Book Review: The Child Garden

Geoff Ryman
1989
Awards: Campbell, Clarke
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

I don’t really know what the Campbell and Clarke committees were thinking when they gave these awards to this book.

I’ll grant that the premise and some of the scientific and setting details are great potential sci-fi fodder. But actually reading the novel is like being dragged along on someone else’s disorganized, depressing, maudlin trip that you desperately want to sober up from.

~~~~~

The Child Garden starts out well. It is set in a London of the relatively near future. The world lives under a single Marxist-Leninist regime governed by an amorphous body of pure thought called the Consensus. Citizens are “Read” by the Consensus at an early age, and their “Reading” determines where they will live and what their profession will be.

A revolutionary war in the recent past destroyed all electricity, most of the metal, and much of the other advanced technology on Earth. People use candles for light, walk as their main mode of transportation, and use couriers to deliver messages.

The only advanced technology society has left is biotechnology—but that is extremely advanced. Consensus-approved scientists have developed viruses that have not only cured all diseases, but are also used for assimilation and education: the viruses “infect” people with everything they need to know. Nobody needs to learn anything on their own anymore; they now learn everything—history, science, art, specific job skills, morality, happiness—through viruses.

As it turns out, one of the unfortunate side effects of curing all disease—specifically, cancer—is that it destroys something in the human body that had enabled people to live a long time. Now, people only live to be about 30 or 35 at the most. Children, with their brains pumped up by teaching viruses, start acting like adults and working at jobs when they are only 5 or 6, and don’t ever really have a childhood.

The book’s main character, Milena Shibush, is a Czech immigrant who lost her parents very young. She is also somehow physically unable to be Read. Her cells rebel against the viruses, taking them apart before they can teach her what she is supposed to learn. She lives in fear that she’ll be discovered to be Unread by the Consensus. And she is constantly made to feel stupid by smaller children who know more than her, because of their viruses.

The other disadvantage that Milena has is that she is a lesbian, which is not looked on kindly in this book’s society. If the viruses had worked, her lesbian orientation would have been programmed out of her, but of course it was not. So she lives in fear of being found out for that reason, too.

Milena’s Consensus-assigned job is in the theatre. Searching in a warehouse for a costume, she runs into a “polar bear:” a genetically modified woman who is large, furry, and engineered for cold, dangerous jobs in the Antarctic. She and the polar bear, whose name is Rolfa and who is also Unread, fall in love. Rolfa, as it turns out, is a beautiful singer and a brilliant composer. She has secretly set many famous manuscripts to music, including Dante’s Divine Comedy. But no one will listen to them or put them on, because they were composed by a genetically-modified polar bear who hasn’t been Read and whose artistic standards therefore don’t conform to those of the Consensus.

So far, so good, Child Garden. But the book becomes increasingly random and goes rapidly downhill from here on (with, unfortunately, about 250 pages still left to go). So, to try to make an agonizingly long remainder of a story short:
 
Rolfa runs away from her family. Her angry father sends a mind-reading “Snide” investigator after her to find her and Milena. Realizing there is no way for Rolfa to avoid being dragged back to Antarctica with her family, they strike a deal: the Consensus will be allowed to Read Rolfa, as long as they agree to put on Rolfa’s Divine Comedy. The Consensus agrees, and, to boot, will present the Comedy via hologram in the sky all over the world, so the entire planet can see it. 

However, the Reading “cures” Rolfa so she is no longer in love with Milena. Rolfa runs away, leaving Milena heartbroken.

The rest of the book descends into a herky-jerky set of disconnected and seemingly pointless remembrances, flashbacks, and flash-forwards while Milena doggedly goes on preparing to force her production of the Divine Comedy on the entire world, and then after she gets cancer and doggedly prepares to die (which is drawn out over about the last 100 or so interminable pages). 

Milena variously relives: her entanglement with a power-hungry rival holographer who makes her life a living hell for a while; glimpses of her very young childhood with her real mother and father; her friendship with an orphanage caretaker that is cut short simultaneously by a hurricane and the discovery of her lesbian nature; and her unique but caring relationship with the male astronaut who transports her into the upper atmosphere to project the Comedy’s world-wide holographic images and then later carries their baby.

In the end, the cancer kills Milena, but in this she feels victorious: she has brought back cancer so that people can live long, healthy lives, and children can be children again. 

It is all told in a disconnected, free-associational, hazy style, which I think is meant to make us feel like we are in the same dream state as Milena. But it felt instead like a collection of unrelated, haphazard, groundless micro-stories. For the most part, all of the stories have uninteresting plots, dippy characters with little or no character development, little apparent connection to or convergence with the other stories, and no real resolution or meaning in themselves.

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As I said, this book definitely had potential. It had the elements of a groundbreaking science fiction novel, with its complex, Marxist-Leninist, Consensus-run dystopia and its highly advanced biotechnology. 

One of my favorite details was that to solve the post-war food crisis, people had been genetically engineered to be able to use rhodopsin in their bodies to photosynthesize food—which made their skin purple. The more they sat in the sun to eat, the more purple they got. I also liked that Ryman developed a way for men to carry babies to term. And viruses as tools of education and assimilation always add a nicely sinister spice.

So it’s sad that the novel ended up being such a loose series of seemingly aimless, ill-defined flashbacks with such low dramatic tension. And, as the story went on, it became more and more preoccupied with death, which I found depressing and hard to read. As she was dying, Milena found solace in the biological evolution of the human race—including a set of people who eventually begin transforming into plants, and one boy who seriously thinks he’s a dog. I think these were supposed to make me feel as much at one with the universe as Milena did, but they only made me feel hopelessness and disconnection.

