No, please! I like your thoughts and reactions. There is plenty of space in my brain for alternative viewpoints on books—comparing reactions is one of my favorite parts of reading the same book together.
Actually, the way the humans thought about "monkeys" didn't really register with me one way or the other; mostly I think it was what you said—the fact that nobody in the human crew even thought to try reaching out, or even seemed to consider that the spiders might be intelligent. Like, I get that people who're in survival mode are not generally in the best frame of mind to do the hard work of crossing cultural divides. And once they made it clear that their goal was genocide, well, I had little sympathy for them, frankly they deserved far worse than they got. But still, it seems unlikely (as you say) that nobody had seen an episode of Star Trek, haha. It makes the crew of the Gilgamesh seem like a particularly unimaginative lot. And then when the author clearly thought this was a happy ending, whereas I saw it as a happy-as-it-could-have-been ending, well...yeah.
I was discussing it with Brian (he hasn't read the book yet, but doesn't mind spoilers), and he put it this way: "It sounds kind of like what might happen if the Federation had gone to the Borg and said 'there's this species that's murdering us, we don't have the ability to stop them but we know that you do—please go Borg them.' Which is a Star Trek I'd love to see and probably one that most fans would hate." I think ultimately that might be part of the problem—Star Trek comes (rightfully) under criticism for painting a particularly rosy view of humanity and aliens both, insisting that there's always room for diplomacy; but in the real world things go wrong, organizations don't always act in good faith, and people make mistakes. I've been reading up on statesmanship both historical and current, and foreign policy is just one giant mess sometimes. Nobody has the whole picture, you're constantly making decisions based on incomplete data, and if they shake out well you're a genius—and if it turns out you missed something key, well, you've just killed a bunch of people or started a war and you should have known better. Star Trek endings just don't tend to stem from that kind of imperfect decision-making.
no subject
Actually, the way the humans thought about "monkeys" didn't really register with me one way or the other; mostly I think it was what you said—the fact that nobody in the human crew even thought to try reaching out, or even seemed to consider that the spiders might be intelligent. Like, I get that people who're in survival mode are not generally in the best frame of mind to do the hard work of crossing cultural divides. And once they made it clear that their goal was genocide, well, I had little sympathy for them, frankly they deserved far worse than they got. But still, it seems unlikely (as you say) that nobody had seen an episode of Star Trek, haha. It makes the crew of the Gilgamesh seem like a particularly unimaginative lot. And then when the author clearly thought this was a happy ending, whereas I saw it as a happy-as-it-could-have-been ending, well...yeah.
I was discussing it with Brian (he hasn't read the book yet, but doesn't mind spoilers), and he put it this way: "It sounds kind of like what might happen if the Federation had gone to the Borg and said 'there's this species that's murdering us, we don't have the ability to stop them but we know that you do—please go Borg them.' Which is a Star Trek I'd love to see and probably one that most fans would hate." I think ultimately that might be part of the problem—Star Trek comes (rightfully) under criticism for painting a particularly rosy view of humanity and aliens both, insisting that there's always room for diplomacy; but in the real world things go wrong, organizations don't always act in good faith, and people make mistakes. I've been reading up on statesmanship both historical and current, and foreign policy is just one giant mess sometimes. Nobody has the whole picture, you're constantly making decisions based on incomplete data, and if they shake out well you're a genius—and if it turns out you missed something key, well, you've just killed a bunch of people or started a war and you should have known better. Star Trek endings just don't tend to stem from that kind of imperfect decision-making.