★★★☆☆ Moon gods, metaphysics, and sneers

Tidal Creatures

Seanan McGuire

Tidal Creatures is the third novel in Seanan McGuire's Alchemical Journeys series, or the seventh if you include the Up and Under books. The unifying principle behind the series is the personification of things that are not persons, objectively or scientifically speaking, such as the Doctrine of Ethos (Middlegame), Winter and Summer (Seasonal Fears), and now the Moon. Five of the main characters are Moon goddesses (Aske, Change'e, Artemis, Diana) and a Moon god (Máni). We also meet Kelpie, who is not in fact a Kelpie, but a personification of Artemis's Hind. Each of the gods/goddesses is in fact two persons -- a god/dess and an ordinary human whose body the two share. McGuire explains the relationship at length.

Roger Zelazny began his career by writing about thirty stories, which he sent to all the Science Fiction magazines, for which purpose he had made a comprehensive list. In this way he collected 150 rejections and no acceptances. He then sat down with all his stories, read them, and tried to figure out what the problem was. He decided that he was explaining too much -- that he would be insulted if an author told him so much, rather than letting him figure it out. So he stopped doing that, and immediately his stories began to sell.

McGuire knows this lesson. As a short story writer she is beautifully economical. But she seems somehow to have unlearned it to write Tidal Creatures. Unnecessary explanations of folklorical metaphysics go on and on.

But there was another thing that bothered me even more -- the sneering. I first noticed it when Judy (that's Chang'e's human) visits Prof Roger Middleton, and thinks this

As she watches him, she realizes she doesn’t really know much about the man; she’s read his published papers, which are meticulously researched, and precisely as petty as any other academic work...

This amounts to an implication that all academic works are petty, and all equally petty. Once I started noticing the sneers, I couldn't stop. They're EVERYWHERE.

For instance, one of the main characters is Isabella, an hechicera. Isabella works with a circle of would-be witches who meet at the home of Catrina, who is one of them. Isabella seldom thinks of Catrina without a sneer. There are pages and pages of this. The problem with this is not that it diminishes Catrina -- we are meant to hold Catrina in contempt. The problem is that it diminishes Isabella. There are few point-of-view characters in Tidal Creatures who don't despise someone else and reveal that contempt in sneering thoughts.

The story is essentially a murder mystery -- moon goddesses are dying. (That's not a spoiler -- the publisher's blurb tells us "someone is killing them".) I think this could have been a rather good story. But the overexplanation and sneers really drained a lot of the fun out of it for me.

Thanks to NetGalley and TorDotDom for an advance reader copy of Tidal Creatures.

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