Space Opera

For this week I read Vintage Season by CL Moore, and re-watched the first episode of Firefly. I was pleasantly surprised by Vintage Season. At first, the main character Oliver was easy to identify with (something I find hard in science fiction sometimes)--watching with trepidation as a group of unwanted strangers move into his house with him. At first I thought he was just antisocial, but later we find out it's because some other fancy stranger had offered him a lot of money to buy his house, after he'd already agreed to lease it to these strangers. I also began to lose interest in him as a character when it showed how he thought of his fiance as more of a nuisance, and how he had no qualms about flirting and getting to be "alone" with one of his tenants. A lot of the beginning of the book is spent describing the visitors--they're too perfect, moving with precision and dressed in glamorous shape-forming clothes.

I was surprised with the direction this story took. For a space opera, I was expecting something that took place in the future on a space ship or a different planet, with the main characters the voyagers, and the main plot their exploration. The voyagers in this story turned out to be from the future after all, but our information on them is all filtered through the eyes of an ordinary man from history. I was expecting the visitors to be aliens rather than humans, but all the same it was very interesting to slowly discover the truth. When Oliver figures out that they knew what was going to happen with the asteroid, and they had the power to stop it but didn't, he gets angry and revolted. Personally, I understand both sides of the argument. If my town was about to get destroyed and I was going to die of a mysterious plague, and there were people around who knew it would happen but wouldn't do anything about it, I'd be very upset too. On the other hand, it's not like the time travelers caused the event, and if trying to prevent it would risk ruining their nice and safe future reality, then I don't really blame them for not doing anything. It's something that's inevitable, and they were just experiencing history in the newest available way.

There was some strange language a few times that I wasn't sure if it was a futurist thing, or a hiccup in translation. "Wifi" instead of "will" in some sentences, words like "ifim" and big O's in words.

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