Welcome to Kaitland

This was a hard book for me to get through. In the end, I enjoyed it despite my earlier criticisms about the treatment of the female characters–especially since justice was given to the conclusions of their individual plots (and mostly without reference to romantic entanglements).

The biggest hurdle to finishing reading the story was the multiple point-of-views wherein much of the action was being described through the eyes of characters for whom the reader cares little. This happened especially nearer the latter third of the book, when it was important for suspense’s sake to hide information from the reader to which the heroes were privy. Some of these passages were quite long, and since I cared more about the characters who had actually been fleshed out emotionally during the earlier parts of the book, I found myself skimming through parts in which, for example, a military director is observing and directing the goings-on of her departments and peers.

I am unable to recall earlier clues pointing toward the final “reveal,” either because I skimmed or because the omniscient narrator chose to omit those details. It really warrants a further, closer reading or two, but I honestly don’t think I would have the patience for it. It was a good book; I’m glad I read it, but I doubt I’ll read it again.

I do, however, want to read its predecessor, A Fire Upon the Deep. I wonder if reading them out of order will decrease my enjoyment any, but I love science fiction and will give it a go.

I’m a sucker for science fiction. At present, I am reading Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky, and as science fiction goes, it is pretty decent. There is a good balance between the maybe-impossible and the scientifically plausible, and attention is paid to the hard realities like traveling between star systems at sublight speeds. I’m not going to get into it, nor am I going to bother talking about the rather pedestrian non-human intelligent life (the gist is, they are basically human in every way except physiologically).

What tends to lose me most with the book is that the author isn’t very good at writing women. I think he probably even knows this, or at least assumes it, because very little of it is written from human women’s point-of-view. This is in spite of narrator semi-omniscience and the fact that approximately half of the pivotal characters are female.

One is sidelined almost immediately and basically mind-controlled; she serves as the love interest of one of the main characters. None of the story is from her point of view.

One has a crush on the first main character and gets manipulated into a sexual relationship by the main villain, a sadistic, much older man. We get her point of view occasionally; fortunately, she is heroic, but since she is described primarily through the eyes of the aforementioned males, the reader gets more of the impression that she’s soft, a dupe, and shrill and annoying on top of that.

The third, a villain, is practically a robot, mind-controlled and without personality. She is the only female character of note who is not romantically attached in some way.

I’m not sure if I’m not giving the characters enough credit, if these are valid frustrations, or if I’ve been conditioned to be frustrated. For example, if most of the women are romantically attached, then that means most of the men must be.* And of course, I don’t have a man’s point-of-view to bounce this off of. And to be fair to the author, the apparent hero of the story has a sexist streak he doesn’t know how to deal with, which colors his views of, and the narrator’s descriptions of, the women.

At any rate, it’s a far, far cry from Orson Scott Card’s Shadow series, in which one of the few female characters in that entire universe, one of even fewer females ruthless enough to go to Battle School, is reduced to being wholly concerned with “making babies.” Which is exactly the term she, and by proxy Card, uses to describe pregnancy.

* A heteronormative viewpoint, to be sure, that is apparently shared (or at least not disavowed) by the author, Vernor Vinge.