Arkhangelsk 6 - Cultures
Did the culture of the colony seem natural to you? Realistic? Did the Russian derivation of that culture seem right? How about the ship's extended family?
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As I mentioned in another thread, I did feel that the scenario for both groups was actually un-survivable... of course the point was that they needed each other but overall it felt too grim for any real future hope. Are they now pinning their hopes on another ship coming out from Earth in response to what we assume is going to be a superluminal message? Are there even faster ships on their way?
But actually the fact that the novel deliberately left those questions unanswered was a good thing, I think.
This was the main thing - probably the only thing - that bugged me about the novel, but it bugged me a lot. Both ship crews were from Russia - future Russia, granted - but noting about the Russian character really came through. To me it was a clear case of culture-washing. Let's say the characters are from Russia, give them Russian names and dot the book with Russian words and.. done. Good enough. Now, I'm no expert on Russia, but I have watched a fair amount of Russian content since the war started and read several Russian SF novels and Russians have a very different way of thinking and expressing themselves than Americans. But I basically felt like the characters in the novel were Americans with the label washed off. I felt the same the Wastelands novel (a train from China to Russia, but no Chinese or Russian character) and that Arabic pirate novel we read some time ago. I know authors are striving for diversity, but I feel they are missing the mark.
Actually the Hypatia's crew - based on the names - were multi-ethnic. Maddie's name was French. I believe Russian was just a common language in the Hypatia's earth, so they knew how to speak it.
But yes, Americans should take our great president for life's lead and write only about Americans in America and fuck the rest of the world. The characters should be the color of the writer. We must write what we know and we all know nothing.
The may have been multi-ethnic but not multi-national. Maddie herself wasn't French - just descended from someone who was French, I could have sworn she said at one point. Americans can be very multi-ethnic and yet all be very American thanks to the melting pot. I'm really not sur if Russian multi-ethnicity follow the American model, or is more like the Canadian mosaic model.
Incidentally, the narrator for Maddie pronounced the ship name 'Hy-pay-sha' so it took me a while to figure out what this was. I would pronounce this 'Hy-pat-yah'. Curious how others read the name. The drawback to doing audio is not seeing how things are spelled, so you have to accept the narrator pronunciation.
She also used a word that sounded like 'Wastatchny' which i gather was referring to the Vostochny Cosmodrome. Weirdly, she seemed to use this word to both refer to the people she was reporting, too, but also as punctuation.
Regardless of the "Russian-ness" of Novayarkha, I thought it was a pretty plausible depiction of a community under great stress and hardship. People had to do what they were told or else everyone would soon perish. The control was warranted, even if it was shown to be misused.
What I didn't understand was all the context of the warring factions on the Archangel ship before arrival on the planet. What was that all about?
"Hy-pay-sha" is the pronunciation in my (British) dictionary.
Oops I forgot ...
But in the story we have a mirror structure where all the "good people" die, and the remainder continue on their defective way. The people on the ship, like the colonists and Exiles, are no longer "human" (born and raised "naturally") but generations of "first tigers".
Bakhtin Speech Genres p. 69:
Bonesteel (like many conspiracy theorists) thinks that this can be perfectly interrupted, hidden, broken by secrecy. I do not.
and Santayana https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17771/17771-h/17771-h.htm p. 147-152:
Bonesteel thinks a "human" society can, through enforced forgetting / lying / propaganda be prevented from realising this over 400 years. I do not.
I'd always said Hy-pay-sha in my head (so to speak) so I guess I must have read the same dictionary source as @NeilNjae
I was also doubtful that stuff could be successfully hidden / kept secret from the population for so long. Surely at very least there's have been conspiracy theories (which apparently thrived in at least one sub-community)
@Apocryphal not sure what you mean - please elaborate.
Anyway I am quite sick of fictional characters who are dim, and remain, dim, because otherwise they might twig to what is going on. Teenagers in slasher movies who go in the house? OK! Otherwise, no.
Examples from this book: Everyone is sick and dying, and they don't seem to understand how people are born, raised, and die, because it's a secret. Likewise people disappear without a trace, there's another community a short distance away that they know nothing about, except that they come and raid us, and we can't make a plan to find them, because they are both stronger and weaker than us. For geez's sake, what is wrong with these people? Oh yeah, they are trapped in a past that isn't true. This could be so interesting, but ...
I think people in the setting fully understand "the birds and the bees" so to speak. The forced pregnancy part at the end of the book is a small, secret project that was running for only a few years, so I can understand that it wouldn't have been discovered.
The Exiles? Yes, you're completely right. It's all daft.
I don't really have a level of expertise or understanding to comment much on the accuracy of the "Russianness" of the cultures. They did seem a little bit forced, but then, I wasn't expecting Tolstoy either.
I thought that the behaviour of Hina was odd. I feel like she would have behaved the exact opposite of how she behaved after being stuck with a tiny population her entire life, and yet she just jumps right in.
> @BarnerCobblewood I was making light of the fact I have no idea what this person is talking about. “The voice of reason, bidding us prefer the greater good, no matter who is to enjoy it, is also nothing but the force of sympathy, bringing a remote existence before us vividly sub specie boni.” 😂
He's saying that the reason one person sacrifices something for another and experiences it as good is affection for that other (sacrifice is always voluntary), and that the extension of affection to those remote from us comes from our already present understanding of affection and its functioning, not from understanding the good. This is why tigers do not seek a common good, they understand ferocity, not affection.
On the other hand, a young woman, full of hormones, and meeting someone who's not a "parent" for the first time... falling for the first vaguely-suitable young man is a plausible reaction.
Fair - but would that look the same in a situation like this where these new people are borderline alien?