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In my time, I've read some great feminist dystopian novels (some of which are also feminist utopian novels, because things change or a vision of a different world is offered). Just off the top of my head, there's Suzy McKee Charnas' Walk to the End of the World, Suzette Hayden Elgin's Native Tongue series, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Sheri Tepper's Grass and Gibbon's Decline and Fall, Joanna Russ' The Female Man, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time.

To this list I must now add L. Timmel Duchamp’s Alanya to Alanya. I rather expected that I would find this book to be both profoundly meaningful and deeply enjoyable, because it comes highly recommended by one of my science fiction heroes, Samuel Delany: “The coupling of real thoughtfulness and rip-roaring excitement is as rare in science fiction as in any other genre. But here, in Alanya to Alanya, they're locked together in the most exciting-and certainly the most intelligent!-tale of alien invasion I've read in decades.”

The first volume of a projected five-volume series, the novel presents a profoundly worrisome (because so much of it is only a nudge beyond where we in the Western world are today) dystopia in which the developed nations of the world have evolved a rigid class-based society in which the Executives – with the males as leaders and the females as support personnel - run everything and reap most of the rewards, the Professionals are the knowledge class and have some freedoms and some benefits, and the Service-tech class performs the labour, and go essentially unrewarded save for mind-dulling mass entertainment and “tube food” – the bread and circuses of the future.

Into this rigid, controlled and repressive world comes an alien race, the Marq’ssan, who have come to liberate the Earth from itself. A species which either has no gender or does not use gender as a signifier of identity, and which has painfully evolved a non-hierarchical system of organising and managing the efforts of their society as a whole, the Marq’ssan intend to help humanity develop their own version of a non-oppressive society. Their first act is to block the functioning of most electronic devices on the planet, essentially demobilising most of the world’s industrial, military and communications potential. Their second act is to demand immediate talks with three representatives of all political entities on Earth – and to specify that all of these representatives must be women. Once gathered together, however, the representatives discover that the intention of the Marq’ssan is not to negotiate or present demands to Earth so much as it is to teach the women of Earth to negotiate effectively for their own needs with the power elites of their own planet.

The novel centres around the path taken by one of the US representatives, Kay Zeldin, a historian (and hence a member of the professional class) who has unexplained ties to one of the most powerful Executives in the US, as she learns more about the Marq’ssan, the nature of her own society, and herself, and makes her choices. At the same time, we have a vivid picture of how all factions in this encounter – Earth’s Executives, human radicals and dissidents, the representatives, and the Marq’ssan themselves – react, interact, and change in response to each other and the changes in circumstances. The aliens are not always right – and they are not always unified, no more than all of Earth is unified in their thoughts and actions.

It is interesting to note that Duchamp originally wrote these novels in the 1980, and it is rather chilling to see how the political and cultural conditions in the “developed nations” have inched closer to her projections over the past 20 years. It is also fascinating to see how a novel written before September 2001 keys into the basic mindset of the “war on terror” and positions it as both consequence and perpetuating influence of an essentially fascist mindspace. Duchamp’s Executives cannot even entertain the possibility that the Marq’ssan are actually aliens – their entire response strategy is initially based on the assumption that they are some scientifically advanced but human terrorist organisation pretending to be aliens.

Inasmuch as Alanya to Alanya is an out-and-out dystopic vision, it appears that that in future novels, Duchamp intends to engage the reader in the process that the Marq’ssan have initiated among some humans – almost all women – in this first book, which suggests that we may, in future volumes of the series, see more of the workings of the Marq’ssan society, and changes in human society which the women being taught in non-hierarchical means of interaction and communication attempt introduce. Whether this results in a shift in tone from dystopia toward a more utopian vision, remains to be seen.

I’m definitely in for the long haul on this series. I want to see where the people of Earth take what tools the Marq’ssan have given them, and what kind of future evolves. But this is more than a political novel – the characters are compelling, and I’m just as eager to find out what happens to Zeldin and the other main characters, human and Marq’ssan. The action is complex and the writing is very well paced – this pages almost flew under my fingers as the story intensified and the stakes got higher and higher.

Date: 2007-06-17 04:56 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ide-cyan.livejournal.com
My initial review of Alanya to Alanya is here (http://ide-cyan.livejournal.com/793945.html). I haven't read the next books in the series yet.

Date: 2007-06-18 02:56 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] morgan-dhu.livejournal.com
You make some good points in your review, which I want to think about for a bit before giving you my feedback.

I've actually ordered the next two volumes from Aqueduct Press, and they should arrive soon. I think I'll want to read them fairly quickly, even though I have a large "to be read" pile at the moment, because I want to see more of the process that Duchamp is trying to suggest as a way out of a heavily stratified and hierarchical society.

Date: 2007-06-19 08:33 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] bibliogramma.livejournal.com
I've been thinking about your comments about Zeldin's obscured backstory and the lack of reference to historical feminist resistance, despite Zeldin's profession as a historian, and wondering if perhaps they are linked in some way - without connection to our past, personal and historical, we don't have a place to stand on and from which we can move to create a new course?

Zeldin does not remember that she has been complicit in the oppression and brutality of the Executive class. It is not until she begins to remember and incorporate this information about her own responsibility that she can commit to the possibility of tearing down an edifice that she has helped to shore up. Her agency has been obscured, and she has to take it back.

If this conjecture holds any water, it should show up in the next volume, so soon I'll know if I'm reading more into this than there is.


Date: 2007-06-19 08:42 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ide-cyan.livejournal.com
Those who cannot remember the past, etc.

It's been two years since I read the book, so my sense of it is a little fuzzy, but I'm rethinking it now in that, well, alien intervention doesn't seem like a radical feminist solution. It seems to me quite an imperialist solution to the problem of empire, so to speak.

Date: 2007-06-19 09:58 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] bibliogramma.livejournal.com
You're right, of course. But a lot of utopian/dystopian fiction, which is more interested in the social set up and how to get out of it, or get to it, or demonstrate why it is good or bad, uses a kind of "fiat lux" - or fiat nox, in the case of dystopic fiction - to get the process moving.

I'm reading the intervention of the Marq'ssan in that light for now, especially since at the end of the first novel, most of the Marq'ssan withdraw from Earth, feeling that they've nudged things in what they hope to be the right direction, and now it's the job of human women to take it the rest of the way. Several Marq'ssan remain, but they are clearly pictured as doing something that wasn't part of the plan, and is generally disapproved by the other Marq'ssan.

It will, of course, be interesting it Duchamp is consciously using the intervention of the Marq'ssan as an example of, as you put it, an imperialist solution to the problem of empire - and if so, where she takes that.

Historically speaking, imperialism has sometimes given a conquered people the tools needed to reclaim and recreate their own culture. Of course, it usually turns out rather poorly, and almost always differently from what the imperialist intended - consider the now-widely mouthed idea that the West is in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan in order to help them create their own stable democracy, with the west naturally deciding who should be the leaders. Which at one level is exactly what's happened in Alanya to Alanya.

These are some of the reasons I want very much to read the rest of the series - at least, from where I'm standing right now. I want to see what Duchamp does with all of these ideas and issues, becasue, frankly, if you've written five books and then reworked them over a 20-year period, you'd better have the wrinkles worked out.






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