Clearly, I know nothing about the specific recommendations you've encountered, so this isn't targeted at anyone in particular. I just overthink things sometimes.
Her early work is super-uneven (she has, for example, an Avatar-eque novel about fish-people and a classic second-wave-ish matriarchy novel, which I think only reads as a critique of that essentialism if you are familiar with the original 1980's genre of gloriously-bad matriarchy novels and even then is not particularly good, because it is still in the style of bad 1980's SF writing.) I suspect that if I didn't have the cultural context I do her prose would flow less smoothly since it at times relies on mythology, queer/poly/feminism references or quasi-academic language. She doesn't explain what is going on when she uses them, so, for example, I knew someone who wasn't used to hearing about multiple boyfriends for one person who ended up confused about why one guy was being referred to by two different names and seemed to teleport. Then there was the racism disaster centered on her, so she is now known in some of my circles as "that RaceFail author". It didn't change how I read her books, for reasons omitted because it got long. I can respect people who choose not to read her because of that, though my perspective is different. I do think she, as an author, has become overdetermined in a way that can rapidly lead to that weird place of recommendations/anti-recommendations depending on the context in which one first encountered her work.
The classic hiker-specific long underwear is often made out of silk, which makes it slightly less irritating than traditional stuff but also more expensive. If you go to a hiking store they probably have fancier pants now made out of spacesuit material or something.
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regna
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-12 08:37 pm (UTC)Her early work is super-uneven (she has, for example, an Avatar-eque novel about fish-people and a classic second-wave-ish matriarchy novel, which I think only reads as a critique of that essentialism if you are familiar with the original 1980's genre of gloriously-bad matriarchy novels and even then is not particularly good, because it is still in the style of bad 1980's SF writing.) I suspect that if I didn't have the cultural context I do her prose would flow less smoothly since it at times relies on mythology, queer/poly/feminism references or quasi-academic language. She doesn't explain what is going on when she uses them, so, for example, I knew someone who wasn't used to hearing about multiple boyfriends for one person who ended up confused about why one guy was being referred to by two different names and seemed to teleport.
Then there was the racism disaster centered on her, so she is now known in some of my circles as "that RaceFail author". It didn't change how I read her books, for reasons omitted because it got long. I can respect people who choose not to read her because of that, though my perspective is different. I do think she, as an author, has become overdetermined in a way that can rapidly lead to that weird place of recommendations/anti-recommendations depending on the context in which one first encountered her work.
The classic hiker-specific long underwear is often made out of silk, which makes it slightly less irritating than traditional stuff but also more expensive. If you go to a hiking store they probably have fancier pants now made out of spacesuit material or something.