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The Dispossessed — Ursula K. LeGuin

Published on January 21, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of The Dispossessed

The Dispossessed
Ursula K. LeGuin
319 pages
published in 1974

After the Earthsea trilogy and of course The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed is arguably Ursula LeGuin’s most famous novel. It was one of a small group of novels in the early seventies –including e.g. Joanna Russ’ The Female Man that took the American New Wave and science fiction as a whole into a much more explicit political direction. It’s a novel that’s still controversial today, or at the very least can still lead to heated debates. The Dispossessed has been hugely influential in radicalising whole generations of fans, while there are plenty of conservative science fiction fans for whom its is a symbol of everything that went wrong with science fiction in the seventies.

The Dispossessed, firmly in the utopian tradition of Herland and looking Backward is a travelogue, set on the double planets of Urras, stand-in for seventies America and Anarres, the “ambiguous utopia” of the subtitle. The protagonist Shevek is a brilliant young physicist whose passion for science leads him to travel from his anarcho-syndicalist home planet to Urras because there he hopes to find the support he needs to finish his thesis. In alternating chapters we get to see his journeys to and on Urras as well as his upbringing and life on Anarres.

Anarres is a harsh world, barely liveable with limited resources; it’s dependent on exporting certain rare minerals and metals to Urras to earn some of the support it needs to keep going. Settled two hundred years before in a grand bargain to prevent an anarchist uprising on Urras, the resulting society has been shaped both by the necessities of life on Anarres as well as the ideology of its founders. The result is a classless, government-less society in which everybody is equal and free to do what they want to, yet in everyday life the emphasis is very much on keeping consensus and sharing. There’s little luxury but a lot of camaraderie, everybody working together to survive on an unforgiven world. Or at least, that’s the theory. The reality is slightly different.

There’s no government on Anarres, but there is Production and Distribution Coordination (PDC), grown out of the crisises Anarres had to deal with, which slowly metastatised into something resembling a professional bureaucracy, including politicing and power struggles. The PDC is responsible for coordinating everything that’s needed to keep people alive, for example assigning people to the jobs that need doing. This is supposed to be done based on the needs of the community as a whole as well as the wants and skills of the individual, who is free to reject the assignment or request another, but in practise some more …difficult… individuals find it hard to get assigned to anything but manual labour.

More insidiously, consensus thinking keeps most of the population in line: you’re free to do what you want as long as your neighbours don’t mind. People like Shevek who are slighly different or slightly awkward at fitting in are punished for it, in more and less subtle ways. In an early scene, the eight year old Shevek has independently discovered one of Zeno’s paradoxes, but when trying to explain it is accused of egotising rather than sharing. In another, a man with a similar name to him attacks him without anybody interfering. Shevek accepts that as the way the world works, any dispute being solely between the two people involved and no business of anybody else. In these and other ways a rough consensus is kept, with those unwilling or unable to keep to it punished in informal ways.

As said, Shevek accepts all this, as it is after all the world he grew up in. While it has its flaws and while life on Anarres can be tough due to the harsh conditions of the world by the end of The Dispossessed it’s clear that it is far more honest and fair than life on Urras; people might starve but they starve together.

When Shevek arrives on Urras he is first struck with the richness of it. The world itself is much richer and friendlier than Anarres, but there’s also the wealth of the people at the university, the fact that he is given several rooms for his own personal use, without the need to share with anyone. Or just the simple fact that Urras’ society is rich enough to throw away paper rather than recycle it. It’s only after he gets used to this richness that he’s able to see the poverty it hides, the sickness that made it possible. Urras is of course a slightly exagerrated view of American society in the seventies, including brutal repression of antiwar and trade union protest as well as a cold war between the two most powerful nations on Urras, one the capitalist nation of A-Lo Shevek finds himself in, the other the vaguely communist nation of Thu.

