Ancestral Night 5: Locations
The book is spread across an enormous variety of different environments and situations. Did you have a personal favourite?
Welcome to the Tabletop Roleplayers' Book Club!
Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Categories
In this Discussion
Help offset server costs by donating. This is totally optional. Any overages will go to library fines or new books.
Comments
I liked the description of Singer, but I did wonder a bit about how the three of them managed to get along so well in such a small space over a long time. Perhaps there was some mental adjustment going on? The stations were well-described, with the different environments suited for different species. I liked the detail of the BYOB Turkish restaurant!
I guess rightminding is powerful stuff
Doesn't Haimey have her emotions turned off until Farweather breaks her fox? I thought there were only two of them in the ship - the third being the non-physical servant type ship mind. Was I mistaken? Anyway, I honestly didn't remark on any of the locations - none stood out for me.
I think she had had her sexual-response emotions turned off, but everything else left "running" with the expectation she would control responses herself via rightminding. But regarding sex and intimacy she no longer trusted herself after (what she remembers as) the disastrous relationship with Niyara.
I thought the flatness of the locations could have been a strength when discussing rightminding, but it never went anywhere. Combined with the flatness of Hainey's affect, or perhaps due to it, I wasn't ever really invested. I think it striking that Bear doesn't provide any real description of the Pirate locations.
I agree, there is little flavor of place. One of very few niggles I had with this book. It was like a cross country trip novel where they always stay at a Red Roof Inn.
Not sure if this is Bear posing the question or me - if you have any sort of unifying galactic organisation, do all localised differences tend to be obliterated over time? It's a question we face now as you travel round England or Europe (or presumably America). It's also one which is posed from time to time in Star Trek - there's a DS9 episode in which Garak and Quark lament that the Federation, left to its own devices, would make everything taste like root beer.
Whether Bear was consciously setting out this scenario or not I can't say, but it seems to me possible that she was deliberately showing how things tend to become more similar in an originally diverse society. The only ones that stood out were either radically different life-forms who just didn't care about conforming (like the Ativahikas), or groups perceived as hostile and antisocial (like the pirates).
There is some truth to this! This is why Toronto is used when filming many movies and TV shows as a stand-in for Cleveland or other generic big cities, Then again, when you see New York or Boston or Pittsburgh or Denver portrayed in fictional media. they are always themselves. In my own experience, Toronto has a very strong personality of its own if you look beyond the glass and steel towers. I quite liked it.
I would agree. Whether or not it's intentional, it's an effect.
I think you're mixing social organisation with the social activity of unifying. The analogy of organisation is that society is like a body inside which are organs necessary for its existence, but a body of only kidneys is, well, not a body.
And I think what you mean by unifying is that society is like a body eating bodies, e.g. we eat all kinds of different vegetables, we were never vegetables and won't become so, and they are destroyed as they are incorporated into us. In a certain way it makes sense to say no new thing is produced, and only things are lost.
However there are other kinds of unifying, e.g. sexual union among bodies works differently - by coupling something new is produced that doesn't necessarily consume the bodies of its forebears. Yet sexual union does have social unifying power by creating opportunity for perpetual care, in contrast to eating which repeatedly fails to eliminate hunger.
I don't see any actual critique of society's ideological super-structures in this novel, so I don't think she was consciously setting this out, especially as we have so much discussion of other social structures. And I don't think the society was originally diverse - it just assimilated most of what it encountered, like a hungry body that is never satisfied. Sad really.
Which in a slightly off-the-point way links to DS9 again - the war between the Federation and the Dominion might be seen as one between a society that at least claims to be diverse and made up of diverse individuals, as against one which is monolithic and made up (strictly, governed by) individuals who are undifferentiated in the extreme. So far as we can tell, the Founders of the Dominion have no analogue to a mixture of organs inside their bodies, but are made of unspecific goo that can simply be remodelled into whatever shape is useful or interesting at the time.
Yes, a good point.
I was thinking that the Synarche must have originally contained diversity if only because of the many species from many different kinds of world from which it was formed. This is something Bear explores a little more in Machine largely by way of one species' instinctive reaction to another, which in proper Synarche cultural terms has to be handled by way of rightminding rather than gut reaction. But I agree a lot of that is left understated in this book, and I suspect that I am mentally combining both novels into a composite.