Further Additions To The To-Read List

[redbrunja]

Dune, Frank Herbert

100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez

The Summer Tree, Guy Gavriel Kay

Comments

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Dune is a bit of a mixed bag. I first read it when I was in junior high or thereabouts, absolutely got sucked into it and loved it to bits, then was so eager for more that I raced to the sequels...and found them all so utterly disappointing that I gave up after book 3 or 4 in disgust. The original is still enough of a nostalgic favorite that I reread it periodically, but I have never had any temptation to go back and try the later volumes again. I'm curious to see what you will think about it, because looking at it from a more critical adult perspective rather than a haze of nostalgia, it's a mixed bag. I still adore the depth of the worldbuilding, the political intrigues and the focus on ecological and environmental issues; there's also a lot of attention given to religious issues in these future societies, which is something I've often found lacking in a lot of SF, where many authors seem to presume that in the future everybody's going to have evolved past caring about such things. There's one society that's very vividly drawn, who are clearly heavily based on Islamic and Arabic models, are literally depicted as engaging in jihad against a more Western, colonialist empire...and they're drawn sympathetically, which is something I imagine would be pretty much seen as unpublishable if it had gone to the U.S. market post-9/11, rather than during the Cold War. BUT...there's a bit of skeevy Orientalism and "what these people need is a honky" syndrome going on in the main plotline that's rather uncomfortably close to Lawrence of Arabia with messianic elements. And I suspect this will be an issue for you, Herbert's treatment of women is pretty frustrating. There are some incredibly strong, appealing female characters who are full of awesome potential, but the text keeps undercutting them because Herbert cannot seem to write women outside of their relationship to men -- they're wives, concubines, girlfriends, daughters, mothers, and for all their brains and talents and skills they essentially are defined by and subordinate and self-sacrificing to their relationship with the men in their life. I didn't notice this as much when I was younger because at that point in time, just finding that many female characters who were active was refreshing, but now I can't help thinking how much more awesome it all could have been in the hands of a writer with a better grasp on gender issues. As Cho has recced to you in the past, I'd also suggest looking at Donald Kingsbury's Courtship Rite to see something that gives you a similar sense of a huge sweep of history, vivid cultural worldbuilding, realistically complex religious and political disputes, but all done by a writer who's better at keeping in mind that women are *people*, not just adjuncts and accessories for men.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

*nods*

I'm very curious to read Dune myself. I feel like I've heard it's not great with the women before, but again, it's such a classic of Sci-fi that I want to give the book a shot just to see what I think.