bibliogramma | Entries tagged with t: alien cultures

The Rolling Stones seems to be a natural break between the novels that set up Heinlein’s ideas about the growth of man as a moral being and humanity as explorer and coloniser, growing throughout the galaxy, and those that highlight situations where those ideas are tested.

The remaining juveniles are mostly stories of one kind or another, showing some of the consequences of space exploration and colonisation. One fairly constant element of Heinlein’s Future Earths is massive overpopulation that drives extreme means of identifying and developing colonies. The development process, meanwhile, almost always seems to involve a stage almost exactly like the early colonisation of Western North America, complete with wagon trains.

His one look into the far future, Citizen of the Galaxy, where humanity is part of a mature, multi-system galactic community, shows that a developed civilisation will always have deep moral flaws - slavery, in this case - and that the same ethical commitment to the whole of the social system is always needed.

Starman Jones, 1954

Heinlein’s post-Rolling Stones juveniles don’t really follow any king a chronological or thematic development, but are mostly about individuals placed in difficult situations they must solve. From a loose narrative of man’s journey into space, we turn to a series of individual adventures in that space. Although in this novel Earth has again declined - people no longer have the right to choose their careers, but must be fostered into guilds, do the same work as their parents, or join a general work pool without prospects.

In Starman Jones, we see Max, a naive but essentially good young man, cheated by fate and by the circumstances of his life of a future in space. His uncle was to have nominated him to the Astrogater’s Guild. Instead, the early deaths of both father and uncle and the selfish thoughtlessness of a stepmother have taken even the proceeds of his father’s farm. He has nothing but his uncle’s astrogation tables - and when he goes to see whether his uncle ever registered his nomination, the Guild takes those too.

He falls in with a paternal conman, who uses Max’s last funds - a deposit for the returned books - to forge papers that will get the both of them onto an interplanetary spaceliner as crew - then warns him that they’ll be discovered after one run, and his only real choice is to jump ship at an attractive colony and settle down on a new planet. But Max still wants the stars he was promised.

This story works with the ‘moral rightness’ that is one of Heinlein’s themes - Max is in a moral trap at the outset of the book. To become an astrogator - which should, in all fairness, be something he has the right ti try for - he must lie and cheat. Later, as his fraud actually seems to bring his goal closer, he has the option to be honest, even if he loses his chance - and discovers that he has been found out already, and only his natural abilities have persuaded his boss to give him a chance, if he does own up to the truth.

What Max learns is that in an ethical bind, the truly moral man will make his own decisions regardless - but be fully prepared to face the consequences.

The Star Beast, 1954

This one is just plain fun, so I’m not going to say much about it. You’ll love Lummox, the most endearing alien you’ve ever met. And the twist of perspective is delightful. The diplomats are funny too, especially Mr. Kiku, so keep an eye out for him. Unfortunately, the human protagonists are boring, but you can’t have everything.

Tunnel in the Sky 1955

This is actually a well-written, exciting adventure story with a beginning, a middle and an end, and some good characters. In this variation on the colonisation of outer space, a system of interstellar gates connects Earth to all the colonised and open-for-colonising planets, and trained survival and colonial development experts are hired by parties of settlers to lead their groups, to improve their chances of establishing successful colonies. These professionals are trained, among other ways, by being set down in a survivable region of an open planet for, in early training, a few days. This is the story of a group of high school and college students who were lost on their first survival run for several years due to technical issues, and had to really fend for themselves without any assistance from home base. So real life and death adventure, and not everyone makes it.

Time for the Stars 1956

Time for the Stars is the first appearance of Heinlein’s most disturbing (to me) literary tic - the marriage of a a man to a (usually red-haired) young girl, often a relative, that he’s somehow groomed and watched as a child and then gone through some time dilation process that has them end up of similar, and marriageable age. In this case, Tom and Pat are identical mirror twins who are telepathic with each other. Tom takes ship on a torch ship that’s just fast enough (it can reach just shy of light speed) to make exploration for colony planets possible - given the presence of these telepath pairs who can communicate instantaneously between the ship and Earth no matter how far apart they are.

Tom goes to the stars, Pat stays on Earth and receives and transmits messages to him. It turns out, as the relativistic slippage increases, that some of the pairs can pass their telepathic connection to the next generation, and that Tom and Pat are among them. So while Tom travels in space, he is able to make connections first with Pat’s daughter Molly, then his granddaughter Kathleen, and finally his great granddaughter Vicky. Tom’s ship is called home, thanks to the invention of the irrelevant drive, when Vicky’s bio age is just a few yews less than Tom’s. Heinlein is careful to insert a phrase reminding us that the genetic convergence is minimal. She proposes, he accepts, end of story. Oh, there are adventures of sorts along the way, but that’s basically it.

Citizen of the Galaxy (1957)

Heinlein had vey strong feelings about slavery; he even wrote two books intended to show how awful it is. Citizen of the Galaxy is the one that sort of worked. Thorby is an enslaved orphan, starved, in poor condition, being sold at the local slave market on Sargon, the capital planet of the Nine Planets, but no one wants to buy him. He’s finally purchased by Baslim the beggar for what amounts to pennies.

As it turns out, Baslim is a very unusual beggar - he is also a spy for the Galactic Hegemony - which Earth is a part of - and his mission is to track down links between large Hegemonic corporations and the slave trade operation beyond the Hegemony’s reach.

Eventually Baslim is discovered and executed, but not before having made arrangements to get Thorby away from Sargon and into the Hegemony where his identity can be traced and his real family found.

It’s a well-developed story, and the adventures Thorby face in finding his real home and purpose in life are fascinating.

Have Spacesuit - Will Travel (1958)

In a sense, Have Spacesuit - Will Travel is the culmination of Heinlein’s message in these novels, that the moral development of the human race is vitally important, and must be achieved before we go too far into space. In this novel, a young girl, Peewee, and a teenage boy, Kip, become involved in the schemes of a group of violent and domineering aliens whose modus operandi is to take whatever they want from the weak. Knowing only that these are not nice people, they assist a member of yet another alien species, who they identify only as the Mother-thing, who seem to be the local branch of the galactic peacemakers.

As things turn out, there is a vast society which includes peoples from all three galaxies in the Magellanic cluster, and they survive by weeding out potentially destructive species when they meet them. Both humans and the aliens who captured the Mother-thing are tried, with Peewee and
Kip speaking for Earth. The aliens, who espouse a master race philosophy, are essentially removed from the galaxy, and the case against the humans looks grim:

“By their own testimony, these are a savage and brutal people, given to all manner of atrocities. They eat each other, they starve each other, they kill each other. They have no art and only the most primitive of science, yet such is their violent nature that even with so little knowledge they are now energetically using it to exterminate each other, tribe against tribe. Their driving will is such that they may succeed. But if by some unlucky chance they fail, they will inevitably, in time, reach other stars. It is this possibility which must be calculated: how soon they will reach us, if they live, and what their potentialities will be then.”

Kip and Peewee win the humans a reprieve - time to prove they can grow into a civilised society - by showing the there has already been growth, and by being willing, even though they personally had been promised amnesty for their actions in helping the Mother-thing, to share the consequences of being human, even to death.

It’s the biggest and most highly symbolic of all of the ways Heinlein’s juveniles have demonstrated the idea that the human race must grow and become fully ethically responsible.

These are far from being the only themes in Heinlein’s juveniles, which also focus on self-reliance, a commitment to life-long learning and the importance of a basic science background for an informed citizenry.

I have been very ill, and the prognosis for recovery is not good. If I must choose in my limited time whether to read more, or write reviews if what I read, I choose to read more. While I’m still going to write about most books, for short fiction, I’m just going to give you my opinions as simple ratings unless there us something I really need to say. Short fiction will be rated excellent, very good, good, no comment or not my cup of tea. Interpret these as you will.

“No Flight without the Shatter,” Brooke Bolander; Tor.com, August 15 2019.
https://www.tor.com/2018/08/15/no-flight-without-the-shatter-brooke-bolander/
Excellent. A bittersweet requiem. Novelette.

