—Happy Birthday to me! And Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who celebrates it!—
***Does a little birthday dance, because birthdays are excellent I-got-new-books days. Ahem. Right…***
Day 22 – Favorite non-romantic/non-sexual relationship.
Oar and Festina Ramos from Expendable and Ascending by James Alan Gardner.
Explorers like Festima Ramos are also called Expendables. The government takes people who are deformed enough to be ugly without being less than physically fit, and send them out to all the newly discovered planets. If they die, no one cares too much. Debilitating deformities are fixed–they have the technology, they’re just heartless.
Oar is an alien on the planet where troublemaker Explorers disappear. Something’s wrong with her people–they go to sleep and never wake up, lying in towers where they live off radiation, immortal but unmoving. She’s incredibly childlike, curious, and self-centered.
Oar and Festina are an odd match, but it works. Cynicism and hopelessness meet childlike stubbornness and things gets done.
