We Who Are About To…, Joanna Russ

We Who Are About To…, Joanna Russ (1977)
Review by Joachim Boaz

We Who Are About To… is the third of Joanna Russ’ science fiction novels I’ve read over the past few years. For some reason I was unable gather the courage to review The Female Man and might have been too enthusiastic about And Chaos Died. We Who Are About To… is superior to both (although, not as historically important for the genre as The Female Man). This is in part because Russ refines her prose — it is vivid, scathing, and rather minimalist in comparison to her previous compositions — and creates the perfect hellish microcosm for her ruminations on the nature of history, societal expectation, memory, and death.

Highly recommended for fans of feminist + literary science fiction.

The classic situation: multi-dimensional explosion hurls a spaceship en route to a new colony onto a barren planet. Due to the nature of starship travel (folding space) there is zero chance of contacting others. Rescue is never a possibility. The unnamed narrator, a musicologist, leaves an audio diary — her words, recorded in secret almost every day, is the version of events we read.

Russ manipulates this common sci-fi scenario. None of the characters have survival skills. The planet contains no aliens or fascinating vistas. Rather, a human drama unfolds — a twisted, dark vision. Be warned, Russ does not conjure the Star Trek miracle syrup plot device à la ”different characters who initially don’t like each other learn to work together and conquer the problem and conjure a communication device that rescues them from the clutches of certain death”. The reader knows the end result from the first sentence of the first page.

Similarly to D G Compton’s brilliant Farewell, Earth’s Bliss, Russ’ varied cast is adeptly characterized from the very beginning. {The cast} The women: the narrator (a baroque musicologist, an activist past, neo-Christian leanings, a cornucopia of pharmaceuticals), Mrs Valeria Graham (a middle-aged wealthy woman who purchased her husband and daughter, wears an Indian sari), Nathalie (a soldier trainee who despises civilians), Cassie (an ordinary woman, the only one whom the narrator cares for), and Lori (Valeria’s twelve-year-old daughter, hypochondriac, serial music lover, doted upon). The men: Mr Graham (strong, manly, plastic surgery), Alan (attentive, careful, polite, flatterer, in love with Lori), and John Ude (professor of ideas, evasive, The Smile).

The narrator suffers an acute crisis upon crashing on the planet due to the fact that no one will ever find them and that no one will remember them — the pharmaceuticals are close at hand. Added to that, the planet is alien, the planet isn’t Earth: “To die on a dying Earth — I’d live, if only to weep” (p 27). Is there any point in waiting to die? The others discover her drugs and take them away, or at least some of them.

The others delude themselves with visions of colonization, utopian societies, the innocence of primitives: “Day two. It began. I just couldn’t keep my mouth shut. Everyone running around cheerily into the Upper Paleolithic. We’re going to build huts. We’re going to have a Village Fire that Lori Graham will tend because she is the Fire Virgin or something” (p21). Unfortunately, the gene pool of the survivors is too small to create a society. And, no one besides the narrator is too concerned with introducing children into the eventual horrors of life on the planet when the supplies and medications run out and they are forced to eat the potentially toxic plants. The visions of a proper society, a proper duty to propagate, are too ingrained in their minds — the women, viewed by the men as walking wombs, incubating the future… All the women besides the narrator decide to get impregnated — “John Ude was very tender and careful with his walking womb” (p59).

When it’s her turn, she drugs everyone and runs away… And when they wake up from their stupor they come looking for her. Her womb is prized.

“Next day, don’t know what day it is. Probably five. Who cares. If history were not fantasy, then one could ask to be remembered but history is fake and memories die when you do and only God (don’t believe it) remembers. History always rewritten. Nobody will find this anyway and they’ll have flippers so who cares” (p113)

The most powerful moments of the novel focus in on the painful isolation the narrator feels. Not only is she separated from Earth but her very words, recorded so diligently, will be read by no one. If a rescue party had the smallest chance of finding them long after their deaths then they would at the very least be a shred of history, a minute connection to others, but even that is impossible. The other survivors do not want to accept the inevitable and delude themselves with fantasies about creating a society even if it would doom their children to painful deaths. Their fantasies that do not accept the reality of the situation. The narrator wants to control the inevitable. And she takes matters into her own hands…

Russ’ prose tears into the heart of things.

“Cassie, Cassie, come out to play.

Come over for a chat.

I don’t mind if you’re rotting” (p133)

It is poetic and visceral and often, hilarious: ”Then [Lori, 12] added, without the slightest transition, ‘I like serial music. You know, the late twentieth-century stuff where it goes deedle deedle deedle deedle deedle deedle deedle deedle for half an hour and then it goes doodle just once, and you could die with excitement’” (p52). For anyone who listens regularly to minimalist music… Well, I suspect you are laughing.

We Who Are About To… is the best I’ve read this year.

This review originally appeared on Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations.

The Shore of Women, Pamela Sargent

The Shore of Women, Pamela Sargent (1986)
Review by Ian Sales

After a nuclear war and a long nuclear winter, small groups of people managed to survive in underground shelters. And once the Earth was habitable again, they ventured out – but by that point things had changed and the women were in charge. So the women built walled cities in which they could live, and all the men were sent out to fend for themselves in the wild. Thousands of years later, the sexes are completely segregated, the women living in technological luxury in their enclaves, and the men, controlled by their worship of the Lady, existing in small hunter-gatherer bands in the surrounding countryside.

Laissa, a young woman in one of the cities, witnesses the expulsion of a woman and her daughter for murder. They are sent out into the country, where they will likely die very quickly. Laissa is having problems with her own mother, who has delayed giving up her very young son. Male children are usually handed to men, who are called to their nearest city to be blessed by the Lady (and have their semen milked while they are drugged and enjoying VR sex). Laissa begins to question the way the cities are run…

Arvil is Laissa’s brother, though neither know it. He lives with a small band of men not far from Laissa’s city, and seems typical of his gender. One day, men on horses appear at the band’s camp and invite them to join their own camp, which is much, much larger. Shortly after Arvil’s arrival there, the big camp is destroyed by flying ships from the nearby city. Arvil manages to escape…

And subsequently stumbles across Birana, the daughter exiled earlier. Her mother has been killed, but her killers had fled on realising they had murdered an “aspect” of the Lady. Arvil, however, is more intelligent and questioning than most men. Thinking Birana is an aspect of the Lady, and so possesses her powers, he helps her. She even hypnotises him so he can convince the women in the city – who the men “talk” to via circlets in shrines as acts of worship – that she has been killed. Arvil and Birana, safe from pursuit by the women of the city, decide to head to the west, where perhaps a refuge of exiled women may exist. They pass out of the lands controlled by the women of the cities, and find several small agrarian male communities scattered around a large lake. An exiled woman lives, and is worshipped, in one of the settlements, and so Arvil and Birana join her.

But men being men, there is a price to pay for the safety the settlement offers. While Nallei, the exiled woman, keeps Birana safe, it’s a situation that can’t last forever. And when Birana finally overcomes her disgust of sex with a male, and begins a secret affair with Arvil, it comes as no surprise when she finds herself pregnant. Events come to a head, Arvil kills the jealous headman, and women from the nearest city attack and raze the settlement. Birana and Arvil escape and head yet further west…

Where they eventually reach the Pacific Ocean, and find a small band of men and women. But the men are in charge. Birana gives birth to a girl, but she wants more for her child then a patriarchal inbred band of seashore foragers, so she and Arvil head back to the interior intending to hand over the child to one of the cities. This is where Laissa re-enters the story. She has persuaded the city to allow her to camp out in a shrine and record the stories of the men who visit there. Birana and Arvil meet her there, tell their story – which becomes the narrative of The Shore of Women – and give her the baby to raise in the city. Laissa’s actions, however, cannot go unpunished, so on her return she is reduced in status and forbidden to have children. Birana and Arvil disappear off into the countryside.

