I read solitaire in a few hours, and I must confess I couldn’t stop. The book left me with a sense of deja vu.
Somehow, it reminded me – specially the shangri la apartments (and I cannot really say why this association) – of William Gibson’s books, like all tomorrow’s parties. do you read his books? is it a known influence? I know things like earthgov and korporations are all over science fiction, asimov laid it all out in foundation, maybe even someone before I am not even aware of , but your books adds a twist to it, the korporation is chacal’s home, not just the almighty enemy, she is part of it.
Something I really enjoyed in your book is that women have a saying. Maybe you overdo it, the male characters are all extremely weak and nearly non-existent, but what the hell! there’s plenty of books, movies… where the girl is only there to show cleavage. Thanks! I work on a very machista (= male chauvinistic) field – science – and even with plenty of women my age there are very few women in positions of power and women are still treated mostly as second class. i.e., my boss gets drunk at a conference and he is great, a woman colleague does the same and she is not just as great.
Anyway, I really enjoyed solitaire and will look forward to your coming novels 🙂
c.
Glad you liked it. Thanks for taking the time to write.
I’ve read some Gibson, of which I reckon Neuromancer had the most impact. I was in my early twenties and had never read anything like it. There’s a certain measure of Sprawl influence in my vision of the NNA, as well as a bit of Philip K Dick and John Brunner. EarthGov is a pretty standard SF trope, you’re right. Politics as a basis for story doesn’t interest me, which is why the specifics of EarthGov are left to the reader’s imagination (grin).
But I really was trying to be different with Ko. The evil corporation is a tiresome story idea, and in my opinion also just plain inaccurate. Corporations aren’t evil, although sometimes people are. And it seems that protagonists in SF so rarely have everyday jobs unless they are pawns of the Evil Corporation. Where are the janitors and the secretaries and the food servers and the kindergarten teachers? We have enough space pilots, already.
It’s interesting that you think the male characters are all extremely weak and nearly non-existent. I disagree utterly, but that’s why we have a word in the language for “opinion.” I suppose it depends on what you mean by weak (what do you mean?). To me, Solitaire is a book full of people who are weak in some ways and strong in others, but not based on gender. To say that all the men or women in the book are a certain way implies some kind of agenda (conscious or unconscious) that I don’t think accurately describes me as a writer or a person. But you see the book differently, and that’s cool with me. It’s an interesting response.
And I’m completely with you on the double standard. I used to work in television a long time ago. I was a freelance technician on remote television productions like sports events or awards ceremonies, where a 55-foot trailer full of TV equipment shows up and they do the television broadcast from the site. When we did “packages” (such as an entire season of Pac-10 college football, for example), we would travel around the country and do a different event every few days or every week. At that time there were few women on these crews, and it soon became clear to me that women weren’t real in some way. I wasn’t really a woman, you see – I was on the crew – so the guys used to talk in front of me about the women they would meet at the bars we went to after the shoot. A lot of steam got blown off those nights, and I saw and heard some astonishing things that I never would have if they’d remembered I was a woman. It went as far as having one of the men tell me one night after several beers that he liked me and respected me so much he wouldn’t even try to fuck me. What can you say to that? (I said “thank you”).
Do I think all men are like this? Nope. It’s a mixed bag, it always is. There’s plenty of assholes in the world. Some of them are men, some of them are women, some of them are someone’s grandma. But I do think that when people group together they will look for commonalities, for a group baseline, and it’s unfortunate that so often those baselines default to extreme gendered or class or cultural behavior. You’d think someone would have figured out by now that teaching little kids diversity-respect skills would be more of a passport to happiness than all the algebra in the world.
Please, no grumpy letters from math teachers. Math is Good. I’m just trying to make a point here.
Ah, so much to say about this post. It reminded me of a Spanish review of Rio Lento I translated for Nicola. The guy who wrote it said, “Going further into the psychology of the protagonists, it is evident that the characters the author develops with greater depth and body are female ones. Few male characters appear in this work: an elderly neighbor, a father with an existential crisis (professional and emotional) on whom weights the suspicion of mistreatment, and an incompetent brown nose at the treatment plant, along with the couple of kidnappers and a saboteur. All of them characters that, at best, inspire pity in different degrees and qualities.”
I thought there was a good balance of male and female characters in Solitaire, especially considering that once Jackal goes into the penal system, she’s bound to interact only with those of own gender. When I think of Solitaire, I not only remember Jackal and Snow immediately, but also Tiger and Neill and Carlos.
I find it so annoying that women authors are put under so much pressure. If they write strong female characters, they must have something against men. If they have a female partner in real life, they must write weak men because they must also have something against men. One of my friends worships Válka s mloky (War with the Newts) by Karel Äapek. I agree that it’s a great novel. But I had to point out that the only female characters in it are microscopic, they have one line and are a stupid blond actress and a lady tourist (traveling with her husband, of course) who talks to one of the newts about flowers and gardening. EVERY other character in the novel is either male or a newt. My friend says that it’s not important. I told him, “Seriously, if I had written the exact same book but having only women and newts as main characters, and thrown in a couple male tokens, say a moronic bodybuilder and a guy who talks about car races with a newt, I would have been crucified by critics and readers alike.”
Oh, I also think Math—and every science—would benefit from having more people learn to respect diversity. Many of the brilliant scientists are very unique themselves. Who knows how many others were crushed before we even got a chance to hear their minds because of prejudice and such.
Mistaking importance in the story for strength is a critic’s problem. You aren’t telling those men’s stories, you’re telling Jackal’s. The men who are in her story are there in reference to her character development and her setting. There are clearly men in her world, and she interacts with them in character-appropriate ways.
Karina, this is all so true that there’s hardly any response I can make except to nod my head in agreement. One of Nicola’s reviews for Ammonite opined that the book would have been so much richer if only Marghe had a brother… the whole thing just makes me want to go bang my head against something sharp.
*rant on*
The world is full of people!! Shockingly, many of them are women!! They actually walk around and breathe and have thoughts and feelings and hopes and dreams even when men aren’t there to see them do it!! Astonishing, but true!!
AND DO NOT EVER EVER EVER COME UP TO ME IN PUBLIC WHEN I AM WITH ANOTHER WOMAN AND SAY, “ARE YOU LADIES ALONE?” NO, WE’RE NOT ALONE! WE ARE WITH EACH OTHER!!!!!!
AAAAAARRRRRRGHHHHHHHH!
*rant off*
It never occurred to me that people might find Solitaire “female-centric”. To me, it’s just about people… The thing that I really worried about, to be honest, was that the Lesbian Nation would get bent out of shape at Jackal being bisexual and having a sexual and emotional connection with Tiger. And maybe people did, but I never heard a peep about that.
Well, I feel a little better after that.
Hi, Kai, and yes, that’s a much more coherent way of saying it. It’s interesting to me that people equate “screen time” or “page time” with strength. I guess it’s one of our cultural assumptions that the protagonist is always strong. And it’s true that I don’t much care to read/see a story about someone who is perpetually weak, but… hmm, I guess what it comes down to is my weariness with secondary characters in books and movies being phoned in. Being under-developed, cliched, etc. just because well, we don’t see that much of them so who cares how 3-D they are?
That’s just bad writing. When those secondary characters are women, people of color, old people, people with disabilities, etc. then the badness just gets worse.