretty irritated with the main character, Lauren Olamina, who narrated the story. I thought she was stubborn and annoying. She had also developed her own religion, “Earthseed,” and spent most of her time proselytizing it all over the place.
So I was hesitant to read Parable of the Talents. But I am glad I did; I liked it much better than Sower. Talents is partly narrated by Lauren Olamina, again, but it is also partly narrated by her daughter, Larkin, who is a breath of fresh air; she thinks her mother is stubborn and annoying and wishes she’d stop always proselytizing her religion all over the place.
The back story (mostly told in Parable of the Sower) is that by the 2030s, for a combination of environmental and political reasons, economic inequality in the US has grown to the point that all middle-class and rich people have to live in iron-walled, guarded sections of cities protected from the chaos and crime and poverty outside. Eventually things outside the walls get so bad that the poor people blast their way in to these citadels; during this revolt, most of the rich and middle-class people are either killed or have to go on the road and scavenge like vagabonds.
Lauren Olamina is one of these people. Most of her family is killed during the invasion of their middle-class home in LA but she escapes and makes her way on foot up the coast, gradually collecting a tribe of people around her who buy into her hippyish Earthseed religion. They settle in northern California on her husband's property, start farming and teaching and having kids and making new lives.
This is roughly where Sower stops and Talents picks up. Just when things are starting to look comparatively rosy for the Earthseeders, a fascist right-wing president gets elected and his minions come and take over the Earthseed compound (claiming that it is a cult, which it sort of is) and steal all their children and adopt them out to nice Christian households. One of these children is Lauren’s daughter Larkin.
Talents is partly the story of
Lauren persevering and rebuilding after the demolition of her Earthseed
farm; this part was less interesting to me. But it is also partly the
story of Larkin growing up in an adoptive household, achieving her own
success, and eventually going to find her biological parents. Larkin is
understandably a bit ticked off when she finds out how little Lauren did
to find her until many, many years had gone by; Earthseed and the
compound were clearly more important to her than her lost child.
The premise of the Parable books is an example of one of my favorite sci-fi sub-genres, in which humanity is all but destroyed by war/disease/rioting/environmental catastrophe and a few survivors are left to band together and make a new civilization while being beset by other humans who want to take what they have and/or control them. There are tons of awesome works of fiction with different takes on this idea (The Stand, The Day of the Triffids, Canticle for Leibowitz, The Omega Man, etc.). One of the best things about science fiction is that you can do this kind of thought experiment and explore the ways people might deal with each other, for good and for ill, when they have next to nothing left.
This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.
1998
Awards: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –
SPOILER ALERT (For Parable of the Sower)
A few years ago I read Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which is a prequel to this book. I liked Sower's premise but much of the time I was pretty irritated with the main character, Lauren Olamina, who narrated the story. I thought she was stubborn and annoying. She had also developed her own religion, “Earthseed,” and spent most of her time proselytizing it all over the place.
So I was hesitant to read Parable of the Talents. But I am glad I did; I liked it much better than Sower. Talents is partly narrated by Lauren Olamina, again, but it is also partly narrated by her daughter, Larkin, who is a breath of fresh air; she thinks her mother is stubborn and annoying and wishes she’d stop always proselytizing her religion all over the place.
The back story (mostly told in Parable of the Sower) is that by the 2030s, for a combination of environmental and political reasons, economic inequality in the US has grown to the point that all middle-class and rich people have to live in iron-walled, guarded sections of cities protected from the chaos and crime and poverty outside. Eventually things outside the walls get so bad that the poor people blast their way in to these citadels; during this revolt, most of the rich and middle-class people are either killed or have to go on the road and scavenge like vagabonds.
Lauren Olamina is one of these people. Most of her family is killed during the invasion of their middle-class home in LA but she escapes and makes her way on foot up the coast, gradually collecting a tribe of people around her who buy into her hippyish Earthseed religion. They settle in northern California on her husband's property, start farming and teaching and having kids and making new lives.
