Hiiii! I am grinning so hard right now :D (Though you're a little early, as Hugo nominees aren't yet out... but yay let's talk about SF!)
The first third of the book, with Mahit on the Station and Three Seagrass in the City, seemed like the bit that a competent editor would tell you to cut off and burn
Heh, I find this totally hilarious because my awesome beta is always asking me, "Do you really need the first third of this story?" And... the answer is often no :P
The problem, I think, is that Mahit simply doesn't like or think deeply about Stationer culture, which makes her a bad viewpoint on it.
Huh. I need to chew on this a bit. I am not totally sure I agree with this, in the sense that I think you can not like or think deeply about a culture but at the same time if it's the culture you grew up in, I think it still surrounds you and makes you something of what you are... Like in the first book, I did feel like Mahit had more centering in being a Stationer, what with her assumptions about imagos and socioemotional training and living on a station that aren't shared by the Empire. But I felt very little of that in this book; maybe Martine was tired of writing about that?
This is something the story really should have explored and made her face up to... Does she just not like it, in the way that a person with few friends and an unhappy upbringing often doesn't? Or another way in which she feels drawn to the Empire despite herself?
Ohhhh, yes this. This would have been really interesting. (I feel like there are several books in here that would have been quite interesting/intense -- another review I read talked about Twenty Cicada and his take on the Empire and how that would have been really interesting to look at more.)
Diplomacy is cool as a plot device when it feels really difficult. This had a bit of an air of "if we could all just sit down and talk to one another..."
Yessss I agree with all of this. I really enjoyed the conflicts within the Empire as well (although Eight Antidote seemed a little too idealistic?) but the alien diplomacy was too easy, as you say. Though some of that easiness was sort of baked into the premise, I think -- what can you do with aliens where you don't understand what they say and they don't understand you? The story has to become about figuring out how to talk to them, in a way.
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Date: 2021-04-02 05:44 am (UTC)The first third of the book, with Mahit on the Station and Three Seagrass in the City, seemed like the bit that a competent editor would tell you to cut off and burn
Heh, I find this totally hilarious because my awesome beta is always asking me, "Do you really need the first third of this story?" And... the answer is often no :P
The problem, I think, is that Mahit simply doesn't like or think deeply about Stationer culture, which makes her a bad viewpoint on it.
Huh. I need to chew on this a bit. I am not totally sure I agree with this, in the sense that I think you can not like or think deeply about a culture but at the same time if it's the culture you grew up in, I think it still surrounds you and makes you something of what you are... Like in the first book, I did feel like Mahit had more centering in being a Stationer, what with her assumptions about imagos and socioemotional training and living on a station that aren't shared by the Empire. But I felt very little of that in this book; maybe Martine was tired of writing about that?
This is something the story really should have explored and made her face up to... Does she just not like it, in the way that a person with few friends and an unhappy upbringing often doesn't? Or another way in which she feels drawn to the Empire despite herself?
Ohhhh, yes this. This would have been really interesting. (I feel like there are several books in here that would have been quite interesting/intense -- another review I read talked about Twenty Cicada and his take on the Empire and how that would have been really interesting to look at more.)
Diplomacy is cool as a plot device when it feels really difficult. This had a bit of an air of "if we could all just sit down and talk to one another..."
Yessss I agree with all of this. I really enjoyed the conflicts within the Empire as well (although Eight Antidote seemed a little too idealistic?) but the alien diplomacy was too easy, as you say. Though some of that easiness was sort of baked into the premise, I think -- what can you do with aliens where you don't understand what they say and they don't understand you? The story has to become about figuring out how to talk to them, in a way.