It’s hard to overstate the libertarian components of this first book. Lauren is fond of statements such as “Armed people do get killed ... but unarmed people get killed a lot more often,” and “If they have manners or if they can learn manners, we keep them. If they’re too stupid to learn, we throw them out.” RAH himself couldn’t have phrased it any more clearly. (And as in Farnham’s, there’s even a hint of incest, as Lauren falls in love with a man who she explicitly states resembles her dead father.) If Lauren, as an oppressed African-American female, has perhaps more justification for such Darwinian sentiments, they are still a bit grating at times, especially when applied to the Great Unwashed Masses who brutally threaten every step of Lauren’s journey.
One might also question whether this anarchic scenario (which has cropped up in stories by other women writers as diverse as Tiptree and Kress, making me think that civilization is indeed a female-oriented, -sustained and, upon its passing, a female-lamented construction) would ever really be able to perpetuate itself. The high birthrate amid chaos which Butler postulates, for one thing, is directly contradicted by the recent Russian experience, where social unrest has brought a decline in births.
Parable of the Talents finds Olamina’s daughter, Larkin, taking center-stage in the colony dubbed Acorn, where the Earthseed principles come up against brutal religious fundamentalism. But Butler finds time to examine the mother-daughter dynamic as well.
Ultimately, neither libertarian overtones nor minor implausibilities in this duology can detract from the power of Butler’s story of survival through apocalypse, followed by rebirth, which is one of the classic sf themes. Told entirely as entries from Lauren’s diaries and Larkin’s, the narratives never flag. The blood spilled in Butler’s book comes not from special effects squibs, but from living, distinct humans. The sex, the dirt, the thirst are all immediate and real. Butler pretty much achieves what Lauren aspires to: “I’m trying to speak—to write—the truth. I’m trying to be clear.”
34
Nicola Griffith
Ammonite (1993)
NICOLA GRIFFITH’S departure from science fiction for the presumably more rewarding field of crime novels was a lamentable blow. Her award-winning work as novelist, anthology editor and short-story writer, though not prodigious in size, was prodigious in talent and verve. Still young, she might yet choose to regift the genre with new work. But meanwhile, we can enjoy her speculative oeuvre as it stands, focusing now on Ammonite, her outstanding debut book.
Ammonite belongs to a long and proud tradition of sf novels focused on gender issues. The roll call of the most famous ones—not to slight a host of marginally less notable candidates—is painfully small, but prestigious. Gilman’s Herland; Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness; Russ’s The Female Man; Charnas’s The Holdfast Chronicles; Slonczewski’s A Door Into Ocean (Entry 9); Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country. In the case of Ammonite, our laboratory for cultural experimentation, an all-female planet, has come into being through the quirk of a virus.
The planet GP, or Jeep, was settled from other human polities several centuries before the story opens. But then contact with the galactic ekumene was severed. Upon its rediscovery, Jeep proves to harbor a universal contagion, present since the initial encampment, that is one hundred percent fatal to all males and twenty percent fatal to non-native females. The planet is utterly woman-centric. Yet somehow, even without male gametes, the population reproduces.
This intriguing setup attracts the professional interests of an anthropologist, Marguerite Angelica Taishan, or Marghe. Somewhat damaged psychically by brutal past experiences, Marghe is drawn to this strange world as well by subconscious impulses. She descends to the planet half-guessing that it’s a one-way trip. After a brief orientation at the precarious encampment of her interstellar peers, she sets off into the uncharted realms of Jeep. Her first encounter is with the nomadic horsewomen known as the Echraidhe. There she acquires an enemy who will figure importantly later: Uaithne, who believes herself an avatar of the Death Spirit, in the manner almost of Native American Ghost Dancers. Forcibly adopted into their ranks, Marghe undergoes both hazing and education before making her escape through harsh blizzards that leave her nearly dead.
