Entertaining the Alien

10. Servant of the Empire, Raymond E. Feist & Janny Wurts

I was very much of two minds about the second book of this series. While it was enjoyable, there was also a sense of frustration with the book whenever Feist tried to pull in his Riftworld setting and make it clash and mesh with the Empire setting.

While I get the point they were trying to make plotwise, it very much smacked of cultural superiority--the "Western" characters coming in and pointing out to the Eastern characters exactly how their culture was wrong and bad. Add the fact that the Western character is male and the Eastern female, and the it's even more irritating.

And while I'm on the subtext soapbox, in this book in particular, there is a very clear sense of "good=slender/muscular/slim" and "evil=fat/stout/lazy". It's a trap that spec fic falls into often (Frank Herbert, I'm looking in your direction, hello House Harkonnen), and it's so overdone here that it's almost comical. When I got bored I started counting up references to Mara as "slender" and her antagonists as fat.

But again, overall, I enjoyed the story in spite of all of the above. It's refreshing that Mara is a female ruler who rules with absolutely no sense of her feminine wiles until late in the game, relying solely on her wits. The love story is sweet and entertaining, and the politics are well done.

Still... I'm starting to wonder what sort of paper could be done on way spec fic equates fat with evil and sexual perversity. Hm.