Torchwood: First Born
Jul. 12th, 2015 07:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI read this because the local library is not oversupplied with F&SF. It's a Torchwood novel from after I stopped wanting to watch Torchwood. It features Gwen, Rhys, and a series of nightmares about dead team mates. And Gwen was never my favourite. To put it mildly. So I was never tempted to read this one.
It turns out to be surprisingly good. I mean, given that I didn't like any of the elements of the setup, I was surprised, but it was good. Engaging, funny, full of the tiny grimy details that make Torchwood feel more real and local than the standard SF fare.
It's set right around the time Gwen's baby gets born. The whole 'children do mind control' thing is unsubtle, is in fact spelled out clearly at several points, but is on occasion hilarious. You don't generally get SF stories where the heroine gets interrupted because the baby needs changing, or is hungry, or she's leaking in ways that somewhat undermine her authority during the rousing speech bit. While heroes do tend to have a bit of the book where they're staggering around from several sleepless nights and all aches and pains, but our heroine is the first I've read do that because baby breast feeding comes with a built in pain clock. The unsettling locals aren't generally discovered on a quest for nappies, and finding a babysitter is rarely a key plot point. So wrapping an SF story around those elements immediately makes a refreshing change. And, as mentioned, funny.
The whole alien vaguely autistic children thing is not my favourite trope. The elements of flat affect, error prone social interactions, rule following in weird circumstances, repeating exactly what is said to them, and a bit of a meltdown, all come from both trope sets.
Also there was some really awful domestic violence in there. Very bad. Both aimed at the kids and done by them. Including murder.
But instead of concluding with the traditional massed villager pitchforks attack, it ... well, quote from right at the end:
So the blame is kept pretty squarely on poorly behaved adults and what they were trying to make of the kids, who turn out to be... malleable but trying hard. Kids.
It isn't as simple as creepy turning out to be evil and solved with a good being killed. They actually sort themselves out and get to keep growing up.
So the ending was a bit of a relief, in some ways. And dead sad in others.
Very Torchwood.
I liked it, enough to remember why I liked Torchwood.
It turns out to be surprisingly good. I mean, given that I didn't like any of the elements of the setup, I was surprised, but it was good. Engaging, funny, full of the tiny grimy details that make Torchwood feel more real and local than the standard SF fare.
It's set right around the time Gwen's baby gets born. The whole 'children do mind control' thing is unsubtle, is in fact spelled out clearly at several points, but is on occasion hilarious. You don't generally get SF stories where the heroine gets interrupted because the baby needs changing, or is hungry, or she's leaking in ways that somewhat undermine her authority during the rousing speech bit. While heroes do tend to have a bit of the book where they're staggering around from several sleepless nights and all aches and pains, but our heroine is the first I've read do that because baby breast feeding comes with a built in pain clock. The unsettling locals aren't generally discovered on a quest for nappies, and finding a babysitter is rarely a key plot point. So wrapping an SF story around those elements immediately makes a refreshing change. And, as mentioned, funny.
The whole alien vaguely autistic children thing is not my favourite trope. The elements of flat affect, error prone social interactions, rule following in weird circumstances, repeating exactly what is said to them, and a bit of a meltdown, all come from both trope sets.
Also there was some really awful domestic violence in there. Very bad. Both aimed at the kids and done by them. Including murder.
But instead of concluding with the traditional massed villager pitchforks attack, it ... well, quote from right at the end:
We'd spent so much time projecting onto those creepy kids we'd made them what we wanted them to be. Somehow wrong. Somehow bad. But they weren't. They were blank slates.
So the blame is kept pretty squarely on poorly behaved adults and what they were trying to make of the kids, who turn out to be... malleable but trying hard. Kids.
It isn't as simple as creepy turning out to be evil and solved with a good being killed. They actually sort themselves out and get to keep growing up.
So the ending was a bit of a relief, in some ways. And dead sad in others.
Very Torchwood.
I liked it, enough to remember why I liked Torchwood.
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Date: 2015-07-12 07:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-07-14 12:02 pm (UTC)