Great Murderbot Review in NYT (and thoughts about other books mentioned there)

[chomiji]

Amal El-Mohtar (a talented author in her own right) reviews SF&F for the New York Times, and her most recent multi-book writeup included very good words indeed about the latest Murderbot:

'While the chief pleasure of the Murderbot Diaries is the protagonist’s unique and delightful voice, “Network Effect” introduces new characters and subtly different perspectives in a way that only amplifies its shocking joy.'

"Shocking joy": I quite like that. It's so nice to see Wells getting the acclaim that she's richly deserved for lo these many years.

However, one of the other books reviewed got me thinking about the issue of re-using a distinctive part of someone else's past work. A book called Docile by K. M. Szpara includes the plot point that (to quote the review) "[debt slaves] are offered Dociline, a drug that makes them willing, contented drones for the duration of their contracts and dims their memories of what they endured as so-called Dociles."

Hello? Anyone besides me remember The Sardonyx Net by Elizabeth Lynn (1981)? Where criminals are sentenced to slave labor on the hell planet Chabad, their suffering relieved by a drug called dorazine, which keep them, well, docile? (James Nicoll has a pretty much no-holds-barred review of it here.)

I have no idea whether Szpara has ever read Lynn's book, but the remarkalble similarity made me feel very indignant, even though The Sardonyx Net is pretty sucky on the ethical axis.

The NYT review also says nice things about Robert Jackson Bennett's Shorefall, reminding me that I need to write that up as well.

Comments

[sovay]

the hell planet Chabad

What, did Elizabeth Lynn get stuck at a neverending Seder in college once?

[yhlee]

Oh hey, I remember The Sardonyx Net! I actually enjoyed it a lot when I read it in grad school precisely because everything was so f***ed up, but then my tastes run weird/grimdark/twisted. No opinion on the Szpara book, which I haven't read, but surely that general trope has been done many times before anyway?

[minutia_r]

I have a feeling that a lot of what Docile is doing is working off of established slavefic tropes. It's entirely possible that The Sardonyx Net helped establish some of those tropes (I remember reading it and thinking "An actual publishing house published a slavefic? In the eighties?") although I doubt many of the people writing slavefic today have read it.

Certainly, from Brave New World on, if not before, there is a history in science fiction of oppressive regimes keeping people in line with drugs.

(Disclaimer: I haven't read a whole lot of slavefic, so I am not the most knowledgeable about its tropes.)