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kaberettThe Entropy of Bones (2015; Ayize Jama-Everett) is terrible. It is abysmal. It is appalling. I am about 60% of the way through (and at this point am probably going to finish it, because that's about 80 pages left) and it is so bad on so many topics. I assume that The Liminal People, by the same author and in the same universe and apparently published first (so perhaps I should have read it first but Oh Well, Never Mind), is not any better.
There are plot points that hinge on a technical expert not understanding that by late 2015, Google searches were very definitely curated according to what else Google knew about you: the same search string entered from different machines (or different profiles on the same machine) is not going to return the same results and this is not evidence of bugging. The geology is laughably bad. The plot holes are big enough that you could, in fact, drive the proverbial Jeep through them -- over the space of two pages, an incredibly upmarket hotel chain is asserted to have existed since the mid-1800s and to have been in the same family for the duration, and the youngish scion of this particular family (thirties? forties?) has, we are informed, a father who Pulled Himself Up By His Bootstraps from Poverty in Liverpool and Poured The Foundations Of These Hotels Himself. I'd think this was an indication of Something Weird And Supernatural Going On apart from the fact that we are literally given decade markers for his father's career.
Which is all fine as far as it goes, like, whatever, I read a lot of pulpy speculative fiction, but then there are the fucking trigger warnings. And oh dear me are there a lot of them. (At some point I will try to usefully articulate the distinction I make between "content note" and "trigger warning", but that time is not now; just... bear in mind that I'm using the latter not the former.)
Cissexism and transmisogyny; heterocentrism, with a bonus of "gay men can't be misogynist"; sexual assault; rape; suicide, and awful cultural narratives about suicide; racism; and PROBABLY MORE TO COME because I keep thinking it can't get any worse AND THEN IT DOES.
Just... if you decide to read this, you might wanna be prepared going in.
There are plot points that hinge on a technical expert not understanding that by late 2015, Google searches were very definitely curated according to what else Google knew about you: the same search string entered from different machines (or different profiles on the same machine) is not going to return the same results and this is not evidence of bugging. The geology is laughably bad. The plot holes are big enough that you could, in fact, drive the proverbial Jeep through them -- over the space of two pages, an incredibly upmarket hotel chain is asserted to have existed since the mid-1800s and to have been in the same family for the duration, and the youngish scion of this particular family (thirties? forties?) has, we are informed, a father who Pulled Himself Up By His Bootstraps from Poverty in Liverpool and Poured The Foundations Of These Hotels Himself. I'd think this was an indication of Something Weird And Supernatural Going On apart from the fact that we are literally given decade markers for his father's career.
Which is all fine as far as it goes, like, whatever, I read a lot of pulpy speculative fiction, but then there are the fucking trigger warnings. And oh dear me are there a lot of them. (At some point I will try to usefully articulate the distinction I make between "content note" and "trigger warning", but that time is not now; just... bear in mind that I'm using the latter not the former.)
Cissexism and transmisogyny; heterocentrism, with a bonus of "gay men can't be misogynist"; sexual assault; rape; suicide, and awful cultural narratives about suicide; racism; and PROBABLY MORE TO COME because I keep thinking it can't get any worse AND THEN IT DOES.
- casual throwaway cissexism and transmisogyny, just as an out-of-the-blue ~~punchline~~
- a middle-aged (white) incidentally gay male character... whose homosexuality makes it okay for him to flirt creepily at a 20yo (POC) woman (no, really, this is explicit... from the PoV of the woman)
- rape, both in the sense of "I'm about to rape this computer game" (said by a male character in a context that seems intended to ~humanise~ him, rather than send up red flags) and in the sense of literal on-screen attempted gang rape of a mid-teens girl of colour by a group of violent middle-aged white men (the set up is that one of them's about to go to prison for murder and she gets abandoned there by her mentor figure in order to prove she's a worthy student by fighting them off -- and the fact that she does feels like it's supposed to make you, the reader, feel like It's Okay that you were just titillated by the description of the attempted rape, because she was Tough and she Beat Them All Up and didn't freeze up in fear or cry or anything, and it was A Good Learning Experience, OBVIOUSLY she's now going to be trained to fight by this guy for the next four years and there are NO PROBLEMS HERE AT ALL)
- the way alcoholism is handled is just shitty
- the point at which I actually stopped to angrily type this up, right, is that a character's committed suicide and this gets described, by the PoV character, as "There was so much love for someone now gone in such a selfish manner", and I FUCKING CAN'T
- and, like, obviously I am not an expert on this but holy shit Wizened Indian Martial Arts Guru Who Doesn't Speak Good English is, uh, not great
- just the sexism in general, honestly
Just... if you decide to read this, you might wanna be prepared going in.
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Date: 2016-05-29 12:07 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-05-29 12:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-05-31 07:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-06-01 09:06 am (UTC)