Read Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 Online
Authors: Damien Broderick,Paul di Filippo
Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (19 page)
The carillon had finished obliterating “Jingle Bells” or “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and was now working on “We Three Kings of Orient Are.” Dunworthy recognized the minor key.
Mary and James Dunworthy are academics of the old school, not a bit like the lone geniuses of much science fiction: rumpled, no longer young, slightly foggy, civilized, caught up in faculty squabbles and small accidents even as Kivrin gets lost in time.
In 1348, Kivrin arrives in pain, with early flu symptoms, ready to accost passers-by with “O holpen me, for I am ful sore in drede,” and “I have been y-robbed by fel thefes.” Wretchedly sick, she is aided by Father Roche, who takes her for an angel appearing in a wash of light. Later, against his vows, guilty, he falls in love with her. The plague is already spreading. Feigning amnesia, Kivrin is succored at a nearby manor house, learns to respect and love these people of another century, yet can do nothing but witness in horror their dying. As her little friend Agnes falls toward death, she rails in her Doomsday Book against God:
You bastard! I will not let you take her. She’s only a child. But that’s your specialty, isn’t it?
A little later, the girl is dead.
Kivrin washed her little body, which was nearly covered with purplish-blue bruises. Where Eliwys had held her hand, the skin was completely black. She looked like she had been beaten. As she has been, Kivrin thought, beaten and tortured. And murdered. The slaughter of the innocents.
It is a powerful, clear-eyed look into the reality of most of human history, appropriately echoed in the epidemic of the 21st century. Willis speaks to the heart as well as the mind in this superb, affecting novel.
[1]
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/firewatch.htm
33
Octavia Butler
(1993)
THE UNTIMELY DEATH
in middle age of Octavia Butler, African-American female sf writer—and that descriptive phrase is so infrequently necessitated by reality, that it serves as both luminous beacon in Butler’s case and indictment of the genre and the culture at large—cut short not just an exemplary career of probing, daring speculative fiction, but also removed a figure who had served in numerous extra-literary ways as an inspiration to an under-served segment of the sf reader and author ranks. The only solace her mourners could take was that Butler had produced a substantial and fairly sizable legacy that seems in no danger of vanishing with her. Although much goodness was undeniably lost, including the third unwritten book,
Parable of the Trickster,
meant to conclude this series, after
Parable of the Talents
.
Butler was a hard-headed and hard-nosed individual not beholden to any party line, as her final novel,
Fledgling
, might well reveal, given its gender-powertripping, quasi-pedophile, vampiric sexual antics. And in fact,
Parable of the Sower
and its sequel surprisingly owe more to Robert Heinlein’s
Farnham’s Freehold
and
Stranger in a Strange Land
than to, say, Alice Walker or Toni Morrison, writers with whom Butler might be expected—by the unenlightened and uninitiated—to share sensibilities.
The first
Parable
is the story of Lauren Olamina, a young woman coming of age in an America gone to hell. Armed enclaves offer the only precarious security in a world of rapists (who seem, contrary to history, totally uninterested in equally succulent boyflesh), cannibals, and marauders.
Given the chance to attain her majority in relative peace, Lauren develops into a woman with a literal Destiny. Formulating her own unique philosophy/religion, training herself to be the very model of Heinlein’s Competent (Wo)Man, she is one of the few prepared to survive upon the destruction of her walled burb, which sends her and a ragtag assortment of companions on a quest down ruined highways for a safe place to found a community based on her well-articulated and intriguing Earthseed principles.
These Earthseed principles revolve around the inevitability and dominance of Change, offering a kind of stripped-down Buddhism fit for nature red in tooth and claw. Olamina as prophet is certainly no hippie-dippy Michael Valentine Smith. But the seductiveness of her platform has inspired real-life adherents, in the same way that the geek culture has adopted Heinlein’s “grok.”
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
(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.
