A pun on the title. Very droll, I’m certain.
I’m kicking off Female Writers’ Month a month early. Why? Because I’m already away, I already have the books and you know what I say to the prospect of holding off from reading books for an entire month just to conform to an arbitrary deadline? Fuck that, that’s what.
Also, it’s going to be two months, because that’s how long I’m away. And it’s still called Female Writers’ Month. Deal wid it.
The first novel I’ve read is Theirs Not To Reason Why – A Soldier’s Duty (or possibly, A Soldier’s Duty – Theirs Not to Reason Why. I’m honestly not certain), a Military Sci-Fi novel by Jean Johnson. Overall, I had a pretty good time reading the novel, but with some reservations.
The initial idea for the novel is an interesting one; Ia, an inhabitant of a backwater planet in a universe where the human race has spread to the stars, is hit by sudden, nightmarish visions of an apocalyptic war that is to occur in four hundred years time. Using her precognitive abilities, Ia resolves that the only way for humankind to win this war is for her to join the Space Force Marine Corp and carve out a reputation so formidable that when crunch time rolls around it will be used as inspiration by the human race to win in the fight against extinction.
The book has a lot of good points going for it; it’s packed with fine details that give it a good grounding in realism, the alien races we see are interesting and are based on some cool ideas and the side characters are fun and have lots of personality. Johnson gets a lot of stuff right and even though the universe was your standard Military Sci-Fi schtick of the USA in Spaaaaaaace! it was engaging nonetheless.
The problem is that, for every good thing A Soldier’s Duty has going for it, there’s something in it that just doesn’t work for me. The main issue with the novel is, I feel, Ia herself; the novel kind of shoots itself in the foot due to the fact that her precognitive abilities are key to the novel, but then mean that she has little room for flaws or growth. She’s just too perfect a character, one who’s prepared for everything in advance and who never seems to be fazed by any development. Her mission of carving out this reputation as the ultimate soldier is obviously the most important drive in her life, but it never really feels like she’s driven by it; aside from one scene in the earlier parts of the novel that stands out, I couldn’t get the sense that Ia is ever really bothered by anything. The whole visions business could have worked if Ia was given maybe some kind of sense of desperation over the issue, but that’s never a problem for her. Combined with the fact that she seems to think everything through so logically, so calmly and so analytically all of the time, and she ends up as a protagonist who’s just too distant and aloof to ever become truly engaging.
The other serious problem with Ia is that she just seems to be, for want of a better word, special. There always seems to be some kind of exception or circumstance that makes her better than everyone else, or the perfect person for the job, or she just so happens to be the only one who comes up with the idea that saves the day. Some of it makes sense and is explained early on, such as the fact that Ia’s has greater strength and faster reflexes than most people due to being a ‘heavyworlder’, somebody born and raised on a high gravity homeworld (in fact, this was one of the worldbuiding details that I really liked). At other times, her abilities just seem to have been pulled out of nowhere when convenient; at one point late in the novel she’s suddenly able to manipulate heat and light, and then out of nowhere, I kid you not, nowhere, she gets a sword made out some kind of invulnerable, psychically-attuned metal that only she can use.
There are other small isuses as well; the novel also hits one of my pet peeve buttons with its over-usage of the of the word ‘literally’, and it does that usual annoying military sci-fi thing of having the motivations of most of the protagonists basically boil down to ‘they’re so. Very. Heroic!’ As well as this, there are a fair few times when the novel has chunks of exposition or description that go on for several pages, which were a pretty big annoyance for me.
Like I said, there’s a lot of stuff in Theirs Not to Reason Why that’s done well, but at the same time it pushes a lot of buttons that just don’t seem to work for me. In all, it passed a good chunk of the time in a ten hour flight between London and Beijing, and it’s engaging enough that I’m planning on reading its sequel, An Officer’s Duty, but the little things were a persistent enough nag at the back of my mind for it to not quite hit the ‘fantastic’ mark.
Verbal Fisticuffs 