I struggled a little with Six Wakes at the beginning, because I'd just come off Among Others, which I loved so much, and I found the prose in Six Wakes to be lacking in comparison. But after I settled into it I enjoyed it, and, as I said before, it became a much bigger, more ambitious story than I'd expected, in a way that worked well for me.
You know, when the Workers' rights stuff came up in the Just City triology, I thought to myself, "this is the only scenario where this sort of thing works for me." Because the humans of the Just City were genuinely committed to creating a, well, Just City, problematic and fallible as that could be. Like you said, all the characters were interested in questioning society. So I was OK with it in isolation. But then, I read Walton's short essay about Terry Bisson's utopian alternate history novel Fire on the Mountain, which is one of my favourite books, calling it naive (among a lot of praise, to be fair). There are aspects of the book where there's an argument to be made for naivete, but since she didn't really discuss it, it kinda rubbed me the wrong way, particularly in combination with the aforementioned plot choice in the Small Change trilogy.
By the way, I highly recommend Fire on the Mountain if you haven't read it yet, and can get ahold of it!
Thank you for the links to those re-read posts on The King's Peace etc. I'm way behind on my DW reading as well as posting, so I had missed those. I had just been wondering if I wanted to try them out, I thought maybe since they were her first books, and since they're in a genre I'm a little less interested in, I might skip them. But your posts make them sound very appealing.
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momijizukamori
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Date: 2017-09-23 07:52 am (UTC)You know, when the Workers' rights stuff came up in the Just City triology, I thought to myself, "this is the only scenario where this sort of thing works for me." Because the humans of the Just City were genuinely committed to creating a, well, Just City, problematic and fallible as that could be. Like you said, all the characters were interested in questioning society. So I was OK with it in isolation. But then, I read Walton's short essay about Terry Bisson's utopian alternate history novel Fire on the Mountain, which is one of my favourite books, calling it naive (among a lot of praise, to be fair). There are aspects of the book where there's an argument to be made for naivete, but since she didn't really discuss it, it kinda rubbed me the wrong way, particularly in combination with the aforementioned plot choice in the Small Change trilogy.
By the way, I highly recommend Fire on the Mountain if you haven't read it yet, and can get ahold of it!
Thank you for the links to those re-read posts on The King's Peace etc. I'm way behind on my DW reading as well as posting, so I had missed those. I had just been wondering if I wanted to try them out, I thought maybe since they were her first books, and since they're in a genre I'm a little less interested in, I might skip them. But your posts make them sound very appealing.