science fiction

Gabriel’s Ghost — Linnea Sinclair

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Cover of Gabriel's Ghost


Gabriel’s Ghost
Linnea Sinclair
447 pages
published in 2005

I’d never heard of Linnea Sinclair before I picked Gabriel’s Ghost up in a secondhand bookstore, but the cover and plot looked interesting. Also, I’m still trying to read more female authors. Googling Sinclair made clear she’s a science fiction romance writer and indeed Gabriel’s Ghost won the 2006 Romance Writers of America’s RITA award for Best Paranormal Romance. Neither this nor the title however means there’s anything paranormal about this novel. Rather, it’s a science fiction adventure story with a somewhat greater emphasis on the romance between the two main characters than usual, which does have some consequences for the rest of the plot.

Gabriel’s Ghost starts imperial fleet captain Chasidah Bergren banished to the prison planet Moabar for crime she didn’t commit. Barely arrived, she had to kill a guard who tried to rape her and only then the real danger began, as the next person she met turned out to be somebody from her past, somebody she thought long dead. Gabriel Sullivan is a rogue and a smuggler she had clashed with repeatedly when she was still a frigate captain, until he died a few years ago. Now he’s back and offering her escape, if she helps him with one little job…

It turns out that somebody high in the empire’s hierarchy is once again breeding a long outlawed biological super weapon: the jukor, a murderous animal originally bred to destroy alien telepaths. Sullivan needs Chasidah for her knowledge of how the imperial navy thinks to help him infiltrate the project and destroy the jukors. She’s not the only one on his team; there’s also one of those alien telepaths, Ren, a Stolorth. In the mepire these are the creatures of nightmares, mindstealers, even seen as demons by the Englarian church and yet this same church has raised him from childhood. It helps that he’s blind and hence unable to use his powers; the Stolorth themselves normally kill their blind kind.

Between Chasidah and Gabriel Sullivan there’s a sexual tension from the start. They not only share a past as nominal enemies, but Gabriel also hides a dark secret he needs to get Chasidah to know and trust him about. He clearly sees her as much more than just a tool; she is skeptical and suspicious and needs to learn to trust him, but it’s hard when he doesn’t tell her even half of what she needs to know and worse, might be actively manipulating her. Ren might not be the only telepath on the team…

Basically then Gabriel’s Ghost has two separate plots running. The first is that of the blossoming romance between Chasidah and Gabriel, while the second is a science fiction adventure of escaping prison planets, stealing spaceships and infiltrating imperial space stations to blow up genetic labs. The two are not always integrated successfully, with the latter at times coming to a halt to explore Chasidah and Gabriel’s romance more.

To be honest, the whole jukor threat doesn’t make much sense anyway. They’re basically hard to kill super predators, but they’re still just animals and you can’t help but think a decently equipped modern day army platoon could make mincemeat of them. They’re certainly not convincing as something that could upset the balance of power in the empire. What also doesn’t make sense, for such a secret project is that so many people know or suspect about it. Chasidah’s almost rape actually turns out to have been attempted because the jukor project uses alien Takan women as brood mares for them, with the poor women dying while giving birth. Apparantly the Takan know this is going on and some of them have decided to rape human women as revenge.

The romance also has some problems. Since Gabriel’s Ghost is told purely through Chasidah’s point of view, we never really get to know just why Gabriel Sullivan is and seemingly always was so in love with her. She herself certainly isn’t clear on this. She thinks she’s plain looking at best, not all that interesting or smart and yet at the same time not only has Gabriel after her, there also turns out to be an ex-husband who still loves her even though she divorced him to choose her career over his wish to get children. Not to mention that Ren the Stolorth, who’s described as being a very male sort of alien, also has something of a thing for her, even if only platonic.

There are also some consent issues playing a role here, as Gabriel not only insists that she asks him no questions about who or what he is, but several times manipulates her perception and memory. It’s not out and out mindrape and she does take him to task for it later on, but it’s uncomfortable and she is slightly too forgiving of it to my taste. It all is a bit too reminiscent of certain outdated romance cliches.

There’s also a lack of female characters other than Chasidah. There’s a jealous ex of Gabriel who shows up in one scene, the ship’s cook who gets a couple of lines and a cliche religious fanatic who turns up on the villain’s side. It barely passes the Bechdel test and emphasises how unique Chasidah is to be able to keep up with the boys.