This is roughly where Sower stops and Talents picks up. Just when things are starting to look comparatively rosy for the Earthseeders, a fascist right-wing president gets elected and his minions come and take over the Earthseed compound (claiming that it is a cult, which it sort of is) and steal all their children and adopt them out to nice Christian households. One of these children is Lauren’s daughter Larkin.
 |
| The Omega Man |
The premise of the Parable books is an example of one of my favorite sci-fi sub-genres, in which humanity is all but destroyed by war/disease/rioting/environmental catastrophe and a few survivors are left to band together and make a new civilization while being beset by other humans who want to take what they have and/or control them. There are tons of awesome works of fiction with different takes on this idea (The Stand, The Day of the Triffids, Canticle for Leibowitz, The Omega Man, etc.). One of the best things about science fiction is that you can do this kind of thought experiment and explore the ways people might deal with each other, for good and for ill, when they have next to nothing left.
This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Friday, April 5, 2013
Book Review: Barrayar
Lois
McMaster Bujold
1991
Awards: Hugo, Locus
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ – – –
Barrayar was the seventh novel written in Lois McMaster Bujold’s long-running Vorkosigan Saga, but it is one of the very earliest in the saga’s internal chronological order. It lays the groundwork for most of the later books, introducing us to the Vor and explaining the birth and early childhood challenges of Miles Vorkosigan, the saga’s most frequent protagonist.
1991
Awards: Hugo, Locus
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ – – –
Barrayar was the seventh novel written in Lois McMaster Bujold’s long-running Vorkosigan Saga, but it is one of the very earliest in the saga’s internal chronological order. It lays the groundwork for most of the later books, introducing us to the Vor and explaining the birth and early childhood challenges of Miles Vorkosigan, the saga’s most frequent protagonist.
In
Barrayar, the story centers around
Cordelia Naismith, a brilliant and charming but independent-minded and steely-tough
red-haired spaceship captain from the planet Beta. She is married to the
brilliant and wise but steely-tough Count Aral Vorkosigan and the two of them
are deeply in love with each other. They live on the planet Barrayar in the
count’s traditional family home.
Count
Vorkosigan is a high-ranking member of the Vor family, which is an elite
military caste in the Barrayaran empire. The count becomes arguably the most
powerful man on the planet when the elderly emperor dies and the count is
appointed regent to Gregor, the emperor’s child successor.
Unfortunately,
the empire not only has several enemy states but is also filled with layer upon
layer of internal intrigue; Vorkosigan’s new position has earned him the
jealousy of several of his Vor kinsmen.
In
addition, Barrayar is a somewhat conservative world and the people are
constantly being shocked by Cordelia’s Betan egalitarian and feminist
sensibilities. She’s constantly being too familiar and unimpressed with
important nobles for local custom (but getting away with it because of her
aforementioned brilliance and charm).
Needless
to say, all of this earns the count and countess many stalwart friends and
supporters… as well as many powerful enemies. Eventually, one of their enemies is
able to get by security and release a powerful neurotoxin in the Vorkosigan
home. It hits Cordelia, who happens to be pregnant at the time.
Doctors
are able to rid her of the toxin, but not before it permanently damages her
fetus, which will have to be gestated in a uterine replicator for the rest of
its term. Then one of the other Vor counts stages a coup, during which the
replicator is kidnapped. Most of the rest of the plot of the book involves the
battle against the usurper count and the recovery of the replicator.
I
never really got caught up in this story. I wasn’t interested in the
internecine conflict among the various Vors and the writing was too much like a
romance novel for my comfort. There were too many flashing eyes and swirling
skirts and unbendingly loyal manservants/armsmen and people being called
"Milady." Cordelia was always being called “feisty” and was always
drawing criticism from the backwards Barrayans with her modern Betan views and
then of course always turning out to be right.
