Colin Greenland

Greenland, Colin. Take Back Plenty. 1990. Tabitha Jute No. 1. SF Gateway, 2013.
In most space operas, human beings find some way to travel to the stars and either create or join a galactic civilization. In Take Back Plenty, Colin Greenland turns these memes upside down. The aliens have come to us, filling the solar system with extraterrestrial visitors of several species. They have also told us to stay home in the Sol system. Thus, there is interstellar trade and culture, but human colonies are outclassed by large-scale alien habitats. Our heroine, Tabitha Jute, is the owner of a small freighter who makes a marginal living as a trader. The freighter has a damaged AI, called Alice Liddell, after the little girl who inspired Alice in Wonderland. To keep it sane, Tabitha tells it stories, some fictional and some from her own past. The main plot begins when Tabitha contracts with a fast-talking, seductive impresario to take him to an alien space habitat called Plenty to pick up his cabaret troupe. Adventure ensues. Tabitha has a well-developed personality with more depth to her character than we usually adventure heroines. The conversations between Tabitha and Alice are charming. The alien menagerie is complex and well-detailed. I don’t know what the competition was, but I am not surprised that Take Back Plenty won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. I plan to read the other two volumes of the trilogy. 4 stars.… (més)

This wasn't earth-shattering by any stretch, but it was extremely enjoyable. I was going to go straight onto the second one in the trilogy, unfortunaltely it gets really abyssmal reviews(on Amazon at least) so I'm now not at all sure I'll be reading it at all. I can't even bring myself to just skip the second and go onto the third, since that one only gets average reviews and says the first book is a lot better anyway.

Still, this one was good. Tabitha Jute is a well written character and her companions are interesting(especially the cherub). I'm not sure how it managed to pick up two awards in the same year, or even in any year. It's not that it's a bad read, it isn't, but I'm sure there are more deserving reads out there. I was in just the right frame of mind for a bit of pulpy science fiction though so that helped my enjoyment.

Very good read. Worth your time.
… (més)

I’ve been a fan of Greenland’s writing for many years, especially the Plenty books and Harm’s Way. He was very active throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as a critic, an editor of Interzone, and a writer, but his last published novel was Finding Helen in 2002. Which is a shame. The Hour of the Thin Ox is one of three literary fantasies, the Daybreak trilogy, he published in the 1980s. I don’t actually recall if they’re set in the same universe – I suspect yes, if only because they’re lumped together as a trilogy. Anyway, in The Hour of the Thin Ox, the heir to a wealthy merchant family in Bryland finds her fortunes so diminished she ends up joining the army to fight the empire invading the countries to the north. This is not a novel that would really pass muster in 2020. It’s well written, but there’s an uncomfortable thread of orientalism running throughout the story, with its emphasis on the Far-East-inspired Escalans and their drive to expand and assimilate other nations and cultures. The second half of the novel takes place in a jungle region, partly conquered by the Escalans, but they’re in the process of killing off its indigenes. The Brylander now leads a small guerrilla group against the Escalan invaders. And, of course, the indigenes are neither as savage nor as primitive as the Escalans insist. The story seemed like it was going somewhere with its jungle warfare plot, but other than a big set-piece, it more or less petered out. A novel that felt like it was part of a larger series and not a complete instalment, despite being well written with some effective world-building.… (més)