Jacob's Ladder trilogy
Mar. 13th, 2019 04:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishElizabeth Bear, Dust (or Pinion)
Chill (or Sanction)
Grail (or Cleave)
I'm torn. The author's preferred titles have lovely opposing dual meanings, but the published titles are more evocative for me. Well, Dust is, anyway. And as a bonus, there are the lovely chapter headings with quotes from, among other sources, Conrad Aiken's lengthy modernist poem "The House of Dust." Oh well. Onward.
The Jacob's Ladder is a generation ship, launched around seven hundred years ago. Five hundred years ago, a series of disasters marooned the ship around an unstable star, and split the ship's governing intelligence into several separate parts. Now the star is threatening to go nova, and our heroes have to get the ship moving again, and find a place to make landfall before the ship completely falls apart.
Dust especially reads like a variant Amber Diceless campaign: the (essentially) royal family are, thanks to nanotech, long-lived, brilliant, just plain superior to normal humans ('Means', in another example of words with multiple relevant meanings), and rightfully distrustful of each other. Hence they spend a lot of time scheming and plotting and maneuvering around. This is not exactly a criticism: I love Amber Diceless, I especially love the later game Lords of Gossamer and Shadow, and I really enjoyed watching the various plots unfold, from the perspectives of characters who don't have quite all the information. It doesn't, however, make for a wholly satisfying read. "Oh, yes, I suppose character X was behind all this. We'll send people to arrest them." And, as in Amber, the gigantic cast of characters means that most of them end up feeling a bit shallow. I wanted to spend more time with most of them, to get to know them beyond just the image they put up.
Chill's big denouement felt a bit weak: not the event itself, the battle at and with the Leviathan that the long-dead crew imprisoned, but the reason behind it all. And Grail... the contact with the unexpected inhabitants of the planet they're heading for is handled so well on a character and dialogue level, and then the conflict is resolved by an almost literal deus ex machina.
Don't read these for the coherent plot, is I guess what I'm saying. Read them for the atmosphere and the characters and the journey. For Mallory the necromancer/gardener and the grove of fruit trees with dead people's memories, for the sentient carnivorous plants and Benedick's animate toolkit. For Perceval's wings, and Rien's bravery, and the Corwinesque Prince Tristen and solid practical Chief Engineer Caitlin.
Delightful, if unsatisfying. Recommended.
Chill (or Sanction)
Grail (or Cleave)
I'm torn. The author's preferred titles have lovely opposing dual meanings, but the published titles are more evocative for me. Well, Dust is, anyway. And as a bonus, there are the lovely chapter headings with quotes from, among other sources, Conrad Aiken's lengthy modernist poem "The House of Dust." Oh well. Onward.
The Jacob's Ladder is a generation ship, launched around seven hundred years ago. Five hundred years ago, a series of disasters marooned the ship around an unstable star, and split the ship's governing intelligence into several separate parts. Now the star is threatening to go nova, and our heroes have to get the ship moving again, and find a place to make landfall before the ship completely falls apart.
Dust especially reads like a variant Amber Diceless campaign: the (essentially) royal family are, thanks to nanotech, long-lived, brilliant, just plain superior to normal humans ('Means', in another example of words with multiple relevant meanings), and rightfully distrustful of each other. Hence they spend a lot of time scheming and plotting and maneuvering around. This is not exactly a criticism: I love Amber Diceless, I especially love the later game Lords of Gossamer and Shadow, and I really enjoyed watching the various plots unfold, from the perspectives of characters who don't have quite all the information. It doesn't, however, make for a wholly satisfying read. "Oh, yes, I suppose character X was behind all this. We'll send people to arrest them." And, as in Amber, the gigantic cast of characters means that most of them end up feeling a bit shallow. I wanted to spend more time with most of them, to get to know them beyond just the image they put up.
Chill's big denouement felt a bit weak: not the event itself, the battle at and with the Leviathan that the long-dead crew imprisoned, but the reason behind it all. And Grail... the contact with the unexpected inhabitants of the planet they're heading for is handled so well on a character and dialogue level, and then the conflict is resolved by an almost literal deus ex machina.
Don't read these for the coherent plot, is I guess what I'm saying. Read them for the atmosphere and the characters and the journey. For Mallory the necromancer/gardener and the grove of fruit trees with dead people's memories, for the sentient carnivorous plants and Benedick's animate toolkit. For Perceval's wings, and Rien's bravery, and the Corwinesque Prince Tristen and solid practical Chief Engineer Caitlin.
Delightful, if unsatisfying. Recommended.