yrgirlkv

"it's yr girl; you already know!"

—dj who is not yr girl and who you do not know at all

sister @cass | mom @pegasus-poetry | writer/designer @ songs for the dusk, sunblack | asexual @ large

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(crossposted from goodreads)

I have been following Seth Dickinson's work on the lore of Destiny since 2014. I am deeply fond of the idiosyncrasies present within it. This book needed a tighter edit.

If there's one thing I've noticed, from Three Bodies at Mitanni throughout most of their Destiny writing and proceeding all the way into Exordia, it's this: the question they're struggling with is what if violence will always win over kindness? What if this victory is as physically inevitable as gravity? Mitanni was about humans deciding whether to cull a branched subspecies because it had become hyperoptimized to pursue survival by cruelty, and the laws of evolution inevitably mean that the most survival-optimized species will eliminate all the others until it controls the galaxy. Destiny and Exordia both posit a world in which something like magic comes to exist just to allow for a cosmos that can sustain human life in the face of swarms of gray goo, something that rewards and sustains minds and souls like ours instead of simply handing the game of natural selection over to forms of life with all the personality of a virus.

Anyway after they set this up in Exordia they spends like eight hundred pages doing not just military sci-fi but really boring military sci-fi. Look, Halo: Reach is one of my favorite video games, so you know I love me some good military slang being tossed around, but you gotta pace it better than this.


I don't want to linger on the pacing issues overlong here because I think lots of other reviewers will probably already have covered them. Instead I think the thing I really want to talk about is race and empire and trauma here, because there is something between Anna and Clayton that really weirds me out that I struggle to find words for. I do not, to be clear, expect anybody to ensure that all their characters of color are morally virtuous (though hoo boy, the optics of Clayton and Erik's relationship is ripe for digging into if someone else wanted to); what I do find somewhat odd is the way that much of these characters' sexuality feels tied up in their experiences of racialized trauma. Ssrin and Anna's relationship is, of course, yuri; what's weird about it is that feels as though the book is asserting that Anna's trauma is what makes her sexy, in a kind of "rabid hot damaged girl" way that is indulged more than it's ever commented on. Perhaps this is a particular frustration of mine; I've seen plenty of people pull this about their own scars, a kind of "well, if I have to be damaged I can at least be sexy about it" trade that I suppose makes a certain kind of sense. Nevertheless, I wish it was less of a thing here.

Clayton, for his part, has a relationship with Erik I think I'd be a lot more amused by in a vacuum but which I find a bit harder to enjoy when they're both so tangled up in imperial power. Their backstory is extremely funny, and feels calculated to force readers critical of American imperialism to accept them in spite of their connections with the American military: no, look, they did a black op to assassinate American war criminals who wouldn't get prosecuted! They're like antiheroes! But this is where I come back to the question of indulgence. It feels like I'm having someone trying to justify including sympathetic American military characters because they want to include fighter jets and superspy double dealing, but I think an honest confrontation of American imperialism would not make these dudes Funny Evangelion Nerds who've read Marx and Anzaldua and who happen to have wound up in the military; it would make them the same types of thoughtless racists who repeat the racial slurs Seth very amusingly twists their way out of actually putting onto the page. I like the idea of Clayton and Erik; I'm not sure I buy them, and I'm not sure this book benefits from being cavalier about who they are and their role in enabling genocides both in Kurdistan and elsewhere.

I sound like I'm being mean and probably I am; I genuinely grinned to myself on several occasions because I've read so much of Dickinson's work, and I've developed a kind of parasocial affection for the quirks of their writing. They are, undoubtedly, one of my favorite sci-fi authors (may I someday develop the strength to return to Baru Cormorant without feeling debilitatingly sad) and arguably one of the best. Their influence will forever find its way into my own creative efforts. Exordia is, I think, an image of them at their most themself; I didn't love everything about it but I'm fond of it still, and if anybody deserved a chance to put all their interests onto the page like this, they did.


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in reply to @yrgirlkv's post:

well said. one of my expectations going into the book was seth's ability to write from multiple povs with wildly different worldviews (having read baru through previously), i was disappointed at the bulk of the political agency and nuance and interior being given over to the american/kurdish characters. like no iranian or russian or chinese characters really analyze their own states' ideologies the way that the relationship between the american empire and the americans is explored in depth.
also the book is set at around the time that american foreign policy is taking a more aggressive posture against china, felt like a missed opportunity to bring in macro-geopolitics to complement the research that seth did on regional geopolitics, among other things that i wished could have been in the book other than chapters and chapters of gunfights... <== didn't enjoy the combat much