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Before reading this book, I’d just read the first three books of Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber series—all three of which are filled with Zelazny’s characteristic surrealistic, mind-bending imagery. The Child Garden made me wonder how one author can write such trippy scenes and also make them so vivid and riveting, while another can try to do the same thing but it ends up vague, scattershot and hard to follow.

Certainly part of it is that Zelazny is simply one of the best at what he does, and it’s hard for others to match him. I think part of it is also because, in the end, The Child Garden tells a prophet’s story, about a central character saving the world through self-sacrifice and passive martyrdom. While Zelazny’s Chronicles tell a hero’s story, about a central character saving the world through direct action and fighting bad guys and overcoming tough odds. And I have to admit I find the heroes far more intrinsically entertaining.

Book Review: A Door into Ocean

Joan Slonczewski
1986
Awards: Campbell
Rating: ★ ★ – – –
 
This is a tale of two worlds. 

The planet Valedon has a highly regimented, restrictive class structure. It has a cash economy in which no one gives anything away for free. And it is part of a multi-planet administrative “Protectorship” ruled from afar by a single “Patriarch” on another planet in another solar system.

Valedon is also a world built around stone. Its inhabitants use stone for everything: as their mode of currency, primarily, but also in their artwork, in their names, and as the symbols of their professions.

Valedon’s moon, Shora, is the opposite of Valedon in almost every way. The entire surface of the moon is covered by ocean, and its inhabitants live on rafts of naturally-occurring vegetable matter floating on the surface of the water. They govern themselves communally, making decisions in consensus-based, non-hierarchical “Gatherings.” They have no cash; everything they need is either provided by the planet or they make it themselves. When they have something in plenty, they give it freely to others who need it.

They are also all female. They reproduce by parthenogenesis in a carefully controlled way, making sure that their population is always roughly a constant size. To the Shorans, every form of life on their moon (a richly and originally thought-out biosphere) has a place, and the balance between all of them must be respected and carefully maintained.

This sets up a tidy contrast between a prototypical patriarchy on Valedon, with its mercantile economy and war-prone population, and an ultimate matriarchy on Shora, where they don’t have any pronouns for males and the worst possible punishment an individual can imagine is to have the rest of her raft-mates refuse to speak to her. 

At the time the book starts, the Valans have already established a beachhead of a sort on Shora: a small number of Valan traders have set up shops on empty rafts and are selling bits of manufactured metal products to the Shorans in exchange for goods that the Shorans produce anyway for themselves, like woven sea-silk and natural medications. This has already created some tension; some of the Shorans desire the Valans’ technology, while others are upset that the Valans’ loud motorboats are disrupting the undersea songs of the giant indigenous starworms. 

There is eventually enough unrest that the Shorans decide to send a delegation to Valedon to find out whether the Valans are honorable and worth continuing to deal with, or if they should be expelled forever from the moon. One member of the delegation (and one of our primary narrators), Merwen, is probably the most understanding person on Shora, and even she has a hard time relating to the Valans. 

Although, to be fair, she is pretty confusing herself, and her behavior isn’t exactly calculated to make connections. After a frustrating amount of inaction and passivity, mostly involving her sitting and weaving underneath a tree in a city park while giving incomprehensible answers to any Valan who is brave enough to approach her, she eventually forges a relationship with just one Valan: Spinel, the dissolute son of a stonecutter, whom she invites to come back to Shora with her. 

Partly because of Spinel’s visit to their world, the Shorans provisionally decide not to kick the Valans out. This turns out to be a huge mistake when the Valans’ Patriarch becomes intrigued by the “untapped mineral potential” of Shora’s ocean floor, and decides to invade. He sends General Realgar, Commander of the Protectoral Guard, up to Shora with an army to take control of the ocean moon. 

Realgar wages his invasion using traditional Protectorship methods—threats, guns, torture, imprisonment. But he finds a baffling, incomprehensible foe in the people of Shora, who meet every assault with unwavering passive resistance. Indeed, both sides find that everything they do instinctively, according to their own cultural standards, is infuriating to the other, and elicits exactly the opposite response that they expect. 

The Shorans think that the idea of killing another human being is morally repellant, and that the Valans are unprincipled, sick children who are dead inside, and everything the Valans do reinforces that impression. The Shorans refuse to react to force with force, so their numbers dwindle and their pain grows as more and more of them are kidnapped and killed by Realgar’s men. 

The Valans think that the Shorans are crazy suicidal terrorists, willing to walk by the dozens into their gunfire, and everything the Shorans do reinforces that impression. General Realgar can’t seem to comprehend that the more he tightens his grip, the more Shora will slip through his fingers. He doesn’t realize that if he continues his warlike approach, he’s going to have to continue until every single Shoran is dead.

It is a powerful thought experiment: how people can be so culturally polarized that cooperation and peace is impossible. And it’s therefore impossible to avoid comparing this book to Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed. Both are tales about the inhabitants of two worlds—a planet and its moon, in both cases—that have such radically different cultures that they are unable to comprehend each other. And in both books, only a very small number of people are able to make connections in both societies and to serve as potential conduits of acceptance and understanding. 

LeGuin’s book did a better job, however, at allowing you to explore the different social structures on the opposing worlds. It presented the pros and cons of both sides without a glaringly obvious bias towards one or the other. It. And it had a more interesting plot and a main character with clearer motivations. 

A Door into Ocean felt much more scattered. The plot was frustratingly meandering, the heroines and heroes were passive and inarticulate, and the confrontations between opposing sides were confusing and usually lacking in any resolution of anything. 