Rescued by a woman named Leifin, Marghe finds her next harbor is Ollfoss, a more civilized settlement. There, healed and accepted into the community, she receives a vision of her mother conferring upon her a totemic object: that type of ancient fossil shell called an ammonite. She takes the name of Marghe Amun, bonds and mates with a woman named Thenike, and begins to accept her role as a viajera, or traveling bard and judge, Thenike’s profession. Marghe learns the secret of the planet’s reproductive methods, and conceives a child at the same time Thenike does. But then other responsibilities call: Uaithne has convinced the horsewomen to wage war on the offplanet invaders, and the tiny outpost seems doomed—without Marghe’s intervention, as a woman of two worlds.
It should be obvious from the outset that it is not Griffith’s intent to describe any kind of simplistic, ideologically biased female utopia. To the contrary, life on Jeep exhibits the same ratio of imperfections and glories, pain and joys, wisdom and folly as the dual-gendered cosmos. But what Griffith presents is a deeply wrought alternative. She is truly conducting an anthropological thought experiment in how uniquely constrained environmental/biological conditions could highlight certain human traits and attitudes, and diminish others. Consequently, her narrative assumes a naturalistic heft and balance not found in more programmatic tales of gender-bending.
The world of Jeep—vividly brought to life with elegant and near-tactile sensory descriptions—is a sensibly functioning enterprise, organic and authentic, rich with bonds and customs and social and familial structures. Griffith invests most of her story in explicating those new paradigms, letting the reader learn them at the same time Marghe does. The effect is of a gradual immersion into the culture, not always easy or comfortable, but ending in total acceptance on the part of protagonist and reader.
Griffith is intent on disabling old dichotomies, the chief of which is observer and observed, actor and acted-upon. Marghe quickly goes from scientific expert to native status, helpless at first, then eventually street-smart. As she observes, she wasn’t in the field, she was the field. But other binary categories are defused as well. Perhaps most telling is that Marghe assumes the surname of a male god of fertility, the Egyptian creator. She is engaged in the major act of creating or recreating herself, erasing the damage inherent in her at the time she arrived on Jeep.
In Chapter Twelve, in a tour-de-force pyrotechnic passage, Marghe learns the extrasensory trick conferred by the virus, now a part of her genome, of mentally diving into her own cells and triggering her pregnancy. (This wonderful hardcore trope of the genre was probably crystallized most strikingly by Norman Spinrad in his story “Carcinoma Angels.”) Literally self-fertilizing, Marghe and the other women of Jeep proclaim their self-sufficiency in the face of all hostile opponents, showing that to master the self is to master the universe.
35
Mary Rosenblum
Chimera (1993)
SCIENCE FICTION lost the talented Mary Rosenblum to the mystery genre for a decade, circa 1996 to 2006, but she returned in that latter year to speculative fiction with Water Rites, a climate change novel, soon followed by Horizons, an accomplished piece of near-future Hard Sf. This is a reinhabitation much to be applauded, since she popped up undiminished, exhibiting the same skills that made her one of the standout new writers of the 1990s. Her lone short-story collection to date, Synthesis & Other Virtual Realities, held many stellar examples of the best of her debut decade.
Chimera’s first chapter admirably exhibits Rosenblum’s sophomore skillset (it was her second book). Within its few info-dense pages, in the best Campbellian “lived-in future” manner, we are introduced to protagonist Jewel Martina, a former guttersnipe, now med-tech, working her way up the establishment ladder of success, via a si
deline of freelance information brokering. We see her problematical interactions with her employer and immediate bete noir, Harmon Alcourt, aged yet technologically preserved and randy rich businessman. We get a primer on the coherent and well-envisioned functioning of the all-important virtual reality-mediated Worldweb (definitely at this date one of “yesterday’s tomorrows,” but still prescient, detailed and clever). And we bump into VR artist David Chen (though he is not assigned his name until later). Not to mention a little tour of Alcourt’s excellent Donald-Trumpish HQ set into the very ice of Antarctica beneath Mount Erebus! Although the pacing is less manic, the language more restrained than Alfred Bester’s, the overall effect is similar to that of The Demolished Man, limning an economy and culture predicated on novelties heretofore undreamed. Rosenblum’s virtuality is light on surrealism and heavy on commerce.
