Elizabeth Bear, Chill. Spectra, 2010 (US): mass market paperback.
My review of Elizabeth Bear’s Chill, the second volume of her Jacob’s Ladder trilogy, is now online at Strange Horizons. Reviewing the middle volume of a trilogy is an odd and discomfiting business. A review of a complete work allows for something approaching definitiveness–not in capturing an author’s intentions, but in giving one’s own reading of a text. When reviewing the second book of a trilogy, however, that reading becomes highly provisional. I wondered in this review, as an example, at two characters using the same metaphor for the same story element within a few pages of each other. Was this just a slip, a metaphor that had been in the author’s mind and so was used twice inadvertently? Or was it a way of signaling something within the story? I’ve seen similar repetitions used in science fiction to indicate that characters were clones of each other, to give one possibility–in this case, both characters are bonded to symbiont nanocomputers, and so it might also be a way of indicating the manner in which such symbionts shape and constrain thoughts; maybe the shared thoughts are a sign of decreasing bandwidth. Or more prosaically, maybe both characters simply heard another person use the metaphor and it stuck with both of them. There’s no way of knowing at this point. To call it out critically is thus to say, and to say only, that I can’t see a possibility latent in the text that makes the awkwardness of the repetition necessary.
But this assumes I haven’t missed a possibility. And that, of course, is a possibility.
Selected past reviews at other venues:
- Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share Without Knowing
- Avram Davidson, Adventures in Unhistory
- David Louis Edelman, MultiReal
- Theodora Goss, In the Forest of Forgetting
- Brent Hartinger, Dreamquest
- Brent Hayward, Filaria
- David Marusek, Getting to Know You
- J.M. McDermott, Last Dragon
- Patricia McKillip, Od Magic
- Geoff Ryman, Ed., When It Changed: Science Into Fiction
- Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss (eds), Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing
- Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem, The Man on the Ceiling
- Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest
- Peter Watts, Blindsight
- Robert Freeman Wexler, The Painting and The City
- Zoran Zivkovic, The Last Book
- Zoran Zivkovic, Seven Touches of Music
- Zoran Zivkovic, Steps Through the Mist
