Exordia by Seth Dickinson
Dec. 19th, 2024 10:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsExordia
2/5. Huge chunky scifi about a transnational encounter with aliens in remote Kurdistan which sweeps earth into a galactic conflict with the evil overlords who want to metaphysically pin human souls to the proper narrative.
This started out great (funny surreal portrait of a young woman enduring the long-term effects of trauma, then she meets an alien in Central Park, it’s great) and went steadily downhill into not just weird, but long and turgid weird. I read the whole thing for the ideas and theming, which are doing a lot – the worst kind of iterative trolly problems and what they do to people, the monstrousness of making a thing only more like itself forever and ever, the work of breaking out of your own narrative. But boy, he did not want to make this book accessible. Or enjoyable. The thing is, he knows what he’s doing – two men spend the entire book in this gross psychosexual attraction/competition narrative over a woman, and in the very brief appearance she makes, she utterly and pointedly refuses to go along with that story. The book is about that kind of resistance. But I still had to read 250,000 words of their gross psychosexual posturing (and don’t get me started on the not real version of that woman they create).
I almost respect this for being one of the weirdest and most specific books I’ve ever read. It shares some meta concerns with Prophet, but bears little resemblance to basically anything. And his writing is, as always, strong. But choices were made here and I am not into them.
Also, there are lesbians here, and there is just something about the way he writes female desire that sets my teeth on edge. I thought so in his prior books, too. I can’t put words to it, but it just always makes me cock my head a little and go ew, please don’t.
Content notes: Genocide, murder, a lot of body horror, military violence.
2/5. Huge chunky scifi about a transnational encounter with aliens in remote Kurdistan which sweeps earth into a galactic conflict with the evil overlords who want to metaphysically pin human souls to the proper narrative.
This started out great (funny surreal portrait of a young woman enduring the long-term effects of trauma, then she meets an alien in Central Park, it’s great) and went steadily downhill into not just weird, but long and turgid weird. I read the whole thing for the ideas and theming, which are doing a lot – the worst kind of iterative trolly problems and what they do to people, the monstrousness of making a thing only more like itself forever and ever, the work of breaking out of your own narrative. But boy, he did not want to make this book accessible. Or enjoyable. The thing is, he knows what he’s doing – two men spend the entire book in this gross psychosexual attraction/competition narrative over a woman, and in the very brief appearance she makes, she utterly and pointedly refuses to go along with that story. The book is about that kind of resistance. But I still had to read 250,000 words of their gross psychosexual posturing (and don’t get me started on the not real version of that woman they create).
I almost respect this for being one of the weirdest and most specific books I’ve ever read. It shares some meta concerns with Prophet, but bears little resemblance to basically anything. And his writing is, as always, strong. But choices were made here and I am not into them.
Also, there are lesbians here, and there is just something about the way he writes female desire that sets my teeth on edge. I thought so in his prior books, too. I can’t put words to it, but it just always makes me cock my head a little and go ew, please don’t.
Content notes: Genocide, murder, a lot of body horror, military violence.
Wow that sounds ....
Date: 2024-12-19 08:14 pm (UTC)... like a choice.
Also line breaks at very large print are funny -- I saw your concerns re lesbians in a line that contained exactly
and I snorfled because I am 5 years old.