Alison Sinclair (1) (1959–)

I liked this book more than I expected. Well, from the cover and the blurb, I expected more fluff. When I started reading, perhaps because of that, the book felt more stiff to me than was necessary. However, just one or two more chapters in, it had captured me, and I found it to have more depth than expected.

For one, the world is quite original. Due to a long-ago curse, half the people cannot stand the light (darkborn) and half cannot stand the dark (lightborn). The lightborn and darkborn are living side-by-side, unable to be in the same room together. The only way they can manage it is by dividing a room using a paper screen. a sign of trust in itself, because if the paper wall were to be breached, the darkborn would burn. Then there is such a thing as shadowborn, who exist on the border of the realm and aggressively attack the darkborn who live there. The darkborn cannot see, and use a sort of sonar (sonn) instead. Although there were some little issues with sonn at the beginning, where I felt there were some inconsistencies, the concept is quite intriguing.
This first book mostly follows the darkborn, but there is some interaction with the lightborn as well, since the main characters share a house with lightborn (using the paper-wall concept).

Then, the characters. I felt they were amazingly diverse. There is a psychiatrist, an aristocrat lady who despite wanting to fit into society, flaunts its rules by marrying him, and the psychiatrist's sister, who is a mage and healer, and works in a hospital (something that is equally flaunting the rules, since in darkborn society, magic is abhorred and women are expected to be ornaments). Then there is the darkborn mage who fights the shadowborn, and the lightborn assassin who is a guard of the lightborn princes.
Perhaps more importantly, the characters had a depth to them that I was not expecting. What I loved most is that although the story starts with Balthasar, the psychiatrist, before long it becomes clear that the real protagonist is his wife Telmaine. She is expected to be ornamental and tries to conform to society where she must, although it means hiding her abilities. Even while denying her own powers, she does not lack courage, however, and when events force her to use them, she is no cowering wallflower. I was glad that the men directly around her (Balthasar and the shadowhunter Ishmael) may sometimes be worried about her safety, but they also recognize her strength and the necessity of the situation and do not stand in her way. Considering that this is the society that belittles women, the number of strong women in it and the number of men who are willing to support them gives high hopes for the sequels, which I expect to focus more on lightborn society (where women are values as equals).

I think there is more to say about this book, but for now I will simply warmly recommend it to anyone interested in good fantasy.
… (meer)

Sixty-six years ago, a faction on the planet Burdania launched an interstellar expedition, against the wishes of the majority. But they had not fully understood that the backwash from their space drive would so distort space that it might render their homeworld uninhabitable. The explorers discovered Taridwyn, a barely habitable world (to them), which was already the home of a species who lived a simple life, but had mastered advanced chemistry using natural materials, and also had an advanced empathic sense. The Burdanians set up a colony that they could live in, but had little contact with the indigenous people of Taridwyn. Now, sixty-six years later, they have sent an expedition back to Burdania to see whether there were any survivors of the planetary disaster they unleashed.

This promising scenario was spoilt for me by clumsy writing. All the characters speak in a highly formal way. The text is peppered with alien words and alien names, not always consistently. I know this is a given of science fiction - after all, I've been reading sf for fifty years - but this sort of thing shouldn't get in the way of the reader's comprehension of the text. Taken too far, it will read like a parody of science fiction, the sort of thing that puts some readers off the whole genre. The invented languages showed their human roots too clearly: the aliens call themselves the kinder'el'ein, which suggests to me the German word for 'children', whilst the Burdanians have alien-sounding names, until suddenly one called 'Sara' or 'Shivaun' is thrown into the mix. (One assumes that the writer's editors assumed that the correct Irish spelling of Siobhan would be too outlandish for some readers.) Sinclair's invented alien language hasn't been thought through: The kinder'el'ein use the same construction for both the personal pronouns (he/she/it) and the personal possessive pronouns (his/hers/its), which just stopped me dead the first few times I came across it. I got used to it, but I still grumbled.

