I’m not sure if I like Binti, despite how much I want to.
The science seems too much like magic. I don’t know what mathematical meditation or “treeing” are. Binti keeps doing things with equations and “currents” that I don’t understand and are never explained. Ancient aliens show up and give people genetically-passed-on neural interfaces, mysterious artifacts get new powers as the plot demands or do things that the book treats as having dramatic importance but which don’t actually affect anything in the rest of the plot, and some people apparently have something akin to Jedi force abilities except based on their skill at visualizing equations in their heads? I don’t know how any of this works, or what it does. It’s all so…shaky. So undefined. After three books, I still don’t know what a master harmonizer does, or what an astrolabe is, or what Binti means when she talks about currents.
But then the plot goes into things that I recognize–othering and xenophobia, how hard it is to leave the culture you know, the ties that bind us together but also chain us to the ground when we want to fly, how hard it is to forgive someone for violence even after you get to know them as a person and they become your friend, the difficulty of getting warring peoples to reconcile–and those parts of the books are great. Absolutely stellar writing.
So I’m not sure. I love, dearly and unreservedly love, parts of this series, but I don’t particularly care for the parts of it that are actually science fiction. Which is the exact inverse of how I usually feel about sci-fi novels. I don’t know what that tells me, exactly.
The Binti trilogy is very good. You should probably read it. It feels important.