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language: English
country: Grenada
year: 2006
form: novel
genre(s): sci-fi
dates read: 15.12.22-27.12.22
the Grenadian sci-fi writer Tobias Buckell’s Crystal Rain is an engagingly-written planetary romance set several hundred years after all advanced technology (“”) on the planet Nanagada was destroyed in order to forestall an invasion by hostile aliens. the inhabitants of the planet have built a kind of steampunk, preindustrial society — or, rather, two, one simply known as “Nanagada”, whose primary basis is Caribbean cultures, and one known as the Azteca, who are exactly what they sound like.
we know I love a fucked-up generation ships and space colonies that have forgotten their origins, and in many ways this book scratched exactly that itch. the multiple POVs were well-balanced, although I would have liked more women and/or anyone who wasn’t straight; the characters were compelling; and the world-building was, with one glaring exception, both well-constructed and well-presented. this would be somewhere in the four star range. I’d even be willing to forgive the stupid heterosexual thirteen-year-olds kissing thing in the Jerome sections.
if it weren’t for the Azteca. the key issue here is that Buckell — like basically every non-specialist — has fundamentally failed to grasp the function and importance of human sacrifice in the Mexica polities: the Azteca are a classic racist/colonialist caricature of bloodthirsty Mesoamerican societies sacrificing people by the hundreds and thousands. we see Azteca warriors, like, cackling gleefully as people are sacrificed (and most of the sacrifices have no apparent ceremonial purpose). also it turns out that the Azteca are being manipulated by aliens known as the “Teotl”, who are masquerading as the Mexica gods.
in principle — if the book engaged with the fact that Azteca human sacrifice and the Teotl bear little resemblance to Mexica human sacrifice or the tēteoh (it does not engage with this) — this could be an interesting narrative choice. however, in the context of the history of colonial representations of the Aztecs and other Indigenous people of Mesoamerica, the fact that it exactly and with no apparent self-awareness duplicates the typical caricature of the Mexica is…not my favorite look. the world-building also ties the settlement of Nanagada to Rastafari concepts — the Caribbean colonists came because they were fleeing the oppression of “Babylon” on Earth; the Azteca are then compared to Babylon. what’s gained by substituting an Indigenous culture for the Western imperialism and white supremacy that “Babylon” names in Rastafari? it’s a weird choice that I did not enjoy.
all of this unfortunately knocked it down several notches for me. it’s slightly ameliorated by the fact that the Nanagadans’ “Loa” are also aliens, but it just…didn’t sit right, and that unfortunately marred the whole book. I am, however, probably going to read the rest of the series at some point, because the rest of the world-building was fascinating; I’m particularly curious to see how Buckell will handle the background of the “Black Starliner Corporation”, which is obviously modeled on Garvey’s Black Star Lines.
moods: adventurous, dark, tense