The way LeGuin builds up the contrasts between Anarres and Urras is clever, as she shows the latter at its most desirable, the former at it least in the first chapter, starting with Shevek being driven from his home and welcomed into the opulence of Urras. She’s also careful to make neither society wholly bad or wholly perfect: the appeal of Urras’ wealth to Shevek is understandable, while despite its flaws, it’s also clear Anarres’ society is superior. This may be ambiguous, but it’s still an utopian society, if a very seventies one with its emphasis on shared suffering rather than shared wealth. The politics of The Dispossessed are well thought out, counsciously worked out, without ever getting preachy. Unfortunately however it’s all let down by a huge but forty years on glaringly obvious blind spot: women.

Because the only two major female characters in The Dispossessed are Shevek’s patient, quietly supportive wife and the woman he sexually assaults on Urras. Of course there’s also Odo, the founder of Anarres anarcho-syndicalism, but she’s there to play the role of safely dead secular saint for the Odonists. Though LeGuin contrasts the even more patriarchal than actual seventies America Urras with the supposedly equality of the genders on Anarres, seeing the actual female characters with such limited roles, only there as props for the protagonist, completely undermines this.

At least for modern audiences. Because I’m not sure how noticable this was to contemporary audiences, back in the days when science fiction was largely a sausagefest and it was no more than natural that even women writers would have male protagonists and women where there only as wives and girlfriends. The Dispossessed was neither the first nor would be the last novel to earnestly talk about equality while undermining itself with what it actually does. This failure shouldn’t necessarily stop you from appreciating what The Dispossessed does, but does show it’s still a product of its time and therefore shows some of the unconscious attitudes of that time. It’s progress of a short that we notice it.

The Time Traders — Andre Norton

Published on January 7, 20141 Comment

Cover of The Time Traders

The Time Traders
Andre Norton
191 pages
published in 1958

If it wasn’t for Project Gutenberg I might’ve never read this novel. Though Andre Norton was one of the most prolific US science fiction writer, mostly writing what we’d now call young adult novels, she never was translated into Dutch much so was missing when I went through my personal Golden Age. It’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve started to catch up with her, in no small part thanks to Gutenberg’s collection of her works. Because until roughly the seventies, American copyright was only valid for a limited time and had to be explicitly renewed, a lot of science fiction pulp and early paperback stories entered the public domain. In this case, the copyright on the original 1958 hardcover publication of The Time Traders was never renewed, making it fair game for Gutenberg.

I picked this out of the available Nortons for two reasons: it was the first book in a series and more importantly, it was a time travel story. It had been a while since I’d last read a good, old fashioned time travel story and this seemed to fit the bill perfectly. After all, it has time agents who have to travel undercover through prehistoric times to find the ancient civilisation from which the Soviets are getting sophisticated weaponry and technology they couldn’t have possibly produced themselves.

But that does point to the novel’s greatest problem: it was written in 1958, at the height of the first Cold War and it shows. It’s not just that this is a straight arms race between heroic, American time travellers and devious Soviet agents, it’s also that the protagonist, Ross Murdock, is an example of that other fifties bugbear, a juvenile delinquent, mollycoddled by society. He thinks he knows how the game is played until he finds himself being drafted in a top secret project, which we, even if the title hadn’t been a dead giveaway, know soon enough is a time travel project, but which costs him some time to find out. Though gifted with a bit of cunning and some inner strength, Ross at first is not the brightest bulb.

The Time Traders starts with Ross being drafted into the project, blind, as alternative to being sent to prison for unspecified crimes. He at first thinks to play along to bide his time until he has an opportunity to escape the polar base he’s sent to, but when his chance at escape would mean betraying the base to the Soviets, he can’t do it. This finally earns him some measure of trust as the goal of the time travel project is explained to him and he begins his training in earnest.

This second part of the book is dominated by I guess you can call it a love story, between Ross and his mentor, an older time agent called Gordon Ashe. Gordon is the father figure Ross never had and he does his utmost to win his respect. This comes to a head as they go on their first time travel journey together, back to prehistoric England, where the agents have established themselves as foreign traders and established a small base. Of course things go wrong and of course it turns to Ross to save the day.

If I’m honest, I would’ve liked to have seen more of Ross and Gordon’s adventures in prehistory, rather than it all devolving in spy games with Russian time agents. Though much of what Norton shows of prehistoric, iron age Britain may be obsolete or have always been nonsense, she does have a good eye for the small, telling detail to make a world come alive and I would’ve liked to spent more time there. The plot itself is of course dated, especially because it is supposed to be set sometime in the near future, but after a while it didn’t bother me. If it would you, there’s an updated version brought out by Baen Books, if I’m not mistaken, which has updated the Cold War plots. I’m not sure that was needed.

