Stone Spring

As I'm collecting this year's LOCKDOWN LIST, I just notched up another one - a fiction, for once. Stephen Baxter's Stone Spring, intimated here. Strange Horizons reviewed it.

This was a product of the late 2000s so, unfortunately, had taken on some fads from that time, in particular Across Atlantic Ice. In our story some European Hunter Gatherers, of R / X clade, make that westward trip skirting the glacier, to rescue the last survivors of the White Apocalypse thence to bring them back "home" [to Europe]. Baxter does have an appendix explaining most of his scholarship. The appendix somehow failed to credit Kyle Birstow.

Not that this blog is going to fault a book for its "racism". This blog is going to fault that book for being a pain in the arse to read. Actually a pain in several nether regions.

Back when I was still commenting at Ace's "book thread" I posted a rant "stop raping your characters" with Stone Spring very much in mind. I'd bought the book six years ago or more but couldn't finish (then) because Baxter really, really likes rape. He does it again in Proxima which book I refused to finish. In this book Baxter is driving home how squalid and Stone Age all these European early-hunter-gatherers are, with a touch of the Jericho Aceramic Mesolithic. Well, fine. But does the author really have to get into detail?

You can skip the forced boning and enjoy all the scenes where the protagonists - when not raping girls, or in Zesi's case seducing underaged boys - are doing poops in the great outdoors. Or, in Jericho Boy's case, stealing stuff. It all gets a bit better when the characters were building that glorious seawall. Here Jericho Boy magically stops being klepto and becomes instead... homosexual. Because when two men become friends, especially when the newbie meets the local priest; it's inevitable that the porn soundtrack starts up.

As for what it says about Strange Horizons that they prefer the squalor and rapine in the first third of this story to the rest of it, when the characters are Getting Stuff Done: I'll leave that to others. Maybe to Vox Day.

I suppose I'm okay with forcing myself to finish this book. I rate this as an inferior Helliconia Spring.

I'm told that in this alt-future we don't get Christianity or Islam. Well, maybe. There is dyotheletism here, in the tension between bisexual priest and Ana the queen of Etxelur, who end up married. (Sorry Jericho!)