inga-lovinde reviewed The Judas rose by Suzette Haden Elgin (The native tongue trilogy ;)
Review of 'The Judas rose' on 'GoodReads'
2 stars
What SHE got right in the first book, she got wrong in the second.
It is still the same white feminist speculative fiction. However, plot setup and world development are distorted to some self-contradicting complexity there.
In the first book, we were told that most people are agnostic/atheist, and that only some inferior women are capable of tricking themselves into believing of some god. It was said that religion is just a women's toy, which helps some women to improve their perceived quality of life. And now we suddenly learn that most people are Christians, including the almost-omnipotent chief Government Works/DAT official. Everything in the world is built around Christianity, and it is not as if we simply didn't notice it in the first book; it was explicitly said not to be the case there.
Or take another example: all that aliens plot is just a cover-up. They can speak …
What SHE got right in the first book, she got wrong in the second.
It is still the same white feminist speculative fiction. However, plot setup and world development are distorted to some self-contradicting complexity there.
In the first book, we were told that most people are agnostic/atheist, and that only some inferior women are capable of tricking themselves into believing of some god. It was said that religion is just a women's toy, which helps some women to improve their perceived quality of life. And now we suddenly learn that most people are Christians, including the almost-omnipotent chief Government Works/DAT official. Everything in the world is built around Christianity, and it is not as if we simply didn't notice it in the first book; it was explicitly said not to be the case there.
Or take another example: all that aliens plot is just a cover-up. They can speak flawless human language, and government communicates with them with ease, but there is a Governmental-Alien conspiracy which forces aliens to pretend they only speak their languages and government to use linguists in public negotiations. That's a huge plot twist, and I'd guess that SHE did not have it in mind when writing the first book.
Sometimes, it is just implausible. Lay people cannot work as translators because they aren't passionate about theoretical linguistics (except for 6% of them who are passionate and can work as translators). How come that of 13 Lines, over two centuries, there was no kids who would rather tinker with computers than discuss some verb conjugation?
And the entire book is full of those. As the sequel to book one, it does not really get us anywhere and does not develop the plot any further; and as a stand-alone novel, it does not tell anything of interest.