The Time Traders was popular enough to spawn three sequels, two of which (but not the second) are also available at Gutenberg, as well as three much later continuations by Norton plus a junior writer. Again, not having read them, I’d be wary to try these latter. Famous writers revisiting popular series with the help of less famous writers never work out.

Remnant Population — Elizabeth Moon

Published on December 30, 2013Leave a comment

Cover of Remnant Population

Remnant Population
Elizabeth Moon
360 pages
published in 1996

Elizabeth Moon is a writer I didn’t pay much attention to until a year or two ago. I’d read one or two of her books and they were competently written military science fiction, better written than those of a David Weber or John Ringo, but nowhere near as good as Lois McMaster Bujold’s. When I decided I needed to read more female science fiction writers, Moon was one of the writers I was giving a second chance. Since then I’ve read roughly half a dozen or so of her novels and my initial impression of her has remained roughly the same. She’s a better writer than she needs to be to sell the sort of stories she usually writes and there’s a bit of hidden depth in her mil-sf stories that’s missing from many of her colleagues, that hint at a greater potential. Yet she seems content to keep on writing the same sort of adventure science fiction and fantasy.

Not always though. On two occasions Moon has attempted to write something else than military science fiction, something more ambitious. The most well known of these two novels is of course her Nebula and Arthur C. Clarke winning 2002 novel, Speed of Dark. The other one is Remnant Population, which is a novel about First Contact, between the hitherto unknown indigenous population of an alien planet and the last remaining inhabitant of a failed human colony. As such, it’s a good case study of Moon’s strengths and weaknesses.

To start with the good bits: the protagonist Ofelia, a cantankerous widowed peasant woman not very enamoured of her youngest child and his wife she’s stuck living with. They’re controlling and bossy, always trying to get her to conform to their ideas of what a respectable widow should look and act like. Coming from a conservative society Ofelia has had more than enough of this her entire life. She resists this the way peasant women have forever, through passive resistance and going her own way as much as she can. It’s the same way in which she avoids being taken aboard the evacuation ship when the colony is abandoned, simply by not being there when the ship takes off.

Throughout the next part of the book, as Ofelia struggles to establish her new life alone and starts enjoying herself, we get to know more of her life before she came to this planet, on another colony world; Earth isn’t mentioned and it’s unclear how long humanity has been colonising other systems. It’s clear, both from what Ofelia tells about her life in the colony as on her homeworld that the society she grew up with, despite having star travelling technology is a conservative one, with a large base of only semi-educated peasants to which Ofelia and her parents belong, very much a “traditional” patriarchy, vaguely Latin American in flavour, though that may just be me. Besides this there’s also a much more technocratic, gender equal, westernised elite that works for the companies and the military. Ofelia doesn’t have much truck for them, as these tend to patronise her as much as her family attempted to control her. She’s glad to be finally alone and beyond the control of either of them.

Ofelia doesn’t stay alone for long; new colonists from a different company show up to reclaim the planet while pretty soon it’s also clear that there is actually indigenous intelligent life on the planet. When the new colonists land on a different continent they’re attacked and killed by these aliens, with Ofelia following everything on the radio. Ever since then she lives in fear the aliens will track her down and kill her too and indeed her worst fears seem to be confirmed when they do show up in her village.

It turns out that the aliens are a lot less hostile than their earlier actions suggested and Ofelia now has to learn to live with them and teach them, something she’s not that enthusiastic about, though gets to appreciate more once she gets used to them. For me it would’ve been perfect had the rest of the book explored the first contact and building up of trust and genuine friendship between Ofelia and the aborigines with their “stone age”, pre-literate oral culture, but Moon felt it necessary to complicate the story by having a human expedition return to Ofelia’s world.

