Wednesday reading: The Raven Tower and Embassytown

[asakiyume]

I finished The Raven Tower. I really liked it, especially the god-narrator's story arc. I loved him, and I loved his best-friend god, the Myriad, who was initially a meteorite but spends most of her time incarnating in swarms of mosquitoes. There was a Justice-of-Toren moment in the story that was very perfect. Ann Leckie sure does know how to show strong emotion in beings that aren't given to emotions; sometimes a very few words indeed will do. And the god-narrator's reflection on the inevitability of change/death and what makes life meaningful was beautiful. The ninja girl is reading it now, and we're having avid conversations. The healing angel has expressed interest in reading it too, and meanwhile we're reading Hamlet aloud together--you know, taking parts--which is very fun. (The human story arc in The Raven Tower has a Hamlet-esque situation and a few analogue characters, though that's more incidental than plot- or character-central).

Having finished The Raven Tower, I started China Miéville's Embassytown, which I've been meaning to read for quite a while. It is *very* rewarding to get around to reading a book you've been meaning to read for quite a while; it feels like keeping a promise. So far I'm liking this book considerably more than Kraken but not quite as much as Railsea. China Miéville has this gonzo imagination that can be a strength or a liability. I found it beautifully, poetically directed in Railsea, but overexuberant (felt self-indulgent) in Kraken. In this one it's better controlled--it's focused on language and other-ness, which I love, but ... I'm waiting to see if the story will have the heart that Railsea had. I'm not holding my breath, though.

In a way it's a perfect book to read after The Raven Tower, because RT had the premise that a god's utterance was performative/became/must be true, and Embassytown features aliens whose language is so bound up in the speakers' perception of reality that they cannot lie, or barely can lie. The (human) narrator and her husband have this conversation:

“Millions of years back there must have been some adaptive advantage to knowing that what was communicated was true,” Scile said to me, last time we’d hypothesised this history. “Selection for a mind that could only express that.”

“The evolution of trust …” I started to say.

“There’s no need for trust, this way,” he interrupted. Chance, struggle, failure, survival, a Darwinian chaos of instinctive grammar, the drives of a big-brained animal in a hard environment, the selection out of traits, had made a race of pure truth-tellers.

And THAT prompted a cynical thought in me about SF worldbuilding--about how even as SF writers play with the rules of one branch of science, imagining (say) a universe with very different physics, they remain very trammelled and hidebound when it comes to other fields--like (in this case) evolutionary biology. Apparently a gajillion years (or mega hours, as the book would have it, because somehow "hour" is a less subjective time unit than a year [why--oh! There is an actual good reason that I was ignorant of: minoanmiss explains here]) in the future, there is no other-better-different notion for how life all and everywhere comes about than Darwinian evolution.

I mean, I get that if you strange up too many spheres of science simultaneously, you end up with a hard-to-understand mess, but still: I'd like to see a book that broke free from the limitations of evolutionary biology. I suppose you could say Le Guin's Lathe of Heaven did that, with characters able to dream things into existence.

Comments

[troisoiseaux]

I loved him, and I loved his best-friend god

Ooooh, super interesting to see that you think of the rock-god-narrator as a "him"; I kept thinking of it as a "her". My interest in The Raven Tower was originally piqued because of the Hamlet-inspired plotline, but I found that, if not the least, than one of the less interesting parts of the book.

[asakiyume]

I am SO gender colonized in my mind, it's terrible! I should at least think of Strength&Patience as "they"

... anyway, yeah, agreed about the Hamlet plotline.

[skygiants]

The Hamlet bits were mostly interesting to me only inasmuch as they represented Hamlet opinions that I found either entertaining or confounding, which in the end turned out to be probably more of a distraction from the point of the book overall than otherwise.

[asakiyume]

Ooh, but I'm interested, tell me more? What opinions are you thinking of?

(Also, I'm just off Facetime from another conversation with the ninja girl and am now feeling chagrinned for not really *registering* the degree of Strength&Patience's malice at the end--like, their revenge really screws over the people of Iraden big time.)

[skygiants]

As troisoiseaux said, the Horatio/Ophelia romance for sure was a surprise; also the take on Hamlet-the-character (a shockingly un-self-aware variant and one I was surprised by and found myself mildly indignant about; it's not that I love Hamlet the character particularly but I do think he's got more going for him than that!); also Strength and Patience of the Hill definitely anti-ships both Hamlet/Horatio and Hamlet/Ophelia in a way that feels a bit hilariously like weapons drawn on the entire Hamlet fandom. (A while back when I read it I ended up concluding that one of the interesting things to me about the book as Hamlet fanfic is the way that S&P, despite being generally so careful about language, is willing to make very definite claims about things that are very deliberately ambiguous in the play.)

[asakiyume]

So did you feel the Hamlet-ness of that storyline was central? Like that Ann thought to herself, "I'd like to tell the Hamlet story--but differently!" Because I more thought that it was a case of, "I want to have an heir get outraged over an illegal/sacrilegious turn of events, and ... hey, that's a little like Hamlet--it would be fun to drop some more Hamlet details in there."

I'm not hard-and-fast stuck on my opinion ... I guess I just didn't see Shakespeare's Hamlet's themes carried over that much to this story, whereas there were plenty of other themes. But then again, retellings don't really have to stick to the themes at all, now that I think of it...

[skygiants]

Honestly, I don't think it is -- some of the other parts feel a lot more central -- it's just that the fact that I'm interested in Hamlet and Hamlet retellings makes me overread it for things as opposed to others.

That said, I did really enjoy the suggestion of Strength & Patience of the Hill enforcing its literary interpretations by divine fiat.

[asakiyume]

This got me to go back and reread your entry--now that I'm not minding spoilers--and I just love the whole thing, and also all the comments. NICE. (And I think you and that commenter had an excellent point)

[troisoiseaux]

The Horatio/Ophelia subplot was a bold but intriguing move!

[asakiyume]

*nodding*, you know, it took me until this moment to perceive a possible equation of Eolo with Horatio (Tikaz-Ophelia I got).

I'm not sure I think of it as a bold move within *this* story; with reference back to Hamlet, maybe I can see it?

I'm trying to think about what the Hamlet story *does* in this story. I'm thinking it shows human scheming and machinations? (Which we can compare with gods' scheming and machinations?)

[troisoiseaux]

I'm not sure I think of it as a bold move within *this* story

Yeah, not really; it's just kind of a funny example of how the Hamlet subplot is like... you can see the parallels, but also, everything's mixed up and odd (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are.... assassins, possibly?? also twins? I don't totally remember what was going on there) that it's like... Shrodinger's Hamlet. If nothing else, it's an exercise in how far you can wander from the source material while still calling it a retelling.......?

[minoanmiss]

Actually, I think hour could be less subjective than year. If a hour is defined in relation to a minute, and a minute to a second, and a second in relation to the vibrational frequency of a certain atom (cesium?) at a certain temperature, then those definitions are constant acrosss the universe. But a year can vary greatly from planet to planet and star system to star system.

Also, I loooooooooove your book reviews.

[asakiyume]

Okay--I hadn't thought about using the cesium clock; that's a good point. So yeah, I guess an hour would be more standard! Thanks for explaining; I'm going to sheepishly modify my snark ;-)

I'm glad you like the reviews ^_^

[amaebi]

Just so.

[skygiants]

Embassytown is probably my favorite Mieville (and Railsea my second favorite) - I'll be curious to see what you think of it, in the end!

[asakiyume]

It's definitely got its teeth in me! I'm thinking about it all the time.