Steal Across the Sky, by Nancy Kress

[mrissa]

Review copy sent to me by Tor.

Nancy Kress is one of my favorite living short story writers. In fact, I think we can scratch the "living" and just say that she's one of my favorite short story writers. Her Beggars in Spain is The SF Novel That Changed My Life--I read it at just the right time, and I think it's safe to say that the course of the rest of my life has been different because of it. But for me her novels depend pretty heavily on speculative premise. With some writers I am willing to read pretty much anything they write, on the theory that other aspects of the book will more than make up for a shaky speculative premise. That's true for me with Kress's short stories. Her novels, not so much so.

Steal Across the Sky...is one of those books it's hard to talk about without spoilers, because it's a two-climax structure: there's one big reveal in the middle and then a snowball of events follows that. I felt that the big reveal in the middle was telegraphed from pretty early. In any case, there are aliens who have shown up and told humanity that these aliens once did something really bad to humanity and wanted to atone.

They are not notably successful with the atonement. On so many levels. I hate to complain about aliens being kind of incomprehensible, because in some ways that's a good thing, if they're sufficiently alien. On the other hand, there's a middle ground where they look less alien than like humans with a lot of guilt and a half-assed approach to mitigating it. Which is I guess okay too.

Mostly I never got caught very well by the central premise. One character was described as "incomprehensibly" being not very interested in the "big bad thing" the aliens did to the humans 10K years ago. I have to say that in his position, I would not only be not very interested once I knew what it was, I would be resoundingly pissed that I had been taken to an interesting extrasolar planet with interesting social and technological stuffs, only to be whisked away immediately once I had seen what someone else decided was the single unifying important thing about my visit there. It's like if someone said, "We will give you a free trip to London!" and I said, "Yay!" and they said, "Now you have seen the hotel we selected for you! You see what your room would have looked like if you'd gotten to stay here? Good. You're going home now!" We saw approximately nothing of this not-very-interested character, nor of anyone else who had any other reaction to the alien cultures in question than to fixate on the thing that the alien culture told them to.

So--aliens doing kind of weird alien things: good. Humans getting one-track about them: not so great. Not a bad book, but not, I think, one that will stand above Kress's other work.

Comments

[firecat]

Her Beggars in Spain is The SF Novel That Changed My Life--I read it at just the right time, and I think it's safe to say that the course of the rest of my life has been different because of it.

Have you written about this anywhere? I would love to read how it changed your life.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I'm sure I have. I'm not sure I can find it before I go to bed. Short version:

I was 12, and I had been reading Golden Age SF in quantity. I had always been a writing sort of child, but Golden Age SF is not really something I can do. My dad turned up with Beggars in Spain one day. I'm not even sure how he encountered it, as he is not dedicated to the pulse of any one genre in his reading material, but it was one of the two books he gave me that year, out of the blue, that changed my life. Anyway. There it was, and I read it, and it was not like anything else I had ever read. It cracked my head open about the practice of SF. And the way it cracked my head open and let the light in was a way that said, "Hey. I can do this. I can do this."

The other book that year was A Brief History of Time; I was going to be a physicist for quite some time and got as far as grad work before abandoning ship on that. It still affects how I write and what I write. And the third book that Changed My Life was two years later, not my dad's fault: War for the Oaks. Because I'd read so much fantasy, but this, this was in my city. This was fantasy I could touch from here, and not by sitting in the coat closet hoping it would turn into Narnia.

I don't think these are my top three most loved books ever. But they're the ones that were the most direct lightbulb moments.

[firecat]

Thanks for sharing that!

[ken-schneyer.livejournal.com]

I'm still in the middle of the book so I didn't read past the second paragraph of the review, but I'll come back to it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I tried to avoid spoilers, but that's not the same thing as avoiding prejudicing someone's attitude. Which is in some sense what a review is for, but once you've already decided to read it, it doesn't seem like a timely thing.

[ex-benpayne119.livejournal.com]

Hey Marissa,

I've loved Nancy's work in the last couple of years in terms of short stories; she's quickly become one of my favourite writers. But I've not read any of her novels.

Which would you recommend as a good starting point?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I still think Beggars in Spain is the best place to start, possibly along with its two sequels. I also think Brainrose and Oaths and Miracles would be decent entry points for her novel set.

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

Have to agree on all points. I was also sent a review copy and have been trying to figure out what to say about it. I was drawn in enough to very rapidly read the first half but was and remained annoyed by the book from about a quarter of the way through until the end. Especially frustrated by the anticlimactic reveal of the aliens' true form near the end, which left absolutely no clue why they had been mysterious about it in the first place.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, that was not a favorite, either. I mean, I wouldn't have liked it if they'd turned out to look like any of the standard "aliens we haven't seen" things (human religious icons such as angels or Satan or one of the more recognizable non-Christian gods like Ganesh, mostly, or Really Bad Monsters, or energy beings--all been done before by now, all been done by Futurama, for heaven's sake, best to move on without fussing), but instead of having a cliched reason for not showing them before, she had...no reason for not showing them before. Not an improvement.

[ken-schneyer.livejournal.com]

Okay, now I've finished the book, and I think I agree with you.

I agree with your major premise, too -- so far I have always found Nancy's short stories (and especially her novellas) better than her novels. But she herself says that she thinks of the novella as the ideal form.

So, okay, it was a pleasant enough read. But I think I'll read "The Price of Oranges" again.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It sometimes frustrates me that there are various pressures on writers towards writing novels. I like writing novels myself, and while I don't have any evidence of it to present to people yet, I think I'm as good at novels as at short stories, maybe better.

But when people say themselves that they like a short length better, I really wish they could just write at that short length and get read. So few people read much at short lengths. And I can't really blame them, because I write short stuff and even I don't read as much at short lengths as I'd like. I like single-author collections more than anthologies and magazines, is part of the problem, but there isn't a very good mechanism for publishing single-author collections without most of the pieces being in anthologies and magazines first, so I do need to support those.