Talk:Restoree

Obese

I'm going to work on this article.

"It is the story of Sara, an obese and introverted librarian from New York"

I'd like to start by challenging this. Where is it said that she is actually obese? I realize that her latter form is more attractive, but my impression was that her primary concern was with her nose (was it her nose? I'm not sure), not her weight. Aranel ("Sarah") 17:17, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I reread it and indeed, you are correct. There are a number of things that hint that her body shape has changed and that the Mil would prefer more meat, but it is never stated. I have updated the description of Sara accordingly. The Steve 17:56, Nov 4, 2004 (UTC)

More work

Is there more to this book then just that? Can it be expanded on at all? Meatsgains (talk) 18:38, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

The Plot summary, first of two paragraphs, does not follow the book (which I have only started reading). The second paragraph describes the plot (so far as I know).

I have marked the old generalization about "many readers" {citation needed} and marked my today biographical remarks {page needed}. I will provide more from Dragonholder, with page numbers, but I might not say more about many readers or about the plot.

I agree, someone else should do more work here. --P64 (talk) 21:18, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

"who look surprisingly like humans"

It's clear that they are human; since in the Restoree-verse, various species have had space travel for many years, this is not necessarily all that surprising. AnonMoos (talk) 07:54, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

I actually wrote the entire summary in a deliberately tongue-in-cheek tone. I'm really surprised it lasted this long. :P  The Steve  11:38, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

Negative review

User:DragonflySixtyseven, I don't want to delete a review just because it's a negative one, but how the heck can Sara be a self-hating Jew when she comes from a rural farm family living in the Eastern Shore of Maryland, an occupation and a location where there's a negligible percentage of Jews????? Furthermore, I really don't understand how "virulent racism" can be involved, when the inhabitants of the planet Lothar belong to a different human race than any found on earth, while real earth races are only very briefly and glancingly alluded to. Again, I don't want to delete valid critical opinion, but unfortunately, this sounds just plain stupid. AnonMoos (talk) 18:37, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

I could give you lengthy excerpts from the review (which themselves quote from the novel). Or you could read the review yourself. DS (talk) 18:52, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

Whatever -- the simple fact remains that Sara is NOT Jewish based on anything presented in the novel (where she speculates that she inherited her nose from a "New England zealot" ancestor), and so therefore characterizing her as having "self-loathing anti-Semitism" is just plain stupid. Probably Sara's parents, as 1950s farmers in a remote rural part of Maryland near Delaware (or possibly a remote rural part of Delaware near Maryland, since Seaford is mentioned) had vague anti-Jewish prejudices (without necessarily having ever closely encountered a Jew in person), but to ascribe such views to Sara or to Anne McCaffrey is also pretty much just plain stupid. I'm sure James Nicoll has good intentions on some level, but he's blown up some very glancing and peripheral references to race in the book, as well as the fact that Sara thinks that her original appearance is ugly, to make the book appear to be full of "virulent racism", which sounds truly bizarre me. AnonMoos (talk) 19:47, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

OK, I took your advice and looked more closely at the review, and one thing right at the beginning that struck me very forcibly is that he says that Sara is transformed into an "Aryan blonde"[sic!!!] while in the book she says she has the "same chestnut hair" she started with, plus a "warm golden" skin color. Look, I get that James Nicoll is a Big Name Fan and has his own Wikipedia article and everything, but if he posts a shoddy review that would get an "F" grade as a fifth-grade book report, then no matter how much of a Big Name Fan he is, that can't change his review into an acceptable Wikipedia source, sorry. AnonMoos (talk) 19:58, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

Ah, I think I see - he mentions " self-loathing anti-Semitism", which is not the same as "anti-Semitic self-loathing": as per quotes from the book, she hates her own physical appearance because she thinks she looks Jewish. DS (talk) 21:53, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

I should also point out nowhere in the review does Nicoll state that McCaffrey was anti-Semitic. And that a science fiction novel can be about racism without having humans of any identifiably-realworld ethnicities. DS (talk) 22:09, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

