I agree with Hamsterwoman that Becky Chambers has leveled up consistently over time. I handed "Long Way to a Small Angry Planet" to a friend of mine with the comment that they'd love the characters (they did) but that it suffered from what my Soviet literature professor called "plotlessness"--- the disease of idealizing society and your characters to the extent that stories aren't allowed to contain real conflict. The second two were much, much better than that.
But I felt very little of that in this book; maybe Martine was tired of writing about that? Yeah. I felt like Mahit spent all this time on Lsel and basically didn't talk to anyone except politicians, didn't go anywhere except meetings, didn't go to see anything. She doesn't seem to have old teachers or ex-girlfriends or anyone to visit. I don't know if it's a deliberate choice that her life on the station is so empty, or just an oversight.
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 Well, talking is hard, it's true... but after you talk, the disagreements and conflicting goals remain. Martine obviously knows this, as a historian. The Empire doesn't subjugate people because of misunderstandings! It has a whole class of official whose job it is to understand barbarians. As in real life, this makes them more efficient subjugators, not less. With the aliens, these very complex, obviously very militaristic cultures are slamming into one another partly because they both seem to have social institutions that want and benefit from war. That's the part that seems much harder to solve.
no subject
But I felt very little of that in this book; maybe Martine was tired of writing about that?
Yeah. I felt like Mahit spent all this time on Lsel and basically didn't talk to anyone except politicians, didn't go anywhere except meetings, didn't go to see anything. She doesn't seem to have old teachers or ex-girlfriends or anyone to visit. I don't know if it's a deliberate choice that her life on the station is so empty, or just an oversight.
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
Well, talking is hard, it's true... but after you talk, the disagreements and conflicting goals remain. Martine obviously knows this, as a historian. The Empire doesn't subjugate people because of misunderstandings! It has a whole class of official whose job it is to understand barbarians. As in real life, this makes them more efficient subjugators, not less. With the aliens, these very complex, obviously very militaristic cultures are slamming into one another partly because they both seem to have social institutions that want and benefit from war. That's the part that seems much harder to solve.