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  NeilNjae

  October 5

  It was an odd one. It took me a while to understand why it was a SF book at all. The first chunk didn't make any real reference to anything other than early-Modern technology, and it also took a while for me to work out what the book was trying to say, what it was about.

  However, it was intriguing enough that I kept with it, and the wider scope eventually became apparent. That part of it reminded me a little of le Guin's Always Coming Home, which wandered for a long while before I worked out what the author was trying to say.

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  RichardAbbott

  October 5

  I also hadn't expected the format to be what it was, and it reminded me a bit of City in the sense of having multiple linked tales. But the links here were much more direct from one story to the next - there was a sense of one word or idea being introduced towards the end of each story, which was then picked up and amplified in the next.

  For me, this sense of linking but without really knowing where the chain was going worked very well - like @NeilNjae I was a bit perplexed at first but was keen to stay with it. Ultimately I really liked it and thought it well worth reading.

  The start with early modern tech and no sense of why this was the starting point reminded me of some AE van Vogt, though I think he would have gone off in a different, esoteric mind-improvement direction!

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  kcaryths

  3:19AM

  I really loved this book. Easy to read, had some great scenes, and the scope of the revenge tale combined with how little the massive revenge really mattered to the current Emperor really gave me a creeping doom sort of feeling. The way the book started small and then slowly eased its way out to the scale it did was also a lot of fun and kept me engaged throughout. These are the types of SF books I really enjoy.

  I am unsure if it reminded me of anything in particular. How High We Go in the Dark had that sort of interconnected story setup to it, but this had a scale to the story well beyond that book.

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  Apocryphal

  1:21PM

  I also really enjoyed the book. Most of the comments I had seen about it before reading it focussed on the carpet weavers and mentioned the domesticity of the book, so I was expecting it to be more like Ryman's Air, with a focus on a small community and the things they do there. So the expanding out to a broader empire was not something I expected. Not to say it surprised me, either. I had more of an 'ah, that makes sense' moment.

  The book put me in mind of a few other books. I wouldn't say this book was 'like' those, just that aspects of this book reminded me of aspects of those. The empire level views made me think of Asimov's Foundation in the way it felt a bit like the empire itself was something of a chessboard upon which pieces were moved. The stupid and extravagant revenge really reminded me of Jodorowsky's Metabarons graphic novels where this kind of over the top thing happens all the time.

  In a less obvious way, the early part of the book reminded me of Donald Kingsbury's 1982 novel Courtship Rite, which takes place on a single planet rather remote from everything else. In that book, strange cultures have developed that might make little sense to us. It's also a male-centric culture, and there's a certain brutality to the culture. But in the case of that book, we get a whole 300+page (and sometimes long-winded) novel about the local families and their machinations.

  I sometimes see The Hair-Carpet Wavers classified as a Space Opera. At first I wasn't so sure it slots into any subgenre so neatly, but when I think in terms of the origin of the name 'space opera' as being derived from 'horse opera' - essentially a Western, in space, I do think I can rather clearly see it's roots in the Westerns, and I think this story could be re-skinned as a western without too much difficulty.

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