The Valans were cruel and brutish, so it was easy to understand where they were coming from. But it was often hard to understand the reactions and motives of the Shorans. They seemed to sink into vagueness when it was least convenient (like when they were being interrogated by a Valan official). They often answered even direct questions in riddles—not, it seems, because they wanted to, but because they got flustered and couldn’t think of what to say. And when they were most shocked or frightened, they would escape into a coma-like trance and not come out of it for days.

It also bugged me that the Shoran’s worst possible punishment was to basically give each other the silent treatment. It’s a stereotypical way that women are often accused of dealing with problems—through passive aggression—and it made them seem a bit like a society of self-righteous eighth-grade girls. 

None of these things are going to get the Valans off your moon without having a lot of your people die. Passive resistance and civil disobedience can be tremendously successful techniques for social change, but by themselves they may not be enough. Your self-sacrifice often needs to be paired with strong communicators who can articulate your issues and explain your actions. If it isn’t, you may just get slaughtered for no reason.

Book Review: Rite of Passage

Alexei Panshin

1968

Awards: Nebula
Nominations: Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ – – –

SPOILER ALERT

The main character of Rite of Passage is a twelve-year-old girl, Mia Havero, who lives on a spaceship with her father and a couple tens of thousands of other people. They live on the ship, wandering across the galaxy, because 160 years ago Earth was rendered unfit for human habitation in some kind of apocalyptic war. The war's survivors fled in ships; intellectuals (like Mia’s forebears) stayed aboard, and less skilled, less educated people settled on various colony planets.

The ships and the colony planets have had a strained relationship ever since, one in which the ships get goods and materials from the colonies and the colonies get a teensy bit of carefully doled-out technological help in return.

Because space on the ships is finite, overpopulation is a potential problem. Ship residents learned hard lessons from overpopulation on Earth (which is sort of implied to be the cause of the war) and have taken measures to keep their numbers constant. One such measure is that when any child turns fourteen, they have to go through a Trial: they get dropped on a random colony planet, raw and wild and backward, and have to last there, alone, for a month. If they survive to be picked back up by their ship, they are adults with full voting rights. If they don’t, well, then, they don’t. It’s a bit far-fetched and passive-aggressive as a method of population control, but there it is.

Mia is precociously smart, self-reliant, and inquisitive. She is also undisciplined (by either her absent mother or her preoccupied, hands-off father), obnoxiously prejudiced about people who are different than her, and more than a little bit antisocial in the way she thinks only about herself. She doesn’t know, and doesn’t seem to really care, how her rude and snotty comments hurt others.

                                         

This book is billed as a sympathetic coming-of-age story, in which our heroine starts out as a naïve child in a cloistered world and then is forced to grow up and conquer her fears and preconceptions through a series of challenges. But it comes off more as the story of a self-centered girl who gets away with a lot of insensitivity by being brash, plucky, and resourceful. And maybe learns a little bit of tolerance at the end, in spite of herself.

Mia’s challenges start when her father gets elected to the chairmanship of the Ship’s Council, and they have to move to a new level of the ship away from all her friends. At first she thinks that all the people on her new level are stupid, but eventually she fights, bullies, and daredevils her way into the good graces of a new group of friends and realizes that maybe they’re pretty much the same as the people she knew on her old level.

Her second challenge is when her father brings her with him on a diplomatic trip to the colony planet of Grainau, where she first meets some of the planet-dwellers that she and her friends have grown up calling “Mudeaters.” She meets colonist kids who think she is snotty (which she is) and self-centered (which she is) and part of a system that denies them access to technology that would help them advance (which she is) and she, in turn, thinks that they’re grubby and smelly and stupid and wear weird clothes. She doesn’t really leave the planet having changed her mind about any of this.

Mia’s training for trial, which starts a year and a half before Trial itself, brings on more challenges, including proving herself to a new group of peers and, somewhat randomly, learning to ride a horse, building a log cabin, and killing a tiger. It is pretty taxing, and I guess there is a sense of victory in it when she accomplishes each of these things, but it doesn’t seem to teach her to be any less opinionated or any more aware of others.

And, finally, at fourteen, Mia goes through her Trial itself. She is dropped onto the colony planet Tintera and discovers that the people there are Free-Birthers, which means they go having children willy-nilly as much as they want, and she is appalled by that. She runs afoul of a bunch of nasty road bandits who destroy her homing beacon, and she is angry at that. She meets locals who seem like they are enslaving the indigenous semi-intelligent life forms, and she is disgusted by that. But, all in all, it is oddly anti-climactic; it doesn't seem all that much harder than any of the challenges she faced on the ship when she was younger.

And she also doesn’t go back to the ship all that much changed. She does run into the elderly Tinterian Mr. Kutsov, who provides her with her obligatory example of the Kindly Mudeater, letting her hole up in his house for a couple weeks. But she later abandons Mr. Kutsov, and then witnesses him being beaten to death by the police, which doesn’t do much to alleviate her prejudice of planet-dwellers in general. And she does rescue her friend Jimmy, also on Trial on Tintera, who has been clapped into jail by the colonists when he was spying around one of their military yards, and who, conveniently, still has a working homing beacon. But she still says and does things that hurt him and offers little in the way of apology.

Book Review: Stand on Zanzibar

John Brunner
1968
Awards: Hugo
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

Stand on Zanzibar is set in the 2010s which, in 1968, was the relatively near future. The world has become severely overpopulated, which has serious effects on everyday life.

Internal combustion engines are banned in most large cities and have been replaced by fuel-cell and fly-wheel vehicles. Almost everyone has to share housing, even the rich. In jails, prisoners are tranquilized and stacked one on top of another on bunk beds which can be pulled in and out of cells like drawers in a filing cabinet.

