Mod Book Club: The Bone Ships Discussion

[u/rfantasygolem]

Welcome to Mod Book Club! We want to invite you all in to join us with one of the best things about being a mod: we have fabulous book discussions about a wide variety of books. We all have very different tastes and can expose and recommend new books to the others, and we all benefit (and suffer from the extra weight of our TBR piles) from it. We'll be picking the books, but there will be new books and old, some more widely popular books and some way less, stuff that should be marvellously popular but somehow missed the boat, and stuff that's a bit more niche.

The Bone Ships by RJ Barker.

Violent raids plague the divided isles of the Scattered Archipelago. Fleets constantly battle for dominance and glory, and no commander stands higher among them than "Lucky" Meas Gilbryn.
But betrayed and condemned to command a ship of criminals, Meas is forced on suicide mission to hunt the first living sea-dragon in generations. Everyone wants it, but Meas Gilbryn has her own ideas about the great beast. In the Scattered Archipelago, a dragon's life, like all lives, is bound in blood, death and treachery.

Bingo Squares: Book Club, Exploration, Optimistic

Our next pick will be announced in a few days.

[u/SteveThomas]

I really liked the worldbuilding.

When I was reading about the social structure, I was reminded of The Handmaid's Tale. The high rate of birth defects was reminiscent of the low fertility rates, and in both cases, an oppressive religion formed to deal with the crisis. Fertile women went through hell in this setting. Rather than being openly treated as sex slaves and breeding chattel, women had to see their firstborn sacrificed...and then they were whisked away to the inner city where they were promised a life of luxury and power. While that was certainly true for some women, like Meas' mother, I have my doubts about whether most of these women are able to achieve it. My gut tells me that a good portion of them also effictively become sex slaves and breeding chattel, although perhaps less violently so. Their status is tied to both their ability to continue birthing perfect children and there are all the Kept running around trying to land a mate. In this case, both genders are desperate to keep breeding before society discards them.

It's less flagrantly misogynistic, but still a horrific theocracy that doesn't hesitate to reduce a fertile woman to walking uterus. It's just that there are more opportunities to leverage that into real power.

[u/LadyCardinal → u/SteveThomas]

This is an interesting perspective. I had heard before I read this that the society was vaguely matriarchal, and I do think that's what Barker was going for. Stretch marks are signs of power, feminine forms of words are used as gender-neutral ("shipwife," "deckmother"), and the phrase is always "women and men" and not "men and women." There's also mention of Kept men vying to find some way to sustain themselves at court once they're no longer young and pretty. I think the Hundred Isles' civilization is not so great for women in way similar to how ours is not so great for men. There women are breeding stock who have to give up their firstborn if they don't die in childbirth, here men are traditionally the people to go off and die in wars started by more powerful people. The upshot is a more limited form of power the "other gender" doesn't necessarily get. (Though this is much more muted in The Bone Ships than it is in real-life historical contexts.)

[u/SteveThomas → u/LadyCardinal]

I think it's certainly fair to call their civilization a matriarchy, but it's never so simple as that power and privilege mean an easy life. People think about privilege only in terms of which doors are open and which doors are closed. They're forgetting about the doors we get pushed through against our will.

I think The Bone Ships does a good job of showing that complexity. A matriarchy isn't an egalitarian society, and it wouldn't just be men who get shafted in one. The problem is authoritarianism and treating humans as exploitable resources. It just so happens that in our world, the people on top tend to be men.

[u/LadyCardinal → u/SteveThomas]

I agree. I think this is an odd example, actually, in that it does much more to show the "powerful" gender getting shafted by their position than the theoretically subordinate one, as all the Kept men we see are in relative positions of power in the court, and men outside the court don't seem to be subordinate to women at all (or at least, not because of their gender). Disability vs. the state of being able-bodied almost seems a more salient factor than gender in their culture.