An earlier version of this review appeared on Cheeze Blog.
Friday, March 29, 2013
Book Review: A Time of Changes
Robert Silverberg1971
Awards: Nebula
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ – – – –
It seems as if Silverberg read The Lord of the Rings and said, “This book is great but what it needs is a lot of sloppy sex and more obvious drug references!”
This book is written in a sword-and-sorcery fantasy style, with strange fell beasts, semi-medieval customs and dress and archaic sentence structures. Many of the names of people and places could be lifted straight from Tolkien (Glin, Loimel, The Burnt Lowlands). Even the map at the front of my 2009 edition uses the same font and brushwork as the maps of Middle Earth.
Unfortunately, this book is most definitely not The Lord of the Rings.
The story is about Kinnall Darival, the second son of one of the rulers of Salla, one of the lands on a planet colonized by space-faring humans centuries ago. The strongest legacy the original colonists left their descendants is a puritanical Covenant, or code of conduct, that says that the most wicked sin is to be a “selfbarer” – a person who shows any kind of reverence to themselves or to their own private thoughts. The words “I” and “me” are banished – you can only refer to yourself obliquely as “one,” as in, “there is love in one for you.”
Kinnall falls into bad company and learns about a drug that allows you to share your inner self with anyone else taking the drug at the same time as you. After taking the drug, Kinnall realizes that it is no sin to bare one's self to other people, and in fact that it can lead to good things like being able to overtly declare one's love for someone else, so he sets out to give as many other people the drug as possible. Of course the establishment doesn’t like this and he becomes a fugitive.
Among the many problems I had with this book, there were two major ones.
1. This “I/me” thing. In the world of this book, saying “I” or “me” is the ultimate obscenity, because it emphasizes the self-ness of the speaker. Samuel Delany dealt with a similar concept in his (earlier) book Babel-17. For all that book’s faults, at least Delany took it to the next logical step – he realized that if you are not going to allow a person to think about themselves by not allowing them to say “me,” then you can’t allow them to say “you” either. If you say “you,” then you clearly have a sense of someone being other than yourself, and therefore by definition you have a sense of yourself. Not to mention that you’re calling the other person’s attention to the fact that they have a self apart from yours. This is Semiotics 101. All the people in this book saying “one” when referring to themselves and then saying “you” when referring to others made the whole premise break down into silliness.
2. Seedy hippie culture. In the preface to my edition, Silverberg says that this book reflects what was going on in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s when he wrote it, but that he hopes it still stands up today, and that the themes revolving around the self-awareness drug aren’t taken too literally to make people think it's solely a drug novel. I’m afraid, however, that it definitely is a piece of its time and that it does not wear well. Taking the drug is the turning point for Kinnall; he immediately feels like his consciousness has been opened and he becomes an eager distributor. In addition, Silverberg finds some excuse for his main character to have sex about every five pages. Kinnall is a big hairy sweaty guy with a premature ejaculation problem, and the euphemisms that describe his lovemaking activities are trite, cheesy, and gross. “The rod of my sex”? Come on. He’d fit right on with Will Farrell and Rachel Dratch’s hot tub lovers.
This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Friday, March 22, 2013
Book Review: The City & The City
China Miéville2009
Awards: Hugo, Locus
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –
The City & the City is, on one level, a decent but not outstanding detective novel. At the beginning of the book, a young woman is found dead in the fictional Balkan city of Besźel, and Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Besźel policzai has to solve her murder.
What makes the book unique and interesting is the setting. The victim is discovered in Besźel, a down-at-heel, primarily Slavic city. But there is evidence that she was actually killed in Besźel’s prosperous, primarily Islamic sister city of Ul Qoma, and then later dumped in Besźel. This is a serious matter, as relations between Besźel and Ul Qoma are extremely tense.
