![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Wednesday Reading
Oct. 17th, 2013 09:59 amI've been chugging along on several books and a bunch of dull academic reading, but I have also finally gotten around to a little fiction and read The Best of All Possible Worlds, by Karen Lord, which I was not impressed with, I must say.It was readable enough - I mostly got through it on a few hours of commute time - but I have no clue what it's about. If anyone does, please tell me. I mean, is this actually a satire that is so subtle i'm not noticing it? I appreciate that it's basically a romance novel in an SF setting, but it's a vaguely nonsensical setting and it's a staggeringly cliched romance, especially the end.
It starts off well enough, and I was actually enjoying the no-stakes plot - just daily life, work, family, details of a particular assignment and getting along with, and possibly falling for, one's colleagues kind of story. But then the end does have your life-and-death stakes suddenly raised, but in such a by-the-by, pointless manner. Also all the characterization that had happened up to that point completely dissolves for tedious fanfic cliche.
This isn't to insult fanfic, but fanfic works because it is fanfic OF SOMETHING. A reader has the experience of the original work which the fanfic works as an addition to. A fanfic can be just the id-happy, shippy stuff, because somewhere over there is the rest of the canon. Here, there is no canon, just these two characters who we are told are competent scientists spending all their time making eyes and awkward small talk at eachother. She the feisty human female with a unique empathy thing, he the emotionally distant but extremely powerful lonely alien male! Again, I wonder if there's a satirical element i've missed, because by the end there is a also a dark and violent past, mentioned exactly once, mind-link bonding rituals, her giving up her career to move to a farm with him, and the kind of cheesy-stilted dialogue that would not embarass a Sheldon/Penny fanfic, despite the fact that fifty pages earlier the dude did not need to be introduced to "this kissing practice of which you speak."
So, what the hell, Karen Lord? Redemption in Indigo was a much, much more interesting, and interestingly written, book!
Er, yeah, I may have needed to rant about that.
It starts off well enough, and I was actually enjoying the no-stakes plot - just daily life, work, family, details of a particular assignment and getting along with, and possibly falling for, one's colleagues kind of story. But then the end does have your life-and-death stakes suddenly raised, but in such a by-the-by, pointless manner. Also all the characterization that had happened up to that point completely dissolves for tedious fanfic cliche.
This isn't to insult fanfic, but fanfic works because it is fanfic OF SOMETHING. A reader has the experience of the original work which the fanfic works as an addition to. A fanfic can be just the id-happy, shippy stuff, because somewhere over there is the rest of the canon. Here, there is no canon, just these two characters who we are told are competent scientists spending all their time making eyes and awkward small talk at eachother. She the feisty human female with a unique empathy thing, he the emotionally distant but extremely powerful lonely alien male! Again, I wonder if there's a satirical element i've missed, because by the end there is a also a dark and violent past, mentioned exactly once, mind-link bonding rituals, her giving up her career to move to a farm with him, and the kind of cheesy-stilted dialogue that would not embarass a Sheldon/Penny fanfic, despite the fact that fifty pages earlier the dude did not need to be introduced to "this kissing practice of which you speak."
So, what the hell, Karen Lord? Redemption in Indigo was a much, much more interesting, and interestingly written, book!
Er, yeah, I may have needed to rant about that.