Circumstances send Jewel back to the thorny bosom of her dysfunctional family in Seattle—shiftless sister Linda, paralyzed druggie husband Carl, street-smart, VR-savvy niece Susana. The earthquake-stricken city and its surrounding “’burbs” are depicted evocatively in classic grim ’n’ gritty cyberpunk fashion.
Jewel looked through the gang-signed permaglass, sweating because the air-conditioning was down again. Below the grimy concrete span of the rail, small houses lined up in orderly rows, separated by tan strips of weedy dust. They were old, with roofs of crumbling shingles. Ancient cars, broken bits of furniture, piles of cardboard and plastic trash cluttered the old yards. A lot of the houses had burned to blackened shells in this neighborhood.
Hello, Detroit 2011. The crumbling infrastructure of Rosenblum’s future, as well as the permanent sullen underclass and greedy, heedless elite, retain their contemporary relevance—sadly and to America’s shame.
David Chen and his male lover Flander are on the scene as well, physically or as avatars, and the accidental bonds first fostered amongst the trio in Antarctica ramify, with Jewel even saving David’s life. Threats by unknown antagonists send Chen, Jewel and Susana into the deserts of the American West and into the arms of Serafina, tough old broad and mysterious VR “guardian angel.” Ultimate confrontation with Alcourt looms.
Rosenblum’s brand of cyberpunk bears a distinct and welcome flavor of the domestic novel and the romance novel, a hybrid leavening of the subgenre’s standard macho posturing. The romantic triangle between Chen, Jewel and Flander, sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit, resonates with the work of Catherine Asaro in her Skolian books, the first of which would appear not long after Chimera, as if obeying some zeitgeist imperative.
But Jewel’s embedding in the blood ties of family, a motif that receives much narrative attention, is an even stronger flavor. Likewise, David Chen’s conflicts with his patriarchal clan, and Serafina’s backstory. Try to imagine Case of Neuromancer taking his niece on his adventures, however Ono-Sendai deck-capable such a hypothetical character might have been, and you’ll see the drastically different vision Rosenblum’s brand of cyberpunk imparts.
Although overlooked by most critics when compiling the history of cyberpunk, Chimera is definitely an epochal second-generation instance of that mode, much in the manner of the work of Simon Ings (Entry 57) and others. That its author was a woman is also historically notable, given the paucity of female cyberpunks. But these incidental milestones cannot compare to the accomplished story-telling and world-building that constitute the book’s essential core.
36
Gene Wolfe
Nightside the Long Sun (1993)
[The Book of the Long Sun]
NO CONTEMPORARY author of science fiction has intelligently considered and ingeniously employed more ways of fruitfully and exponentially undermining his own narratives than Gene Wolfe (although a chosen few—Barry Malzberg, Christopher Priest (Entry 70), Brian Aldiss (Entry 87)—may have come close). A large portion of Wolfe’s oeuvre consists of stories whose immediate surface voice is frequently bent, subverted, transmogrified, or mitigated by a secondary voice usually concealed within a net of subtle textual clues. Two or more interpretations of Wolfean events are standard, and part of the fun of reading Wolfe is assigning identities to the voices and deciding which is primary, which secondary (if such relative weights can be assigned at all).
Paradoxically, Wolfe also has an ability and a reputation for composing stories that are almost naively straightforward in their transcription of events. Physical happenings and emotional states are rendered by certain of his narrators in crystalline simplicity, rich in sensory detail, and delivering a powerful emotional impact. And sometimes, of course, these two characteristic Wolfes—deceiver and revealer—inhabit the same page.
The Book of the Long Sun at first seems to belong to the straightforward camp. The tale of a generational starship shaped like a standard O’Neill tin can (hence the titular rodlike axial sun) coming to the end of its voyage was stylistically and thematically informed on every page by the Jesus-like character of its protagonist, Patera Silk, a humble, honest, ultimately influential priest of the ship’s AI gods. What a surprise, then, at the very close of the fourth volume, to learn that the whole long narrative was not the product of some omniscient objective author viewing the wild flurry of events from some nebulous godlike vantage, but rather a historic memoir, a recreation, written by two of the subsidiary characters, a husband and wife named Horn and Nettle.
