The Empress of Mars by Kage Baker
Sep. 6th, 2010 10:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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The Empress of Mars by Kage BakerMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
A beerily maniacal skiffy romp. A bunch of social misfits do what people do when they’re shipped off to colonize Mars: run a bar, have babies, and give the bureaucrats a serious fucking headache.
The sort of cheerfully madcap book that has sentences like, “And that was the end of Marsha the cow,” and “’I’ll just go off and see an oppressive corporate monolithic evil entity about a dog, shall I?’” That really gives you all the flavor you need. There’s some other stuff about church power struggles and the deeper powers moving behind them, but you know, that is so completely not the point.
A delight.
Caution: Do not confuse this, the novel, with Baker's novella of the same name.
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Date: 2010-09-07 10:13 am (UTC)Huh. Will have to try this.
I adored Baker's Company series until it went off the rails, then doggedly plowed through the last few books because I still had to know what happened to those characters even though the story had fallen to pieces. Cursing her for the bright shining moments of beauty that kept me from drop-kicking the books into the trash can.
I vaguely remember reading the Empress novella in Asimov's magazine and being underimpressed.
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Date: 2010-09-07 02:32 pm (UTC)I haven't read the novella, but I suspect the novel just expands the basic concept and adds a couple hundred pages of random hilarity.
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Date: 2010-09-07 03:21 pm (UTC)(Oh, and from what I recall of the novella "Empress," you'd probably also like _The Anvil of the World_ (review), but I'm told that its prequel should be avoided at all costs.)
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Date: 2010-09-09 02:44 pm (UTC)