Laurie J. Marks: Earth Logic

[rachelmanija]

There's a lot to like about this book, including some luscious food descriptions and an excellent plot strand about a female commander who changes and grows. Plus babies and children described in a non-sappy manner. However, if most of the cast had climbed into an insanity-inducing Gundam or been poisoned with crazy-making drugs or had any other rationale for their sudden attack of collective nuttiness, the entire second half of the book would have made a lot more sense.



I refer, of course, to Emil, Zanja, and Medric doing a foretelling which seems to indicate that their goals will be accomplished in some nebulous manner if they kill Zanja... and they do it! (Sort of. Not quite, because Norina retains some vestige of sanity.) And Karis lets them! (By wandering off.)

This makes no sense and is not believable on any level, and it completely contradicts the characters' attitude toward foretelling in the previous book, which was that you cannot blindly follow predictions but must apply common sense, analysis, and ethics to them. What they all did was exactly like the massacre of Zanja's tribe due to the blind following of a prophecy, except that by authorial fiat killing Zanja worked out better.

Not only did this make all the characters seem to have lost their minds, but it was not necessary to how the plot actually went: Zanja's presence in the Sainnite garrison was only a small portion of what enabled the happy ending. It also was unnecessary to get her there: the foretelling could have just told them that Zanja needed to be a spy-- even a temporarily memory-wiped spy-- and then all the same things could have happened without the characters being CRAZY.

Also, it would have been nice if Garland the cook had affected the plot in any way whatsoever, because he was my favorite character.


Well, I did still order Water Logic, so this obviously didn't completely ruin the book for me. But I hope nothing like it happens in the next one.

Comments

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

I suspect Water Logic will be fine for you.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

My one big problem with the Logic books, and it's a biiiiig one, is that an invading imperial army appears to be completely unconversant with rape. It's just sort of quietly not-addressed, and the Sainnites, male and female, do their thing; but our existing conceptual terminology for imperial invasion kind of revolves around rape and kidnap, so that big blank in the world-building really, really leapt out at me.

Which was what made me conclude that the books were probably better read as YA, and thus leaving things out so as not to be as upsetting to younger readers.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I thought she was suggesting that rape would not exist in a gender-egalitarian society. If you ever read Phyllis Ann Karr's generally more fluffy "Frostflower and Thorn" books, she suggests that a gender-egalitarian society would merely include rape by women. I have to say, I think that's more plausible.

[chomiji]

I've also read some discussions (particularly one about The Northern Girl by Elizabeth Lynn) suggesting that in a more egalitarian society, rape might become "just" another form of violence: a crime, painful, worth punishing, etc., but without the specific shame or stigma it has in the societies we know.

(And someone else who's read Frostflower and Thorn and its sibling! They're not terribly good but they're very, very readable. And I like the friendship that develops between the title characters.)

[oyceter]

I had some plot problems with Water Logic as well, but it is not on the same level as the mass insanity in this book!

Garland was awesome. Also, I was so hungry after reading it!

[branna.livejournal.com]

I agree, _Water Logic_ has its issues, but nothing so severe as _Earth Logic_. I'm very curious to see where she goes with the final book in the quartet.

[loligo.livejournal.com]

I've been meaning for years now to write up a little something about why I find the Insane Plot Twist quite believable in that context. But since my list of Things I Ought To Write For LJ has at least 20 items on it and is growing every day, don't hold your breath.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

...in even a few sentences?

[loligo.livejournal.com]

Okay. I think you are all underestimating the soul-shaking nature of the constantly escalating prescience of Emil, Zanja, and Medric. They're experiencing unprecedented power and they're isolated in their own little cabal. I can definitely see how that would lead to the nigh-surreal level of faith required to carry out that interpretation of their vision.

