![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
justira posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
ladybusiness
Hello friends! I want to talk about MYSTERIES! And execution and editing and structure. And the experience of reading a book! Let's just do all those at once, sure
I recently read both Kristin Cashore's Jane, Unlimited and Mur Lafferty's Six Wakes (both from Orbit), and for mysterious reasons I had vastly different experiences reading these very different books by different cool women. I'm going to be up front here: I loved Jane, Unlimited and very much did not love Six Wakes. Both books are, at heart, locked-room mystery novels. We are presented with an isolated physical place, a large number of questions to answer, and a central conceit. These are the ingredients to many a mystery, but I want to talk about how these two books succeed or failed for me in terms of structure and experience. Because while these are quite different books, they nonetheless share quite similar preoccupations and problems that I experienced in divergent ways, not just book to book, but compared to a lot of other readers of each or either novel. I'd like to talk about those common elements, those divergent experiences, and how I think some different editing choices could have created a more universal reading experience and made each book's strengths shine.
This post is split into two sections. The first is a spoiler-free dual review, but does contain a general discussion of the each book's format and structure. Then, after a break, follows a more nitty-gritty discussion of editing decisions and structural choices, as well as the resolutions of both plots.
Spoiler-Free Review
In Six Wakes, cloning is used for immortality rather than multiplication: only one iteration of a person may exist at a given time, and each successive iteration is formed from the mindmap of the preceding one, retaining all memories and personality. However, the six-person clone crew of the generation ship Dormire wakes up with all six of their previous iterations dead, the ship's AI out of commission, and no memories at all from the previous 25 years. To solve their own murders, they must piece together not just the missing generation's memories, but also how their past identities and histories fit together — what caused their lives to converge to crew this one ship in its august mission. The crew comprises captain Katrina de la Cruz, security officer Wolfgang, pilot Akihiro Sato, doctor Joanna Glass, engineer Paul Seurat, and general factotum Maria Arena, who is the closest thing to a singular main character or protagonist that the book has. The ship also has an AI called IAN, who is disabled when the novel opens — another mostly-murder to solve. As the novel goes on we get flashback sections delving into each character's history prior to coming aboard the Dormire, and insight into the ramifications of cloning and mindmapping technology.
In Jane, Unlimited, protagonist Jane arrives at the mysterious island manor of Tu Reviens and meets a wide cast of characters obviously harbouring secrets, some of which seem tied to the recent death of Jane's aunt Magnolia. Aunt Magnolia made Jane promise to never turn down an invitation to Tu Reviens, so Jane — at this point completely orphaned in both relations as well as plans and means for her life — arrives at the manor quietly desperate to delve into this connection even as the weight of her grief silently consumes her. After learning just enough about the place and its inhabitants to tease her curiosity, the narrative presents Jane with a choice of several paths towards getting answers. Along each path lies not just a story to tell, but an entire genre of narrative to explore and an entire path of development for Jane that she can either take or miss out on: at the end of each chapter, the narrative returns us to the central choice, and a new route is taken.
Right off the bat — before I even tackle how two books that sound so different on the surface belong in a review together — I must say that both books have diverse casts and progressive sensibilities. The protagonist of Jane, Unlimited is explicitly bisexual, having both a male and a female love interest in the book, and is surrounded by secondary characters of multitudinous races and genders. In Six Wakes, the ensemble cast is half female, includes a black woman with disabilities and a Luna-born man who struggles in normal Earth gravity, and features only one able-bodied white man. Meanwhile, the narrative concerns itself with social consequences and always remains aware of exactly what demographics would have access to cloning technology
But each books' sensibilities have interests beyond progressiveness. Both are deeply concerned with genre, genre conventions, and themes of identity and possibility, especially the idea of lost possibility. In Jane, Unlimited, Jane will never know what the paths-not-taken amount to; she can never live all choices fully, and the growth she experiences along each path is lost each time the narrative returns to the central choice. In Six Wakes, the crew is missing decades of self that they will never get back, and as the story unfolds we learn of even more layers of self and experience that have been hidden or lost entirely. These squandered selves hover over both narratives like ghosts, breaths of memory and glimpses of might-have-beens that tantalize the characters— but even moreso the reader.