Despite these flaws, which made Gabriel’s Ghost into a lesser novel than it could’ve been, I still enjoyed reading this. Linnea Sinclair is a good enough writer to keep you engaged throughout the story and it’s only afterwards that you start thinking, hang on, that’s a bit dodgy. What for me in the end made the novel was Chasidah who, while sometimes taking a turn to the cliche, still is a smart, interesting character. She’s unsure of herself, but she does take charge when she needs to and keeps a cool head in danger. Ultimately she is the hero of her own story and she is instrumental in stopping the plot to breed jukors. I wouldn’t mind spending more time with her.

Dragonsong — Anne McCaffrey

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Cover of Dragonsong


Dragonsong
Anne McCaffrey
192 pages
published in 1976

Dragonsong is the first novel in the Harper Hall trilogy of novels that Ann McCaffrey wrote in 1976-1978 as a continuation of the original Pern novels, cite>Dragonflight and Dragonquest, weaving in and out of the main series. The heroine of the series, Menolly, would also show up in the later Dragonriders books, e.g in The White Dragon as a supporting character, occassionally hinting at her adventures in her own series. I hadn’t actually read this particular subseries before, as I never came across them until recently. All I knew was that the Harper Hall books had been consciously written for a young adult audience, unlike the original Pern books.

And reading Dragonsong that impression turned out to be right. This is as close to the platonic ideal of a certain kind of adolescent power fantasy as I’ve ever read. It’s even better than Harry Potter in this regard. You have the young heroine, on the verge of becoming an adult, with a special talent that’s not only unappreciated by her family, but actively suppressed and forbidden from practising it. She of course runs away from home, only to find people who do appreciate her and to find out she’s capable of more than not just her family, but she herself thought she was capable of. That’s the daydream of almost every misunderstood teenager at one point or another.

Menolly is the youngest daughter of the masterfisher Yanus, Sea Holder of Half-Circle Seahold, who is a dour, rigidly conservative man and who rules his hold and family in the same manner. In this he does not differ much from most of his subjects, all focused on the hard task of fishing in Pern’s oceans. Menolly is different, encouraged in her musical talents by the Hold’s resident harper, Petiron, as she works as his assistant in teaching the children of the Hold proper music and songs. Petiron was an old man and over the years Menolly took over more and more of his tasks, but after his death is forbidden by her father to practise her music anymore, especially not where the new harper can hear her.

One of the ways in which Menolly instead flees her miserable existence at the Hold is to undertake all the long, dreary foraging tasks that take her outside for most of the day, away from her family, none of whom are all that sympathetic to her plight. On one of those outings she discovers a group of fire-lizards flying over a cove, where a steep cliff leads down to a sandy beach. These are the creatures that the original Pern colonists genetically engineered to create dragons from, but of course the Pernese don’t know this yet. For Menolly, they’re magical enough on their own.

Meanwhile at home her situation worses and after an illness caused by an infection when she cut herself gutting fish, she decides to run away early one morning. Unfortunately that’s the day that Thread is due to fall. Thread is the reason the dragons were created in the first place, alien spores drifting in from one of Pern’s neighbour planets when its orbits are close enough. Caught out in the open during Threadfall is a good way to get killed. For Menolly there’s no other option than to head to the cave in the cove where the firelizards are living. She arrives there at the same point as the queen’s eggs are hatching and she frantically tries to feed the newly hatched fire-lizards to stop them from flying out into Threadfall. She manages to save nine of them, all of whom imprint and bond with her…

In the wider world meanwhile, the harpers from Harper Hall are busily searching for the mysterious apprentice Petiron was raving about, not realising “he” is a girl. Things come to a head when Menolly is out during a second Threadfall and is rescued by a dragonrider and taken to one of the dragonriders’ Weyrs, at Benden. There she finally realises there is a future for her outside the seahold and that there are other options open to her than either living miserably at home or all alone in a fire-lizard cave…

So yeah, this really is a story in which everything is set up to drive home how special Menolly is. The people who oppress her are all dull, miserable, loathsome if not actively evil, while all the cool people — dragonriders, masterbards, fire-lizards — all recognise her talents immediately. In the hands of a lesser writer, even a J. K. Rowling, this would’ve been tedious, but McCaffrey is good enough to overcome this. This is nowhere near as good a novel as the original two Dragonriders ones, but I would’ve eaten this up when I was twelve.

