Book Review
Apr. 8th, 2008 04:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catsittingstillBook Review:
There Will Be Dragons by John Ringo:
Short version: Pity—it could have been pretty good. 2 out of 10
The book has some interesting ideas. Unfortunately they are dragged down by failure to explore them or even consistently take them into account while worldbuilding. Odd expository lumps crop up, particularly toward the beginning of the book. There is plenty of positive second amendment propaganda, for those who like that kind of thing, but (I can't help but note) not a mention of the 13th, 15th or in particular the 19th amendments which would really have applied to the situation. But in the end I finally realized I had been unfair in judging it by the standards of professional speculative fiction, and that, ranked among its true genre, it's not really that bad.
There Will Be Dragons by John Ringo:
Short version: Pity—it could have been pretty good. 2 out of 10
The book has some interesting ideas. Unfortunately they are dragged down by failure to explore them or even consistently take them into account while worldbuilding. Odd expository lumps crop up, particularly toward the beginning of the book. There is plenty of positive second amendment propaganda, for those who like that kind of thing, but (I can't help but note) not a mention of the 13th, 15th or in particular the 19th amendments which would really have applied to the situation. But in the end I finally realized I had been unfair in judging it by the standards of professional speculative fiction, and that, ranked among its true genre, it's not really that bad.
Serious failure to follow through:
In the real world relatively minor biotechnology (birth control) led to sweeping changes in the position of women and the attitudes toward us. In this story-world, magical medical nannites were invented a millennium ago that can turn you into a unicorn if you feel like it, so presumably turning a woman into a man or vice versa is relatively minor restructuring--and yet the attitudes toward the sexes are if anything backward of today's.
For example Big Bad 1, a member of the ruling council, shows up all in a lather that humans are down to (horrors) just under one billion (reality check: one thousand million) people, and he wants to coerce women to raise unwanted babies to make sure the human race doesn't die out.
But in a world where woman = person who happens to be female today, that proposal doesn't even make sense. It's like trying to coerce people who happen to be wearing yellow shirts today—theoretically you could try it, but tomorrow you'd look out the window and there wouldn't be a yellow shirt in sight. Big Bad 1 is batshit-crazy, I understand that; but why does it not occur to any of the other council members to point out the obvious hole in his plan?
Plus Big Bad 1 is that rarity in a world that has had gender change on a whim for a millennium—a sexist. Presumably the other council members would be as taken aback by this proposal as you would be if you sat down at a business meeting and the man next to you confided that "all witchcraft is motivated by carnal lust, which is in women insatiable." Like I said, Big Bad 1 is, in the context of his times, batshit-crazy; why is nobody reacting the way people normally react to crazy people?
Plus given that Big Bad 1 could become female himself at any time, why does it not occur to anyone to suggest that he demonstrate the sincerity of his motives by becoming female and raising babies? People live to be 500 in this world; Big Bad 1 has at least 200 good years ahead of him—she could raise a lot of babies in that time. Good luck with that—let us know how it works out for you. But that doesn't occur to anybody either.
This could have been a great opportunity to explore how much of our personality and sense of self is rooted in our bodies, and what society might really be like if our bodies were changeable on short notice. What a pity nothing came of it.
Life gets bad, especially for women:
In the meantime, civilization Falls, the magical medical nannites are suddenly only available to council members, and the people who happened to be female during the Fall are up shit creek. Much unsympathetic lingering over the drawbacks of being female in a low tech environment, minimal rational attempts to do anything about it, aside from menstrual pads.
For example, in the principal refugee camp a desperate doctor is losing patients because she has always had magical medical nannites at her disposal and is now having to fall back on techniques compatible with stone knives and bearskins—techniques she naturally never studied. The female council member (call her Good Guy 1) can program little android-like things to hang around in the woods and direct refugees to the camp, but she can't program even one android to walk into camp with basic medical knowledge like properties of local herbs, how to make a speculum, how to use hypnosis and/or meditation to reduce pain, how to perform early-term abortions (clue: tansy, referred to in the book, is not safe; and probably not particularly effective; there are better low tech ways), and help the doctor? What's up with that?
And excuse me—but rape? In a world where gender has been something you can put on like a shirt for the last thousand years? I would think it would be a strange concept, along the lines of "people who happen to be male can theoretically hurt people who happen to be female by forcing unwanted sex on them. Like people who happen to have food handy can theoretically hurt other people by forcing unwanted food down their throats. A millennium ago this was actually pretty common. Weird, huh?"