Both books center reader experience with an almost postmodern sense of medium awareness. Dramatic irony — the exercise of the reader knowing more than the characters — is played to full and fascinating effect in both books. In reading Six Wakes, the audience is invited to put together the pieces in ways that the characters not only cannot but actively refuse to, remaining reticent in sharing their past selves with each other even as they are frank and straightforward in their present interactions. In experiencing Jane, Unlimited, the reader builds up a store of knowledge about Jane’s character, Tu Reviens, and its past and present inhabitants, while Jane herself can only glimpse a subset of those stories at a time . In Six Wakes Lafferty calls these lost possibilities murder; in Jane, Unlimited Cashore conveys a bittersweet sense of play as Jane's choice spawns orphan universes behind her.
Both books relish revealing character at strategic points, not just to the readers but to the characters about themselves. But beyond that, both books also make powerful decisions regarding the interplay between character and narrative, story and structure. At heart, both books struggled to balance character and concept. In Six Wakes and Jane, Unlimited, Lafferty and Cashore are both very conscious of structure, but the novels' relationships to narrative form and how the authors situate characters in those narrative forms are very different. This is where editing really comes into play, because a good editor can take an ambitious idea and really point out where a novel's structure and choices support or undermine that idea. And this, I think, is a big part of why my experiences reading these books were so different.
Jane, Unlimited is by far the greater departure from traditional narrative structure and characterization choices. This was a huge risk to take, and that risk has downsides. While Cashore devotes lavish time and prose to Jane's interiority, she never serves a consistent character arc because Jane is essentially reset at the start of each chapter. A friction lives in between those stories: the stories the reader gets, with the weight of Jane’s accumulated choices, and the self-narrative(s) Jane gets to experience. We know, more and more with each chapter, what Jane is capable of, what she's like, where her flaws can sting and her strengths blossom. But Jane herself is deprived of that knowledge. It's a mystery in another sense, where Jane is kept secret from herself. The uniqueness of it delighted me, as well as the loving attention to detail in constructing the narrative and mystery.
Part of the reason Jane, Unlimited worked so well for me in part because I am a rereader, a genre-hopper, and a lover of strange and innovative structure. The way Cashore explored a single character and her connections, contexts, and potential entranced me, and details like Jane's umbrella-making had just the right amount of whimsy for me. Despite its very rigid structure, Jane, Unlimited felt very organic in its character development and worldbuilding, and the prose — occasionally lyrical while other times smooth and unobtrusive — helped ground me in the book's strange structure. Cashore cradled me expertly in her hands as she delivered this genre love letter to me. It's a fascinating exercise in form, but the drawbacks add up. Other people have rightly pointed out that Cashore, by structuring the book in this way, missed out on opportunities to develop Jane more fully and explore the trajectories for growth she laid the groundwork for. For those readers, the frictional frustration of multiple resets, vastly different tones between sections, and inconsistently sustained themes were enough to set the experience back or ruin it entirely. A good editor could have helped Cashore trim down on repetition and sustain threads across the five sections more consistently; I'll come back to this in the spoilers section.
Six Wakes suffers from a lack of character development as well, but in a very different way. Lafferty has explicitly set up Six Wakes and its setting to meticulously serve her aims in terms of who has what information at what time, including both reader knowledge and character self-knowledge. Six Wakes opens with a set of codicils about the legal limits cloning and mindmapping technology, situating narrative, characters, and reader in the type of story she wants to tell. Each Codicil is there for a reason, and the characters in their past and present selves, both lost and retained, play out the consequences of these codicils. But that is where my experience of Six Wakes soured: The characters are so closely tied into plot and setting that they felt like constructs for plot delivery, rather than people in and of themselves.
