{"id":1858,"date":"2014-06-16T11:00:33","date_gmt":"2014-06-16T15:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/?p=1858"},"modified":"2024-01-21T11:32:49","modified_gmt":"2024-01-21T16:32:49","slug":"samatar-stranger-in-olondria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2014\/06\/samatar-stranger-in-olondria\/","title":{"rendered":"Samatar, Sofia: Stranger in Olondria, A<\/cite>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria<\/cite><\/strong> is part of my 2014 Hugo\/Campbell voting homework and a difficult book for me to talk about, because I’m fairly sure I haven’t done it justice.<\/p>\n

I’d seen a few reviews and purchased it before Samatar was nominated for a Campbell, but all I retained about it going in was that Samatar is also a poet and people spoke highly of the prose. So I was expecting it to be difficult, frankly, very densely written and requiring a lot of unpacking.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, that turned out not to be the case. The prose is rich in its descriptions, true, but I had no trouble falling through the page. My lack of knowledge was more of a problem when it came to the plot: I had no idea what it might be, and as I read the first quarter of the book, I increasingly began to wonder whether there was<\/em> a plot. <\/p>\n

Well, there is, so I can say that much. But it’s hard for me to talk coherently about the book otherwise, partly because I read it in small chunks, which did neither me nor it any favors, and partly because I think the book is genuinely somewhat fragmented in structure—its twenty-one chapters are arranged in a full six books. My overall impression is that I’ve registered the plot and the most obvious theme, but that I suspect it’s doing more than I can really appreciate at the moment. <\/p>\n

The plot is that the narrator, Jevick of Tyom, comes to Olondria and becomes haunted by the ghost of a young woman he met on the ship there. The haunting puts him in the middle of an existing political and religious conflict, but one that is ultimately secondary to Jevick’s personal experience. The major theme is different experiences and consequences of stories: how language choice, format, and storyteller influence not only individual experience but class structures (and, I suspect, gender structures as well, but my thoughts on that are much more tentative). <\/p>\n

Yes, I am failing to do this justice. Let me try to cut to the chase: both Samatar and Max Gladstone<\/a> are nominated for a Campbell this year. Right now, on the strength of this book and Gladstone’s first two books, I rank Samatar over Gladstone. Why? Well, even putting aside Gladstone’s second book, which I was pretty “meh” about, I think Three Parts Dead<\/cite><\/a> is more fun but this book is better: both are creating detailed secondary worlds and putting their characters in thematically-interesting plots, but Olondria<\/cite>‘s prose and control over narration is more assured. <\/p>\n

More useful, though spoiler-filled, reviews by Abigail Nussbaum<\/a> and Nic Clarke at Strange Horizons<\/cite><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria is part of my 2014 Hugo\/Campbell voting homework and a difficult book for me to talk about, because I’m fairly sure I haven’t done it justice. I’d seen a few reviews and purchased it before Samatar was nominated for a Campbell, but all I retained about it going in … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Samatar, Sofia: Stranger in Olondria, A<\/cite>“<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[122,48,15],"tags":[370],"class_list":["post-1858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2014-hugo-nominees","category-books","category-sf-and-fantasy","tag-samatar-sofia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1858"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1858\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2452,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1858\/revisions\/2452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}