![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksRead August 3rd.
This is an odd book for Norton, because it's an ensemble cast from the beginning and it stays that way; it never slips into what I think of as her default, which is the single person with telepathic animal having to trek across rough country to avoid some kind of nasty threat.
No, this is an entire spaceship's crew, wrecked, and they remain, basically, one party, and a lot of the conflict in the book is factionalism in the party and the difficult relationships in it caused by differences in rank, species, and ability. The ship is split down the middle into Patrol officers, who are human, and who are aristocratic and have a tendency towards xenophobia and are good at tech, and Rangers, who are sometimes human and sometimes other sapients and are good at things you do on a planet when you get there and need to survive. The protagonist is sort-of-human and a Ranger, so he's in an odd position where he has firm sympathies and friendships in the direction of his affiliation, but is also uniquely equipped to get concessions and decent behavior out of the other side (and feels obliged to try to keep them alive).
Things I liked: when I say sort-of-human, I do mean sort of; he's believably psychologically not-quite in ways I haven't seen Norton do before, mostly focused around his telepathy. I liked his Ranger team, who are snarky as hell and also think that most human priorities are pointless when you could be, you know, sitting on a rock and estivating. I liked that there are times the infighting can be set aside for survival and times it cannot.
However, plotwise this was trying to be about seven books at once. I mean, it has that much plot. There's the thread about where they've crashed, and the one about who else has crashed there, and the one about who else might crash there, and the one about the possible natives, and about three different things related to the infighting, plus it's a book where every single character has an arc, which is usually a good thing but here feels... crowded, because, as I said, about twenty-seven things going on every second. One of those books where nobody ever sits down, and you the reader do not, mentally, either.
I am therefore of two minds about it, because on the one hand the thing where it's ninety pounds of plot in a twenty-pound container and the complex three-dimensional character interactions are not standard Norton and mean that bits of this are good in directions that she doesn't usually hit. It also means that bits of it are bad in directions she doesn't usually hit. It was an early-fifties book, which Baen has just reprinted in one of those omnibuses they've been so nice with lately, and I can't tell whether I'm sad that this isn't a direction she really ran with or not. I mean, if she'd gotten control of the ensemble-cast-plus-complex-outer-plot thing that would have been awesome. On the other hand Norton is one of the great writers I know on the subject of people alone or in small groups or with animals surviving in hostile landscapes and it's one of the things I read her for. So... well, as with all roads not taken, I don't know. This book was fun, although fun in that way where it is frustrating to be able to see exactly what I would have changed in edit.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
comments over there.
This is an odd book for Norton, because it's an ensemble cast from the beginning and it stays that way; it never slips into what I think of as her default, which is the single person with telepathic animal having to trek across rough country to avoid some kind of nasty threat.
No, this is an entire spaceship's crew, wrecked, and they remain, basically, one party, and a lot of the conflict in the book is factionalism in the party and the difficult relationships in it caused by differences in rank, species, and ability. The ship is split down the middle into Patrol officers, who are human, and who are aristocratic and have a tendency towards xenophobia and are good at tech, and Rangers, who are sometimes human and sometimes other sapients and are good at things you do on a planet when you get there and need to survive. The protagonist is sort-of-human and a Ranger, so he's in an odd position where he has firm sympathies and friendships in the direction of his affiliation, but is also uniquely equipped to get concessions and decent behavior out of the other side (and feels obliged to try to keep them alive).
Things I liked: when I say sort-of-human, I do mean sort of; he's believably psychologically not-quite in ways I haven't seen Norton do before, mostly focused around his telepathy. I liked his Ranger team, who are snarky as hell and also think that most human priorities are pointless when you could be, you know, sitting on a rock and estivating. I liked that there are times the infighting can be set aside for survival and times it cannot.
However, plotwise this was trying to be about seven books at once. I mean, it has that much plot. There's the thread about where they've crashed, and the one about who else has crashed there, and the one about who else might crash there, and the one about the possible natives, and about three different things related to the infighting, plus it's a book where every single character has an arc, which is usually a good thing but here feels... crowded, because, as I said, about twenty-seven things going on every second. One of those books where nobody ever sits down, and you the reader do not, mentally, either.
I am therefore of two minds about it, because on the one hand the thing where it's ninety pounds of plot in a twenty-pound container and the complex three-dimensional character interactions are not standard Norton and mean that bits of this are good in directions that she doesn't usually hit. It also means that bits of it are bad in directions she doesn't usually hit. It was an early-fifties book, which Baen has just reprinted in one of those omnibuses they've been so nice with lately, and I can't tell whether I'm sad that this isn't a direction she really ran with or not. I mean, if she'd gotten control of the ensemble-cast-plus-complex-outer-plot thing that would have been awesome. On the other hand Norton is one of the great writers I know on the subject of people alone or in small groups or with animals surviving in hostile landscapes and it's one of the things I read her for. So... well, as with all roads not taken, I don't know. This book was fun, although fun in that way where it is frustrating to be able to see exactly what I would have changed in edit.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