Rich countries have enacted various forms of eugenic legislation to control birth rates. In the US, for example, you are forbidden to have children if you have genes for certain hereditary conditions like hemophilia, diabetes, phenylketonuria, or color-blindness.

~~~~~~~

The book has two semi-intertwined main plots, each of which is centered on one of the two somewhat asocial main characters, Donald Hogan and Norman House. Donald and Norman are roommates and are also probably as close to being friends as would be possible for either of them.

Norman is black, Muslim, and a VP at General Technics, the world’s largest technology firm. His company sends him to Beninia, a remote African country, to work out a deal to allow GT to mine Beninia’s natural resources before its neighboring countries can invade and do so. While there, Norman finds that Beninians are very strange – no wars, no murders, not even lost tempers – and he sets himself to learning why.

Donald is white, Christian, and a spy for the US government. He gets sent to Yatakang, a remote Asian country, which has announced that it is developing the technology that will allow it to clone embryos, select out the ones with undesirable traits, and then implant the best in any woman. This may have disastrous capacity consequences for governments, as it will allow anyone to get around eugenics laws and have a child. Donald’s mission is to either expose their claim as a fraud or, if it is not a fraud, to make it not come to pass.

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Reading Stand on Zanzibar is a little like reading Shakespeare or A Clockwork Orange, in that it is pretty hard to follow at first. Brunner creates a whole new vocabulary for this future dystopia that you have to get used to. Some of the new terms are abbreviations (“dicty” for “addict”); amalgamations (“Afram” for “African-American”); free-associations (“codder,” from “codpiece,” for “man”); or just plain slang (“shiggy” for “girl”).

But if you persevere, by the time you’re halfway through the book, you can read and understand a sentence like “Sheeting hole, Frank, I’ll never forgive those bleeders!” without batting an eye.

Even the table of contents is wacky. Chapters are listed not in chronological order but by category, of which there are four:

“Continuity” (the main plot)
“Context” (explanations of the main plot)
“Tracking with Closeups” (side stories about minor characters)
“The Happening World” (jumbles of ads, gossip, conversations, and news)

The four types of chapters are interwoven throughout the book. It is a little chaotic, but that is part of what Zanzibar is all about. The combination keeps the plot going, helps you understand it, provides detail and color, and gives you an idea of the volume of stimuli constantly bombarding the populace.

~~~~~~~

Stand on Zanzibar is also similar to Neuromancer in many ways. It has a trippy style and a unique vocabulary. It has advanced technology such as fuel-cell cars and internet-like, real-time global media. It has widespread use of hard-core drugs. It has a massive self-aware computer that controls many everyday operations for all of humanity worldwide. And it even has a woman with metal eyes (in this case, chromed contact lenses).

The main difference (aside from the fact that Zanzibar came out 16 years earlier than Neuromancer) is that it is less about the self-aware central computer and more about humans coping with each other in a crazy, overcrowded world. Brunner is bitingly sarcastic and cynical and, at the same time, handles complex issues with a lot of sensitivity and understanding.

Brunner’s main focus is how the loss of privacy and property affects us psychologically and sociologically. Humans are social animals able to deal with each other pretty well...until we get overcrowded, and then we turn on each other. The world of Zanzibar is full of violence: individual killing sprees, terrorism, riots, and war. Many people try to escape from it all with drugs, most of which are legal or at least tacitly allowed: everything from marijuana to powerful, laboratory-synthesized hallucinogens with names like Triptine and Skulbustium.

Brunner shows that the pressure created by overpopulation both exacerbates the gap between rich and poor and, at the same, binds them more closely. His message (sent primarily through the character of the popular, cynical sociologist/commentator Chad Mulligan) is that even though you may think you are rich, you are not, really, if the rest of the world is horribly poor. And many elements of his analysis have come depressingly true; Mulligan (presciently) points out that water is eleven times more expensive than it was fifty years ago; that all our foods are prefabricated in factories; and that the fanciest new building being built in the world is a jail.

And throughout the whole book runs another brave, touchy debate about reproduction. In an overpopulated world, choosing to have a child is itself a political statement. There are a million different ways to have a child: donor eggs or sperm, externally-fertilized ova, adoption, cloning. Each option brings anxiety and pain. And when the Yatakangis announce their cloning program, it brings up new questions about tailored babies. Is it right to breed for certain traits and against others? And do parents really want children who are more advanced than them?

And whether or not you want a child, you still have to deal with complex emotional issues. Some couples desperately want to have a baby but are not allowed to because one partner has a bad genotype. Some have good genotypes but are infertile. Some people have excellent genotypes but don’t want children, and are constantly questioned (and constantly question themselves) why they don’t. Brunner handles all of this with perceptiveness and sensitivity, as well as humor.


An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: Stations of the Tide

Michael Swanwick
1991
Awards: Nebula
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ – – – –

I started out excited to read this book because of the setting. It takes place on a planet called Miranda, which has a very long annual cycle around its sun lasting several of our years. Miranda has one large dry-land continent (named “Continent”) and one ocean (named “Ocean”) surrounding the continent. During half of the year, the polar ice caps melt and the tides come in and Ocean rises to cover half of Continent. Any creature living on the land who is not prepared for the annual tides gets swept into Ocean and drowns.

The indigenous animals of Miranda, collectively called the “haunts” by the colonizing humans, have evolved to be able to change to either land-suitable or water-suitable form, as necessary. Miranda’s native mice, for example, change into sort of swimming mini-otters when the tides come in.

