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Reading: The Best Of All Possible Worlds
May. 21st, 2016 06:44 amLooking back, I can see that I bought Karen Lord's The Best Of All Possible Worlds in one of Amazon's Kindle sales a few years ago. It sounded interesting, had good reviews on Amazon and fitted with my desire to read more contemporary SFF by women.
I was pretty unimpressed by this. I hadn't got very far in before it struck me that the central plot driver (the home planet of the Sadiri, a race known for being hyper-intelligent and telepathic and practising mental discipline and strict emotional control is destroyed by another race of aliens who are the descendants of the people who left the first planet because they refused to exercise emotional control) seemed oddly reminiscent of the destruction of Vulcan in the Star Trek reboot. The novel focuses on a small team undertaking a joint mission between Sadiri survivors and other humans to find cultural and genetic similarities among the isolated communities of the planet Cygnus Beta, a kind of galactic melting pot. The episodic structure of the novel reminded me even more of Star Trek* and I got a strong Planet of Hats (warning: TV Tropes link) vibe off most of the communities the mission team visited.
The social background of the novel seems more conservative than I think it's intended to be; there's no sense at all that women aren't equal in Cygnian society, and we see plenty of women in senior roles. There's also a genderqueer character and a couple of mentions of polyamory, but the underlying structure of society seems to be for monogamous heterosexual relationships with parenthood as a key element. One of the reasons for the mission is to find and encourage compatible women to marry the overwhelmingly male Sadiri survivors, because the vast majority of Sadiri working offworld had been men; Lord's afterword explains this from the Doylist perspective as being down to her interest in the tensions resulting in communities affected by the 2004 tsunami where far more women, at home with the children, had been killed than men, who were often out working or fishing, but from an in-universe perspective it doesn't really make any sense that this would have been the case in such an advanced society.
I found the characters generally reasonably likeable but one-dimensional. None of the minor characters were given enough life to really catch my interest**; the narrator was bubbly and chatty and came across as much younger than I think she was supposed to be (there are references to her being very old to be single and approaching the end of her fertility), while the romantic interest was basically Spock. I enjoyed their developing friendship, but found the transition from friendship to romance rather awkward.
*I remarked on this kind of TV-series style episodic structure in The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet, as well, and I do wonder if it's something that is emerging more generally among writers who grew up with US-style TV drama.
**This is not quite true, but as the one character who did was blatantly Leonard Nimoy!Spock I'm not sure that counts.
I was pretty unimpressed by this. I hadn't got very far in before it struck me that the central plot driver (the home planet of the Sadiri, a race known for being hyper-intelligent and telepathic and practising mental discipline and strict emotional control is destroyed by another race of aliens who are the descendants of the people who left the first planet because they refused to exercise emotional control) seemed oddly reminiscent of the destruction of Vulcan in the Star Trek reboot. The novel focuses on a small team undertaking a joint mission between Sadiri survivors and other humans to find cultural and genetic similarities among the isolated communities of the planet Cygnus Beta, a kind of galactic melting pot. The episodic structure of the novel reminded me even more of Star Trek* and I got a strong Planet of Hats (warning: TV Tropes link) vibe off most of the communities the mission team visited.
The social background of the novel seems more conservative than I think it's intended to be; there's no sense at all that women aren't equal in Cygnian society, and we see plenty of women in senior roles. There's also a genderqueer character and a couple of mentions of polyamory, but the underlying structure of society seems to be for monogamous heterosexual relationships with parenthood as a key element. One of the reasons for the mission is to find and encourage compatible women to marry the overwhelmingly male Sadiri survivors, because the vast majority of Sadiri working offworld had been men; Lord's afterword explains this from the Doylist perspective as being down to her interest in the tensions resulting in communities affected by the 2004 tsunami where far more women, at home with the children, had been killed than men, who were often out working or fishing, but from an in-universe perspective it doesn't really make any sense that this would have been the case in such an advanced society.
I found the characters generally reasonably likeable but one-dimensional. None of the minor characters were given enough life to really catch my interest**; the narrator was bubbly and chatty and came across as much younger than I think she was supposed to be (there are references to her being very old to be single and approaching the end of her fertility), while the romantic interest was basically Spock. I enjoyed their developing friendship, but found the transition from friendship to romance rather awkward.
*I remarked on this kind of TV-series style episodic structure in The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet, as well, and I do wonder if it's something that is emerging more generally among writers who grew up with US-style TV drama.
**This is not quite true, but as the one character who did was blatantly Leonard Nimoy!Spock I'm not sure that counts.
