The Mount by Carol Emshwiller
233 pages
Published 2002
Read from June 24 to June 26
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
High-concept soft science fiction in fine form. Emshwiller brings a gentle but sure hand to her prose, finding unexpected conviction and sensitivity, and ambiguity of feeling, in her tale of alien invaders using human beings as, and breeding them for, riding stock, and employing the conceit as a lens to examine concepts of freedom, self-determination, civilization, and mutualism as a survival strategy. The novel benefits from the breadth of these questions, but I wasn't left convinced that I'd gained any new insight into these topics after reading it. There's an awkward absence of representation in the Hoot-dominated breeding stock, with black-haired white people and red-haired white people forming the bulk of extant humanity, which even in Emshwiller's preferred setting of the Sierra Nevada seems to be omitting some folks.
Just as in her The Secret City, Emshwiller treats the Sierra as a central character in the novel, lingering on views and the palpable exertion of climbing up and down rocky passes, pausing to huddle under and then admire a high-altitude hailstorm.
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