This book is part of an ongoing minor project of mine to read some SF/F books by women that were written before 2000 or so. This one hails from 1982.Crystal Singer was originally four short stories, and while it comes together decently as a novel, it was easy to see the seams where the various plot arcs came and went.The main thrust of the book is largely wish fulfillment, with our heroine Killashandra coming quickly, through a combination of natural talent and circumstance and with very little personal discomfort, into the highest ranks of the workers on Ballybran: the Crystal Singer. A Singer cuts crystal from the earth that gets used in instantaneous interplanetary communication, among other things. Lucky Killashandra! Her self-confidence is reinforced by the very universe around her.Speaking of wish fulfillment, Killashandra never lacks for male companionship. Sexuality was an odd mix. On the one hand, you have Killashandra sleeping with a handful of men over the course of the book, everything being consensual in an easygoing way. On the other, men's interactions with Killashandra were on the paternalistic side. I couldn't count how many times men took her by the arm to steer her here or there, or called her "dear," or took charge of trivial matters that she could quite easily take care of herself. Two different men end up shoving food in her mouth to make her eat, which I thought was kind of weird.On language: "It would have taken a far more punctilious person [...] to depress his ingenuous manner" is a good example of McCaffrey's style in this novel. She's precise with her vocabulary; the only times I ever tripped up were obvious typos or machine-reader slip-ups, so she wasn't misusing long words in an attempt to look smart. But while I got used to the prose, it always felt too clinical, too syllable-inflated for the simple things it was expressing: fluff that reads like a legal document. Weak characterization didn't help matters. Killashandra is all right, I suppose--and shares my fondness for beer!--but no one else has more than one simple personality trait: cheery, sneer-y, pushy, sweet. And some characters don't get even that. This was one of those books with a bunch of secondary characters that I had to search on Kindle to remember where I'd seen them before.Ballybran was neat, though. The crystals are a fun and fanciful concept, and the descriptions of the landscape and the dangers of the planet were the most enjoyable parts of the novel for me.That said, Ballybran's social structure was unconvincing. The population of the whole planet is quite small (less than 30,000, I think) and the society has a guild setup where reward and punishment is meted out in debits and credits. Commerce is great and all, but I doubt it could create a utopia where there's no need for justice. There was no mention of a security or police force, jails or courts.Crystal Singer was interesting as an artifact of SF's history, but even as a light entertainment it fell short.
Hmm, vaguely mixed feelings. Crystal Singer is all about Killashandra's journey to become a, well, obviously, crystal singer. She had spent years training in music only to have her dreams dashed because of a burr in her voice that couldn't be corrected and so she throws all of her training and her hopes away, and races off after the first thing that seems promising--and where she feels she wouldn't be second best--which is crystal singing. Many people tell her not to go down that path, as crystal singers are a select group that can never truly leave their planet, not to mention the personality problems they all seemed to have, but she recklessly throws herself forward anyway.The book details her life as she goes about becoming a crystal singer--the training, the background of the world she's on, her relationships with others. To become a crystal singer, one of the requisites is adapting to a symbiote, which happens when people touch down on the planet. If you don't adapt well enough you can't become a crystal singer. Instead, you're placed within another job, one that apparently never leaves the planet. Which is strange, to me, considering that crystal singers can leave for short periods of time, so why couldn't the other people who live on the planet (ignoring the costs of doing such a thing). Killashandra is interesting. I don't particularly like her, but I don't particularly hate her either. She has a huge ego, is so very convinced that she must be better than everyone else, and is more than a little stubborn (and dramatic). She throws away ten years of her life because she can't be the best, only to dive herself head first into something where so much depends on chance and not on her training. This baffled me on a large scale, though part of the allure for her was the fact that there are so few crystal singers. Still, the ability to become one isn't contingent on one's skills, but also how they adapt to the symbiote, which is something she would have to take a chance on. For someone so determined to be the best, the worries that she might be shunted to the side never really seemed to cross her mind. The other characters are a bit flat. There's the universally hated girl who is a real bitch, and of course gets her comeuppance (in a way). There's the person jealous of her, an awkward person who is never shown to grow out of it, and a love interest who (view spoiler)[also happens to be her boss. Which also baffled me--not because I didn't like their relationship, but because of the power dynamics that are more than a bit sketchy. Neither one of them really seemed to think about it, and the relationship is portrayed as mostly casual, but still. You'd think that it'd affect them somewhat. (hide spoiler)]
What do You think about Crystal Singer (1985)?
Oh. My. God. This book is so BORING! I tried to reading it first but couldn't get halfway through it, so I borrowed the audio book from the library to listen to it while I drove home from college one weekend--absolute failure! This is a book that cures insomnia. Seriously. If you can't sleep, crack open CRYSTAL SINGER--you'll be out like a light in no time. I'm not making this up. At least I finished it in audio book form. It was still god-awful! & I can't believe McCaffrey wrote a sequel. Why? Did she feel like she had to inflict further harm on her readers?
—Jason
A reread from childhood. A rather interesting premise, in which "crystal" is essential to power technology in a wide-flung space-faring civilization, but it's only found on one planet, Ballybran, where almost no one leaves. The elite few who do are crystal singers, possessed of perfect pitch and thus able to cut the resonant crystal from the mountain ranges where it's found.Crystal singers are not nice people. Due to a symbiotic spore which infects everyone on Ballybran, they live long but lose their memories, making their ties to other humans rather tenuous, and they obsess about crystal, to the point where jumping one's claim triggers homicidal attacks. And Killashandra wants to become one, after a failed musical career and a serendipitous encounter with a crystal singer on vacation.Of course, not everyone makes it. Adapting to the spore is no sure thing, and it takes guts and arrogance to even make the attempt. Killashandra's got these qualities in spades. She's not a particularly sympathetic character, but it's almost refreshing to watch her fling away ten years of her life and just stride into a perilous future. A lot of the book covers her training and how the Heptite Guild structures society on Ballybran around crystal singers, which I personally find fascinating (and brings me back to this book), even when the actual plot itself isn't particularly compelling.
—Yune
One of the best sci-fi books I've ever read. Killishandra Ree is a disappointed singing student who finds her way to a mysterious and dangerous planet to become a Crystal Singer. These people have to have perfect pitch and survive terribly dangerous conditions, including memory loss. Killishandra is special, she can cut the elusive and very expensive black crystal.Killishandra is a complex character. She is both self-possessed and shy. Her confidence borders on arrogance, only a little tempered by the rest of her personality. However, there is a vulnerability to her that makes her a likable character.The action is well paced, the characters strong and engaging. I have loved this book for years and re-read it every so often. I still find it a delightful book to read, even after a dozen times or more.I highly recommend it to any McCaffrey fan. If you aren't one already, I recommend it to you too. You'll be one when you're done.
—Dellani Oakes
