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silverflight8) wrote2022-08-30 12:24 am
silverflight8) wrote2022-08-30 12:24 am
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The Galaxy, and the Ground Within - Becky Chambers
I am reading the Hugo finalists for Best Novel. So far it's not going so great.
The Galaxy, and the Ground Within is a novel set on the barren planet of Gora, which has a small waypost for travellers to fuel up mid-journey. Owing to a Plot Event of the satellite fleet crashing into each other, a half dozen different aliens are stranded together on the planet for a few days. This is very much supposed to be a character-driven book, not a plot-driven one.
I didn't like it very much.
I have many objections to this book. The first is that character driven should still create some kind of meaningful or enjoyable story. There are five aliens with very different body plans and occasionally extremely different physiologies (an anaerobic alien among aerobic respiring ones!) They work different jobs and supposedly come from very different social structures. But the book doesn't really let their background influence their reactions or mindset. I've criticized this before in other novels - the sense that even though one character is someone who has seen war and ferries supplies to active warzones, pilots her starship through interstellar space alone, and yet has the sensibilities and reactions of someone who feels like a liberal Anglophone living in the 21st century, someone who second-guesses their social interactions a lot and has analyzed their feelings and why they act the way they do. Chambers sounds like a nice person, but it doesn't make for very enjoyable reading, and everyone sounds and reacts the same. The dialogue and method of resolving conflict feel very much like internet therapist advice. Acknowledge the feeling and let it sit before responding. Make sure you put your seatbelt on before assisting others - take care of your body, self care, when you're going through mental turmoil. They just all talk like this, and feel like this, and work through issues like this, and it's so weird. And boring. Again - I feel like Chambers is a really nice person. I think these are great things to do. But I'm not reading for self-instruction. Reading something feels so disconnected from reality, where most people do not have this personality or mindset. The host of the waystop is a motherly figure who loves dessert and spends a lot of the book worrying about things and baking desserts, to such a degree it felt irritating, not comforting.
Part of my frustration was with the actual writing of the book. I don't mind workmanlike prose, but the action, such that it was, kept stopping dead so that Chambers could infodump about the character's motivation. There are many chapters where the character might have a cup of tea, or a conversation, and this thin action is padded out thickly with narrative blocks of flashbacks, explaining why they felt this way. We received most of the worldbuilding about various species via narrative description this way, and it was so frustrating to have conversations - finally, something is happening, a character is talking to another character! - get interrupted constantly by long paragraphs of written-out explanation, so you could understand why based on their long ago childhood. It brings all the momentum to a halt and also makes the reader feel like the author feels they can't get it without an elaborate backstory, and that we can't infer.
The book tries to incorporate a bunch of social issues, but quickly and simply. It felt very much like a child's book, about how to get along with others. But written for adults and 300 pages. I feel like some of the alien interactions are heavy-handed metaphors for disability, or racism, and I don't really enjoy that kind of fiction - the metaphors often veer into very confusing places, or it doesn't make sense. And they get solved very simplistically. There's one argument and it gets interrupted by a medical emergency (the second, and last, plot event). It just feels like the issues get name-checked - some very big ones, like xenophobia, and reproductive autonomy - and then because there are so many other things to deal with, so many issues, and the book is mostly about Everyone Learning To Get Along, complete with actual teenager alien also learning how to adult, they all get treated simply and put back into their little box. One character, Pei, is a species where fertility happens once in a lifetime and the social expectation is that you take advantage of it - employers let you have the gestational period off, soldiers are shipped back from war. Pei starts becoming fertile while stuck on Gora. She agonizes over what to do, but eventually has a conversation with someone from a species that her species hates, who says "you are allowed to feel what you feel and if you don't want to, then you don't have to". So Pei looks in herself and decides that yep, she doesn't. And then she doesn't. This is something empowering you say to someone who's starting out in life and realizing they can make their own decision, to someone escaping from a situation from which they have no control. Not to someone who gives orders and has command over other people's lives, believes her work is important and worth it, and is good at something that is both difficult and involves a lot of difficult and weighty decisions.
On a final, somewhat nitpicky note, every once awhile the logic just didn't add up. There's very careful explanation that Gora has no atmosphere, no life at all, and so on, the perfect blank backdrop. If there's no atmosphere, why is the sky on fire? Why would satellites burn up on re-entry? Pei's species communicates and understands the world through visual input, keying specifically on colour. But they are overwhelmed when faced with a busy store display with many different colours. But thinking about it for more than a second makes this seem so bizarre. If your primary means of navigating the world is through a particular sense, then why is it so easily overwhelmed? How has your species not gone extinct? Humans, too, are super visually focused; we identify wavelengths of light and use them to help understand; our brains are used to sorting and categorizing visual input, narrowing our focus down to smaller spaces to help us concentrate while keeping us alert to new things. This isn't one individual struggling, apparently the whole species does. Is their home planet completely grey and just their faces flash colour to communicate? Well, it's not, because Pei (in one of the many infodump backgrounds) says she was such-and-such age when she learned that a yellow-coloured flower was not in fact yelling at her. Apparently Roveg has no muscles (so how does he move? He's insectile). It's stuff I probably would have ignored if I had been charmed by the worldbuilding, or characters, but it feels like it goes hand-in-hand with the shallow characterization.
