Read March 2024
Recommended for very forgiving fans of Repo Man
★
I really want to like Elizabeth Bear. I'd also really like to sink into a book about a doctor in space. But something about Bear and I seem to be incompatible. This review is 100% for carol, by carol, so if you aren't me, you should probably move along, risk being bored or offended. If you enjoyed it, awesome! Now move along.
I loved Bone and Jewel Creatures, and the companion novella, Book of Iron. I thought her writing enjoyable, if unsurprisingly plotted, at least it did it in an interesting manner. Mostly, I loved her imagery and ability to make me feel like I could see the jeweled skeleton in front of me, or the unexplored cliffs and pools the team were navigating.
But, and this is a big one, when she gets a full-length novel, something goes awry. Description and asides replace dialogue and action. Worse, dialogue here sounds stilted and didactic. It is, quite honestly, terrible. At 5%, as her supervisor and her explore a derelict generation ship, and she is starting to panic about her inability to reach the ship AI, they have this dialogue:
"Do you remember a time before the chronic pain?"
I could claim that wasn't a preceptive question, but then I'd have to explain why I stood there silently for a good thirty seconds before I found an answer. "No," I admitted. "There's always been the pain."
'So how would you, as a kid, have learned that things were going to be okay, or that adults could solve your problems? Why would you ever have cause to think things would turn out all right?'
'Huh,' I said, eloquently, While the tinkertoys went click click click...'So you think I never learned trust because, as a child, I had nothing to believe in?'
'You trust, though. You trust Sally with your life--'
'That's not what I mean,' I sighed. 'Yes, I can decide to take a risk on Sally, or on you. But I know it's a risk. Whereas I've heard people talk about the belief that somebody would never hurt them. Or the sense that everything will turn out all right in the end. I've never had those.'"
This was pop psychology at its worst. Nevermind that Dr. Jens is the medical officer and spent at least a page affirming why she was the best person for the mission, being the only one with a reinforced exo-skeleton and so forth; nevermind that she uses hormone boluses to moderate her physical reactions (can you 'panic' without adrenalin spikes?); nevermind that she is a medical person apparently being surprised by basic attachment theory; nevermind that 'always been the pain' opens up a complex neurobiological discussion on what pain is. Her supervisor is choosing to do a little free-form analysis on a dangerous mission? Just ugh.
It is followed up by a large chunk of didactic on machine intelligences and her 'duty to care' for an AI that has clearly played a pivotal role in the entire human shipboard population going into cryogenic chambers while it continued to cannibalize the ship. The logical thing to do? Bring it over to her own ship. Just no. Basic infection precautions don't seem to apply, despite Bear saying earlier they were suited up 'because our microbes won't play nicely with microbes from a millennia ago." It's like Bear is playing at being a scientist, and making her doctor do whatever the plot needs to explore her issues rather than look at the integrity of the character creation.
There's so much head-talk here! And normally I am down for head-talk, but this isn't noticing the world, it's babble.
"Intuition is a real thing, though there's nothing supernatural about it. It's not without mysteries, however. The human brain (and presumably, the nonhuman brain as well) gathers and processes a lot of information in excess of that which we are consciously aware. It doesn't use words or often even images. It deals with feelings and instincts, and that glitchy sensation that you can't trust somebody, or that something is wrong.
So when I say that I had the increasing, creeping conviction that the generation ship's endlessly rolling wheel was deserted, that it felt empty, I don't pretend there was any higher knowledge behind it. But I was sure there were plenty of subtle clues, even if I couldn't have named one of them."
You mean like the absence of people you already noted? The absence of your radio waves being acknowledged earlier? The weird 'tinkertoy' structure in the hallways? The lack of heat signatures on your infrared cameras? The generally unpredictable occurrence of a generation ship from a thousand years ago traveling at a speed it should not be traveling it? You mean those subtle, factual cues?
Also, way to blow a sense of creeping dread. Now I'm just bored with you explaining intuition to me.
Awkward science integration, crappy pop psychology acting as dialogue and inner voice, and TSTL™ decisions mean DNF at 10% after she lets her ship AI, Sally, hook up with the mentally unstable one. I absolutely do not have tolerance for medical lecturing about personhood for AI intelligences (ah, for Martha Wells, who does it so much more elegantly with Murderbot) from a doctor who can't seem to recognize sociopathic behavior ("I protected my people by putting them to sleep forever"). If there's some elegant point in here about how we deal with such things (pain, AI, brains), it is absolutely lost in this writing.
I could go on, but I risk boring myself. I think Bear needs to be banned from my 'buy without reading' list unless she's forced into novella form. I really, really want to read a space book about a cool doctor doing medically things and dealing with alien somethings. This is definitely not it.
Tomislav has an excellent review that sums up the plot and his positive experience of it.
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