Male characters. I'm not saying I need male characters to be interested in a story, but if you're going to have them...use them. The male characters in this story serve largely as foils for other characters, especially Lore, to appear stronger in the comparison. Which really isn't necessary because Lore, as well as the other female characters, are well rounded with flaws and strengths already.
Her relationship with Tok is a glaring flaw with this. Sure, she was close to him. Why? Because she says she was? That is not enough for a narrative this deep, this character driven. There is a law in most narrative mediums, that characters only use words to lie, even to themselves. While this isn't literally true, what it means is that you must back up what a character says with actions and events, or the words feel hollow, which is how I feel in this case.
Now male writers do this quite a bit, but they don't get to walk away unscathed. Nicola Griffith does this and wins awards. Not that this isn't a great book, award-winning indeed, but almost no one criticizes her writing for this. Whilst male SF writers, and to a lesser degree, male writers in general, must tread eggshells when it comes to their female characters. This double standard is ever-present in many aspects of modern society, especially our expressive forms. And I thought double standards were what feminists were against.
But, in the end, I still thought it was a good book, and if Paul hadn't practically forced us to look at this from a "This is how a girl writes Sci-Fi" perspective, I probably wouldn't even be talking about this.
2 comments:
Good stuff, but this makes me wonder how much sci-fi content is required for it to fit into the genre. Obviously it's going to need more than just Robocop making a cameo or some such thing, but even the SF content of this book didn't seem like enough.
When men write about sex, every female out there thinks he's a pervert and in no way can the writing be considered good. A female writes one and it is an amazing peice of art and everything is so wonderfully done..blah blah blah.
Males shouldn't be afraid to write sex scenes in fact it should be welcomed with opened arms, however, they should also consider reading some romance novels or whatnot whatever was written by a woman, and see if their writing could become better and if it can then why critize them...men and women will forever have different veiws, and we should quiet wasteing out time in asking why can't men write a better sex scene...they can it's only in their perceptive, which is absolutly wonderful.
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