“Firelight,” Ursula Le Guin; Paris Review, Summer 2018. Paywall; subscription required.
https://www.theparisreview.org/fiction/7176/firelight-ursula-k-le-guin
Excellent. Le Guin bids a final farewell to Ged, and to us. Short story.

“The Starship and the Temple Cat,” Yoon Ha Lee; Beneath Ceaseless Skies, February 1 2018.
http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-starship-and-the-temple-cat/
Very good. Short story.

“The Starfish Girl,” Maureen McHugh; Slate, July 23, 2018.
https://slate.com/technology/2018/07/the-starfish-girl-a-new-sci-fi-short-story-about-gymnastics.html
Very good. Short story.

“A Brief and Fearful Star,” Carmen Maria Machado; Slate, June 27, 2018.
https://slate.com/technology/2018/06/a-brief-and-fearful-star-a-new-short-story-from-carmen-maria-machado-author-of-her-body-and-other-parties.html
Good. Short story.

“Asphalt, River, Mother, Child,” Isabel Yap; Strange Horizons, October 8 2018.
http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/asphalt-river-mother-child/
Excellent. Powerful use of traditional Philippine religious figures to tell a modern, and all too widespread, story. Short story.

“Music for the Underworld,” E. Lily Yu; Motherboard, March 29, 2018.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8xkxqx/music-for-the-underworld
Excellent. Powerful and disturbing. Short story.

“Ruby, Singing,” Fran Wilde; Beneath Ceaseless Skies, September 27 2018.
http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/ruby-singing/
Very good. Eerie, like a folktale. Short story.

I enjoyed Becky Chambers’ first two books, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and A Closed and Common Orbit, even though, as some have noted, the novels are light on linear narrative and long on character development and interaction. I enjoyed watching the characters grow and interact - together. Each of these novels focused on a small group of people doing things together, an that was what made them work for me.

Unfortunately, Record of a Spaceborn Few, though like her other novels, almost entirely character driven, doesn’t do the same for me, and I think it’s because here, the characters are not, for the most part, in conversation (in the broadest sense of that phrase) with each other. They are all connected through their presence on one particular ship in the Exodan Fleet - the collection of ships that carried almost all of what remained of the human racd away from the ravaged planet they had once called home, in which they had lived and died, creating a culture of ecological self-sufficiency to replace the rapacious and unsustainable culture of humanity on Earth.

Though the human race is not part of the galactic community, it has been given a home planet, where some have settled, and is free to travel, work and live among all the planets and peoples in that community. However, many have remained in the Fleet, holding onto the culture and ship-based way of life that evolved out of the near-death of the Earth. Even though the Fleet no longer wanders, but remains in formation around their new sun.

But, now that humanity has options, and change is inevitable due to new contacts and new technologies, what effect will this ultimately have on the Fleet. Chambers examines that question through her characters, most of whom are natives of the Fleet, one of whom is a human whose grandmother left the Fleet to live planetside, but who is curious about the ways his ancestors developed before they bound themselves to a world again.

The novel thus consists of a number of independent stories, each one focused on a different individual, linked primarily by a commonality of place and circumstance, but not initially interacting with each other. And I think that’s why this novel has not worked for me as her earlier books did, though over the course of the novel I did become invested in the stories of some of the characters, and enjoyed reading about their lives and experiences. The consequences of alien influence on a massive convoy of human refugees isn’t quite a tightly enough focused story for me to open to all of the characters because of their role in the story.

However, when a significant event takes place about two-thirds of the way into the book, and all the characters begin to respond in at least some degree to that, it seems to pull the narrative together, tightening the focus and making the story more engaging, at least for my tastes. It’s safe to say that the book grew on me, rather than capturing me at once.

And in the long run, the examination of what keeps a society together, and what causes some to abandon it, when there are such options, was an interesting meditation, and raised some issues I’ll be thinking about for a while.

Deep Roots is the second volume in Ruthanna Emrys’ fascinating and intensely readable series inspired by the Cthulhu Mythos. These books are told from the perspective of the last on-land members of the sea people who once lived in Innsmouth, before the US government kidnapped and interned them in a concentration camp in the desert where all but two - brother and sister Aphra and Caleb - died from lack of the ocean and the conditions required to make the change to their near immortal sea-dwelling form. Emrys begins from the assumption that everything we think we know about these people is wrong, based on twisted propaganda spread by those who hated and feared them.

In the first novel, Winter Tide, Aphra, who is a student of the ancient magics known to her people (and others), formed a confluence, or chosen family, comprised of an unlikely group of people with the ability for pursuing magic and a commitment to trying to rebuild the land community of the sea people: her brother Caleb; his lover DeeDee, a black woman recruited by the FBI as an informant, seductress and spy; Charlie, a gay man who is Aphra’s friend and student in the magical arts; Neko, the daughter of the Japanese couple who adopted and cared for Aphra and Caleb when when the internment camp they and the few other dying sea people were held in was repurposed to imprison Japanese Americans during WWII; Catherine Turnbull, a mathematician and scholar of magic who had been the host of one of the time-travelling, body-borrowing, and rather arrogant Yith; Audrey, a woman of mixed heritage, part ‘ordinary’ human (the people of the air), part descendent of a third human subgroup, subterranean dwellers called the people of the earth; and, on the periphery of this family, Ron Spector, Charlie’s lover, and an FBI agent working in a branch of the bureau established to investigate magical threats to the USA.

In Deep Roots, Aphra and her confluence have been following leads and rumours of other sea people who may have survived the genocidal actions of the government, ‘mistblooded’ descendants of he few who left the Innsmouth community and married into families of the people of the air. Having learned of a woman, Frances Laverne, and her son Freddie, who live in New York City, they travel to the big city, only to discover that Freddie - who could be Aphra’s only chance to bear a new generation of sea folk - has become involved with a community of Mi-Go and other humans.

Lovecraft’s Mi-Go are, alternatively, the origin of the Abominable snowman myth, or other-dimensional aliens, winged and clawed, technologically advanced, who take human minds and place them in cannisters which they can then transport across space. Emrys has taken the latter description as her starting point. Her Mi-Go - who are more properly referred to as the Outer Ones - see themselves as benefactors, travellers who set up communities on many worlds, recruit followers - or travel-mates, as they refer to them - from the indigenous populations, and offer them the same experiences they themselves spend their lives pursuing, the exploration of and communication with minds across the vastness of space. While the Outer Ones can travel in their own bodies, other races must be separated mind from body in order to travel, their minds placed in devices that the Outer Ones can carry with them as they travel. The process is reversible, but many who join the Outer Ones find themselves less and less inclined to return to physical form.

The Outer Ones have a long and not particularly positive relationship with Aphra’s people, not least because the mind-body separation process is more dangerous to the people of the sea and those who travel with the Outer Ones are likely to be unable to return to their bodies and remain healthy - thus, those lost to the Outer Ones are lost forever. Also, The Outer Ones and the Yith, with whom the people of the sea have a strong and positive relationship, are enemies at a deep philosophical level - the Yith are firm believers in non-interference, the Outer Ones often try to ‘save’ species they fear are on the verge of extinguishing themselves, often by interfering with the political and cultural life of the planet.

Aphra is drawn into contact with the Outer Ones because she hopes to extract Freddie Laverne from their fellowship, seeing him as a possible father for the children she must have fir her race to continue growing. At the same time, the FBI is drawn into the unstable mix because of all the disappearances reported by families of those who have joined the Outer Ones.

Aphra learns that the majority faction among Outer Ones are considering taking action to intervene in human affairs because of the tensions of the Cold War and their fear that the human race will destroy itself. Part of this manipulation involves discrediting Aphra, her confluence, and the sea people with the FBI branch involved with magic and non-human activities - a nit too difficult task, considering the extreme paranoia of the FBI and the existing distrust between the two. Yet the only chance for humanity to maintain control of its own destiny is for Aphra to convince the FBI agents that they must help her in putting the faction that favours non-intervention in charge of the Outer One’ colonies on Earth.