Most novels featuring feminist utopias seem to set out to demonstrate that women do not need men – cf Sally Miller’s Gearhart’s The Wanderground – but in The Shore of Women men are very much necessary. The women use religion, and their technology, to control the men, but without them they cannot breed. Of course, this does not require actual physical contact – see the earlier mention of VR sex. The problem here is that while the men believe women to be divine, as in the many aspects of the Lady present in the shrines, they are also conditioned to see intercourse with women as something to aspire to, as a reward for worship. In their mean camps they may turn to one other for comfort and release (the novel is surprisingly coy on this aspect), but their society is still chiefly heteronormative, even if the women are not actually present.

It’s different for the women in their cities. They consider men to be little better than animals, and their society is built on relationships between women. Though they may use the male of the species to provide genetic material, it’s all done by machine, and any boy children they bear are sent from the city at a very young age (their memories carefully wiped so they don’t know what they’ve lost). This viewpoint is most forcibly expressed by Council member Eilaan, who seems so fierce an advocate of the city way of life that she reads like a deliberate foil to the more considered voices of Laissa, Birana and Arvil.

According to the story, this set-up has been in place for thousands of years, but there’s no real sense of history attached. Who built the cities? Who invented whatever power it is that keeps the flying ships aloft? When Laissa falls out with her mother, and her girlfriend dumps her because she has become “politically undesirable”, Laissa moves in with Zoreen. Who she normally avoided because Zoreen works as an historian. Zoreen also lives near the normal women of the city (Laissa and her friends are all upper class, “Mothers of the City”, the only women in the city permitted to have children). There’s a hippyish flavour to the lives of the normal women, but other than arts and crafts and food outlets, no real indication that they maintain and operate the various services of the city. It’s as if the enclave magically appeared and the women simply populated it.

The men’s society is no less realistic. Given the life they lead, it’s likely nasty brutish sorts would prosper, eventually leading to that type predominating. Any attempt at organisation, at creating larger settled communities, in which other male personalities might prove useful, are quickly destroyed by the women. And yet, despite all this, the system still manages to produce Arvil – who figures out human reproduction from a couple of remarks made by Birana, who works out how the entire society functions after inadvertently waking up while being milked of semen… Not only is he more intelligent than the other men, he is also sensitive and treats Birana like an equal. It is because of this that Birana eventually falls in love with him and overcomes her anti-male feelings.

Despite all this, The Shore of Women is an engaging story, even if the setting is not especially plausible. But that final swerve into reconciliation between man and woman feels too much like an undoing of the point the story initially seemed to be making. The sexes were segregated for the safety of the women, and human society has subsequently survived for thousands of years – unchanged and slowly stagnating, it is true; but the Earth is safe and the race is in no danger of self-extinction. To pretend all along that the women don’t know what they’re missing because they refuse to interact with the men directly contradicts what the cities demonstrate. Birana may have found true love with Arvil, but he’s hardly an average specimen of his gender – and, further, circumstances forced her to find some accommodation with the males of the species. It’s almost as if the story were suggesting male-female relationships were more fulfilling, carried greater emotional weight. It’s a conclusion that sits badly with all that has gone before. In fact, it feels banal, given the contortions placed upon history, society and human nature the setting requires. Disappointing.

The Pride of Chanur, CJ Cherryh

The Pride of Chanur, CJ Cherryh (1982)
Review by Ian Sales

Cherryh is no longer as popular as she once was. Her books have not been published in the UK for over a decade, and she does not even have a title in the SF Masterworks series – though  Downbelow Station (1981) and Cyteen (1988), both Hugo Award winners, are possible contenders. Reading The Pride of Chanur, which was shortlisted for the Hugo Award in 1983, and which is the first book in a five-book series, a possible reason for Cherryh’s fade from favour suggested itself.

The title of the book is the name of a spaceship, a trader operated by the Chanur family and captained by Pyanfar Chanur. She is hani, as are all the crew. The hani are leonine aliens, one of the four oxygen-breathing and three methane-breathing races which form the Compact. While docked at Meetpoint Station, a strange alien creature sneaks aboard The Pride of Chanur, and though its return is demanded by another alien race, the kif, Pyanfar refuses. The creature is not property but sapient. It also has plainly run away from mistreatment – perhaps even torture – by the kif.

The alien creature is, of course, a human. And it is the potential market suggested by the appearance of humans in Compact space which causes near-war between the hani and the kif. And in the middle of which stands Pyanfar Chanur. So it’s just as well that she manages to resolve it. In her favour, of course.

Like all Cherryh novels, the prose in The Pride of Chanur is brusque and effective. She makes no concessions towards her readers, and her novels are typically light on exposition. But everything the reader needs to know is in there and skillfully revealed. Pyanfar is a strong lead character, well-drawn and engaging. As are her crew. The hani are all female – the males stay at home, indolent and nominally in charge, while the females do all the work and actually run things. The world-building, however, is uncharacteristically sparse. Technologically, the races of the Compact appear to have FTL – some form of jump drive – but no artificial gravity, and communications and sensors are limited by the speed of light. Most of the action in the novel takes place in space stations, which very much resemble the one described in Downbelow Station. It is only in the final third of the story that it moves to the surface of Anuurn, the hani homeworld. And even then, Cherryh does her usual trick of filing the serial numbers off a human culture.

In fact, reading The Pride of Chanur it becomes apparent that everything in the book hovers on the edge of familiarity. The hani are lions, the kif are jackals, the mahendo’sat (another alien race) are apes, the shto… Well, the shto only make a handful of appearances in this first novel in the series so it’s a little difficult to make out their inspiration. Throughout the story, the oxygen-breathing aliens operate more like human cultures than they do real aliens. The mahendo’sat, for example, talk in a sort of pidgin English that would not be acceptable in a twenty-first century novel.

The methane-breathers, on the other hand, are more mysterious than they are alien. There doesn’t appear to be any sort of real communication or relationship between the two groups. Cherryh tells us they trade, and the knnn do prove useful in the final scenes of the book… But then The Pride of Chanur is the first in a series, so it’s possible the methane-breathers will become better integrated into the setting in later books.

All this is not to say that The Pride of Chanur is not a fun read. It’s pacey, has more than its share of thrills, and possesses a likable and sympathetic cast of protagonists. But it is a little hard to understand why it made the Hugo shortlist in 1983 – though, to be fair, the rest of the list that year was mostly poor (for example, Asimov’s Foundation’s Edge actually won the award). Cherryh’s novels are very much products of their time, and while they’re certainly well-crafted, their time has passed. Fans of her work – and I count myself one – will continue to treasure them, but their appeal is six parts nostalgia to four parts admiration.

I never did get around to reading the rest of the Chanur Saga. Having now reread The Pride of Chanur (decades after I last read it), I think I will make an effort to track down copies of the sequels – Chanur’s Venture (1984), The Kif Strike Back (1985), Chanur’s Homecoming (1986) and Chanur’s Legacy (1992). All five novels were also published in two omnibus volumes in 2000 and 2007.

The Zero Stone, Andre Norton

The Zero Stone, Andre Norton (1968)
Review by Redhead

Can someone please tell me why it took me so long to read this book? Nearly every Andre Norton I’ve picked up has been excellent, and The Zero Stone is no different. Skillfully written and wonderfully imaginative, I think this is my favorite Norton so far.

