"Glory Season", David Brin
27 July 2014 01:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI finished David Brin's "Glory Season" last night (having stayed up late two nights running).
http://www.davidbrin.com/gloryseason1.html
Certainly excellent value for a doorstop-size SF paperback that I picked up from the bargain box of a second-hand bookshop for 85p: the world-building is fascinating, and the author manages a convincingly alien viewpoint while conveying necessary information (that the narrator takes for granted) to his human readers. And I really liked and cared about the characters... which is why it's so frustrating that *three* times in the course of the plot the protagonist gets close to someone who is then whisked out of her life and effectively never returns despite being constantly mentioned in her thoughts! Perhaps it's meant to be realistic in that we don't always get happy endings, but it's very frustrating for the reader: especially, I found, in the case of the boy Brod, who becomes a major character in the space of a relatively short time, who is hinted at as having all sorts of heretical potential, but is literally left on the top of an island never to be met with again, even though the story keeps *talking* about him. Likewise the heroine's sister...
The ending is just skimmed over and totally confusing: I actually wasn't sure what the protagonist had decided to do. We are told that she was going to do what she wanted for a change, but it really isn't self-evident what the author had in mind for her at that point. Nor is it clear whether Renna's 'sacrifice' was staged deliberately, was a wasteful accident, or was faked (there's a hint towards the latter at the very end, but I'm not sure it's intended).
In many respects this is an excellent swashbuckling adventure as well as a classic speculative fiction exercise in the exploration of a totally different culture: the basic premise is that due to genetic engineering, a stable society has been created in which successful female individuals can reproduce themselves in the form of clone-daughters, producing a wide variety of clans specialising in a particular talent (from private detectives to librarians and agricultural workers). However, a minimum amount of normal sexual mixing per generation is required in order to produce the necessary males to maintain the population and this results in an equal number of unpredictable non-clone daughters, to be expelled from the clan they do not match and sent out to seek their fortunes... and if they are very, very, lucky, to find a niche and found a new clan of their own.
The protagonist is one such 'variant' -- thus giving her the requisite outsider viewpoint and motive to seek adventure, although she is still relatively privileged in a world where three-quarters of the population is female and men are regarded as hearty lower life forms, sent off -- whatever their aptitudes -- to crew ships in order to keep them away from civilised society, and generally seen as creatures to be avoided during their uncontrollable summer 'rut'. Although Maia ends up meeting a lot of males during their asexual winter phase and comes to regard them as people in their own right; this shift in her views is another element of the novel that doesn't really get followed up.
It's a classic example of a wide-ranging planet-changing plot that gets revealed little by little as the protagonist's horizons widen, and her personal problems turn out to be tiny issues within the vast clockwork of a wider conspiracy (or in fact several rival factions). The main issue, as I've said, is that having set in motion all this lovingly detailed stuff the author doesn't seem to know how to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion. It's a long book and it's as if he just got tired and started skipping bits at the end: maybe a conventional romance isn't realistic in a world where such a bond would be highly unconventional, maybe a clone-based society does tend to stultify change even after events as dramatic as those described, but it would be nice to have at least an idea of what happened to all the characters and what sort of future they are respectively planning!
A sweeping adventure novel and an interesting venture into female-moulded society by a male author (who writes resignedly in the afterword of his expectation of flaming for the attempt -- whether that transpired I don't know). I just felt let down by the absence of resolution.
http://www.davidbrin.com/gloryseason1.html
Certainly excellent value for a doorstop-size SF paperback that I picked up from the bargain box of a second-hand bookshop for 85p: the world-building is fascinating, and the author manages a convincingly alien viewpoint while conveying necessary information (that the narrator takes for granted) to his human readers. And I really liked and cared about the characters... which is why it's so frustrating that *three* times in the course of the plot the protagonist gets close to someone who is then whisked out of her life and effectively never returns despite being constantly mentioned in her thoughts! Perhaps it's meant to be realistic in that we don't always get happy endings, but it's very frustrating for the reader: especially, I found, in the case of the boy Brod, who becomes a major character in the space of a relatively short time, who is hinted at as having all sorts of heretical potential, but is literally left on the top of an island never to be met with again, even though the story keeps *talking* about him. Likewise the heroine's sister...
The ending is just skimmed over and totally confusing: I actually wasn't sure what the protagonist had decided to do. We are told that she was going to do what she wanted for a change, but it really isn't self-evident what the author had in mind for her at that point. Nor is it clear whether Renna's 'sacrifice' was staged deliberately, was a wasteful accident, or was faked (there's a hint towards the latter at the very end, but I'm not sure it's intended).
In many respects this is an excellent swashbuckling adventure as well as a classic speculative fiction exercise in the exploration of a totally different culture: the basic premise is that due to genetic engineering, a stable society has been created in which successful female individuals can reproduce themselves in the form of clone-daughters, producing a wide variety of clans specialising in a particular talent (from private detectives to librarians and agricultural workers). However, a minimum amount of normal sexual mixing per generation is required in order to produce the necessary males to maintain the population and this results in an equal number of unpredictable non-clone daughters, to be expelled from the clan they do not match and sent out to seek their fortunes... and if they are very, very, lucky, to find a niche and found a new clan of their own.
The protagonist is one such 'variant' -- thus giving her the requisite outsider viewpoint and motive to seek adventure, although she is still relatively privileged in a world where three-quarters of the population is female and men are regarded as hearty lower life forms, sent off -- whatever their aptitudes -- to crew ships in order to keep them away from civilised society, and generally seen as creatures to be avoided during their uncontrollable summer 'rut'. Although Maia ends up meeting a lot of males during their asexual winter phase and comes to regard them as people in their own right; this shift in her views is another element of the novel that doesn't really get followed up.
It's a classic example of a wide-ranging planet-changing plot that gets revealed little by little as the protagonist's horizons widen, and her personal problems turn out to be tiny issues within the vast clockwork of a wider conspiracy (or in fact several rival factions). The main issue, as I've said, is that having set in motion all this lovingly detailed stuff the author doesn't seem to know how to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion. It's a long book and it's as if he just got tired and started skipping bits at the end: maybe a conventional romance isn't realistic in a world where such a bond would be highly unconventional, maybe a clone-based society does tend to stultify change even after events as dramatic as those described, but it would be nice to have at least an idea of what happened to all the characters and what sort of future they are respectively planning!
A sweeping adventure novel and an interesting venture into female-moulded society by a male author (who writes resignedly in the afterword of his expectation of flaming for the attempt -- whether that transpired I don't know). I just felt let down by the absence of resolution.