I also dislike To Be Taught, If Fortunate-- I don't know enough about the geology and biology and other science involved to tell what's wrong, but it didn't feel very grounded? Though my main problem is actually that the story is issuefic, that it's all for the sake of setting up the final question, which could have been set up in a much shorter work, and so all the stuff in the middle is just pretty set-dressing. And I am also annoyed by works that are like 'I have set up a Big Question and that is sufficient! It is for The Reader to answer (#2 pencil only, blue books down sharply on the hour, please, and don't forget to cite your sources)'. If I'd been editing I'd have sent it back for another pass.
I quite enjoy her novels and think the latter two in particular do interesting things with story structure-- sometime I should write that essay on how the third one is structuring a story in a way that both SF/F and litfic don't usually see as being a structure at all, but it's intentional and it does what she planned-- so I was very disappointed by the novella, though still looking forward to her future work.
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regna
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Date: 2020-08-03 01:23 am (UTC)I quite enjoy her novels and think the latter two in particular do interesting things with story structure-- sometime I should write that essay on how the third one is structuring a story in a way that both SF/F and litfic don't usually see as being a structure at all, but it's intentional and it does what she planned-- so I was very disappointed by the novella, though still looking forward to her future work.