Dragonquest — Anne McCaffrey

Fantasy, science fiction
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Cover of Dragonquest


Dragonquest
Anne McCaffrey
303 pages
published in 1968

Rereading Dragonflight/Dragonquest I realised something: Anne McCaffrey’s influence on modern fantasy is highly underrated. The Dragonriders of Pern after all was a bestselling series long before a Robert Jordan, J. K. Rowling or Stephenie Meyer had even started writing, functioning as a gateway drug into fantasy and science fiction for a lot of young teenagers the way e.g. the Potter books do now. Yet she is rarely mentioned when we’re talking about the evolution of fantasy, with the potted histories of the genre usually starting with Tolkien, lightly touching on an Eddings or Brooks before getting to the fantasy boom of the nineties and beyond with Jordan, Goodkind, Rowling, Martin et all. Is it just because when the Pern books were first published fantasy was still science fiction’s poor cousin and they were therefore sold as sf?

Certainly the streamlining of genre history often has the side effect of erasing all the awkward, not quite fitting parts of it, in favour of a more teleological approach and too often these awkward fits are female pioneers like McCaffrey. More so than Tolkien she helped shape what modern epic fantasy looks like. The loner, young adult hero or heroine, in telepathic contact with his or her dragon, saviour of the world though looking extremely unlikely to be so at first, all taking place in a largely medivaloid world, that’s all McCaffrey. But there are differences with modern fantasy as well: her dragons were made by science, not magic.

What’s more, her world did not stay medievaloid for long. I didn’t remember it happening so soon, but already here, in the second book in the series, the Pernese start exploring their planet and heritage, rediscovering some of the technology and science their ancestors had to abandon because of Threadfall. This is also a common trope in epic fantasy, but McCaffrey goes further: her characters do not just rediscover, they also research and discover.

Unlike the first book in the series, Dragonquest from the start was written as a single novel, rather than a fixup of shorter stories, but is still somewhat episodic in nature. Most of the plot is driven by the conflict between the old timers, the dragon riders brought back by Lessa in the previous novel, who can’t get used to a more democratic minded Pern where dragon riders no longer get the automatic respect and deference they are used to.

If there’s one flaw McCaffrey had, it was inventing believable villains for her stories, with the more obnoxious old timers never quite convincing and almost completely ineffectual. She just never could really concieve of why anybody would want to harm her heroes…

McCaffrey’s writing is like a warm bath, comfortable and easy to slip into. She was never the greatest stylist in science fiction, but is still a cut above the workman like prose of e.g. an Asimov or Clarke. She’s the sort of writer you do want to read at twelve.

Double Vision — Tricia Sullivan

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Cover of Double Vision


Double Vision
Tricia Sullivan
377 pages
published in 2005

Karen “Cookie” Orbach’s life seems fairly mundane when looked at from the ouside: she hasa job with the Foreign Markets Research Division at Dataplex Corp, does karate as a hobby and a weightloss exercise, has no boyfriend or partner but does has a cat, eats too much out of stress and for comfort, reads a lot of science fiction and fantasy. The thing is, Cookie is psychic and while she did offer her services to the police, who believes an overweight Black woman reading too much Anne McCaffrey? Luckily Dataplex did see her potential and engaged her as a Flier, somebody who can see what’s happening in the Grid, an alien world Cookie can see when she watches television, where see can monitor the progress of the military expedition there and work as a reconnaissance flier for Machine Front, which coordinates the offensive.

Cookie’s mundane even boring life stands in shrill contrast to the dangerous glamour of the Grid. Despite being only a passive observer there, it is much more real to her, much more interesting. It matters, while her routine life outside of it doesn’t. It’s a feeling that any science fiction or fantasy fan can recognise, that idea that whatever fantasy world floats your boat is more important than what happens in real life, but for Cookie that fantasy world is real — or is it?

As a science fiction reader you’re obviously biased towards the strange, the potential hallucination to be real, even if there’s a long tradition to use this against the reader. In Double Vision you start off with the default assumption that what Cookie experiences is real, only for Sullivan to sow doubt in your mind as certain inconsistencies become clearer. For example, if the scouting she does in the Grid is so important, why is it that her boss is only interested in which brands she heard mentioned by the soldiers? What is she really used for?

In real life Cookie is not a standard science fiction hero either –being Black and female for starters– as she’s self effacing, content to go along to get along, struggling with her weight, meek but with outbursts of anger. She comes in her own in the end, gets stronger, both physically through her weight training and karate classes and mentally through her experiences in the grid, but it doesn’t gain her much. At the end of Double Vision she’s in prison for having assaulted her sensei in a fit of anger of his coverup of the sexual assault on her friend.

