lightreads (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lightreads) wrote2015-06-12 10:05 pm
lightreads) wrote2015-06-12 10:05 pm
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2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson
2312
2/5. Solar system scifi with – I understand – KSR's usual interest in environmental issues.
I've been sitting on this review for weeks, which turns out to be long enough to have forgotten most salient facts of this book. Which tells you something right there. But the thing is – everyone said I'd like this. It was all "interesting gender ideas!" and "post humans that push our boundaries but are all still very us!"
And I . . . didn't think so. At all.
Like, either I missed some key early turning in this book. I am very, very busy this spring, and very, very tired, so yeah. Maybe there was some path it should have led me down and I just wandered on by, head down in my commute, and then looked up two days later to wonder where this floppy, start-stop, confused book was going.
Or maybe. Or maybe the "interesting gender stuff" is just a thin layer of speculation over the same old shit. Maybe he interleaved so many fake nonfiction excerpts to explain this culture because he can't, on more than the most surface level, make these people live those lives. Maybe this is pretending to be a story of flowering biological and gender possibilities, except it's funny how comfortable it all is. Like not a single pronoun in this book challenged me. We get lots of nonfiction excerpts and the occasional passing reference to a central characters non-binary sexual identity, but hey everyone's pronouns are familiar and comfy and the relationships are heteronormative.
Yeah. One of those.
2/5. Solar system scifi with – I understand – KSR's usual interest in environmental issues.
I've been sitting on this review for weeks, which turns out to be long enough to have forgotten most salient facts of this book. Which tells you something right there. But the thing is – everyone said I'd like this. It was all "interesting gender ideas!" and "post humans that push our boundaries but are all still very us!"
And I . . . didn't think so. At all.
Like, either I missed some key early turning in this book. I am very, very busy this spring, and very, very tired, so yeah. Maybe there was some path it should have led me down and I just wandered on by, head down in my commute, and then looked up two days later to wonder where this floppy, start-stop, confused book was going.
Or maybe. Or maybe the "interesting gender stuff" is just a thin layer of speculation over the same old shit. Maybe he interleaved so many fake nonfiction excerpts to explain this culture because he can't, on more than the most surface level, make these people live those lives. Maybe this is pretending to be a story of flowering biological and gender possibilities, except it's funny how comfortable it all is. Like not a single pronoun in this book challenged me. We get lots of nonfiction excerpts and the occasional passing reference to a central characters non-binary sexual identity, but hey everyone's pronouns are familiar and comfy and the relationships are heteronormative.
Yeah. One of those.