Schoolgirl Outfits?
This is a queued post and it’s just one review because I had to split the two I have between this Monday and next Monday.
Review: Locust Magic by Laurence Moroney
CW: Child death
This is actually an omnibus edition and weighs in at slightly less than 1,000 pages. Some of which are good.
Moroney’s work starts out as Science Fiction Harry Potter complete with houses and Spaceball, which is essentially Quidditch in tiny flying saucers. It then takes a side step through Tunnel in the Sky before 180ing into Independence Day.
It’s an alien conspiracy novel and unfortunately Moroney includes aspects that are often considered problematic, including lizard people (the fact that he puts them under the control of the smarter grays helps, but only so much) and ancient aliens.
He’s also aiming at anticolonialism and because of that he includes prominent Navajo and Aine characters…neither of whom are the MC. I don’t know if the Navajo stuff is accurate. I’d have to ask a Navajo... I even more don’t know about the Aine. I do know that the white, Irish MC comes over as a white savior multiple times. I don’t think this is intentional…it might even be that Moroney was avoiding the pitfalls of having a Navajo MC.
Then there are the anime schoolgirl uniforms, with girls as young as 12 wearing miniskirts and leggings. Which is played for juvenile humor more than once. It comes over as the author having a fetish…
So, yeah, I had a couple of problems with this book. Actually, I had three, the third being some egregious science errors including snow on Olympus Mons. Snow. On Mars. It’s not a hard SF book remotely, but you still have to get the basics right.
On the good side, the characters are interesting. Despite the schoolgirl uniforms, the female characters are treated fairly and don’t need rescuing more than the male ones. Some of the space battle scenes are awesome. Then it turns into about 150 pages of space battle. The author was clearly having fun.
(Also, despite a huge number of characters, everyone is relentlessly heterosexual and the 12-year-olds are…well…there are just way too many romance plots for that age group. His 12 year olds act like 15 year olds and he would have been better served to make the characters a bit older).
I did enjoy parts of this book, but I wasn’t able to get past the schoolgirl uniforms, the pairing off, or the bad science. Maybe Moroney’s just an anime fan and was going for that look.
I’d recommend this one to people who enjoy alien conspiracies and space battles enough to be able to overlook that.