Sixth Post!

[hoisinsauce]

"The thing about illegally breeding fire-breathing possums is that you gotta keep a bucket of water handy."

*Those fools! Fire-breathing possums are greasy; water will only feed the flames! Oh, if only I could tell them of my empire...*

(Context: https://secretfanspace.dreamwidth.org/1839.html?thread=2678831#cmt2678831)

Talk fandom! Making things! Reading, writing, drawing, whatever! Miscellaneous life chatter! Meme's happy to see you again!

(start a comment thread by replying to this post)

Comments

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

SA

"if she didn't help me, I'd land myself in the clink"


gjdhfjgfjdhfjs I CANNOT with this fake-British narrator. x'D Was Novick reading Dickens at the time???

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

Also lol inasmuch as there are any staff at a buffet, they really won't care if you go back for 2nd, 3rd, millionth helpings; it's there to be eaten and they've seen it all. Suppose this could just be El's paranoia. But I'd assumed it was based on some real travels of Novik's so am just gonna assume she was in a loud group and mistook people's irritation at the noise as judging them for what they ate. :P

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

El is flying for the first time, in first class, eating an airline lunch.

"We ate it all anyway. We had low standards."

Lollll El's social class is about as convincing as her Welshness.

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

Now this book is acting like the worst thing one can possibly be is a middleaged woman with a utilitarian approach to ethics, and it's all a bit weird. Am used to women being randomly disproportionately hated but was hoping Novik would avoid that. Maybe it'll make more sense later.

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

Around pg 290. Am finding the YA morality grating, and am getting bored of the repetitive essays on how this or that person didn't deserve to die horribly. The author seems so certain that her audience thinks someone *does* deserve to die horribly, and she needs to explain why they don't, it's really weird if it's not the way you yourself think.

The narrator continues to hate on this random woman who hasn't done anything on the page, and not engage with any of the points she raised.

I do like the way balance and sacrifice is treated in this book so far, though. It's annoying that such cool mechanics are attached to these characters and this narration.

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

And now they've joined the mile-high club. Hope the airline bans them. Poor flight-attendants.

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

"Dubai enclave, which is big and modern and firmly aboard the tolerance train"-- this comes out of nowhere and feels like some kind of protesting-too-much. She specifically mentions it tolerating differences of religion, nationality, and sexuality (UAE not exactly *famed* for its tolerance there; not the worst place out there but I'd characterise it more as "looking the other way" than "firmly aboard the tolerance train"...). I can believe that an enclave might follow different laws to the country where it's based, but this currently feels like a performative "I'm challenging stereotypes!", which serves only to reinforce them (in an odd way, because since when were enclaves expected to be moral, or governments assumed to represent the views of all their citizens?) Maybe we'll get more explanation. For now it reads strangely.

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

Now got to a neat and satisfying twist which is a really nice use of the mechanics and am annoyed again that these mechanics are in this book instead of the much better book it could have been.

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

Sa

But then

"My own personal trolley problem to solve"

Aaaaaaargh
Not the FUCKING trolley problem
Do writers have 1 braincell between them atm?

Fuck me this book is bad
Why is it so bad
I liked her other stuff on the whole
But stuff like this reads like it was written by some kind of YA focus group

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

Sa

I feel like the outline for this book is good but the heart is missing and she's going through the motions, along with trying to pacify the online YA crowd, and thus it's torturous. The characters are so thin. The description is so thin. The realisations are so repetitive. I wonder if she just really hated writing this and wanted the project to be over?

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

Omg on pg 357 and just burst out laughing at "Me too," Miranda said., character wasn't even in the scene for 3 pages and just pops up again out of nowhere, it's just a cartoon at this point.

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

Sa

Just this amazing Itchy and Scratchy and Poochie moment.

"I'll help you," said Aadhya, my first real friend and closest ally.

"And me," said Liu, my other best friend, whom we had just saved from eternal torment.

"Me too," said Poochie Miranda.

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

sa

Literally all I know about Miranda is that he's from Austin and he doesn't pass.