To make matters even more complicated, Besźel and Ul Qoma are co-located. That is, the two cities are physically intermingled with each other. Some sections are total Besźel; some are total Ul Qoma; and some are “crosshatched,” meaning that streets and buildings in one city alternate with those in the other—sometimes block to block and sometimes house to house.
And if you are in one city, it is a tremendous offense not only to physically step into the other city, but also even to sense or acknowledge the people, buildings, traffic, or sounds of the other city in any way. If you do, and you are caught doing it, you can be arrested for breach, and spirited away by a sort of black ops breach enforcement unit, never to be heard from again.
Children in both cities are taught from birth to “unsee” what they aren’t supposed to see. Tourists to either city are given an intensive multi-week training program in the practice of unseeing. But even adult natives can have a hard time with it, since sometimes the only way to tell which city a thing or person is in is by the subtlest of cues—architecture, colors of clothing, or how hedges are trimmed.
Needless to say, this makes it extraordinarily difficult to conduct everyday life in either city, much less solve a murder where the person was murdered in one city and then dumped in the other. In the course of his investigation, Inspector Borlú has to use all his skills navigating the divisions and still runs afoul of breach enforcement units, militant unificationists who want to combine the two cities, and nationalist extremists on both sides who want their city to take over the other.
Reading this book, I found myself comparing the detective story (favorably) to Resurrection Men. As in Resurrection Men, the main character was an experienced, middle-aged male detective with an able younger female constable assisting him; the police hierarchy had a British flavor; and the story took place in the present day, complete with cell phones and modern attitudes and style. But The City & The City was a more interesting story, with a far more likeable detective, and it was, thank goodness, told in the past tense. The ending was a little bit deflating, but that may have just been a natural result of the mystery being explained, the unknown finally becoming known.
It was Miéville’s conception and implementation of the dual city-city, though, that made this book a real standout.
Some reviewers have called this book a “post-9/11” novel, meaning that it explores the split between Islam and Christianity. But I think the metaphor is more general than that. Besźel and Ul Qoma are like many different divided societies, past and present—Berlin, Jerusalem, Cyprus, Budapest, the Balkans, Northern Ireland. Their people live close to each other and sometimes seem alike to outsiders, but are sharply and violently divided by thought and history. Separation is perpetuated by entrenched political institutions. Prejudices strengthen with time and lack of familiarity.
What makes The City & The City a great thought experiment is that in Besźel and Ul Qoma, the separation is entirely mental. I couldn’t help but think that the inhabitants of Besźel must be aware of the Ul Qomans around them, and vice versa. I thought about how it would be so easy to commit breach by walking from a house in Besźel into an Ul Qoman one next door. And yet it hardly ever happens. For the citizens of these two cities, the mental divisions are so ingrained that they have become physically real. The inhabitants of one city really can’t see the inhabitants of the other, even in the case of danger or panic.
And, at the risk of being high-faluting, I don't think this is so far-fetched from reality. I know that there are all kinds of things—and people—in front of my face in my everyday life that might seem ridiculously obvious to others but that, for one reason or another, I don't see at all.
This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
The Ten Best Dogs in Science Fiction
I enjoyed this post on Tor.com about "The 10 Best Dogs in Science Fiction" not for the ten dogs Tor chose, but rather for the gazillion reader comments at the end suggesting other SF dogs (and "dogs") that really should have made it onto the list.
 |
| Rat Thing from Snow Crash by Cypher Calliste |
Friday, March 15, 2013
Book Review: Falling Free
Lois McMaster Bujold
I found Falling
Free primarily dippy and also a bit creepy.
1988
Awards: Nebula
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ – – –
Falling Free is technically part of Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga, as it takes place in the same universe as the other books in that series. But since there is essentially no overlap with any of the key characters in the other Vorkosigan novels, it can be read as an independent story.
Awards: Nebula
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ – – –
Falling Free is technically part of Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga, as it takes place in the same universe as the other books in that series. But since there is essentially no overlap with any of the key characters in the other Vorkosigan novels, it can be read as an independent story.
