WisCon, the feminist science fiction convention I’ve previously mentioned, has an event at the beginning of the weekend called The Gathering
. This is kind of a free-for-all of generally fun stuff like palm readings, throat singers, a clothing swap, etc. Last year one of the booths had bunches of galleys and other free books. I’m not sure who donated them. Anyway, the booth sells them each for $1 which goes to either the Tiptree Award or WisCon itself, I can’t remember which. This is where I got Delhi Noir last year which was awesome! I didn’t pick my second book though. I asked the person collecting money (I think it was Jennifer Pelland) to pick one for me, at random or however. The idea being that I would get something where I didn’t choose by the cover. She picked Kristyn Dunnion’s Big Big Sky. The cover does have a stompy boot on it, and I love stompy boots.
A year later, I finally got around to reading it. Big Big Sky tells the story of a pod of five brainwashed teenage soldiers in the future. Part one is them figuring out that the aliens who pull their strings aren’t telling them the truth, and their breakout from the facility that imprisons them. Part two tells about the pod fighting the higher level soldiers sent to bring them back, dead or alive. And part three, well, I won’t spoil this part.
There are a lot of awesome things about the book. The group of teens are all women, for one. This book possibly passes the Bechtel Test faster than anything I’ve ever read before. Lesbian relationships are treated as first class relationships too; heterosexuals get the ooh ick
treatment. They get to communicate with each other through telepathy, and their group is melded to work together. There’s some cool weapons, at least at the beginning. One of the pod members is a healer, able to do some fine medical work through the use of her hands. As they progress through the story, even more genetic engineering becomes apparent, as two of the group become something else as they hit adolescence of a sort.
The premise is pretty common in Y.A. science fiction. See John Christopher’s Tripods series or Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series. I’ve liked it when I’ve run into it before, and I liked a lot about this book. But, unfortunately, there are more negatives about the writing than positives about the plot outline or the sociological or science fiction elements in the previous paragraph. It just seems like the book could have used a rewrite and a better editor.
The pacing is very uneven. Part one covers a couple of days. Part two covers another few days, a bit longer. Part three, weeks and months of story time. The earlier parts dragged because they had too much detail. The latter parts didn’t have enough. They went by quickly. Some of those pieces seemed to be written in a “you’ve seen this trope before, so fill in the details yourself” fashion. Like joining a renegade group living apart that views newcomers with suspicion.
Some essential pieces of the story went missing. Loo and Marta (the former a pod member and the latter a recruit from another pod), at one point kill an electroll (a less than intelligent smelly brute) guarding them and escape. But the next time I read about them, they are trussed up and being presented as captives to a bad guy. There’s also a giant battle looming toward the end that doesn’t happen for unknown reasons.
And my god, did I get tired of the future-slang quickly. Somepod. Blaaty. Whafa. Chronic. Full-frontal. Ironical. I get it. People in the future won’t talk like us. The language probably will transform in weird ways like this. But it’s jarring and annoying to read continually.
The beginning was okay, though somewhat of a drag. In the middle I was hyped! This was awesome! I’d finally gotten used to the language, the characters were fighting and interacting and I wanted to see what was going to happen. But at the end I just kept asking myself what the hell?
and what happened to this?
I would so read a Kristyn Dunnion book if it were put out by Tor or Orbit or Night Shade or Prime. I’m sure it would be awesome! I have to believe a good editor would have worked with Dunnion to turn Big Big Sky into gold. Hell, maybe it wasn’t the editing that went wrong. Nalo Hopkinson is listed as the editor, and her writing is top notch. I don’t really know how the sausage was made. For something I loved in the middle and where I liked the ending itself, but not how it was presented, just feels like could have been
.
A couple other blogged reviews:
Title: Big Big Sky
Author: Kristyn Dunnion
Cover creator: Jacquie Morris and Delta Embree
Imprint / publisher: Red Deer Press / Fitzhenry & Whiteside
Format: Paperback
Length: 244 p.
Publication date: Feb 2008
ISBN-13: 978-0-88995-404-5
