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porticosci-fi mystery is one of those genres that is so up my alley (but still relatively niche) that i tend to pick them up automatically. so all i knew about Drunk on All Your Strange New Worlds by Eddie Robson was that it was a sci-fi mystery. it's also near-future sci-fi and alien sci-fi and translation sci-fi and...workplace sci-fi? is that a thing? if that combination of descriptors is making you think of julie e. czerneda, you're not alone! but crucially, also, there is a murder.
lydia is a translator for the logi cultural attaché in new york. she's in many ways an outsider: she's british, but not high class, she's never seemed to mesh with fellow translators, and she spends all her time either with her boss, an alien, or at high society cultural events becoming progressively drunk. because that's the thing about translating for the logi--only a small percentage of people can even learn to speak logisi, a telepathic language, and even if you can speak it, doing so results in a feeling of drunkenness. the drunkenness plus one very persistent theater producer lands lydia in some hot water, professionally, which is where she is when her boss is suddenly killed.
this is a fun whodunnit with an amateur sleuth (lydia) and a really good variety of elements in the mix. my favourite part of the book, however, was lydia's relationship with madison, the logi who is acting cultural attaché after the murder. lydia knows that her late boss, fitz, was at odds with madison, so she's disinclined to do madison's bidding, especially when it prevents her from the legwork required to investigate a murder. madison is very no-nonsense, and seemingly not nearly as cognizant of the toll that translation takes on the human brain as fitz was, and also maybe kind of a bitch? naturally, where the book really took off for me (and which gave me pleasant flashbacks to czerneda's survival trilogy) was when circumstances force lydia and madison onto the same side. just a fun book, start to finish.
lydia is a translator for the logi cultural attaché in new york. she's in many ways an outsider: she's british, but not high class, she's never seemed to mesh with fellow translators, and she spends all her time either with her boss, an alien, or at high society cultural events becoming progressively drunk. because that's the thing about translating for the logi--only a small percentage of people can even learn to speak logisi, a telepathic language, and even if you can speak it, doing so results in a feeling of drunkenness. the drunkenness plus one very persistent theater producer lands lydia in some hot water, professionally, which is where she is when her boss is suddenly killed.
this is a fun whodunnit with an amateur sleuth (lydia) and a really good variety of elements in the mix. my favourite part of the book, however, was lydia's relationship with madison, the logi who is acting cultural attaché after the murder. lydia knows that her late boss, fitz, was at odds with madison, so she's disinclined to do madison's bidding, especially when it prevents her from the legwork required to investigate a murder. madison is very no-nonsense, and seemingly not nearly as cognizant of the toll that translation takes on the human brain as fitz was, and also maybe kind of a bitch? naturally, where the book really took off for me (and which gave me pleasant flashbacks to czerneda's survival trilogy) was when circumstances force lydia and madison onto the same side. just a fun book, start to finish.
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Date: 2024-09-09 11:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-09-10 05:38 am (UTC)I had the slight barrier when reading it of, uh, being a translator. (But not an interpreter, which is what Lydia actually does although not what Robson calls it, but nobody outside the field ever gets that right anyway.) Most crucially, that meant being aware that it's standard practice that interpreters often work in pairs in this kind of situation, so they trade off every 20 minutes or so, because it's mentally exhausting work! Even in our world, where they don't get physiologically drunk as a hazard of doing it, lol. And that would have absolutely kicked out the foundations of the plot. Which meant that I kept wanting Robson to give us a reason why they weren't working in a buddy system, instead of making Lydia and all her peers get drunk for an evening of solid work. (Cultural reasons on the Logi end why they insist on only working with one? Too few qualified translators to manage it? Robson could absolutely have justified it easily for plot purposes!! But the fact that he never mentioned it, along with some other details I've forgotten since, made me kind of suspect he never actually talked to any interpreters about how their job actually... works in real life.)
But that truly was a minor side nitpick about what was a really fun book, for me if not necessarily for Lydia. Loved the worldbuilding! Loved the Lydia-Madison team-up! Loved the increasingly complicated Lydia-Fitz dynamics! Had a great time! And for all my nitpicks, it's still pleasant to have a book where interpretation is a central focus and being done by humans; I loved that part, too.
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Date: 2024-09-10 01:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-09-10 01:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-09-10 02:15 pm (UTC)Yeah, I'd happily have accepted any number of quick handwaves about why Logi translators/interpreters didn't follow our time's standard professional practices; I just wanted to get that handwave, lol. But this is one of those "because I care deeply about this and it's my profession, I am both the right audience and the wrong audience for this bit" moments that I'm used to seeing my archivist friends have with different aspects of fiction... Anyway, minor nitpicks aside, I had a great time. Love a locked-room mystery with weird sff stuff!!