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dolorosa_12) wrote2020-07-31 08:52 am
dolorosa_12) wrote2020-07-31 08:52 am
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Unconquerable Sun
I've mentioned Kate Elliott's latest book, Unconquerable Sun — a space opera about a gender-swapped Alexander the Great — several times in previous posts. As Elliott is one of my favourite authors, I felt the book warranted a longer post than a few lines in my monthly reading roundup.
The 'Sun' in the title refers to the eponymous Alexander analogue in this book — the first in a trilogy — who is the daughter of Queen-Marshal Eirene, a powerful woman who rules a vast interplanetary empire. (Queen-Marshal appears to be a gender neutral, or default title, as there are references to past male queen-marshals, or at least holders of the title who used he/him pronouns.) She's returned back to her mother's court after some early success in battle, and is having difficulty navigating the various political factions that are manoeuvring for influence, and is much more comfortable surrounded by her group of Companions — close friends from various powerful families who were brought up with her and accompanied her into battle. Meanwhile, we also have chapters from the points of view of two other women — Persephone Lee, daughter of one of the most scheming and influential families, whose brother is one of Sun's Companions, and who has fled from the weight of familial expectation into anonymity in a military training academy, and Apama, making her way through the ranks of the military in the rival Phene empire.
This is a hard book for me to review. I consider Kate Elliott a friendly acquaintance; around this time last year she was reading from the book at Worldcon in Dublin and telling me that I had written the best and most perceptive review she had ever read of her Crossroads series. The new novel does all the things well that Kate Elliott does best: matriarchal societies with lots of prominent older women, power that doesn't just come from military might and a commitment to making heroic the ordinary labour of everyday life, intricate and thoughtful worldbuilding that considers questions such as where does people's food come from, and what is the economic basis for the various societies, complicated family relationships, and perceptive glimpses into the lives of ordinary people. When it focused on these elements, the story sang, and I enjoyed it immensely.
The problem I had with the book is more a me problem than a Kate Elliott problem: I have always found it impossible to relate to, and empathise with, and therefore be drawn into, works of fiction whose characters are unquestioning parts of the military. People using violence to resist an occupying force is fine, and guerrillas and revolutionaries are fine, but I have always been incapable of engaging on a deeper level with stories told from the point of view of people for whom joining their country/empire's military is seen as admirable and desirable, and who, having joined said military, unquestioningly accept its hierarchy, aims, and orders. I find them at best unengaging and unsympathetic, and at worst repellant as characters. A book where all point-of-view characters are in the military, all of whom view expanding their respective empires as an admirable thing, and where large portions of the plot are dedicated to descriptions of (for me confusing and hard to follow) aerial battles in space is never going to be greatly appealling to me.
On a surface level, I could see that all this military stuff was done well, but I found my mind wandering whenever I was reading the battle components, and drawn back in when the narrative returned to scenes of court intrigue and backstabbing, or domestic moments in the households of working class or refugee families. I trust Elliott not to write an uncritical story of empire-building (she's always so good at deftly puncturing the illusions of old SFF tropes and themes), but I worry that I might not be able to remain engaged in it for an entire trilogy.
The 'Sun' in the title refers to the eponymous Alexander analogue in this book — the first in a trilogy — who is the daughter of Queen-Marshal Eirene, a powerful woman who rules a vast interplanetary empire. (Queen-Marshal appears to be a gender neutral, or default title, as there are references to past male queen-marshals, or at least holders of the title who used he/him pronouns.) She's returned back to her mother's court after some early success in battle, and is having difficulty navigating the various political factions that are manoeuvring for influence, and is much more comfortable surrounded by her group of Companions — close friends from various powerful families who were brought up with her and accompanied her into battle. Meanwhile, we also have chapters from the points of view of two other women — Persephone Lee, daughter of one of the most scheming and influential families, whose brother is one of Sun's Companions, and who has fled from the weight of familial expectation into anonymity in a military training academy, and Apama, making her way through the ranks of the military in the rival Phene empire.
This is a hard book for me to review. I consider Kate Elliott a friendly acquaintance; around this time last year she was reading from the book at Worldcon in Dublin and telling me that I had written the best and most perceptive review she had ever read of her Crossroads series. The new novel does all the things well that Kate Elliott does best: matriarchal societies with lots of prominent older women, power that doesn't just come from military might and a commitment to making heroic the ordinary labour of everyday life, intricate and thoughtful worldbuilding that considers questions such as where does people's food come from, and what is the economic basis for the various societies, complicated family relationships, and perceptive glimpses into the lives of ordinary people. When it focused on these elements, the story sang, and I enjoyed it immensely.
