book: Among Others
Oct. 6th, 2013 07:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraConfession: I had a hard time giving this book a fair shot, due to lingering hard feelings over it beating Embassytown for the Hugo in 2012. Having read it, now, I can see how it's the sort of thing Hugo voters might go for, although I still think Embassytown is brilliant and Among Others is... fine. I mean, it was good! I liked that it was a book about the aftermath, which is one of my favorite themes in fanfiction, especially about life in the mundane world (the Pevensies after Narnia, Will Stanton as a teen, etc). I liked the slippery nature of the magic. Of course the whole business of a lonely bookish teen wishing for and then finding her people had enormous personal resonance for me. A lot of Among Others is just *about* science fiction, though, whereas Embassytown *is* science fiction; Among Others is not a sensawunda book.
Early on in the book, when Mori's father tries to molest her, she has this serious debate with herself over whether she did the right thing pushing him away, because she "knows from Time Enough For Love, which is very explicit on that, that incest isn't inherently wrong", and there's "that Sturgeon story in Dangerous Visions", and at that point I really thought the book was going in a more critical direction, like, examining whether there might be a down side to getting your whole identity from books, such as being vulnerable to any bad idea that someone happened to stick into a book. But then this never really came up again (either specifically, or as a pattern), and I guess I'm just curious whether anyone else had a similar thought (or agrees that it would have been a more interesting book)?
And then secondly, there were all these various hints about the similar names and telling the twins apart and Mori even says that after the accident she started calling herself her twin's name and I swear I thought we were building to some sort of major revelation like "and she is STILL DOING THAT" or "in fact nobody knows that it was the other twin who died" and that this was going to matter somehow and then... nothing. So... *was* she in fact still going by her twin's name, or not, and if so, who in her family knew the truth, or not, and did it matter at all, to anything? I guess not?
Early on in the book, when Mori's father tries to molest her, she has this serious debate with herself over whether she did the right thing pushing him away, because she "knows from Time Enough For Love, which is very explicit on that, that incest isn't inherently wrong", and there's "that Sturgeon story in Dangerous Visions", and at that point I really thought the book was going in a more critical direction, like, examining whether there might be a down side to getting your whole identity from books, such as being vulnerable to any bad idea that someone happened to stick into a book. But then this never really came up again (either specifically, or as a pattern), and I guess I'm just curious whether anyone else had a similar thought (or agrees that it would have been a more interesting book)?
And then secondly, there were all these various hints about the similar names and telling the twins apart and Mori even says that after the accident she started calling herself her twin's name and I swear I thought we were building to some sort of major revelation like "and she is STILL DOING THAT" or "in fact nobody knows that it was the other twin who died" and that this was going to matter somehow and then... nothing. So... *was* she in fact still going by her twin's name, or not, and if so, who in her family knew the truth, or not, and did it matter at all, to anything? I guess not?