Emrys does a wonderful job of subverting the racist tropes of Lovecraft’s work, while keeping the real sense of potential menace - locating it in the institutions of a racist society instead. The novel ends in an uneasy truce between the surviving sea people and the government, with Innsmouth beginning to live again, though after some degree of compromise with the very people who once destroyed it. So eager for the next installment.

An Ancient Peace is the first book in a new series by Tanya Huff, featuring Confederation Marines Gunnery Sergeant - now ex-Marine Gunnery Sergeant - Torin Kerr. Torin is a true hero, with many hard missions under her belt, but the thing she’s most known for is that no matter what the situation, she always brings her people home. Not always all of them, but she survives, and those with her survive, far more often than you’d expect of someone with a gift for getting into the worst situations in the galaxy.

No longer a Marine, Torin and her lover, former salvage operator Craig Ryder, have put together a small team of specialists, most if them ex-Marine, all of them with special skills, and take on unusual jobs - Torin can’t stop thinking of them as deployments - for various Confederacy departments.

This time, it’s the Justice Department. They have evidence suggesting that someone has located the ancient grace planet of the Elder Race of H’san, and is trying to break into the tomb that holds the weapons they buried millenia ago when they gave up the idea of war. The mission is a secret one - Humans, like the other Younger Races, are in the Conferation on sufferage, with many of the Elder Races thinking they are still too primitive and warlike to be trusted in galactic civilisation. So Torin’s people have been ordered to go in quietly, track the grave robbers to the secret planet of the ancient dead, and solve the problem by whatever means necessary.

I’ve loved the Torin Kerr stories from the beginning. They started out as some of the best milsf in the genre, and have slowly developed into something that’s still full of action and adventure, but represents a mindset that’s developing beyond warfare. A more evolved set of ethics that defends, but doesn’t conquer.

In An Ancient Peace, Torin and her people finally set the military mindset behind them. Oh, they’re still kickass in the very best ways, but Torin’s allegiances are shifting. Once she was all about her duty to the Marines, and to her people. Then ‘her people’ grew into a larger set, to humanity and the other younger races who’s been used and manipulated by external forces. And now, she’s thinking about peace, and the whole of Confederation, as her people. And she always brings her people home.

Nnedi Okorafor has described the arc of her Binti trilogy as: “African girl leaves home. African girl returns home. African girl becomes home." Which is to say, that this is not a narrative in which the important things are what Binti does, but rather, who Binti is, and who she becomes.

By the time we as readers embark on the final volume of the trilogy, Binti: The Night Masquerade, Binti has already become much more than she was in the beginning. She starts out her journey as an African girl, of the Himba people, a marginalised group within the area she grows up in, which is dominated by the more numerous and far more aggressive Khoush. She is a harmonizer, someone who can sense and use the currents of energy in its very broadest sense - emotional, physical, cultural - to bring things into harmony with eachother, a peacemaker. But she longs to be more.

She travels to an ancient, galactic university, surviving a massacre of her shipmates by the non-human enemies of the Khoush and entering into an exchange of genetic material with her attackers in order to bring about a measure of truce. She becomes friends, perhaps even more than friends, with Okwe, one of the Meduse who attacked her ship, and in the second volume, when she returns to Earth and Himbaland, Okwe accompanies her. At home, she discovers that she has grown beyond the limitations placed on her by the traditions of her people, and learns that through her father, she has a heritage communion made many generations ago between sone of her people, not treated as outcastes, and an alien race, the Zinariya. And yet again, Binti becomes more, as she chooses to join the outcaste community, having her alien DNA activated. Bonding with Okwe gave her the ability to communicate at a distance with the Meduse; becoming Enyi Zinariya opens her to a gene-based technology that permits long-distance communication with all others of her kind, and access to a racial history.

But at the opening of the third novella, Binti is in dire circumstances. Still struggling to adapt to the changes in her ways of thinking, perceiving and communicating brought about by the activation of her Zinariya self, she learns that the Khoush have attacked her parent’s home, seeking to kill both her and Okwe. Having failed to find either, they have set fire to her family’s house, and all her relatives, who sought safety in the deep roots of the ancestral structure formed from a massive tree, are believed dead. And Meduse ships, summoned by Okwe, are en route to avenge the attack and open up a new chapter of the long Meduse-Khoush war, on a battleground of the lands of the Himba people.

Despite her deep personal loss, despite being rejected by the other Himba for what and who she has become, Binti tries to use her skills as a master harmonizer to bring about peace between Meduse and Khoush.

And here is where it is vital to remember that this is a story about who Binti is becoming, not a story about what Binti does. Because despite her efforts, she is betrayed, and the peace fails. And everything that follows after is about what Binti will become, and not what happens to the Himba, the Khoush or the Meduse.

And part of Binti’s becoming is learning to be her own judge and arbiter, not to accept without question the beliefs if others, which her own experiences have shown her are so often limited and blind. In becoming her own home, Binti becomes mistress of herself, unbound by the restrictions others have always placed on her, freed by the web of connections she has forged with others to be fully herself among them.

Reading a few short pieces of Eleanor Arnason’s pieces fiction that have come my way. Arnason is one of my favourite authors, both for the originality and gentle thought-provoking nature of her work and the skill of her craft. She challenges the accepted, leads her reader toward questions that require some contemplation, and highlights such important things as ethical decisions and respect for others. I like her work.

A Dog’s Story features Merlin and a young and not particularly noble knight named Ewan who Merlin has changed into a dog as punishment for attempting to rape a young woman after killing her brother. Ewan is actually happier as a dog, because he doesn’t have to think about right and wrong, and female dogs are usually quite willing at least when they’re in heat. Merlin trues from tine to time to restore him to his human shape, but he never really seems comfortable with it, and keeps asking to be a dog again. The story carries through to the end of Merlin’s story, his entanglement with Nimue, and Ewan’s restoration to human form, with finally some idea of what it is he wants to do as a man.

Stellar Harvest is the first of the Lydia DuLuth stories. Lydia works for an interstellar entertainment production company called Stellar Harvest, and she is on assignment on a new planet, location scouting, recording sights and sounds to be used in the next blockbuster entertainment starring icon Ali Khan. After spending some time in the town of Dzul, she heads into the wilderness for more local colour. Things become complicated when she shoots a local male who trues to steal her chool, an animal used for transportation. On this planet, most makes if the dominant species are altered - castrated - in the belief that unaltered men are only capable of passion-driven actions. Unaltered men are kept prisoners in their family homes, and traded for stud service. The male she encounters - Thoo - is an unaltered male who has escaped his family compound, longing to be free. Lydia agrees to taje him into the mountains where perhaps he can survive away from his kind, but his altered brother Casoon hunts them down and tries to capture Thoo. Unwilling to give Thoo up to captivity, or to allow Tho to kill Casoon to keep his freedom, Lydia comes up with an unexpected plan that gives both brothers a new chance at life.

The Warlord of Saturn’s Moons recounts a day in the life of a science fiction author, sometime in the not-too-distant future, as she goes about her everyday life, thinks about the world she lives in, and writes - a most exciting story, too, about a heroic red-haired adventurer and her mysterious, dark and brooding associate and lover, as they battle across the ice fields of Titan in a desperate attempt to foil the dastardly plans of the evil warlord of Saturn’s moons. The contrasts between hero and author, the thought processes of the author as she plots, more or less on the fly, and her thoughts about the polluted and violent world around her, make for an interesting and subtle commentary on the escapist and cautionary functions of science fiction. Plus, it’s both a damn fine character study and an exciting story-within-a-story.

If Tomorrow Comes, the second novel in Nancy Kress’ Yesterday’s Kin trilogy, begins about ten years after the conclusion of the first book. Earth has survived the spore cloud, but at great cost - in some regions, notably Russia/Central Asia, as many as 30 percent of the population have died due to mutations that disabled the immunity to the disease in most humans. Some animal species have been decimated, causing ecological chaos. Some humans want to reach out to their cousins on World - now called Kindred by most people - others blame then for the chais and destruction.

In the ten years that have passed, two ships have been build based on the ancient alien plans left by the Kindred - one by the US and other pro-Kindred factions, intended to carry a diplomatic mission, and the other by Russia, which is believed to have been destroyed after a failed attempt to disrupt the building of the US ship.

