Captain Vorpatril's Alliance
Jan. 22nd, 2014 01:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackGood
I loved this book a lot, lot more when I reread it. I like seeing grown-up Ivan, but more than anything else, I liked seeing emotional interactions with Simon Illyan and Alys Vorpatril. I laughed a lot, and really cared about the fragile relationships being rebuilt. And I liked the varied viewpoints.
Bad
There is a very short passage describing a trans man, Dono, from a previous book. Who was a very good character (despite some false starts, and being inconsistent with what we know about being trans in the real world).
It is from the point of view of one or two people who are not sympathetic, which is possibly realistic, but it's really awful that that's the only mention in the book, and it's not outweighed by any non-phobic description :(
Ugly
Like several recent books, the plot machinations are mostly a background to the characters, which is fine. But I'd rather the plot were dialled back to a smaller scale, rather than trying to squeeze in "oh, and $bigthing is in danger" into a sidenote somewhere.
The two problems I averred to in my previous post, are the necessity for Ivan and Tej to marry, and Simon's plan to give the Arquas more rope, rather than just ringing ImpSec and saying "Hey, you know how we want a presence in Jackson's Hole? If you offer these guys a big loan, they'll go and do it for you. PS. There's a bunch of money buried under impsec."
I think the intent of the plot is that those were necessary, and Ivan's and Simon's emotional biases toward marriage and meddling were a minor peccadillo, not "and then we nearly got lots of people killed because we didn't think things through". But I genuinely can't tell. Am I missing something?
I loved this book a lot, lot more when I reread it. I like seeing grown-up Ivan, but more than anything else, I liked seeing emotional interactions with Simon Illyan and Alys Vorpatril. I laughed a lot, and really cared about the fragile relationships being rebuilt. And I liked the varied viewpoints.
Bad
There is a very short passage describing a trans man, Dono, from a previous book. Who was a very good character (despite some false starts, and being inconsistent with what we know about being trans in the real world).
It is from the point of view of one or two people who are not sympathetic, which is possibly realistic, but it's really awful that that's the only mention in the book, and it's not outweighed by any non-phobic description :(
Ugly
Like several recent books, the plot machinations are mostly a background to the characters, which is fine. But I'd rather the plot were dialled back to a smaller scale, rather than trying to squeeze in "oh, and $bigthing is in danger" into a sidenote somewhere.
The two problems I averred to in my previous post, are the necessity for Ivan and Tej to marry, and Simon's plan to give the Arquas more rope, rather than just ringing ImpSec and saying "Hey, you know how we want a presence in Jackson's Hole? If you offer these guys a big loan, they'll go and do it for you. PS. There's a bunch of money buried under impsec."
I think the intent of the plot is that those were necessary, and Ivan's and Simon's emotional biases toward marriage and meddling were a minor peccadillo, not "and then we nearly got lots of people killed because we didn't think things through". But I genuinely can't tell. Am I missing something?
no subject
Date: 2014-01-28 06:58 pm (UTC)Since Dono was well off and well informed, that would seem to make it unlikely that by a happy chance they happened to want to transition anyway.
So my interpretation of it is:
It might have been By's suggestion, but Dono is a willing participant, regarding crosstransitioning (this is a word I've just made up) as better than meekly submitting to the otherwise inevitable.
(Implication: if something in the books is potentially offensive, I think it's not Ivan sticking his foot in it, or even a book where the only thing is Ivan doing so, but the implication that at least some people will find being in the wrong gender body quite tolerable really, given that Dono seems content enough with it to be thinking of being a groom at the end of A Civil Campaign. The Culture books have much more of this...)