Crudrat by Gail Carriger

Crudrat by Gail Carriger is a Kickstarted audiobook that I backed last year. It will soon be available to non-Kickstarter backers in both audio and ebook forms. Although I got both ebook and audiobook versions for backing, I consumed the audiobook version and I've only opened the ebook to check name spellings. Oh, and it's not in any way related to Gail Carriger's steampunk novels.

The Progenitors of The Wheel live high up above the sky, amongst the stars, removed from the petty concerns of mere mortals. Each one designed, engineered, perfect; their imperfect children get left to die.

Ghosts. Cyphers. They do not exist. A lucky few, the Crudrats, scrape out a perilous living cleaning the toxic wastes from the great machines that power the station.

Meet Maura. Cypher. Crudrat. Grown too tall, alone in a spaceport with no use for her, doomed to starve. With only her crud-eating murmel and an alien monster to help her, she must find a way to survive, or escape, before they catch her and blow what’s left of her life, and her companions, into space.

As I said, this was a very different book to Gail Carriger's other work. It's science fiction and not a comedy. Also, the main character is twelve or thirteen, which I think is even younger than the Finishing School characters. She does have a cute pet, though, but I think that's the only common element. Maura's life starts off as bleak as a Dickensian orphan's until a luck and a chance encounter basically save her life and allow her to get off the space station she was born on and to a better society where she has a chance to, well, not be dead within a year.

I'm a big fan of Carriger's other books, but this one took me longer to get into than I expected. I think there are a few contributing factors. First up, I'm not used to listening to audiobooks with special effects and — especially — background music. In the opening scene, especially, the music was louder than I would've liked — relative to the words — and a bit much when trying to first get my bearings in a new story with setting and characters to learn. I think there were similarly directed scenes later on which didn't bother me in the same way.

Another thing that bothered me was the dialect of the crudrats speak. It just grated. I suspect the reason I enjoyed the second half of the book more was because Maura was in a different setting, trying to fit in (to a degree), and the people around her spoke in a different dialogue that didn't bother me.

What I liked was the view Carriger gave us of different societies and, particularly completely different societal systems. Showing the difference between an urchin and aristocrats (or their equivalents) is one thing, but then showing us a society where neither concepts exist is another thing entirely. Furthermore, everyone in Crudrat is a genetically engineered human (or their antecedents were genetically engineered), even the people Maura thinks are aliens. I was left wondering whether the particularly broad selection of phenotypes was a stand-in for race. Probably not. On the Wheel phenotype seemed more indicative of social class with crudrats being stained blue because of the dangerous work they do (they clean crud off shafts with blades slicing through them, a construct that initially reminded me of Galaxy Quest and the urge to make SF settings dangerous for purposes of entertainment) and the upper classes are selectively bread. But on the other hand, the society Maura encounters after leaving the Wheel has humans from different "original" habitats living together in equality (or meritocracy, at least).

I enjoyed Maura's disbelief at how the society worked. Not only did it work well for setting the scene, but the complete lack of mutual understanding was entertaining, especially when no one believed her about her previous job. (Because why would you power a space station with giant blades and use orphans to clean them?) I also really liked that some cursory attention was paid to the laws of physics, though I can see why my talk of giant blades — which are part of dark matter engines — may not lead you to think so. It's certainly not hard SF, but there were no stupid errors/misconceptions that made me want to punch things, so that's automatically a win.

Anyway, Crudrat was ultimately enjoyable and I would read a sequel (although I'm not sure that one is forthcoming). I recommend it to fans of adventure-style SF and coming of age stories. I highly recommend not going into it expecting something like Soulless, because your expectations will not be met in the slightest. If you like full-cast audiobooks/productions then definitely get a hold of the Crudrat audiobook.

4 / 5 stars

First published: March 2014, ArtisticWhispers Productions (Kickstarter edition)
Series: No... (but it is listed as The Tinkered Stars, Book 1)
Format read: Audiobook
Source: Kickstarter campaign (it should be available commercially somewhere

Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson

This review was originally posted here on the Legend Awards website. I received a review copy of this book from the folks at the David Gemmell Legend Awards because it was nominated for a Morningstar Award (debut novel). Sadly, it didn’t make the shortlist, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad book.

Fire and Thorns is about Elisa, a sixteen year old second princess who was chosen by God for a higher purpose and who, at the very start of the novel, is married off to a neighbouring king. This is very much a coming of age story in which we watch Elisa grow from a fat and useless princess — in her own eyes — to queen.

When she was a baby, God sent Elisa a Godstone, a gem which is lodged in her bellybutton and which marks her as chosen to perform a divine service. But she has no idea what that service might be, or how she can possibly achieve it.

I liked the setting Carson chose to write. It’s a blend of Middle Eastern location — deserts, adobe houses, dark-skinned people — and Spanish linguistics. At first I was a little geographically confused when Elisa first left her father’s kingdom (I wished the book included a map) but this was resolved as the story wore on and she travelled more. Likewise, I found the Spanish-inspired names a bit confusing in what my brain associated with an Arabic setting, but culturally, I think it worked, especially as we learnt more about the religion and the Godstones.

At the start of the novel, Elisa is has a bit of an inferiority complex. However, she’s been well trained by her tutors and when she arrives in her new kingdom, she discovers that her skills — particularly what she knows of war and strategy — can be put to good use. She is also overweight and, although she never defines herself entirely by her weight, part of her low self-esteem is tied to her thinking everyone sees her as “fat and useless”. When she faces trials throughout the book, it’s really nice to watch her confidence and self-worth grow as she overcomes them. By the end, I found it quite plausible that she could go on to be a great queen.

The main criticism I have, and the only thing that made this feel like a first novel, is that the setting was a little bit under-described. Despite being told in first person, I thought a little bit more setting description beyond the character’s immediate surroundings would have been nice. For example, some explanation of the nature of the jungle separating her father’s and husband’s desert kingdoms. Since Elisa is well-educated, I think this could have easily worked. In the same vein, some of the secondary characters could have been fleshed out a little more. Also, the role of women in their societies was never explicitly discussed. I got the feeling that there were few prejudices stopping women from being in power (there were no issues with her sister inheriting her father’s throne, for example), but then why was she married off without consultation? Maybe because she was a princess, but we don’t get a chance to find out how similar arrangements are made among commoners of her father’s kingdom (though there are vague hints about how it works in her husband’s kingdom).

Nevertheless, I enjoyed Fire and Thorns. According to Carson’s website, it’s the first book in a trilogy, but it is quite self-contained and absolutely stands alone. From the ending, I can see where the sequels might take the story, but there is certainly no cliff-hanger and no niggling loose ends. I’ll probably take a look at the next book when it comes out, but it’s not quite at the top of my to read list.

I recommend Fire and Thorns to lovers of fantasy and YA fantasy, especially those who’ve had enough of medieval-style settings.

4 / 5 stars