The story gets rolling right away when Murdoc Jern’s patron is assassinated. Raised by a gem dealer with shady connections and then apprenticed out to the legitimate gem merchant Vondar Ustle, Murdoc knows everything there is to know about gems and stones, but he’s woefully naive about everything else. When Ustle is murdered Murdoc finds sanctuary and then takes the first available ship off planet.

All this time, Murdoc has been in possession of a singularly strange ring. Too large for any human finger, the ring holds a weird lusterless stone. It was found on a corpse in space, and it seems to offer guidance to specific people. What does the ring point to? Is this why Ustle was killed? Is Murdoc in danger?

Befriended by the ship’s cat, Murdoc accidentally allows the cat to eat a strange pebble. The pebble impregnates the cat, and a weird little mutant cat is born. The mutant cat, who calls itself Eet, is telepathic, intelligent, and refuses to tell Murdoc anything about its origin. Eet helps Murdoc escape from those who would do him harm, and a partnership is formed between the two. Not quite trusting friends, they do need each other. Eet is stuck in a tiny feline body and needs a strong person to help, and Murdoc could certainly use some help avoiding certain death and learning more about the powers and origin of the ring.

Murdoc isn’t your typical space adventurer (he doesn’t even want to have an adventure!), and Eet most certainly isn’t your typical telepathic cat. The ring guides them to a planet, and at first it is believed this is the home planet of the ring and other powerful stones. At first all Murdoc and Eet find are cannibalistic natives. Eet doesn’t so much offer suggestions of how to survive as made demands of what Murdoc should do to do and when. If Murdoc wants to survive, he better listen to the mysterious little mutant.

Like Murdoc, at first I was a little creeped out by Eet, but I quickly came to care about that bossy little alien freak. The Zero Stone is pure adventure, and fun on every page. If you’re new to Norton, this is an excellent place to start. The story continues in Uncharted Stars, and both can be found in the Omnibus Search for the Star Stones from Baen Books.

The only thing I can complain about with The Zero Stone is that even though the entire thing is perfectly paced, for the first half of the book or so you have no idea where the plot is going. This really isn’t a big deal, as that first half of the book is filled with Murdoc’s fascinating and funny thoughts about what’s going on around him, background information about his family, and of course, the oh-so-alien Eet. So even though I had no idea where the story was headed, I was having so much fun I barely noticed.

Something that surprised me was the complete nonchalance of a lot of the minor characters. When the cat is pregnant with an alien kitten, no one seems to care much. They lock her in sickbay, and don’t seem to mind when she escapes to give birth elsewhere. Things like that, that these days (thanks to decades of sci-fi horror movies) are big deals, back then it was fine to gloss right over them. I found things like that very funny.

I’ve already mentioned it, but if you are new to Andre Norton, The Zero Stone is a perfect place to start. The story will pull you in right away (even if you’re not sure where it’s going) and as soon as you meet Eet, you’ll be asking yourself the same question with which I opened this review.

This review originally appeared on The Little Red Reviewer.

The Kindly Ones, Melissa Scott

The Kindly Ones, Melissa Scott (1987)
Review by Ian Sales

If I had discovered Melissa Scott during my late teens or early twenties, I don’t doubt I would have become a huge fan of her novels. There is something about the world-building in the two Scott novels I have read to date – Shadow Man and this one – which I find very appealing. But I am not a teenager or a young man anymore and my taste in fiction has changed, as have my expectations when I pick up a work of fiction.

This is not to say that Melissa Scott is a bad writer – I’d like to think I was not that undiscriminating a reader back in my twenties. On the contrary, she writes well and what she writes is readily recognisable as science fiction. But in The Kindly Ones, her setting seems to flex and warp at the behest of plot, rather than simply being something which enables it. And for that reason, I finished the novel less enamoured of it than I had been, say 100 pages in…

Orestes and Electra, the cold moons of the gas giant Agamemnon, were settled fifteen hundred years before, and in the centuries following a strict social code has evolved. The inhabitants of both moons are organised into five kinships, each ruled by a genarch, with associated Branch families, and strict rules of conduct. These rules mean that certain crimes or social infractions are punished by complete ostracisation. Those ostracised are deemed “dead” by the kinships and families, are referred to as “ghosts”, must wear a white mark on their forehead, and can only be acknowledged or spoken to by other ghosts, people who work as “mediums”, or those who have chosen to live outside the code, called para’an.

Another element of the code is legal feuding. When one kinship or family declares feud on another – ratified by the Ship’s Council, the ruling committee comprised of the five genarchs – that allows each of the feuding parties fight, inconvenience or aggravate the other in all manner of ways. Feuds are common, generally low-key, and have dominated politics on the two moons for over a millennium.

The narrative of The Kindly Ones is split between several characters. There is Leith Moraghan, captain of the six-weekly mailship; and Trey Maturin, an offworlder employed as chief medium for the Haxel Kinship; Rehur, twin brother of the Haxel demi-heir, an actor and “dead” to the kinship; and Guil ex-Tam’ne, a para’an pilot, originally from Electra. The first half explores the society of Orestes through these viewpoint characters, and it’s a nicely-written and engaging story.

Interestingly, Maturin’s narrative is the only one to use the first person, and no reference to the character’s gender is made. Trey can be read as either male or female – I assumed the medium was a man, even though later “he” has sex with Rehur. Other may read the character as female. I’m not sure it’s possible to say definitively which they are.

All this is just set-up for the actual plot. The Haxel and their mortal enemies, Brandr Kinship, have only recently resolved a feud. But an accident at a hoobey race (hoobeys are huge winter beasts, used to pull sledges) and its consequences provokes Brandr to declare feud once again. This time, however, the Brandr – in a move which seems to completely ignore the code as so carefully outlined previously – go for all-out war. They also start harassing the surviving Haxel ghosts – some of their soldiers actually torturing Rehur for information.

Up until that point, I thought The Kindly Ones very good. This was an interesting world Scott had created. The novel may have opened with an info-dump straight from a galactic encyclopedia, and some of the details of her world were a little dodgy – eg, mailship, mail carried electronically, so what need for longshoremen? And the technology too smacked of 1980s futurism, with storage devices known as “tapes”, weapons called “blasters”, and so on. But in terms of world and society, Scott had created something very interesting indeed. For instance, when Maturin witnesses a play starring Rehur, Scott makes it sound fascinating and manages to evoke the history of the artform.

And then the Brandr attack…

To make matters worse, Scott’s careful prose doesn’t appear well-suited to the military science fiction which comprises the second half of the novel. After the surviving principals have fled to Electra, they cobble together a fleet and army for a decisive strike against the Brandr. The trip back to Orestes, through one of the most dangerous sections of the ring about Agamemnon, is woefully short of drama. Scott writes too much, when she should be focused on the action. It makes for a dull couple of chapters.

The Kindly Ones is a book of two halves. The first half is good. Sadly, the same cannot be said for the second. It not only doesn’t seem to fit with the first, but the tone and style is also ill-suited to the story it tells. The Kindly Ones is by no means a bad book, but it could have been so much better. I still plan to seek out more books by Scott to read, and I suspect I will enjoy them – mostly – as much as I did this one.

China Mountain Zhang, Maureen F McHugh

China Mountain Zhang, Maureen F McHugh (1992)
Review by Nic Clarke

“It’s a lie,” I say, “and you always told me that a lie always creates complications.” But my face is a lie as well, and she condoned that. I am sure she hears the accusation, but we never talk about my mother’s contradictions.

She does not touch me, although for a moment I think she is going to cover my hand with hers and I am afraid.

“It is not the revolution that is at fault,” she says, “it is the people who are implementing it.”

I don’t believe in socialism but I don’t believe in capitalism either. We are small, governments are large, we survive in the cracks. Cold comfort.

