Raven Strategem

[unspeakablehorror]

Am currently reading Raven Strategem by Yoon Ha Lee and am partway through chapter 10.  These are fairly character-driven stories, which is something I appreciate, but the large amount of military minutiae here is really not my thing.  I don't skip over things like that, though, especially since it's an important part of the story. 

I do find the worldbuilding intriguing, though often confusing as well.  The worldbuilding is extensive, and the universe (galaxy? galaxies??) Yoon Ha writes about is truly alien even while the people seem to be mostly human.  It takes a while to even start to understand a lot of the terminology which is immediately thrown at you, and even after it's explained somewhat I tend to blink and think 'did I understand that correct?'  Example: Composites apparently refers to more than one person (I get a sense this is usually a small number, like 2 or 3) being somehow merged into one person?  That one's weird but at least somewhat understandable.  I still don't understand threshhold winnowers, except that they sound truly terrible.  The worldbuilding is off the charts in this series, and one of my motivations for reading through the story is trying to get a better handle on that.  The worldbuilding has had quite a bit of significance to the overall story so far, so I try to pay attention to those sorts of details.

I find it difficult to categorize the plot.  Is it action?  There is some action, but less than one might expect in a book about space battles.  Mystery?  I feel like a mini-mystery is solved every time I learn more about how this universe works, and there are some significant reveals at the end of the first book, but it doesn't really quite have a mystery feel to me.  Psychological thriller?  This one probably seems like the most accurate to me, though I think it's probably taking a somewhat nonstandard approach to that. 

This has been a difficult series to read through for me, for a number of reasons.  It doesn't shy away from upsetting things, and while I appreciate that in a story about war and intricate political machinations, it can also be a bit too much for me at times.  I certainly do want to see where the characters and story eventually end up, though, and dicipher the complex universe the author has built.

Comments

[rugessnome]

yeah lol I read Raven Strategem in pretty much one go I think and I don't necessarily remember it as well as I might like because of that, but it also was not as fast as some books because Information DENSE.

I seem to remember that the number for composites seemed potentially higher than 2 or 3 to me at some point in that book, but I still think it's probably in the realm of less-than-20.

I was doing Continuing Education things for something today ~"yesterday" and the explanation of how something work struck me as very black-box, very superficial; I'm sure there's a complex physical chemistry story behind how the thing worked, but all the explanation was just for: this is how you use it. That's what your thought on the threshold winnower reminded me of.

For me, I feel like I conceptualize the threshold winnower as almost a sort of algorithmic transformation. like, somewhere between math and computer programming somehow? I think functions and ...objects? (I am failing to remember a word just now) in my intro to object-oriented-programming class and like, Laplace transformations (PDEs) are related to my conception.

(I should probably remember to note to people with future recommendations that there is an instance of incest in RS; it doesn't come up in NG. Idk if you'll have come across it yet. )

[unspeakablehorror]

Ah, yes, I did encounter the instance of incest earlier, and actually stopped reading for a while due to that. There are a number of the military and war-related things in this story that set me off, too, but I won't always stop reading things that contain triggering or otherwise upsetting content to me, and I do have a strong interest in finishing this story. While I certainly have stopped reading things that I've found triggering or upsetting in the past, and expect to continue to do so in the future, it's also actually pretty common for even my favorite stories to contain content that's deeply upsetting to me due to the sheer number of different things that have that kind of effect for me.

It certainly is a very information dense story. There's a lot going on, and there's a lot of new ideas to deal with all at once. There's a great deal that I feel is being expressed via the worldbuilding alone, but the plot and characterization has a lot going on too.

Interesting that we have different impressions on the number of people involved in composites. I don't think I ever saw a concrete number listed for that, so I was just going entirely off of my feeling on how large it might be based on their behavior. Though really, I have no idea what people would act like at any scale if they were all just kind of squashed into one person.

And that's an intriguing observation about the threshhold winnower. One of the things that occurred to me as I was thinking about what you've said here about that was that the Machineries of Empire universe seems so different that it may very well operate on different laws of physics than ours. So perhaps the its premise is based on manipulating the laws of physics themselves via mathematics. And this reminded me of the otherwise rather different Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy where this also (actually) eventually occurs (though the context and execution of that certainly differs considerably).

There's a lot of layers to this story. I'm sure it will give me a lot to think about for a long time to come.