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Titan Q1: Characters
The narrative starts with the Ringmaster and crew in Saturn Space. How do the crew seem to act, compared to how they act afterward on Gaia? Who are the main characters of the story? What do you thinnk of Cirocco Jones as a leader? As a heroine? What characters appealed to you? How was the author at creating and maintaining characters?
Comments
Opening the novel with a sex scene was ... a choice. It certainly distinguishes the novel from the asexual stories of Clark and Asimov.
This was a novel very much in the tradition of Big Dumb Object, so the characters weren't the focus of attention.
Jones as a character: she seemed a little flat to me, and a little simple to be an interesting character. She certainly wasn't a good leader of that sort of team. With high-performing, ambitious people, you don't give orders: you lay out proposals and argue why one is better.
The strangeness of the characters after their "rebirth" was well done, I thought. The were obviously changed people from the sort that would be astronauts on that mission, and those changes had consistent effects in the rest of the novel.
As I mentioned in my march book roundup at The Agora, one thing I really appreciate about Varley is that he's the only male author I'm aware of that will put so much effort into understanding women and portraying women's issues. He's also been very actively normalizing gender fluidity, not so much in this novel, but in his short stories and in Steel Beach, which we read during the G+ years with Mischa. So yes, it's a very different style from Clarke and Asimov. It's interesting that the back cover quotes Asimov describing Varley as 'the next Heinlein' but I don't see that much resemblance - maybe in the prose styling. Once thing I do know (via Varley's introductions to the stories in his short story collection, The John Varley Reader, is that he was first inspired to write SF by his reading of Niven, so it comes as no surprise to find a very Niven-inspired work. Varley also attended Clarion workshops, which a lot of successful SF writers did, so that was probably also a big influence.
Now, as to characters - we're dealing mostly with the crew which seemed to be fairly well-rounded, within the subset of white Americans, anyway. Maybe they weren't all white (was skin colour ever even mentioned? Maybe it was) but they were certainly all 'melting pot' Americans. Given the time of writing, that was a pretty common thing. I thought they were different enough to be interesting - especially as a group - but character development wasn't all that deep.
Cirocco Jones (I hated her name, btw, and especially the fact it was pronounced 'shirocco' - named after Varley's rescue dog, per the intro.) She seemed very much like a made-up character. But she was 'every-person' enough to identify with her, so it wasn't too hard to get past this. The other characters were more diverse and interesting. Not so much the aliens, except Gaia herself, who did have a character (multiple ones, it turned out). Even so, I think the characters were more lively than Clarke or possibly Niven would have turned out. And I think Varley was probably better at portraying women than most other male SF writers.
Turning up late to the party
I kind of agree with what has been said. The crew in their original personas were OK but not overwhelmingly convincing... but then they were all changed in one way or another, and the changes were (IMHO) more interesting than the originals. Now, we needed Cirocco (I agree with @Apocryphal ... I've always pronounced it s- rather than sh- though looking up on Wiki suggests that various languages are split as to what exact sibilant is used, and so maybe sh- makes sense to a lot of folk). Sorry, I digressed. We needed Cirocco to be almost the same so we could follow her through the transformation, so it was good that she came out broadly unscathed, while the rest were more or less radically different. The changes made for a good story, as we weren't sure (along with Cirocco) exactly how anyone was going to respond or act. The most poignant was (of course) the twins / clones who were forcibly torn apart, but those transformations kind of drove the story along in a good way.
Very Niven, especially very Ringworld (I mean, calling the ship Ringmaster was kind of a giveaway) but I did enjoy those of the many allusions which I spotted. It ran the risk of being totally nerdy but I think just about avoided that,
Actually April apparently did not become pregnant. I always wondered why... possibly because she was no longer human, and therefore Gaia did not want a hybrid Titan/Angel?
Very true... consider my question suitably modified... and I suppose this was potentially another way of separating April and August, though this particular way never got explored (in fact part of my original thinking was that the whole pregnancy bit never (so far as I recall) got mentioned ever again?
I don't think anyone WANTED to mention it. A very ugly incident...
> I don't think anyone WANTED to mention it. A very ugly incident...
Yes, I agree that the characters would not have wanted to mention it... but why didn't the _author_ follow it up?
Now I look back at the book it feels a bit like a series of episodes strung together and then left behind. Kind of like a Star Trek original series way of telling the story rather than DS9, so there's not much by way of follow on implications of events which were actually very traumatic.
For me as a reader it was ugly and raw. Maybe he felt like that was enough? I don't know. I did.
It's a general issue. On the one hand, I like that Varley treats sex as something normal for adult humans (unlike Clarke or Asimov). On the other hand, I think Varley is clumsy if not offensive every time he brings it up.