But two weeks after the Fall, people who happened to be female when civilization collapsed are being raped. And impregnated as a result. (Not force-fed, though, for some reason. Coincidence I guess.) And not only is the impregnated rape victim more or less okay with being pregnant by the rape, and even planning to raise the baby, she's encouraging her child (sixteen years old, mind you) who also happened to be female during the Fall to get pregnant too. Yum.
I mean, I realize that women have all kinds of reactions to being raped, and being impregnated by rape, but does this seem…off…to anybody else? Bear in mind that she is encouraging her daughter to get pregnant in a world where the height of medical technique is to make amputation as rapid as possible because there are no anesthetics.
But it's all so real, and noble
In the middle of this mess, you have a major male point of view character (call him Good Guy 2) saying that life seems more vital, more real, more important under these circumstances. It has more soul. Feh.
Judging unfairly
But, I have to admit I have realized I was judging this book unfairly. I discovered this when Good Guy 2, a fifteen (or seventeen--it varies in the text, though I don't get the impression enough time has actually passed to make the difference) year old boy whose parents had abandoned him, and who had almost no friends until his previously-untreatable cerebral-palsy-like condition was cured a few months before the Fall, comes back on the scene.
The refugee community has a big hunt, with dozens or hundreds of beaters driving wild and feral animals toward a bunch of people on horseback, one of whom is Good Guy 2, because he had been training for a virtual reality sort of LARP that included horses. In the chaos of the hunt, Good Guy 2, who is hunting for the first time, and using a bow from horseback for the second time in his life, hits a tiger, four times out of four attempts, shooting an unfamiliar bow from the back of a moving (unfamiliar) horse. Then, having never used a lance for real before either, he runs down and spears a charging boar, thus saving the beautiful girl (not one of the two he'd bedded in the previous week, but a third, whose tentative advances he'd gallantly turned down saying he "just wanted to be friends" because she'd been raped recently and didn't seem to really have her heart in the seduction attempt). In the process of rescuing the girl he gets knocked off his horse and wakes up with the beautiful doctor and her beautiful daughter bending anxiously over him to find out if he is still alive.
It was at this point that I realized I had been unfair. This is a Mary Sue story. I'd been slow to recognize it, because I thought most Mary Sues were written for 14 year old girls, and this one is written for 15 year old boys, and the story is further cluttered with a bunch of expository lumps and second amendment yadda-yadda, so that it takes awhile for the Mary Sue part to really start cooking.
I had been judging it by the standards of professional speculative fiction, and I had naturally been disappointed. But judged by the standards of fanfic, it's really not all that bad. It's not top-quality, but there is no doubt that There Will Be Dragons can hold its head up among the rest of its genre, as a strong example of better than average fan-fiction.
In the real world relatively minor biotechnology (birth control) led to sweeping changes in the position of women and the attitudes toward us. In this story-world, magical medical nannites were invented a millennium ago that can turn you into a unicorn if you feel like it, so presumably turning a woman into a man or vice versa is relatively minor restructuring--and yet the attitudes toward the sexes are if anything backward of today's.
For example Big Bad 1, a member of the ruling council, shows up all in a lather that humans are down to (horrors) just under one billion (reality check: one thousand million) people, and he wants to coerce women to raise unwanted babies to make sure the human race doesn't die out.
But in a world where woman = person who happens to be female today, that proposal doesn't even make sense. It's like trying to coerce people who happen to be wearing yellow shirts today—theoretically you could try it, but tomorrow you'd look out the window and there wouldn't be a yellow shirt in sight. Big Bad 1 is batshit-crazy, I understand that; but why does it not occur to any of the other council members to point out the obvious hole in his plan?
Plus Big Bad 1 is that rarity in a world that has had gender change on a whim for a millennium—a sexist. Presumably the other council members would be as taken aback by this proposal as you would be if you sat down at a business meeting and the man next to you confided that "all witchcraft is motivated by carnal lust, which is in women insatiable." Like I said, Big Bad 1 is, in the context of his times, batshit-crazy; why is nobody reacting the way people normally react to crazy people?
Plus given that Big Bad 1 could become female himself at any time, why does it not occur to anyone to suggest that he demonstrate the sincerity of his motives by becoming female and raising babies? People live to be 500 in this world; Big Bad 1 has at least 200 good years ahead of him—she could raise a lot of babies in that time. Good luck with that—let us know how it works out for you. But that doesn't occur to anybody either.
