Reading: Seven Surrenders
Nov. 18th, 2017 04:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartAda Palmer's debut novel, Too Like The Lightning, blew me away with its vividly-imagined future, shifting web of connections between characters, and philosophical digressions. With hindsight, its brilliance is perhaps more flawed than it appeared when I was still dazzled by my first reading (how can a world of billions of people have so few who actually seem to have a role in decision making, and all of them apparently having sex with each other? Also, it did feel rather as though Palmer was sometimes just adding complexity for the sake of complexity) and for the first half of the sequel, Seven Surrenders, the flaws seemed uppermost; it probably didn't help that I had a bug and wasn't really up to wrapping my head around the complicated philosophical aspects for a few days, but it's also true that the characters are all fairly unlikeable and their relationships are so tangled that six months after reading Too Like The Lightning it took me a long time to remember who was who and what they had done and had done to them in the first book. (The two books were originally written as one, and that may have been part of the problem; where most sequels are aware of the need to reintroduce characters and situations for the benefit of readers whose memory has faded, this one plunges you straight in and is quite frustrating to read. Reading the two back-to-back would have been better.)
Once I'd got past that, though, I did enjoy the book; after the setup of Too Like The Lightning, this is the denouement, as the various plot threads play out and we watch the world of the future change forever. I wasn't entirely convinced by the idea that in a post-gendered world gendered sex and the tools of seduction could be used to control everyone so completely, or indeed by the idea that after 250 years in a post-gendered world people would still be assuming that gender-neutral automatically equated to things which are coded masculine in contemporary society. I definitely wasn't convinced by the idea that the reason World War 1 was so terrible was because none of the major powers had been engaged in significant fighting on the main European stage for too long beforehand and there weren't any veterans to show people how wars worked (what price the Franco-Prussian war?) but that may just have been Palmer the historian making a joke about the dangers of historians trying to extrapolate grand theories from their study of the past*. It felt more like a parable than a science fiction novel about a world that could actually happen, but it was a compelling read and mostly lived up to the brilliance of the first book.
* This is, after all, a novel with a deeply unreliable narrator giving their own interpretation of the complex ideas and motivations of complicated and often deliberately deceptive people. I have seen a number of reviews online complaining that a hermaphrodite character is referred to as "it", and saying that Palmer should know better, but I feel that that rather ignores the fact that these are the words of a rather disturbed mass murderer with an unorthodox interpretation of the concept of gender in any case, and therefore cannot be taken as implying authorial approval.
Once I'd got past that, though, I did enjoy the book; after the setup of Too Like The Lightning, this is the denouement, as the various plot threads play out and we watch the world of the future change forever. I wasn't entirely convinced by the idea that in a post-gendered world gendered sex and the tools of seduction could be used to control everyone so completely, or indeed by the idea that after 250 years in a post-gendered world people would still be assuming that gender-neutral automatically equated to things which are coded masculine in contemporary society. I definitely wasn't convinced by the idea that the reason World War 1 was so terrible was because none of the major powers had been engaged in significant fighting on the main European stage for too long beforehand and there weren't any veterans to show people how wars worked (what price the Franco-Prussian war?) but that may just have been Palmer the historian making a joke about the dangers of historians trying to extrapolate grand theories from their study of the past*. It felt more like a parable than a science fiction novel about a world that could actually happen, but it was a compelling read and mostly lived up to the brilliance of the first book.
* This is, after all, a novel with a deeply unreliable narrator giving their own interpretation of the complex ideas and motivations of complicated and often deliberately deceptive people. I have seen a number of reviews online complaining that a hermaphrodite character is referred to as "it", and saying that Palmer should know better, but I feel that that rather ignores the fact that these are the words of a rather disturbed mass murderer with an unorthodox interpretation of the concept of gender in any case, and therefore cannot be taken as implying authorial approval.
