Reading catch-up: To Sleep in a Sea of Stars and Shadows Rising; now with extra Secret Santa squee!

[lunasariel]

So, life has been happening. We have a new president who has never incited a violent insurgency - yay! I have a new coworker who is an Ann Leckie fan - double yay! But more importantly: BOOKS.

First up, To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, by Christopher Paolini. I came across this while cataloging, and noticed the name (which carried across to the book itself - the spine is just one big PAOLINI, and his name on the front cover is, shall we say, prominent, so I guess I know what the publisher is banking on). I remember reading the first...two? three? Eragon books in junior high/early high school and liking them ok. They didn't blow me out of the water, but I also didn't really get the "UGGGGGGHHHHHHH" hate that was being direct at them. They weren't high literature, sure, but in hindsight they were just about what you would get if you asked a homeschooled 15-year-old to write a Fantasy Epic. So not, like, Twilight bad, but not something I'm super eager to re-read.

But the professional reviews for TSiaSoS were glowing - it was so majestic! and grand!! and deep!!! Did I mention that it was Super Deep??? So I figured I might as well check it out. I do retain something of a soft spot for Chris Paolini, if the above paragraph wasn't evidence enough - I met my HS and post-HS best friends at a signing when he came to Santa Rosa, and I made the trek (hey, when you're 14 and can't drive, half an hour is a trek) out to see him, so I guess it's a Good Associations kind of thing. And he seemed like a perfectly nice dude; a little O.O at a whole bunch of preteens clamoring at him, but not like actively an asshole or anything. So between the aforementioned Good Associations, the rave reviews, and vague memories of the Eragon books being "eh, not the absolute worst Tolkien knockoffs I've ever read," I thought I'd give TSiaSoS (which shall heretofore be further shorted to SoS, heh) a shot.

Overall, it was...not good. The first third or so was Actively Bad, the second third was a mildly competently done if bland paint-by-numbers kit, and the last third actually ended up being kinda hokily cute, if definitely not in a way the author intended. The whole thing was WILDLY pretentious - chapter titles in Latin (when Latin appears nowhere else in the text except for some pre-existing star names), epigraphs from Cicero, the Aeneid, and various Classical and Western philosophers, not a single character even comes close to feeling three-dimensional, and it asked questions about the nature of individuality, consciousness, and morality that it was way beyond incapable of answering, almost 100 pages of appendices to make sure the reader Really Understands how FTL travel and ship-to-ship combat work in his world - but the cumulative effect was that this kid is *trying*, darn it. ...Granted, I think "this kid" is about 40 now, but it still feels very much like something written by a young adult.

So, let's start out with the worst part. The first third is just bad. The plot devices are beyond transparent, the protagonist is actively unlikeable, and all the promise of a cool setup and futuristic world is squandered.
When we went from an opening quote from... the Odyssey, I think? to the protagonist spending the first 10-20 pages going "gee, I sure do love my Found Family of fellow scientists! Especially my beloved Perfect Boyfriend, whom I just agreed to retire from my glittering career to marry and settle down on a newly terraformed planet with! I'm sure nothing at all bad will happen in the near future. :DDD"

...Guess what happens by like page 35? XP

But seriously, when the Perfect Boyfriend (a geologist) proposed to Kira with a ring he hand-forged from Kira's favorite luminescent ore and a field of Kira's favorite orchids (which, of course, are impossibly hard to grow, and he'd grown in secret over the course of months), and an offer to leave This Corporate Life for the cozy space-cottage they've both Always Dreamed Of, and explicitly offered her the companionship that she's always craved (good job stating the protagonist's motivation and flaws EXTREMELY BLATANTLY right out the gate there), my thoughts weren't "I ship it." They were more like "sooooooo is he going to die immediately or be revealed to be a cheating bastard?" Turns out it was the former.

This set the tone for the rest of the novel, tbh. Not a single surprise, character-wise and precious few plot-wise. It was all entirely by the numbers. If you've read and/or seen any sci-fi over the past 15 years or so, you know exactly how this is going to go - the badass captain of the ragtag crew of misfit space smugglers will turn out to have a heart of gold, the Inconceivably Alien Aliens will ask "but what if humans are the real monsters???", the Space Elves will be inscrutable and world-breakingly powerful but fatally proud, the hardass military commander dude will be stubborn and block-headed but eventually heroic when the chips are down, and the day will be saved by The Power of Love (and Nukes). You know how it goes.