Unfortunately, although the setting has great potential, the plot is confusing and ill-defined, and the characters are all either annoying or just plain boring. I don’t know how William Gibson and Kim Stanley Robinson could have given it the stunning reviews they did.

Basically, the story is about a bureaucrat (“the bureaucrat”) visiting Miranda from its governing worlds, which are many light years away. A mysterious Mirandan wizard named Gregorian is rumored to be in possession of proscribed technology, and the bureaucrat has been sent to find him and get him to give it back. Over the course of completing his mission, the bureaucrat has life-threatening adventures, learns Gregorian’s true identity, experiments with mind-altering drugs, and has pretty kinky, very explicit sex with a witch. It all takes place on the coast in the last days before the tides are scheduled to come rushing in, adding a certain urgency to his task.

My major problem with the book is that Swanwick has a Vernor Vinge-like habit of continually bringing in new ideas and plot lines and technology, and then never carrying them through. From the Mirandans’ vaguely restrictive census bracelets, to the feverdancers that affect your brain when you’re on drugs, to the weird TV drama that everyone is always watching, many of the early details you think hold promise and are going to be explored further are just left amorphous and hanging. And some elements essential to the ending are brought up for the first time in the last five pages.

To make matters worse, many of the ideas in this book are painfully derivative of better earlier work by other people. For example, one of the characters has to go through a test of strength and character that involves sticking their hand in a pain-box in a scene that could have been copied directly from Dune. And the dual nature of Miranda’s haunts seems similar to, although not as well developed as, the local fauna and flora in Speaker for the Dead. (Note: I did appreciate the overt homage in which the massive, multi-towered granite government buildings the bureaucrat works in are called “the Mountains of Madness” by the employees.)

Swanwick sprinkles references to The Tempest throughout the book, undoubtedly inspired by the ocean forces that hover in the background, threatening inundation at any moment. Celestial bodies are all named for characters in Shakespeare's play – the sun is Prospero, one moon is Caliban and the other is Ariel, and then of course there is the planet Miranda itself.

None of the references are carried through with any meaning, though. He throws them out but feels no need to incorporate any deeper parallels to The Tempest into the story. That would have been quite possible; after all, one of the main characters is a powerful magician, and it takes place on what is essentially an island whose inhabitants feel constrained by their colonial government (although they are also kind of colonizers themselves). (I have to admit, though, I never really liked The Tempest either. I don’t like Shakespeare’s plays about fairies and romances nearly as much as the ones about despotic rulers.)

Our lives may be such stuff as dreams are made on, but this book definitely is not.


An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

Kate Wilhelm
1976
Awards: Hugo, Locus
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

Kate Wilhelm’s writing is subtle and understated. It grows on you gradually.

This story sucked me in so slowly, in fact, that at first I thought it was going to be boring.

Also, the first part of the book, which takes up about a quarter of its total length, is basically an introduction to the rest. So many major events happen and so much time passes during that first section that it seemed like too much; I thought I was never going to be able to get into any of the characters. I would just start to get attached to one and then they were gone.

The later sections of the book go at a better speed, however. And for them to work as well as they do, I have come to think that the first part has to cover that much ground.

This is a post-apocalyptic story in which we have destroyed our environment with radiation and toxic chemicals. All the pollution and contamination cause people to become infertile and, over time, Earth’s human population gradually dies off and dwindles down to almost nothing. And, to top it off, another ice age begins and glaciers start crawling all the way down into Maryland.

Only one very organized, very wealthy family in the Shenandoah Valley continues to reproduce – by cloning themselves. They saw the writing on the wall, trained themselves on the necessary technology, and built themselves a secret compound complete with hospitals, laboratories, incubators, schools, and dormitories.

This is all very well and good and controlled at first, but then instead of sticking to producing one child at a time, the family scientists begin to produce multiple sets of identical children. At first there are twos and threes and eventually they get up to sevens and eights.

The sibling sets start to discriminate against oddball “singles” with increasing viciousness. And, at the same time, the sets grow progressively more and more group-focused until they are completely dependent on their clone brothers or sisters to function. They are unable to think originally or creatively on their own.

Ironically, this means that the clones themselves are headed for extinction, since they cannot invent new technology or repair their equipment when it breaks, much less adapt to the approaching glaciers. And they have ostracized the single children, the only ones who have a hope of doing these things.

I did think that the ending was a little too neat. But, overall, I liked the book. In particular, I thought that Wilhelm did a good job of taking an idyllic setting and a group of happy fresh-faced youths and gradually making them into something more and more sinister and unpleasant. Something almost as sinister and unpleasant as… junior high school.


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: Green Mars

Kim Stanley Robinson
1993
Awards: Hugo, Locus
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –
SPOILER ALERT

This is the second installment in Robinson’s Mars trilogy. It is a sequel to Red Mars, the extremely realistic story of the original hundred colonists’ landing and their first few decades of settlement on the red planet. 

In this book, the population of Mars is growing fast. Some of the growth comes from immigration from Earth, as it always has, but much of it now also comes from children born on Mars. The native children tend to be physically different from Earth people – taller and leaner, better at loping around in the lower gravity. 

Martian political conflicts still abound and are even more complicated. Most importantly, since Mars is now run by transnational corporations, there are all kinds of resistance movements across the planet trying to organize a second revolution. 

There is also still a basic tension between the “greens” (who want to terraform Mars) and the “reds” (who want to keep Mars in its original state). The greens are winning by default, having released some unauthorized lichens which have adapted to the atmosphere and have taken off. Since it would be next to impossible to bottle this up again, the reds are getting increasingly hostile and reactionary. 

