The Axiom Series by Tim Pratt (reading notes)

[elainegrey]

I stopped work early on Friday, knowing i had pretty much fried my brain. To recover, i binged The Axiom Series by Tim Pratt (The Wrong Stars, The Dreaming Stars, The Forbidden Stars). Nice space opera, fun. I liked the how the AI's are "born" (my word, not the author's), I liked the way religious community was incorporated. The world building of the alien context in which Earth finds itself is engaging. It is unapologetic Space Opera, and i enjoyed that. And creating a reader's way into the universe by explaining things to someone from the past entertaining.

Two things had my brain twitching:

One had to do with the characters' language and the narrative's claims of referential confusion where the current people missed the person from the past's references, but otherwise communication was completely clear (except with the bartender on the past person's first experience of the "future").  Telling me there were slight miscommunications around humorous references poked at my suspension of disbelief of an otherwise undrifted style of communication over 500 years.

There were some other odd bits around gender and sexuality: i think it may have been a telling but not showing sort of error. While the main couple was described as a same sex couple, it very much read like a heterosexual couple. Of course that's my stereo typing of gendered behavior coming forward, too. I think if some of the "telling" parts in the narrative hadn't happened, i wouldn't have noticed. Maybe.

Comments

[oracne]

I enjoyed those books as well!

[warriorsavant]

It's super hard to do the "language changes" thing. Kudos to the author for at least trying.

[elainegrey]

It is hard, and to be clear the author didn't try to do anything with the language. It was cultural references, where many and most were shared but every now and then the character from the past made a reference the future people didn't get.

Some of it was humor, i think. Another bit of setting the future was with a use of a phrase we'd recognize and a quick disagreement over whether it was from the Bible or Shakespeare -- when neither. One of these "proverbs" was "space is cold", and the character from the past saying that the person who wrote that did not intend it to be a proverb. (I guess that's George Lucas's line about "Space is cold" from episode 1? But so many many people say space is cold....) The book starts a riff on Churchill's description of Russia as "A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma" but doesn't play that game then.

[amaebi]

Tangentially and re: AI: Have you read Murderbot?

[elainegrey]

I have, and i've really enjoyed them. When thinking about the way relationships were put forward in this trilogy, i compared them to the feel of diverse expressions of characters in the Murderbot stories and Becky Chamber's works.

[amaebi]

:)

I love Murderbot.

[elainegrey]

So are you excited about a tv show? I think i like murderbot as i've imagined them, and ... i dunno about TV.

[amaebi]

Oddly, I hadn't thought about that aspect of t! I've been glad at the thus-demonstrated popularity of Murderbot, and that Martha Wells gets the money! :D You're right: it feels like a big risk.