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bloodyrosemccoyDammit, there has got to be at least one speculative fiction novel out there that doesn’t introduce a female protagonist by RAPING HER.
It’s not so much that I disapprove of it happening in a story—stories are great because all sorts of totally awful things can happen to pretend people, instead of to real people, and I could write a whole dissertation on this. All I'm sayin' is, when it becomes the default way to introduce someone, I … get a little unsettled.
This book is pretty damn good anyway, and it does look like the incident serves some purpose of character and/or story development, but I'm starting to regard authors with suspicion when they open this way. Good grief.
It’s not so much that I disapprove of it happening in a story—stories are great because all sorts of totally awful things can happen to pretend people, instead of to real people, and I could write a whole dissertation on this. All I'm sayin' is, when it becomes the default way to introduce someone, I … get a little unsettled.
This book is pretty damn good anyway, and it does look like the incident serves some purpose of character and/or story development, but I'm starting to regard authors with suspicion when they open this way. Good grief.
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Date: 2010-04-05 11:12 pm (UTC)I liked his worldbuilding an awful lot, and forgave his obvious wish to make the Neanderthal world a utopia (I can't argue--I have a shameless utopia world too), but the characters fell a little flat. The woman (from our world) who got to start out the book on such an upbeat note was a scientist with weird religious reservations pastede on yey, like a bad version of Mary Malone from His Dark Materials, and Sawyer didn't seem to think she could grapple with moral and societal issues unless they had affected her personally. So her story wound up kinda cobbled together.
I'm not sure if I'll bother reading the rest of the trilogy at this point. He should have published this book as one of those oversize popup ethnologues that seem to have suddenly gotten popular after Dragonology.