{"id":9,"date":"2001-08-09T09:18:32","date_gmt":"2001-08-09T13:18:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog-test\/?p=9"},"modified":"2001-08-09T09:18:32","modified_gmt":"2001-08-09T13:18:32","slug":"kagan_janet_hel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2001\/08\/kagan_janet_hel\/","title":{"rendered":"Kagan, Janet: Hellspark"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name=\"4995388\"><\/a> <a name=\"link_4995388\"><\/a> <\/p>\n<p>After reading <a href=\"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2001\/08\/kagan_janet_mir\/\"><cite>Mirabile<\/cite><\/a>, I grabbed <strong>Kagan&#8217;s <cite>Hellspark<\/cite><\/strong> when I saw it in the library. I finished it last night. While not as cheerful and comfort-book-like as <cite>Mirabile<\/cite>, it&#8217;s still a good read.<\/p>\n<p><cite>Hellspark<\/cite> is the story of a survey team on a new planet, internally split over whether the major animal life form is sentient or not. Adding to the tension, a team member has died&#8212;murder? accident? No-one knows. Into this situation comes Tocohl Susumo, whose planet of Hellspark emphasizes linguistic and cultural fluency. Since everyone on the team is from a different culture, and they were briefed by an idiot, <em>and<\/em> since one marker of sentience is language, well, she&#8217;s quite welcome. (Her extrapolative computer doesn&#8217;t hurt; I don&#8217;t read many AI stories, but Maggy seems like a good one to me.)<\/p>\n<p>Some of the cultural tics presented seem a little extreme to me, and while I don&#8217;t doubt that body language is a very important component of language, I was starting to get a little jaded by the <i>n<\/i>th time some problem was solved by Tocohl&#8217;s noticing that a movement was wrong. Overall, though, it was a solid, entertaining, imaginative book.<\/p>\n<p>[<cite>Hellspark<\/cite> has been reprinted by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.meishamerlin.com\/Hellspark.html\">Meisha Merlin<\/a>.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After reading Mirabile, I grabbed Kagan&#8217;s Hellspark when I saw it in the library. I finished it last night. While not as cheerful and comfort-book-like as Mirabile, it&#8217;s still a good read. Hellspark is the story of a survey team on a new planet, internally split over whether the major animal life form is sentient &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2001\/08\/kagan_janet_hel\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Kagan, Janet: Hellspark&#8221;<\/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":[48,15],"tags":[260],"class_list":["post-9","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-sf-and-fantasy","tag-kagan-janet"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9","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=9"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}