An Unkindness of Ghosts
Feb. 12th, 2018 06:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraSo An Unkindness of Ghosts, by Rivers Solomon, is one of the two completely unrelated Unkindness books this year; I haven't read the other one, An Unkindness of Magicians, yet. I had decided I wasn't interested in Ghosts when I first heard about it, but added it back to my reading list when it showed up in some years-bests discussions. Always risky - my own sense of what I'm going to like is pretty well-developed - but I hate to miss something big. And half of the elevator pitch for Ghosts has definite appeal: intersex autistic Black heroine on a generation ship! Ooh!
The other half, though, is "plantation slavery in space". And at first, as the book hinted at a "learning the secrets of the past" plotline, I got interested in this too: how did this even come about? Did the people who initially built and ruled the ship intend from the beginning to replicate plantation slavery, or did that develop later somehow? Did the enslaved people know when they came on board they were going to be enslaved? Were they already enslaved on-planet? "How the fuck did this grotesque recapitulation of a really ugly time in history *happen*" seems like a reasonable and sadly relevant question given how many USian white people apparently think plantation slavery was just fine - I could imagine a pretty cutting story in who got fooled, who looked the other way, etc. (Which maybe also addressed why the 19th century physical culture, why paper books and typewriters in space... hints at deliberate reenactment, no?)
But that's totally not what this book is about, because, I guess, that's a story about the perpetrators of slavery, and this is a story about people under slavery. Someone even says at one point "you keep thinking there's a reason for everything, 'cause you can figure some out. There ain't. All the bad that's happened to you, it was never about you. It was about them." Ok. The problem for me was, that basically boiled the book down to "plantation slavery is Bad", which, like, no shit. At that point (to me) you're kind of in the territory where the book has to be carried by the characters, or the writing? Like "Splendor & Misery" is totally "let's put slave narratives back into science fiction", but it's pulled off with extreme technical/artistic skill. The pacing in Ghosts absolutely did not work for me, events felt random and there was no momentum. And... I feel bad about this, but a big theme seemed to be that either because of their (extensive, horrible) histories of trauma, or because of non-neurotypicality or mental illness, the main characters were simply unable to act strategically/adaptively in the system where they found themselves, and as a result they were *really frustrating*. Maybe this is part of what Solomon was trying to do, to challenge the reader to deal with main characters who weren't just cutely and sympathetically missing NT social stuff in their POV, but were really deeply, inconveniently, self-destructively *functioning differently*. But I would rather read sympathetic characters; I'd rather read awesome auties whose brain quirks are a secret superpower than "autism as tragic flaw". The book does try to show the main character as awesome - she's like a bio-medical genius - but, structurally, it doesn't really work, because it's like it's on her character sheet but within the story all her work is ultimately futile?
Man, I don't know. I went and looked at Goodreads just now, and wow, a lot of people seem to have read a really different book than I read. I don't know. SPOILERS from here. Maybe if it hadn't been such a slog, I would have been more caught up in the drama of the end? I mean, I think it was supposed to feel like the end of THX-1138, or Gravity, this liberatory escape from the hostile confines of where we've been for the entire rest of the story. Or, ha, the end of Wall-E. Honestly the worldbuilding and space travel make about as much sense as in Wall-E. But, hm. In Wall-E the whole community gets to "grow up". In Gravity there's only one person who needs to escape in the first place. THX leaves a community behind, but it's not a community in *distress*, exactly, just a community that's rejected what he's pursuing. In Ghosts, though, the whole community is in distress, and for one person to get out THX-style doesn't actually feel like it answers the "problem" of the story. Maybe that's why it didn't work? (Or maybe it just needed more Bach, I'll buy a lot if the soundtrack tells me to.)
Anyways, blah. My sense of these things says we might see Solomon on the Campbell ballot; we'll see, I guess.
The other half, though, is "plantation slavery in space". And at first, as the book hinted at a "learning the secrets of the past" plotline, I got interested in this too: how did this even come about? Did the people who initially built and ruled the ship intend from the beginning to replicate plantation slavery, or did that develop later somehow? Did the enslaved people know when they came on board they were going to be enslaved? Were they already enslaved on-planet? "How the fuck did this grotesque recapitulation of a really ugly time in history *happen*" seems like a reasonable and sadly relevant question given how many USian white people apparently think plantation slavery was just fine - I could imagine a pretty cutting story in who got fooled, who looked the other way, etc. (Which maybe also addressed why the 19th century physical culture, why paper books and typewriters in space... hints at deliberate reenactment, no?)
But that's totally not what this book is about, because, I guess, that's a story about the perpetrators of slavery, and this is a story about people under slavery. Someone even says at one point "you keep thinking there's a reason for everything, 'cause you can figure some out. There ain't. All the bad that's happened to you, it was never about you. It was about them." Ok. The problem for me was, that basically boiled the book down to "plantation slavery is Bad", which, like, no shit. At that point (to me) you're kind of in the territory where the book has to be carried by the characters, or the writing? Like "Splendor & Misery" is totally "let's put slave narratives back into science fiction", but it's pulled off with extreme technical/artistic skill. The pacing in Ghosts absolutely did not work for me, events felt random and there was no momentum. And... I feel bad about this, but a big theme seemed to be that either because of their (extensive, horrible) histories of trauma, or because of non-neurotypicality or mental illness, the main characters were simply unable to act strategically/adaptively in the system where they found themselves, and as a result they were *really frustrating*. Maybe this is part of what Solomon was trying to do, to challenge the reader to deal with main characters who weren't just cutely and sympathetically missing NT social stuff in their POV, but were really deeply, inconveniently, self-destructively *functioning differently*. But I would rather read sympathetic characters; I'd rather read awesome auties whose brain quirks are a secret superpower than "autism as tragic flaw". The book does try to show the main character as awesome - she's like a bio-medical genius - but, structurally, it doesn't really work, because it's like it's on her character sheet but within the story all her work is ultimately futile?
Man, I don't know. I went and looked at Goodreads just now, and wow, a lot of people seem to have read a really different book than I read. I don't know. SPOILERS from here. Maybe if it hadn't been such a slog, I would have been more caught up in the drama of the end? I mean, I think it was supposed to feel like the end of THX-1138, or Gravity, this liberatory escape from the hostile confines of where we've been for the entire rest of the story. Or, ha, the end of Wall-E. Honestly the worldbuilding and space travel make about as much sense as in Wall-E. But, hm. In Wall-E the whole community gets to "grow up". In Gravity there's only one person who needs to escape in the first place. THX leaves a community behind, but it's not a community in *distress*, exactly, just a community that's rejected what he's pursuing. In Ghosts, though, the whole community is in distress, and for one person to get out THX-style doesn't actually feel like it answers the "problem" of the story. Maybe that's why it didn't work? (Or maybe it just needed more Bach, I'll buy a lot if the soundtrack tells me to.)
Anyways, blah. My sense of these things says we might see Solomon on the Campbell ballot; we'll see, I guess.
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Date: 2018-03-04 12:10 am (UTC)