This is probably Elizabeth Moon’s greatest weakness: she can’t write a story without overt conflict for which she needs a villain. In this case the villains are the members of the expedition back to Ofelia’s world, there to determine whether the aborigines are really intelligent and what to do about them. They’re smug, patronising to Ofelia and much much dumber than they themselves realise. While Ofelia manages to establish genuine contact with the aliens, learning to slowly speak their language, the expedition dissolves in petty squabbles, threatening the trust Ofelia had managed to build. In other words, the author’s thumb is very much on the scale at Ofelia’s side.

Making the newcomers more stupid than they should be, making these highly educated and smart specialists too dumb to find their backsides with a map, a compass and a flashlight, cheapens the story. It does fit the overall theme of the story though, which consistently puts Ofelia’s “uneducated” peasant wisdom against the book learning of her social superiors. It’s a deeply conservative message, which isn’t all that surprising coming from Elizabeth Moon, whose writing always has been a bit on the conservative side. The only problem with this here is that she basically has Ofelia defeat straw men, the plot didn’t need these cardboard villains.

Remnant Population then is a flawed but interesting attempt by Moon to write something deeper than the military adventure sf stories she usually writes. It’s unfortunate that she led her worst instincts to take over the last third of so of the story to introduce unnecessary conflict.

Crashcourse — Wilhelmina Baird

Published on December 27, 2013Leave a comment

Cover of Crashcourse

Crashcourse
Wilhelmina Baird
277 pages
published in 1993

Wilhelmina Baird is an interesting writer: wrote some short science fiction at the dawn of the New Wave (as Kathleen James), then returned in 1993 with this, a cyberpunk inspired novel with overtones of the sort of fifties satirical sf Pohl and Kornbluth wrote. She wrote three more novels, two sequels to this, then disappeared. She’s obscure enough not to even have a Wikipedia entry, so it’s unclear if she stopped writing or just couldn’t get published anymore. I vaguely remember that her second novel, Clipjoint, was hailed as a minor classic when it came out, but that’s all I knew of her writing when I first got this.

In the world of Crashcourse the population is divided in a small ruling class of Aris, slightly more Techs and Arts to serve and entertain them, with the vast mass of people being unemployed umps. Cass, Moke and Dosh are three of them, trying to earn enough (illicit) money to get off Earth, Cass as thief, Moke as artist and Dosh as whore. Caught up in a love triangle, with Cass loving Dosh who loves Moke who loves Cass, only wanting to leave if all three of them can leave together. That is, until Dosh is roughed up once too many by one of his clients and temptation comes calling in the form of an Aris with a film proposal.

As Cass is all too well aware, such a film is little more than a legalised snuff movie, where some hapless umps are enticed to sign their lives away in return for a shot at the kind of money that can get them off Earth and into the good life. Meanwhile the audience doesn’t just see them get killed, but actually feels the emotions of the leading actor or actress in a movie. It used to be that the film company didn’t inform their stars that they were on camera, but that had been outlawed — not that this made the films necessarily safer.

Cass — short for Cassandra, as what else could it be — warns against taking the contract, but Dosh is obsessed by becoming a proper actor and sees this as his real break, while Moke is happy enough to go along if only to stop all three of them from staying stuck in their old routines, with no real hope of making it off Earth. Once they have signed the contract, things move fast. Cass and Dosh are caught in a runaway funfair ride, while Moke gets an invitation from a serious art collector to talk about his sculptures and to top it all off, they rescue a young teenage girl from a gang rape.

To be honest, the plot flowed in a familiar pattern from there on out, where of course the “rescue” is all part of the film and the art collector, who the protagonists all dismiss as too obvious a put-on, turns out be genuine. Just as predictable, Cass and her friends, with a little bit of help from the local gangster in love with her, plot to turn the tables on the film company and succeed, but at the cost of the life of one of them.

The plot is therefore slightly pedestrian, while the background is, as said, clearly influenced by cyberpunk, but with a fifties sheen to it. It’s not quite over the top enough to rank with something like The Space Merchants, but it has some of the same elements. A world rigidly divided in haves and have nots, where the vast mass of people have nothing to do but engage in mindless entertainment and crime, while their rulers in turn amuse themselves with them. There’s some use of the usual computer hocus pocus you’d expect in cyberpunk, but it’s marginal; this story could’ve easily been told without it.

