The Long way to a Small Angry Planet Blind Punch - Port Coriol

[Sheri]

Feel free to describe any other thoughts you have here, but here's some questions I came up with:

The first chapter of this section describes the physics and experience of building wormholes in this universe. Were you able to follow along? What did it tell you about the crew dynamics as they prepare and execute this?

After the punch, Dr. Chef mentioned that human games all revolve around conquest. Does this feel accurate? He also mentioned it's similar to his species, which is becoming extinct. How do you think humans look against the rest of the galactic races so far?

With the new job, what do you gather from the situation as described? Do you agree that the reward is worth the risk? Do you think the crew is making a mistake?

at Port Coriol, there's a number of encounters or descriptions of different sects of humanity and other species. How do those feel compared to our normal experiences with diversity? Do the various attitudes mentioned feel familiar? Extreme?

We touched on the AI aspect of Jenks and Lovey last post, how do you feel about Peppers concerns about body kits? Does she have a point? How do you think the universe would act to a form of artificial life that more closely matched what they were used to? As in being bodied, and not locked into larger machines.

How do you feel about Sissix's encoutner with the other Aandrisk at the market? What did it tell you about their culture and who Sissix is?

How about the encounter with Ashby and Pei? How does that show their characters, and the landscape of various species interactions?

Any other thoughts?

[Megan]

Thanks again for coming up with these questions, Sheri!

I followed the wormhole explanation much better in this book than in just about any other I've read that includes them - I appreciate that the author only focused on what we need to know for the plot and didn't launch into their whole physics dissertation. :) It was totally presented the way any situation would be to someone starting a new job who's not familiar with the technology, environment, etc. but will be once they're settled in, so it definitely helped with creating the impression of the crew having worked together for a while.

Generally, I agree with Dr. Chef - as with anything else, there are exceptions, but on a worldwide level, conquest has been the defining force in human history. At this point in the story, I didn't really have a good sense of how many different planets/species were out there, so it's hard to say where humans fall on the continuum of the GC members.

I definitely had warning bells about the new job, but mostly because there are rarely books written about situations in which everything goes as planned. Based on the information presented so far, though, I completely agree that it seems like a good idea to take it - there's no reward without some level of risk in that kind of work.

I really liked how the author handled the presentation of different cultures and species - she just gave an overview without implying a bias. I haven't read too many books about human-only interactions that handle it that well, let alone multi-species stories. After I finished this book this morning, I immediately started a book by a different author with a more traditional white American way of describing characters, and it felt super cringey after seeing how it could have been done based on this one. The attitudes of the characters all read as fairly realistic to me - people definitely have biases, and there are different levels of acknowledging and dealing with them going on.

Pepper seems to have more life experience, and specifically more exposure to "bodied" AI than Jenks, so she raises a lot of good points. I think that people get used to things pretty easily over time, so I'm actually surprised that the prohibition has lasted as long as is implied in this world. If you think about all of the things we use technology for in our world that would have been unthinkable even 10 or 15 years ago, and how much attitudes have changed, I really am surprised that attitudes haven't evolved at all in the story's setting.

[SPOILERS FOR FUTURE CHAPTERS] I enjoyed reading about Sissix and the other Aandrisk, but I really thought there was going to be some significance later in terms of the other character reappearing or having some place in the larger plot. But I do realize this is a series, so I guess she could show back up in one of the other books. I appreciated that her later interaction with Rosemary was presented so differently, because I think they had very different meanings for Sissix, and overall I was particularly impressed with how the author took a character and culture that could have been reduced to comic relief and really showed the complexity and diversity of their relationships, with this interaction and the visit to Sissix's home world.

The Ashby/Pei relationship was a bit more traditional in terms of the human male and the alien-but-possessing-attractive-to-humans-sexual-characteristics female. I was glad that the descriptions weren't more graphic, since it's not that kind of story, but aside from that, I didn't find this relationship as original as some of the others in the story. But this particular conversation was interesting - I really like that the characters aren't firmly split into pacifists and warmongers like so many stories like this would do.

I also loved the recurring thing in these chapters about Krizzy's presents - the apron, how she gets presents even for the species that don't celebrate birthdays, wanting to give the soap away, the twelve days of jam cakes....