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Sarah's Reviews > The Best of All Possible Worlds
The Best of All Possible Worlds
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This was a lovely, subtle piece of science fiction, of a sort I don't see enough of. It's reminiscent of The Left Hand of Darkness and Ammonite: anthropological and travelogue-ish in the best senses. Lord develops characters slowly, letting the reader discover them through their actions as they are placed in new and strange situations. The story begins with a large-scale tragedy, but starts the action some time later, so that the book is about long-term personal coping rather than the immediate aftermath.
I have a couple of minor issues with the book. Though it is very different from Lord's first book, Redemption in Indigo, she at times falls back on some similar narrative techniques. Addressing the reader works in a folktale, but pulls me out of the story here, making me wonder how the tale is being related to me and why in a way that I shouldn't be questioning.
The book is very episodic, and some of the episodes were more resonant than others. Some threads seem like they would come back again, but really don't make any return appearance.
I love seeing sexual minorities and ethnic minorities portrayed in SF, and for the most part Lord handles those topics well. There is a character of ambiguous gender in this novel who is written as a well-rounded member of the team, neither a curiosity past the initial mention nor a source of ridicule. I was therefore a little disappointed when at one point (very, very minor spoiler) (view spoiler) The latter shouldn't necessarily preclude the former in a society this open-minded.
In any case, I found myself reading only a chapter a night because the book was such a pleasure to read, I wanted to stretch it out as long as possible.
I have a couple of minor issues with the book. Though it is very different from Lord's first book, Redemption in Indigo, she at times falls back on some similar narrative techniques. Addressing the reader works in a folktale, but pulls me out of the story here, making me wonder how the tale is being related to me and why in a way that I shouldn't be questioning.
The book is very episodic, and some of the episodes were more resonant than others. Some threads seem like they would come back again, but really don't make any return appearance.
I love seeing sexual minorities and ethnic minorities portrayed in SF, and for the most part Lord handles those topics well. There is a character of ambiguous gender in this novel who is written as a well-rounded member of the team, neither a curiosity past the initial mention nor a source of ridicule. I was therefore a little disappointed when at one point (very, very minor spoiler) (view spoiler) The latter shouldn't necessarily preclude the former in a society this open-minded.
In any case, I found myself reading only a chapter a night because the book was such a pleasure to read, I wanted to stretch it out as long as possible.
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Reading Progress
December 11, 2012
– Shelved
January 24, 2013
– Shelved as:
first-reads
February 5, 2013
–
Started Reading
March 11, 2013
– Shelved as:
sf
March 11, 2013
–
Finished Reading
Comments Showing 1-3 of 3 (3 new)
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Rebecca
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Aug 01, 2014 12:04AM
I got 2/3rds through it and it began to feel like a slow building het romance which does not interest me. I kept waiting for the subversive Le Guen type thing to happen but the only non gendered character was portrayed as asexual. That is not subversive.
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Rebecca wrote: "I got 2/3rds through it and it began to feel like a slow building het romance which does not interest me. I kept waiting for the subversive Le Guen type thing to happen but the only non gendered ch..."Yeah, agreed. That was disappointing. There are people who are asexual, and people who are agender, but the one does not connote the other.
Yeah, I'm asexual but cisgender, if only by default, and the implication, even if only unintentional, that only agender people are asexual rankled me.While I can understand not being interested in reading het romance SF and hence finding this book disappointing for that reason, I’m not sure that Lord ever really promises to be subversive in that sense. And I think, if anything, that this demonstrates it’s possible to have hetero-romantic narratives within an inclusive and tolerant setting that mentions and celebrates other forms of romance, gender, and sexuality, even if the main characters themselves are cis/hetero. That, too, is subversive, even if it does not foreground things quite so much as queer main characters.