The problem I had with the book is more a me problem than a Kate Elliott problem: I have always found it impossible to relate to, and empathise with, and therefore be drawn into, works of fiction whose characters are unquestioning parts of the military. People using violence to resist an occupying force is fine, and guerrillas and revolutionaries are fine, but I have always been incapable of engaging on a deeper level with stories told from the point of view of people for whom joining their country/empire's military is seen as admirable and desirable, and who, having joined said military, unquestioningly accept its hierarchy, aims, and orders. I find them at best unengaging and unsympathetic, and at worst repellant as characters. A book where all point-of-view characters are in the military, all of whom view expanding their respective empires as an admirable thing, and where large portions of the plot are dedicated to descriptions of (for me confusing and hard to follow) aerial battles in space is never going to be greatly appealling to me.
On a surface level, I could see that all this military stuff was done well, but I found my mind wandering whenever I was reading the battle components, and drawn back in when the narrative returned to scenes of court intrigue and backstabbing, or domestic moments in the households of working class or refugee families. I trust Elliott not to write an uncritical story of empire-building (she's always so good at deftly puncturing the illusions of old SFF tropes and themes), but I worry that I might not be able to remain engaged in it for an entire trilogy.
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I don't necessarily have the same issue with reading military stories, depending on how they're handled, but I've never read Elliott before, and since it seems like this wasn't your favorite, can you recommend a better starting point?
*most important question does the Alexander equivalent have a Buchephalus equivalent?
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most important question does the Alexander equivalent have a Buchephalus equivalent?
Yes! It's a spaceship, and it's awesome!
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I can be rather drawn to military characters, but not if they don't question it! I guess I have a weakness for characters who are a part of the military (or other institutions) and went into it because they wanted to do good things, but then they see the problems that they are part of, and are torn between doing their sworn duty to that organization and their other obligations/goals. These kinds of dilemmas where characters are torn between duty/honour/love/moral principles can be catnip to me. *points to current fandom*
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GOD YES. Just...yes.
I'm glad to have this warning; it'll help me set my expectations when I read the book. It sounds like there are enough other things going on that it would be worth reading.
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I know for a fact that Kate Elliott had a massive, potentially lifelong Alexander the Great phase (one of her sons is even named Alexander), and I strongly suspect that this novel — a real labour of love — is doing exactly the thing you're describing. I think you will enjoy the novel if you had a similar phase — there were some things that I recognised (the spaceship called Bucephalus), but I suspect a lot of the references went over my head.
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You and I differ in that I enjoy a lot of military fiction, and have a particular soft spot for military academy stories. It's kind of a weird reading penchant, in the sense that my dad was a conscientious objector and I myself am a committed pacifist, but I like stories about people dealing with the conflict between the systems they try to live by and reality?
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I can completely understand why you enjoy that kind of conflict — I like reading about it myself, although I prefer it when the 'system' is a character's family, place in a social/political hierarchy, or things like that, and (as is probably very apparent from this post) tend to tune out when the 'system' is the military.
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I think the best way to explain it is that in the book's universe, broader groupings of people are more important than individuals: most of the societies depicted are communal rather than individualistic. And so the book is more concerned with intracommunal relationships and connections between people — their familial connections (mothers, fathers, grandparents, siblings), and their connections within organisations and hierarchies — rather than an individual person's gender identity. A lot of the names for these family or other types of relationship are names which have a gendered connotation in our world ('mother', 'Queen', 'ma'am'), but don't always match the pronouns used by the individual character (although I'm assuming that pronouns=gender, which is not necessarily true). This is not viewed by the characters as misgendering them, which is what leads me to think that gender doesn't work the same way it does in our world: either gender is unimportant to them, or titles etc that we would view as gendered are perceived as a gender neutral default in the world of the book. Hardly any of the characters seem to be straight, but given what I've just said about gender, I don't even know if the way we talk about sexual orientation can map exactly onto sexual orientation in this universe. I don't know if that makes sense?
(Which is an extremely long-winded way of saying that female!Alexander in this world is in a relationship with a woman ... if we are treating 'uses she/her pronouns' to mean 'is a woman'.)
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