In a different sort of a novel, a son shying away from the prospect of his mother’s touch might signal some deep dark secret on which the plot will pivot. In Maureen F McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang, however, this is a simply one of many little moments helping to build up a sense of a character and a (science fictional) world. It is a story – or a collection of interconnected stories – about the distances between people, whether those distances are geographical, cultural, or emotional. Whether they are on the teeming streets of Manhattan or in the dorms of Nanjing University, a remote research facility in the Arctic wastes or a tiny farm cowering under a dome in the Martian desert, McHugh’s characters have an intimate familiarity with what it is like to feel alone, adrift, and sick for the comfort of a largely imaginary home.

McHugh’s future is Chinese: the People’s Republic has become the world’s centre of economic and cultural gravity, and socialism its baseline set of political assumptions. (Even the US has experienced, belatedly, a workers’ revolution, although not quickly enough to prevent its slide into the international second tier.) For the most part, though, this is a novel about the people and places on the margins of the new hegemon; the shiny heartland provides the setting for one section, but otherwise China remains a distant but inescapable influence on most of the characters, rather than something they interact with directly. In the way of all bastions of cultural imperialism, China inspires a mingled emulation and resentment among those who live in its shadow.

The weight of this backdrop is felt most clearly in the novel’s central character, a young man rejoicing in the name China Mountain Zhang. (In an excess of enthusiasm, his mother named him Zhong Shan, one possible translation of which is ‘China Mountain’, after a famous revolutionary; “To be named Zhang Zhong Shan”, he notes ruefully at one point, “is like being named George Washington Jones”.) As ABC – American-born Chinese – Zhang finds certain doors open for him that are inaccessible or simply invisible to others, even when he is working construction at home in the US:

The foreman is all right, for someone born inside. He speaks English as if he learned it in school in Shanghai, which he did, but at least he speaks it unaugmented. He likes me; I work hard and I speak Mandarin better than most ABC. I am almost like a real Chinese person. My manners are good. An example of how breeding will out, even in a second rate country like this. He can talk to me, and there are probably very few people Foreman Qian sees each day who he can talk to. “You here what for?” he asks me. “You smart. You go Shanghai?” Everyone inside thinks that all the rest of us are dying to go to China.

His face, literally, fits; he is in fact of mixed (Chinese-Hispanic) heritage, but his parents pooled their meagre resources to get his genetic make-up tweaked in such a way as to make him appear fully Chinese, in order to give him the best possible start in life. But Zhang, in truth, doesn’t know quite what he wants to do with his life, and he mostly feels alarmed at the prospect of having to do something so purposeful as make a decision; he is a procrastinator by nature, a dreamer and a vacillator who prefers to amble into situations rather than making active choices. The same goes for his social life; although he comments at one point that he wishes he were “brave enough to do something truly rude”, his instinct is always to take the path of least resistance rather than tell the truth:

Having politely declined three times I can now say yes, I would be pleased to have some tea. It is always easier to let people give you something than to convince them that you are not being polite, that you really just don’t want it.

This aspect of him is most clearly on display in his interactions with Qian San-xiang, the foreman’s spinster daughter, whom the foreman very clearly hopes will prove an eligible match for an ambitious young ABC like he imagines Zhang to be. San-xiang is, in Zhang’s eyes, “astonishingly ugly. More than ugly, there is something wrong with the bones of her face”. Zhang, moreover, is gay. But through a toxic combination of inertia, politeness, and pity (“The world is unnaturally cruel to ugly girls”, he muses at one point), he plays along with his boss’ unspoken scheme. Even knowing that he is not in the least attracted to her and never will be, he asks San-xiang out on a date:

San-xiang finishes getting ready. She finally appears in tights and a long red jacket. She has nice taste in clothes but the night already has the same out-of-synch quality as all those times in Middle School when I took a girl out. At least now I am not hoping that something will arouse some sort of latent heterosexuality.

What ensues is both hideously awkward and compassionately sketched. The pair’s stilted conversation – and especially her shy, slightly tipsy blushes – is offset, or perhaps highlighted, by the soaring, pulse-racing atmosphere of the future!sport they spend their date as spectators of. Kite-racing is basically a sort of high-speed hand-gliding, in which humans strapped into flimsy, turbo-powered wing-frames dash through the skies above the city, vying to out-pace – and, if necessary, out-crash – each other to the finish line.

Just as spectators can plug themselves into a live feed of the kites’-eye-view of the race, the narrative switches briefly to the perspective of one of the racers, veteran flyer Angel, through whom we share the anticipation, the adrenalised transcendence (“I don’t even have a body anymore. My body is the kite. I feel the air on my silk, I balance on the air”), the thrill of speed and danger, and the brutal come-down at the end of the race (“I feel heavy, dirt solid”). “I always forget”, says Angel, “that half of the people who watch us fly are waiting to see us die.” It makes for an arresting change of pace, the first signal that McHugh’s tale will be a multi-layered and polyphonic one.

Despite the fact that, at this stage, she is seen entirely from Zhang’s perspective, San-xiang never becomes an object of ridicule nor entirely a powerless victim to be pitied. After the date night, San-xiang increasingly makes moves – albeit not always successfully – to take control of her life, becoming more politically engaged and leaving home while Zhang continues simply to drift. Still, San-xiang’s story, while not an unalloyed tragedy, is arguably the saddest of the novel. When she at last gives into the demands of fashion and social convention, and has the plastic surgery her parents long wished they could afford for her, at first she sees only new possibilities (“I can feel my new life opening, like one of those paper pills you put in water that open out into flowers”). But her newfound beauty proves every bit as debilitating as her earlier ugliness, attracting unwanted, repulsively entitled male attention – to which she has no experience to help her respond, no vocabulary to communicate her true feelings:

No one has ever touched me that way. It’s a little scary, but Bobby does it so it must be very normal. How would I know, I haven’t had many dates, and Zhang never touched me except to kiss me good night.

We sit down and he says, “I feel like I know you.”

I don’t know what to say so I don’t say anything.

“You know what I mean, don’t you, don’t you feel as if we know each other?”

“Yes,” I say, because it’s what he wants me to say.

“I’ll bet you drink Chrysanthemums,” he says.

“I do,” I say, even though I don’t and I feel a little uncomfortable.

He orders drinks. He is so handsome, and I feel so pretty, people must look at us and envy us.

For the reader, it is easy to see where this is leading, and all the more heartbreaking as a result. There is perhaps an argument to made that it falls into certain storytelling cliches of female vulnerability and passivity (especially given the racial dynamic at work); yet on reading it I came away feeling that there’s no doubt here that this is a part of San-xiang’s story, not simply a cheap use of sexual assault to set a mood or motivate a hero. What is upsetting is not that she is left with some stain on her purity, but the violence done – and it is the violence and frustrated panic that is emphasised, not titillation – to San-xiang’s hard-won agency and still tentative sense of selfhood. We never meet Bobby again, but San-xiang stays with us.

Zhang’s drifting takes him to a six month posting on a research station in Siberia, another change of pace and perspective if ever there was one. “Six months for you to brood yourself into catatonia”, remarks his ex-boyfriend, and at first it proves; but Zhang survives the long night of the Arctic winter – discovers, indeed, what he can survive, and who he is with little else to distract him from himself but the sound of the wind – and finds a certain peace:

I am watching the horizon. Dawn seems so close, so possible. The sky is the pearlescent white of dawn, shading to pink, lavender, indigo, and then somewhere above, to black. The ice is the color of the sky.

And then, four days early, I see the edge of the sun, blinding, above the horizon. [...] It’s morning. I smile and smile. [...] We sit in silence and watch the sun rise and then dip. In minutes it is over.

