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Dust
By Elizabeth Bear
A. bought this, via an amazon wishlist she'd had success with in the past, unaware that I'd been considering picking up some of her work after reading Shadow Unit, the collaborative (and excellent x-files like short fiction, nto to mention the two wonderful short stories by her read out on Escape Pod and (I think) Starship Sofa. "And the deep blue sea" is one of my all-time favorite short fiction podcasts..
Dust is a hard science fiction novel, in that it takes binary stars, colony ships, nanotechnology, genetic (and social) engineering, and extrapolates a 'what if'. I'm not usually a fan of such fiction - the last one I read (Blindsight by Peter Watts), was technically good but had no soul or decent characterisation. Dust doesn't have this problem - its definately character driven, with mostly-believable protagonists. Some of the sexual politics in the book were just odd - Bear doesn't seem to have made up her mind how she wants to portray certain characters - or perhaps thats her way of conveying the confusion within them. I liked the way that the background and such of the world were not laid out, but enough hinted that you could work some out, and wonder about others. It carries, like all of her work, an underlying theme of redemption (English Lit essay; all of Bear's work address redemption in some form or other, discuss.). Overall, it wasn't as engrossing as some of her other work - A thinks its an earlier work, and later work (Like "New Amsterdam", which I'm keen on getting) would be more polished. Well, it was published first in 2007, so maybe - she certainly seems a more prolific author than I thought.
I'll be purchasing more of her work, for certain.

Posted at: 10:16:00 13 Jul 2008 [/books] permanent link