Sci-Fi & Fantasy Girlz discussion

Since we went with short selections this month, we're picking our top two selections on the poll.

Our winners are Binti and Witches of Lychford.

This is the official discussion thread for Binti, the one for Witches of Lychford is right here:

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

I've heard great things about Binti. I'm looking forward to reading it!

Witches of lychford is a great read.

I've read both of these, but want to reread Binti before I read the next two. I can 100% rec the audiobook for Binti. Robin Miles is my favourite narrator, and she does all the accents. I remember the Witches of Lychford one being decent too.

I've already recently read Binti, but these are short works, so I'll give it a reread. I might pick up the next installment of that series while I'm at it.

I'm going to give Witches of Lychford a shot first, though. Starting in tonight, I think....

I now realize that I should have probably created two different discussion threads, one for Binti and another one for Witches of Lychford. So I think we will re-purpose this one for Binti, the one for witches of Lychford is here:

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

So... I finished Binti this morning. All I can say is "yikes!".

What are your thoughts on the book? Anyone? :)

I haven't got to rereading it, so my thoughts are a couple years old, but I remember enjoying it. The girl with special cultural talents who stumbles into a special situation only she can solve was very YA Of My Youth (Arrows of the Queen, etc).

There was probably a bit more wholesale slaughter than I was expecting.

Yoly wrote: "So... I finished Binti this morning. All I can say is "yikes!".

What are your thoughts on the book? Anyone? :)"

Here is my first impression when I read it in January:

These days novels seem to be growing larger and larger. The cheap/fast ebook market and word processing (and more than a little electronic dictation, I suspect...) means that many writers are churning out thick texts that would make the author of a 19th century scholarly definitive study cringe. Nowadays, you pick up the first book in a series the way you accept a first date, vaguely wondering if this is going to be a lifelong commitment or if you're going to have to bail out before your new lover does. A lot of the books I've read in recent years I felt would really be better off if someone had hacked and slashed at them with a blue pencil like Conan the Editor.

So it's a little weird to read a novella like this one. Novellas are all well and good. I like short form fiction, and I seem to get less of it than I would like. It's nice to pick up something and not feel like you should have had the writer sign a prenup. But after finishing, I felt like this one actually should have been another 40-60 pages longer. The short form made certain key plot points rather brief and abrupt. "Wait... there's aliens?! Huh. OK, there's aliens now." I thought during the scene with aliens. I thought this was going to be a whole human outsider story (which, I guess it was) but I can't help but think that would contrast rather badly with the whole "aliens among us" issue. A human who puts red stuff on her skin might not stand out all that much compared to an actual creature next to her. Granted, there's a range of provincial attitudes in any given place, so we could assume that the Khoush she encounters early in the novella are rubes. But the story went from "I'm so strange that I stand out" to the cantina scene in Star Wars ep4 pretty quickly. A bit more fleshing out of the story would have made that less jarring.

The denouement of the major story/conflict seemed more than a bit thin too. The professors resolving the dispute with a little roundtable/forum discussion was a bit pat. Sure, it's a university planet, so we might expect them to be a little smug in their Ivory Tower, but not only that, they were pretty dismissive of a shipload of passengers and crew (view spoiler)[slaughtered for the sake of an apparently re-attachable bodypart (hide spoiler)]. There's an elaborate history of real world depredation/predation by developed societies upon the less developed or more isolated societies that is being referenced there, and I thought that contrasted badly with the chief's stinger. There are references to indicate that some sort of genocidal/murderous activity was going on in addition to stinger theft/display. And, yes, that's an act of mutilation and humiliation, but having it be the linchpin of the core motivation for the Meduse seemed like a pretty serious over-reaction to me. Granted I've never had my stinger removed and put on display, so I don't know that kind of dishonor, but I hope I don't (view spoiler)[kill a boatload of teenagers in response, and plot a terrorist attack (hide spoiler)]. They even give one of the not-really-terrorist aliens a scholarship, and not one entitled Khoush teenager who then has to go to his backup university planet screams, "Affirmative action!" and sues the place.

Oomza Uni apparently has a massive weapons of death R&D component, but no paranoid security agencies or government officials to raise a hullaballoo about college kids getting slaughtered and the (almost) terrorist incident they were going to perpetrate? Where's all the Khoush equivalent of the GOP to start chanting, "Build a force field! Build a force field!" or whatever? Where's the orangish insect alien buzzing away, "Zzzzum uv zem are good alienzzzz, but zey bring drugzzzzzz. Zey bring crimezzzz...." What about the slaughtered kids' families? None of them demand bloody retribution? That doesn't sound very human in science fiction-y.... It's much more of a handshake (tentacle grasp?) deal. I wanted another 10-20k words to fill that out.

The only other issue I'll bring up at the moment are the McGuffins. The first half or so of this novella seemed like it was going to be a hard science fiction story. That is, it was all math and real world cultures. Maybe the otherwise unexplained abilities/powers of her otjize and edan will get explained more in later installments before she fully transitions into a giant cuttlefish or whatever, but those items were pretty extraordinarily convenient to have around when heading off to college. Kind of makes the prepaid calling card they put in the college orientation package these days look like crap.

