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antishurtugal_rebornThis chapter is unnecessary. It literally just consists of Kira travelling, eating, and learning the alien’s name, yet somehow takes up longer than this spork.
The chapter is called Exeunt 1. For those not familiar, exeunt is an old-timey word meaning “exit”, and it appears at the end of acts in plays. The chapter title makes it sound like Paolini’s trying to come off as “sophisticated” here. It doesn’t work. Pro tip: If you want your work to sound sophisticated, then the writing needs to be sophisticated. Fancy words and titles can’t replace that.
Kira is looking at herself in the “Markov bubble”, which is basically a bubble that insulates the ship from the superluminal universe. I don’t know why the bubble would be reflective, and I don’t know how the Markov drive could transport matter. However, I won’t pretend to know the science. Hopefully someone more qualified than me can explain it in the comments.
Kira has never been awake for FTL, so she is interested in all this. We get a paragraph of infodump, and then:
Kira remembered a description her fourth-year physics teacher had once used: “Going faster than light is like traveling in a straight line along a right angle.” The phrase had stuck with her, and the more she’d learned of the math, the more she’d realized how accurate it was.
Why the heck is a xenobiologist learning advanced physics? And of course the xenobiologist who couldn’t calculate how long the ration packs would last her has a physics degree. You’re not fooling me, Paolini.
Kira asks the computer to play the complete works of Bach, on a loop. In a personal touch, he’s her favorite composer. I like Chopin myself, but you do you Kira.
Kira felt herself begin to relax. The structure of Bach had always appealed to her: the cold, clean mathematical beauty of one theme slotting into another, building, exploring, transforming. And when each piece resolved, the resolution was so immensely satisfying. No other composer gave her that feeling.
Music is about emotion. That’s why we like it so much. This description seems like it’s from someone who isn’t into music at all. But anyway, if Kira wants a satisfying resolution, I think someone needs to introduce her to “Prelude in E minor”.
Kira decides to give the alien a name, because it saved her. She does acknowledge that she wouldn’t have been in danger without it, but she still feels “gratitude and confidence.” Because nothing makes you confident like having a crazy death-suit attached to your body!
Kira tries to name the suit Obsidian, but the alien rejects it, probably because the name is cliche as all hell. Through images and sensations, the alien tells her its name. Before I get into the name reveal, I would like to point something out. This is the only time that the suit communicates in a way like this. Otherwise, it’s dream visions. I actually like this, since there is no reason for the suit to know Kira’s language. This would’ve worked for Saphira, too, since it’s less human. Unfortunately, the suit becomes an accessory after this. This had so much potential! Imagine if Kira had to learn how to communicate with it.Struggling with how to get along would be an actual conflict, and it would provide a setup for the climax (which, as it is, comes right out of nowhere).
Kira then waxes lyrical about the suit’s name:
It was a complex name, composed of and embodied by a web of interrelated concepts that she realized would probably take her years to fully parse, if ever. However, as the concepts filtered through her mind, she couldn’t help but assign words to them. She was only human, after all; language was as much a part of her as consciousness itself. The words failed to capture the subtleties of the name—because she herself didn’t understand them—but they captured the broadest and most obvious aspects.
*Snicker snicker.* We all know where this is going. The name?
The Soft Blade.
As opposed to the Hard Blade?
Kira sees the suit as a companion now that she knows it has a name. The name I will now give it is Limp Dick. Apparently, whoever named the alien “possessed a sense of elegance and poetry”. Or they possessed a dirty sense of humor and a few bottles of wine. Kira goes to sleep and has a weird dream/vision. It’s written in this weird pseudo-fantasy way, which really clashes with the previous prose style. Here’s an example:
Falling. Softly falling within the blue-black reaches of the swelling sea. Past lamp and sway, through wafts of heat and chill, softly fell and softly swam. And from the folds of swirling darkness emerged a massive form, there upon the Plaintive Verge: a mound of pitted rock, and rooted atop that rock … rooted atop that rock …
Not to mention this is confusing as heck. What is the alien even talking about.? The massive form?Also, “Softly falling within the blue-black reaches of the swelling sea.” is a sentence fragment. So is “Past lamp and sway, through wafts of heat and chill, softly fell and softly swam.” With my authority as the GRAMMAR POLICE CHIEF, I hereby slap Paolini with a fine of three crimson rubies and an ice cream sandwich. Pay the cashier at the front.
