{"id":2951,"date":"2018-02-12T01:50:02","date_gmt":"2018-02-12T00:50:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/?p=2951"},"modified":"2020-03-20T23:12:13","modified_gmt":"2020-03-20T22:12:13","slug":"review-the-high-ground-by-melinda-snodgrass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/?p=2951","title":{"rendered":"REVIEW: THE HIGH GROUND BY MELINDA SNODGRASS"},"content":{"rendered":"

The High Ground<\/em> by Melinda Snodgrass (Titan Books, 2016)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>When I was a child I loved the breakfast cereal Ready Brek<\/em> \u2013 instant porridge whose television advertisements used to feature a young boy protected from the winter elements by a warm glow of healthy goodness. I would eat Ready Brek<\/em> for breakfast, supper and, basically, whenever I could persuade someone to give me a bowl. If I\u2019d had my way I might have eaten nothing but Ready Brek<\/em>. Recently, in a moment of nostalgic weakness, I thought I\u2019d revisit my childhood obsession and made myself a bowl. I\u2019m not sure what my seven-year-old-self saw in the stuff, but I can tell you that I was left wondering why anyone would eat this flavourless, textureless, pap.<\/p>\n

Melinda Snodgrass\u2019s The High Ground<\/em> is a lot like Ready Brek<\/em> \u2013 easy to consume and familiar but also bland and unappealing. Unlike Ready Brek<\/em> this book does not leave the reader with a warm, protective glow.<\/p>\n

The back cover of this volume introduces Snodgrass as an acclaimed novelist and noted scriptwriter on Star Trek: The Next Generation<\/em>. This is the first time I\u2019ve come across her work but she has written with George RR Martin in the Wild Cards<\/em> series and her novel Circuit<\/em> (published in 1986 \u2013 the first of a trilogy) was nominated for a Prometheus Award.<\/p>\n

The High Ground<\/em> is the first (of five) in a new series (The Imperials Saga) in which humanity has largely abandoned the environmentally ravaged, over-heated Earth. Beyond our own solar system we have encountered and conquered a variety of alien species to establish a \u201cSolar Empire\u201d which has existed for long enough that it has begun to slip into decadence, if not yet decline. The emperor of this confection has a problem \u2013 a family full of daughters but a genetic inability to produce a male heir that (perhaps improbably) this society\u2019s advanced sciences seem incapable of curing. The emperor\u2019s solution is to break with tradition and appoint Mercedes, his eldest daughter as his heir. But, to claim the throne, Mercedes must prove her fitness to lead by becoming the first young woman to attend and graduate from the empire\u2019s elite military college, the titular High Ground, set in a vast station orbiting the imperial throneworld, Ouranos.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Thracius (Tracy) is the bright son of an impoverished tailor who has \u2013 much to his dismay \u2013 been awarded a scholarship to The High Ground. Tracy\u2019s position as an intitulado <\/em>\u2013 a student from outside the aristocracy \u2013 is not unique but his low-born status attracts scorn and maltreatment.<\/p>\n

Despite being sold as a \u201cspace opera\u201d almost all of this novel (barring a brief prologue and a final action sequence) is a tepid school-based romance that weakly rehashes material that will be familiar from a host of more dynamic and more engagingly and elegantly written young-adult novels. There might have been some mileage in a story that sought to talk about expectations of gender and class in a rigidly structured society, but this is not this book. The \u201cpolitics\u201d of The Imperials Saga go no deeper than the average Hollywood high school teen romance and the plot unfolds with exactly the same sense of cloying inevitability. Mercedes and Tracy are, of course, bound to fall in love \u2013 though their difference in station means their love \u201cmust never be\u201d. And, of course, both have misadventures due to their atypical status \u2013 forced to fight the prejudice and ignorance of others and the expectations of their society.<\/p>\n

The major problem with The High Ground<\/em> is that for around 350 pages nothing interesting happens and it doesn\u2019t happen in very familiar ways. It\u2019s very hard to care for a pair of protagonists who, despite the supposed obstacles placed in their paths, are so obviously and unquestionably destined to succeed. Mercedes may worry about whether she\u2019s pretty enough or capable enough, but it is immediately clear that, of course, she\u2019s really<\/em> beautiful and, of course, her practical competence will be rewarded. Tracy might suffer from regularly-spaced bouts of insecurity but he\u2019s also obviously destined for greatness and bound to outshine all of his higher-born classmates. That\u2019s just the kind of novel this is.<\/p>\n

Beyond the two lead characters, the book is full of insipid and wafer-thin cut outs. None of these people seem to have a life that extends beyond their relationships with the leads and none of them are destined serve any purpose beyond helping Mercedes and Tracy learn important lessons about themselves. This solar empire may extend to distant stars, but it has no depth<\/p>\n

As for the plot \u2013 what there is of it \u2013 there\u2019s not a single line or paragraph or page in the book that makes the reader doubt that it is going to deviate from a well-worn and regularly signposted path. Fifty or so pages from the end of the book a half-baked plot against Mercedes is revealed and there is some brief action but it\u2019s unaffecting and what little tension is generated is quickly dissipated. The schemers of the imperial court are, frankly, blithering idiots and their plots have all unnecessarily silly complexity of a hackneyed comic book villain. Perhaps, as The Imperials Saga develops and extends itself into the wider universe Snodgrass has created, the story will gather pace and become more engaging, but the signs are not good \u2013 the aliens seem neither more interesting nor better defined than their human counterparts.<\/p>\n

Snodgrass\u2019s writing is polished to a glassy smoothness throughout, there\u2019s no doubting her professionalism. The downside of this, however, is that so many rough edges have been removed that every feature that might snag the reader\u2019s attention has been worn away. The text is it is easy to consume, certainly, but it also lacks anything to chew on, any real flavour or anything that would make you want to go back and consume some more: just like Ready Brek<\/em>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A shorter version of this review was originally published in The BSFA Review<\/em> #2, January 2018.<\/p>\n

P.S. If you are a fan of football (the proper, non-American kind), then one of the genuine “highlights” of The High Ground<\/em> is a description of a game of “soccer” that is mind-blowingly wrong. Snodgrass’s description of the game is written as though not only has she<\/em> never seen a game of soccer, but the person who described soccer to her had not only never seen a game either but had only read about it in a book that was written in a language that they only partly understood. It’s ludicrous… Anyway, there are no blockers in proper football.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The High Ground by Melinda Snodgrass (Titan Books, 2016) When I was a child I loved the breakfast cereal Ready Brek \u2013 instant porridge whose television advertisements used to feature a young boy protected from the winter elements by a warm glow of healthy goodness. I would eat Ready Brek for breakfast, supper and, basically, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22,10],"tags":[157,73,47,43,156,46,71],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p27AP7-LB","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2951"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2951"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2951\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2957,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2951\/revisions\/2957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}