I expect to feel the weight of the night again, but no, the sunrise is enough. I can wait. I can study, I can pass the exam. And the second night is not so bad, never as bad as the first.

I have survived. And I think, finally, I am adapting.

When, at length, he makes the leap and goes to study engineering at Nanjing, it is as an altogether more centred and confident individual. This is not to say he breezes through life, of course. In China he experiences a different sort of isolation, that of the colonised thrust abruptly into the metropole. “I’m so tired of being a colony of one”, he says; he finds himself floundering to retain a sense of identity in the middle of a world so alien to his prior experience, and in which he is so manifestly marginalised, and irrelevant:

Everything is different. In New York I ride a subway system built sometime in the 1900′s, here buses segment and flow off in different directions. There’s a city above the city, a lace work super-structure that supports thousands of four tower living units and work complexes like the University complex we live in; what they call the xin gongshe, new communes. And there’s the constant assault of Chinese, I get hungry for someone to speak English with. The food. I ate Chinese and Thai food at home, but not all the time. And there’s food here I’ve never seen or heard of, from Australia and South America and Africa, at outrageous prices. Everyone here seems rich.

I laugh. “At home, I knew what was going on, and if I had something to talk about, I called somebody and talked to them. Here,” it is my turn to shrug, “I am not quite sure what will happen, what things mean, and I don’t have anyone to talk to about it.”

Being a gay man, here, is both threat and comfort; homosexuality is outlawed and thus a precarious endeavour, but it also offers a private rebellion, a secret set of signals, a way of relating to others and of “pretending I’m not alone”:

It seems to me that Haitao and I are dancing, watching each other’s faces a little longer, responding by looking away or swift nervous smiles. But this is China, maybe I’m crossing cultural signals. I’m lonely and I want this young man, this polished tidal wave, to be like me. To like me.

The novel’s other major character is Martine, a blunt, practical middle-aged farmer and beekeeper, who lives on the outskirts of Jerusalem Ridge, a socialist colony on Mars. Whereas Zhang’s story is about trying to connect with other people to overcome loneliness – and the various ways in which his personality, his situation and/or the wider culture around him undermines his efforts (inertia, gendered and racialised power hierarchies, institutionalised homophobia, etc.) – Martine’s is, or appears to be, quite the opposite. Martine is content in her solitude; indeed, she is active in preserving it, deliberately setting up home some distance away from everyone else and holding herself carefully clear of communal politics.

One evening, she offers hospitality to a pair of strangers passing through, a man named Alexi and his young daughter Theresa. She does this not quite reluctantly, but certainly with the sense that she is looking forward to having her home “given back to me” again once they’re gone, and the simple fact of a few hours’ conversation disturbs her equilibrium:

We go back out to the front room and have two more beers. I tell him a little about Jerusalem Ridge, find myself unexpectedly talking about what it was like when I first came here and so many people had been relocated that we had a severe labor shortage. He asks intelligent questions. He has been promised his own plot in three years, but I warn him that the way things get done around here it could be five.

He’s thirty-four. I’m forty-two. Theresa is six-and-a-half.

We go to bed early. I lie awake, over-stimulated I suppose. I can’t hear anything, but I feel as if I can hear them breathing. The house seems full. After awhile the breathing turns into the ocean, and at four-thirty the bed wakes me and I have been dreaming of the Pacific. In my dream, the sky was full of crows.

Martine’s point-of-view narration is simple and direct, in contrast to Zhang’s more thoughtful, figurative, pie-in-the-sky style and San-xiang’s tentative, heavily conflicted voice, which combines her intense focus on physical sensation and the here-and-now with the filters of hesitation and uncertainty imposed upon her by years of interacting with the world from behind a barrier of socially-unacceptable unattractiveness. Martine is given to statement more than she is to speculation or empathy or analogy; she describes the visible signs of others’ motives and emotions without giving much sense that she is engaged by or shares them. For example, she and Alexi discuss the fact that the Commune is likely to re-assign him to a work detail in an even more remote and dangerous region than Jerusalem Ridge – a water reclamation project at the pole – because, as he puts it, he has “no guanxi, no connection”. Martine is taken aback, but still cannot quite feel Theresa’s evident distress:

“They won’t send you, they couldn’t send a man with a six year old daughter,” I say, thinking that the commune couldn’t possibly. [...]

I hear the sniff and look around. Theresa is standing there holding on to Cleopatra. Cleopatra looks at us with golden eyes expressionless as agates. Theresa rubs her nose with her arm and rubs her eye with her fist, crying and trying to be quiet and trapped between backing away and coming towards us. Did she hear? Or did she just fall or something?

“Baby?” Alexi says, “what’s wrong?”

“Are we going to move again?”

“Oh, baby,” Alexi says helplessly.

And yet the pair work their way under her skin, even so. It isn’t a conventional love story, or in many ways even a love story at all, but what unfolds between Martine and Alexi over the course of the novel is a wonderfully drawn, very human tale of compromise and companionship. Martine has carved out a space for herself with her own two hands; she has built herself a life she is happy with, filled with tangible achievements she can be proud of and a routine she enjoys.

But out of a combination of entirely unromantic pragmatism and a half-recognised desire for just a little something more (“I think about Alexi too much, I have middle-aged fancies. He’s young and attractive and friendly and yes, I’m lonely and goats aren’t enough”), she finds herself reaching out to Alexi. She can offer him a way out of the work detail: she will marry him, making him a landholder who will therefore not have to move. “It wouldn’t be a real marriage, of course”, she adds, outlining the details of how there are enough rooms for them to sleep separately, and we suspect – and so does she – that she protests just a little too much. At first Alexi is reluctant to intrude on her “so, so self-sufficient” space; he admires her, he says, and he wants her respect rather than her charity. She points out that it wouldn’t be charity – she’ll be expecting him to get up at 4am most days, just like she does – and I am quite charmed by the whole idea, and the no-nonsense-but-a-hint-of-longing in the way it is presented.

In the final analysis, things are easier with more than one pair of hands. Like Zhang, a gay man in a homophobic society governed by a high-surveillance state, Martine’s existence is inescapably a precarious one in a hostile environment (albeit, in her case, a largely indifferent one rather than one than is actively persecuting her and/or people like her). McHugh does an excellent job of conveying, on the rare but striking occasions when Martine has to step outside her dome to perform maintenance – and when the systems keeping her farm alive begin to break down more seriously – just how tiny and vulnerable humans are on the surface of Mars:

The little airlock has a pump that labors mightily to pull out some of the air mixture. It doesn’t create much vacuum, but it’s always a shame to waste mixture. Then the outer atmosphere vents in and I crank the outer door open, straighten up and brace against the wind. My face mask polarizes. I can’t remember what season we’re in. I squint at the sky, almost black through my darkened facemask [...] There’s the crest of the ridge behind me, sunlight glinting off the curve of our skylights. The rest of the settlement is in the less side. In front of me the land is full of dark chunks of rock in rusted soil.

I always thought of Mars as a desert and somehow expected it to look like home. Other than being dry, it doesn’t. The soil color is wrong, for one thing, for another, the only erosion on Mars is wind erosion. For another, there are more rocks. I guess most of our soil comes from water and the action of plants and insects on rock. Pictures of some of the areas down at the pole show stuff that looks more like the baked ground of home, but a great deal of it is huge, cracked areas, like baked mud. Except the plates of cracked soil are meters across, and the cracks are bigger. Step into bigger. Martian landscapes are exaggerated, simplified.