Sowing confusion is fine, but you have to satisfy it, and the dream visions are never fully resolved.
Kira woke, confused.
Her and me both.
It was still dark, and for a moment, she knew neither where she was nor how she had gotten there, only that she was falling from a terrible height—
She yelped and flailed, and her elbow hit the control panel next to the pilot’s seat. The impact jolted her back to full awareness, and she realized she was still on the Valkyrie and that the Bach was still playing.
This would’ve been good, except that the narration is disconnected from Kira. For example, she shouldn’t know that her elbow hit the control panel. She should still think she’s dreaming. It would be better if we experienced the moment of awareness with Kira instead of before her. It’s little things like this that make the prose weaker.
Kira thinks about the dream for a while, wondering about who made Limp Dick and if she can separate from it. She notices that this weird dust is coating Limp Dick. Apparently, it’s Limp Dick’s waste. … … She’s covered in alien poop. This is absolutely disgusting. Kira doesn’t do what I would do, which is get to the nearest water source and jump in it, and instead thinks about how the alien could do this. I literally do not care. I came here to read about action and alien wars, not about how an alien excretes.
The next part is literally Kira sleeping and eating. The excitement might literally kill me. Kira runs out of ration packs. Oh, the humanity. How will I go on?
Now came the hard part: no more food. For a moment, she thought of the cryo tubes at the back of the shuttle—and of Orso’s offer—but as before, her mind rebelled against the idea. She would rather starve than resort to eating another person. Maybe her stance would change as she wasted away, but Kira felt certain it wouldn’t.
Really??? What was the point of all that in the last chapter, then?
Kira goes back to sleep. I envy her. I’d rather be sleeping at this point. Kira’s very hungry. How horrible. Then Limp Dick, being an otherworldly alien with survival instincts, takes over Kira and starts eating Orso’s leg- wait, no it doesn’t. Kira just prays to Thule (whom we know nothing about except that he’s the god of spacers) and goes to sleep. And that’s the end of the chapter.
My verdict? So. Damn. Boring. You could cut all of this out and you wouldn’t miss a thing. I think the parts with Limp Dick should be folded into the previous chapter. The rest should be just. Have the last chapter end with her travelling, and then cut to the next chapter, where she wakes up after her journey. It would cause mystery as to how she survived, and, more importantly, it would save us all of this sleeping.
Curse count in the chapter: 0
Book curse count: 56.
I also think we should start keeping an OGY, or Oh God Why count, for the weird moments in the book. I think the moment where Alan is killed is an OGY one because of the whole spike groin and“obscene intimacy”. In the last chapter, the alien being a creep is definitely an OGY, and the whole “Soft Blade” thing is a third OGY.
OGY count: 3
Feel free to add more if you think I missed any.
Next is Awakening with Snarkbotanya.
no subject
Date: 2020-10-23 11:30 am (UTC)It's bad science to stick on one hypothesis and not even consider any others.
no subject
Date: 2020-10-23 11:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-23 03:49 pm (UTC)Yeah. She's much more passionate about plants than animals in the long run. She really should've been a botanist instead of a xenobiologist. Or a repair technician.
no subject
Date: 2020-10-23 11:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-23 11:14 pm (UTC)And relatable. She's traumatized and has a crazy death suit on her body.
no subject
Date: 2020-10-24 01:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-24 09:01 pm (UTC)I think Paolini should stick to writing teenagers, personally, and not try to pretend they're "mature".
A (mature) adult would likely have a lot more perspective and stoicism than Kiragon displays.
This could work if it was established that Kiragon was traumatized as hell, but we all know how good Paolini is at writing that.
no subject
Date: 2020-10-26 03:41 am (UTC)I agree. When he tries to write adults he just ends up making them so painfully immature and childish that it's not remotely believable that they are adults. Okay, there are adults in real life who are super childish, but when the entire cast is like that and they're somehow entrusted with commanding spaceships and leading armies and whatnot, it stretches suspension of disbelief well beyond breaking point.
ie not at all. For feck's sake, when you're super upset about someone dying traumatically in front of you you can't just switch it off at will. That's not how emotions work, Chris.