Horizon by Lois McMaster Bujold

[lightreads]

Horizon by Lois McMaster Bujold


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
In which this four-book romance fantasy wanders – by which I mean plot? What plot? – to a close – by which I mean babies for all!

Yikes. A friend called this the "never-ending beige adventure," which made me laugh. More than the book did.

I'm feeling kind of cranky about this book. It's intellectually boring, with a thematic conversation (communication, clashing and changing paradigms, etc.) little deeper than your average morality play. I could forgive intellectual boredom for emotional interest – God knows I've done that before. But my emotional needle didn't so much as quiver throughout. I will say that the book is at least prettily, if . . . rustically written. And I don't usually get cranky over boring, because boring for me is a great romance for someone else (though, I've never met anyone who was actually really moved by this particular series . . . Bueller?).

No, the real problem is the explicit and implicit helping of babymaking propaganda. Did you guys know that the purpose of marriage is babies? Didya didya didya? The sheer amount of moral imperative this series piles on reproduction – though, okay, not always heteronormatively – is staggering because half of it is delivered with this 'duh' of universal unarguable truth, which, um, no, and the other half feels entirely unconscious and kind of uncomfortable as a glimpse of author id to me. The older I get, the more toxic that becomes. Yeurgh.

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Comments

[quietann.livejournal.com]

Spot on, unfortunately. LMB really lost her compass on this one.

[readerjane]

What frustrated me so much about this series was that it's Bujold! Lois freaking Bujold! Who gave us Miles and Cordelia and Bothari and Cazaril and did I mention Miles?

Prettily written beige could be excusable from someone else.

[ecaterin.livejournal.com]

EXACTLY my growls words. WTF Lois????? She can write GOLD, so why did I grind my teeth mere pages into the 1st Sharing Knife book and put it down rather than tarnish my vision of Bujold? I do NOT get it.

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

To be fair, I think the Sharing Knife world has population replacement problems, right? So reproduction is actually kind of fundamentally imperative in their society. (Although I could be wrong... I was so uninvolved with this series that I was not really paying attention that much.)

Though on a similar note, what really galled me about this book was how all the hard problems of the world, like racism, can be solved simply by... look over there!! A cute baby!! ...yeah, right.

[readerjane]

Well, I do know what kept me going. It was the occasional glimmers of Miles, like when broken-armed Dag was caught up a tree and dumped the hornets onto his tormentors. I kept thinking, see, SEE? She's coming round...

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

Which makes me apprehensive about the new Miles book. I mean, I want to read it, but what if it's all *hand gestures* shallow and and and babies!

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I had a moment of honesty halfway through the book and thought, 'okay, self, would you actually be finishing this series if it was written by anyone else? No? yeah, that's what I thought.'

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

Yes, I thought the same thing -- and had the exact same reaction of 'yeah, probably, wasn't paying that much attention.' But then I thought that I really wasn't going to cut her slack based on the rules she set up.

And yes to the second point. The other solution being, apparently, 'if we just listen to each other we'll all get along.' Oh. Well then.,