Wow. I didn't catch the current events relevance of the shooting. Ow.
I took the book as being multiple things, mostly along the lines you described--I don't particularly think of it as a genre critique, but I do think of it as both a space-opera-bridge-book and a social patterns exploration book. Breq's been set up as someone who cares about patterns of power abuse, and she's just been handed a whole lot of power in a society that has a whole lot of inherent power abuse. Some of it is "What does she do with it?" and some of it is "What are the limits of that power?" And then there's a whole lot of "Who (what?) the heck is Breq?", which is a topic that I think there's *still* room to do interesting exploration of--this is in many ways the most alien character I've ever read a first-person narrative from.
I was recommending this series to someone and remarking that I thought it was very good despite being not the sort of book I usually like. They asked what sort I usually liked, and after flailing around a bit, I eventually came up with "one in which the protagonist is easy to empathize with". Breq's not (at all!) a bad person, but for obvious reasons involving her background she's someone who it's fairly hard for me to feel like I grok. And that's part of the fascination of the series.
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Date: 2014-11-09 04:46 pm (UTC)I took the book as being multiple things, mostly along the lines you described--I don't particularly think of it as a genre critique, but I do think of it as both a space-opera-bridge-book and a social patterns exploration book. Breq's been set up as someone who cares about patterns of power abuse, and she's just been handed a whole lot of power in a society that has a whole lot of inherent power abuse. Some of it is "What does she do with it?" and some of it is "What are the limits of that power?" And then there's a whole lot of "Who (what?) the heck is Breq?", which is a topic that I think there's *still* room to do interesting exploration of--this is in many ways the most alien character I've ever read a first-person narrative from.
I was recommending this series to someone and remarking that I thought it was very good despite being not the sort of book I usually like. They asked what sort I usually liked, and after flailing around a bit, I eventually came up with "one in which the protagonist is easy to empathize with". Breq's not (at all!) a bad person, but for obvious reasons involving her background she's someone who it's fairly hard for me to feel like I grok. And that's part of the fascination of the series.