The Galaxy, and the Ground Within is a novel set on the barren planet of Gora, which has a small waypost for travellers to fuel up mid-journey. Owing to a Plot Event of the satellite fleet crashing into each other, a half dozen different aliens are stranded together on the planet for a few days. This is very much supposed to be a character-driven book, not a plot-driven one.
I didn't like it very much.
I have many objections to this book. The first is that character driven should still create some kind of meaningful or enjoyable story. There are five aliens with very different body plans and occasionally extremely different physiologies (an anaerobic alien among aerobic respiring ones!) They work different jobs and supposedly come from very different social structures. But the book doesn't really let their background influence their reactions or mindset. I've criticized this before in other novels - the sense that even though one character is someone who has seen war and ferries supplies to active warzones, pilots her starship through interstellar space alone, and yet has the sensibilities and reactions of someone who feels like a liberal Anglophone living in the 21st century, someone who second-guesses their social interactions a lot and has analyzed their feelings and why they act the way they do. Chambers sounds like a nice person, but it doesn't make for very enjoyable reading, and everyone sounds and reacts the same. The dialogue and method of resolving conflict feel very much like internet therapist advice. Acknowledge the feeling and let it sit before responding. Make sure you put your seatbelt on before assisting others - take care of your body, self care, when you're going through mental turmoil. They just all talk like this, and feel like this, and work through issues like this, and it's so weird. And boring. Again - I feel like Chambers is a really nice person. I think these are great things to do. But I'm not reading for self-instruction. Reading something feels so disconnected from reality, where most people do not have this personality or mindset. The host of the waystop is a motherly figure who loves dessert and spends a lot of the book worrying about things and baking desserts, to such a degree it felt irritating, not comforting.
Part of my frustration was with the actual writing of the book. I don't mind workmanlike prose, but the action, such that it was, kept stopping dead so that Chambers could infodump about the character's motivation. There are many chapters where the character might have a cup of tea, or a conversation, and this thin action is padded out thickly with narrative blocks of flashbacks, explaining why they felt this way. We received most of the worldbuilding about various species via narrative description this way, and it was so frustrating to have conversations - finally, something is happening, a character is talking to another character! - get interrupted constantly by long paragraphs of written-out explanation, so you could understand why based on their long ago childhood. It brings all the momentum to a halt and also makes the reader feel like the author feels they can't get it without an elaborate backstory, and that we can't infer.
The book tries to incorporate a bunch of social issues, but quickly and simply. It felt very much like a child's book, about how to get along with others. But written for adults and 300 pages. I feel like some of the alien interactions are heavy-handed metaphors for disability, or racism, and I don't really enjoy that kind of fiction - the metaphors often veer into very confusing places, or it doesn't make sense. And they get solved very simplistically. There's one argument and it gets interrupted by a medical emergency (the second, and last, plot event). It just feels like the issues get name-checked - some very big ones, like xenophobia, and reproductive autonomy - and then because there are so many other things to deal with, so many issues, and the book is mostly about Everyone Learning To Get Along, complete with actual teenager alien also learning how to adult, they all get treated simply and put back into their little box. One character, Pei, is a species where fertility happens once in a lifetime and the social expectation is that you take advantage of it - employers let you have the gestational period off, soldiers are shipped back from war. Pei starts becoming fertile while stuck on Gora. She agonizes over what to do, but eventually has a conversation with someone from a species that her species hates, who says "you are allowed to feel what you feel and if you don't want to, then you don't have to". So Pei looks in herself and decides that yep, she doesn't. And then she doesn't. This is something empowering you say to someone who's starting out in life and realizing they can make their own decision, to someone escaping from a situation from which they have no control. Not to someone who gives orders and has command over other people's lives, believes her work is important and worth it, and is good at something that is both difficult and involves a lot of difficult and weighty decisions.
On a final, somewhat nitpicky note, every once awhile the logic just didn't add up. There's very careful explanation that Gora has no atmosphere, no life at all, and so on, the perfect blank backdrop. If there's no atmosphere, why is the sky on fire? Why would satellites burn up on re-entry? Pei's species communicates and understands the world through visual input, keying specifically on colour. But they are overwhelmed when faced with a busy store display with many different colours. But thinking about it for more than a second makes this seem so bizarre. If your primary means of navigating the world is through a particular sense, then why is it so easily overwhelmed? How has your species not gone extinct? Humans, too, are super visually focused; we identify wavelengths of light and use them to help understand; our brains are used to sorting and categorizing visual input, narrowing our focus down to smaller spaces to help us concentrate while keeping us alert to new things. This isn't one individual struggling, apparently the whole species does. Is their home planet completely grey and just their faces flash colour to communicate? Well, it's not, because Pei (in one of the many infodump backgrounds) says she was such-and-such age when she learned that a yellow-coloured flower was not in fact yelling at her. Apparently Roveg has no muscles (so how does he move? He's insectile). It's stuff I probably would have ignored if I had been charmed by the worldbuilding, or characters, but it feels like it goes hand-in-hand with the shallow characterization.