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A review by tikimoof
Silence in Solitude by Melissa Scott
4.0
A fairly fun romp. There was less visualization of traveling through Purgatory, which is a sadface.
These books are pretty short and are basically adventure novels, so there's not a whole lot to get offended by, characterization-wise. Silence is the only really fleshed-out character, so there's not much to say about the poly relationship. Chase Mago and Balthazar are mostly archetypes, and half of the book was Silence in a harem so there was even less space to flesh them out.
This isn't a bad thing - it means even less space to run into disagreements between gender theories of the 1980s and 2020's. That said, there are like three lines of genetic gender assignment that would be pretty not-great today (but then again it's in a pretty misogynistic society so maybe it still passes a little? But either way, not great).
The stuff about Silence not being very good at being a tradfem woman was interesting, more so her getting called out on it by another woman. There are some deeper questions to be asked about whether women could present Silence's powers and remain more feminine, but (a) I think it's also tied to the extremely masculine nature of the jobs she takes and the power they convey and (b) it's not that kind of book.
A lot of deeper societal questions lurk underneath - and I don't think many of the answers about the worldbuilding reflect badly on Scott, even when viewed through a 2020's lens - but I'll just enjoy a queer-positive space romp from before I was born.
These books are pretty short and are basically adventure novels, so there's not a whole lot to get offended by, characterization-wise. Silence is the only really fleshed-out character, so there's not much to say about the poly relationship. Chase Mago and Balthazar are mostly archetypes, and half of the book was Silence in a harem so there was even less space to flesh them out.
This isn't a bad thing - it means even less space to run into disagreements between gender theories of the 1980s and 2020's. That said, there are like three lines of genetic gender assignment that would be pretty not-great today (but then again it's in a pretty misogynistic society so maybe it still passes a little? But either way, not great).
The stuff about Silence not being very good at being a tradfem woman was interesting, more so her getting called out on it by another woman. There are some deeper questions to be asked about whether women could present Silence's powers and remain more feminine, but (a) I think it's also tied to the extremely masculine nature of the jobs she takes and the power they convey and (b) it's not that kind of book.
A lot of deeper societal questions lurk underneath - and I don't think many of the answers about the worldbuilding reflect badly on Scott, even when viewed through a 2020's lens - but I'll just enjoy a queer-positive space romp from before I was born.