This actually looped back around into a positive thing by about 2/3 through, when I stopped expecting to be surprised or emotionally connect with anything. If you look at it purely as an expression of tropes arranged in the correct order, it's actually not bad. When Kira accosted Sparrow and declared that they would now have a heart-to-heart in which Sparrow delivers a concise synopsis of her backstory and confides her Darkest Secret in this random lady she just met (I also kinda get the feeling that the author doesn't fully get how human relationships work??? So many times, two characters just kind of walk up to each other and start talking and boom! They have had an Official Bonding Conversation. But I digress), I didn't at all empathize with either of them, and I wasn't particularly invested in their relationship, but I found myself thinking "this is a good place for an Official Bonding Scene. It's in the lull following an Action Sequence, and it takes place during a period of travel when the reader's attention might otherwise wander. Well placed! :)" So as fulfillment for very, very low expectations, SoS actually did a fine job.

One of the things that hampered SoS was the disjunct between what it wanted it be and what it was. It asked a lot of very deep questions along the lines of "How can two sentient beings successfully cohabitate in one body following an involuntary merge, especially when their desires and goals appear to be working in opposite directions?" and "How far does an individual's duty to support their community go when weighed against their own self-determination?" and "Is it morally wrong to use a peaceful sentient creature for destructive purposes against its wishes if doing so is the only viable means of preserving a large number of lives and/or a civilization?" ... but in practice, the dialogue is very 80s B-movie, and the characterization is about at the same level. So I can see where it was going, it just didn't get there. By the end, it was at least in the right ballpark, but for his intent to have fully landed, I think I needed to care about at least one of the characters a lot more than I did. XD

Speaking of which! I mentioned above that Kira as a protagonist just Does Not Do It for me, and I think that was on a couple of levels. Her xenobiology background showed up an awful lot less than you'd expect for humanity making first contact with three separate alien species, and when it did, it was mostly in a "hmmm, these composite zombie aliens definitely didn't evolve naturally" or "the Giant Punching Squid aliens definitely came from an aquatic environment" kind of way. Like, I'm pretty sure *I* could have gotten that.

I also found her kind of cowardly and incompetent in a way that was clearly meant to convey that she was just an ordinary person in truly extraordinary circumstances, but mostly just made me facepalm. Like, it make sense that she would be worried about her far-distant family, and somewhat upset about her fiancé's death. But the fact that we're occasionally beat over the head with "but my family is in danger! probably! somewhere!" and Dear Dead Alan is a wee bit annoying, especially since we never actually see her family other than a couple of flashbacks and video messages, and we've got all of like 35 pages before Clearly Doomed Alan becomes Dear Dead Alan/meets his inevitable fate combine to prevent me from fully connecting with any of them. And then we run into the problem that all of Kira's problems are her own fault, from accidentally bonding with some sort of xenomorph to accidentally killing a bunch of people (several times!) to...accidentally causing a hull breach by shooting a gun. On a spaceship. XD And this isn't even going into the "I don't care if everybody on this ship is about to be flash-frozen because of me and we're on the verge of intergalactic war, I wanna lawyer!!!" thing. Oy.

Oh, and she was weirdly passive riiiiiight up until the very end. Part of this was definitely the old "villains act, heroes react" problem, but more than that, she just seemed to kinda be buffeted around by the plot, a living MacGuffin rather than a character with agency. She rarely, if ever, made plans or made premeditated decisions; she just kinda reacted to things as they happen. Danger? Run away! Run into a bunch of new people? Hang out with them for a while, why not. Get a vision from the xenomorph? I guess we're doing that now.

So, that was the bad stuff. On the plus side:

• The pacing was surprisingly good! It rarely if ever gave me that "uggghhhhhh why is this taking so longgggg" feeling, and generally it skipped right along, which was particularly surprising given that it weighs in at almost 900 pages. I think this was an aspect of the "well-constructed paint-by-numbers kit" thing, where he's clearly very good at all of the technical, tangible aspects of writing, but not so much at the wobblier ones.


• The 80s-ness was occasionally hilarious, if usually inadvertently. I got R2 to read some of the Space Marines' dialogue out loud, first to me and then to Bestchat, and it was fairly amazing. XD.