As the novel opens, just hours before the Friendship is due to depart, an elderly woman tries to contact authorities - she’s discovered something worrisome about her grandson, who is part of the team headed for World. But before she can make her concerns known, the, ship lifts off early, to foil any last minute sabotage attempts. As the focus of the narrative shifts to the voyagers, we the readers know only one thing - one of the men on board has a secret agenda.

The personnel of the Friendship is primarily diplomats and scientists - to open negotiations and, if necessary, assist the Kindred in the creation of a vaccine effective for their biology - and a squad of battle-hardened US Rangers. The journey, using alien technology, is fast and relatively uneventful. What happens when they arrive at World, however, is unexpected and catastrophic.

The first shock is the realisation, from star placements, that they have experienced a time dilation effect of 14 years, something the Kindred had not warned them about. Instead of arriving years before the spore cloud is due to reach Kindred, it is now due in less than three months. Suspicion, especially among the military contingent, is immediate, made worse by the fact that they have difficulty contacting World, and communicating once contact is made. And then disaster. The Russian ship appears above Kindred, fires on the Friendship, and then on the planet itself, destroying all of their major cities.

One shuttle, containing six Rangers and three scientists, reaches safety on Kindred. Where they find a largely agrarian, low-tech society and no viable vaccine. Most of the population has returned to family homesteads in the country where they are preparing to die.

The story that follows is one of repeated cultural clashes, and unexpected meetings of minds, not just between Terrans and Worlders, but between medical scientists and the military, as a desperate fight to save the planet from chaos and destruction begins.

It’s going to be very difficult waiting for volume three.

Martha Wells’ fantasy The Cloud Roads, the first volume of the Books of the Raksura series, introduces a complex, long-lived species with multiple forms, some of whom can fly, all of whom have certain shapeshifting abilities. Through the protagonist, Moon, a youngish male Raksura orphaned young and left to survive among “groundlings” - non aerial humanoid species - who is reunited with other members of his species after years of knowing nothing of who and what he is, Wells is able to explain her creations without needless exposition. And the Raksura are a fascinating creation indeed. The worldbuilding here is deep and satisfying, both in the nature of the Raksura, and in the richness and sometimes strangeness of the world they live in.

Learning about the Raksura, their society and way of life, and their enemies, the vicious Fell, is probably the best part of the first volume. The rest of it is a not unfamiliar story about the outsider that virtually no one trusts until he saves the people who weren’t sure they wanted them, at which point he ends up respected and granted some high status. In this particular story, the people who don’t trust him are part of a “court,” as Raksura communities are called, that has been dwindling for years, through a combination of ill-luck, illness, and attack from outside, that has left many wondering if there’s a curse on the place they settled in, or some other evil stalking their community. But Moon is a fertile winged male, or consort, and few such are born in any community of Raksura, and this community, Indigo Cloud Court, has lost all but one of its consorts to illness or injury, and the remaining consort, Stone, is old. Moon may be an outsider, of unknown history and bloodlines, but he is a consort. And it is his past, his experiences with other peoples, that hold the key to survival when the ancient enemy of the Raksura attack the court and take many of its members prisoner.

It’s very well told, suspenseful, with lots of action, touches of humour, and great characterisation. A well-crafted story, fun to read, and thoroughly engaging.

After finishing The Cloud Roads, I was curious enough to discover what would happen next to Moon, Jade - his mate and the secondary queen of Indigo Cloud Court - and their community, driven from their home by the attack of the Fell. So I started reading The Serpent Sea on the same day I finished The Cloud Roads.

Stone, the old consort and line-grandfather of Indigo Cloud Court, leads the survivors to the Reach, a vast forested land, home to a species of gigantic mountain-trees, each one large enough to shelter a community several times the size of the remnants of Indigo Cloud Court. Here they find the empty mountain-tree where their ancestors had lived when Stone was still a child, a home that, by Raksura custom, they still held claim to. But once they arrive, they make a terrible discovery - the magical heartseed which allows the giant trees to be shaped into a vast, living habitation has been stolen, and without it, the tree that was their ancestral home is dying.

Once more faced with a fight for survival, Moon, Jade and Stone lead a party of Raksura on the trail of the thieves, hoping to find and reclaim the heartseed and heal the mountain-tree so they may begin the slow process of rebuilding their court in a safe home.

Again, the twin delights of the story are its fast-moving plot, and its formidable worldbuilding. We learn more about the Raksura, their history, and how different courts interact, the politics and rituals of greater Raksura society. And we see more of this fantastic and complex world that Wells has created.

The third volume of the Books of the Raksura, The Siren Depths, begins shortly after the conclusion of The Serpent Sea. With their home tree healing, and the community settling into their new life in the Reaches, Moon and Jade decide it’s time for her to being their first clutch - but before they can conceive, news that may imperil their future together arrives. The story of Moon’s early life has spread among the other courts of the Reach, and a formal embassy arrives to deliver a message on behalf of distant Onyx Night Court. Moon, it seems, is the survivor of a Fell attack on a small court that had fissioned off from Onyx Night - and there are other survivors, including one of the queens, who claims Moon as a member of her court, and refuses to acknowledge the union between Moon and Jade. Without the consent of his home court’s queen, Moon cannot, by Raksuran custom, contract a union, and must return to Onyx Night Court.

Jade is unwilling to give up her relationship with Moon, and, with Stone and a few other members of Indigo Cloud Court, follows Moon to Onyx Night to claim her mate from his queen - who, he learns, is also his birthmother. As Moon begins to piece together the story of his childhood, and Jade struggles to convince his mother, Malachite, that Moon belongs to her, an old enemy resurfaces. Both Onyx Night Court and Indigo Cloud Court have suffered deep wounds at the hands of the Fell, and their reappearance brings about an uneasy truce as members of both courts unite to foil the long-laid plans of the Fell.

Again the story Wells tells is tightly plotted, full of action and suspense, reversals and revelations. We learn more about the linked history of Raksura and Fell, but at the end of the novel, we are left still in the dark about much that has gone before. Fortunately, there are more Raksura novels to read.

More novelettes from 1942 pulp magazines.

Isaac Asimov’s “Runaround” is one of the Mike Donovan Robot stories, in which a robot acts strangely and Donovan has to figure out why, and how to fix the problem. Both error and solution usually involve some bizarre circumstances that impacts on the way the robot resolves the tensions between the famous Three Laws of Robotics, and this story falls perfectly into the pattern. A robot with a deliberately heightened sense of self preservation is given a casually worded order to do something that would endanger him. In this case, the two a mathematically balanced, causing the robot to run in circles around the location he was ordered to, while singing Gilbert and Sullivan songs. Kind of amusing, standard Asimov robot story.

1942 was the year in which Isaac Asimov published the first of the stories that would eventually become his iconic Foundation series. “Foundation” is the origin story, which gives us the basic background to the series, and covers the first “Seldon crisis” - how will Terminus, the remote and relatively isolated home of the First Foundation and the Encyclopedists, hold into its independence as the Empire crumbles? It really was one of the most ambitious concepts of its time, even granting that lots of writers were creating lengthy and complex histories for their fictional universes, from Heinlein to “Doc” Smith. Just one month after “Foundation” appeared in print, the second story dealing with the next Seldon crisis, was published as “Bridle and Saddle.”

1942 also saw the publication of Asimov’s “Friar of the Black Flame,” in which an Earth ruled by the reptilian Llhasinu from Vega are driven from Earth and destroyed by a battle force drawn from all the human worlds. It’s fairly standard milsf, but what makes the story interesting is that it mentions Trantor as one of the human worlds, establishing it as part of the backhistory of the Foundation series.

Alfred Bester’s “The Push of a Finger” is a story of the sort we now associate with the “butterfly effect” - the idea that a butterfly’s wings flapping could a tornado on the other side of the world - though of course it predates that formulation. In a future society where the prime principle is stability, a machine is developed capable of calculating the future - and it predicts the end of the universe in a catastrophic scientific experiment in only a thousand years. The pronosticators use the machine to track back to the one moment that, if changed, can prevent the disaster. There’s a surprise plot twist, of course, which the modern reader will immediately deduce because we’ve seen it too many times, but the story is well told and, I expect, was fairly new and original back in 1942.

