Machinehood
Nov. 27th, 2021 08:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraMachinehood, SB Divya. I liked Divya's novella Runtime (link to what I said about it, since I bothered to find it), so I was excited to see a novel from her. I ended up with mixed feelings! I really liked the beginning - Divya builds a really interesting near-future world (2095) where most work is gig work, everyone has a tip jar, privacy is obsolete, and most goods and services are managed through the cloud. So, yay techno-socio-economic speculation, so far so good, and the initial mix of action and mystery seemed fun. I tried to be patient as the pacing lost some momentum and the writing got a bit repetitive - there was clearly some moving of pieces around to get to the next stuff she wanted to do - but then there was a Big Event, which it seemed like Divya was saying had a lot of Big Effects, but then the plot didn't entirely seem to reflect that? I don't know, I'm trying to be non-spoilery and am probably just being uselessly vague, but I ended up feeling like either I hadn't understood the nature of the Event, or I hadn't understood the world to begin with, or possibly that Divya hadn't really considered how enormously devastating the disruption would be, if her characters were still fixated on much more comparatively minor earlier events. And maybe that was just my poor reading comprehension! I am plenty able to just get things wrong! But I ended up frustrated with the book, fairly or not. I realize that it will get tedious if every time I talk about disaster stories I compare everything unfavorably to Perihelion Summer, but, man, Egan really does not soft-pedal and I appreciate it.
One more thing, and this is a big spoiler, but maybe also a content note some people would want: there's a forced-pregnancy storyline, as in, a woman who wants an abortion but whose husband will not give her the required legal permission to have one. She does get her abortion with the help of another woman, but the storyline from there is about whether her husband will forgive her, and not whether, like, she will forgive her husband. I found this pretty upsetting and offputting; I don't want to say "nobody should ever tell stories about this relationship dynamic that is surely realistic for way too many women", but I really didn't like the way it was handled, bleah.
One more thing, and this is a big spoiler, but maybe also a content note some people would want: there's a forced-pregnancy storyline, as in, a woman who wants an abortion but whose husband will not give her the required legal permission to have one. She does get her abortion with the help of another woman, but the storyline from there is about whether her husband will forgive her, and not whether, like, she will forgive her husband. I found this pretty upsetting and offputting; I don't want to say "nobody should ever tell stories about this relationship dynamic that is surely realistic for way too many women", but I really didn't like the way it was handled, bleah.
