Review: Hmmm... some issues with this installment
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 08 3, 2013
I very much enjoyed the first part of Karma's story (The Sky Used to be Blue), so I plunged eagerly into this second installment, and read it over the course of a couple of hours. But now that I've finished it, I find myself feeling somewhat dismayed.I think what bothered me the most was the overt male bias in the running of the Silo. Karma's "husband," Rick, seems fully aware of both past and present - and I find him really repugnant as a character. He is at least complicit in taking the former Helen away from her real husband, Donald; now he's uncommunicative, uncooperative, and forces himself on her sexually. He'd pale in comparison to the murderous Jeff, except that Jeff appears only as a minor character.So we've got men running the Silo, making decisions for the women, and slaughtering them when they don't cooperate. Nice. Yes, I'm realistic about the world, but one would like to think that by the time the Silos are being built (just a couple of decades from now), women have stepped further into positions of authority and have a strong, solid voice that's being listened to - so it was disappointing to fall backwards into a paternalistic society where women are viewed as secondary, and are drugged to keep them docile and compliant. In Hugh's "canon" Wool stories, men and women seem much more equal, and I'd like to see that carry over into all the published fanfic.That said, Karma's story is involving and interesting, and I'll continue on to the next part of the saga - though perhaps with a bit less enthusiasm than I had when I started this section.