This could have been a great opportunity to explore how much of our personality and sense of self is rooted in our bodies, and what society might really be like if our bodies were changeable on short notice. What a pity nothing came of it.
Life gets bad, especially for women:
In the meantime, civilization Falls, the magical medical nannites are suddenly only available to council members, and the people who happened to be female during the Fall are up shit creek. Much unsympathetic lingering over the drawbacks of being female in a low tech environment, minimal rational attempts to do anything about it, aside from menstrual pads.
For example, in the principal refugee camp a desperate doctor is losing patients because she has always had magical medical nannites at her disposal and is now having to fall back on techniques compatible with stone knives and bearskins—techniques she naturally never studied. The female council member (call her Good Guy 1) can program little android-like things to hang around in the woods and direct refugees to the camp, but she can't program even one android to walk into camp with basic medical knowledge like properties of local herbs, how to make a speculum, how to use hypnosis and/or meditation to reduce pain, how to perform early-term abortions (clue: tansy, referred to in the book, is not safe; and probably not particularly effective; there are better low tech ways), and help the doctor? What's up with that?
And excuse me—but rape? In a world where gender has been something you can put on like a shirt for the last thousand years? I would think it would be a strange concept, along the lines of "people who happen to be male can theoretically hurt people who happen to be female by forcing unwanted sex on them. Like people who happen to have food handy can theoretically hurt other people by forcing unwanted food down their throats. A millennium ago this was actually pretty common. Weird, huh?"
But two weeks after the Fall, people who happened to be female when civilization collapsed are being raped. And impregnated as a result. (Not force-fed, though, for some reason. Coincidence I guess.) And not only is the impregnated rape victim more or less okay with being pregnant by the rape, and even planning to raise the baby, she's encouraging her child (sixteen years old, mind you) who also happened to be female during the Fall to get pregnant too. Yum.
I mean, I realize that women have all kinds of reactions to being raped, and being impregnated by rape, but does this seem…off…to anybody else? Bear in mind that she is encouraging her daughter to get pregnant in a world where the height of medical technique is to make amputation as rapid as possible because there are no anesthetics.
But it's all so real, and noble
In the middle of this mess, you have a major male point of view character (call him Good Guy 2) saying that life seems more vital, more real, more important under these circumstances. It has more soul. Feh.
Judging unfairly
But, I have to admit I have realized I was judging this book unfairly. I discovered this when Good Guy 2, a fifteen (or seventeen--it varies in the text, though I don't get the impression enough time has actually passed to make the difference) year old boy whose parents had abandoned him, and who had almost no friends until his previously-untreatable cerebral-palsy-like condition was cured a few months before the Fall, comes back on the scene.
The refugee community has a big hunt, with dozens or hundreds of beaters driving wild and feral animals toward a bunch of people on horseback, one of whom is Good Guy 2, because he had been training for a virtual reality sort of LARP that included horses. In the chaos of the hunt, Good Guy 2, who is hunting for the first time, and using a bow from horseback for the second time in his life, hits a tiger, four times out of four attempts, shooting an unfamiliar bow from the back of a moving (unfamiliar) horse. Then, having never used a lance for real before either, he runs down and spears a charging boar, thus saving the beautiful girl (not one of the two he'd bedded in the previous week, but a third, whose tentative advances he'd gallantly turned down saying he "just wanted to be friends" because she'd been raped recently and didn't seem to really have her heart in the seduction attempt). In the process of rescuing the girl he gets knocked off his horse and wakes up with the beautiful doctor and her beautiful daughter bending anxiously over him to find out if he is still alive.
It was at this point that I realized I had been unfair. This is a Mary Sue story. I'd been slow to recognize it, because I thought most Mary Sues were written for 14 year old girls, and this one is written for 15 year old boys, and the story is further cluttered with a bunch of expository lumps and second amendment yadda-yadda, so that it takes awhile for the Mary Sue part to really start cooking.
I had been judging it by the standards of professional speculative fiction, and I had naturally been disappointed. But judged by the standards of fanfic, it's really not all that bad. It's not top-quality, but there is no doubt that There Will Be Dragons can hold its head up among the rest of its genre, as a strong example of better than average fan-fiction.
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no subject
Date: 2008-04-08 10:06 pm (UTC)This was still during the time when the world had magical medical nannites that can turn you into a unicorn if you feel like it, right?
