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WoGF Review: Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
Alex Hammel (ahmmel) is an MSc. student in botany at the University of British Columbia. He started reading Tolkien and Lewis as a young nerd, and became an avid reader of all kinds of speculative fiction as an undergraduate when he discovered that it was more fun than studying. He joined WWEnd to participate in the WoGF challenge, and can often be found in the vicinity of a good beer.
My (quite late) June WoGF review is of Diana Gabaldon‘s Outlander, a fantasy/historical fiction/romance novel about time travel, Scotland, sex, Scottish men, and sex with Scottish men in Scotland after traveling through time. (Yes, my wife recommended this to me. No, I am not Scottish.)
As I am sure the reader has gathered, there is quite a lot of sex in this book. Although romance novels are not my usual reading material, my feelings about the sex scenes are that they fulfill the same purpose as space battles in military SF, or regular battles in an adventure fantasy novel: it’s just for fun. Putting the focus on the ‘just for fun’ elements can result in either an entertaining light read or a dreary slog through yet another orbital skirmish/drawn-out siege/Scotsman. Gabaldon, mercifully, gives us the former.
It helps that the sex scenes are very well done, and surprisingly tasteful (to me, anyway). This is not, to borrow a phrase from Neil Gaiman, a ‘one-handed read’, although it’s hardly PG-rated either. Gabaldon has quite enough to say about 18th-century and 1940s attitudes towards marriage, abuse, consent, and rough sex to keep things interesting, and she is for the most part careful not to let the romance swamp the rest of the story. The sex is, I think, one of the smartest things about the book.
WoGF Review: Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold
Alex Hammel (ahmmel) is an MSc. student in botany at the University of British Columbia. He started reading Tolkien and Lewis as a young nerd, and became an avid reader of all kinds of speculative fiction as an undergraduate when he discovered that it was more fun than studying. He joined WWEnd to participate in the WoGF challenge, and can often be found in the vicinity of a good beer.
I’m not sure how I managed to overlook the fact that Silver has four arms on the cover, but I did. Falling Free, my WoGF read for May, manages to be an excellent SF adventure without taking any of the usual recourse to space battles, aliens, and colonization.
Having disposed of these devices, Bujold does an excellent job of giving us an engineering-based adventure. Seriously. Almost all of the excitement and suspense in the book comes from the planning, last-minute revision, and execution of engineering projects. This works much better than I’m probably making it sound: I was deeply emotionally invested in Graf’s bid to make a large mirror under difficult conditions.
The engineering focus of the story lends a lot of realism to the setting. In this universe spaceships are made of real parts that can break through wear or misuse and be refitted to do new stuff. Granted, stuff breaks in most space operas, but Bujold accomplishes a certain amount of verismo by making her protagonist an engineer (when was the last time you saw an engineer in an SF story who had tasks aside from pressing buttons and spouting technobabble?) and letting us go through the process of thinking up plausible solutions to technical problems the way real engineers (I suppose) have to. It makes for a very believable universe, even with the presence of soft-SF devices like faster-than-light travel, a brain/computer interface, and ad libidum genetic engineering.
WoGF Review: Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey
Alex Hammel (ahmmel) is an MSc. student in botany at the University of British Columbia. He started reading Tolkien and Lewis as a young nerd, and became an avid reader of all kinds of speculative fiction as an undergraduate when he discovered that it was more fun than studying. He joined WWEnd to participate in the WoGF challenge, and can often be found in the vicinity of a good beer.
I read this book not knowing anything about it except that it contains dragons and flight. As it turns out, it’s a fairly blatant wish-fulfillment story about a plucky heroine who discovers that she is the only person who can save the world, since she a long-lost priestess of sorts with the secret power to communicate with dragons. Flying dragons. Flying, teleporting dragons. Huge, psychic, flying, teleporting, time-travelling, fire-breathing dragons who like to cuddle.
From this, admittedly really awesome, premise, I didn’t find that too much was delivered. The prose was probably the purplest I’ve ever read, and I read this coming off a China Miéville novel. A lot has been said about the misogyny in this novel, and… yeah, it’s bad. It’s usually really easy to cheer for the heroic organization sworn to protect the world from evil (think the Jedi knights or the Avengers), but in this book they’re kind of arrogant, douchey, kidnapping, thieving, jerk-asses. There’s really no getting around the fact that the plot resolution is a deus ex machina.
WoGF Review: Among Others by Jo Walton
Alex Hammel (ahmmel) is an MSc. student in botany at the University of British Columbia. He started reading Tolkien and Lewis as a young nerd, and became an avid reader of all kinds of speculative fiction as an undergraduate when he discovered that it was more fun than studying. He joined WWEnd to participate in the WoGF challenge, and can often be found in the vicinity of a good beer.
My February WoGF entry is Among Others by Jo Walton. This is a very strong work of adolescent fantasy with really smart treatments of magic and growing up.
The interesting thing about the plot is that the magic in the book is mostly a red herring. It’s certainly a big part of Mori’s life, it’s not at the center of the novel. This is mostly a book about an adolescent girl coming to terms with a difficult childhood and learning to take on adult responsibilities (a familiar enough sort of story). It’s just that in this particular case, those responsibilities include performing magic on behalf of fairies which only she can see. This trick of making the magical elements of the story prominent but not central is great for realism, but some of the magical plot elements don’t wrap up in a satisfying way. For me, that’s the biggest disappointment in the book. All the essential elements to wrap up the main magical conflict are there, but some threads are left hanging and there was nothing much to surprise me.
On the other hand, the adolescent coming-of-age plot was one of the better ones I’ve read. Again, not too many surprises with the plot here, but it’s quite a clever book when it comes to dealing with teenaged inexperience and confusion, with the adult world, and especially with sex. It’s quite refreshing to read an adolescent fantasy that deals with the topic head-on and in an intelligent way, rather than disguising it as desire for Turkish delight or something.