• On a related note, the romance was also occasionally and inadvertently hilarious. A lot of this, however, clearly came from a *painfully* straight dude trying to write things from a (also straight, IIRC) woman's perspective. Like, I dunno about you, ladies, but I definitely refer to my genitals as my "innermost parts" in my internal narration. XD


• Oh, and the Romantic Lead! We certainly never stopped hearing about Dead Dead Alan, but the new guy was such a Harlequin romance hero! He has "eyes like chips of blue ice" that we were reminded about A Lot. He's initially positioned as this super shady criminal dude but his Grand Crime was illegally importing newts. To show he has a Soft Side, his beloved ship has a ~whimsical~ name, and he has a pet cat and a pig with a similarly ~whimsical~ name. The pig in particular had me scratching my head, since it was named after a Lewis Caroll poem, which is like me naming my parakeet Hrothgar or something. Oh, and he has a Dead Little Sister backstory and a bunch of badass scars from when he tried heroically but fruitlessly to save said little sister. And he has stubble. So much stubble! I realize that all of this doesn't sound like a particularly good thing, but it all added up to "oh honey, you're trying *so hard*" for me. Like, the scene that was clearly intended to be a Super Sexy Fanservice scene where he had to strip down to his underwear to go into cryo and Kira was appreciating, like, his back muscles or something. It was so clear that the author had been told what women find sexy, and was trying his damndest to write something that a woman would realistically relate to, but it just...wasn't happening. Like, at all. XD


• I actually did have an emotion about the plot...once, I think. Twice, maybe? At the end, during the inevitable "ragtag bunch of misfits + motley collection of uneasy allies vs. Giant Alien Armada" big fight scene, I actually found my heart rate increasing. Definitely the way it would for, say, an action movie, where I'm not exactly in awe of the storytelling or narrative artistry, but I am in in full "*pew pew pew* WHEEEEEEE!" mode. So that was fun, but only if you're in the mood for, say, an average later Avengers movie.


• Once I'd gotten over my expectations that I would, like, emotionally connect with any of the characters, I found myself quite enjoying it. Which was weird, since I enjoyed it in an entirely plot-focused way, and I'm normally a very character-focused reader. But even the bad stuff wasn't enough to make me actually hate it, the way I did with A Queen in Hiding, and it wasn't close enough to stuff I would otherwise love to make me ??? as to why I wasn't loving it, the way I did with Witchmark. So I think it hit that sweet spot of not bad enough for me to hate it, but not good enough for me to feel betrayed. Yay?

So, TL;DR: To Sleep in a Sea of Stars was wildly over-ambitious, clunky, and almost painfully inept at times, but after a while (to the tune of about 500 pages a while) it actually circled back around to "awwww he's trying, bless his little cotton socks." And even with the ridiculous length and the I Am Author, Hear Me Roar pretentions and the failure to follow up on cool setups, I actually... didn't hate the experience. So while it wasn't the literary tour de force I was half-expecting, I wouldn't call it time wasted.


At about the same time (ish), I was reading Shadows Rising, a World of Warcraft: Shadowlands profic novel by Madeleine Roux. (Actually, am I using "profic" correctly here? I've mostly seen this term applied to fanfic with the serial numbers filed off and published, but I can't think of a word for "officially licensed & approved novels based on an existing IP not of the author's creation." But I digress.) To be 100% honest, I read it because of the rumor that it features WoW's first canon queer characters, and...kinda?

So, my history with profic has not been great. I vaguely recall reading some Star Trek: TOS novels back in like junior high/high school that I was thoroughly unimpressed by/"why does this even exist???". ...And then I discovered fanfic, and the whole point seemed slightly moot. I tried a couple of Dragon Age novels, which had the advantage of being written by one of DA:O's lead writers, who was also a contributing/lead writer for DA2 and DA:I. Unfortunately, as it turns out, David Gaider is a fantastic writer of dialogue and a dab hand at character work in general, but his prose is Not Very Good. So my bar going into Shadows Rising was not super high - Madeleine Roux isn't a complete newbie author, so I wasn't expecting something utterly incompetent, but I wasn't hoping for Tolkien, either.

In its favor, SR does deliver on queer characters, if not quite as triumphantly as I'd hoped. There were a couple of background mentions of what were apparently normative same-sex relationships - some random dude in Westfall mentions that his husband was part of the group of Forsaken betrayed by Sylvanas Windrunner during Caila Menethil's attempted reconcilliation, but this was one line, and from a character who appears for like three pages and is never seen again. There was also a very sweet sub-sub-plot where one of the newly-minted Queen Talanji's first rulings is to decide whether to restore a defeated (and subsequently deceased) traitor's lands and associated noble goods and priveledges to his surviving family, as the daughter of the house needed a dowry to marry her girlfriend. There are a couple of very awwww-inducing moments with these two random teenage troll girls, who are very clearly heart-eyes-ing each other, even though, IIRC, neither of them is named.

