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Species Imperitive by Julie E Czerneda
Mar. 28th, 2014 06:48 pmOnce I got over the "people getting dissolved" aspect I really enjoyed this series! And I think that if I hadn't been (a)particularly squicked by that kind of biological scariness and (b)softened by not having read anything remotely horror-y for ages it would have been fine, certainly I felt much better at the end of books 2 and 3 than I did at the end of book 1.
Anyway! If you can deal with a bit of scariness this is quite an enjoyable scifi trilogy, with an interesting female protagonist, moderately inventive worldbuilding, thrills, romance, humour, and likeable (if not super deep) characters (many of whom were female scientists! Having complicated and important friendships!!). It's not the best thing I've ever read, I could see the scaffolding behind the writing more than I would like, especially when it came to the romance (though the love interest himself was nice enough) and spreading out exposition. Avoiding too many info dumps in a row is good, but you have to be a bit more creative than just having three chapters worth of your main character being constantly interrupted every time she tries to read a letter.
I love some clever alien reproductive biology, and this book had lots, as well as some very varied gender roles, but the author fell into some of the typical traps, like making everyone straight (or equivalent) and generally interested in having kids at least in an abstract sense. If you can't even capture the diversity of human reproductive drives/gender etc...
It's definitely a trilogy telling one story, but each book has a moderately neat ending, they don't just stop or end on a cliffhanger or anything. I'll definitely be checking out some of her other books, though I may avoid the ones that look like they focus more on romance since that was the weakest part to me.
Anyway! If you can deal with a bit of scariness this is quite an enjoyable scifi trilogy, with an interesting female protagonist, moderately inventive worldbuilding, thrills, romance, humour, and likeable (if not super deep) characters (many of whom were female scientists! Having complicated and important friendships!!). It's not the best thing I've ever read, I could see the scaffolding behind the writing more than I would like, especially when it came to the romance (though the love interest himself was nice enough) and spreading out exposition. Avoiding too many info dumps in a row is good, but you have to be a bit more creative than just having three chapters worth of your main character being constantly interrupted every time she tries to read a letter.
I love some clever alien reproductive biology, and this book had lots, as well as some very varied gender roles, but the author fell into some of the typical traps, like making everyone straight (or equivalent) and generally interested in having kids at least in an abstract sense. If you can't even capture the diversity of human reproductive drives/gender etc...
It's definitely a trilogy telling one story, but each book has a moderately neat ending, they don't just stop or end on a cliffhanger or anything. I'll definitely be checking out some of her other books, though I may avoid the ones that look like they focus more on romance since that was the weakest part to me.
