Review: The Kindly Ones

The Kindly Ones by Melissa Scott
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I picked this up as a reward for participating in the Fairfax County summer reading program, intrigued by the pulpy cover art and the solid description on the back. After glancing at a few reviews, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Melissa Scott is known for her inclusion of LGBT characters in her stories, and that this novel in particular features a main character whose gender is never referenced (and has either sexual encounters with or attraction to both men and women) and a lesbian couple.


The story takes place in a future where humans colonized many planets prior to the discovery of an FTL drive, but in the intervening years an FTL drive has been discovered. The years between, though, mean that outlying colonies spent many years in isolation with their own unique cultures fermenting. On Orestes and Electra, a pair of moons that orbit the same (uninhabitable planet), the social code is based on family. There are five Families, each in charge of their own holdings and with subsidiary family lines, that come together to govern the worlds. If one commits a violation of their legal/social code, they are outcast and become a "ghost" - legally dead, unable to speak to the living. If a living person speaks to or acknowledges a dead one, that person also becomes legally dead. There's a third category for people who just want to leave their Family obligations who can talk to the dead without breaking code, called para'anin.

The main character, Trey Maturin, is a mediator (their title off-world) who comes to Orestes to be a Medium for one of the Families. Mediums are mediators, but also allow facilitate communication between the living and the dead. Trey works for the Halex Kinship, and the first half of the story is largely description of Trey's experience with the Family members and the strangenesses of the world. There's a long jaunt to the Necropolis - a city full of ghosts and para'anin, where acting and music and prostitution are the common professions. There's also a kind of dog-sled race with the native animals that is much faster and more dangerous than sledding.

Spoilers from this point on.

The second half of the story involves an official feud between several Families and its escalation beyond anything their code has ever had to deal with, and also the abrupt deaths of most of the secondary characters introduced in the first half. The code looks down upon bringing in off-world help for many things, and so the weapons technology on Orestes and Electra is very basic - mostly crossbows and knives - until one Family imports high-tech weaponry, causing a small arms race. One Family almost completely obliterates another, and in the ensuing battles large portions of the culture-rich Necropolis are destroyed and the ghosts use their status to literally walk into the enemy stronghold and win not only the battle, but recognition in government. Which doesn't happen until the final pages, but is referenced on the back of the book, so I feel that the book spoiled itself for me as I kept wondering when the ghosts would become involved.

As for how I felt about this book: I'm pretty mixed. I think it tells a great story and the world is fascinating with a lot of room for other stories in the same universe (perhaps on other worlds - Melissa Scott may have actually written other books in the universe, but I don't know for sure). The culture is complex and can lead to interesting interactions while also being fairly familiar and relatable. There were some beautiful passages and some interesting dynamic set-ups (but that the payoff for those dynamics was often lackluster). It brings to mind C. J. Cherryh's "Foreigner" and the newer Ann Leckie's "Ancillary Justice" in its strictly rule-governed culture and mostly diplomatic (rather than violent or adventuring) exploration of that culture.

I also think, though, that the writing left a lot to be desired while also giving the reader way more than any reader desires. There is a lot of over-telling and over-showing - descriptions of the exact movements peoples' faces and hands are making accompanied by explanations of exactly what that movement/expression meant. There's no intentional ambiguity; the Brandr are treated as Bad all the way through and the Halex are Good, even though there is definitely ambiguity as far as their actions are concerned - it's just that none of their actions are treated as ambiguous by the story. I wasn't very compelled by many of the main characters, either. I felt that there was, again, a lot of over-explaining of motivations combined with a lack of ambiguity, plus a lack of personality consistency. Characters' rationale for their actions is given in great detail but they always make the best choice, not necessarily the choice their character would have made. This also nullifies a lot of the dynamics and tension created by the strict social/legal code, since in every case where the code would keep the characters from doing something important they either ignore the code or find a loophole. The code only seems to matter in dialogue, where people have to choose words very carefully and the narrator has to (read: doesn't have to but does anyway) explain to you the exact consequence of every utterance.

Pacing is also a slight problem. A lot of scenes only exist to show you how cool the world is and the actual conflict of the story doesn't start until halfway through. If the code was more effectively woven through the story, that whole first half could have been great set-up, but instead it read as a prolonged self-indulgent introduction.

And possibly my biggest gripe: Trey is a former actor and another viewpoint character is an actor and there is extensive and enjoyment-damaging use of the analogy that everyone is just "playing a role" in any given situation. So many scenes where Trey thinks something like "and now he's playing second-lead, which is not his typical role, and he is acknowledging that he's playing it too, because he's an actor, which means he knows that the second-lead usually has a dramatic death," or "and he said exactly what the script demanded of him, perhaps not even knowing that he was drawing from the script." And then, from Rehur, "This is the second time I've been offered a second-lead, and I am growing more comfortable in that role." And this happens dozens of times. When all of your characters are meta-aware of their actions, it takes a lot of the drama and tension out of the story.

Overall, I usually find myself complaining that a book or movie tells the wrong story for the world it creates. This is the opposite - it's exactly the kind of story I wanted it to be, but poorly executed on the prose and structural levels.

Edit: I will say here that neither the title nor the cover have anything to do with the story as far as I can tell. The phrase "the kindly ones" refers to the Furies, and while I can see what Scott was going for - beings who symbolize vengeance and, according to Wikipedia, are "those who beneath the earth punish whosoever has sworn a false oath" do kind of evoke some of the themes of ghost-hood in Orestean society, but all ghosts and para'anin in the story, save one, have no problem with or even prefer being a ghost, and when they rebel, they do it because their city's probably gonna get blown up, not because they don't want to be ghosts anymore. (The one para who does have some anger toward the 'living' doesn't show that anger until the climax, when she's suddenly furious and bloodthirsty and wants to kill people because they've been rude to her.) And the cover? I guess it has volcanoes and ice mountains in the background and maaaybe it's supposed to be a scene following the sled-race, but the rest of the image doesn't fit at all.

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