Review: The Journeyman: In the Stone House (2015 Hugo Nominee)

The 2015 Hugo Awards are upon us!  The nominees for this year are listed here and as the deadline for voting approaches I will be supplementing my usual reading and reviewing to specifically review the 2015 Hugo nominees I have not yet covered.

“The Journeyman: In the Stone House”, Michael F. Flynn (Analog, 06-2014) (online)

Eligibility: Eligible for 2015 Hugo in the category of novelette

Status: nominated

This is the editorial voice review.  The reader's voice review is forthcoming. (for info on what this means, see here)

First thoughts
This is an engaging read with interesting characters and a setting that keeps he reader trying to figure things out. The main characters are given their own distinctive patois, and this helps to build the flavour of the story but at the same time is sometimes a bit annoying as it occasionally strikes me as being too clever. The story itself appears to be one of a series the author has planned - the first was published in 2012 and this story clearly builds on events that occurred in that tale as well as building toward some continuance. As such, while the story is entertaining as a stand-alone as well it does tend to be a little unsatisfying without the other pieces in hand.

Ideas
The author's big idea is to reimagine what things might be like after a tech collapse (Or so it seems - hard to say without reading the first) and as such is more of a social speculative work than a tech speculative one. The conception of societies is interesting, if not particularly novel. Another dimension here though is the way in which these societies handle concepts like revenge and personal honour, and the story seems to revolve around the tension between various individual and cultural concepts.  In this sense, it’s very much a social SF story, and while the deep ideas aren’t explored in any detail the world building is strong.  In a few places, however, it seems as though he has tried to be too clever for his own good – in particular in the way in which he resolves the revenge plot.  After a fairly skillful build-up, he lets us down by letting the feuding characters get out of the corner they’re painted into with a bit of sophistry – perhaps this theme was deeply examined in the first installment, but in that case its presence in this story is redundant.  If you’re going to use it, why not explore it further?

Writing

The story starts in an interesting way, by echoing the kind of language often used in English translations of Native American mythology – this inevitably sets the tone for the setting, but it seems obvious from the start that this language couldn’t be maintained through the entire story, and of course it isn’t.  For the most part, the writing is good – it’s a bit on the rich side when descriptions are used, but the author balances this out a bit by doing most of the exposition work via dialogue.  And this is where the problems arise.  The author is trying to paint for us a world in which several disparate societies, presumably emerging from some kind of dark age, are encountering each other.  He tries to depict in shorthand form the differences between these people by reflecting their backgrounds in the kind of language they use.  Odd dialects are a common way to depict alien-ness in SFF but typically works better used sparsely, and I have to say that for me the dialects were overused and on top of that the way they were used tended to grate, making it less enjoyable to read.  Plotting seemed good, but again this seems to be the middle of a story, which makes it hard to judge.  As a stand-alone, it does work well, but the pacing and the narrative arc itself relies too heavily on the part that came before and the part that apparently comes after.  While there is a clear thread that sees resolution, it doesn’t strike me as having been the main point of this particular installment in the story, and as a result we end up seeing a lot of unresolved issues.  Likewise, new elements are introduced rather late in the story but then play important parts in the final few pages.  All in all, the tale feels incomplete and unsatisfying – but in a way that makes me think that the story has suffered from being cut into pieces. (interestingly, this is the opposite of how I feel about other tales that were similarly published in parts and then later woven together into a single work – Charles Stross’s Accelerando, for example I loved when it was published as a few interwoven novelettes back in the 90s and early 2000s, but when they came out as a novel I didn’t think it worked nearly as well.).  Exposition is done skilfully, without too much lecturing – we see most of the world through the eyes of the characters, and the rest is inferred by description that hints at just where they are and what things are like.  There are a few places where the author is forced to provide us with capsule explanations of what came in the previous installment, and I think the story suffers from it, but under the circumstances it’s probably unavoidable.

Characterization

The two main characters seem to come as a set, and as such they work together and give the sense of being complete.  They have distinct ways of speaking (albeit marred by the dialects they affect) and the patter between them is generally amusing – though on occasion a bit annoying. Beyond these two, however, the remaining characters feel a bit hollow.  It’s not as though they are cardboard cutouts, but rather that the framework has been completed but the author hasn’t had enough time in the space of the story to develop them fully, and critical elements seem to be missing.  In part, this is again because the story is clearly an installation in a series – a number of characters are introduced, and it’s obvious that several of them are going to be important, but they don’t end up really coming into their own within the space of this novelette.  While the delay in getting into these characters to develop them is understandable, it does leave me unsatisfied.  Beyond this, the main complaint I have is the degree to which the author relies on affected dialects to generate our image of the characters – as a technique, it has a long and illustrious history, but in this case it almost seems a crutch.  As social SFF there is a fair bit of development seen, interactions between the characters are the mainstay of the story after all, but at the same time the dialects – and the fact that it seems almost as if every character has their own – give the impression of walking stereotypes.  Perhaps this is a bias coming directly from unfamiliarity with the other parts of the tale, but it seems as though the characters would have seemed more real and more full if they hadn't all been unique individuals – if there had been more of the wider societies presented to us.  And this is probably the fault of the dialects again: from whose perspective are we expected to be viewing the action?  With everyone speaking in dialect, it almost seems as we’re outside them all, which reduces them all to stereotypes again.

Verdict

The story itself and the two main characters were interesting enough to pull me along through the story despite slight annoyance at the dialects.  I found myself wondering what these societies were like, and from comments and hints in the dialog I became curious about what had happened, so much so that I’m tempted to go out and hunt down the first one just to find out what happened.  The narrative arcs introduced and developed in this story do seem unfinished however, and while leaving things open is probably good business sense to encourage readers to look out for the next installment it does leave me feeling unsatisfied.  The conclusion would probably have felt much better if he had built the story around a stronger central plot that could be started and finished within the confines of this particular work, while retaining the threads that connect it to the preceding and following installments.  It would also help the story immensely if some of the more powerful social issues raised were explored more thoroughly.  The revenge theme in particular seemed to be dismissed with a cop-out, and a few other issues raised were barely discussed.  In part, this is probably simply because the situations are supposed to be seen by us as just how things are in this world, but it still leaves the reader unsatisfied and we’re forced to imagine how things might have been for ourselves.

Readability: Pass

Hugo quality: Pass