Stealing the Elf-King's Roses, by Diane Duane

[jinian]

This book, this multiverse-structure, makes me angry. I thought at first it was part of the Wizards' cosmology (what with Huichtilopochtli and all), but it's not alike, it's angry and sad. In it our world is the broken one, contagious, one that can't have commerce with other realms because they'll catch our low ethical rating. What a bunch of crap. And she specifically says that the WTC is gone, and oh I am mad. I do not see how she's going to pull this out for me. It is too late to introduce a character who would allow our leper-world to heal using a part of itself. And fuck the Elf-King and cops from a good world doing it for us.

I understand despair, but it is not fair to get me emotionally involved with this book and then slap me across the face.

All right, that was around page 360. Let's see what else happens. Dammit, I was having a good time watching the myths come together and twist around, even if I did guess that the informant was the Laurin himself. (I was probably meant to, since the revelation was small.) Fine. Let's go.

You know, this is not unlike today's lunch (a burrito with red peppers in, bleah), except I didn't know from the beginning. If I'd been on my guard I could have picked the damned things out of my reading experience.

[time passes]
Nope. Ruined the book for me. Maybe I'll try it again someday when I'm expecting it.

Broken, just broken, inimical, feh. How dare she? I live here and I like to think that we are improving. I am okay with the Lone One's alternate Manhattan in So You Want To Be A Wizard; it's scary, but the twisting was done to it, and things are not irretrievably corrupted. "Nope, sorry, birth defects" makes for an entirely different kind of book.

Hiss and spit, that's what. Grr.

She couldn't pull it out, I was right about that. The stuff about accepting Death, which usually rings like poetry, didn't get me to stop being annoyed, and, while the ending pleased me, it wasn't enough either. I'm not sure I want this book in my house right now. Anyone want to read it after my rant?

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I'm not at all sure I want to read it at all, after than rant.

That sort of thing just isn't on.

There is a weird thing about writing fantasy in a macro sense using our world, because it's misattributing real things. Tepper's Beauty annoyed me because it made homeless people time travellers from the future where everything is awful, no need to worry about the real problem. Hambly's The Magicians of Night did diminishing things with the Nazis, and while it didn't quite misattribute, the reality of them was too heavy for the fabric of the novel it was set into, which is a real pity because I loved the first one in that series.

But when it comes to saying "Despair, for this world is broken beyond mortal fixing..." well, I have a real problem with that.

It's easy enough to have made it another world if she wanted it to be a leper world for the plot.

I haven't quite been trusting Duane for a while now, nothing really big, but she's been palming cards and not having people die when they ought to.

(People say to me about my Relentlessly Mundane story, at Strange Horizons, that I should write the novel that comes after it, about saving this world, and I tell them if I knew how to save this world I'd be doing it, we're all doing it every day.)

[jinian.livejournal.com]

I've never known why I disliked Beauty, but I'm sure that will be part of it now.

There is no reason to have made it us. How many readers of speculative fiction are there who do not realize that things here have problems? I think she must have been really hurt to write it like that, and I can forgive but not excuse. I think we were meant to be in "wouldn't it be great?" space all through the book, and I certainly was at the beginning, but the detour into "because we SUCK" threw me right off the train.

As long as we're doing spoilers, well, we did eventually lose Nita's mom. But still.

I think that's a good response.

[elynne.livejournal.com]

Hm. So the thing that is raising your ire is the late-revealed plot idea that Earth is essentially broken? I think I am not quite understanding what is ireful from your post. Feel free to explain it to me... I may be interested in reading it (or at least borrowing it in perpetutity to get it off your hands), but I don't mind the spoilers.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

I don't know that I can explain. It was the way it was done, the way we couldn't help ourselves, the way the characters felt ill the whole time they were here, the way the basic evil (though she was careful not to say that) seeped into the other worlds in the sheaf and caused increased badness there. Contaminated, radioactive, feeding on itself, cancerous -- are the words she didn't use outright. The ones I used in the initial rant are hers, except for "leper". It felt hateful, and I didn't want to read it from someone I expect to be writing with hope.

[elynne.livejournal.com]

Hm... maybe I don't want to read it. Such sentiments are rather contrary to my own feelings, as well. :|

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

I like that you have your angry icon for stuff like this

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Heh. Me too. It took me long enough to get it scanned in, though.