Review: The Glass Slide World

The Glass Slide World by Carrie Vaughn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Competent, rather than thrilling. That's even true of the interpolated excerpts from the pulp fictionalization of the main character's two fathers; it's both more competent and less thrilling than real pulp fiction of the era. I think the lack of thrillingness, despite pirates and conspiracies and spies and disease outbreaks and the threat of a selfish person causing World War I to break out early because of an obsession with wealth, is down largely to three things.

Firstly, the main character, Ava, is not obviously emotional about any of it. Now, I yield to nobody in my liking for a level-headed, sensible, pragmatic female character rather than an emotional mess, but they should still obviously feel something, and I never got much of an emotional sense off Ava. I'm not sure if that's the character or the narration style, which is matter-of-fact throughout.

Secondly, there's no real driving plot question. (Some spoilers in this paragraph for a not-very-exciting plot; you really won't lose much tension by reading them.) (view spoiler)[Ava goes off on a self-assigned scientific expedition to Nassau, pirates randomly occur for reasons not connected with her, she and her fellow passengers and some of the crew deal with that, she ends up in what is now South Africa (then the Cape Colony) and there's a need for someone with medical training, which she has, at a concentration camp left over from the Boer War, so she deals with that, meanwhile noping out of the whole spies-and-international-intrigue plot which lay behind the pirates. Then she goes home and passes her medical exams (implausibly learning the results on the same day). The end. (hide spoiler)]

Thirdly, the magic system is super loose and non-Sandersonian. The premise is that naturalists, by understanding nature, gain the ability to access powers that the creatures they study have, but a lot of it seems to be dependent on imagination, and while Ava insists that it's science (though not an exact science) and that it's not magic, it's totally magic. Her particular area of study is small and microscopic organisms, so her family think it's lacking in power, but it's really not.

Some of it is pretty dubious, too. At one point, needing a way to sterilize things in a field hospital, Ava turns water into alcohol using the power of yeast. Except yeast can't turn plain water into alcohol; alcohol has carbon atoms in it, and you need a source for those. Ava also learns to scry using bacteria, which are everywhere, and even has a vision of the future, feebly justified by the chain of life stretching through time as well as space.

The magic can do pretty much anything, and we don't know in advance what its limitations are, so it can be used to overcome any plot difficulty. Which is why Sanderson's First Law ("An author's ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic") is so important. The stakes never feel very high, because we're never convinced that Ava is going to fail; she'll just pull a solution almost literally out of the air - plus she's not setting out to solve an overarching problem, she's just dealing with what's in front of her. Perhaps the next book, where she tries to prevent World War I, will solve the second problem if not the first.

But the book is, at least mechanically, very competent, like its heroine. I only noticed three sentences where there were missing or misplaced words in the pre-publication version I got from Netgalley for review, and the punctuation is impeccable.

The setting in 1902 feels authentic; it's not just scenery flats with some 21st-century people in cosplay performing in front of them. Sure, Ava's parents are what's now called a throuple, but it isn't like such arrangements didn't exist in the period. The poet Sir Henry Newbolt (1862-1938), author of 'Drake's Drum,' had a well-documented and long-standing polyamorous relationship with his wife and her cousin, for example, though as at time of writing his Wikipedia article doesn't mention it. The comparative openness of Ava's parents' arrangement - which seems to have been reached in the first book, which I haven't read - is perhaps slightly anachronistic, but given that one of her fathers is of African descent, anyone who's going to be shocked already is, so why obsess about hiding it?

Still, if this book was a contestant on American Idol around the mid-20-teens, Randy Jackson would describe it as "just OK for me, dogg," while Harry Connick Jr would say it was "all chops and no gravy". It's... fine. The competence would normally get it a Silver rating in my annual Best of the Year list, but I just didn't find it that exciting, mainly for reasons of craft that I've outlined above. An experienced author like Carrie Vaughn, who has written thrilling urban fantasy and supers books, can definitely do better than this.

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