Crashcourse, even if predictable, kept me entertained, in large part due to the way Wilhelmina Baird writes Cass, as a self aware, sometimes funny, tough but vulnerable woman, somebody who goes along with a harebrained scheme against her better instincts, out of love. The love triangle between Cass, Dosh and Moke is only sketched, but comes across as warm and real, a far cry from some of the more regretable cyberpunk cliches.

Vast — Linda Nagata

Published on December 1, 20134 Comments

Cover of Vast

Vast
Linda Nagata
403 pages
published in 1998

Space opera used to be terrible, reactionary stories of brawny male heroes with safe anglosaxon names making the galaxy safe for terran manifest destiny by cheerfully genociding any alien races looking at them funny. Long derided as the lowest of the low, though with the occasional saving grace in the form of that elusive “sense of wonder” all science fiction strives to achieve, it was sort of rehabilitated in the seventies by a generation of fans and writers who’d grown up reading the stuff. In the eighties and nineties this led to the socalled New Space Opera, which took that sense of wonder and removed the xenophobia and human supremacy from it. Though in this New Space Opera the universe was far more indifferent to human pretensions than the old stuff, it could still be upbeat, as in e.g. Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels, where hundreds of various human races live happily ever after in an AI controlled utopia.

But not always. In Linda Nagata’s Vast the universe is not just indifferent, but actively hostile to human life. A millions years old alien war has left still active, automated warships behind, warships capable of blowing up suns. As humanity moved out of the Solar System and established colonies around other stars, these Chenzeme ships started to attack. One such attack has left only four survivors, fleeing the attack aboard the Null Boundary, a slower than light spaceship, who have decided to go look for the source of the Chenzeme coursers, somewhere in the swan direction of the Orion arm of the galaxy, all the while being chased by a Chenzeme courser themselves.

Vast is therefore one long chase scene, taking places over centuries of travel time as the Null Boundary moves further into the Orion Arm. It reminded me somewhat of Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space and sequels, which also partially took place onboard vast, ancient slower than light ships moving between star systems. There’s the same feeling of claustrophobia and isolation, though Nagata’s characters are much more strange than Reynolds’.

There’s Lot, infected by the alien Cult virus, which basically makes him want to infect everybody he meets to let them join in a brotherhood of cosmic love. Unfortunately for him, everybody on the ship is immune to him, which means he has no outlets for his urge to infect. It’s unclear where the virus came from, whether it’s related to the Chenzeme or, as some of the characters speculate, their hypothetical enemy.

Then there’s Nikko, the owner of the Null Boundary who most of the time remains within the ship’s systems, only occasionally downloading himself into a meat body and who, during the long centuries that nothing happens, tends to wipe his own memories every ninety seconds, living in minute and a half loops unless something interesting happens.

The two remaining passengers on the Null Boundary are Urban and Clemantine, the most normal and human looking, but like Nikko, each of them can upload and save their memories to the ship’s systems, redownloading in new bodies when needed. Thanks to the cult virus, Lot can’t and is therefore condemned to spending a lot of time in cold sleep. He and Clemantine used to be lovers, but when she was still vulnerable, he infected her with the virus, which put a bit of a strain on their relationship. Now she’s cured but none of the other three trust Lot all that much, suspicious of his virus induced pacifistic leanings.

Vast is a psychological drama, where the questions of where the Chenzeme came from or what their goals were, are never quite answered, but the focus is in how Lot and all deal with their long voyage towards an answer, change and evolve during their journey. It’s not entirely successful, as other than Lot, the characters remain largely two dimensional, not quite convincing. Nikko and Urban especially come across more as a collection of tics and responses than as real people.

Vast is an excellent example of the new hard space opera, playing “fair” with the laws of physics in limiting its space ships to slower than light, while still using miracle technology in the form of nanotech, computer uploads, semi-intelligent alien viruses, not to mention functioning robot warships millions of years old. It attempts to show something of the vastness of space by emphasising how long a journey even between relatively close star systems would be, again something that isn’t entirely succesful. In the end Vast provides a sort of monochrome sense of wonder, much more sober than the old, gaudy space opera of the pulps.