Throughout Silk’s story, these two characters hid behind third person (in retrospect, Horn was present from page one of the opening volume, naturally enough). But finally stepping out into first-person voice, Horn disclosed his authorship and portrayed himself living with Nettle and children on the world Blue, the ultimate destination of the starship. Of Silk, they knew nothing more, the priest having remained behind
But it was only with Exodus from the Long Sun, the fourth volume in the middle part of a gigantic saga that began with The Shadow of the Torturer—The Book of the New Sun, The Urth of the New Sun, The Book of the Long Sun, The Book of the Short Sun— that readers could finally begin to say some semicogent things about the central quartet.
First, readers could note that the Long Sun quartet was in reality one seamless narrative, a market-dictated publishing freak, 1200-plus pages that should, in a more perfect world, have been enclosed between two cloth-covered boards only. Prior to the appearance of the final volume, only partial truths could have been uttered about Wolfe’s novel(s).
Those who might doubt the unity of the book should consider the publishing breakpoints and resumptions. While somewhat dramatically satisfying and terminal, the former are no more than traditional chapter closures, bridges broken in midair, not rainbow pots of gold.
At the end of the first volume, Nightside the Long Sun, our protagonist’s hand is upon a doorknob, mystery awaiting beyond. At the start of the second, Lake of the Long Sun, he opens that selfsame door. At the end of that volume, we leave our hero kneeling in the mud by a dying man. He reappears, aged only a few hours, admittedly not until Chapter Two of the third book, Caldé of the Long Sun, but that small delay is only because Wolfe has now decided to splinter the narrative among different viewpoints, and Chapter One of the third entry is devoted to other people. Book Three ends with our main character standing outdoors as friendly foreign troops prepare to enter his city in a victory parade. We find him a few pages into Chapter One of Book Four, hurriedly tackling personal chores before that very parade’s start.
Much more important is the tightly enclosing timeframe. The entire action of the quartet takes place over a mere ten or fourteen days. Events from the first book reverberate continuously throughout. Wounds sustained in the opening volume have not even healed by the climax of the last. And of course a rigorously consistent symbolism and thematic unity enfolds all four volumes.
Enough of generalities. Our story opens in Nightside the Long Sun, a book that is somewhat anomalous when compared with the later entries, since it represents the last days of the old order of affairs.
We are ins
ide a multi-generation starship shaped like the traditional O’Neill space habitat: an immense spinning cylinder, inhabited lands on the curving interior wall, the eponymous source of heat and light a blaze that runs from endcap to endcap. The residents mostly know on some subliminal level that their world is artificial—especially as it is undercut by an immense tunnel network—but are too busy living their mundane, centuries-hallowed lives to bother themselves about destinations or cosmology. Especially since they are kept in line by very real AI gods who dwell in Mainframe and can possess their human servitors via an optical download. (This theocratic setup, by the way, echoes Harry Harrison’s underrated Captive Universe.)
Mediating between gods and mankind are the Pateras, the priests, and the Mayteras, or nuns. Patera Silk is our focus. This is his story, “The Book of Silk,” as it is called retrospectively by a hidden narrator. Even when he is offstage, Silk dominates the action, the dialogue, the feelings of his fellow citizens of Viron. If we understand Silk, we understand the whole series.
Basically, Silk is the Brave Little Tailor, a simple soul with a high destiny.[1] From his opening epiphany Silk moves to eventual selfless dominance of his city, and insures the salvation of the whole Whorl of the Long Sun. This is the most obvious reading of his adventures.
And yet Silk simultaneously embodies several other archetypes. He is Don Quixote, delusionary romantic. Consider how he falls impossibly in love with a woman he barely knows, ultimately throwing away everything to pursue her. He is a thief, the Jack of Shadows, to borrow the title of Roger Zelazny’s 1971 novel, which was a tribute to Jack Vance, whom Wolfe also admires. He is—no sarcasm intended—also the canny urban or noir-ish priest best envisioned as played by Bing Crosby or Spencer Tracy, trying to save his parish. And as a true believer and hierophant, Silk also necessarily casts a shadow of Jesus, in everything from symbolic donkey rides to wounds received from soldiers to temptation in a High Place.
Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 Page 13