The main protagonist, Lian D'Halldt, had suffered an accident before the action of the book opens, tied in some way to the main assembly hall of the Burdanian colony and his being somehow excluded from it; so he climbed up the outside of the building but fell through the roof and suffered a head injury. As a consequence, his speech is depicted as being faltering, and it is an important part of his character's composition; as an impaired person, he sometimes has access to people and places that a more able person would not. But his halting speech does not convince; his hesitations seem to be inserted at random, instead of considering what words such an impairment would block.

The story is told in two strands; one on Taridwyn, showing Lian's relationship with one of the kinder'el'ein and exploring his background, and at the same time going in some detail into the political debate over whether a return expedition to Burdania should be undertaken; and a second, showing what happened when the expedition returned to Burdania, what they found, and how Lian plays an important part in reconciling the explorers and the survivors of the catastrophe.

(To be fair, the alien-ness of the kinder'el'ein is only gradually exposed - they are never directly described - and there are sufficient clues in the text to suggest that the Burdanians aren't wholly human. The sixty-six years since the expedition left is described as 'ten generations', which either means that the Burdanians are short-lived, or that Burdania had a shorter year. This, at least, is well done.)

I said that I found the writing clumsy. (It was not helped by poor proof-reading and sub-editing.) But the clumsiness wasn't restricted to the writing, The name 'Burdania' immediately made me think of the Marx Brothers' film Duck Soup and its land of Freedonia; and when the explorers began to talk at length about their obligations to survivors as their "burden" I inwardly groaned a little, mainly because of the amount of time I was made to wait for that obvious revelation. The plot in the Tardiwyn strand of the story is based around whether the exploration will be allowed to go ahead and will Lian be allowed on it? But we know it will go ahead and that Lian will be on it, because the Burdonian strand opens with the explorers in their ship. That segment would have been better attached to the end of the Taridwyn strand, so the Burdonian one opens with Lian already on Burdonia and making contact with the inhabitants, leaving us to speculate as to how he got there.

The whole plot, over the accident with the space drive, how it left the Burdonians, and how everyone adjusts to the return of the explorers, plays second fiddle very much to the interpersonal relationships between Lian and everyone else. His relationship with the kinder'el'ein having come to naught because of the very nature of the aliens, his encounters with the Burdonians seems from an early stage to have one end in mind, which Sinclair duly delivers.

I'm sorry not to like this book more, but it seemed to be about relationships first, and the central problem of the story second. But it is the premise of the story that attracted me to the novel in the first place. And the execution seems to me to be impaired by technical issues with the writing.… (meer)

Not quite sure why this didn't quite work for me. It's an interesting premise, but the chopping between the two teams and occasional asides to the downworlders didn't quite keep the plot moving fast enough and became confusing.

The scenario is that of a first contact team, arriving on world centuries after a plague sundered the human empire. Only about 1 in 5 colonies have survived and the team members carry their own issues from prior excursions. The world has split into at least two factions who are fighting for control over a landmass terraformed to aid human survival. The world itself is hostile, with alien proteins causing genetic damage. The small contact team splits into two groups working with each faction to try to understand the path of the plague, and equally to enable the colony to join the confederation. It's not clear how much of the landmass is occupied as we only ever deal with a few individuals.

The characterisation works quite well although there are too many characters. I liked the magnetic personality of the powerful, and crippled, leader of one faction, but never really emphasised with any of the away team members, they all seemed to have opaque motivations. From the other faction which was culturally more interesting, having divided their society up into technological based castes, there was no clear voice and it all became muddled.

Part of the difficulty is that not only does the reader have to struggle with the split teams and their various viewpoints, but also that of the downworlders and their politics and factions never really become clear. I'm fairly sure the author fully understood how that world worked, but they never quite managed to explain it to the reader.

Interesting but not quite well enough written to prompt further exploration of the series.… (meer)