Lester del Rey’s novelette “My Name Is Legion” is an example of the “time loop” story, in which the subject is caught in the same sequence of time, looping through the same events. In this story, it’s a defeated Hitler trapped in the loop by a scientist bent on revenge for the deaths if his Jewish wife and children, and it is a particularly nasty loop with an all-too-appropriate end built into it. Quite an effective story.

“Though Poppies Grow,” also by del Rey, is the most powerful of all the war-themed anti-fascism stories I’ve read in the past few weeks, and there have been quite a few of those, what with the US being at war in 1942. In this story, the ghost of the Unknown Soldier from WWI is called forth from his tomb, acting out the promise from the famous poem - “If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.” The writing in this novelette is so evocative, so well-honed, as del Rey follows the young soldier, confused, knowing only that he has a mission, wandering through the streets of Washington, touching people as he passes in various ways. At first he does not know he is dead, a ghost, but slowly as it dawns on him, he is overwhelmed, until at last, he is led to understand his role is to remind these who waver, or are complacent, that there can be no compromise with fascism, with tyranny, with hatred. The story is exquisitely told, the character made so real you can feel his struggle to understand, the message as important today as it was in 1942.

A story in a completely different vein, del Rey’s Lunar Landing s about a mission to the moon, sent in the (faint) hope of rescuing three men from the first lunar voyage. The crew of the Moth - five men and two women - encounter serious problems in landing themselves, and their search for the first ship becomes even more important because they hope to cannibalise it for parts they’ll need to get home themselves. But very little goes as planned in this mission, beginning with the first surprise, plant and animal life adapted for survival on the moon. As I’ve noted elsewhere, del Rey’s style, like Heinlein’s, has aged well. His characters are quite fully and realistically developed, and the two women in the story are intelligent, brave and have lived lives of their own - they have relationships with men, but are not defined solely by them.

Ross Rocklynne’s “Jackdaw” portrays the bewilderment of an alien species on discovering a world where only one living being remains, alone on a planet whose cities, roads and farms have been destroyed by massive bombardment. When the lone survivor dies in a suicide attack on their craft, they are bewildered, but despite their best attempts, the end of the species and the actions of its last member remain incomprehensible to a species that cannot envision war.

“QRM—Interplanetary” by George O. Smith is a cautionary tale of what can happen when you put a businessman whose only focus, and area of expertise, is cost-cutting, in charge of a facility that depends on scientific and engineering excellence to function. QRM, we are told, is the shortwave code for man-made interference in radio transmission. The story takes place in a communications relay station on an asteroid whose orbit is positioned such as to ensure radio transmission between Earth and Mars at all points of both planets’ orbits. The man-made interference is a new Director who knows nothing about either the technical aspects of communication, nor the intricacies of life in an artificially sustained environment. The consequences of his policies, while humorously described, are disastrous. Eventually, the proper order is restored, but not before his decisions come close to killing everyone on the station.

1942 was the date of E. Mayne Hull’s first published work, a haunting novelette called “The Flight That Failed.” Set during the war, it’s the story of a time traveller who tries to avert the destruction of a plane crossing the Atlantic with a secret cargo that will change the course of the history he knows if it gets through.

Fredric Brown’s “The Star Mouse” is a rather poignant tale about a mouse who is shot into space in a small experimental rocket built by your standard eccentric tinkering scientist. Mitkey, as he’s been called by the professor, and his rocket come to the attention of a civilisation of very small people living on an asteroid that happens to be passing near earth. Concerned about potential threats from humans, they explore Mitkey’s memories to find our what they can about human civilisation - but doing this involves giving Mitkey intelligence equal to that of humans. Mitkey goes home again, but alas, the boost in IQ doesn’t last. Still, he survives, is reunited with his mate, and the professor provides him with lots of cheese.

In Jane Rice’ “Pobby” a writer of horror starts a new story - his idea is to tell a gruesome tale of a poor farmer named Pobby who finds a strange seed, plants and waters it, hoping that it might grow into a rare flower that will make him some money, only to be eaten by it once it flowers. As he starts to write his installments for magazine publication, however, someone named Pobby, who looks and talks like the character he’s writing about, appears to various of his friends, saying he needs to find the writer and get him to stop making him grow the flower, because he doesn’t want to die. Finally, Pobby and the writer meet face to face, but the writer persists in following his story - until he finds himself in a writers block just before the final scene. Frustrated, he travels to the lace where he has set Pobby’s farm, finding the town much as he’s written it, with characters he’s mentioned, and Pobby’s farm, where he discovers the cause of his block - Pobby, out of desperation, has written his own ending to the story. An interesting exploration of the conceit that characters can take on a life of their own.

“The Magicians’ Dinner,” also by Jane Rice, is a comic ghost story about a young bride, married to a magician, who tries to handle a dinner for forty in their first home, when she’s never cooked before. Fortunately for her, her family’s long-dead cook decides to return from the other side to save her firmer employers’ daughter’s bacon, so to speak. The tale is told in first person, the narrator is rather self-depreciating and quite engaging and likable, so that the story comes across as light-hearted and sweet. We will pass over the class issues and the trope of the help who care more for the families of their employers than they can for their own, and some if the annoyingly sexist assumptions about how marriages between men and women should work.

In Rice’s “The Elixir,” the narrative voice is again a somewhat unconventional woman, a out-spoken, accident-prone, unmarried writer of mystery novels. In this light-hearted time travel yarn, Amy Parrish’s equally unconventional neighbour, Clare Holloway, throws a Halloween party and Amy decides to attend as a witch. While waiting for the party to get started, Amy mixes up a batch of punch, tossing in liquor, ice cream, and halloween candy, while reciting some off-the-cuff doggerel, and ends up in Salem during the witch hunts. Much strangeness ensues, but all ends well, with Amy back in her own time, wondering if everything happened as she recalls it, or if she was just drunk silly and hallucinating. Having read several of Rice’s stories now, I must say that I am quite delighted with her descriptive style, which is both unique and very apt, and her mastery of tone. It’s a pity that her work is not remembered nearly as well as that of other writers of this era.

Fonda Lee’s young adult novel Exo is set in a future society where humans are subordinate to an alien race, the zhree. The fortunate humans are “marked,” tattooed to indicate that they are loyal to a zhree patron. Most other humans struggle to find work, hoping to be marked themselves. And some humans resist, even after a century of zhree presence on earth.

Donovan Reyes is 17, and marked, a soldier-in-erze. He’s an exo, surgically modified with alien technology that protects him for projectile weapons, heals his wounds, gives him advantages over unmodified humans. But it still doesn’t prevent him from being captured by the resistance, known as Sapience, during a routine check of a civilian tip. What keeps the resistance from killing him at first is the fact that he’s the son of the Prime Liaison, the human representative of the zhree.

Lee’s vision of conquerors and resistance is a nuanced one. The alien zhree take good care of their human associates, especialy those accepted into the zhree social network, those “in erze.” They are patronised, they have no political autonomy, they have been colonised, but they are not slaves. It’s very much a rcapitulation of the “white man’s burden” style of colonial rule, with the zhree as benevolent rulers and compliant humans as junior partners.

And the resistance is not necessarily the ‘good guys’ - they are engaged in guerilla warfare, and that includes all the tools, including bombings, assassinations, hostage-takings and provocations intended to make the aliens deal more harshly with humans, to generate more support for the cause. They torture captured exos to death and release films of these executions. They don’t protect innocent civilians caught up in violent interactions with zhree or human exos. They are fighting by any means necessary and there is little that’s noble about their methods - it’s a realistic picture of resistance fighters justifying the means by the ends.

As an exo, Donovan is “other” to both non-modified humans, and zhree. He is only really comfortable with other exos. Though his father sees him and other exos as a bridge between the two peoples, he is in reality neither fully part of either group. As if to underscore the way his identity is caught between worlds, once he is taken to a secret resistance, he learns that the mother who left him as a child is one of the resistance leaders. Part human, part zhree, he is also caught between the humans who comply, and the humans who resist, bound by ties of family to both factions.