I think that an alleged distinction between "self-loathing anti-Semitism" and "anti-Semitic self-loathing" is a little too theoretical to deflect blame or accusations of casting blame. In any case, neither one of them has much to do with what's actually written in the book. In the book Sarah hates her appearance because her nose is too big and "hooked". Her parents are philosophically opposed to interfering with nature (to the degree that they refused to buy eyeglasses for Sara's brother when he desperately needed them), and also have a vague belief that only Jewish girls get nose jobs. That's it for the references to Jewish people in the novel, which James Nicoll has spun up into some portentous psychodrama (combining it with the "Aryan blonde" nonsense). If he thinks that the novel is full of "virulent racism", then it's hard to see how he's not making some kind of accusation against Anne McCaffrey. AnonMoos (talk) 22:43, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

P.S. I posted a comment on http://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/pretty-face (trying to be reasonably polite); we'll see if anything happens there... AnonMoos (talk) 22:54, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

I think you're misreading Nicoll, aside from the "Aryan blonde" bit (which he has already remved from the review). He reads Sara as being driven by antisemitism (whether her own or that of others), and many of the alien characters in the book as being racists; none of this is meant to criticize McCaffrey in any way. He thinks the book is worse than he remembers it, but that's something else entirely. Nicoll's criticism in recent years has included a number of projects which examine the sensibility of SF culture (fan and pro alike) in past decades, in the light of modern insights into racism, sexism, antisemitism, etc. This review is to some extent part of that discourse. --Orange Mike | Talk 02:19, 11 September 2017 (UTC) FULL DISCLOSURE: I've known Nicoll for decades, and he drew my attention to this discussion, in part because I'm one of the best-known SF fans in Wikiland.

(Sorry for belated reply, but I've had limited time for Wikipedia over the past week-and-a-half or so, and I chose not to devote what time I had to the Restoree review nonsense.)

I still think that the Nicoll review has very big problems, and that it's not out of line for people editing Wikipedia to evaluate proposed external links for basic factual plausibility. I once removed a New York Times article as an external link due to excessive non-factuality (see Talk:Leap year/Archive 2#Removed NYT article link), and I don't particularly understand why a personal blog book review is entitled to more tender consideration than the NYT. The basic facts are that Sara hates her original appearance because she thinks it's ugly (and attributes it to a "New England zealot" ancestor, not Jews). Jews only come into it at all because Sara's parents have a vague impression that only Jewish girls get nose jobs (something that they are more likely to have derived from secondhand rumor/gossip or pop-culture than from any direct encounters with Jews in Seaford, Delaware--population 4,430 in 1960--or its surrounding rural areas), and this is a mere SECONDARY reason for them to not help Sara get a nose job (the PRIMARY reason being the same as why they refused to buy Sara's brother glasses). That's the ONLY mention of Jews that exists in the novel -- there's nothing else! Furthermore, the inhabitants of the planet Lothar are all of the SAME race (a race which does not exist on earth), and they are not really aware of the existence of earthlings during the events in the novel. And the Lotharians (Lotharios? ) know of four other species: the Mil (perpetual aggressive antagonists), Ertoi and Glan (high-tech allies of the Lothar in the fight against the Mil), and Tanes (very low-tech, and apparently lacking in basic self-defense traits, which allows the human villains of the book to victimize them). I really don't see where all the "virulent racism" is. If there is any, Nicoll has done a very poor job of explaining where it is... AnonMoos (talk) 19:14, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

"Less technologically advanced races are deemed inferior (...) Doomed to be replaced by more capable races, better equipped to make proper use of the planet". The Lothar treatment of the Tane. DS (talk) 18:16, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

The Tane are objectively less able to defend themselves against spaceship attacks than the Ertoi and Glan, and it's the villains of the novel who take advantage of this characteristic. Sara herself never even sees a Tane, and those Lotharians whom she directly encounters mostly regard the Tane as a distraction to more pressing problems of their own personal and planetary survival, so that Sara's opinions of the Tane, insofar as she has any, are based on hearsay. You would really have to read between the lines to discover any "virulent racism", as far as I can tell. AnonMoos (talk) 00:18, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

Categories

With respect to the "Novels set in Delaware" and "Novels set in New York City" category, it's only relatively brief "flashback" scenes which are set there; all the main action of the book is set off-earth. AnonMoos (talk) 20:01, 26 October 2018 (UTC)