Despite these criticisms, I did get a kick out of this novella. It's a quick read. Nnedi Okorafor's language is crisp and entertaining. I do have issues with several elements of her story in this case, but if I can criticize my criticisms, I'll point out that those are all elements and issues that are common to any number of standard sci-fi products. You can't get through an episode (let alone a season) of Star Trek without encountering that many or more... and if Frodo had just ridden the eagles to Mordor I wouldn't be out $38 in movie tickets. JJ Abrams (my most recent whipping boy...) has built a career out of tossing everything at the screen to see what sticks.

"You want McGuffins? Here's... TEN of 'em, you stupid audience!"

(I'm pretty sure Abrams has that tattooed on some part of his body surrounded by arcane and arbitrary symbols that, in fact, mean nothing.)

Point is, two McGuffins isn't a bad number, and professors resolving interstellar diplomacy in an afternoon isn't odd compared to the Treaty of Organia.

Part of the problem with the brevity of this novella is that Okorafor presented us with a lot of possibilities in her world building, and we only get a 96 page look at it. It seems like there's a lot of there there, if you will. Seeing it in this short form is a bit of a tease.

(I'm pretty sure Abrams has that tattooed on some part of his body surrounded by arcane and arbitrary symbols that, in fact, mean nothing.)

Ha! I still get angry whenever people mention the Lost finale...

I agree with most your comments. I could not believe nothing happened after all those kids got slaughtered. It was like, "Oh, ooops my bad, so you want your stinger then?" and everything was ok.


Part of the problem with the brevity of this novella is that Okorafor presented us with a lot of possibilities in her world building, and we only get a 96 page look at it. It seems like there's a lot of there there, if you will. Seeing it in this short form is a bit of a tease.

Well, in my case she lost me on this one. I don't care what happens next. The first few pages I was excited, then I got a similar reaction as you "oh, there's aliens?" and then I was sure things would pick up but then was disappointed when they didn't.

The writing was ok, but I thought the story was boring. I had read so many praises about this book, but I didn't enjoy it. I only managed to finish it because it was very short. Can't love them all I guess :D

Yoly wrote: "Well, in my case she lost me on this one. I don't care what happens next. The first few pages I was excited, then I got a similar reaction as you "oh, there's aliens?" and then I was sure things would pick up but then was disappointed when they didn't."

I have a lot of critiques, but I'm curious enough to check out the next one. Overall, though, thinking of it in terms of an episode of a sci-fi TV show makes a lot of those flaws easier to overlook or, at least, common to similar products.

I think the strengths of this book are:

1. The strength of the protagonist/POV narrative. We really get inside that narrator's head. So much so, in fact, that it makes some of the other plot issues kind of stand out as lopsided in comparison.

2. The "outsider" nature of that narrator that is both very easy to relate to a contemporary character but in a science fiction/future society. So, she's recognizable as both a "fringe culture" and technologically astute.

3. Her successful presentation of mathematics as culture/craft in a way that isn't full of math for the word-oriented.

4. I think she did a good job with the Meduse, presenting them as a distinct alien species rather than just a human analogue, which happens a lot in F/SF. That is, Vulcans and elves and time lords and goblins are usually simple human analogues or monstrous battle fodder. Her aliens still are human analogues (it's arguable whether it's possible for a human writer not to make fantasy race/alien/robot characters a human analogue on some level) but they aren't transparently so, especially for a product of this length.

Since I already read it, I got hold of the audiobook for Binti. The narrator (Robin Miles) gives an interesting performance. I can't say that I know enough about African accents to say how authentic it is, but it's enough to fool my ear.

I hadn't thought of it when I was reading it the first time, but the first person narrative for this novella works nicely for a audiobook, and the brevity of the story might help that a bit too. It makes it fit more into a "storytelling" kind of format than someone reading a novel.

I just finished Book #2, Home. There are several reveals regarding the McGuffins and some of the other issues that I critiqued above. For instance, there's a whole character development in which she's dealing with (view spoiler)[PTSD (hide spoiler)] as a result of her experiences in Book #1, which I like. The actual (view spoiler)[slaughter of innocents (hide spoiler)] doesn't get addressed/redressed from a legal or cultural perspective, so my objection to the ease of that plot point resolution still stands, but at least the protagonist deals with the events in some sort of way. Overall, I'd say it reads like she has a more carefully considered plan/plot than I got from the first book alone.

I still don't know if that means this should really be one novel rather than three, but I'm leaning toward the latter. I don't think putting it all together into one volume would have harmed it in any way. In fact, I listened to the audiobook this time before picking up Home and the breaks between the books tracked much more like a chapter break than an actual separate "book" per se. There's a time jump, but the narrative continuity picks up right where it left off, and she addresses a lot of the character's background and does a lot of culture- world-building that was absent in the first installment, so it reads much more like a single unit to me than it does a "trilogy" as it were.