Lee crafts a tightly woven story, combining YA themes of coming to terms with the influence of one’s parents and finding one’s own moral code with standard science fiction themes of alien invasion and colonisation and the use of advanced technology. All of the factions - rebels, marked humans, exos and zhree - are drawn with complexity; there are no clear heroes or villains, and no monolithic blocks where everyone shares the same opinions. There are just sentient beings doing what they think is best for their people, however they may define that. I thought that Donovan’s situation at the end of the book was a little far-fetched, but so did several of the characters, which made it a bit more believable. This the first book in a series, and I am curious to see where it leads.

Ann Leckie’s latest book, Provenance, is a most engaging science fictional political thriller cum murder mystery. Set in the Radchaii universe, but not in the Radch itself, it’s a smorgasbord of plots, conspiracies, political infighting, diplomatic maneuverings, hidden identities, thefts, attempted invasions, and murder, where every major character and most minor ones have at least one hidden agenda and no one’s motives can be assumed. And that is why it’s so much fun.

I’m not even going to try to explain the details of the plot, because before we’re through the first chapter, it’s gotten hopelessly complicated by circumstances. The protagonist is Ingray, the daughter of a powerful politician in the Hwae government. Overshadowed by her sibling Danach, who is favoured to become the heir to her mother’s power and position, Ingray has come up with a very risky scene she hopes will improve her house’s fortunes and her own position in her mother’s eyes. That scheme involves the dishonored and exiled child of another powerful house, and some very valuable historical documents, known as vestiges, purporting to show the origins of that house. But things get complicated, and then they get more complicated, and then... well, that’s why I’m not trying to give any plot details. You’ll have to read it for yourself. But one thing that’s very important to the success of this novel is that Ingray, despite her attempts to scheme and plot, is basically a nice person. That’s part of why things get so complicated for her. But it’s why you want to keep reading, because you really want everything to work out well for her.

A lot of the action, the scheming, the secrets and mysteries, centre around vestiges. The Hwae have a deep regard for the histories of things - houses, events, people. And what other peoples might treat as souvenirs, or interesting historical artefacts, are matters of great seriousness in their culture. A signed menu from an important dinner. The original draft of an important law. A floor tile from a building where something significant happened once. These are vestiges. For the Hwae, vestiges have almost the status of sacred artefacts. They connect them to their past, tell them who they are by declaring where they come from, what they have done, and who they have been.

As one might gather from the title, history, documentation of history, and the legitimacy of such documentary evidence is at the heart of much of the plots and conflicts in the novel, from the ownership of a space ship, to the foundations of a house, to the origins of an entire people. The social and philosophical questions that underlie the narrative are very much about how we construct history and self, and the value we place on how things came to be, in comparison to how things are. As one of the characters says: “Who are we if our vestiges aren’t real?”

I read Nancy Kress’ novella Yesterday’s Kin because I wanted to know what seeds she started from in adapting that initial story to what is planned to be a trilogy of novels, the first if which, Tomorrow’s Kin, I anticipate reading.

Yesterday’s Kin is a combination first contact/approaching apocalypse/medical thriller story. Aliens arrive on Earth, only to announce two equally starting facts. First, they are in fact humans, somewhat altered by tens of thousands if years if evolution on an alien planet, where their ancestors had been settled, seeded by an unknown ancient race. Second, they have come to warn their distant cousins that the path of the solar system is about to pass through a cloud of alien spores, which has already killed the inhabitants of two of their colonies.

They offer assistance in helping to find a vaccine, or at least some form of treatment. They also seek members of their closest human kin, a rare and very old haplogroup that us almost extinct in Earth, but which all of their people are members of.

The story focuses on the family of scientist Marianne Jenner, the geneticist who discovered the existence of this rare haplogroup on Earth. The aliens ask her to take charge of finding other members of their haplogroup, and so she and her team join other researchers on the alien’s space ship, moored in the New York City harbour.

The science of the story is fascinating, as is the exploration of different responses to the presence of the aliens, the news they bring, and the actions they take. There are several not entirely unexpected plot twists - if you’re reading carefully you figure them out just a bit before they happen - and a lot of potential for the story to continue.

I’m very much looking forward to the expanded and extended story.

Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti - Home, begins less than a year after the first Binti novella. Binti and her Meduse companion Okwe have both been studying at the great Oomza University, Binti in mathematics and Okwe in weapons. But Binti becomes aware if a need drawing her home, and so, with Okwe at her side, she makes the return journey to Earth.

If the first Binti story was about finding communication and common ground with the other and the enemy, then this second story is about the consequences to those who try to make such contacts and keep them open. It is about the effects that going beyond the narrow confines of expectation and tradition has on the family, the community, the network of relationships around one. It is about being open to change and new ideas, new ways of being, of becoming.

Binti’s journey continues, as she becomes more apart from the people of her childhood, and encompasses more of who she can be.

Yoon Ha Lee's Ninefox Gambit, the first volume of the Machineries of Empire trilogy, is a mindfuckingly brilliant piece of work.

It is a story told many times before, of rebellion and war and political intrigue and the battle for hearts and minds, but never told in such a casually alien way. Lee drops us into a universe that does not work the way ours does, a universe built not on physics and facts, but mathematics and belief, into a political environment where a rebellion in which a heretical calendar that has been adopted in one captured fortress changes the way that technology works in the space around it, where the essential skills needed to fight the rebels are not just leadership, tactics, and battle skills, but intuitive mathematics and the ability to think flexibly while maintaining total loyalty to the ruling hexarchate and the consensus reality enforced by the orthodox calendar and the rituals that derive from it and structure every aspect of life.

Kel Cheris - Kel being her designation as one of six personality types recognised by the hexarchy - is that rare person, a battle commander who can function with originality within the rigidity of her society, who can recalculate the equations that shape reality within a hair's breadth of heresy without crossing the line.

But Cheris is young, and has never commanded a large scale operation. To face the calendrical rot spreading out from the rebel base in the Fortress of Scattered Needles, Cheris will need the strategic skills and experience of a long dead mad general whose consciousness has been preserved, whose advice can only be accessed by grafting his personality to her own - and whose secret agenda may result in her destruction.

I can not begin to give the alienness of the hexarchate's universe a fair description. The book must be read, the universe entered wholeheartedly, to experience what Lee has done in his worldbuilding in this novel. Yet at the same time, the humanity and depth of the characters makes the strangeness real, even if it is never quite understood.

A truly astounding first novel.

Finally, there is a collection of Eleanor Arnason's short fiction set among the alien Hwarhath, appropriately titled Hwarhath Stories: Transgressive Tales by Aliens. What makes the collection even more delightful to read is that Arnason has framed it as an anthropological investigation of Hwarhath culture and the response of the Hwarhath to contact with humans through their stories, and has fleshed out the volume with scholarly analyses of what these tales tell us about the Hwarhath.

As the Introduction, supposedly written by Rosa Haj of the Independent Scholars Union, explains:

"As far as can be determined, the stories in this collection were all written after the hwarhath learned enough about humanity to realize how similar (and different) we are. Our existence has called into question many ideas about life and morality that most hwarhath would have called certain a century ago. With two exceptions, the stories don’t deal with humanity directly. Instead, the authors are looking at their own culture through lenses created by their knowledge of us. Reading this fiction, we can begin to learn about our neighbors in known space. We may even learn something about ourselves."

I had read most of the stories collected here at one tine or another, but it was most enjoyable to read them again, and to savour the ones I had missed until now. And to ponder the ways in which transgressions both change and preserve societies.