[loligo.livejournal.com]

Also (see, this is why it's going to take a whole essay to do it properly): I think it's really important that Zanja and Emil (not so sure about Medric) see their power as relational. It's not just a thing that they do or a thing that they are, it's part of their relationship with their tribal gods or with the land/goddess Shaftal. Their growing success with divination creates not just the heady thrill of confidence in their own powers, it creates trust in that relationship -- trust that no matter what happens to them, there is something *beyond* them that is working toward their goals and will find a way to carry them out. That relationship both frees them to take this risk, and *asks* them to take this risk.

(Also also, Zanja's not exactly a stranger to suicide.)

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Actually, that plot twist made perfect sense to me. The thing is, Zanja is a fire blood, which means that by nature and by intention of the gods she's intended to work through intuition, travel, unexpected revelation, and action taken without or almost without thinking. And she went through so much in Fire Logic that, quite rationally (and I'd do the same thing) she stopped moving. She's stuck at the beginning of Earth Logic, she knows Karis is supposed to be doing something, and Karis won't, and Zanja can't nag her into it, and Zanja has lost the ability to take any action that isn't nagging Karis. The stuckness comes from her damage-- the loss of her tribe, and then everything else that happened-- and what survived that damage wasn't the fire blood the presumptive ruler of a war-torn country would need, and decidedly wasn't Zanja's best self.

And she isn't getting out of it on her own. At the start of the book, it's been years of stuck, literally. Her marriage is starting to strain and what's left of her sanity is starting to crack. She hasn't gone anywhere, traveled, in years; that's a serious sign of trouble in a fire blood. The other fire bloods have been gallivanting around the country doing administration and printing and whatnot; not Zanja. When you think about the way she lived with her tribe, where she spent a lot of time camping and traveling, with the fixed base to return to every so often, you see the healthy pattern of life for her, but instead she's been as rooted to one spot as the earth blood she lives with.

So it made sense to me that everybody's foretelling would say death was the way out, because it was. Acting out the end result of all the damage, letting the pain play through to its natural end, even pretending that she did die of the things that nearly killed her, because many parts of her did-- and doing that with total verisimilitude, with everyone involved believing it to be absolutely real, except Norina, whose job as an air blood is to maintain contact with objective reality at all times-- is what frees her to be not merely alive but completely herself again, and reactivates the fire blood talent of turning up unexpectedly at the correct moment.

I also don't think you can compare it to the wiping out of Zanja's tribe. That was to prevent a prophecy, if I recall correctly; the Sainnites had heard that Zanja's tribe would be their downfall, and moved to stop it. Zanja and her family have a prophecy which is immensely upsetting and inconvenient to them, which they nevertheless decide to go with. I could complain about the privileging of going with what the powers-that-be appear to determine for one over fighting to maintain the supremacy of one's will in the world, and the standard usage in fantasy of prophecy as authorial fiat, but I think that in this case the moral difference between on the one hand trying to avoid pain and on the other doing what one feels one must even if it is painful is meant to be significant.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Thank you for getting here sooner than I did, as you said it much more incisively.

(Zanja is stuck, Karis is stuck, the entire country is stuck. Really, it worked slightly better on the larger level than the personal level, but it didn't feel to me like a betrayal of the personal level.)

I need to re-read Water Logic. Since the logic escaped me.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I also need to reread Water Logic, as I think I had it while I was reading it, but then it left.

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

That is a great explanation and now I need to reread.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Hi, I deleted your comment because it looked spoilery for Water Logic, which I have not yet read. Please re-post without the spoilery elements.

[snarp]

If this is for me (I'm not getting comment notifications right now), I don't have a copy of what I wrote, but I don't think I said anything spoilery about Water Logic - I recall bringing it up to say something like: "There's a plot point I won't specify in Water Logic that confirms some skeevy feelings I had about the first two books." (I don't remember if I said it in that bad of a run-on sentence. I might have.)

But as I don't have a copy of it, I can't be sure I didn't put something spoilery in. So, yeah, if you're being careful, probably don't read it anyway.

(I don't feel up to rewriting it just now - I think Water Logic's left me actually too mad at Marks for me to be talking about these books.)