Daniel's Updates

"My feelings on Haze are very complicated, so I'm getting a bit in depth on this one. I'd say it has a lot of concepts I like, some executions that don't work well for me, and some elements I greatly disliked.

However, many a time I've picked up a book from a negative review if a reviewer made it clear what they didn't like, because I could tell that I WOULD like it. My hope with this review is just that: that the people who have tastes similar to mine will not pick it up and avoid being frustrated, and that people who have other personal preferences will pick it up and get to enjoy what it has to offer.

So, in theory this book has everything I like in it: a messy bisexual protagonist who is addicted to drugs and can't get off the drugs not just due to addiction but because all pilots who access space warps actually need to take this drug to be able to do their job. He's sexually turned on by getting to do (essentially) warp drive maneuvers while piloting, and genetically engineered in ways that deeply mess him up (view spoiler). Add into that a devoted male lover who is handling his addiction the best he can, mysterious AIs getting abandoned, visual things only he can see while in warp (shunt), a political conspiracy, and more, and it should be everything I want. This was even more so from the cover promising a diverse cast with normative bisexuality and polyamory. Conceptually, this is entirely up my alley, and there's a part of me that appreciates very much that Kerr went for this and made a work that includes all these things.

However, for all these things, the execution was done in a way that kept me at arm's length from my ability to enjoy it.

First up: the narrative writing choices are odd. Sometimes it feels like Kerr wrote out a full outline in flow form, because it's in 3rd person present tense with very little emotional interiority, i,.e., not letting us see what the characters are feeling. When dialogue happens, it is often pages of back to back dialogue exchanges with no emotional markers and few markers of who's talking -- when it gets a few pages in, I often have to go back a few pages and count to see who's saying what, because the voices are a bit similar (more on that in a moment).

The lack of emotional markers is arguably worse -- if you're promising me messy characters having messy situations, not getting a read on their tone when they talk to each other was isolating to me as a reader (though other readers may disagree). It doesn't need to be constant, of course, but having any in there at all would help bring me into their inner lives. Example off the dome (not actual dialogue) "Are you going to meet up with (x) on shore leave?" "Sure, I was thinking of it. Is that a problem?" "No problem. Do what you like." Ok. Are they actually being chill here? Are they being anything but chill? Especially if the story doesn't bring it up later it feels like we have to read it as chill but we won't know if it will be brought up later at the time we read it. Without knowing the overtones of what they're saying, we have to read into it -- which I'm fine with when done deliberately as something to make a point, but because it was so constant, I spent a lot of time feeling as if I wasn't able to 'hear' the dialogue, only see the words with no tone implied in them. Again, for some readers, this might be really enjoyable, but the execution wasn't what I was hoping for.

When I mentioned that their voices weren't terribly differentiated, it actually ties into a narrative choice Kerr makes* that is theoretically very cool but I found didn't work for me, which is that instead of having section breaks between POV exchanges, there's either a sudden switch or this sort of narrative handover point in the text. For example, Captain Evans will get information about the docks they're pulling in at in dialogue, and the resulting description of the docks apparently from her POV will be given, and then we'll see Devit on the docks and it becomes clear the 3rd person POV is now his. And because of these handover points, it's not clear in retrospect whether the docks bit was actually her POV as we thought or if it was actually Devit's. It's a bit like a camera following one character with a pan over a scene and then the pan lands on another character and continues with them.

* at least, I think this is a choice she makes. It's possible the ARC simply removed all section breaks. But regardless, in the version I read, there was no break between any paragraph where pov fully shifted.

Again, theoretically I think this is really, really cool. But again, in execution, I struggled to actually read it because it happens so often. I counted up the number of them in a random chapter -- 13 switches like this occur in chapter 9. By doing it so often, I found it confusing, and was constantly rereading back a paragraph or two to try to figure out when I started 'following' a specific character. In addition, in order to make them work, every piece of narrative needs to be held at a distance so there's no character voice being included in the narrative writing. In general, I prefer 3rd person subjective POVs, where the narrative camera is in alignment with that character's feelings and opinions. In order to do narrative switches like this and do it so often, the camera stays objective, so that each of those moments can flow into each other without a clear sudden shift in tone.

