Femslash February, Day 13
Feb. 13th, 2025 10:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flo_neljaHello! Today I will rec the Baru Cormorant series. I have already reviewed it in French, but it was volume by volume, never as a whole.
So, Baru Cormorant is a series by Seth Dickinson, of three volumes right now, but it's not finished and we're hoping for volume 4 one day.
It's set in another world, though with cultures that are reminiscent of some Earth ones. Baru Cormorant has seen, when he was a kid, her island colonized by the Masquerade. It seemed to have good things; she was brilliant at their school, offered her a great future accessible despite her low birth, just for her skills.
But they are also stifling her culture, igniting the internal wars, and pushing a very homophobic agenda.
When one of her fathers is killed and it's meant to be an accident, she understands what happens better, and decides she will destroy the empire instead, from the inside.
As she's sent in another province as a top accountant, she'll have to decide whether she will help the local rebellion actions, that remind her of her home, or whether she wants to help the empire to win more power and get closer to her destruction goals. It's a series about hard moral choices, about compromising, with an heroine with high ideals and low empathy, who had part of her model of the world, at a vulnerable age, molded by her enemies, who's terrified of it and of serving them unwillingly, but still admires the beauty of numbers and hard science. (I also love her math metaphors, very well done, ring very true).
Also, she's a lesbian in an empire that's very, very homophobic, and she has UST with one of the rebel duchesses, Tain Hu. Spoilers : it's a tragedy. I think no one should go here unspoiled. Still, I enjoyed every line of it.
I love her, and watching her cut and lose parts of herself for her goal is awful and fascinating and heart-rendering.
I really love the universe. It's not exactly fantasy, though it's low tech. Some people believe in magic, and they can't be proved wrong, Baru, who regrets having forgotten even the name of her gods, still has the reflex to explain things by science, and sometimes she gets it almost right and sometimes it's different science, because nature evolved differently in a different universe. The evil empire didn't get theur equivalents of Darwin, Mendel and Rosalind Franklin, but they're still unparalleled at practical eugenism on humans. They also do mental conditioning, and on this point, it's almost science-fiction. Sometimes it's more like fantasy or magical realism. It's hard to categorize, but it works very well to me.
It's also, of course, a strongly political series. The author, every time he gets told "your villains are caricaturally evil", is able to point quite a few points in our history where these techniques were actually used in colonization. It gets very dark. It gets very dark in the resistance actions too, and the other cultures aren't written as black-and-white good.
I love the writing style. It's sometimes precise as a math equation, and sometimes epic, and sometimes tragic and grandiose.
Basically it's a huge rec but only for people with specific tastes. ^^
So, Baru Cormorant is a series by Seth Dickinson, of three volumes right now, but it's not finished and we're hoping for volume 4 one day.
It's set in another world, though with cultures that are reminiscent of some Earth ones. Baru Cormorant has seen, when he was a kid, her island colonized by the Masquerade. It seemed to have good things; she was brilliant at their school, offered her a great future accessible despite her low birth, just for her skills.
But they are also stifling her culture, igniting the internal wars, and pushing a very homophobic agenda.
When one of her fathers is killed and it's meant to be an accident, she understands what happens better, and decides she will destroy the empire instead, from the inside.
As she's sent in another province as a top accountant, she'll have to decide whether she will help the local rebellion actions, that remind her of her home, or whether she wants to help the empire to win more power and get closer to her destruction goals. It's a series about hard moral choices, about compromising, with an heroine with high ideals and low empathy, who had part of her model of the world, at a vulnerable age, molded by her enemies, who's terrified of it and of serving them unwillingly, but still admires the beauty of numbers and hard science. (I also love her math metaphors, very well done, ring very true).
Also, she's a lesbian in an empire that's very, very homophobic, and she has UST with one of the rebel duchesses, Tain Hu. Spoilers : it's a tragedy. I think no one should go here unspoiled. Still, I enjoyed every line of it.
I love her, and watching her cut and lose parts of herself for her goal is awful and fascinating and heart-rendering.
I really love the universe. It's not exactly fantasy, though it's low tech. Some people believe in magic, and they can't be proved wrong, Baru, who regrets having forgotten even the name of her gods, still has the reflex to explain things by science, and sometimes she gets it almost right and sometimes it's different science, because nature evolved differently in a different universe. The evil empire didn't get theur equivalents of Darwin, Mendel and Rosalind Franklin, but they're still unparalleled at practical eugenism on humans. They also do mental conditioning, and on this point, it's almost science-fiction. Sometimes it's more like fantasy or magical realism. It's hard to categorize, but it works very well to me.
It's also, of course, a strongly political series. The author, every time he gets told "your villains are caricaturally evil", is able to point quite a few points in our history where these techniques were actually used in colonization. It gets very dark. It gets very dark in the resistance actions too, and the other cultures aren't written as black-and-white good.
I love the writing style. It's sometimes precise as a math equation, and sometimes epic, and sometimes tragic and grandiose.
Basically it's a huge rec but only for people with specific tastes. ^^
no subject
Date: 2025-02-13 11:34 am (UTC)Thank you for the rec, it looks excellent. (And also thank you for the spoilers about the rebel Duchess and about the fact that book 4 is not yet written. I certainly prefer to know that before going into it.)
no subject
Date: 2025-02-13 11:38 am (UTC)I was afraid that book 3 ended on a cliffhanger, but looking at some reviews online, I think that is not the case? Did it still feel like a satisfying ending to you, even if Book 4 were never published?
no subject
Date: 2025-02-13 11:43 am (UTC)So, yes: it wouldn't, not for me. Still, not a cliffhanger, the reviews are right.
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Date: 2025-03-24 08:42 pm (UTC)no subject
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