Questo romanzo è stata un’enorme delusione. L’ho scelto dalla listopia di Goodreads dedicata ai romanzi con personaggi asessuali e dubito assai che Dust possa rientrare nella categoria – e, se lo fa, non fa una gran favore alla comunità asessuale.

Il personaggio asessuale, infatti, dovrebbe essere Perceval, una delle protagoniste: come avrete intuito dal nome, si tratta di un riferimento al cavaliere della Tavola Rotonda, proprio a quello casto e puro. Infatti, la Perceval di Dust è celibe, lo ripete più volte nel romanzo, ma non menziona mai l’asessualità, ma solo un generico disinteresse per il sesso (che non è sinonimo di asessualità, definita come mancanza di attrazione sessuale).

Il grosso problema di Dust per me è che è un romanzo allegorico: sebbene ci siano anche diversi personaggi non binari e/o intersessuali, questo non si traduce in una rappresentazione vera e propria, ma solo in allegorie di qualcosa. C’è una scena di sesso tra Rien e un personaggio intersessuale che è palesemente un rimando al mito dell’Eden e qualunque diversità passa in secondo piano rispetto al significato allegorico. Adesso ho un nuovo motivo per provare antipatia per i romanzi allegorici.

Non so se proseguirò la serie con Chill: da una parte mi rendo conto di averlo letto svogliatamente, anche per il periodo di caldo afoso che è coinciso con la lettura; dall’altra se ripenso a tutte quelle allegorie del quale significato me ne sbatto altamente, mi viene voglia di affogare questa malsana idea in una tazza di tè.

E cosa c’è di meglio di una tazza di tè verde accompagnata con una fetta di cheesecake alla Nutella? Di sicuro non Chill. ( )

Some interesting concepts mired in an execution that I disliked. Zero interest in reading the rest of the series by the end. ( )

This is an original and engrossing version of a 'generation' colony ship gone wrong. I liked that Elizabeth Bear didn't slow down and didn't infodump. She presented me with two strong but vulnerable characters under threat, added a constant stream of action that kept me turning the pages and gave me all the threads I needed to weave my own understanding of this strange world.

The story is enabled by technology so advanced that it sometimes feels like magic but it isn't, it's just broken machine intelligence that has healed twisted, combined with a nanotech-engineered human evolution, tainted by the religious aspirations of the founders of the colony ship and soured by unintended generations spent aboard a stranded ship. It seemed to me that the thinking behind the evolution of the machine intelligence and the nanotech-infested humans was original and rigorous.

The storytelling style contrasts with the hardcore Science Fiction contents. The story is told through the eyes of two young women, estranged sisters brought together when one of them is maimed by the leader of the household in which the other has been raised as a hostage and it is as much a story about the love and loyalty that grows between them as it is about a ship in space. The story is structured as a quest. The two sisters travel through the ship, encountering enemies and allies (although it's hard to know who is which) and working towards a journeying towards a common goal. The result is that, while 'Dust' is a generation colony ship story that I'd normally think of as space opera, the experience of reading the book is much more like reading a sword and sorcery fantasy.

For me, this unusual tension between style and content worked well. It felt fresh and it kept me thinking about what was going on.

For most of the book, I was eagerly turning the pages to see what would happen next but the final few chapters didn't feel as intense to me. The ending was a mix of challenging concepts, intense action and emotionally charged decisions. It worked but I had to work at it.

Even so, I'm looking forward to reading 'Chill' the next book in the series ( )

I don't even know. The sisters (one asexual) fall in love and are spiritually married before one is eaten by a nanomachine AI? What was this book ( )

I should have loved Dust. It has all the elements I tend to love in a story. Religious allegory? Check. Strong characters? Check. Sacrifice for the greater good? Check. These are all things I enjoy in Fantasy, but they didn’t draw me in this time. It took being almost halfway through for me to not get distracted away easily. One thing I really did enjoy was that the main character was a lesbian, but her sexuality doesn’t define her. Too often a homosexual character’s sexuality plays a major role in the plot and how things develop. While Rein’s attraction to women has some impact on the story, it isn’t a major plot point. Other than that, I felt the characters were a little flat. I would have liked to see them flushed out more. Bear began to do this with Rein, but didn’t go all the way. This is probably the best reason for why I didn’t get into the novel. I do have to give points to Bear for the setting, however. Having two dying moons, and a ship that is barely functional was an incredible place to host a novel, I just wish the characters had been fully developed.

Will I read the rest of the books in the series? Probably not. The sense of closure at the end was more than enough for me. I strongly dislike having a series just to have one, or because it is a normal part of the genre. Sometimes a book is it, and you don’t need to expand upon it. Not having read the rest of them I can’t say for certain that there isn’t more story to tell, but I feel that Dust should be it. Take this for speculation on my part, if you’d like.
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