So. Are they all crushed by the bigger, impersonal systems around them? Are Zhang, San-xiang, Martine, Alexi, Angel and the rest just victims of circumstance, or do they make their own way, within the parameters available to them, as actors in their own stories? The novel is often bleak and unforgiving, there’s no doubt; none of the characters have anything that could be described as happy-ever-afters. Yet I’m inclined to think the latter: neither their joys and nor their pains are conclusions, or definitive statements on who they are and what they can be. Rather, they are episodes in these people’s lives, to be overcome or reshaped by, and ultimately moved past. One way or another, they rise to their challenges.

I also smiled with some recognition at Zhang’s presentation on how history works, late on in the novel, to a class full of students:

“[History] is not random, but it is non-linear. Marx’s predictions were based on the assumption that history is a linear system, and using those assumptions he predicted the future. But if weather is a complex system, it seems reasonable to assume that history is also a complex system. History is sensitive dependent on initial conditions. You cannot predict the future.”

This review originally appeared on Eve’s Alexandria.

The Wall Around Eden, Joan Sloncewski

The Wall Around Eden, Joan Slonczewski (1989)
Review by Ian Sales

Nuclear war has destroyed the Earth, except for several communities around the globe, which found themselves protected by alien force-fields. One such community is the small US town of Gwynwood. Unfortunately, things aren’t going so well now. Outside the force-field, everything is dead as far as the eye can see, the ozone layer has been completely destroyed, and there is little or no hope of rescue. Inside the force-field, the water-table has been contaminated by radiation, the number of children born with disabilities is increasing, and deaths outnumber births. This is the despite the assistance being rendered to Gwynwood by the city of Sydney in Australia.

At the centre of the dome over Gwynwood is the Pylon, an alien construction itself protected by a force-field. The Pylon allows the inhabitants of Gwynwood and Sydney to send supplies to each other. The Pylon is also the source of “angelbees”, which are spherical alien surveillance devices, albeit not especially smart ones. Some people think the mysterious aliens who planted the Pylon and created the force-field were responsible for the destruction of the Earth; others suspect they may be working to repair its damage.

Isabel is a teenager in Gwynwood. Her mother is the town’s only doctor, and Isabel usually assists her. But Isabel is also fascinated by the Pylon, and wants to understand what it is, what it does and what it’s for. When she accidentally discovers a means of penetrating the force-field surrounding it, she learns something about the aliens who built it.

Gwynwood, of course, is no Eden, though it is a protected garden. Through the Pylon, Isabel finds a place much closer to the description of the biblical garden, and while trapped there she learns how to communicate with the aliens and makes a number of – later proven – accurate guesses at their nature.

Despite all this, The Wall Around Eden is neither a first contact novel, nor puzzle-type sf. It is chiefly about Gwynwood and the people in it, and how they react to their situation.  For one thing, the community is religious – but it is a mixture of religions, with Quakerism predominating. They have a Meeting House – not a church – where they worship and hold town councils. Gwynwood is a rural agrarian community whose members can remember the industrialised society prior to the destruction of the Earth outside the dome. And while they rue their loss, they are determined to build something sustainable and fair with what they have.

It is Isabel who carries the story of The Wall Around Eden. Unfortunately, because she is a teenager, with a teenager’s preoccupations, it makes the book read somewhat like YA. A superior YA, it must be said; and certainly one that deserves to be republished as such in today’s buoyant YA market. The Wall Around Eden is an intelligent novel, and remarkably optimistic given its set-up. Isabel is an engaging protagonist, her best friend Peace Hope is equally engaging, and the community of Gwynwood feels like a real living small community. The later appearance of a group of Australian rebels loose in the Pylons can do little to dispel the general good-feeling the novel inspires.

Perhaps that’s another reason why The Wall Around Eden seems like a YA novel – the fact that it is a happy book. It does not describe a happy situation – the Earth has been pretty much destroyed by nuclear war, for one thing – and its cast have no good reason to be especially cheerful… but there is a strong current of hope throughout the narrative, and that gives the story a notable sense of good feeling. It is a story that works through the character of its cast, through the ingenuity of its protagonists, and through their exploration of their situation.

The Wall Around Eden also feels partly like a masterclass in writing a science fiction novel. Here is the opening situation, here are the core characters… now tell a story using them. Here are a list of topics you must incorporate in your narrative. Yet the end result is far from cookie-cutter science fiction, or a novel written by the numbers. I would happily give copies of The Wall Around Eden to people who would like to understand what science fiction is. I would happily give copies of The Wall Around Eden to teenagers who would like to try a book that isn’t about special snowflakes or post-apocalyptic warlordism or middle-class wizardry at secret boarding schools.

It’s certainly past time someone brought out a new edition of The Wall Around Eden. There is a new audience waiting for it.

A Sweet, Sweet Summer, Jane Gaskell

A Sweet, Sweet Summer, Jane Gaskell (1969)
Review by Nic Clarke

Till she came we were all just one big happy family. The summer laid itself like a lover’s sweat over the rooms where we laid on our beds, Szzummer, Szzzummer, went the bright busy bluebottles in our rooms, Connor rooting Sweetness on her old pungent mattress, me in my nice tidy room relaxing with my collection of knives and sea-shells.

Then she had to come.

I first heard about Jane Gaskell’s Somerset Maugham Award-winning A Sweet, Sweet Summer at the Cheltenham Literary Festival in 2010. China Miéville was a Guest Director that year, and at one of his panels, in a response to a question (okay, my question) about great science fiction written by women, he singled out Gaskell’s novel for praise. Having never heard of Gaskell before, and with the SF Mistressworks project in mind, I resolved to track a copy down.

I’m very glad I did. It’s an odd, spiky, clever little book about people ill-at-ease in their own skin and inclined to take out their insecurities on those around them – one well represented by its cover, which features a sneering young woman brandishing a broken bottle. It took me a little while to settle into the voice, largely because of the narrator – the aptly-named Rat – who in many ways resembles the Dunning-Kruger Effect in human form. He is smarter than he self-presents to the world, but not nearly as smart as he privately believes himself to be. Reading the novel is often, necessarily, an exercise in reading between his savage and sometimes stupid – and sometimes arch – lines. What at first seems like clumsy writing in places gradually resolves into a vector of characterisation, and other sides to the story emerge from under his view of things.

He offers us a crabbed, stunted sort of narration, deliberately (as he eventually confesses, in a brief moment of introspection) constraining his language choices and his range of emotional notes: he writes run-on sentences with minimal punctuation, messes up his prepositions, verbs nouns and adjectives, uses ungrammatical phrasings like “could of” and “should of”, and above all tries to avoid nuance and thoughtfulness at all costs:

Now I shall tell the real reason I hate Frijja. I haven’t put this in this book before. I don’t know really why I am writing this book. It disturbs me to write it. It is a sort of scratching of itches I thought I had deadened and made to rot away through neglect a right time ago.

She started me off on it. She has me picking through the old old feelings again and I am starting up that kind of perceptiveness I thought I had threw out along with the other old rubbish.

I see things with my ribs as well as my brain now. I mean, I can feel a quiver in my bowel when I see a patch of blue petrol spilt on a wet road. [...] And then along comes the right word, a nasty senseless habit that should have gone out with the garbage, along with all the things that clutter and soggy your life, and sugar and sticky and freshen it up, and make you waste time and nervous energy and make a fool of yourself over things that don’t farther any ends, only pull us backwards in the race. You find yourself thinking That was not the blue of denim, like a summer sky is, nor the blue of an Admiral’s eyes like a summer sea, it was the blue of mouldy gorgonzola.

