The book belongs to a very loose series, where the background of the world is the same, but the story and characters have nothing to do with the previous parts. There are several visitors on an interstellar relay station. As there is some waiting involved, before they can continue their journey, a random bunch of aliens travels to a kind of waystation where supplies, entertainment, and hospitality are offered. Some sort of catastrophe that destroys most of the orbital infrastructure happens, and the aliens are stranded for a longer time than they were expecting.
Luckily, the host is very friendly and understanding, as is her child - whose gender is still undermined - it is typical for the species that gender determination happens at puberty. The child especially is very interested in alien visitors with all the clumsy enthusiasm of a smart preteen. The characters meet, spend time together, make friends, eat together and even have political arguments. An optimistic and positive book, where the characters are pretty well-drawn and understandable. They are very, very anthropomorphic, though. They might look very different from humans (there is only one human in the book, and she just makes a short appearance in a side role.), but their behavior is hardly different from human behavior. Also, they make puns that work only in English, which felt very stupid. Their language structure (even if the language is “spoken” with color patterns) is very English-like - for example, there are gender-specific pronouns in all languages, even if the gender is fairly fluid and/or nonsignificant for the species. The author isn’t very experienced with foreign languages. But as a whole, it was fun to read and is such an optimistic book. It was nominated for a Hugo award, as I assumed. This year’s book nominations seem pretty good.
No comments:
Post a Comment