Candas Jane Dorsey

Canadian SFF monadnock Dorsey is operating in a new field so y'all sit up and hit the one-click. As one would expect from the author of Black Wine, sex and its coevals gender and sexuality get a workout here. Reading the third of what I devoutly hope will be an ongoing series first, I thought permaybehaps I'd be a bit lost, without the deeper background that makes series mysteries such good reads for me.

I forgot whose work I was reading.

Feeling lost and a little at sea is Author Dorsey's calling card. That said, I was never wondering where someone came from, or how anyone fits into the schema of the story being told. It probably helps that the way events unfold is as stochastic as real life is itself...it felt to me as though I was genuinely following our nameless detective around, learning things alongside them. In any truly immersive read I hope that I will be investing in the characters along with the main character, and that was indeed the case here. What might not work quite so well was the book's use of **COPIOUS** footnotes...over two hundred!...and huge numbers of acronyms. It took me some time to find a reading rhythm in this story, but I was so ready to trust the author, from past acquaintance in her SFF days, that I kept my hopes up. I felt rewarded. Again, as one would expect from Author Dorsey, there are little SFnal grace notes relatively unobtrusively scattered about.

As in all series reads, though, it's the characters that make the reader invest or decline to invest in the story at hand. Our nameless protagonist, sharp-eyed and -tongued, is a big draw for me. The other characters are literally kaleidoscopic, forming startling and unusual conjunctions with the narrator, each other, and the story unfolding. This is, to me, a net positive because as unusual as the juxtapositions can be, they're never gratuitous or exploitively deployed. I do sometimes feel as though some authors have, in their heads or on their editors' checklists, a set of identities that they feel the need to dot around to be "inclusive." This is absolutely never the way this read came across to me. In part that's because I've read the author's earlier work; in part it's down to the way the characters are included in the sleuth's life and thus this narrative.

I'd be remiss if I failed to mention the evident pro-environment, anti-capitalist thrust of the story. That won't work for some readers, because it's intrinsic to every element of the series' world-building. You know who you are, so you should seek elsewhere for your own ma'at needs to be met.

For me, it went down like a truly excellent, complex, single-malt whisky. I heartily recommend the read.… (más)

I received an advance copy of this book, thank you.

This was an interesting book in a lot of ways, but at the same time I had a hard time with it. In complete fairness to the author, this is the Third book in a series, and I have not read the first two. This book would have been much easier to get into had I. The author in fact. states on page 8 after referencing the first two books,"If you haven't read them, please do that, okay?, because there is a ton of backstory there. I still most inevitably review in these early pages because people's reading habits, unlike life, are not always sequential - but we all have limited patience with expository lumps, amirite?"

What I found interesting and unique about this book and this story was the style in which it was written.
The main character doesn't have a name, yet I had no problem picturing her and keeping track of her. All the other characters who interact with her do. The story is written in a very conversational way, the character pulls no punches, and clearly is thinking all the time, and this leads me to the second unique feature in the book. As the character is telling the story and going on with her life, thoughts pop into her head, and the author adds them by making footnotes. This is clever, and different, but I really didn't enjoy this style at all. There are footnotes on more than half of the pages.
So, if you're looking for a different kind of read, read the books in order and enjoy.… (más)

review of
Candas Jane Dorsey's A Paradigm of Earth
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 23, 2012

I got this bk marked down in price. It'd been marked down twice. I saw it on sale cheap at at least 2 bkstores. It seemed they were desperate to get rid of it. That's often a very good sign to me. My own bk, Not Necessarily NOT Very Important ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2598529-not-necessarily-not-very-important ), was remaindered almost immediately. I bought many of my favorite Mothers of Invention records in the cut-out bin at a supermarket. The sadly predictable thing about this particular bk being sold off cheap is that a probable reason for it is the way in wch the 'outsiderness' of the characters is treated.