What I was really hoping for, though, was that Mathias Shaw, Stormwind's own James Bond/spymaster, was supposed to come out as bi, and start a relationship with Errol... I mean, Flynn Fairwind. And that...did not happen. We got what I could very generously interpret as incipient pining/Oh No I Caught Feelings on Mathias' part, as he's a POV character, and overall the sort of shippiness you'd expect from a traditional genre work where dudes work together and form emotional relationships with each other, but not so far as to be queerbait-y. It felt kinda like they were going for the whole "plausible deniability" thing in order to placate the dudebros - but then why have cute teenage lesbian trolls??? I feel like I'm not getting something here.

Actually, "I feel like I'm not getting something here" is a fair summary of my attitude towards the novel as a whole. Sometimes it felt like the author was being super constrained by her contract with Blizzard, since the incidences of And Suddenly Foreshadowing For The Upcoming Expansion!!! were rather high. But maybe I should have expected this, since it *is* specifically a Shadowlands novel, after all. (Also potentially affecting my opinion is the fact that I ADORED Battle for Azeroth - it's my second-favorite xpac of all time, and a very close second to Wrath of the Lich King, which is widely acknowledged as WoW's finest moment - so I went into Shadowlands and all associated media with a bit of an "awwww :(" feeling.) And then some of my favorite characters felt massively OOC, for reasons I couldn't quite figure out. It could also be a contract thing, since I'm sure it really sucks to have a certain amount of plot and character information dictated to you when you're used to being able to create your own, or it could just be a result of different writers having a different take on the characters.

Oh, speaking of! Specifically, I was not happy with Alleria and Talanji, and suspiciously :\ about Anduin. I was thoroughly :\\\ about one of the novel's overarching themes, which seemed to be a pretty standard "war is bad and makes good people do bad things" message, but in particular I wasn't crazy about Alleria Windrunner's grimdark reboot. I'm not particularly invested in her as a character, but they were driving in that "I do what I must, and what I must do isn't very nice" message SO. GOD. DAMN. HARD., even when it was patently unnecessary.

Talanji, however, was one of my favorite characters in BfA - Thanassis, my BE paladin, was massively impressed by her, and if he was the slightest bit attracted to women he would probably have fallen head-over-heels for her, trolls vs. blood elves thing be damned - and the novel took her in an entirely different direction. I could buy that the death of her father changed her, made her harsher and more reactionary, but Talanji always came across in-game as someone with a cool head and a full heart, even in Trying Circumstances. She was extremely politically canny, even when Rastakhan was alive and she was just a princess, but her message of unity and compassion, and her reaching-out to groups traditionally marginalized by the Zandalari elite, was her biggest strength, and what allowed her to survive the political turmoil of Zul's treachery and the much more literal turmoil of the Siege of Zandalar. Hell, even after Rastakhan's death, her investiture as Queen was all about her formally inviting representatives of all citizens of the Zandalari Empire onto her council, and about positioning herself as a servant/healer of her people, rather than an autocrat. But in SR, an autocrat was exactly what she was - brasher and more brittle, and prone to knee-jerk fits of panic and rage. Definitely not the compassionate, calm, and collected leader of the Nazmir Campaign. (Hey, I just got it! Nazmir = Nazmire. Heh.) Feh.

Anduin is a character who, as cafemassolit would say, I like A Normal Amount. It's been interesting watching him grow and develop as a character, but I'm not super invested in his ~journey~. That said, it was kind of disheartening to see the author go down the "but what if eeeeeeeeeeeevil?!?!?!?!?!?" route with him, the way she did with Alleria. Maybe it's just an authorial tic of hers, idk. But there was a *lot* of time spent on how The Pressures of Power are Becoming Too Much, and his POV was almost entirely taken up with "woe! and also alas! for have I mentioned lately that Death Comes For Us All! and these brave young soldiers died For Me, Specifically and they were so young and eager and full of life, and now, alas, they are so still and cold! woe! and also alas!" Granted, Anduin has also semi-recently lost his father, but I got a real "observe their feet of clay!" (and no, I don't mean the wonderful Discworld novel) feeling with regards to all of the leaders in this novel. Even Tyrande, who has canonically Seen Some Shit and may be going off the deep end, was pretty much "I long for vengeance. The End."