Lafferty's choice to prioritize the what of her story over the how — facts over delivery — was in direct conflict with how I prefer to read. The blunt, unadorned prose struck me as clumsy and listless, while for others it read as getting right to the point and moving the story along quickly and efficiently. Lafferty rarely sustained the mysteries behind the characters, dropping a hint and then — often within paragraphs or even single lines — transitioning to the relevant backstory. For me this failed to deliver the most delicious part of a mystery: sustained anticipation. For others this breakneck hopping from hint to reveal made the novel a page-turner, engrossing and difficult to put down because the reader knew there would be more exciting things page after page. Six Wakes would make an excellent movie, where economical dialogue can be buoyed up by actors' delivery and the expectations of narrative, structure, and experience are different.
It's clear that both books have another large issue in common: pacing and efficiency. Six Wakes is fleet and economical to the point of undermining its themes and choices, while Jane, Unlimited manages to both linger lovingly and move so fast through each section, especially the last two, that the tradeoffs in terms of worldbuilding and characterization become obvious. In terms of my own experience, Cashore's choices were more congruent with my style of media consumption, while Lafferty's rubbed me the wrong way from the start. Six Wakes is eager to get the character parts out of the way so it can focus on concept. Jane, Unlimited, is also focused on concept to the detriment of character and pacing, but it was an experience I enjoyed a lot more. The prose was lyrical; the book lingered on aesthetic details. That's my jam.
There's another way in which both Six Wakes and Jane, Unlimited are attentive to reader experience: both books' heavy intertextuality. Jane, Unlimited is very explicitly inspired by works such as Rebecca, Jane Eyre, and The Yellow Wallpaper; incorporates Winnie the Pooh stories into its narrative at various points; and makes copious Dr. Who references. Six Wakes, meanwhile, opens with its Cloning Codicils, making reference to Asimov's Laws of Robotics on the very first page. From there, Lafferty continues to follow Asimov's form in exploring how those laws are subverted, interpreted overly literally, or broken altogether in the world she has built. Lafferty's story goes on a a genre-bending journey vis-a-vis clone technology, rejecting the common device of clone multiplication in favour of clone immortality while engaging in the traditional questions of ethics, responsibility, and morality, all wrapped up in a mystery rather than a more standard delivery. Cashore's story is genre-bending in a more literal sense, as each of the five choices Jane can make center a different genre storytelling style.
And that's part of both books’ troubles and triumphs: In the end, they suffer from having too much story to tell. Both authors made choices in what to prioritize, and their editing teams in turn made choices in how to help shape these ideas into their most congruent wholes. These sets of choices are best discussed with full context and spoilers, so this is where the unspoilery review ends.
SPOILERS: Plot, Details, and Editing Discussion
All right. It's time to get down to the details. Both books have so much to offer in terms of ideas, and I really want to talk about how those intertwine with editorial decisions.
Straight off, I want to ask: What do the murders in Six Wakes mean? In Lafferty's world, the murder of a clone doesn't mean much, but she presents several scenarios where something valuable is lost to a clone line, something that is not quite a full human life but retains the hallmarks of experience and potential. The most obvious of these instances is the lost decades aboard the Dormire, but the two cases of yakotari, Maria's murders on Luna, and Wolfgang/Orman's excised faith present several more cases, as well as all the implied large-scale loss of self perpetrated by mindhacking. Minoru Takahashi's situation is a sort of in-between case here, as his mind has definitely been hacked, splayed open and pinned onto an artificial infrastructure in service of Sophie Mignon's goals. However, he also regains a human body at the end, while it is implied that the other losses are permanent. Minoru's inclusion in the crew actually presents one of the biggest hiccups for me in Lafferty's constructed mystery, though Minoru's thread is the best sustained mystery in the entire novel. He showed up in the background just the right number of times and without heavy-handed reveals along the way; by the time his mystery was revealed, I was not surprised but had experienced a pleasant sense of buildup and anticipation followed by the satisfaction of a correct guess. Still, his presence on the ship doesn't make sense to me. I understand that Sophie Mignon's motive was revenge and that Minoru wronged her in helping the Codicils pass. But surely confining him to a computer would have been punishment enough, and he makes an invaluable resource that way. Instead she shot him into space when she could have tortured him forever on Earth. This is just one aspect of how Lafferty's mystery felt artificial to me, both in its setup and in its conclusion. I guessed Sophie wanted the mission to fail pretty early on, but the way the characters extract themselves from this trap involved so many coincidences and positive instances of entropy that I found it hard to believe. I did appreciate that in the end it was a story about cooperation and redemption, but as I said before the characters felt more like constructs, so I felt very little emotional payoff from the happy ending. The characters always felt like they were acting erratically, doing whatever advanced the plot instead of building a sense of personality and consistent characterization. I was given so little sense of interiority for any of them that I couldn't connect to their plights on an emotional level. Six Wakes became an intellectual exercise in societal engineering for me.