W/ that aside, for the moment, I'm going to plunge ahead here & call this 'women's sci-fi'. Having written that, I'm already irritated w/ myself for doing so but I STILL think it's appropriate. I don't really LIKE or ENDORSE dividing any product or activity into 'men's' & women's' but I'm doing it here ANYWAY. What gives?! I certainly don't want to repeat the mistake of the SF author who wrote that 'only a man could write this' in reference to the writings of 'James Tiptree, Jr' only to have it turn out that Tiptree, the man, was actually Sheldon, the woman. What if Dorsey is actually a 'man'?

Nonetheless, I find myself strongly associating this bk w/ the work of other women SF writers: perhaps most notably Joan Slonczewski's A Door into Ocean, Pamela Sargent's Watchstar ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/869253.Watchstar ), Ursula K. LeGuin's Always Coming Home, etc.. But what's the generalization to be made here? Do I think that all SF written by women inevitably share certain characteristics? NO. I wdn't put LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven in w/ the list I just made - nor wd I put Tiptree's Brightness Falls from the Air there (others might). Are there works written by men that I might include in the list? Perhaps.. but I can't think of any at the moment.

When I 1st started reading A Paradigm of Earth I admit to being bored & even.. not caring that much to bother finishing it. Back in the 1970s when friends of mine & I got kicked out of a gay bar for "dancing too weird" (the norm was popping amyl nitrite & pretending to go down on yr partner) I used to say that I looked forward to when being hetero wd be a perversion (see Anthony Burgess' The Wanting Seed) since I was hetero but also a blatant pervert par excellence. Since then, the subcultures I move in have almost become queer-normative enuf for that dream to come true. The relevance here being that the main character here is bisexual & the world in wch she lives is the-world-in-wch-mainstream-society-somehow-thinks-it-has-the-right-to-poke-its-nosiness-into-the-consensual-sexual-practices-of-people-it-tries-to-scapegoat. So why was I bored? B/c it reeked too much of preachiness for political correctness - something that I've been inundated w/ enuf for a lifetime. BUT, it got better.

In other words, at 1st I was afraid this was a work of 'This-is-how-you-shd-think' more than it was a work of the imagination. The human-interest-story-in-wch-there-is-introduced-the-being-from-outer-space struck me as a bit thin. But, then, I ultimately liked it. Maybe the worst part about it was that the villain was so damned obvious from the get-go that it amazed me that it actually turned out to be them b/c there was no surprise to be had from THAT.

Back to the utterly unacceptable generalization that I'm fumbling for: why is this 'women's sci-fi'? B/c emphasis is more on experiences usually associated w/ women than w/ men?: the main character is a health-care worker turned child-care worker for an 'alien'. Even the rules of the commune she sets up I associate w/ the dreary matriarchal dictatorships that I've personally encountered (sorry (NOT), I'm an anarchist - I'm against patriarchy AND matriarchy).

In the end, I think the characters were well-developed & not oversimplified (except for, perhaps, the villain - the author might be advised to see the movie Licensed to Kill (1997) by Arthur Dong for a realistic look at gay bashers) & the grey areas of the interactions between the 'outsiders' & the powers-that-be were sensitively portrayed (Shd that be 'sensitivelyportrayed'? That phrase has been so overused that it practically deserves to become a compound word).

I even liked this in spite of the almost inevitable sex-w/-the-alien plot development that might've been fresh when Philip José Farmer wrote about it & was, at least, challenging when William S. Burroughs explored it, & wch might've been somewhat thrilling in Andrzej Zulawski's 1981 film Possession but wch is now well on its way to being a queer-normative cliché aimed at a demographic of people who think they've somehow invented the idea.

In short, this was too much of an 'alternative'-community-explored w/ too little of thinking-outside-the-new-box to really be more sci-fi than just-another-novel-about-social-manners-w/-some-murders-&-an-extra-terrestrial-thrown-in but at least it was well done enuf to get a 3 star rating from me anyway.… (más)