Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (6 page)

The whole shambling novel, typically for Vonnegut, is a jumble of flash stories and blackouts, salted with sardonic jokes and agony, yet somehow manages to achieve what Martin Amis claimed for it, that “it makes the reader sweat with pleasure, but also with suspense.” This is so even though we know that “Thanks to certain modifications in the design of human beings, I see no reason why the earthling part of the clockwork can’t go on ticking for ever the way it is ticking now.” Brainless, that is, with no Beethoven, no Shakespeare, no high school movie showing annually the erotic mating dance of the Galápagos’ blue-footed boobies, copulation deleted.

7

Pat Murphy

In any case, the protagonist of
The Falling Woman,
Elizabeth Butler, is indubitably a scientist—an archaeologist—who sees ghosts, as does, intermittently, her daughter (thus suggesting a genetic basis for the ability). So exactingly and empathetically is the mother’s professional field depicted that we accept the ghosts as merely one more tool in her toolkit, a handy technic that her less-gifted peers simply lack.

Elizabeth Butler and her professorial co-worker Tony Baker are on their annual summer dig at the Mayan site of Dzibilchaltún, riding herd on the usual set of horny and lackadaisical and sincere students. (The camp’s interpersonal dynamics summon up allied notes from such safari scenarios as Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”) Elizabeth, long prone to seeing animated shades from the past while not interacting deeply with them, now experiences visions of the last inhabitant of the once-flourishing Mayan settlement, an old woman named Zuhuy-kak. More vitally, Elizabeth discovers she can converse with Zuhuy-kak, and begins to learn information she could not otherwise have access to. But the spirit is bitter and vengeful, and has bad things in store for Elizabeth, generating the book’s considerable suspense, which is compressed into a mere two weeks or so.

Into this fraught scenario comes Diane, the estranged daughter, fleeing bad times of her own. She wishes to reconnect with her mother, and Elizabeth reluctantly agrees to take her on as an untrained helper. (Diane’s inexperience allows Murphy conveniently and unawkwardly to educate both character and readers in the methodology and goals of a dig.) Murphy splits the narrative between mother and daughter points of view, and the resulting see-sawing insights and battling failures of communication prove fertile.

The mother-daughter relationship obviously is a central engine of the book, and Murphy explores it passionately and deeply. Likewise, the patriarchal roadblocks Elizabeth has experienced in her career are highlighted in a judicious yet righteously ireful manner. Elizabeth’s damaged psyche receives an airing as well, nowhere more tellingly than in Chapter Thirteen, where she muses on the central dead space inside her heart. “I had sealed off the part of me that knew how to love. It was too close to the part of me that knew how to hate, and that was at the center of the madness. I had sealed them all away, leaving a dead place...” Then Elizabeth all unconsciously segues to a discussion of the cenote—the Mayan sacrificial well that plays such a pivotal role in the tale—never realizing that, metaphorically, just such a cold vacuity full of skeletons and sacrificed virgins lies inside herself. Murphy’s deft symbolical identification of inner and outer topography is complete.

Murphy’s novel consorts well with the elegantly enigmatic work of Graham Joyce, Jonathan Carroll and Jo Walton, although with an emphasis on science rather than fantasy. Elizabeth Butler is no Indiana Jones. In fact, she belittles her profession. “Archaeologists are really no better than scavengers, sifting through the garbage that people left behind when they died... We’re garbage collectors really.” But the dedication and intellect she bestows on her chosen field, the scrupulousness with which she follows her protocols into the territory of artistry, her unselfish desire to expand humanity’s knowledge base, all belie her protests, and her adventures of the mind—whether with trowel in hand or conversing with the dead—end up outshining anything Harrison Ford has yet brought to the screen.

8

Pamela Sargent

Alongside the many excellent writers she showcases in her anthologies, Sargent exemplifies this prospectus in her own novels. These range from one of the first novels exploring the consequences of human cloning,
Cloned Lives
(1976), to a formidable trilogy about terraforming Venus, and other serious, thoughtful, lucid work. In
The Shore of Women
(1986), Sargent constructs a post-apocalyptic world where today’s smug certainties have been undone by global nuclear war and a consequent “nuclear winter.”