I found Falling
Free primarily dippy and also a bit creepy.
It is set on
a remote space station owned and operated by the Ampad Corporation. Ampad has
staffed the station with custom-made, genetically engineered workers called
“quaddies.” The company has no intention of ever letting the quaddies walk on a
planet’s surface; they are designed to spend their entire lives in a
gravity-free environment. So the company engineers have manipulated the
quaddies’ genes to grow an extra pair of arms where their legs should be.
The quaddies are a real money-saver for Ampad. With four
hands, they are able to work better in free-fall than a regular two-handed
person since they can hold on to stabilizers with one or two of their hands
while working with the other two or three. And breeding their own permanent
in-station work force is cheaper than hiring planet-bound contractors that have
to be periodically replaced.
The quaddies have been psychologically conditioned to be good-natured and friendly. Unfortunately, however, the company doesn’t give a darn about them and sees them as expendable slaves. The quaddies aren’t ever allowed off the station. They are forced to reproduce with whomever the company says they have to reproduce with, regardless of if they like that other quaddie or not. They can be sterilized at will.
The quaddies make up the bulk of the station’s work force, but the company hires a few two-armed, two-legged people to fill supervisory roles like trainers and managers. For the most part, the two-legged employees are 100% evil and mean and regard the quaddies as subhuman.
But one of the two-legged guys, welding instructor Leo Graf, isn’t prejudiced towards the quaddies and quickly grows attached to them. And when he finds out that the company is thinking about installing cheap newly-developed artificial gravity systems in the station, which would mean they wouldn’t need free-fall-only employees anymore, he realizes that he has to help the quaddies escape before the company decides to sterilize and/or possibly kill all of them to cut costs.
The reason I say this book is dippy is because the plot is pretty simplistic and the characters just weren’t interesting or complex enough to make up for it. I lost most of my enthusiasm about a third of the way in. The quaddies are also almost uniformly upbeat, optimistic, charming, friendly, kind, and earnest. Annoyingly so. I wish that some of them were a little cantankerous or at least just not so innocent and nice all the time.
The creepy part was that Leo Graf, who, based on his many years of experience, I understood as being a somewhat older man, had a romantic relationship with what seemed like a really, really, really young quaddie. I’d like someone to tell me I have the ages wrong because it gave me the heebie-jeebies.
An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.
The quaddies have been psychologically conditioned to be good-natured and friendly. Unfortunately, however, the company doesn’t give a darn about them and sees them as expendable slaves. The quaddies aren’t ever allowed off the station. They are forced to reproduce with whomever the company says they have to reproduce with, regardless of if they like that other quaddie or not. They can be sterilized at will.
The quaddies make up the bulk of the station’s work force, but the company hires a few two-armed, two-legged people to fill supervisory roles like trainers and managers. For the most part, the two-legged employees are 100% evil and mean and regard the quaddies as subhuman.
But one of the two-legged guys, welding instructor Leo Graf, isn’t prejudiced towards the quaddies and quickly grows attached to them. And when he finds out that the company is thinking about installing cheap newly-developed artificial gravity systems in the station, which would mean they wouldn’t need free-fall-only employees anymore, he realizes that he has to help the quaddies escape before the company decides to sterilize and/or possibly kill all of them to cut costs.
The reason I say this book is dippy is because the plot is pretty simplistic and the characters just weren’t interesting or complex enough to make up for it. I lost most of my enthusiasm about a third of the way in. The quaddies are also almost uniformly upbeat, optimistic, charming, friendly, kind, and earnest. Annoyingly so. I wish that some of them were a little cantankerous or at least just not so innocent and nice all the time.
The creepy part was that Leo Graf, who, based on his many years of experience, I understood as being a somewhat older man, had a romantic relationship with what seemed like a really, really, really young quaddie. I’d like someone to tell me I have the ages wrong because it gave me the heebie-jeebies.
An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.
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