Becky Chambers' debut novel, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, is a delicious read. It focuses on the experiences of the multi-species crew of Wayfarer, a tunnelling ship specifically designed to create the equivalent of stable wormholes between planets that facilitate intergalactic travel. Captain Ashby Santoso and his crew are a motley bunch, the ship mostly held together by the eccentric brilliance of her two human techs, Kizzy and Jenks, and the ship's AI Lovey. The most indispensable crew member is their Navigator Ohan, a Sianat pair - one body, two entities, one a symbiotic infection that enables the Pair to perceive the otherspace they tunnel through. The actual flying of the ship is done by pilot Sissex, a cold-blooded but extremely affectionate Aandrisk. The ship's doctor, a six-legged Grum who answers to the name of Dr. Chef, doubles as the cook and gardener. Rounding out the crew is Corbin, another human, who is responsible for maintaining the production of the algae used to fuel the ship. Into this mix comes Rosemary, the ship's new clerk, whose ability to navigate the bureaucracies of multiple worlds will make the Wayfarer more likely to win and effectively complete higher-end contracts.

The first of these is a very valuable contract - requiring them to travel in normal space for a full year to the home planet of a species newly welcomed into the Galactic Commons, and then "punch" the tunnel back to GC space.

The story unfolds slowly, giving us time to enjoy discovering the depths and mysteries of the characters, and their cultures. It's in some ways a different kind of space story, one that's more about the people undertaking a tricky mission and how that affects their relationships over time than it is about action and adventure - although there's a fair bit of that, too.

I'm looking forward to more from Chambers - maybe even more tales of the good ship Wayfarer and her crew.

Nnedi Okorafor's novella Binti is, like all of Okorafor's writing, a many-layered narrative that centres black peoples and black culture in a future that is much richer for it.

Contact and communication between different people is key in much of Okorafor's work. In Binti, she tells the story of a gifted young woman who breaks the traditions of her reclusive people to accept an invitation to study at a university renowned throughout the galaxy. But to reach Oomza Uni she must first navigate the human society of the Khoush, who are one of the dominant human cultures, and then survive an unexpected and tragic encounter with the Meduse, an alien people who are at war with the other known species in the galaxy.

Binti's cultural traditions and personal gift for bringing things into harmony allows her to become the first non-Meduse to communicate with the war-like species and reach an understanding of the reasons behind their aggression.

Backgrounding Binti's story and all the issues of contact interactions between peoples, traditions, cultures, and species are alluring glimpses of a fascinating future where mathematics and metaphysics overlap, and starships are grown from genetically modified shrimp. I find myself hoping that Okorafor revisits this future.

Rediscovery (co-written by MZB and Mercedes Lackey, pub. 1993) tells the story of the rediscovery of the planet Darkover by the Terran Empire, more than 2,000 years after the original colonists crashed there. The crew of the survey ship that finds the planet try to follow basic First Contact rules, but when the flyer they send down to make an exploratory visit crashes during a storm in the Hellers, and the powerful young leronis Leonie Hastur senses their plight and sends a telepathic warning to the nearby Aldaran Comyn, that intention evaporates. Fortunately for the Terrans, crew members Elizabeth Macintosh and David Lorne have some telepathic ability, which enables Kermiac Aldaran to communicate with them. Before long, it's been verified that the Darkovans are descended from the colonists of a Lost Ship, the planet has been assigned Restricted Status - meaning a spaceport can be build if local government agrees, and limited trade may be permitted - and Lord Kermiac has granted the Terrans land to build their port near the village of Caer Donn. Lorill Hastur, Leonie's twin brother, is sent by the comyn of the other domains to investigate the situation.

There are, of course, many complications, including a secondary plotline involving Lorill Hastur, Leonie's twin brother, another Terran telepath, Ysaye Barnett, and Leonie, who is in telepathic contact with both of them during much of the novel. This ends in death for Ysaye and complete withdrawal from outside telepathic contact for Leonie after Lorill and Ysaye are inadvertently exposed to kiresith pollen intended as a trap for Elizabeth.

Meanwhile Elizabeth and David, now married and planning to remain on Darkover as Spaceport personnel, are captured for ransom by bandits while on a field trip. When the Terrans rescue them using aerial weapons that violate the Compact banning weapons that operate at more than an arm's length distance, setting off a dangerous forest fire in the process, only the Aldarans - who do not follow the Compact - remain interested in contact with humans. And so the first Terran spaceport on Darkover is built in the Hellers, at Caer Donn, and the pattern of relations between the Empire and the six Domains of the Comyn is set.

With respect to sexual politics, we see clearly the patriarchal family structure that has developed on Darkover, with occasional references to the exceptions (or escapes) to the restricted place of women in Darkovan society - life in the Towers, or life as a Renunciate (Free Amazon). Leonie lives in a secluded world where women have power as Keepers, and the Keeper of Arilinn has power at the highest levels as the representative of the Towers. But all other women must have a man to acknowledge their legitimacy or they are without any place in society. All the Darkovan women we see at Aldaran are in some way connected to, legitimated and protected by men - Lady Aldaran, Mariel, Felicia, Thyra. Indeed, the worst thing one can say of a child is that her father is unknown. And as women under the protection of a man, they cannot function as equals. Kermiac tells Elizabeth: "to tell the truth, I am not accustomed to discussing serious business with women."

Terran society, however, appears relatively egalitarian. Because the novels were not written in chronological order, in Rediscovery (written in 1993) which takes place several generations earlier than The Bloody Sun (written in 1964), the Terran Space Service is more integrated, with more women in positions of authority (Ysaye Barrett is the senior computer analyst, Aurora Lakshman is the Chief Medical Officer).

Contraception is freely available, as is abortion, at least within the Service. While sexuality in the Service seems to be a matter of personal choice, it's clear that the various planets in the Empire have varied cultural norms with respect to sexual behaviour. Ysaye comes from a culture that values monogamous marriage and frowns on contraception and abortion. On the other hand, various references are made to planets like Vainwal, where sex work is legal and attitudes seem very permissive.

One of the particularly enjoyable aspects of this novel for me is that many characters who play major roles in the saga of Darkover are shown here as they were before the events that made them crucial characters in the history of Darkover - Leonie and Lorill, but also Kadarin, and Thyra. Jeb Scott will eventually marry Felicia Darriel, and father Rafe and Marjorie Scott. Kermiac's younger sister Mariel will marry Wade Montray; their daughter Elaine will marry Kennard Alton. Elizabeth and David will stay on Darkover and raise their child Magda Lorne. In this book, written well after many of the novels dealing with the generations of contact with the Terrans, Lackey and Bradley have worked into the narrative a host of references to things to come. The narrative itself is rather on the thin side, but for the devoted fan of Darkover, the joy of seeing how it was in the beginning makes Rediscovery a book worth reading.

Thendara House (pub. 1983) is a direct sequel to The Shattered Chain - it details the events immediately following on Jaelle n'ha Melora's freemate marriage to Terran (but Darkovan born and raised) Peter Haldane, and the entrance into the Thendara Guild House of Terran Intelligence Agent Magda Lorne (known among her guild-sisters as Margali n'ha Ysabet) for six months of training and seclusion.

For both women, it is a time of self-discovery. Jaelle, who has repressed her early life in the Dry-Towns, and who has lived since then among Renunciates, finds that her relationship with Peter raises those early memories. She is faced with an internal struggle between the deep, repressed conditioning that drew her to Peter - who is slowly revealed as a domineering and potentially abusive mate - and her identity as a Renunciate - a struggle that is only exacerbated when she realises that she is pregnant. Meanwhile, Magda is challenged to question her Terran values and sense of privilege, and is brought face to face with the reality that she is more deeply attracted to women than she is to men.

In addition to struggles with conditioning and culture shock, both women are dealing with the adult onset of powerful laran - Jaelle because of the resurgence of her childhood memories, which were shut down along with her laran when she experienced her mother's death while in rapport with her, and Magda as a result of her increased contact with other telepaths, including Jaelle.

Thendara House is not only a sequel to The Shattered Chain, however. It is also part of the story of the Forbidden Tower, in which both Magda and Jaelle will play a part. For both women, the connection that leads them to Armida is Andrew Carr, now known as Ann'dra Lanart.

Jaelle, in her role as cultural consultant in Terran Intelligence, is tasked with helping a visiting Terran official, Alessandro Li. Li is a Special Representative of the Senate, sent to investigate whether Cottman Four should retain its Closed World status or be reclassified, and to make recommendations about a Legation. Li is at first very interested in finding out all that he can about the Comyn and the rumours of telepathic abilities among the Darkovan ruling class. When the wreckage of Andrew Carr's downed plane is discovered and it is learned that Carr survived the crash, Li becomes fixated on finding out what happened to him.

