All the Colours of Darkness, Lloyd Biggle
Jul. 27th, 2016 07:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI read this last night and it was quite a nice story.
Had one female human character, two apparent human women that turned out to be alien men, and two alien women who apparently looked like cookies cause they were all flat and wide? And the last two couldn't speak English so weren't very interactive. So I don't know quite how to count all that. But the one female human was described as a great private detective. And then her whole story was joining the PI company because she's in love with the boss, realising he'll never love her back, then marrying a fat engineer who spent the whole story sighing about how women would never notice him, so, that's... predictable.
Also if there was any racial diversity I missed it.
But it was about humans inventing a sort of teleport, or a wormhole between two doors - the engineer did the demonstration with folding the bit of paper until the squares line up - and it started being interesting about what impact that would have on society. Which made it clear that the other book by this author I read, in reverse order because no numbers on the books, was quite a lot about what an older or bigger society would look like once it was built around these instant doors to anywhere. Which made quite a lot of it more interesting and necessary to the story. Honestly, I'd not noticed what the interesting miracle was meant to be in that one, because doors to anywhere are sort of routine now. But describing the packed together architecture of a civilisation that doesn't need corridors, or indeed any two rooms of a house to be physically in the same place, was quite interesting. Though I didn't see how his conclusion followed, that people would get bored of windows and stop going outside. If everything is in walking distance then surely the things in ordinary walking distance are equally interesting? And you'd want your place to be interesting to look at because anyone in the galaxy could drop in to view it.
But, that was the next book. In this book the doors company was having teething troubles and just teetering on the edge of going out of business, when finally they had their grand opening. And that turned transport on its head, and sent the airlines out of business.
They priced the tickets at airline prices to start with, priced by distance even though it made no never mind to the new technology. They said that in future they'd drop the price to be competing with rail, then buses, then taxis. And making it cheap enough to use around the home would be the logical last step. They hadn't got freight all worked out yet, but they figured dropping gates on the railways would make freight all speedy. It was interesting stuff.
And it made it seem like there were tons of commercial reasons for the sabotage discovered early in the book.
The way they did the sabotage was quite clever, and worked out in fair stages as the book explained how the SF bits worked. That bit was lively and interesting, a con with a new tech to play with.
And then it turned out to be aliens, and the plot took a wide yet logical swing in a new direction, specifically the moon.
It sets out the theory that aliens won't talk to us because, basically, we suck. It's pretty articulate about it, saying how humans hate other humans just for being a different shade, and how can our interstellar neighbours trust us for five minutes when they look so much more different? And we can't even get along with other genders even when we only have two!
And then the protagonist boggles and reconsiders gender vis a vis the aliens he's currently talking to, and concludes there are more than one type of men!
... which seemed like a good try for a beginner.
... ish.
And then there's an action denoument that makes perfect sense with the rules we've already been given. Which is always fun. And involves the human man being triumphant not by hitting things but by being most moral by the other guy's standards.
So that bit was a plenty good ending.
I liked the action, I liked the characters well enough, it's skinny but does interesting things in the page count, and it follows through on its science fiction bits in an interesting and methodical way. Plus it makes the other Biggle book I've got look better by emphasising different parts.
So I'll be keeping these two.
Had one female human character, two apparent human women that turned out to be alien men, and two alien women who apparently looked like cookies cause they were all flat and wide? And the last two couldn't speak English so weren't very interactive. So I don't know quite how to count all that. But the one female human was described as a great private detective. And then her whole story was joining the PI company because she's in love with the boss, realising he'll never love her back, then marrying a fat engineer who spent the whole story sighing about how women would never notice him, so, that's... predictable.
Also if there was any racial diversity I missed it.
But it was about humans inventing a sort of teleport, or a wormhole between two doors - the engineer did the demonstration with folding the bit of paper until the squares line up - and it started being interesting about what impact that would have on society. Which made it clear that the other book by this author I read, in reverse order because no numbers on the books, was quite a lot about what an older or bigger society would look like once it was built around these instant doors to anywhere. Which made quite a lot of it more interesting and necessary to the story. Honestly, I'd not noticed what the interesting miracle was meant to be in that one, because doors to anywhere are sort of routine now. But describing the packed together architecture of a civilisation that doesn't need corridors, or indeed any two rooms of a house to be physically in the same place, was quite interesting. Though I didn't see how his conclusion followed, that people would get bored of windows and stop going outside. If everything is in walking distance then surely the things in ordinary walking distance are equally interesting? And you'd want your place to be interesting to look at because anyone in the galaxy could drop in to view it.
But, that was the next book. In this book the doors company was having teething troubles and just teetering on the edge of going out of business, when finally they had their grand opening. And that turned transport on its head, and sent the airlines out of business.
They priced the tickets at airline prices to start with, priced by distance even though it made no never mind to the new technology. They said that in future they'd drop the price to be competing with rail, then buses, then taxis. And making it cheap enough to use around the home would be the logical last step. They hadn't got freight all worked out yet, but they figured dropping gates on the railways would make freight all speedy. It was interesting stuff.
And it made it seem like there were tons of commercial reasons for the sabotage discovered early in the book.
The way they did the sabotage was quite clever, and worked out in fair stages as the book explained how the SF bits worked. That bit was lively and interesting, a con with a new tech to play with.
And then it turned out to be aliens, and the plot took a wide yet logical swing in a new direction, specifically the moon.
It sets out the theory that aliens won't talk to us because, basically, we suck. It's pretty articulate about it, saying how humans hate other humans just for being a different shade, and how can our interstellar neighbours trust us for five minutes when they look so much more different? And we can't even get along with other genders even when we only have two!
And then the protagonist boggles and reconsiders gender vis a vis the aliens he's currently talking to, and concludes there are more than one type of men!
... which seemed like a good try for a beginner.
... ish.
And then there's an action denoument that makes perfect sense with the rules we've already been given. Which is always fun. And involves the human man being triumphant not by hitting things but by being most moral by the other guy's standards.
So that bit was a plenty good ending.
I liked the action, I liked the characters well enough, it's skinny but does interesting things in the page count, and it follows through on its science fiction bits in an interesting and methodical way. Plus it makes the other Biggle book I've got look better by emphasising different parts.
So I'll be keeping these two.