Even on that level, I failed to connect with the books. I understood that there should be a sense of loss hovering over the entire narrative, rooted first in the initial murders and later building up as we learn more about the many ways cloning and mindmapping technologies have been used and abused. However, that sense of loss never crystallized for me, and I think it's because I'm more used to the style of exploration used, for example, by Bujold in her Vorkosigan Saga. One of the strictures Lafferty put in place, that clones would not be able to have children, is exactly the sort of thing I've been conditioned to expect a lot of thought and exploration on, as I am very interested in how reproduction is treated in speculative fiction. Bujold explores this facet thoroughly. But this is the least-commented on codicil in Lafferty's narrative, taken at face value to a surprising degree that speaks to entirely different sorts of speculative preoccupations from my own. Lafferty is always aware of what kinds of people — speaking to both demographics and temperament — would flourish in her imagined society, but this doesn't really carry through in a thorough social exploration even as I recognize the novel is trying to do exactly that. It just feels like a very shallow portrayal, especially in one area: religion.
Both Six Wakes and Jane, Unlimited have very odd treatments of religion. Full disclosure: I'm somewhere in the atheist/agnostic region on religious matters. Still, this bothered me. In Six Wakes during Joanna's backstory, she has this to say:
One Codicil that didn't pass was the law that would deny clones any religion. Most world religions had agreed that cloning was against the rules of God/Goddess/Gods/Nature, anyway, so they dealt with it in their own houses of worship. But leaving the clones with no recourse to religion was deemed too limiting.
The very idea that "most world religions" could agree on anything, especially something as complex as cloning ethics, is simplistic to the point of absurdity, and really took me out of the narrative qua exploration of the consequences of technology. This was early in the book, but as we go on to learn more about Father Orman/Wolfgang, the treatment of Christianity in particular gets even stranger. Father Orman (apparently from a Catholic faith, judging by the mentions of the Vatican) has some explicit religious meditations on clones, but to me those spoke of a very surface understanding of religious debate. The church in general is portrayed in a pretty universally negative light when it comes to the question of clone ethics, which is not an entirely unrealistic stance for future fiction to take, but it rings hollow in a book that's explicitly concerned with societal exploration. It's another place where Lafferty's prioritization of matter over mode sat very poorly with me: even setting aside the book's overall take on religion, it does a disservice to Wolfgang's character to treat such a pivotal part of his past so shallowly. Maria's excision of his faith is supposed to be an atrocity, but because Lafferty provided only a surface gloss of that belief and the structures it was situated in, that sense of loss in severely undermined.
Likewise, in Jane, Unlimited, when Jane travels to another dimension in the fourth iteration of her choice, this exchange ensues:
Jane searches for the words her own first Mrs. Thrash would use. "Your counterpart sent me through her portal," she says. "I'm Jane. Janie."
"Which counterpart?" says the first Mrs. Thrash. "You do realize I could have as many as infinitely many?"
"Oh god," Jane says. "I feel sick."
"Aha!" she says. "A god-worshipping dimension. Likely a Limited Dimension, then."
I'm deeply bothered by the implication that religion is an inherently limiting force. Speaking to both books: Wouldn't the human impulse towards spirituality and ritual expand as humanity's understanding of the world expanded? As religion has done since it first began, however reluctantly or enthusiastically, slowly or quickly, fully or piecemeal? I'm not a believer myself, but I don't think spirituality and ritual are necessarily in conflict with the growth of knowledge and expansion of scientific understanding. I touched on this in my Planetfall review, where I discuss ritual as an antidote to anxiety. Lack of knowledge and expansion of knowledge both cause anxiety, and spirituality and ritual are a valid way to process that, and can live in harmony with progress and progressivism. I really don't like when speculative fiction includes spirituality in its purview and then dismisses it wholesale, same as I don't like it when speculative fiction incorporates some element of human reproduction in its narrative/worldbuilding without paying enough attention to which populations would be most affected by that, and how.
