Loses a star for not being "The Dispossessed"
Uses unreliable narration to explore Terrorism V Freedom Fighting , and the barbed nature of imperialism. There's a spectacularly unpleasant rape scene which adds little. ( )

A fine debut, though one that feels like a debut! It's a novel of two halves, the first half being a Le Guin homage (The Dispossessed meeting Left Hand..), and the second turning into a surprise novel of ideas. Its faults are obvious, not least that there isn't really a plot (though this doesn't have to be a fault, its just that the setting cries out for it), but that certainly not fatal. The surprise novel of ideas left me melancholy, I was desperately hoping for Als to win somehow, and the ideas that were floating round my head didn't reassure me about the world. There was nothing here that was new to me, and perhaps that helped, because it made the people of Als more identifiable to me, and thus increased my emotional connection to them. Maybe someone not steeped in the history and theories of anarchism might not have cared so much about Als. I would be interested to read what a self-confessed conservative reactionary would make of the book - would they identify as wholly with Senaar as I did with Als, look upon Barlei as flawed but in the right as I did with Petja.

Spoiler alert:

I wasn't sure whether the depiction of Petja's rape of Rhoda was a good piece of dramatically necessary work. I understood that it was a good demonstration of the linguistic differences between them, I thought that it was brave that it was neither named as rape nor dismissed as a cultural misunderstanding - the reader is left to deal with it on their own, to interpret Petja's actions through the lense of their own cultural understanding and their own experiences. Was it necessary for an otherwise heroic, positive character to have such a serious flaw, and to make us question whether that flaw came from misunderstanding or cruelty? Was it just a convenient way to get rid of Rhoda and turn the expected narrative on its head? Is this an implicit critique of anarchism and anarchists, is Barlei thus correct in his descriptions of them all?

So yeah, a book that made me think but perhaps not in a productive way! ( )

Loses a star for not being "The Dispossessed"
Uses unreliable narration to explore Terrorism V Freedom Fighting , and the barbed nature of imperialism. There's a spectacularly unpleasant rape scene which adds little. ( )

his first book. i figured out at last why i have trouble with this guy: it's because he's not really writing sf, but rather mainstream fiction set arbitrarily in the future; and yes, there's a huge difference in the result. this one is actually about the middle east, just barely disguised as two quarrelling groups of settlers arrived on a new desert planet. there's the rich, authoritarian technological culture, and there's the very poor, anarchic culture of dreamers, and guess who's gonna win. bit of a setup, that. but anyway, static narrative about one aspect of contemporary culture, and not connected to that other literature of, you know, ideas. the one that's like, lesser because it's only genre. so i think, having nailed this down now to my own satisfaction, i'll tiptoe quietly away as Not For Me. ( )

http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2014/04/review-of-salt-by-adam-roberts.html ( )