Meanwhile, Magda meets Andrew when, along with a number of other Renunciates, she travels to the Kilghard Hills near Armida to help in fighting a fire. While they do not know each other, she recognises him as Terran - and vice versa. She believes him to be an Intelligence agent in deep cover, and later on, when she meets Alessandro Li, she innocently mentions seeing an agent at Armida. Li makes the connection between this unknown Terran and the missing Andrew Carr, and when all other attempts to contact Carr are thwarted, he sets out alone, unaware of a severe storm coming, to travel to Armida and confront him.

When Jaelle discovers what he has done, she determines to go after him, knowing the danger he is in. Peter attempts to stop her, threatening to have her declared temporarily insane due to her pregnancy, and placed in restraints. Jaelle lashes out and Peter is rendered unconscious (though Jaelle believes she has killed him). Jaelle, in emotional turmoil and psychic distress, heads out after Li, stopping briefly at the Guild House where she tries to see Magda. Magda, unfortunately, is in a meeting with the House Guild-Mother, and doesn't learn that Jaelle was asking for her until much later. Reaching out with her untried laran, she is able to discern where Jaelle is headed and why. Coming suddenly to understand that she is in love with Jaelle, she rides out after her. Magda finds Jaelle just in time for them both to find shelter from a sudden flood, but they are trapped by the rising waters. Jaelle miscarries and once more, Magda's laran enables her to reach out for help. A rescue party led by Andrew arrives, having also found and rescued Alessandro Li. During Jaelle's recuperation at Armida, both women realise that they have grown beyond both the limitations of their respective cultures, and the oppositional renunciations that form the essence of the Guild. Possessed of powerful laran, the next step for them is to join the Forbidden Tower - thus bringing together in Jaelle and Damon Ridenow the parents of Cleindori Aillard.

In Jaelle's experiences, we see through her encounters with other Terrans and with the cultural assumptions inherent in the way life and work are structured in the Terran Zone, the sexism of the Terran culture.

From the Terrans, Jaelle must deal with having her identity elided in a way that goes against her Renunciate's oath - among the Terrans, she is no longer Jaelle n'ha Melora, but Mrs. Peter Haldane. She is Haldane's wife, Haldane's girl, even Haldane's squaw. On the other hand, she encounters men in the Terran Service who accept her competence without question and work beside her without concern that she is a woman.

However, because Peter is Darkovan-raised and (as we are reminded several times) psychosexual development is fixed before adolescence, Peter's responses in intimate relationships are more typical of a Darkovan man who has acclimatised to Terran surroundings, than of a citizen of the Terran Empire. As Peter and Jaelle embark on their marriage, we see how the patriarchalism of Darkovan society affect relationships between men and women. Jaelle herself comes to think that it is the Darkovan in Peter, not the Terran, that creates problems between them: "Maybe it is not the Terran in Peter I find objectionable; maybe it is his Darkovan side which insists I must be no more than his wife and mother of his children… other Terran men are not like that."

Jaelle faces endless criticism from Peter over her inability to behave like a good wife, in either the Terran or Darkovan sense. When she acts "inappropriately" due to culture shock or the need to preserve her sense of autonomy, he lectures her on how this reflects poorly on him:

"I'm working under Montray now, and I'm in enough trouble with him without having him think—" he stopped, but to Jaelle, surprisingly, it was as if he had spoken aloud what was in his mind; think I can’t manage my wife.

As their relationship worsens, Jaelle comes to see that for Peter, love is equivalent to possession, and that he expects her as a matter of course to see to all his needs: "...and suddenly she knew him as Magda had known him, he really believed that he could treat her as valet, comrade-in arms, personal servant, breeding-anima, and somehow repay it all just with the ardor of his lovemaking..."

Nor is Peter's sexism limited his attitudes toward Jaelle. Because her heightened laran enables her to sometimes read his thoughts, Jaelle gains awareness of how he thinks about the new head of Intelligence Cholayna Ares, and his former wife and colleague Magda.

Not fair, dammit, I spent five years setting things up so that when Darkover got an Intelligence service I'd be at its head, and now some damned woman walks in and takes over. Bad enough playing second fiddle to Magda..."

When she finally tells Peter that she no longer wants to remain married to him, he responds that he will not allow her to leave - asserting his belief that she belongs to him and cannot break their connection without his permission, despite the fact that in Terran marriages, a married woman is not property, as she is under Darkovan law.

She detected a glimmer in his mind of logical resentment; women were damned unreasonable creatures, yet a man was at their mercy if he wanted children, and how else could they have any immortality? It almost made her pity him. “Don‟t be silly, Jaelle. I‟m not going to let you divorce me, not with a baby coming. I owe it to my child at least, to protect and look after his mother, even if we‟re not getting along too well.”

Thus in the short space of a few months, the intimate portrayal of the deterioration of their relationship brings into sharp relief the glimpses we have had previously of the traditional Darkovan marriage and the attitudes that shape it.

Magda's experiences in the Thendara Guild House mirror in some ways the early years (late '60s and early '70s) of the feminist movement - in particular the use of consciousness-raising groups to become aware of - and change - internalised sexist conditioning and to examine gender roles, institutionalised sexism, and nature of the differences between male and female. The other significant themes explored through Magda's life as a new Renunciate are lesbianism and transgender issues (through the emmasca character Camilla).

As a newly sworn Renunciate, Madga is expected to go through a period of training and seclusion, during which she may only leave the Guild House with permission of on the Elders of the House. At one of the first group meetings, the Guild Mother tells her and the other trainees "... you will learn to change the way you think about yourselves, and about other women.”

During her time in the Guild House, Magda comes to realise how pervasive same-sex attraction is on Darkover - and not just among Renunciates, although same-sex relationships between women are taken more seriously in the Guild than outside it, where such relationships between women are seen as adolescent fancies or secondary relationships, insufficient to keep a woman from her primary function, to marry a man and bear children.

Men may swear such oaths. And yet for women, such an oath is always taken, it seems, as a thing for untried girls, and means only, I shall be bound to you only so long as it does not interfere with duty to husband and children…”

In this perspective, it would appear that the frequent accusations against Renunciates, that they are all lovers of women and seduce honorable wives away from their husbands, refers not to the fact that many of them are in fact lesbian or bisexual, but that they value such relationships - and indeed, all relationships between women, sexual or not - as highly, or even more highly, than they do relationships between women and men. It is not that they love women, but that in doing so they choose not to be available to men.

Through the struggles of both women to find their true selves and desires, MZB explores much of the feminist analysis and praxis of second wave feminism of the 60s and early 70s. The nature of the patriarchy, the role of cultural conditioning, attitudes toward child bearing and rearing, alternative family structures, instititionalised sexism, the effects of sexism on men, the question of living separate from men as much as possible, even the debates over the role of lesbians in the movement, all have their expression in the inner journeys of Magda and Jaelle. It would be a rare woman of that era who did not see something of her own experiences and struggles somewhere in the pages of this novel.

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My life in books

Books in my life

Entries tagged with t: alien cultures

Heinlein’s Juveniles Part II

Short Fiction: February 23 2019

Becky Chambers: Record of a Spaceborn Few

Ruthanna Emrys: Deep Roots

Tanya Huff: An Ancient Peace

Nnedi Okorafor: Binti - The Night Masquerade

Eleanor Arnason: Selected Short Fiction

Nancy Kress: If Tomorrow Comes

Martha Wells: Books of the Raksura

Reading for the Retro Hugos: Novelettes Part II

Fonda Lee: Exo

Ann Leckie: Provenance

Nancy Kress: Yesterday’s Kin

Nnedi Okorafor: Home

Yoon Ha Lee: Ninefox Gambit

Eleanor Arnason: Hwarhath Stories

Becky Chambers: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Plane

Nnedi Okorafor: Binti

Marion Zimmer Bradley and Mercedes Lackey: Rediscovery

Marion Zimmer Bradley: Thendara House