![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsA few weeks ago I blogged about Justina Robson's Living Next Door To The God Of Love, which I thought was okay. In that book, a thing called The Unity exists, and although it is ineffable, it has agents that have created weird, extant, alternative realities for human beings, a search space whereby Unity searches for meaning, often by absorbing the distinctiveness of individuals into itself. It has one major agent running around, and a lot of human beings trying hard to find the key that will unlever Unity's power over humanity. Unity is a seething mass of all the things its ever absorbed; a great storm of "seethe" broke away, called itself Jaeleka (the nominal titular character), and things got weird.
I just finished the book that came before Living Next Door..., Natural History, and it leaves me with this one strong impression: while I can see how Robson got from Natural History to Living Next Door..., I really, really wish she hadn't.
The second book had wonderful, complex characters and lovely set pieces, but it didn't all add up to a meaningful story; Natural History, on the other hand, not only has the same complicated, wonderful, lovely characters you come to love or hate, but it does have a meaningful story with a highly charged and yet satisfying ending.
Robson starts with a world where human beings have genetically engineered thousands of species of human/machine hybrids, the Forged, who do the dangerous, dirty, environmentally challenging, or merely drudge work. Spaceships, ocean explorers, asteroid miners, Jovian gas harvesters, each is an individual human being whose structure has been pushed to absurd, extreme limits. The naming scheme for these people is wonderful, complex, and creative. Robson did marvelous work.
Crippled by an accident, Forged interstellar explorer Voyager Lonestar Isol finds something that gets named Stuff, which allows her to repair herself and travel instantly anywhere in the galaxy. She returns to Earth where she tells the Forged Independence Movement that she has the power to take them "away from the monkeys," to a world of their own. She says she has found such a world, and allows one human visitor, Zephyr Duquesnse, to go there, to assess whether the Forged or "all humanity" should lay claim to it.
But Stuff is not just wish-fulfillment technologies. And when we learn what it is, we learn what it can do for us, but the price for some may be just too damned high.
What annoys me now more than ever is the amount of mythology she crammed into Living Next Door... to try and make it consistent with this book. Natural History was good enough. Robson could have written another book, a better book, without relying on the Stuff mythology and then tacking on all the extra elves, mystical engines, and past lives crap.
Everyone in Natural History book is brilliantly thought-out and realized: Zephyr, Isol, Gritter, Tatresi, Corvax, even Bob The Collie. If you like your SF literary, this book might just you cry. Robson plays a bit fast and loose with her science (transitions from Jovian to Terran space seem to take only a few hours even for fusion-based STL craft, for example) but it's okay: it's all in service to an excellent story.
I just finished the book that came before Living Next Door..., Natural History, and it leaves me with this one strong impression: while I can see how Robson got from Natural History to Living Next Door..., I really, really wish she hadn't.
The second book had wonderful, complex characters and lovely set pieces, but it didn't all add up to a meaningful story; Natural History, on the other hand, not only has the same complicated, wonderful, lovely characters you come to love or hate, but it does have a meaningful story with a highly charged and yet satisfying ending.
Robson starts with a world where human beings have genetically engineered thousands of species of human/machine hybrids, the Forged, who do the dangerous, dirty, environmentally challenging, or merely drudge work. Spaceships, ocean explorers, asteroid miners, Jovian gas harvesters, each is an individual human being whose structure has been pushed to absurd, extreme limits. The naming scheme for these people is wonderful, complex, and creative. Robson did marvelous work.
Crippled by an accident, Forged interstellar explorer Voyager Lonestar Isol finds something that gets named Stuff, which allows her to repair herself and travel instantly anywhere in the galaxy. She returns to Earth where she tells the Forged Independence Movement that she has the power to take them "away from the monkeys," to a world of their own. She says she has found such a world, and allows one human visitor, Zephyr Duquesnse, to go there, to assess whether the Forged or "all humanity" should lay claim to it.
But Stuff is not just wish-fulfillment technologies. And when we learn what it is, we learn what it can do for us, but the price for some may be just too damned high.
What annoys me now more than ever is the amount of mythology she crammed into Living Next Door... to try and make it consistent with this book. Natural History was good enough. Robson could have written another book, a better book, without relying on the Stuff mythology and then tacking on all the extra elves, mystical engines, and past lives crap.
Everyone in Natural History book is brilliantly thought-out and realized: Zephyr, Isol, Gritter, Tatresi, Corvax, even Bob The Collie. If you like your SF literary, this book might just you cry. Robson plays a bit fast and loose with her science (transitions from Jovian to Terran space seem to take only a few hours even for fusion-based STL craft, for example) but it's okay: it's all in service to an excellent story.
