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beccaelizabethI'm reading a book from the ancient inherited SF collection, 'Plague Ship' by Andre Norton. It's from 1971. It's older than I am.
So far I've been ignoring the way there don't seem to be any womens in this story, and the thing where there's a new and weird way of referring to every routine thing, because, old, is going to be odd.
But now I've hit something I just keep tripping over whenever it is mentioned. They've got interstellar trade, colonies on all sorts of worlds, massive sprawling civilisation of multi species. Very high tech, FTL, gravity, lots of neat stuff. The fact that these ships land on a big fire tail, and are designed to both do FTL and land on planets, didn't strike me as odd to start, because they're trader-explorers so why not? Though having just read CJCherryh Downbelow Station books the complete absence of orbital stations is just odd. These people fall down gravity wells! On purpose! All the time! But, okay, so, it's a weird and entirely planet based FTL civilisation. I can accept this for the length of one book.
What I can't accept is they're hiding out in an unknown area of Earth.
It's not just the hiding, though how do they hide a spaceship landing? They think nobody's watching?
The thing is, the whole bit of geography they're in is unknown. It's a surprise to them that there's any green life in it. They're expecting a continent sized scorch mark. Because it is radioactive and nobody walks in it any more, the book assumes nobody knows what it looks like.
In the era of Google Earth, where I can look at pretty much anywhere on the planet on the scale of I can see my house from waaaaay up here, I simply can't believe or suspend disbelief about this point.
And it's odd, and keeps striking me as odd, because here I am happily accepting FTL travel, but I can't just ignore that a planet with a heavily populated moon appears to not have been looked at.
I'm not much loving the book in general. I'm thinking of selling it. I haven't finished it yet, it might have a good ending. At the moment what it has is some fight scenes, some puzzles it tells you the solution to way in advance of the characters figuring it out, some puzzles it hasn't told the reader enough to figure out until the character does, and some animals behaving oddly in a way that lets the characters off of actually figuring stuff out. It's kind of boring. But I have tons of books lying around I haven't read yet, so I figured I should get started on them.
So far I've been ignoring the way there don't seem to be any womens in this story, and the thing where there's a new and weird way of referring to every routine thing, because, old, is going to be odd.
But now I've hit something I just keep tripping over whenever it is mentioned. They've got interstellar trade, colonies on all sorts of worlds, massive sprawling civilisation of multi species. Very high tech, FTL, gravity, lots of neat stuff. The fact that these ships land on a big fire tail, and are designed to both do FTL and land on planets, didn't strike me as odd to start, because they're trader-explorers so why not? Though having just read CJCherryh Downbelow Station books the complete absence of orbital stations is just odd. These people fall down gravity wells! On purpose! All the time! But, okay, so, it's a weird and entirely planet based FTL civilisation. I can accept this for the length of one book.
What I can't accept is they're hiding out in an unknown area of Earth.
It's not just the hiding, though how do they hide a spaceship landing? They think nobody's watching?
The thing is, the whole bit of geography they're in is unknown. It's a surprise to them that there's any green life in it. They're expecting a continent sized scorch mark. Because it is radioactive and nobody walks in it any more, the book assumes nobody knows what it looks like.
In the era of Google Earth, where I can look at pretty much anywhere on the planet on the scale of I can see my house from waaaaay up here, I simply can't believe or suspend disbelief about this point.
And it's odd, and keeps striking me as odd, because here I am happily accepting FTL travel, but I can't just ignore that a planet with a heavily populated moon appears to not have been looked at.
I'm not much loving the book in general. I'm thinking of selling it. I haven't finished it yet, it might have a good ending. At the moment what it has is some fight scenes, some puzzles it tells you the solution to way in advance of the characters figuring it out, some puzzles it hasn't told the reader enough to figure out until the character does, and some animals behaving oddly in a way that lets the characters off of actually figuring stuff out. It's kind of boring. But I have tons of books lying around I haven't read yet, so I figured I should get started on them.