I finished this last night, took me ages to read. That has more to do with how little time I devote to reading fiction than it does to Scalzi’s writing (although the style was a little offputting to me, but I got used to it)
I liked the book as I read it, especially the diversity of alien life represented in the book. But my lingering thoughts this morning are about the ways this book is so clearly by a man. To clarify, I almost exclusively read a subgenre of speculative fiction, a subgenre of the subgenre social science fiction– feminist speculative fiction. 99% of the time, I read fiction written by women. This is somewhat by design; I can suspend disbelief about a variety of science fictional premises, but I find it unacceptable jarring to be asked to enter worlds where women are simply and unquestioningly their tits or their sexual role or absent or otherwise one dimensional and false.
Scalzi doesn’t do that. Certainly, a man is the main character, and the book would not pass the the Bedchel test (there are multiple named female characters, but they never talk to each other). But that’s OK, the women characters are as fully drawn as other characters and are not marginalized in any way. That wasn’t the part that bugged me.
So what made me feel the maleness of the author so profoundly? I think it was the lack of anthropology.
I don’t know if it’s related to gender, or just to the women authors I read, but I find myself missing the answers to the questions about what the alien life is like. Even when that isn’t the point of the book, the authors I read would have included some aside about the handicrafts or housing peculiarities of the 1″ tall humanoid species, of the whalelike species that polymerize water, of the lobsterlike species with additional humanoid hands….
This morning I found myself drowsing in bed this morning wondering about the cool ability of inch tall humanoids to do fine electronics work, and how valuable that would be. And wondering if their swimming pools would make interesting bracelets. I know it’s not the book Scalzi wrote, but the complete absence of those tiny details has also made me realize the absence of those details in the story Scalzi focused on, and this lessened the book for me.