The fact that Six Wakes' revenge plot centered on disappointment is a little ironic for me, as I was so very disappointed by the book, but I don't want to dismiss how those themes were both baked into Six Wakes — and Jane, Unlimited — and an integral part of my experience in reading these books. The sense of squandered potential, of lost possibilities, is shared in common between these two books, and also by my reading experience, as Jane, Unlimited, too, disappointed me in some ways. Jane herself was disappointed by her Aunt Magnolia in the end, which I found poignant and realistic, but also frustrating because only that Jane will ever know that particularly devastating truth. Just as the crew of the Dormire will never know the full richness of experience their murdered predecessor clones lived, Jane will never know what other lives she could have led, not really. The encounter Jane has with another's universe's Jane is very interesting in this sense, because she gets a glimpse of one of those lost lives, like the crew of the Dormire does though the few records left behind and from Katrina's aged clone's brief waking. How other characters react to these possibilities is interesting too. Kiran, for example, is haunted by her other selves in a way not dissimilar to how Katrina is haunted by her predecessor clone's nominal survival.
I am, in turn, haunted by what both of these books could have been. The premise of Six Wakes is very engaging, and I know part of my negative reaction to the book is because of that, because Lafferty set such high expectations and I know a particular weakness of mine is supreme frustration with a good idea poorly executed. But Jane, Unlimited suffered from the expectations Cashore set, too. The first three sections, especially the astoundingly effective horror section, made the last two sections feel small and underdeveloped, especially as by that point I was well into the game of genre play. The sense of the extraordinary escalated steadily through the first three chapters, building from mundane but exciting art heist through globe-spanning espionage and all the way to surreal horror, something like magical realism. Compared to that astounding ascension, the space opera and portal fantasy chapters were rather disappointing, feeling mostly like they were tacked on to tie up loose ends and round out the set than to really explore the opportunities the genres presented.
In talking to others about Six Wakes, I've learned that some of my reader friends, having loved the book's fast-paced and energetic presentation, felt that many of what I perceived to be narrative flaws were just part of the genre package. But that just... sounds very belittling of the genre? A good mystery can have both plot and character, both economy and expressive prose. These are not diametrically opposed poles of storycraft, and I feel like both Six Wakes and Jane, Unlimited could have been better balanced in this regard.
This is why I want to talk about editing.
For Six Wakes, I would have suggested several changes that could have evened out the experience. For one, the POV structure was confusing and irregular: sometimes it seemed omniscient, revealing things the characters could not possibly know, but the rest of the time sticking to close 3rd. This was definitely a factor in my lack of connection to the characters, and sticking to a POV style/approach would have really helped me "pick a seat", basically: the distance of omniscience or the intimacy of close individual POV. In addition, the characterization — and prose — could have been aided by the inclusion of more sensory details, tailored to each character. The opening with Maria was strong in this sense, as I got a good visceral feel of what it was like to wake up in a clone vat, but from there sensory experience was almost entirely absent, and it really contributed to my sense of detachment. Sensory details don't have to slow down a story — they can in fact heighten a sense of urgency with strong descriptors of excitement, fear, or revelation.
Finally, I would suggest a better balance of hinting. Minoru's story was exemplary in this sense, and I really wish the rest of the book's many mysteries had followed that structure more closely. Starting from the beginning, Joanna's story could have been hinted at earlier, just once or twice more, before we realize she was at the center of the passing of the Codicils. In general, putting more space between first hint and reveal would have heightened the sense of anticipation without necessarily slowing the narrative down, because the hints don't have to pause the story when they're dropped — delighted hindsight is one of the pleasures of a good mystery. The way Lafferty paced reveals and character details served to almost undermine her narrative, depriving her readers of a more immersive experience. With a setup this artificial — which is not in and of itself a problem — the author has to go to some lengths to make the rest of the experience feel organic. That's the biggest element I feel is missing from Six Wakes: attempts to defuse the tension between artificiality and suspension of disbelief. You need to really ground your readers to make sure you're not losing them when you have such an elaborately constructed house of cards for your story structure.
