What Were You Thinking Wednesday

[evelyn_b]

What I've Finished Reading

Stardoc was exactly the book I wanted it to be, except when it really, really wasn't. Dr. Cherijo Grey Veil proves herself as a space doctor, does her best to ignore her creepy mad scientist dad, finds love, and learns to believe in herself. There's a pretty cool medical mystery for Cherijo to solve (unfortunately it's a deadly epidemic, but that's how medical mysteries are sometimes) and it ends with exciting plot twists and a flight into the unknown. The exobiology is inventive, the narrative voice is brisk and bright, the characters are on the flat side but not in a bad way. It's like watching a fun, light TV show set in space.

Except for the rape plot, which was like watching an incredibly stupid TV show set in space.

I'm putting this under a cut AND breaking out the whitetext because it's spoiling time!


One thing leads to another during the epidemic, and Cherijo gets herself locked in a plot box with the most unattractive of her love interests. [Highlight the white text for spoilers aplenty: An alien entity takes this opportunity to take over the ULI's body and force him to rape her. It's a drawn-out, unpleasant scene (on purpose) and it definitely throws some fetid water on my fun parade, but ok. My fun parade is resilient.

The ULI's response when he gets his mind back, though, isn't to apologize, or even to avoid Cherijo, which would be understandable enough. Instead, he pesters her relentlessly, trying to explain that it wasn't really rape at all, because he (a telepath) already knew that she wanted to have sex with him in his non-mind-controlled state, so what difference did it make if a completely different person hijacked his body to attack her with? It's still his body and she's totally into his body, so it's the same thing, right??

>:|

Telepaths and the possession-prone please note: it is not the same thing.

Viehl doesn't gloss over how infuriating this convoluted line of reasoning is, but she also wastes no time killing off Cherijo's more attractive love interest (a suave space monogamist) and finding new ways to shove Captain Convolution into the foreground, where he and the narrator persist in needling Cherijo for not letting bygones be bygones. I'm concerned that her goal is to get them together for real, and I'm not feeling it in the least. How are we supposed to root for this guy when he can't even work out why anyone would object to his airtight telepath logic?]


Other than that, it's fun. On balance, I liked it a lot; if it weren't for Captain Convolution and his sorry telepath excuses I would have loved it. I haven't decided yet if I'm going to actively seek out the next book, or just wait and see if it falls into my path.

What I'm Reading Now

I wasted all my time complaining about Stardoc and now it's after noon and I have to get back to work. What I'm reading now is Love and the Loveless (subtitled A Soldier's Tale and the third Book of the War), which is knees-deep in mud, and A for Alibi, which is just as good as C for Corpse. Also Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome by Donald G. Kyle, which has a beautiful origin story: this guy was whipping up murderous tales of arena gore for his Gen Ed students, when one of them suddenly said, "What did they do with all the bodies?" He realized he had no idea what they did with all the bodies, and a book was born.

What I Plan to Read Next

Words, words, words.

Comments

[asakiyume]

Ugh, I hate it when the author apparently is rooting for a character as a love interest who's exactly NOT who I want for a love interest.

[evelyn_b]

There are definitely times when I enjoy having a shipper on deck, but this wasn't one of those times. I liked Cherijo's original love interest, the suave space monogamist, and didn't appreciate him being tossed off the plot bus to make room for a boring human with no boundaries and no discernible traits other than pushiness and flat affect. It didn't kill the book for me, but it was a nuisance.

[liadt]

Yeah, not the kind of telepath mind set I want in fun reading:/

Now, killer eyewear, that's a different matter!;p

[evelyn_b]

He's the worst, and not in a fun way. Apart from The Incident, he's always trying to paralyze Cherijo with his mind so he can tell her some important thing without having to bother being convincing or making an appointment like a normal person.

[liadt]

Sounds like it wouldn't take much to take over when he's scummy from the start:/

[brigdh]

You know, when you said the rape plot was stupid, I was expecting the twist to be that the telepath complained he was possessed, which is like mind-rape, so really he's suffered the more of the two of them! And I was prepared to sigh and wish that every rape plot didn't somehow become about the man-pain, but I suppose the author wasn't wrong exactly, it would really suck to have your body taken control of by someone else....

And then you said what actually happened, and wow. That is way worse that I could possibly have imagined. The rest of the book must have been *really* good if you're willing to keep reading the series after that!

[evelyn_b]

I KNOW. I read the passage over like 4 times because I couldn't believe my eyes! It would still have been bad form to complain about his suffering as a mind-rape victim to the victim of his unintended body rape, but at least IT'S TRUE IT WOULD SUCK YOU CAN'T DENY THAT. But it's not even that it becomes all about his man-pain - that would be tiresome but UNDERSTANDABLE, given the nature of pain - it's that he genuinely doesn't think he has anything to be pained about - and that the author seems to sympathize with his way of looking at things.

"Really good" is probably a little strong - more like it pushed some very large and obvious buttons, and I'm not too picky if I can have doctors in space. But I did enjoy it a lot. Part of me is even enjoying boggling at the rape plot, though as usual I would have preferred no rape at all.