Rat is anxious to avoid this sort of thing because he sees it as a signal of weakness, something that potentially undermines his masculinity. He has carefully developed a blustering, bullying and bully-appeasing persona, both as a survival mechanism and because he thrives on it. He runs a boarding house/(very tiny) brothel in the seedy, precarious underbelly of a future Britain that is half-cowering, half-bemused by an alien occupation that is barely-understood, and frankly rather Dadaist (at one point the aliens conduct a public execution of Ringo Starr to cast the populace into despair):

Meanwhile, the huge A craft just hung there casting 1000 foot of shadow across each of the big cities, over the Woolworthses and Dolcises and babies out in their prams for an airing. People rush under them when the rain starts so municipal authorities have erected seats and slot-machine arcades under them and charge you for using them.

This backdrop is cursory, but it is so because Rat’s notion of what is going on consists of anecdotes like this, plus a few shaky theories that mostly pivot around his conviction that certain groups of people (“turban-wearers”, for example) are doing suspiciously well out of the New Alien Order. He is inordinately proud of said theories, which he expounds at length to (female) audiences that he can count on to be impressed. (“Sweetness gazed at me in awe, as I hoped Frijja noticed. I use syntax when I discuss things. I can discuss like a public-bar pro.”)

Rat is, indeed, a performer, and one who performs in strikingly different ways depending on whether he is with men or with women; in mixed company, he plays primarily to the men, manifestly seeing them as higher status. Around women – like the two workers at his makeshift ‘brothel’, more dependent residents whose bodies are offered up as protection money to the local gang of thugs, than prostitutes per se – he flits back and forth, between being ostentatiously solicitous and lashing out to reassure himself that there are at least some people below him in the social hierarchy. When his favourite girl, Sweetness – the infantilised name is a give-away, I think – witnesses his humiliation at the hands of the gang, and attempts to console him, he promptly gives her a dressing down (accusing her of being a drain on his resources, and so on) to exorcise his own feelings of inadequacy. Bludgeoning her, verbally, with the fact of his power over her physically calms him: “I felt better”, he tells us, “when I noted her cringe. I stopped my shaking.”

Later, we get a more direct statement of this dynamic:

If she’s hurt, though I hate her, I’ll go and mother her. I like helping hurt things, the more hurt the better. It’s worth hurting them yourself just to enjoy soothing them after, in fact that’s best of all, because they’re so trembly and distrustful and heart-wounded, and they take a long time to understand you’re really going to cuddle them and make them feel better again now at last.

At which point, he concludes, you destroy that new trust by hurting them again.

Where Rat comes unstuck is with his cousin, Frijja, the woman referred to in such ominous tones in the passage quoted at the head of this post. Frijja is a punk avant la lettre, forthright and uncompromising and aggressive; she’s a striking creation who dominates the novel, despite all Rat’s efforts to cast her in the worst possible light. She upends Rat’s sense of the world because she – much like Rat himself – does not fit into the neat gender binary he imagines. Whereas Sweetness “is all delicious, brown and rosy and smelling of her correct function” (he means, of course, sex), Frijja has short cropped hair, “such cold eyes” and “cheekbones sticking out like a haunted cat’s”. I love that last, vivid phrase: Rat can’t resist the power of his imagination all the time, and here I can’t help but feel that his sense of anxiety and inferiority around his cousin is coming through subconsciously – even a haunted cat could take down a rat, presumably.

Above all, Frijja is gender-ambiguous, something that – coupled with her aggression (also an attribute ‘wrong’ for her gender) and her capability, all of which earns her Rat’s hatred – enables her to face down an attempt by the local thugs to take over the boarding house brothel:

I realised they reckoned she was a boy. She is so slight, like a wisp after the slow time in hospital being patched together, and there’s nothing female about her crop, with the scars still plain under it where her skull was chopped. Her face is not exactly boyish, but it’s not a girl’s face just yet either, all eyes and bones and pallor, and she looks like she’s a sickly kid its mother never expected to live, except for the capable tough matter-of-fact efficient-knuckled thin hands on the ‘gun’.

Said ‘gun’, incidentally – an improvised projectile weapon – gives Gaskell the chance to indulge in some strikingly phallic imagery for Frijja’s one-woman defence:

And there, on the landing below, was Frijja my cousin in her shirt and jeans, her cropped hair fluffing with electricity as she handled the bazooka or whatever you could call it on its small stand, the used magazine jerking out in a gorgeous solid stream of security at her knees.

Rat, meanwhile, gets the feminine-gendered actions and language in the confrontation. Although he puts himself between Sweetness and the invading gang, he does so from the upper floor, making sure he stays well clear of the stairwell where he might be visible. There is perhaps even an element of self-awareness in the way he describes his one contribution to the proceedings: “‘Put those guns away, they might go off,’ I scolded intrepidly, still master of my household.” The gender-clashing juxtaposition of ‘scold’ (something women are assumed to do, not men) and ‘master’, the peevish, pleading tone of his half-arsed attempt to stop the fight, and above all the wonderfully absurdist ‘intrepidly’ gives a strong flavour of irony, although whether this is supposed to be a conscious choice on Rat’s part, or Gaskell’s way of undermining him, is a matter of interpretation.

Around men, Rat is cringingly deferential. Of the group of thugs who spend much of their time at his sort-of brothel – and do, at length, stage a successful invasion – he reflects, “I started off keeping in with them once long ago”. Although they treat him with contempt and abuse, he hovers around them obsessively, entreating them to stay even while he is privately wishing they would leave, and egging them on whenever they select a weaker target than him for bullying. But his fixation on the ringleader, Connor, goes beyond simply self-preservatory appeasement: “I am excited by the idea of Connor,” he tells us, “the brute and unpredictable unmarked clay, difficult and dangerous to touch.” He fantasises that he is useful to Connor – “his right-hand man I am, his point-maker, a loyal creature” – and someone who, being smarter, can give voice to things Connor does not properly understand about himself and his intentions. He imagines that he can use Connor, subtly using him to take down people he cannot reach or threaten on his own.

It goes further than even this, however. Although Rat explicitly insists that he is “not queer for Connor”, he admits that it is Connor he’s thinking about as he writes (“Who am I writing this book for? Connor will never read it”), and he finds Connor’s violent dominance both terrifying and a turn-on. The same behaviour that he deplores in Frijja, because it places her outside the category of ‘woman’ (or rather “girl”, with the obvious subordinate power dynamic that entails), is something he watches with open-mouthed fascination when Connor does it. After one incident, he notes, half-defensive, half-matter-of-fact:

I had to rush away and masturbate after, but do you know it wasn’t that I enjoyed it. My nerves was so terribly jangled by it, I wasn’t right for days after.

In particular – and what makes me think Gaskell has not simply portrayed a stereotypically bitter, unloved gay character, but rather a young man deeply fucked up by confusion over his gendered place in the world – Rat enjoys watching Connor dominate women. His apparent jealousy of Connor’s (unwelcomed) attraction to Frijja (“I don’t want her to get him, that’s all. Why not? Because she don’t want him. Because she don’t deserve him. She don’t understand him”) may indicate he’s in deep self-denial about the queerness of his feelings for Connor, but I think it’s also about gender performance. Rat longs for the absolute, unquestioned masculinity he believes he sees in Connor whenever Connor interacts with – that is, threatens and degrades – women.

