betty reviewed Undertow by Elizabeth Bear (Bantam Spectra science fiction)
Review of 'Undertow' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
One sentence: Solid writing, nicely foreign future, good speculative use of the human impact of quantum physics, oddly un-foreign aliens.
I liked that the aliens, "ranids" or froggies in the vernacular, didn't have a species name. They call themselves "people" as most people do. Only the humans called them ranids. They were genderless, and this was done so well that at one point in the book there was what I assume was a spell-checker error and the neutral pronoun 'se' was suddenly 'she' which was jarring-- in my mind, the character certainly wasn't female, se was seself.
On the other hand, the ranids did have a binary reproductive split, either endo- or exo- parent, which both socially and biologically mapped a bit too closely to female and male for my satisfaction.
I liked what was done with quantum physics; the social and economic implications seemed well thought out and went …
One sentence: Solid writing, nicely foreign future, good speculative use of the human impact of quantum physics, oddly un-foreign aliens.
I liked that the aliens, "ranids" or froggies in the vernacular, didn't have a species name. They call themselves "people" as most people do. Only the humans called them ranids. They were genderless, and this was done so well that at one point in the book there was what I assume was a spell-checker error and the neutral pronoun 'se' was suddenly 'she' which was jarring-- in my mind, the character certainly wasn't female, se was seself.
On the other hand, the ranids did have a binary reproductive split, either endo- or exo- parent, which both socially and biologically mapped a bit too closely to female and male for my satisfaction.
I liked what was done with quantum physics; the social and economic implications seemed well thought out and went further than most authors do except in the hardest of SF.
It seemed to me that at least one of the protagonists, André, was a character of colour, at least, going by a rather oblique hint. Did anyone else have that impression?
I found the book a bit unsatisfying in that although all of the characters had moved forward at the end, none of them had reached any kind of stable state; they had just transitioned to a new dynamic one. This is obviously perfectly reasonable and life-like, I just like resolution in my music and my novels; it's a personal preference.
