lightreads (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lightreads) wrote2018-06-17 07:08 pm
lightreads) wrote2018-06-17 07:08 pm
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In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan
In Other Lands
4/5. Expansion of an online novel about Elliot who goes away to school in another dimension when he's thirteen.
Elliot is a delightfully horrible little shit, and the story of him becoming incrementally more capable of forming meaningful connections with other people is wonderful. It's also a story of colonialism around the edges, and cross-cultural communication, and queer teenaged awakenings. It's great, basically.
Also, this book is a great litmus test. If a person calls it Harry Potter fanfic, you can immediately dismiss all their opinions since they clearly have no critical faculties. Brennan has a great note on the page above about all the shitty ways people have called this work fanfic. You know, where people use a perfectly fine and acceptable description as an insult. But anyway, this is specifically not Harry Potter fanfic. It is not in conversation with those books really at all. It does contain a boy-boy-girl friend trio, which to the tiny-minded is apparently enough? Idk. Anyway, my point is that what this does have is a fanfic sensibility, if you know what I mean. I.e. it cares about the things I care about in proportion to how I care about them. Specifically, all the complicated relationship stuff and also there's a plot which illuminates all the complicated relationship stuff. A+.
Knocking one star off for that weird phenomenon where the end of this book did exactly what I wanted it to, relationship wise, without particularly satisfying me. I think Brennan may have hamstrung herself a bit since she wrote this incredible long developed novel after a short story set in the same universe, and the short story kind of boxed a lot of things in.
4/5. Expansion of an online novel about Elliot who goes away to school in another dimension when he's thirteen.
Elliot is a delightfully horrible little shit, and the story of him becoming incrementally more capable of forming meaningful connections with other people is wonderful. It's also a story of colonialism around the edges, and cross-cultural communication, and queer teenaged awakenings. It's great, basically.
Also, this book is a great litmus test. If a person calls it Harry Potter fanfic, you can immediately dismiss all their opinions since they clearly have no critical faculties. Brennan has a great note on the page above about all the shitty ways people have called this work fanfic. You know, where people use a perfectly fine and acceptable description as an insult. But anyway, this is specifically not Harry Potter fanfic. It is not in conversation with those books really at all. It does contain a boy-boy-girl friend trio, which to the tiny-minded is apparently enough? Idk. Anyway, my point is that what this does have is a fanfic sensibility, if you know what I mean. I.e. it cares about the things I care about in proportion to how I care about them. Specifically, all the complicated relationship stuff and also there's a plot which illuminates all the complicated relationship stuff. A+.
Knocking one star off for that weird phenomenon where the end of this book did exactly what I wanted it to, relationship wise, without particularly satisfying me. I think Brennan may have hamstrung herself a bit since she wrote this incredible long developed novel after a short story set in the same universe, and the short story kind of boxed a lot of things in.
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Also, while describing this book to someone, I did compare it to Harry Potter, but only to say that it's the opposite in many ways, as this is a book about a kid who doesn't want to do war...and doesn't.
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Yeah same. (if you didn't know, Brennan used to write a lot of fanfic, and still does for all I know. Which is a recommendation in my book, but a point of mockery for a lot of people who like to call any original work people from fandom put out "fanfic" as an insult)
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(It also felt, to me, like it was in conversation with Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality -- which I have no idea if Brennan's read. But there was a part of me that saw this as starting with Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality's Harry, but who grows into being a decent person who I want to root for and who sees other people as worthy of value.)
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I almost said 'but HP isn't a portal fantasy' and then was like 'oh wait, duh, it is.' I take your point, but to me that's more like saying it's in conversation with the genre, you know? Except he's not just genre savvy. His savviness isn't the sort where he understands how the narrative is going to go. He just understands where it's fucked up. And let's be real here, anticolonialism and pacifism are not the things he would have learned by reading genre classics. He's critical genre savvy, specifically. I mean, clearly this is a kid who belonged online if he hadn't been shipped off to monster-fighting school. Tbf, at a certain point, in conversation with the genre does blur into being in conversation with HP, given how large it looms. Though I still maintain the connections are hardly more than superficial.
...I never did finish Methods of Rationality and I'm probably okay with that. The comparison is a good one, though. But actually, I don't really think MoR is particularly interested in HP either? Which I realize on the surface is a weird thing to say, but I honestly think it's true. I mean, the author's fandom is clearly philosophy wanking way way way more than it is HP>