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enne📚 reviewed Remnant Population by Elizabeth Moon

For forty years, Colony 3245.12 has been Ofelia's home. On this planet far away in …

Remnant Population

4 stars

I read Remnant Population from the #SFFBookClub backlog. I had a lot of fun reading this. This is a first contact novel with the main character being an older woman in her seventies. At the start of the book, Ofelia is living with her only remaining adult son and his wife. When the colony she is on loses their contract and evacuates, and she decides to hide and stay. It turns out that the planet had undiscovered intelligent life, and these aliens come to investigate her. In the end, she's caught in the middle between these friendly aliens and returning humans.

I think what I most appreciate about this book is the wry internal perspective and character development of Ofelia. She is an old woman who has put in the work, and whose primary character trait is that she's just tired of putting up with other people's expectations and attitudes. …

I read Remnant Population from the #SFFBookClub backlog. I had a lot of fun reading this. This is a first contact novel with the main character being an older woman in her seventies. At the start of the book, Ofelia is living with her only remaining adult son and his wife. When the colony she is on loses their contract and evacuates, and she decides to hide and stay. It turns out that the planet had undiscovered intelligent life, and these aliens come to investigate her. In the end, she's caught in the middle between these friendly aliens and returning humans.

I think what I most appreciate about this book is the wry internal perspective and character development of Ofelia. She is an old woman who has put in the work, and whose primary character trait is that she's just tired of putting up with other people's expectations and attitudes. Her daughter-in-law harangues her about how she dresses, and the fact that she will be free and able to live blissfully in solitude is the real motivating factor for her to not leave with the rest of the colonists.

When the aliens show up to curiously investigate her, Ofelia begins by treating them like irresponsible children; when they track mud in her house, she tries to teach them how to mop. The aliens certainly interrupt her solitude, but ultimately give Ofelia the community and respect that she never previously had, even despite the language and species barriers.

When more humans show up, they're a threat to the aliens, but they're just as much as threat to Ofelia's new-found independence. These new humans treat her more or less the same as the previous ones (via an ageist and ableist lens), rudely unable to take Ofelia or her experience seriously or believe that she can communicate in rudimentary ways with the aliens, let alone that she has an accord with them. In the end, it's an opportunity for Ofelia to come into her own and be able to finally ignore the people-pleasing internal voice that tries to keep her small.

Ofelia reminds me in some ways of the aiji-dowager Ilisidi from CJ Cherryh's Foreigner series. Ofelia is not crafty and maneuvering like Ilisidi, and instead leans on her own introverted stubbornness. That said, they're both irritated at all of these condescending youngsters who think they know better, who can't even bother with politeness or sharing some tea. And, when confronted with the unknown, they both treat it with kindness and courtesy.

enne📚 reviewed Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were …

Never Let Me Go

3 stars

Content warning premise spoilers

Never Let Me Go is another book from the #SFFBookClub backlog. I content warned this for spoilers, but it's mostly for the "clone" aspect, even as I feel like this was pretty obvious from the get go. I don't even think that this is a "twist" book, but I think the slow building reveal is also effective and I didn't want to ruin it.

This is a first person perspective story about a group of kids in an English boarding school and their lives after. They slowly learn that they are infertile clones, and that the trajectory of their lives is to be organ donors for "real" people. That said, despite being a book about the lives of clones, it isn't a book about that at all.

The reader's guide at the back of the book has a snippet from (presumably) this article which I liked a lot:

But there are things I am more interested in than the clone thing. How are they trying to find their place in the world and make sense of their lives? To what extent can they transcend their fate? As time starts to run out, what are the things that really matter? Most of the things that concern them concern us all, but with them it is concertinaed into this relatively short period of time.

I think this quote really helped put this book into perspective for me. This is not a story about resisting or struggling against an unfair situation. Characters largely move from states of ignorance directly to acceptance; there's no denial, there's a half attempt bargaining (for deferral, not escape), and there's barely even any anger about it--at most, Tommy screams into a field, only at the very end. There's much more anger from the non-clone teachers and guardians about how clones are treated, sadness about the harshness of this new world, and revulsion(!) about the clones themselves.

Instead, it's really a book about poignancy of life and friendships. I think it's trying to ask questions of "what's important (and why do anything), if you only have a finite amount of time to live" as if that doesn't apply to all of us (and as if we all aren't in our own unfair situation, to various degrees).

I have only read one other Ishiguro book, Klara and the Sun, which felt like a sister book to this one. Kathy and Klara both share an optimistic perspective, speak in a similar matter-of-fact tone, and don't struggle against the (horrific) limitations of their world. It's similarly a dystopia and science fiction, but these are at the margins of a personal story.

Ultimately, my feelings about this book are mixed. I think this would have worked much better as a shorter length piece. I found myself much more interested by Klara in Klara and the Sun than I did with the school friendship dance between Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy. There was some good school and growing up vibes, but there wasn't enough depth to the foregrounded story to make the its metaphor stand on its on.

enne📚 reviewed The Core of the Sun by Johanna Sinisalo

Set in an alternative historical present, in a "eusistocracy"--An extreme welfare state -- that holds …

The Core of the Sun

2 stars

I read The Core of the Sun because it was on the #SFFBookClub backlog.

This book is about a woman in a (gender-)dystopian Finnish society that puts public health above all else. Applying eugenics, gender stereotypes, applying science like the fox domestication experiments to humans, this society divides everybody into men and women, and further into H.G. Wells-esque eloi/morlock categories, all based on childhood appearance, behavior, and health. Eloi women especially are forced into extreme feminine stereotypes. The main character has been secretly educated but pretends to be eloi.

I think the most weird and delightful part of the book for me is the focus on chili peppers and capsaicin. It's been made illegal (along with alcohol and tobacco), and so a lot of the book is focused on the main character getting her chili fix, illegal pepper drug trade, and the transcendental experiences from having too many scovilles. The …

I read The Core of the Sun because it was on the #SFFBookClub backlog.

This book is about a woman in a (gender-)dystopian Finnish society that puts public health above all else. Applying eugenics, gender stereotypes, applying science like the fox domestication experiments to humans, this society divides everybody into men and women, and further into H.G. Wells-esque eloi/morlock categories, all based on childhood appearance, behavior, and health. Eloi women especially are forced into extreme feminine stereotypes. The main character has been secretly educated but pretends to be eloi.

I think the most weird and delightful part of the book for me is the focus on chili peppers and capsaicin. It's been made illegal (along with alcohol and tobacco), and so a lot of the book is focused on the main character getting her chili fix, illegal pepper drug trade, and the transcendental experiences from having too many scovilles. The book takes this all quite seriously, interspersed with mostly true facts about peppers, but it's hard not to feel some unintentional comedy about it.

Not that every book has to be fresh and unique, but I'm not quite sure what the dystopian part of this novel was getting at here that hasn't been done elsewhere. Unlike other dystopian novels, this book doesn't seem to be a musing on abortion, or capitalism, or democracy, or even really a queer story about not fitting into gender roles and questions of passing (though it could have been). Maybe I just expect a dystopia to be playing with and exaggerating a particular idea; I never got the feeling this book was going for any of that, and so the dystopian worldbuilding mostly felt tiresome and well-trodden. (Maybe I'm just tired of gender stereotypes.)