Good Crossover Review

Another good review at SFF World. I like this kind of review as the reviewer spends a lot of time making observations rather than just recounting what happens.

Interestingly, he suggests that the book can be read as anti the current American political regime. I'm very pleased that he and some others have read it that way, but not because it's what I intended, because it's not. For one thing, the initial draft of what became Crossover was written before President Bush's election. Politically I'm a genuine neutral, I find aspects appealing and detestable in equal measure on both sides of politics, both in Australia and America.

No, the reason I'm pleased is that whatever my own political views, I make an effort to keep them out of my writing. Individual characters may pop up who have views one way or another, but as a reader, nothing annoys me more than heavy-handed authorial narrative twisting events, characters, plot etc all to serve as a diatribe in favour or against a particular political viewpoint. That kind of thing is called propaganda. I hate propaganda in any form, partly because it's the antithesis of entertainment and intelligence both, but also because it's impossible to make any kind of political argument unless you first acknowledge that every political viewpoint comes from somewhere valid. Even the worst aspects of something detestable like racism come from a basic aspect of human tribalism that causes us to demarcate the world into 'us and them'... in this case, by race or skin colour. The end result is horrible, but it comes from something that all of us have, to varying degrees. Anyone who's a sports fan knows a little about instinctive tribalism. Propogandists are incapable of understanding that even bad politics can come from good places, and if you can't understand that, you can't tell an interesting story about it, to my mind. So I'm pleased that anti-Bush folks can read my work as anti-Bush, and I equally hope some pro-Bush folks will read it as pro-Bush. Either could be right. Or wrong.

There's also a comment already fastened onto the review from someone who likes the series (though not as much as the reviewer) but complains that Sandy takes her clothes off too often. Gratuitously.

Well first... what is good sex, if not gratuitous? Secondly, I think there's a huge difference between a narrator perving at a good looking female character, and a viewpoint from the character's own perspective. I've tried to do the latter. Believe it or not, I didn't just chuck the sex in because I wanted to be more commercial and write something with lots of sex (and come to think of it, there's very little sex in the second book, and just a moderate amount in the third). With Sandy, it just seemed to work. We're talking about someone from a very different, self-contained society, bound by none of this society's morals, and made up of individuals who are nowhere near as emotionally developed and complex as we. Sandy's the exception to the latter bit, but I wanted her to be quite naive about human social morals, to feel like an outsider, but not necessarily in a bad way. As a person, she's endlessly curious, and having a brain capable of processing enormous inputs of sensory information (enhanced vision, enhanced hearing, super high-powered neural uplinks) it just seemed to me that sensory stimulation would be something she loves... and has never learned any moral qualms about. And so she loves food, loves music, loves art, and naturally, loves sex. It's meant to represent her humanity, and to some degree, a certain good humoured vulnerability to baser human instincts. I thought it a good antidote to the super-duper high intelligence AI cliche of the android who only likes playing chess and reading science manuals. Sandy's much more into sex, drugs and rock and roll... only without the drugs, they don't really work on her. And if you have enough sex and rock and roll, who needs the drugs anyway?