-- [ From: David Christenson * EMC.Ver #2.5.3 ] --
Just finished reading *The Fortunate Fall* by Raphael Carter. Some
observations:
A very ambitious first novel. Maybe too ambitious. Though it's never
uninteresting or particularly confusing, and Carter manages to sift much
background into the narrative, there are elements of the tale that
seemed undeveloped. For example, my picture of the repressive society
remained unclear through most of the book, as did the circumstances that
led to that repressive society.
It's quite dialogue-heavy, thus heavy on the info-dumping, particularly
at the climax - nearly a hundred pages of dialogue, or rather characters
exchanging monologues. But most of that final section is more or less in
the form of a lengthy broadcast interview. (Elsewhere, the dialogue
occasionally struck me as too-clever.)
My reservations about the complexity and style aside, its gender-bending
aspects are quite interesting. A lesbian reporter outlawed for
lesbianism, artificially repressed, pursued in a romance via enhanced
cyberspace while she investigates layered conspiracies. Meanwhile, the
matter of gender equality is so taken for granted it never really seems
to come up - perhaps an advantage to having a culture that's fully cyber
-ized, where physical differences are moot?
Any comments?
-- David Christenson - ldqt79a@prodigy.com"The most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." - H.P. Lovecraft
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