skygiants

looool okay!

Okay, so. In the first four pages or so:
Our heroine, Destry, is an ecological ranger of some sort in a boreal forest on a planet in the wilderness part of terraforming. She has a sentient moose partner whom she rides. She also has some kind of modification? cybernetics? something tbd? that allows her to directly interface with the soil bacteria, fungi, roots, etc, to get direct info about her environment and the health of organisms within it, whereas most of her colleagues have to look at sensors to get that. So far, so good!

There is someone on an unauthorized campsite here! Burning a campfire!! (What is the wildfire ecosystem and management system here? We don't know! Destry's concern is phrased not as fire safety, but as trespassing and "uncontrolled carbon emissions." Irritation #1. I don't mind a terraforming planet ranger being upset about a trespasser in an area no one is authorized to be in, or about setting a fire that may not be in accord with policy, but the tone of it and stated reasons for it irked me. It felt like it really was about "eww, look at this horrible ignorant man we're about to clap back at" rather than a matter of policy and stewardship, even if it's framed in terms of Destry being a professional steward of this forest.) Not only that, but he's killed and is cooking a rabbit! HORROR REVULSION DISGUST. Not because of any suggestion that the rabbit is sentient, but just on general principles of killing and eating animal flesh being abhorrent.

(I figured that attitude was likely here, but it annoyed me. This is ironic in some ways, because a) I'm like 95% vegetarian and b) I recently read a very mediocre Anne McCaffrey book in which all the POV characters were likewise horrified by the very idea of eating meat. But that book was from 1976, and Anne McCaffrey had POV characters hunting, eating livestock, etc, in other books, so I know in that case it was a deliberate culture-building choice, and am very curious about the intended audience's reaction. In this case, in 2024, it felt like it was the acknowledged Non-Problematic Attitude™. Possibly that's unfair; possibly the cultural and/or personal roots of this are delved into later. But off the cuff, it felt like a very 2024 urban progressive vegetarian attitude rather than the attitude of someone with a built-in neurological connection to a boreal forest's ecosystem and its food web.)

Irritation #2, which is unfair in a way because I wouldn't've known this without spoilers from Becca: Destry also has a conversation with her moose friend Whistle. Whistle is the one who has a brain thing limiting him to single-syllable words. But he says the word Destry! Even if they're speaking a language where Whistle is one syllable, Destry isn't! Maybe personal names are an exception to this brain limiter but it reminded me that that plot point exists and annoys me.

Anyway. Destry goes to challenge the guy! He gives her lip and is generally resistant! She pushes back! She fails to make any real arguments beyond "because I said so." (Now, she is in a position of authority here, so I get the because-I-said-so factor, but when you've got somebody refusing to recognize your authority, just repeating yourself louder is not going to do anything to change that. This could be a character point -- maybe she's not good at asserting herself, maybe authority doesn't sit easily on her shoulders -- but there's a narrative attitude of "mic drop! and then everybody [who isn't problematic] clapped" surrounding her statements that was irritation #3.)

The guy, by the way, is a remote-controlled person -- someone who's loaned? sold? his body for use by somebody up in orbit for livestreaming a Pleistocene-level experience. It's the unknown person up in orbit who's actually talking through him, as Destry recognizes quickly and as his statements soon confirm. We don't know anything about the guy whose actual body this is or what he thinks about any of this, except that he was willing to be a livestreaming puppet for whatever reason.

And we're not going to! Because when saying "because I said so" three or four times doesn't get him gone, Destry SHOOTS THE GUY IN THE HEAD.

Irritation #4. Killing a rabbit to eat is a horrific ethical violation, but killing a guy after 30 seconds of conversation with the other person puppeting him is totally fine! Well, Destry regrets it in that it'll get her in trouble if she doesn't successfully cover her tracks (which she immediately starts to do), but there are no ethical qualms about this, apparently? "DO THEY EVER COMPLICATE THIS OR ADDRESS THIS CONTRADICTION???" I asked Becca. "lol no of course not," Becca said.

...And that's when I put the book down and went to go read something that angered me less for a while. I do want to read more of this book, if only so I can booklog about it, but clearly I'm gonna have to brace myself and be in the right mood to get through any of it.