Scan barcode
A review by kathyxtran
An Earthly Crown by Kate Elliott
1.0
In a few words: a sequel that doesn't scale successfully and I mean, I get this is some sort of white woman hetereosexual fantasy but it has a lot of Issues
What: Kindle library loan
Why: riding on the high of reading the first book in the series
As a caveat: I haven't read the third book in this series yet and I know the book was originally split over two volumes. So I'm reserving some judgement based on that there's still a lot of valid complaining to follow.
Worldbuilding flavour: light! Light as hell! The first book introduced this interesting galactic backdrop but only touched on it, which is fine, in lieu of establishing and focussing on all the nuances and details of the culture and lives of the jaran told through an outsider character, experiencing and learning in tandem with the reader, like a romance novel wrapped up in a ethnographic study. But this book just feels like it's retreading the same and painting broad strokes over the rest it attempts to introduce, scaling up and adding a heck ton of new characters from all sorts of cultures, but having them just react to each other and fumble around appropriate practices without any real meaningful conflict?
Also, am I one thousand pages in this series and barely know anything more about the super interesting Chapallii and intergalactic empires and rebellions? We get a barest glimpse of a birth and a female and otherwise characters are wholly uninterested in them except to note from time to time their opaque alienness.
The huge, glaring: whiteness of it all. This is true of the first book as well, but when you have so many more characters coming together and having cultural conflicts, it just becomes so much more obvious how flawed the approach is. A lot of SFF stories posit that humans are post racial, post gender, post whatever and then draw on real world and historical racial dynamics with their fictional "othered" group as a stand in. I get metaphorical whiplash when you end up with your oppressed minority Martians/mutants/vampires/super intelligent apes facing off against the speaker of human-led bigotry represented by characters from actually marginalized groups, upholding the systems (capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism) that those groups are subjected to in reality.
The humans find the jaran barbaric (and the Chapallii capitalistic/transactional/hierarchical). The jaran find the other people of their planet (which mirror cultures of the human's past) to be barbaric and unclean in turn. An ambassador is from a highly patriarchal and misogynistic kingdom and this purposefully contrasts to the matriarchal society of the jaran that allows for female sexual autonomy. The have slaves! Women have sex for money! Women veil themselves when in public! People pray with their heads touching the ground! I wonder what culture this is intending to invoke and criticise.
But the jaran are not malicious to the unfamiliar, we're told, they are intrigued by it. Sometimes, a story will let you know there are actually a couple characters of colour in their fictional world by calling attention to their physical traits, but what that only makes me realise that so far, everyone else has been overwhelmingly white. When only one person's skin colour is described, then that means everyone else is the default. Not even getting into the problematic equating of blackness to dark coloured skin.
There's a couple moments given to the jaran's reactions to non-white members of the human visiting party. I'm not sure what the reason is--to show off the benign nature of their reaction to the unfamiliar, or highlighting their isolation and ignorance. Nonetheless, the confusion about dark skin for dirtiness that doesn't wash off and the mocking of the eyelid shape of one of the East Asian characters are both things that have baggage in our culture and presumably so for the human characters. But this is presented as harmless, quickly glanced over. I know I wouldn't be able to use the same throwaway plot device, not at least without a lot of context given. And curious that only characters of colour are othered in this way!
(But a mousy brunette girl is so alien and exotic to these alien barbarians, even though there's this continued obsession with beauty and not being beautiful and I'm not going to talk about the threesome.)
I could have really done without: a bunch of straight characters "poo-pooing" the one non-straight character in the group because apparently they knew better than he did. And lament that the characters might be better off dead! Cool cool cool, in this future, humans are self righteous about some things, but not enough to make a stance for what is right against a cultural and technological interdiction that they also don't care enough about to honor most of the time if it's inconvenient for them. (Ahem, Tess, why are you putting your husband under potentially life threatening medical procedures without his consent, holy shit!)
What: Kindle library loan
Why: riding on the high of reading the first book in the series
As a caveat: I haven't read the third book in this series yet and I know the book was originally split over two volumes. So I'm reserving some judgement based on that there's still a lot of valid complaining to follow.
Worldbuilding flavour: light! Light as hell! The first book introduced this interesting galactic backdrop but only touched on it, which is fine, in lieu of establishing and focussing on all the nuances and details of the culture and lives of the jaran told through an outsider character, experiencing and learning in tandem with the reader, like a romance novel wrapped up in a ethnographic study. But this book just feels like it's retreading the same and painting broad strokes over the rest it attempts to introduce, scaling up and adding a heck ton of new characters from all sorts of cultures, but having them just react to each other and fumble around appropriate practices without any real meaningful conflict?
Also, am I one thousand pages in this series and barely know anything more about the super interesting Chapallii and intergalactic empires and rebellions? We get a barest glimpse of a birth and a female and otherwise characters are wholly uninterested in them except to note from time to time their opaque alienness.
The huge, glaring: whiteness of it all. This is true of the first book as well, but when you have so many more characters coming together and having cultural conflicts, it just becomes so much more obvious how flawed the approach is. A lot of SFF stories posit that humans are post racial, post gender, post whatever and then draw on real world and historical racial dynamics with their fictional "othered" group as a stand in. I get metaphorical whiplash when you end up with your oppressed minority Martians/mutants/vampires/super intelligent apes facing off against the speaker of human-led bigotry represented by characters from actually marginalized groups, upholding the systems (capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism) that those groups are subjected to in reality.
The humans find the jaran barbaric (and the Chapallii capitalistic/transactional/hierarchical). The jaran find the other people of their planet (which mirror cultures of the human's past) to be barbaric and unclean in turn. An ambassador is from a highly patriarchal and misogynistic kingdom and this purposefully contrasts to the matriarchal society of the jaran that allows for female sexual autonomy. The have slaves! Women have sex for money! Women veil themselves when in public! People pray with their heads touching the ground! I wonder what culture this is intending to invoke and criticise.
But the jaran are not malicious to the unfamiliar, we're told, they are intrigued by it. Sometimes, a story will let you know there are actually a couple characters of colour in their fictional world by calling attention to their physical traits, but what that only makes me realise that so far, everyone else has been overwhelmingly white. When only one person's skin colour is described, then that means everyone else is the default. Not even getting into the problematic equating of blackness to dark coloured skin.
There's a couple moments given to the jaran's reactions to non-white members of the human visiting party. I'm not sure what the reason is--to show off the benign nature of their reaction to the unfamiliar, or highlighting their isolation and ignorance. Nonetheless, the confusion about dark skin for dirtiness that doesn't wash off and the mocking of the eyelid shape of one of the East Asian characters are both things that have baggage in our culture and presumably so for the human characters. But this is presented as harmless, quickly glanced over. I know I wouldn't be able to use the same throwaway plot device, not at least without a lot of context given. And curious that only characters of colour are othered in this way!
(But a mousy brunette girl is so alien and exotic to these alien barbarians, even though there's this continued obsession with beauty and not being beautiful and I'm not going to talk about the threesome.)
I could have really done without: a bunch of straight characters "poo-pooing" the one non-straight character in the group because apparently they knew better than he did. And lament that the characters might be better off dead! Cool cool cool, in this future, humans are self righteous about some things, but not enough to make a stance for what is right against a cultural and technological interdiction that they also don't care enough about to honor most of the time if it's inconvenient for them. (Ahem, Tess, why are you putting your husband under potentially life threatening medical procedures without his consent, holy shit!)