Connor is, let’s say, not the healthiest of role models – his habits include wanking over unsuspecting women sitting in front of him in cinemas – but the thought of Frijja influencing him with her entirely unsubmissive femininity fills Rat with horror. “‘You must save him from my cousin, Sweetness. She’s dangerous’”, he says, after Connor’s gang have physically manhandled Frijja into Connor’s room, Connor has repeatedly overridden Frijja’s clearly-expressed boundaries and wishes, and the door has been shut on the two of them with Connor wrenching her away from the window and threatening to handcuff her to the bed (altogether, a very well staged and deeply disturbing sequence). It’s not completely clear whether Connor rapes Frijja: he flatly denies it, ridiculing Frijja’s account of events to the extent that Frijja herself comes to doubt her own recollection, although this closely resembles a classic tactic of abuse and so cannot, I think, be taken at face value. Rat, for his part, is surprised by the denial, and his description of his reaction is revealing: “I don’t know am I disappointed. Or more magnetised than before.” He was excited by the idea that Connor might have raped Frijja, because he longs for Frijja to be reminded of her proper place; she is

not like a proper girl who is fit for one thing and glad of it, her scorn of that function (and of me and you who she was made for and she won’t admit it and looks at you and me her masters with coldness)

Above all, he is worried that she outshines and emasculates both him and Connor, turning their own desire into a weapon against them and demonstrating at every step that power is not something inherent in men, accruing to them simply by virtue of their maleness: power is also something that can be seized, and can be lost. At any sign that Frijja might be defeated, Rat exults: “Now she would be ordinary. She would no longer be a trap of steel and diamonds. She would lose her height and her glitter, and be much less than ordinary.” He is an unbearable little shit, and also a fascinating, complex, pitiable figure; overall, this is an impressive piece of work.

This review originally appeared on Eve’s Alexandria.

Lamarchos, Jo Clayton

Lamarchos, Jo Clayton (1978)
Review by Ian Sales

It’s not easy being a special snowflake heroine in a space opera. Though such characters are usually gifted with great beauty, special powers, the fastest spaceship in twelve sectors, and so on, it’s also a life filed with rape, sexual slavery, rape, slavery and rape. Take Aleytys, the heroine of Clayton’s Diadem series of nine novels. Born on a backwater planet of an offworld mother and maltreated as a result, she eventually escaped with the help of interstellar master thief Miks Stavver. And with him, she now seeks her mother and her mother’s homeworld. Not only is Aleytys very beautiful, and a loving mother to her baby son, Sharl, but she is also Vryhh. This means she will live longer than other humanoids, is stronger and faster, has a better memory, and a natural affinity with machines. She also possesses the diadem, which gives her mental powers.

Despite all this, she spends some of the time in Lamarchos, as she did in the first book of the series, Diadem from the Stars, in sexual slavery. She is on the eponymous world to assist Stavver in stealing a bunch of poaku stones from the Karkiskya, at the behest of psychopathic mercenary Maissa and a returned native called Kale. The Karkiskya are interstellar traders, who have many worlds, Lamarchos among them, tied up in a monopoly. They trade the prized poaku stones for knives, which the Lamarchans use as a sign of manhood.

Aleytys is assisted in the mission by Lamarchos’ resident gods, the Lakoe-heai, who make her a gikena, a type of wandering healer witch-woman. Disguised as such, with Stavver, Maissa and Kale as her travelling companions, she makes her way to Karkys, where the Karkiskya live. En route, she heals a young native man, learns he was unjustly outcast from his tribe, takes him home, and as gikena proves his innocence. But he must serve her for an unspecified period as payment, and so continues on with her to Karkys.

The heist goes as planned, but then things go awry. Maissa makes off with the swag (and baby Sharl), leaving Stavver and Aleytys to face the music. They con their way out of trouble and set off in hot pursuit. Maissa has the only starship on the planet and has promised Stavver and Aleytys a trip offworld to I!kwasset. Before they catch up with Maissa and Kale, they run into the Horde, a near-mindless, er, horde of brainless savages who strip the countryside they pass though like humanoid locusts. Aleytys is taken prisoner and raped by the Horde’s master, who is enormous – in all respects:

He was naked. As grossly male as he was grossly huge. Aleytys suppressed an inclination to gape and contented herself with wondering what sort of woman could receive that bulk into herself. (p 164)

The answer is apparently herself. And she appears to suffer no physical damage from the act.

But. Maissa caught, booty regained, master killed and Horde vanquished, and it’s finally time to leave Lamarchos. Except here come the Rmoahl Hounds, indefatigable guardians of the diadem who want it back. Aleytys makes on last deal with the Lakoe-heai, and Maissa, Stavver and Aleytys successfully launch. Kale remains behind – Lamarchos is, after all, his homeworld, and the poaku stones stolen from the Karkiskya were really for him all along.

And then an epilogue has Aleytys drugged and sold into slavery by Maissa, ripe for adventure in book three of the series, Irsud.

There seems to be a tendency in some space operas – less so now than was the case in the 1960s and 1970s – for the protagonist to be some sort of super-powered Mary Sue. They are always beautiful, and they spend much of the time naked. To balance this, the author throws all manner of horribleness at them, usually at the expense of both plausibility and the reader’s feelings. Given all that has happened to Aleytys during the first two books of the Diadem series, it’s astonishing she’s not suffering from severe PTSD. Sexual assault is commonplace, yet the author has Aleytys blithely carry on as if each violent rape were no more than a minor plot hurdle. Humanity has apparently found some way to colonise the galaxy, and found itself among countless alien races – and yet every world is populated by barbarians, violence is endemic, and all races practice slavery…

This is not adventure. It may exhibit all the trappings of space opera or science fantasy, but the disregard with which Clayton hampers her heroine’s travails with rape, violence and slavery, and the unfeasible ease with which Aleytys recovers from each such assault, make of this book something far less savoury. It astonishes me the reader is expected to identify with Aleytys. While she certainly possesses agency – she usually saves herself; and others – it’s as if that could not be allowed on its own. There must be balance. Which, of course, is not something which typically applies to male protagonists in space operas and science fantasies.

If the Diadem of the Stars series is mostly forgotten these days, it’s no real surprise. In the twenty-first century, such grimdark genre fiction is typically fantasy rather than science fiction ,and the protagonist is usually the perpetrator of sexual assaults rather than the victim. This is, of course, no improvement.

Summary

Earlier this week saw the end of SF Mistresswork’s first full calendar year. After a small hiatus towards the end of 2011, the website settled into a routine for 2012. I posted two reviews a week from January through to September, but then had to drop to one review a week. Unless I get a sudden huge influx of suitable reviews, I’m afraid I’ll have to maintain that schedule. So the good news is I plan to keep SF Mistressworks going for as long as, well, as long as there are books to review for it. Running this site has changed my reading habits and introduced me to a huge number of twentieth century science fiction authors completely new to me, and I hope it has done the same for others.

For the record, in 2012 SF Mistressworks posted reviews of 72 books, 6 reviews of books previously reviewed by other hands on the site, and a review of one book that has now been reviewed three times on SF Mistressworks (fittingly, it is The Female Man by Joanna Russ). Not all of the reviews were original to SF Mistressworks, but that has never been a requirement.

Those 72 books were by 44 writers. One was an anthology. The most-reviewed author was Sheri S Tepper, with 7 books, closely followed by Andre Norton and Joanna Russ with 5 each, and then Ursula K Le Guin with 4. Writers that were new to me personally included Jayge Carr, Rena Vale, Jo Clayton, Marta Randall, Amy Thomson, Maxine MacArthur, Tess Williams and Phyllis Gotlieb. There were also a number in the anthology New Eves, and I hope to track down novels by them.

I’d like to thanks everyone who provided reviews during 2012: Joachim Boaz, Admiral Ironbombs, Larry Nolen, Martin Lewis, Adam Roberts, Martin Wisse, Cheryl Morgan, SueCCCP, Grace Troxel, Requires Hate, Nic Clarke, Aliette de Bodard and Carl Vincent. I hope you’ll all continue to contribute.

Finally, SF Mistressworks would like to wish everyone a prosperous and happy 2013. Don’t forget, reviews are always needed. And feel free to spread the word about SF Mistressworks. There are still thousands of books to review before we can call this website complete…