Which actually did give me some interesting ideas for post-Teldrassil intra-night elf conflict, particularly between Tyrande, who is on the path of vengeance and apparently cares about literally nothing else, and Asterion, my NE druid, who has functionally been the boots-on-the-ground leader of the night elves, securing housing/medical aid/food/other refugee necessities, while Tyrande nopes off looking for Sylvanas, and Malfurion nopes off looking for Tyrande. Y'know, not like they've got people depending on them or anything. :\ But my question is: Tyrande is becoming increasingly hardline and paranoid. Some of this is understandable, certainly, but it occured to me that she might react Somewhat Less Than Well to find that the Champion of the Alliance has functionally usurped her. The fact that it was entirely by accident, that he would much much rather be climbing trees with his cute human now-more-than-boyfriend, and that *someone* had to make these decisions and Tyrande sure wasn't there to do so, probably wouldn't hold an awful lot of water with her. And the fact that the Kul Tirans, who Asterion is firmly in bed with (both literally and metaphorically), have several ex-Forsaken in their ranks and appear to largely favor friendly relations between the Forsaken and their previous human families going forward, would also not sit well with her. Although, this question raises another: has she even noticed? She fucked right off to an entirely different dimension to hunt Sylvanas, leaving Elune only knows who to, y'know, actually govern the newly homeless and decimated night elves. Since her entire Shadowlands storyline is her going WAY off the deep end, it's entirely possible that she hasn't noticed and/or doesn't care about her responsibilities as High Priestess, and is so focused on vengeance for the dead that she's forgotten the needs of the living. Yeah, I think I could buy that. It probably means that Asterion will continue bootstrapping himself into Tyrande's role, though, quietly panicking every time someone asks him to make a decision On Behalf Of His People, growing increasingly <3 at Ben's logistical/Krisma abilities. I've described Asterion before as "needs an industrial-strength cup of coffee and/or a nap," since his stated responsibility is Saving The World And Everything In It, Plus Any Spare Worlds We Might Happen Across, and now he's kind of accidentally become personally responsible for the survival of his species following the destruction of his homeland and the death of 20% of his remaining family. Eeeeesh, somebody get this boy a hug. (Ben. Ben is somebody, and is v. ready with hugs/invitations to fuck off into the uplands and look at cool plants for a while/a cup of that funky-smelling tea that nobody but him has noticed Asterion likes.)

Anyway, fic ramblings aside, TL;DR: I found myself underwhelmed by Shadows Rising. Maybe it was the falling interest that's only natural when moving from one of my favorite xpacs ever to anything else, but I found that a number of the characters I really like in-game were way too feet of clay-y here, the long-lauded "hey queer people exist!" didn't quite materialize the way I'd wanted it to*, and the writing itself, while indeed of a higher caliber than I've experienced from profic/media tie-ins in the past, didn't balance out the character problems. Like with To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, it wasn't an Utter Fucking Waste of Time the way some things I've read recently are *cough*A Queen in Hiding*cough*, so I'm trying to treat it kindly, but I am thoroughly lukewarm about it.

* I forgot to mention! There was a short story was published for free on WoW's website (with very little fanfare, as far as I can tell), "Terror by Torchlight," where Mathias and Flynn do have a casefic-y adventure with mildly shippy overtones that does culminate in a kiss, but again, I got the weird feeling that they were pulling their punches.

And last but not least: look what came in the mail!!!

I know it's become A Thing to get extremely :DDD about the mail arriving in 2020-shading-into-2021, but how can I not, when it previously brought me Secret Santa Squee, and now brought me this?



The incomparable rinkafushi sent me what is *clearly* The Best Card. I'm not sure it comes through in the photo, but there is a LOT of glitter here, you guys. A LOT. It is an Utter Fucking Disaster Delight, and I love it an inordinate amount. As requested, I said hi to my cats - well, cat singular, now that Chico has passed away. But I did pet the little random fluff of his fur that we kept, and Rasha seemed to accept this trans-Atlantic adoration as her due (which is very gracious of her, considering that she's currently mad at me for trying to go running instead of forming a lap for her XD).

Thank you, Rinka/M, for brightening my day! Literally with how much glitter has currently come into my life. :DDD (Also: I'll see you a Worst Scenic Bavarian Postcard and raise you a Worst California Scenic Postcard! >:D)