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language: English
country: USA
year: 2007
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
series: Elemental Logic, #3
dates read: 3.10.21, 19.7.22, 29.4.24-30.4.24
Water Logic is in some ways as perplexing as water logic, which I feel I’m getting closer to understanding but which nonetheless — appropriately — continues to escape my grasp. (the fact that Marks identifies herself, per the quiz on her site, as only 1/12 water vs. 5/12 fire and 3/12 earth (no idea where the missing 1/12 goes) perhaps explains why water logic as a logic gets short shrift.) it is, however, still extremely good.
once again we’ve changed perspectives: still Zanja, of course, but now also Seth and Clement (plus Ocean occasionally). it’s nice to get some earth logic interiority again, especially from someone whose relationship to it is less fraught than Karis’s is, and Clement’s perspective here really highlights the work of reconciliation (and I still think “truth and reconciliation” is a useful framework to think about these books through) and the extent to which even with Karis’s declaration of peace this kind of “reconciliation” cannot be undertaken entirely peacefully. there’s a horror to it: the inevitability that not eveyone who has become attached to the position of power that settler colonialism gives them will be willing give it up; some of them (perhaps many of them) will in fact be willing to kill to protect it. there’s also, I think, an interesting parallel between the Basdowners and the soldiers’ obedience/submission to hierarchy.
thematically, I also love the vision of Shaftal’s past, because it reminds us that social change is constant (Zanja observes as much to Tadwell): the Shaftal the Sainnites destroyed was itself the result of centuries of social change, sometimes small, sometimes large — in a way it serves as an affirmation that despite the discontinuity of the Sainnite occupation and the scale of the changes that are necessary now, this is still in some fundamental ways a continuation of processes that are centuries old; to borrow from Butler, it’s not untrue that “the only lasting truth is change”. Shaftal has changed before, and it can and will change again, even radically, and still be Shaftal.
I love Medric. I love Emil. I love the horror of what Clement and Karis do — I love seeing the shifts in Karis’s metacognitive attitudes towards her impulses to act, the tension between her impulse to fix, her recognition that sometimes she needs to be pragmatic, and also her recognition that sometimes her way of fixing isn’t necessarily the best way, even if it’s effective. I love Seth — and Damon. the journey through Basdown is…really good.
really good book.
moods: adventurous, challenging, hopeful, inspiring