For Jane, Unlimited, I wish there could have been more grace notes like Kiran's at the end of the first choice, where she mentions other dimensions without either Jane or the reader necessarily knowing what she means. Things like that brief conversation have the potential to be great vehicles for carrying developments across the iterations. Jane's encounter with another Jane was a particular tease in this regard — the entire space opera section was a little like this, because Charlotte's haunting of the house carried through there, an echo that readers recognize but Jane does not. The book also took a long time to build up to the choice, so long that I know several people abandoned it before reaching that point. Cashore has a lot of pieces to put into play here, but I would have suggested trimming the opening section down as much as possible, because it and the initial art heist choice are the most mundane, and don't serve to sell the book particularly well.
In general the sections were not as balanced as they could have been, in both content and pacing. The horror chapter serves as such an emotional high point that the contrast of the irreverent space opera chapter after it felt almost cartoonish, and I would have appreciated a take on that genre that was just a touch more grounded and carried through more of the somber notes of Charlotte's chapter to ease the transition. And while I loved the Charlotte chapter for its flawless genre delivery, it was also the chapter that was most disconnected from Jane's emotional development, especially her grief for Aunt Magnolia. There was so much opportunity to really harmonize between Octavian's grief and Jane's — that could have really helped that chapter feel more at home in the book, more like a part of Jane's story. The portal fantasy chapter I am most conflicted about, as it was the least subversive, but its place as denouement and the way it deals with Aunt Magnolia rather sets it up to say: "Disappointment is part of the experience." It's hard for me to tell if letting the audience down a little at the end was part of the emotional journey Cashore intended for the reader, but I'm willing to at least come down on the side of saying that if an author's intention on something like this is unclear, a little more revision couldn't have hurt. Clarifying that intent could have helped delineate between intended narrative cooldown versus unintentional limpness.
All that said, both books have a ton to offer — almost too much, like I said — and this is part of why I have so many thoughts on the places I feel they let me down. Six Wakes ended up not being for me, but I do applaud Lafferty for her interesting setup and unique combination of narrative elements. Jane, Unlimited was very much my jam, but I've seen too many people put the book down and never pick it up again because it's too slow or too frustrating. In the end though, it's definitely a blessing to have two women putting out such interesting creative work, and I'm grateful to Orbit for publishing them. Books like these are part of what makes speculative fiction flourish as a genre.
I discussed editing quite a bit here, and it is only right that I give credit to Bridget of SF Bluestocking for looking over the first draft, and to Jenny of Reading the End for her excellent editorial assistance. My work is shaped by those around me, and I am ever grateful.
Other People's Thoughts
Jane, Unlimited
- Jane, Unlimited is a spy thriller, space opera, gothic horror story, and more. It’s great. at Vox
- The Book Smugglers
- Pretty Terrible
- Someday My Printz Will Come — this three-person roundtable discussion really helped shape my own thoughts
- Strange Horizons — a more negative reaction than my own
- Impractical Loves: On Kristin Cashore’s Jane, Unlimited and Fan Fiction at Unbound Worlds — loved this take
Six Wakes
- SF Bluestocking — one of the people who helped with this post, and a very divergent opinion from my own
- Reading the End — Jenny was super helpful with helping this post come together, but again her opinion differs from mine
- First Sight Second Thoughts
- Solving Your Own Murder: A Review of Six Wakes at Speculative Chic
- The Book Smugglers (joint review)
- The Speculative Herald
- And There’s Footsteps Loud and Strong Coming Down the Hall at James Nicoll Reviews
no subject
Date: 2018-05-01 02:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-05-01 04:51 am (UTC)I'm going to have to check out Jane, Unlimited.
I'd be interested in your take on And Then There Were (N-One) by Sarah Pinsker, another new science fiction mystery with a nifty premise.