Hundreds or perhaps thousands of years later, matriarchal and apparently worldwide urban utopias—walled enclaves protected by force fields—maintain a stationary technological civilization, in the midst of a vast wilderness sparsely populated by bands of hunter-gatherer men scratching a stone age living. These mini-clans get along grudgingly with each other in prickly territoriality, united by a “holy speech” used in the many hi-tech shrines scattered by women across the landscape. Here worshipful and (by default, in everyday life) homosexual men drop by to commune in wired dream with the Lady, and Her several virtual aspects, enjoying imaginary coition with very real consequences, as their semen is milked away mechanically and used to inseminate the Mothers of the World safely within their lesbian redoubts. Girl children are retained by the enclaves, boys shoved out at 5 or 6 after mindwashing and placed in the custody of men. If any bands get the itch to join into larger settlements, risking the reinvention of agriculture, the wheel and metal-working, golden flying globes are dispatched from the nearest city to slaughter the brutes and raze their habitats to the ground.

Inevitably, since this is a novel written for today’s readers, it takes a Romeo and Juliet turn, although one with more fear and loathing and remorseless slaughter than Shakespeare managed after
Titus Andronicus
. A young woman, accused of complicity in a near-murder done by her mother, is exiled with her into the outer grimness. While her mother dies almost immediately at the hands of male ruffians, Birana survives, sheltered by wise Wanderer. In the guise of a beardless youth, she meets Arvil, a young man of about her own age. Their growing relationship and even intimacy is thwarted by Birana’s bigoted, heterophobic upbringing.

But this social order is no mere inversion of our own traditionally homophobic rejection and stigmatization of gays and lesbians. In Sargent’s future, men are repeatedly conditioned to worship the ideal feminine, and to crave the orgasmic satisfactions of vaginal sex. So while Birana is revolted by the prospect of physical intimacy with a male, Arvil must fight his own impulses.

Meanwhile, Birana’s peer and former object of desire, Laissa, has problems with her own mother, who retains an unhealthy affection for her infant son Button, trying to forestall his exile into barbarity. By a curious coincidence, Arvil is Button’s older brother, and Laissa’s twin—and the physical resemblance does not escape Birana, whose initial interest in the young man is a displacement of her infatuation with his sister.

The early emphasis on Laissa, more or less dropped for the bulk of the book, is explained in the end, when as a historian she shapes much of the first-person testimony of these two star-crossed lovers into the book we’ve read. It perhaps explains a certain muted, almost sepia-toned calmness in the telling of events that do not lack in drama, tension, fear, intoxicated romance, terror, death, birth, and courageous perseverance. This avoidance of a melodramatic tenor in a narrative where it might seem an endless temptation is one of the features that draws the reader into a sympathetic languor, the kind of mood more often elicited by long Victorian novels than by survivalist thrillers, or even the chilling bleakness of Cormac McCarthy’s
The Road
(Entry 84)
.
It is a little reminiscent of the long dying falls of George R. Stewart’s superb
Earth Abides
(1949), but Sargent tells a more confronting tale than history’s collapse into pastoral loss of memory.

The women’s enclaves resemble more closely the sequestered, changeless city Diaspar, in Arthur C. Clarke’s
The City and the Stars
(1956). The youth who leaves Diaspar for the forbidden outdoors is Alvin, almost an anagram of Arvil, so perhaps
The Shore of Women,
with its hints of a rapprochement between the sexes and these mutually alien ways of life, is a kind of inversion of Clarke’s famous fable. The voice of that book, too, moved against the fall of night to a vivid stance opposing restriction and fearful stasis. In the end, this is the reality the women of Sargent’s enclave must accept, however resentfully: “We are being given a chance to reach out to our other selves. What we do will show what we are and determine what we shall become.”