Final Discussion

[latespring]

Hello everyone!

Here's the final discussion post for Station Eternity.

No one submitted any questions, so I'd like to pose to the group: what do you think generally worked for you in the book, and what didn't? What draws you to mysteries?

I'm excited to see what everyone thought!

(I'll be back with my thoughts below this post later, as well!)

Comments

[littlerhymes]

Not much worked for me either! Although the basic hook of Mallory being a murder magnet is clever and quite meta, the book doesn't live up to that promise.

I like mysteries so I was quite intrigued by the "murder mystery on a spaceship" concept but I don't think it makes effective use of that idea at all. Lafferty doesn't do the classic mystery structure which would be fine if the book was engaging, but what we get instead was just rather scattered and messy. It introduces the cast of suspects sooo late into the story and then gives each of them a POV chapter or two, to very mixed effect, as none of them ever felt like 'real' suspects, and none of them seemed to have any motivation for being involved in the main conflict of humans arriving on the alien station. By the end I was so disengaged with the mystery that I almost zoomed over who actually did the original murder.

I was not interested in any of the aliens which seems like it should be the most obvious thing to make interesting.

I just did not vibe with this book. When Mallory and Xan bonded over liking Octavia Butler rather than Kurt Vonnegut, I sighed. When Calliope says she wrote RPF fanfiction on AO3 about a military incident she was involved in, I sighed twice.

[greenet]

A lot of sighing when reading this book, is my conclusion.

[bookishdagger]

omg the fanfic line killed me especially because she said she got a lot of “karma” on ao3 for the fic….not kudos….“karma”..

[glitteryv]

I ranted abt that specific thing to a friend (who didn't read the book). Neither of us could figure out why Lafferty replaced 'kudos' with 'karma' given that she had already named AO3 by its official name.

It was a moment that made me put the book down for a moment and try to process that. Full disclosure: I loathe fandom/fannish references in profic. It's close to nails on the chalkboard for my brain. So seeing that character talk abt posting RPF and the 'karma' thing was just very very. IDK.

[littlerhymes]

HA I stared at that for so long, if you know AO3 how can you not know kudos? And it was just so unfunny 😭

[glitteryv]

Yeahhh, I wish she'd gotten more focus on keeping the "space murder mystery" angle as the main theme vs. whatever the book ended up being. FTR, I didn't hate it, but I did finished it with a O__o? kinda feeling (if that makes any kind of sense.)

When Calliope says she wrote RPF fanfiction on AO3 about a military incident she was involved in, I sighed twice.

The way I sighed when Cal said that. I'm still not sure if the author meant it as wink-wink (a.k.a. "hey, I'm one of y'all for the RPF folks) OR if it was supposed to be a How Do You Do, Fellow Kids (a.k.a. "I'm trying to be hip with what the Youth (TM) are into".) it was a moment that legit took me OUT and, in some ways, marked the moment when I was like "let me stop stressing out abt this book and get to the end of it," LOLsob.

[littlerhymes]

LOL it gave me the Fellow Kids vibe! But it was really hard to tell because the book was tonally all over the place. You're right tho, less stress and just finish was the right attitude to take.

[glitteryv]

NGL, I ranted abt the whole Karma vs. Kudos thing and the overall ridiculous to a friend. Once all of that was out of my system, I was determined to finish the book and not worry abt much of the goings on. Which, I have to add, is not how I usually read. XD