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A review by abandonedmegastructure
The Red Scholar's Wake by Aliette de Bodard
adventurous
emotional
hopeful
lighthearted
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
I recently called Of Ants and Dinosaurs 'the best bad book I read this year'. The Red Scholar's Wake, on the other hand, might be the worst good one.
Imagine a ship gliding through the void, frictionless, coasting on inertia alone, driven by those onboard only in the sense that their presence kicked off this journey. The Red Scholar's Wake's story is much like that ship. It's all just smooth, predictable, formulaic - the romance beats happen at the set times, problems get resolved shortly after showing up, character arcs are spun up in a way that already heralds their conclusion, and when you arrive at your destination three hundred pages later, there's a vague dissatisfaction accompanying what should be a perfectly serviceable wrap-up.
Right before the climax, a completely new character gets introduced to accompany the protagonist into danger. I immediately predict she's going to get killed off to show Things Are Getting Serious And Not According to Plan, and what do you guess, four pages later she's gone. It's emblematic of the book's faults: trying to feint danger and uncertainty when it's so incredibly obvious nothing truly bad can happen.
The narration is ponderous, unsubtle, and prone to showing us the same event from two different perspectives. Emotional development is slow relative to the number of pages dedicated to it, making for a very languid read. Flourishing up the descriptions are a number of space metaphors: I think black holes get used as a figurative device every two chapters. At first it's fun, but it devolves into 'hold your hippogriffs' levels of ham-fisted scene-setting, as if the audience is at risk of forgetting they're in space.
The worldbuilding is art: beautiful to look at and paper-thin. There's a system of title-pronouns that are moderately neat. There's the nods to Vietnamese culture sprinkled in everywhere. There's the by-now classic Pirate Planet with a Pirate Council. There are ships that are people and house vast organic cyborg brains at their core. There are 'bots' which can do about anything the plot needs them to be able to do.
But none of it felt thought-out. Rice Fish gains and loses superhuman powers of perception and analysis as the plot demands, and comes out feeling like a rather normal black-irised human (which I can imagine putting off the people interested in the whole spaceship romance part of the premise). The pirate council doesn't practice the most basic of security measures. There's implausible asteroid fields because space is an ocean and it needs reefs. There's people doing boarding actions, somehow, despite mindship-controlled bots being plentiful and seemingly more useful than them in every way. Time and time again, side characters - up to and including the main villain - do stupid things so the main duo can seem competent. There's holes in the plot you can fly a spaceship through, and not even an attempt at patching them up.
Worst of all, it never managed to capture me emotionally. The characters felt unmotivated, which made it hard for me to care about them, which made it hard for me to care about their romance. The book is clearly deeply uninterested in anything that's not the scavenger lady getting with the spaceship lady, to the point where even the necessary scaffolding to hang the romance on simply crumbles. It's a very subjective point, and I'm not expecting people to share my opinion on this, but I want to get it out there anyway.
...perhaps some are surprised by now that I called this a good book and gave it three stars still. But quality is a measure of how well a book succeeds at what it tries to do, and no matter how unambitious The Red Scholar's Wake is, it's exactly the slowburn space opera pirate queen romance it aspires at - just nothing more.
Imagine a ship gliding through the void, frictionless, coasting on inertia alone, driven by those onboard only in the sense that their presence kicked off this journey. The Red Scholar's Wake's story is much like that ship. It's all just smooth, predictable, formulaic - the romance beats happen at the set times, problems get resolved shortly after showing up, character arcs are spun up in a way that already heralds their conclusion, and when you arrive at your destination three hundred pages later, there's a vague dissatisfaction accompanying what should be a perfectly serviceable wrap-up.
Right before the climax, a completely new character gets introduced to accompany the protagonist into danger. I immediately predict she's going to get killed off to show Things Are Getting Serious And Not According to Plan, and what do you guess, four pages later she's gone. It's emblematic of the book's faults: trying to feint danger and uncertainty when it's so incredibly obvious nothing truly bad can happen.
The narration is ponderous, unsubtle, and prone to showing us the same event from two different perspectives. Emotional development is slow relative to the number of pages dedicated to it, making for a very languid read. Flourishing up the descriptions are a number of space metaphors: I think black holes get used as a figurative device every two chapters. At first it's fun, but it devolves into 'hold your hippogriffs' levels of ham-fisted scene-setting, as if the audience is at risk of forgetting they're in space.
The worldbuilding is art: beautiful to look at and paper-thin. There's a system of title-pronouns that are moderately neat. There's the nods to Vietnamese culture sprinkled in everywhere. There's the by-now classic Pirate Planet with a Pirate Council. There are ships that are people and house vast organic cyborg brains at their core. There are 'bots' which can do about anything the plot needs them to be able to do.
But none of it felt thought-out. Rice Fish gains and loses superhuman powers of perception and analysis as the plot demands, and comes out feeling like a rather normal black-irised human (which I can imagine putting off the people interested in the whole spaceship romance part of the premise). The pirate council doesn't practice the most basic of security measures. There's implausible asteroid fields because space is an ocean and it needs reefs. There's people doing boarding actions, somehow, despite mindship-controlled bots being plentiful and seemingly more useful than them in every way. Time and time again, side characters - up to and including the main villain - do stupid things so the main duo can seem competent. There's holes in the plot you can fly a spaceship through, and not even an attempt at patching them up.
Worst of all, it never managed to capture me emotionally. The characters felt unmotivated, which made it hard for me to care about them, which made it hard for me to care about their romance. The book is clearly deeply uninterested in anything that's not the scavenger lady getting with the spaceship lady, to the point where even the necessary scaffolding to hang the romance on simply crumbles. It's a very subjective point, and I'm not expecting people to share my opinion on this, but I want to get it out there anyway.
...perhaps some are surprised by now that I called this a good book and gave it three stars still. But quality is a measure of how well a book succeeds at what it tries to do, and no matter how unambitious The Red Scholar's Wake is, it's exactly the slowburn space opera pirate queen romance it aspires at - just nothing more.