A Deepness in the Sky feels like the author know he can’t write female characters, but knows that women ought to feature in the plot, so is going really out of the way to avoid showing their viewpoint … at least, in a direct way.
There are a lot of surprise plot twists, so its hard to expand on this without plot spoliers.
Oh (not a spoiler) the second narrator is obviously not being entirely truthful. The book gets a lot better when you realise they;re supposed to be read as an unreliable narrator. (So, sure, its communications intercept of an alien species approximately rendered into English by an intelligence analyst who has been enslaved by Space Nazis … someone, somewhere, might be lying here...)
Oh (not a spoiler) the second narrator is obviously not being entirely truthful.
That’s totally a spoiler :-), but for me it was one of the most brilliant twists in the book. You have this stuff that feels like the author is doing really poor sci-fi, and then it’s revealed that the author is perfectly aware of that and is making a point about translation.
A Deepness in the Sky feels like the author know he can’t write female characters, but knows that women ought to feature in the plot, so is going really out of the way to avoid showing their viewpoint … at least, in a direct way.
There are a lot of surprise plot twists, so its hard to expand on this without plot spoliers.
Oh (not a spoiler) the second narrator is obviously not being entirely truthful. The book gets a lot better when you realise they;re supposed to be read as an unreliable narrator. (So, sure, its communications intercept of an alien species approximately rendered into English by an intelligence analyst who has been enslaved by Space Nazis … someone, somewhere, might be lying here...)
That’s totally a spoiler :-), but for me it was one of the most brilliant twists in the book. You have this stuff that feels like the author is doing really poor sci-fi, and then it’s revealed that the author is perfectly aware of that and is making a point about translation.