serves me right for indulging in my refusal to read Aliette de Bodard because of her shitty class politics...
some prominent reviewer thought body harvesting tropes in an Aliette de Bodard fantasy was needlessly grim with no payoff and recommended this instead. hah! California Bones? more like osteomancy w Chinese characteristics! or inexplicable Asian despotism: the cannibalising bone magic system!
and this is the thing! none of the world-building necessarily requires a Mao+Ho Chi Minh Big Bad! there is no (Watsonian) reason for this particular flavour of authoritarian fantasy sinicization. in fact, there is nothing utopianly/dystopianly egalitarian or populist in the animating reason for how the political/magical economy is set up. nothing mass about the Hierarch's rise to power. so why would something so gauchely communist as The People's Gallery exist in the Hierarch-ruled South California a.k.a. the Southern Kingdom?
lack of imagination I guess. I mean, the characterization and plot beats are already paint-by-numbers, so it follows that the aesthetics of political dystopia are similarly hamfistedly prosiac. Gang of Four? Council of Six. Purges? Purges. The Five Year Plan? The Third Correction where children turned in their parents. Potemkin Villages? Fake artifacts made of plaster. Food shortages? Magic shortages.
I stress again that none of this actually supports or is supported by the magic system or the world building. but are grafted on, for effect, decoratively. show more which really illustrates the narrow range of narrative signifiers for "bad" or "dysfunction" the author can think to employ. which is always the saddest thing about these liberal fantasies the publishing industry churns out, the legacy the cold warriors have left us even as no one would ever cop to being trapped by ideology: it's still so rare to find the dystopia we need to nourish our imaginations in order to survive the world we're living in right now. even in fiction is there barely room for imagining its demise, crowded as we are by these paper enemies and empires. how's that for hegemony.
goodreads import. originally reviewed June 29, 2019
ps as for everything else - characterization, plot, writing, pace, style: the first few chapters are great. love it. the drop off after that is quite something... flat and bloodless are the adjectives I'd go for, I guess. show less
some prominent reviewer thought body harvesting tropes in an Aliette de Bodard fantasy was needlessly grim with no payoff and recommended this instead. hah! California Bones? more like osteomancy w Chinese characteristics! or inexplicable Asian despotism: the cannibalising bone magic system!
and this is the thing! none of the world-building necessarily requires a Mao+Ho Chi Minh Big Bad! there is no (Watsonian) reason for this particular flavour of authoritarian fantasy sinicization. in fact, there is nothing utopianly/dystopianly egalitarian or populist in the animating reason for how the political/magical economy is set up. nothing mass about the Hierarch's rise to power. so why would something so gauchely communist as The People's Gallery exist in the Hierarch-ruled South California a.k.a. the Southern Kingdom?
lack of imagination I guess. I mean, the characterization and plot beats are already paint-by-numbers, so it follows that the aesthetics of political dystopia are similarly hamfistedly prosiac. Gang of Four? Council of Six. Purges? Purges. The Five Year Plan? The Third Correction where children turned in their parents. Potemkin Villages? Fake artifacts made of plaster. Food shortages? Magic shortages.
I stress again that none of this actually supports or is supported by the magic system or the world building. but are grafted on, for effect, decoratively. show more which really illustrates the narrow range of narrative signifiers for "bad" or "dysfunction" the author can think to employ. which is always the saddest thing about these liberal fantasies the publishing industry churns out, the legacy the cold warriors have left us even as no one would ever cop to being trapped by ideology: it's still so rare to find the dystopia we need to nourish our imaginations in order to survive the world we're living in right now. even in fiction is there barely room for imagining its demise, crowded as we are by these paper enemies and empires. how's that for hegemony.
goodreads import. originally reviewed June 29, 2019
ps as for everything else - characterization, plot, writing, pace, style: the first few chapters are great. love it. the drop off after that is quite something... flat and bloodless are the adjectives I'd go for, I guess. show less
Each Night Was Illuminated: A Young Adult Coming-of-Age Novel of Faith, Ghosts, and Hope by Jodi Lynn Anderson
ok this ends my 9 years or so of reading YA as an adult phase. this is a perfectly fine book; has much to recommend it. but I no longer have any interest in dwelling within these particular registers. unfortunately for me a sizeable chunk of the publishing industry seems to have morphed into some crypto YA whether you like it or not zone so I don't think my declarations of non YA reading will amount to much in itself. just wanted to plant some sort of flag for tracking purposes.
goodreads import. originally reviewed September 5, 2024
goodreads import. originally reviewed September 5, 2024