Robinson tells the story while switching among the points of view of several different people. Sometimes we follow Sax Russell, one of the first hundred colonists and a terraforming proponent. Sometimes we follow Ann Clayborne, another original colonist and one of the most ardent reds. Sometimes it’s Nadia Chernyshevski, a genius at construction who has built many of the power plants and major settlements and only reluctantly gets involved in politics. And sometimes it’s Nirgal, one of the native first-generation Martians. 

This technique is great because after living in the shoes of all these different people, you find yourself being sympathetic to all sides of the political debates. You realize there is no clear-cut easy answer to any question about development. You see why they fight, and you also see how they can actually find common ground and work together sometimes. 

I think my favorite characters are Nadia, who is very practical and realistic, and Sax, who was one of those who originally started the clandestine seeding of the planet but who learns a lot from Ann and goes through a lot of changes of heart over the next hundred years. 

I found the politics less interesting than the biology, however. While all the bureaucratic conflicts are going on, the “greening” of Mars is relentlessly underway. The lichens that the first colonists distributed have started to produce oxygen and are mutating into new varieties. As the book goes on, we begin to see leafy plants and bushes and finally animals – insects, centipedes, and birds. Robinson is so good at this hard, realistic, imaginable SF. I just loved the unpredictable and very, very slow but inexorable transformation of Mars. 

Toward the end of the book there is a catastrophe on Earth when a huge chunk of Antarctic ice breaks off and begins to melt. Sea levels rise, destroying many coastal cities. I had a difficult time watching Earth descend into poverty and chaos while up on Mars people were still able to make and re-make their own societies. It reminded me a little bit of the story in Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles where the population of Earth is destroyed in a nuclear war and the only humans left are the lonely colonists on Mars. 


An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: Mirror Dance

Lois McMaster Bujold

1994
Awards: Hugo, Locus
Rating: ★ ★ – – –
 
Once again the Hugo voters force me back into Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga.

The Saga is a multi-book series set in a universe of planets interconnected by trade and internecine political struggles. Space travel and warfare are at a Star-Trek-level of speed and sophistication.

                                                                                
Mirror Dance is one of the later books in the series. Its plot centers on Miles Vorkosigan, the son of the plucky, beautiful starship captain Cordelia Naismith and the handsome, strong, passionate, wise Count Aral Vorkosigan of the planet Barrayar. Enemies of the Count attacked Cordelia with a neurotoxin when she was pregnant, so her son Miles was born with an extremely small stature and brittle bones that break easily. He spent most of his first years in an incubator and later had to go through uncounted types of painful therapy.

Fortunately, Miles was also born with a quick wit, fantastic intelligence, and an innate ability to lead others. This allowed him to compensate for his physical disadvantages and he grew up to be a brilliant military tactician, a beloved ship captain, and irresistibly attractive to all ladies and hermaphrodites of intelligence.

Mirror Dance is a book about Miles in his prime and at his most powerful. It is a time when he is living a double life as the dutiful heir of the Count on Barrayar and the brilliant, daring Admiral Naismith of Barrayan Imperial Security.

It turns out that when Miles was a baby, an evil group of the Count’s enemies stole some of Miles’s cells and created a clone of Miles, whom they named Mark. In an impressive display of long-term plotting, they raised Mark from a baby and trained him to be an assassin, the idea being that they would eventually substitute Mark for Miles and he would then be able to get in and kill the Count.

The sinister lab where Mark was created and raised is also a facility that raises clones for rich people and performs brain transplants on them when the progenitor grows aged and wants a new, younger body. Unfortunately for the Count’s enemies, the head of the cloning facility has been abusive to Mark. By the time of Mirror Dance, Mark has had enough of it. He steals a spaceship and tries to free all the other clones. But his escape attempt fails and lab security clamps down. Miles comes after Mark and rescues him and the other clones, but gets shot and left behind in the process. Miles’ crew, Mark, and the rest of Miles’ friends and family spend the rest of the book trying to rescue Miles and also trying to destroy the clone lab, if they can, as a nice side project.

I’m sure if you’re a fan of the Vorkosigan Saga, you will love this book. For me, the saga is too much like a romance novel or a soap opera to get very excited about, and the plots are overly convoluted and not terribly original, and this installment is basically par for that course.

Bujold's characters are divided cleanly between those who are unjust and evil and horrifyingly ruthless, and those who are completely in love with Miles. Miles always knows exactly the right thing to do in any social, diplomatic, or wartime situation. As Admiral Naismith he is theoretically in danger of his life almost every minute, but you also never for a moment forget that he’s secretly royal and that gives him a lot of advantages in staff and equipment that others would not have. Also it lets him bestow lavish and perfect but anonymous gifts on his friends and loyal subordinates.

There is also a lot of time spent on how tedious and wasteful all the glamorous royal ceremonies are, and the primary characters spend a lot of time being forced to go and dress in fancy uniforms and stand around making cynical comments about the other guests, but underneath it all you feel like they really love it. No one could force the Count and Countess Vorkosigan to hold their own Winterfair Ball if they didn’t want to, after all, so it seems kind of hypocritical to have them standing around being snarky about it the whole time. 


An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: Barrayar

Lois McMaster Bujold
1991
Awards: Hugo, Locus
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

Barrayar was the seventh novel written in Lois McMaster Bujold’s long-running Vorkosigan Saga, but it is one of the very earliest in the saga’s internal chronological order. It lays the groundwork for most of the later books, introducing us to the Vor and explaining the birth and early childhood challenges of Miles Vorkosigan, the saga’s most frequent protagonist.

