Customer Reviews

Alanya to Alanya (Marq'ssan Cycle, Book One)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Just to get this out of the way, the whining of the first reviewer aside, there isn't a lot of female-centered science fiction out there compared to all the male-centered SF. So it's a welcome change to find a book like this.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and loved the idea of an alien race that attempts to help us solve our problems by forcing us to communicate in a rational way. It's an intriguing thought experiment, but disturbing as well. Duchamp imagines a world full of crappy, creepy men and their even creepier female companions. And yet I don't find this vision in any way exaggerated or unrealistic. It's just a projection of the worst we have now.

The only problem I have with the book is that I kept expecting things to go wrong for the protagonist and other main characters. Everything they set out to do is done with a minimum of Things Going Wrong. While you don't want folks thwarted at every turn, I found myself disbelieving the great number of things that go right. I wasn't sure how I felt about that at the end.

Though this is just the first book in the series, I feel like it's a complete story on its own. I am interested to find out what happens next, and where Duchamp intends all of this to end up. She is right in showing us that the work of changing a society and a culture is lengthy. It's not all going to happen at once, and it's not all going to happen just because powerful aliens drop out of the sky. But at the end of the book, I felt confident Duchamp could paint a conceivable picture of it happening somehow, so I'll stick around for the next volumes.

This is a series not to be missed. It reads slowly because it is so involving--I love a book that makes me slow down, re-read, and think. It is probably a difficult book for men to read, because the main characters are female. There are a lot of creepy men and their frightening female assistants (manipulators). However, after having read science fiction for close to fifty years ("Podkayne of Mars" was my first), I have certainly read and enjoyed my share of male centered fiction. I have learned and thought a great deal from books where female characters were window-dressing at best. So, outgrow yourself, step up, open your mind, and prepare for a great read. Amazing how fascinating dystopia can be.

Some of the major feminists think that men are just as harmed by the demands of the male sex-role as women are by the female. Ok. Lets say that they're overstating that, that men are only 75% as harmed as women, or maybe even only 50%. What are the chances that we're all getting anything approaching a balanced view, when 99%-plus of gender commentary is done by, for, and about women - and not much of that has anything good to say about men? Many women don't want to hear anything about what life is like for men, and especially don't want to hear anything about their own sexist attitudes. The more that women-centered gender material is put out to inform all of us, the more people think we don't need to know about men, because the MOUNTAIN of women's material must surely mean men have, comparatively, nothing to complain about. And that becomes part of the reason nobody has much to say about sexism that harms men. It's considered a small-scale anomaly, and it becomes politically incorrect to assert otherwise. If sexism harms men as much as women, then to fully document that would have the effect of making women's plight seem not so deplorable, by comparison. It would no longer be a woman's issue but, instead, a people's issue. That's why it amazes me to hear some feminists say, in effect, that it isn't just a woman's issue. Well, nobody pays much attention to that; it gets buried in the women-centered mountain.