this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
55 points (91.0% liked)
Science Fiction
13602 readers
2 users here now
Welcome to /c/ScienceFiction
December book club canceled. Short stories instead!
We are a community for discussing all things Science Fiction. We want this to be a place for members to discuss and share everything they love about Science Fiction, whether that be books, movies, TV shows and more. Please feel free to take part and help our community grow.
- Be civil: disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally insult others.
- Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, ableist, or advocating violence will be removed.
- Spam, self promotion, trolling, and bots are not allowed
- Put (Spoilers) in the title of your post if you anticipate spoilers.
- Please use spoiler tags whenever commenting a spoiler in a non-spoiler thread.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The first book has barely any of the weird stuff. It's a slow burn and by far my favorite. Did you read the full trilogy? The second book is where the plot goes off the deep end, and the third is bonkers.
I could get into specifics but I'd have too look up chapters and sentences to quote, charachter names etc.
And as I said, the exploration of actual sci-fi concepts is solid right up to the end.
The first tome left the strongest impression on me as well. Although I remember in some detail the whole part in space with the solar system collapsing into 2 dimensions, and that's near the end. Some of these ideas were crazy cool. Thanks for letting me know about the not so neat stuff
Oh I agree, if you only look at the sci-fi stuff, the books get into tons of shit that is cool as hell.
Yes, but that was a few years ago. The scifi may have occluded the weird stuff, I guess. I wasn't so observant of the representation of women either back then, so it may totally have flown over my head
It's fairly on the nose, if you zoom out a bit and look at the plot at arms length.
You might remember that after the female lead character hibernates into the future. She's wondering where all the men are, until someone explains that men have become "feminized" to the point that they are as "frail" and "beautiful" as women. The reason given is the prolonged period of prosperity making "real" men unneeded and unattractive, which is fucking stupid.
The plot makes a point out of claiming that women lack the "ugly" parts of man making them the better half of humanity, but at the same time that those same parts are what are needed to be a pivotal person who can maintain an interstellar stalemate to save the human species.
It's basically three books worth of words that on gender boil down to men being doers and women being lookers, and that whenever either tries to step out of their role, things go wrong.
Men only being valued for what they can do, and women only being valued for how they look, is classic sexism.