                                                                                                   

In Barrayar, the story centers around Cordelia Naismith, a brilliant and charming but independent-minded and steely-tough red-haired spaceship captain from the planet Beta. She is married to the brilliant and wise but steely-tough Count Aral Vorkosigan and the two of them are deeply in love with each other. They live on the planet Barrayar in the count’s traditional family home.

Count Vorkosigan is a high-ranking member of the Vor family, which is an elite military caste in the Barrayaran empire. The count becomes arguably the most powerful man on the planet when the elderly emperor dies and the count is appointed regent to Gregor, the emperor’s child successor.

Unfortunately, the empire not only has several enemy states but is also filled with layer upon layer of internal intrigue; Vorkosigan’s new position has earned him the jealousy of several of his Vor kinsmen.

In addition, Barrayar is a somewhat conservative world and the people are constantly being shocked by Cordelia’s Betan egalitarian and feminist sensibilities. She’s constantly being too familiar and unimpressed with important nobles for local custom (but getting away with it because of her aforementioned brilliance and charm).

Needless to say, all of this earns the count and countess many stalwart friends and supporters… as well as many powerful enemies. Eventually, one of their enemies is able to get by security and release a powerful neurotoxin in the Vorkosigan home. It hits Cordelia, who happens to be pregnant at the time.

Doctors are able to rid her of the toxin, but not before it permanently damages her fetus, which will have to be gestated in a uterine replicator for the rest of its term. Then one of the other Vor counts stages a coup, during which the replicator is kidnapped. Most of the rest of the plot of the book involves the battle against the usurper count and the recovery of the replicator.

I never really got caught up in this story. I wasn’t interested in the internecine conflict among the various Vors and the writing was too much like a romance novel for my comfort. There were too many flashing eyes and swirling skirts and unbendingly loyal manservants/armsmen and people being called "Milady." Cordelia was always being called “feisty” and was always drawing criticism from the backwards Barrayans with her modern Betan views and then of course always turning out to be right.

The best part of the book, really, is that it introduces the Vorkosigans’ son, Miles. When Miles is finally born from the replicator, he is very small and has brittle bones that are easily broken; he will never grow to full adult size and will have to live with bone recalcification treatments and physical limitations all of his life. Luckily for him, he is born with the brilliance and steely-toughness of both of his parents, enabling him to overcome his handicaps in spades; this makes for plenty of fodder for the later books in the saga.


An earlier version of this review appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: Cyteen

C. J. Cherryh

1988

Awards: Hugo, Locus

Rating: ★ – – – –

Cyteen is one of the central books in C. J. Cherryh’s enormous Alliance-Union universe series. It is billed as a masterwork of colorful characters and multi-layered political intrigue.

It is, indeed, a complex tale of intergalactic politics. Unfortunately, it is also incredibly boring. And massive. I found myself less and less motivated to finish it with the turn of each one of its 680 pages. I didn’t care about the politics or the intrigue. I thought the writing was overwrought. The characters were all unappealing and I was troubled by the abusive treatment of those who were clones.

The story takes place on the planet Cyteen, primarily in the city of Reseune, the home of giant labs that churn out genetically engineered clones. Many of these are “azi” clones, which are people not only designed with a specific genetic makeup but also neurally programmed from birth to have particular personalities and skill sets.

There are factions within factions in Cherryh’s universe, most of which have unmemorable names with similar connotations even though they are opponents (e.g. “Alliance” versus “Union”). Cyteen is a Union planet, so the relevant opposing parties in this book are both sub-factions of the Union faction: Expansionists, who support cloning and colonizing as many habitable worlds as possible, and Centrists, who don’t like either cloning or colonization. The Expansionists hold the majority on the governing council of Cyteen and its colony worlds but the Centrists are a powerful and angry minority.

At the beginning of the book, a brilliant scientist and powerful Expansionist politician, Ariane Emory, repeatedly sexually abuses a younger brilliant scientist, Justin Warrick, who works under her in the Reseune labs. Ariane is then found dead. Justin’s father, Jordan Warrick, a brilliant scientist backed by the Centrists, is accused of Emory’s murder and banished to a remote outpost.

The Expansionists then create a clone of Ariane using her stored DNA, in hopes of recreating someone with her scientific brilliance and leadership abilities to pick up where she left off. Justin, who is actually a clone of Jordan in addition to being his son, is left in Reseune to cope with debilitating flashbacks while watching the young clone of his abuser growing up close by.

Along the way there are endless interest groups that want various things out of Ariane, Justin, and/or Jordan, and which play excruciatingly subtle intergalactic politics with the three of them, their projects, and their funding.

I didn’t like the mealy-mouthed Justin or his insipid azi servant/lover Grant; I didn’t like the cruel Ariane or her goody-goody azi assistant/lover Florian or her impersonal azi guard Catlin; I couldn’t keep any of the governing council members straight; and all the other characters were either uninteresting or sneaky and conniving.

The political maneuverings were incredibly hard to keep track of, partly because the positions of the different sides seemed way too abstract to be really motivational. The Expansionists are supposedly driven by the “fear of loss of momentum” and abstract economic collapse at some point far in the future. The Centrists are supposedly driven by fear of clones, expansion, “peripheralization,” and “diffusion of human cultures.” Those don’t seem like the kind of things you’d bomb your opponents for, much less risk war over. For people to sacrifice their lives, it seems like the cause has to be closer and personal, like the fear of immediate physical danger or deprivation. I couldn’t bring myself to care about any of the abstract scheming and I didn’t see how any of the characters could, either.