Between that, the lack of the aforementioned interiority, and the lack of any dialogue markers, I feel really isolated from the emotional beats of the story, kept at arm's length when I didn't want to be. Again, it often felt like reading an outline rather than a final version, more bones than meat to chew on, at least to me.

Finally, I want to touch on the subject of diversity. Definitely, there are queer characters, polyamorous characters, and non-default whiteness, which is great, again. For me, and as my followers know, I'm primarily a queer reviewer, the queer rep was disappointing. The thing is: I love bisexual characters regardless of the makeup of their relationships (a bi woman with a man is still bi, and that relationship is fundamentally queer because of their bisexuality) and I adore reading polyamory (all our ships can happen! And there's more room for romantic confusion or beats if more relationship options are on the table!). I want to establish that up front.

However, the problem I had here was twofold. First, the pre-established relationship was queer (between two male leads), but their relationship was written very dry; there was no sexual chemistry in their interactions and basically no romantic moments, while their interactions with female characters were dripping with sexuality (often describing nipples swelling, erections, etc). Beyond that, despite a mention of four-directional marriages being common to establish a default-polyamory, the characters were constantly jealous of each other's hooking up with other people, which is reasonable because at no point do they communicate with their partners about wanting to before they've actually hooked up. Obviously there's open relationships that rely on not talking about it, but they communicate in advance to decide not to talk about it. I wouldn't even mind per se if this was deliberate to portray the messiness and strains on their relationship, but it is kind of portrayed as normative jealousy (one of the first scenes in a book is a jealous boyfriend attacking one of our male leads for flirting with his girlfriend, and the jealousy also continues between these two leads; we don't have any examples of these open relationship hookups where they talk to each other or are happy for each other about them -- and no wonder, since they don't find out until after when they're hurt about it). Whenever the jealousy is resolved, it's offscreen. They don't communicate. And the way this relationship ends up feels, well... I'm not spoiling it, and I can see ways a second book can fix it, but I did not enjoy it. This does come down a bit to taste; I don't know that I'd say this is problematic, but it felt like some relationships were receiving more sexual and romantic approval than others, and whether on purpose or not, this aligned with a traditional male-and-female relationship. On the one hand, individual relationships certainly can go this way, and many people don't handle open relationships as well as they expect to (and I am sure a polyamory-normative life wouldn't change that fact in all cases). On the other, with no other onscreen examples of the situations that worked, we're left with only this situation as-is, and the outcome of it.

There was also a scene that almost made me stop reading, because it was so anti-neurodivergent and ablest. The plot as a whole has a heavy subplot about eugenics (in this case building certain humans, called "Throwbacks," with genetic functions). Most of them are DNA taken from old earth animals, but at one point it's revealed the Throwbacks with good math skills were bred from... well, old earth people who have autism. They use the word (though slightly sci-fi-ized, in the same way "border collie" became borracolls, it was autiz or something like that, and was specifically described as people who have"amazing skills with numbers and math, even though they couldn't do much else." 1. I think we can all agree here that it's ablest to say autistic people can't do anything but math, holy wow, this is an incredibly outdated and horrible stereotype. 2. Actually, only a limited number of people with autism have superior mathematical abilities, and mathematical difficulties are actually more common than in neurotypical people and it's clear Kerr threw this detail in based on her own common knowledge (often incorrect for us all) with no research. 3. Autism is a spectrum, with a wide variety of challenges, behaviors (beneficial and disadvantageous), severity, etc, but primarily regarding communication, learning, and social behaviors. 4. There is no good-at-math gene. 5. While I doubt this was deliberate, it equates autistic people to animals, given the rest of the Throwbacks have animal genes. (This could be the characters misunderstanding, but there was clearly a whole, ah, breeding program for it at one point, so that means all those scientists did as well, if so.)

I only continued past that because at 70% in, I wanted to see it through to be able to comment on the whole ARC. But your mileage may vary, and I felt it was important to talk about that moment and my reaction to it. It did only happen once, but it really impacted me hard.

In short: It wasn't for me. But, this is probably really good for someone who loves a more objective narrative voice that plays with form, and is looking for a distant camera observing messy characters without putting you in the mess itself, and who wants the rest of what this has to offer, this might be exactly what you're craving.

Thank you to Arc Manor and to NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review. "