SALVAGE, Alexandra Duncan's cli-fic/feminist/SF/dystopian door-stopper of a good read

SALVAGE
ALEXANDRA DUNCAN (Salvage #1)
Greenwillow Books
$17.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Ava, a teenage girl living aboard the male-dominated, conservative deep space merchant ship Parastrata, faces betrayal, banishment, and death. Taking her fate into her own hands, she flees to the Gyre, a floating continent of garbage and scrap in the Pacific Ocean.

I think that's pretty damn skimpy, so here's the flap copy as well:

Her life is a shadow of a life. Her future is not her own to fashion. Her family is a tangle of secrets. She cannot read. She cannot write.

But she is Parastrata Ava, the Captain's eldest daughter, the so girl of a long-range crew—her obligations are grave and many.

And when she makes a mistake, in a fragrant orchard of lemons, the consequences are deaadly.

There are some who would say, There but for the Mercies go I.

There are some who would say Parastrata Ava is just a silly earthstruck girl who got what was coming to her.

But they don't know the half of it.

My Review: Well now, wasn't this a long damn book. Luckily I liked it, so it wasn't a looooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnnggggg damn book.

Feminist dystopian SF as a category description doesn't get me in a lather of urgency to read a book. It might be more likely to lather me up now, since Duncan's gift for poetical description is deployed to create such a series of parallel worlds. The Crewe of Parastrata, Ava's birthplace and homeland, are misogynistic patriarchal violence addicts. The strange society of the Gyre, where Ava finds lovingkindness, is worthy of an entire book of its own. The horrifying megamega-megalopolis of Mumbai, 170 MILLION strong, made me claustrophobic, and the modren tecknowledgee was more like what we'll have in 2020 than futuristic...my one big complaint.

But listen, if your Firefly love was at least partly rooted in its unique linguistic take on the future (if you DIDN'T love Firefly you wouldn't be my friend and therefore shouldn't be bothered by reading this review), this book will scratch the bump left by its short life. Like Firefly as well is the more-or-less libertarian bent of this book's worlds. It's completely impossible to closely govern a dense population the size of Mumbai, no matter how high your tech.

The pleasures of reading lovely sentences are sometimes lessened by those sentences serving a slow-paced story. For my part I found the leisurely pace of the novel added to my sense of getting to know the worlds Duncan was giving me in some depth. Some things still managed to get sprung on me. I found Ava's about-face from Obedient Girl to Power Ranger a bit unfounded, for example. But in the end, it was a small cavil in the larger picture of empowerment and growth.

In my quest never to ossify above the neck, I choose a genre to read a book in that I normally avoid like it gots the cooties. YA is one of those genres for me. This YA novel was a pleasant surprise, and it contained a message that I would very much like any teenaged girl in today's world to receive. No one will empower you. Empower yourself and refuse to listen to "no."

THE LADY ASTRONAUT OF MARS, Mary Robinette Kowal's Hugo-winning novelette

THE LADY ASTRONAUT OF MARS
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL
Tor.com
Free online read, or 99¢ on Kindle

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Thirty years ago, Elma York led the expedition that paved the way to life on Mars. For years she's been longing to go back up there, to once more explore the stars. But there are few opportunities for an aging astronaut, even the famous Lady Astronaut of Mars. When her chance finally comes, it may be too late. Elma must decide whether to stay with her sickening husband in what will surely be the final years of his life, or to have her final adventure and plunge deeper into the well of space.

My Review: No wonder this story won the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Novelette. Kowal, comme d'habitude, presents her Lady Astronaut with a life-choice that will reverberate down the ages no matter how she decides it; and makes it clear that this is not the first time Elma has faced such life-choices, but is at last old enough to really *get* what she's deciding.

It's a theme in my reading here lately. This is the same vein worked by Blake Crouch in his exciting and engrossing novel DARK MATTER. It's an evergreen in all manner of fiction from Jack Finney's romantic obsession novel TIME AFTER TIME to the entire genre of alternate (sic) history worked famously by Harry Turtledove and Eric Flint. It speaks to something deep inside us, a common core of regrets seething or simmering in each human breast. It's impossible to exist in the material world without creating this core, and I'm beginning to think that it's the source of our human condition: malaise, misery, morbidity. We're all weighed down to one life of the infinity of possibilities by the gravity of our regrets.

Elma and Nathaniel have lived a happy life. They're married many years, they're still in love with each other, but they're childless and they're aging (she more gracefully than he) on Mars. Their work in the space program, here turbocharged by a celestial accident much discussed in modern space science: asteroid impact, made the Martian colony possible when politics made it imperative.

As she levels up in her life experience, Elma isn't clear on the correctness of her decisions already made which gives her pause in facing this latest one. Her husband's life is ending, both inevitably and painfully. Her misery is deftly portrayed, without melodrama or self-pity. When her life-changing decision arrives, she's sure of her course. Nathaniel, however, has other ideas. He does, out of love, a self-sacrificing thing to enable his beloved Elma to do the only job she's ever had, the only one she loves. The no-correct-way ending feels so deeply true and right that it brought me to tears. I identify with Nathaniel and Elma, probably because I'm about Elma's age, and because my life circumstances are, like theirs, constrained by decisions made long ago.

Like them, I don't regret my decisions so much as question them. Stories like this enable me to go through my own life's process again. So far, I don't regret much that I did and didn't decide to do; but the ones I regret, I regret completely, forcefully. Which tells me that I did life right: I'm still not obsessed with trivialities!