And none of it seemed to have any impact on the story in the end, anyway, making reading it feel like a complete waste of time. The main characters spent interminable hours agonizing over the minutiae of politics, and speculating intensely on the meaning of people’s tiniest actions, but very little actually happened. On the rare occasions when something did happen, we often had to hear the event described again and again from multiple participants’ only slightly different points of view.

The most troubling aspect of the book, though, was the role of the azi clones. Azi are designed to be dutiful subordinates such as servants, assistants, or guards. Each azi is programmed from birth to obey their single Supervisor unconditionally, to feel bad when they are displeasing naturally-produced humans, and not to let too much free will or complicated emotion get in the way of their actions. They don’t have the same rights as other people: they can be legally mind-probed, punished or rewarded with drugs and behavior modification programs, and “terminated” with sufficient cause.

Needless to say, this creates some very weird relationships. Azi are expected to behave on the one hand like servants and on the other hand as lovers and emotional supports, even though the relationship is never one of equals. At one point, one of the Expansionists justifies the azi program by explaining that their primary purpose is to ensure genetic diversity as humans expand to new colony planets. But it is hard to see that an azi is anything but a slave (albeit often in a gilded cage).

And the azi are so well programmed that they never seem to bridle at this. In fact, Cherryh has a way of soft-pedaling and almost, it seems, reveling in all the abuse. Not only was this a bit upsetting, but it also made me think that perhaps Cherryh herself was not fully aware of the implications of what she had created.

Book Review: The Left Hand of Darkness

Ursula K. LeGuin
1969
Awards: Nebula, Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

LeGuin creates very human, reachable characters. And her writing is somehow…soft. I don’t mean wimpy-soft; I mean that it carries you along easily on a soft cushion of plot and description. You don’t have to struggle to follow the story. And you certainly don’t have to struggle to figure out what messages she’s trying to send.

Because her novels always do have messages. Most of the time they involve the idea of The Other – how society and/or individuals understand and accept or fear and reject someone who is different from themselves.

I generally appreciate these messages. Sometimes, though, they are just a little too loud. It can be hard to have fun reading when you’re too consciously aware that you’re receiving a MESSAGE.

All of the above, both the good and the bad, were generally true with this book.

There are several minor themes in this novel (the nature of patriotism; the importance of uncertainty) but the main messages are about gender and our assumptions about gender roles. It wasn’t the first piece of science fiction to deal with androgyny but it remains one of the most sensitive and was certainly groundbreaking for its time.

The main character, Genly Ai (a man), is an ambassador for the Ekumen, a peaceful association of 80-plus planets (including Earth) allied for the mutually beneficial exchange of information and trade. Ai is posted to the remote world of Winter (or “Gethen,” to the natives) to try to convince its residents to join the Ekumen.

Gethen is in the middle of an ice age, so it is covered with snow and ice and is always freezing cold.

The Gethenians are all androgynous except for a few days each month when they go into “kemmer.” During kemmer, either male or female hormones temporarily become dominant and the person’s body changes slightly to take the form of that gender. This is the only time the person can mate with somebody else (as long as that other person is also in kemmer and has taken the opposite gender role). Then they revert a few days later back to their normal neutral status. Any person can be male or female in any particular cycle; everybody has the potential to be a mother in one cycle and then a father the next.

This sets up a perfect framework in which to explore issues of difference and acceptance. As an Ekumen scout, sent to the planet undercover long ago, wrote in her report, any ambassador to Gethen “must be warned that unless he is very self-assured, or senile, his pride will suffer. A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. On Winter they will not exist. One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.”

The Gethenians are freaked out by Ai, who they see as a pervert, a person in a permanent state of kemmer. The genderlessness (or, rather, dual gendered-ness) of the Gethenians is also a challenge to Ai. He is uncomfortable thinking of his associates as both men and women – he is always trying to pigeonhole them as one or the other.

Plugging ahead with his job, though, Ai first appeals to the king of Karhide, a poor but basically happy land. The king is threatened by the idea of the Ekumen and exiles Ai and Ai’s main local ally, Prime Minister Estraven. Ai and Estraven then go to a rival country, Orgoreyn, which is richer and more technically advanced than Karhide, but which has work camps and secret police and an atmosphere of fear. Eventually they are exiled from Orgoreyn as well.

The two of them then have to go through a life-threatening mid-winter cross-country trek during which they, naturally, bond and attain a deep understanding of each other despite their differences. A major breakthrough for Ai comes when Estraven goes into kemmer as a female during their ordeal. “And then I saw again,” Ai says, “and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as well as a man. Any need to explain the sources of that fear vanished with the fear; what I was left was, at least, acceptance of him as he was. Until then I had rejected him, refused him his own reality…I had not wanted to give my trust, my friendship, to a man who was a woman, to a woman who was a man.”

In general, I liked the themes and the characters. I also liked the descriptions of the icy scenery and the incredible cold of Gethen:

“Under certain conditions our exhalations freezing instantly made a tiny cracking noise, like distant firecrackers, and a shower of crystals: each breath a snowstorm.”

Ai and Estraven traveled over a glacier “covered with great lumps and chunks of ice,” “slick blue ice hidden by a white glaze,” “broken pressure ridges taking queer shapes, overturned towers, legless giants, catapults.”

It’s just that, as I said, sometimes it felt like the main messages were kind of bald. It’s hard to define where the line is but I know it felt like too much when at one point Ai drew the yin/yang symbol for Estraven, explaining that it represented him - “Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Male, female. It is yourself...Both and one.” I get it already.

I thought that LeGuin’s Dispossessed was a slightly better exploration of the process of growing to understand people who are different from you. Or, anyway, I felt like the main character was a little stronger and that the message was a little more subtle and well integrated with the story.


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.