Reviews tagging 'Grief'

Perhaps the Stars by Ada Palmer

2 reviews

agavemonster's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging emotional hopeful inspiring slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

A magisterial work. Regardless of the author's occasional stumbles, unjustified optimisms, and eternal didacticism, this book rises to meet its universe's problems and answer its universe's questions. I was worried after reading #3, The Will to Battle, as my least favorite thus far, but #4 brings it all home with everything I love about this series.

Strengths of this book and this universe:
  • The Homeric tenor of the back half lends a nobility and majesty that makes the strange world and its often-inhuman characters deeply emotionally affecting.
  • The crazy mish-mash of conflicting factions, loyalties, shifting sides, and motivations for actions that aim at one thing but achieve another is one of the most realistic depictions of war I've read.
  • Issues of justice, governance, what it means to live a good life, and human destiny are explored at a depth unmatched by any other author I can think of.
  • The completely unrealistic and off-the-wall values, political priorities, and wartime choices and behaviors challenged me to think and expand my mind about what I value and prioritize.
  • The experimental chapters are brilliantly done (I'm thinking of the Lorelei Cook brain logs, the 9th Anonymous's hospital journal, and Mycroft's odyssey).

The one failing of this universe is that its "small author" is, I find, too optimistic about human nature. There are a few truly evil characters (almost all women, by the way...) whose only joy is to control, dominate, and torture, and everyone else is almost unrealistically noble. Most people are not either that good or that bad; they are self-interested. In this world, everyone acts out 100% of their values, all the time, or if they fail, it's in a tragically hubristic fall from grace. There are not many people in the real world who live on this grand scale of either heroism or villainy.

There are many other criticisms, both serious and nitpicky.
  • The celebration of Empire and Enlightenment-era rational thought as the pinnacle of human achievement is challenged with 2 monologues by an African politician, who otherwise barely appears. (These slight scraps of resistance against the Doylist choice to focus primarily on the Hives do not a coherent counter-narrative make.)
  • The Homeric relationship between Cornel MASON/Patroclus and the Major/Achilles weakens the once-in-a-lifetime love we're told that MASON and Apollo Mojave shared (also MASON loved Madame equally, enough to feel jealousy when the King of Spain has a thing with her? IDK).
  • The unusual sex and gender norms in this universe, wobbly and starting to show cracks in The Will to Battle, more or less fall apart in this book. Why do we receive the biological sexes of every character in a huge long monologue by the 9th Anonymous, someone who's presumably less obsessed with gender than the unhinged Mycroft?
  • Characters who doubt JEDD Mason's godhood are depicted as overly suspicious and even foolish for not believing the evidence of divinity that's right in front of them, when it's perfectly reasonable that characters wouldn't inherently trust Some Guy who was born among a political tangle in the heart of a global conspiracy and raised in the hallways of power. For all the discussion of "we" and the ways in which humanity should extend rights and privileges to intelligences that are unlike us, there is little in JEDD Mason's personality and demeanor that isn't already encompassed in human existence as we know it today (stilted speech, overly literal embrace of ethics and definitions, a belief that they and they alone exist for some greater purpose). Who's to say that this teenager should be handed the reins of the world? Whether he is truly a god or not, giving over the entirety of the world into the hands of one person with dictatorial power is intolerable (as the African politician Dembéré said, in their one of two speeches, sigh). And why does a divine Remaking look like modern reformist politics, with almost nothing changed?
  • I agree with every issue this Reddit commenter raises: https://www.reddit.com/r/TerraIgnota/comments/yzvkdg/please_help_me_understand_perhaps_the_stars/

I know these seem like damning issues, and a long list compared to my list of parts I loved, which was short. But overall, it truly was a tour de force.
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mishnah's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny mysterious reflective tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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