Swordspoint

[beccaelizabeth]

I just finished reading Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner.
It is not the book for me.
The appeal is politics with swords and a central queer romance.
The problem, for me, is they're all terrible people. Just murder all over the place. No pretence at the sort of honor that means much. Provoking fights for fun. And as a form of self harm that gets other people killed. One of the main characters expresses himself by walking into a window and standing there bleeding with glass in the wounds. Far from the only time he does similar.
They're terrible, murderous, people in a world that mostly lets them get away with it, and early on I realised I barely cared what happened to any of them because they were all like that.

There's a cover quote from George RR Martin on my copy, and I really should have realised it was a bad sign.

It's a skillfully written book with characters who fit a certain version of realistic and fleshed out and are certainly lively among all the death. It's just not my sort of thing at all, and I'm currently unsure if I'll give it long term shelf space.

Comments

[the_rck]

Oh, thank goodness I'm not the only one! I read the book long enough ago to be too young to figure out why I hated it, and I've wondered for years if there's some flaw in my character that makes me dislike all the characters and never want to read about them again.

[beccaelizabeth]

no, they're just mean, that's not interesting

[the_rck]

I'm going through my inbox and trying to answer some comments. We were talking about why we didn't enjoy Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner.

Thinking about it, this might be one of those things where there was nothing else remotely like it-- not anything commercially published in mass market paperback and shelved with the fantasy in a big book store-- when it came out. I saw someone, years back, talking about a particular anime series which was an early one of its type to come out commercially in the US (some time in the 1990s) and was wildly popular for a while. Then once people had a basis for comparison, they started realizing that it had mountainous warts.

The essayist said that, in order to understand why people adored it, you had to understand that it was like water in the desert. If you're dying of dehydration, something terrible (I believe the essay actually said 'camel piss,' but I wouldn't swear to it) will still seem like the best thing you've ever had, and you will never later understand how someone else who isn't parched can react with revulsion.

Someone who tries it when they're not thirsty and/or have other options... Well, it's going to register quite a lot differently for them.