A review by zonefarmer
Daughter of Elysium by Joan Slonczewski
3.0
warning: got out of bed and wrote this with no editing. It's a raddling madpersons review.
Why won't good reads let me do decimals? I'd give this a 3.5 as it waivers between liked and really liked. I was excited to contiue in Slonczewski's universe after having finished Door Into Ocean. This book continues on the same planet but centuries later. The sharer people now seem far less important in the novel other than their ideology which has now been parabolized in a story called "The Web" and a race known as Elysians rely on their approval to continue their occupation on shora. The Elysians are referred to as immortals because they live for several centuries (up to a millennia.) A husband and wife duo are the main protagonists, immigrants from the Bronze Sky. The mother Raincloud is an exceptional linguist who has been hired from afar to specialize in Urulite a language of supposedly savage people who idealize warrioship as their culture. She just also happens to be fluent in Sharer. Blackbear the father is a doctor and scientist who is helping the Elysians in genetic experiments to create even greater longevity in their people. There are also L'ites , and the Valans play a role in supplying most of their servo technologies. There becomes indeed quite a "web" of relations between all of these groups of people. The book takes a long time to get any where with it, and I'd say a lot of the world building was slow and kind of a drag for me. I'm still into Sloanczewski's universe and will contiue reading more but, I found this one quite a slow burn with not a lot of reward. Some reason the fact the "scent of passion flower" was mentioned at least half a dozen times but I think maybe more drove me crazy. There were a lot of other redundancies. Many ethical quandries were presented about overpopulation (did J.G. Ballard not already describe this as a cliche of sci-fi by the 70's? I haven't read enough sci-fi to say, but it does seem a bit cliche.) Which I find really sad considering there seems to be so much use of technology and the problem is again too many people rather than, say, the responsibility for people to use technology to benefit others. The only solution seems to be, in a spacex fashion, to terraform more planets. Which shora people for example see as unethical. I could go on but I wont ruin the book for you. I will say as far as moralism goes, this book is even more vague and blurry than Door Into Ocean. Which is fine, but why such a long slow build up to go nearly nowhere? It seems you have to be in it for the dynamic of the universe more than for any real moral development.
Why won't good reads let me do decimals? I'd give this a 3.5 as it waivers between liked and really liked. I was excited to contiue in Slonczewski's universe after having finished Door Into Ocean. This book continues on the same planet but centuries later. The sharer people now seem far less important in the novel other than their ideology which has now been parabolized in a story called "The Web" and a race known as Elysians rely on their approval to continue their occupation on shora. The Elysians are referred to as immortals because they live for several centuries (up to a millennia.) A husband and wife duo are the main protagonists, immigrants from the Bronze Sky. The mother Raincloud is an exceptional linguist who has been hired from afar to specialize in Urulite a language of supposedly savage people who idealize warrioship as their culture. She just also happens to be fluent in Sharer. Blackbear the father is a doctor and scientist who is helping the Elysians in genetic experiments to create even greater longevity in their people. There are also L'ites , and the Valans play a role in supplying most of their servo technologies. There becomes indeed quite a "web" of relations between all of these groups of people. The book takes a long time to get any where with it, and I'd say a lot of the world building was slow and kind of a drag for me. I'm still into Sloanczewski's universe and will contiue reading more but, I found this one quite a slow burn with not a lot of reward. Some reason the fact the "scent of passion flower" was mentioned at least half a dozen times but I think maybe more drove me crazy. There were a lot of other redundancies. Many ethical quandries were presented about overpopulation (did J.G. Ballard not already describe this as a cliche of sci-fi by the 70's? I haven't read enough sci-fi to say, but it does seem a bit cliche.) Which I find really sad considering there seems to be so much use of technology and the problem is again too many people rather than, say, the responsibility for people to use technology to benefit others. The only solution seems to be, in a spacex fashion, to terraform more planets. Which shora people for example see as unethical. I could go on but I wont ruin the book for you. I will say as far as moralism goes, this book is even more vague and blurry than Door Into Ocean. Which is fine, but why such a long slow build up to go nearly nowhere? It seems you have to be in it for the dynamic of the universe more than for any real moral development.