Books with things missing, structurally
Apr. 8th, 2013 04:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jsburbidgeI have read three books in the last few months which seem to me to be missing something in such a way that "fixing" what they were missing would make them something else, structurally. All of them are good books, but each of them leaves this niggling sense that somewhere out there in the phase space of possible works is something that's related but without this structural gap, and possibly much more interesting as a result (not necessarily better, but more interesting).
The first one is the odd one out: Captain Vorpatril's Alliance. This is not in any way a bad book. It's well-written, a good read, and much better than either Diplomatic Immunity or Cryoburn. But I realized, after finishing it, that unlike any other of Lois's work it's not structurally an SF book; rather, it's a bit like an Anthony Hope novel in space.
Let me unpack this a bit. Lois' other SF books are all irreducibly SFnal. You can't have DI or Barrayar without uterine replicators, or Cryoburn or Mirror Dance without cold sleep, or Brothers in Arms or Mirror Dance without highly effective cloning. Memory depends on Illyan's chip, and Komarr on the Komarran terraforming technology as well as wormhole physics. But you can transfer the plot of CVA to some Ruritanian monarchy without losing anything of its structure, although you would have to fiddle some minor details. (You can even do some handwaving about latent crustal faults and riverine effects and have the subsidance of Cockroach Central.)
The other two works are lacking in a different way.
American Elsewhere, by Robert Jackson Bennett, has all sorts of good things going for it: good writing, strong characterization, an interesting concept. But... it depends on Lovecraftian beings whose very appearance will drive unprotected normal humans insane, and then ends up centring around interactions which assimilate their motivations and thoughts to those of a recognizably human, familial, dynamic. The whole point of Lovecraftian eldritch horrors, though, is that they're starkly incomprehensible to us -- as beyond our comprehension as we are to a fly. But if you restore that key trait of the Great Old Ones, then the whole plot of the book collapses. It has a flaw which can't be repaired without destroying the whole structure of the book.
Finally, Seanan McGuire's Rosemary and Rue, (and her other Toby Daye novels) are also well-written have an engaging narrator, and are generally good examples of urban fantasy. But her fae are entirely too comprehensible -- too much humans with extra powers and longer lives, but with entirely understandable motivations and thought processes. Their ambitions and interests are ours, maybe slightly magnified or adjusted by their levels of power. Elves / fae / etc. are supposed to be inscrutable, with motivations that don't make sense, hovering around the very edges of what can pass for human given a narrow area of interaction. (The obvious examples are Tolkien (he's careful to note, especially in the Silmarillion, that the elven stories have been heavily anthropomorphized in the passing on, and that the Valar are not very much like us), Crowley (Little, Big) and Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell). However, McGuire's books, told from the standpoint of a changeling whose primary interactions are with the fae, would be a mess if we couldn't understand the majority of the figures with whom the narrator interacts. So again the very structure of the works means that the conceptual gap resists "fixing".
The first one is the odd one out: Captain Vorpatril's Alliance. This is not in any way a bad book. It's well-written, a good read, and much better than either Diplomatic Immunity or Cryoburn. But I realized, after finishing it, that unlike any other of Lois's work it's not structurally an SF book; rather, it's a bit like an Anthony Hope novel in space.
Let me unpack this a bit. Lois' other SF books are all irreducibly SFnal. You can't have DI or Barrayar without uterine replicators, or Cryoburn or Mirror Dance without cold sleep, or Brothers in Arms or Mirror Dance without highly effective cloning. Memory depends on Illyan's chip, and Komarr on the Komarran terraforming technology as well as wormhole physics. But you can transfer the plot of CVA to some Ruritanian monarchy without losing anything of its structure, although you would have to fiddle some minor details. (You can even do some handwaving about latent crustal faults and riverine effects and have the subsidance of Cockroach Central.)
The other two works are lacking in a different way.
American Elsewhere, by Robert Jackson Bennett, has all sorts of good things going for it: good writing, strong characterization, an interesting concept. But... it depends on Lovecraftian beings whose very appearance will drive unprotected normal humans insane, and then ends up centring around interactions which assimilate their motivations and thoughts to those of a recognizably human, familial, dynamic. The whole point of Lovecraftian eldritch horrors, though, is that they're starkly incomprehensible to us -- as beyond our comprehension as we are to a fly. But if you restore that key trait of the Great Old Ones, then the whole plot of the book collapses. It has a flaw which can't be repaired without destroying the whole structure of the book.
Finally, Seanan McGuire's Rosemary and Rue, (and her other Toby Daye novels) are also well-written have an engaging narrator, and are generally good examples of urban fantasy. But her fae are entirely too comprehensible -- too much humans with extra powers and longer lives, but with entirely understandable motivations and thought processes. Their ambitions and interests are ours, maybe slightly magnified or adjusted by their levels of power. Elves / fae / etc. are supposed to be inscrutable, with motivations that don't make sense, hovering around the very edges of what can pass for human given a narrow area of interaction. (The obvious examples are Tolkien (he's careful to note, especially in the Silmarillion, that the elven stories have been heavily anthropomorphized in the passing on, and that the Valar are not very much like us), Crowley (Little, Big) and Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell). However, McGuire's books, told from the standpoint of a changeling whose primary interactions are with the fae, would be a mess if we couldn't understand the majority of the figures with whom the narrator interacts. So again the very structure of the works means that the conceptual gap resists "fixing".
