L. Timmel Duchamp: The Marq'ssan Cycle

[bibliogramma]

The final two volumes of L. Timmel Duchamp’s absolutely enthralling and thought-provoking Marq’ssan Cycle, Blood in the Fruit and Stretto are on my list of the best books I read in 2008.

In this series of novels, Duchamp has written not only an engrossing science fictional saga story about the effects of a global intervention by aliens proves the catalyst for meaningful change, and the women who in various ways give their lives to that change, but also a truly masterful analysis of how oppressive and fascist states and organisations (and personalities, there’s more than a whiff of Reich and Marcuse in some of Duchamp’s characterisations of both states and characters in these books) function and respond to resistance, and of the various ways of resistance to oppression, whether it be at the level of the personal, the social, or the state. It’s also a deeply feminist analysis of power relations and how they can operate constructively or destructively, depending on the means, methods and goals.

Reading the series, following the lives and thoughts of the various viewpoint characters in your head, is a curiously multi-layered experience – each book is at the same time a complex political/psychological thriller and a workshop in identifying, resisting, subverting and ultimately, replacing the fascist architecture built up in one’s own mind from years of living in a society where authority is defined as coming from without and from above, difference is used as a tool of control, not a resource to be shared.

This series really is some of the most important feminist and political writing out there at this time.