Bannerless – Carrie Vaughn

Rating: 4 stars

The short: A quick-moving book in a decently well thought-out world, but it fails to live up to expectations.

Long: Before I begin, I chose this book because it was either the winner or runner up of a Sci-Fi award, and I had pretty high expectations coming in. It flowed quickly and well, but it had some pretty big flaws. Even besides high standards though, it fails on a number of levels. I’m probably going to list out my grievances, but you have to keep in mind that I gave this book 4 stars, so there’s quite a bit of good, but the bad things require more examination in my opinion.

From the first chapter, you get the impression that some of the thinking comes from other sources, I was wondering if it was somewhat of a cross between Caves of Steel and The Handmaid’s Tale. It seems a little unfair that I compare a book to more notable precedents, but sometimes authors are conscious of that too. I’ve heard the advice, when querying agents, to connect your novel with other, popular titles.

A simplification of the story is that it’s a post-apocalyptic set of human communities who have somewhat maintained a level of technology (I’ll touch on that later). It’s somewhere around pre-industrial levels with a fairly egalitarian society, though there is no animal husbandry. The presence of state is mostly absent except there are quotas, well, except that’s the wrong word. They’re maximums, something that might be called a limit, but not in this book. They’re quotas to make sure resources aren’t used up. They quota mostly what resources can be used and how many children can be produced. I feel like the author spent most of her mental energy on thinking up a somewhat plausible world, but she kinda forgets the small things.

The first thing I want to talk about is the maximum number of kids allowed in a household. But then it isn’t necessarily that the people with the banner are the biological parents of the child, supposedly because most people are eager just to be able to win a banner). The logical problem with this is that after a number of generations, you’re not going to have any genealogy, especially since people have eschewed tribal last names completely for geographic ones (I.E. the protagonist is Enid of Haven). Second off, in the beginning there’s a small part about how Enid feels for the people who want to have a bannerless child, however she never talks about this again. I was really hoping for an ethical and/or moral discussion of this, how necessity has overridden people’s freedom. There are some vague mentions of how luxury and waste caused the Fall (AKA the apocalypse), but there’s no specifics given.

The second thing that irked me is when, about halfway through the book, the author talks about the things that caused the Fall. It felt quite gratuitous, and I think the reader would’ve been better off without any examples or specific knowledge like natural disasters or plagues. A plot point is that people’s diaries lasted from the past (and that’s part of the education of the investigators who enforce the rules), but it being described early and later as too many bad things happening at once is better than specifics.

The third thing is that the book talks about the loss of knowledge and capability to do certain practices, such as fingerprinting and x-rays. Fields are exhausted, too. However, fingerprinting and crop rotation (x-rays I’ll give a pass since they are a little more complicated) are easy to do once you know that they’re possible. Here’s crop rotation in a sentence: rotate fields so every three years you harvest something that has a lot of whatever nutrients crops need to grow there. I don’t know which exact crops, but that could be solved with a tiny amount of research. Fingerprints is mostly finding something fine-grained enough to stick to the nooks and crannies. Electricity (at least the most basic principles) is this way too. Once people know of their existence, then they can be resurrected very easily and without using too many resources. The world didn’t rely on electronic databases of fingerprints for most of its existence.

My fourth and last complaint is some of the writing. It’s a little nit-picky, but again, getting a SF award makes me more critical than I would be otherwise. There are a bunch of these, but I’ll cite a few exemplars:

“She hadn’t thought anyone noticed. But no, everyone had noticed.”

The second ‘notice’ is entirely superfluous. A small annoyance, but it kinda adds up. This sort of repetition feels overused to me.

“He made a grunt of agreement. It was them against everyone else, like usual.”

This just seems wordy.

“…the rested shells of cars, signs, lights an all the rest.”

Idem

“Dad wanted to be where he was safe. Where he was loved.”

Not only is this repetitive, but there are frequently these half-sentences throughout the book. The thing is, if you don’t use all the grammatical ‘function’ words it has to be for a good reason. But this isn’t a scene with tension or anything that warrants such a construction. I get it’s less written style and more oral, but it struck me as awkward when I read the book.

“An entertainment, light and frivolous. As if none of this mattered.”

Idem