Mar. 27th, 2022

psocoptera: ink drawing of celtic knot (Default)
The Actual Star, Monica Byrne. This book was fascinating and had a ton going on but before I say anything else about it I want to throw out a significant content note for self-injury, child harm, ritual mutilation and sacrifice, animal mauling, eye trauma, claustrophobia, and threat of drowning. Squeamishness is very personal so ymmv but I felt like there were some scenes that were kind of a lot. (But please feel free to ask for more specifics if you're trying to figure out whether you want to try this one.)

So, okay. This is literary science fiction consisting of three interwoven stories - one set in 1012 Belize about a pair of Mayan royal twins and their little sister, one set in 2012 about a tourist girl from Minnesota and two Belizean tour guides, and one set in 3012 about two people with opposing visions for their culture. It's about travel, and tourism, and Place. How religions develop, and the role of chance in history, and the question of individual choice and control vs environmental and subconscious factors. Byrne is very interested in a question I also find interesting, whether civilizational collapse from climate change has to be a regression or whether it could be a kind of progress, or could enable progress. Byrne in interviews has talked about Dispossessed but I think it's also very much talking to/with Always Coming Home. I would also recommend it to people who liked Years of Rice and Salt, or some of the recent explorations of, uh, utopia-aspiring futures in the at-least-semiautomated gay space communism direction (Record of a Spaceborn Few, The Unraveling). Or people who liked Byrne's first book, The Girl in the Road (which I wrote about here)! Byrne is looking to be the Helene Wecker kind of author who produces something brilliant and meticulous every 7-8 years and I will definitely hope we get another new book in 2028ish.

A bunch more detail about various things behind a spoiler cut, but one more note first, which is that at certain points there's a bunch of dialogue in Belizean Kriol, which made certain chapters very slow going. It's totally readable by sounding it out, but for me that was more like deliberate decoding than automatic literacy, and thus work. (Ugh, work.) There's also some scattered Spanish but my Spanish, while very limited, is good enough that I could more or less "just keep reading" those parts instead of hitting the decoding wall. I'm sure there are reasons Byrne did this and why she did so much of it but to me it was a little too much. On the other hand there was definitely a point where I was like "dang is the whole rest of the book going to be like this" and it wasn't, that was the peak of it, so, uh, take heart?

And now all the rest of my random thoughts behind this cut. Read more... )

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