(no subject)
Mar. 23rd, 2005 08:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
progFinished A Deepness in the Sky. Liked it a lot, though I grumble at the authorial tactic of hiding information from the reader in a very sneaky way. Specifcally, having characters we know everything about secretly make a discovery and then conspire to work behind the reader's back! There is a "clue" in the fact that, from that point (whose location is spelled out at the very end of the story), we never see the story from those characters' points of view again. But still... argh, tricky!
While I really enjoyed the villains, who are some of the nastiest bad guys I've ever met in a novel, I dunno how I felt about them both being sexual predators on the side. I mean, in literature, that's kind of a cheap way to make a character completely despicable. A killer, no matter how brutal, still has shades of gray to play with, machiavellian ideals and whatnot. A rapist, on the other hand, really has nowhere to go. It was perfectly fitting with how they thought of everyone below them, though... hmf.
The ending actually becomes a little depressing, since we know from Fire what ultimately happens with Pham's mission to explore the galactic core... not only did it end in disaster, but the entire excursion was, in retrospect, based on an ill-informed jump to conclusions. I guess it was done for the right reasons, but the inspiration that Pham means to engender with his speech at the end hangs heavy with unwitting, and most unfortunate, irony.
Unanswered question, at the meta-plot level: I can't think of a reason not to recommend that a new reader read this book before A Fire Upon the Deep. What am I forgetting about?
One thing I have forgotten: do the Spiders appear at all in Fire?
While I really enjoyed the villains, who are some of the nastiest bad guys I've ever met in a novel, I dunno how I felt about them both being sexual predators on the side. I mean, in literature, that's kind of a cheap way to make a character completely despicable. A killer, no matter how brutal, still has shades of gray to play with, machiavellian ideals and whatnot. A rapist, on the other hand, really has nowhere to go. It was perfectly fitting with how they thought of everyone below them, though... hmf.
The ending actually becomes a little depressing, since we know from Fire what ultimately happens with Pham's mission to explore the galactic core... not only did it end in disaster, but the entire excursion was, in retrospect, based on an ill-informed jump to conclusions. I guess it was done for the right reasons, but the inspiration that Pham means to engender with his speech at the end hangs heavy with unwitting, and most unfortunate, irony.
Unanswered question, at the meta-plot level: I can't think of a reason not to recommend that a new reader read this book before A Fire Upon the Deep. What am I forgetting about?
One thing I have forgotten: do the Spiders appear at all in Fire?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-03-24 03:40 pm (UTC)You're right...The bad guys were fully evil enough, and making them sadistic sexual predators as well seems like overkill. I'm not sure why that bit was put in.
One thing I rather enjoyed was thinking of the similarities of the Spider's world and the burst of scientific research at MIT and Princeton during WWII...It seemed like each cycle of the Spiders goes through about fifty years of human scientific progress, starting at telegraphs and crude radio, World War I, through the "roaring twenties", and then into World War II. I think Vinge took a lot of inspiration from that chunk of American history.
You'll find my comments, from a couple months ago, here:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/hauntmeister/87194.html