Disbelief is not so much suspended as hung by the neck until dead, dead, dead.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-08 10:15 pm (UTC)Nope, don't understand. Happy to suspend disbelief as long as possible, but it seems to have rotted off the string.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-08 10:06 pm (UTC)Michael O'Shea, a fireplug of an iron-pumping ex-soldier, leaves game design behind to train and then lead power-armored infantry in a merciless battle against the equally merciless, centauroid Posleen for the sake of Earth's allies. Several subplots show Ringo's fondness for special ops types and marines, and his experience as a paratrooper shows in the way he handles military small-group politics and disciplinary problems. The subplots point up the potential grimness of Earth finding itself under siege, if not actually under assault. (Don't worry, that will probably come; this book has series written between all the lines.) The interstellar skulduggery is thick, and the final action sequence, occupying a third of the book, juxtaposes power armor, aliens, lasers, and leopard tanks, and is practically impossible not to read in one sitting.
Not in one sitting ... right. One gives up shaking one's head way before then. It was ... really really bad. About guns and Men that are MEN and blood and gore and more of all that. And unrealistic characters and behavior and WHY DID NO ONE TRY TALKING TO THOSE ALIENS? DUDES? HELLO-O? Reality check?!
So, yes, your review rang all kinds of bells with me. :-)
no subject
Date: 2008-04-08 10:23 pm (UTC)I actually read There Will Be Dragons because I'd slogged my way through one of the March books--I think it was March To The Sea and had not been very impressed, and a friend then loaned me a later March book and I actually found it offensive to women and gave up on it 20 pages in.
So I thought, well Ringo can't be *that* bad surely--he sells a lot of books. Perhaps a different one would be better. And I thought I'd give him one more try and this book was available free from the Baen Free Library...
It was worth what I paid for it. I gave it 2 out of ten because for fanfic it's pretty competently written.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-09 02:39 am (UTC)It's a common theme in his writing - he generates right-wing fantasy scenarios, and assumes that liberals will invariably choose the side of evil/stupidity - and will always either die in a cowardly fashion or convert to conservatism (and beg for help) when things get personally dangerous.
It's not just limited to peaceniks - all flavors of liberals get the treatment, he has a real "issue" with environmentalists.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-09 03:08 am (UTC)Enh... this might explain why a population of (horrors) only one billion people was presented as a grave threat, as opposed to a still-heavy burden on the Earth's biosphere.
What a maroon.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-09 06:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-09 07:39 pm (UTC)At a very generous estimate, it might possibly be time to think about worrying if the human population dropped below 100,000. Which is to say 1/10,000th the size it is when Big Bad 1 is panicking.
And for goodness sake, it's so easy to check it out. He really has no excuse.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-09 02:39 pm (UTC)The worst I've seen is David Drake. I read one of his. I tend to describe it as 'military porn'.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-09 04:56 pm (UTC)It's a pity, because there are aspects of his books that I like, and could enjoy more easily if he wasn't always shoving his straw-man caricatures of liberals up my nose.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-08 11:04 pm (UTC)As for plot and character, I love Weber's Honor Harringtons.
Because you'd posted, I re-read the Lord Darcy mysteries. (Beams with contentment.)
Eric Flint wrote _1632_, which is an alt-history of modern-day Virginians transported to the Germanies of that year. Not too shabby, although Flint (and later, Weber co-authoring the sequel _1633_) tend to explore different aspects of alt-history after introducing something I think is kewl.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-08 11:23 pm (UTC)I enjoy the _Honor Harrington_ books too, but mostly the people (and tree cat) parts. The ravening space beam parts I tend to skim through as fast as possible--lots of people are going to die and I'm not looking forward to it and the exact mechanisms are not particularly interesting to me. Different tastes I guess.
I hope you enjoyed Lord Darcy--it looks like you did :-) Those are fun, aren't they? They're the earliest instance I know of of a writer treating magic like science (a method of approach that I really enjoy, though I know it drives some readers up the wall).
I like _1632_ and most of its sequels. I enjoy the military parts less than the other parts, though.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-10 02:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-10 02:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-10 10:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-10 02:42 am (UTC)At about page 35, I put the book down, never to rise again.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-10 02:04 pm (UTC)I was softhearted and wanted to give him a second chance. Alas, there comes a point where softheartedness and softheadedness become difficult to distinguish reliably. In the future I shall be more inclined to go with my instincts.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-10 10:40 pm (UTC)