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

365

"a short Chinese man came in, wearing a Mao suit made out of some kind of fabric that looked almost like denim"

This is just a parody at this point

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

368

We've reached "closed-source software causes mass-torture". But El's got a GPL with her! Who will win?

Software parallels worked better when the stakes were a bit lower, gotta say. Having a thinly-disguised promo for copyleft licensing mid-war doesn't exactly add to the drama. I *would* have liked a book that involved more political intrigue from the start, instead of this thing that constantly picks up characters and drops them with minimal development. Like wtf Liu was being *crushed to death* and we're meant to treat it like yesterday's news???

I don't hate everything about this book but it started off wobbly and it has got wobblier and now I just want it to end. Much like a maw-mouth.

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

Sa
374
More cool mechanics, though I thought we'd already inferred all this? Also "I don't have the moral high ground, and I won't pretend to," Shanfeng said -- why does everyone in this book talk like this? Where are all the normal people? Liesel is the closest we've had so far so of course she vanished from the narrative ages ago. At least that gives us a respite from the sexless sex scenes, I guess.

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

Anyway yeah whenever they get onto ethics it's like it's been custom-written to prompt commentary from some moronic self-righteous letsreader, which it probably has.

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

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<small">Ophelia got-- not the hero she wanted, but the hero she deserved."</small>

I don't know if I *can* finish this book. I cut gideon ix some slack for that kind of shit because it was a first novel but

<small>Fuck it, I'm team ophelia now, she's the only person I halfway like in this book at this point, pls defeat them all and make it end.</small>

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

Oops but oh well not particularly spoilery I was just being cautious (NOT CAUTIOUS ENOUGH)

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

watch nonny break down in real-time, the novel.

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

395

Idly curious what examples she had in mind here, because afaict she's not involved in anything where she'd know the pain of a situation like this, which might explain why it's limited to two clumsy paragraphs right at the end of the book.

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

That said, I like the development on pg 396-397, and am reminded again that this was almost a good book. All the best stuff is always about two sentences long, mentioned in passing.

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

400

oh what Orion's still alive? I thought he was effectively dead in the void or something. Not sure if terrible storytelling or terrible reading comprehension, and don't care either way, so doesn't really matter.

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

FINISHED!

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

Will write up detailed thoughts in a bit, but for now, as I'm writing them up, I'm noticing again what was absent from this book. Most glaringly, the significance of *freedom*.

This is a character who's been locked up in a nightmare for *years* and has just got her freedom. It should *matter* to her. Air and sky should matter. Being able to walk outside should matter. Plants. Food.

Instead, it gets a cursory mention, and then she's complaining about the amenities on her first class flight. It makes no fucking sense. I get that the author was in an awkward position thanks to the twist she'd put at the end of the previous book, and this was probably meant to show just how much El cared about Orion, that it left her victory empty-- but I think if your plot destroys the emotional foundation of your work like that, you just have to change your plot.

I just don't think the author was mature enough to write this book. I don't think she understood how profoundly imprisonment affects a person. I'm idly thinking of the contrast with the treatment of Sirius Black in HP-- a side character! But his detention in Azkaban is treated with so much more gravity. Even though he's not at the center of the books and he's in a position where he's hiding the worst from the pov character, we still see how the experience scars him. All these new YA books want to be the next HP, but the authors don't have the empathy or the maturity to get anywhere close. I don't normally like criticising a work by speculating on qualities of the author, but I do think that must be the central problem here, so guess I have to. The author wants us to feel, but she's not empathising herself. Where she really enjoys herself is in laying out *how things work*, and I think it's a bit sad that current lit culture doesn't encourage her to write the book she'd actually be good at writing, and instead tries to squash her to fit this character-driven formula. She clearly loves the scholomance itself, while the people in it are incidental, and it shows.

I don't think every writer needs vast stores of empathy, but then I think they need to have insight into where their strengths lie, so they can avoid trying to work from formulae devised for people who are completely different to them.