Said sexual assault is the weakest and most problematic part of the book, as it hinges around certain racist cliches about Asian men and their lust for white women. It takes place in the context of a visit by the Okinawan masters of the karate organisation Cookie’s dojo belongs too, who are feted by the dojo’s owner and his students, when one student remains behind to learn more about the history of karate, or that’s what she thinks in her innocence: she’s blonde and tall, he’s short and dark and speaks broken English. It’s blatant enough that even I noticed it, which doesn’t always happen with racial or sexist imagery.

Fortunately, Tricia Sullivan is a writer honest enough to to recognise these racist undertones in hindsight and decent enough not to be happy with this:

I was working out my personal issues with karate on the page. I had been with a group of Americans travelling to Okinawa to train, and while we were there I learned a little about the American presence on the island. It was only years later that I began to hear of the abusive behaviour of US soldiers toward the Okinawans—especially the women. But I didn’t think this through when I was writing. I’m ashamed of the fact that when I flipped the roles around in Double Vision and made the Okinawan masters visitors to the US (which I did for storytelling convenience) I completely failed to see the ways in which I was reversing the more typical scenario of US male sexual assault upon Okinawan females. I couldn’t see it at the time. I was too busy trying to deal with the way it felt to write about what had happened—the karate side of things more than the sexual side, to be honest—and so I didn’t look at the material properly.

This is exactly the sort of honest examination of your own privileges and innate biases that you should engage in when called upon them, yet we rarely see. I can only wish I would be so honest and fair in similar circumstances.

Though this is a blemish on the novel as a whole, I think it’s still a worthwhile book to recommend. I can’t really speak to the validity of Sullivan’s portrayal of Cookie and how fair it is, being neither Black nor a woman, but certain parts ring true. What it feels to be a large person, a fat person, how food, especially bad food, junk food, plays a role in your life as a substitute, a placebo for everything you can’t get because of your size, knowing full well that it doesn’t help. What Sullivan also hits just right is that feeling of just living your life waiting for something important to happen to you, living vicariously through science fiction.

Furthermore, Double Vision is a quietly feminist science fiction novel. Where in real life Cookie daily experiences some sexist jab or other, in the Grid there are no men, only women, as the men fucked up, leaving it up to them to clean up their mess. Everything in the story revolves around Cookie’s relationships with other women. Of the men in the story, only two are sympathetic towards Cookie, with only one having a real friendship with her; the majority are disinterested bystanders or active harassers. As with Nicola Griffith’s novels, this is done so naturally that you don’t notice how different this is from your usual science fiction story until you actually pay attention to it.

In short, Double Vision is flawed in some aspects, as Tricia Sullivan has acknowledged, but it has its heart in the right place and ultimately overcomes its flaws. Recommended.

Hellflower — Eluki bes Shahar

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Cover of Hellflower


Hellflower
Eluki bes Shahar
252 pages
published in 1991

Eluki bes Shahar is a science fiction and fantasy writer better known as Rosemary Edghill, the form of her name she now prefers. She’s been active since the late eighties, starting her career writing straight romance novels, then moving on to science fiction and fantasy, most recently in collaboration with Mercedes Lackey. I think it’s fair to say she’s only been middling succesfull as a writer, somebody largely forgotten as an science fiction writer. The question is, is she worth rediscovering?

At first glance Hellflower seems to be a bog standard space opera or adventure sf story. Hardbitten female independent trader/starship captain rescues a young nob from a mugging, due to his honour he’s now in her debt, the same honour leads him to be scheduled for execution, she rescues him again, they take off from the planet guns blazing, he turns out to be more than just a young, bored noble and she’s in over her head. What makes Hellflower different from the several dozen other space opera stories with the same plot is the atmosphere of elegiac foredooming it takes place in. This particular caper might have a happy ending after all, but sooner or later the odds will catch up with our protagonist.

Said protagonist is Butterflies-are-free Peace Sincere st-Cyr, who grew up on a low technology reservation planet and broke the embargo into a precarious life in the Phoenix Empire. Her only friend and confidant is Paladin, the last existing AI left in the empire, now installed in Butterfly’s ship, The Firecat. AIs are feared and loathed in the empire, with Paladin being a remnant from an earlier golden age. Together they’ve so far managed to survive in an increasingly hostile universe, but Paladin knows if Butterfly doesn’t, or pretends to, that it’s just a matter of time before something goes wrong.

And Butterfly’s impromptu rescue of Tigger Stardust, young teenager hellflower aristocrat with an overinflated sense of honour, first from a gang of thugs, then from police imprisonment, looks very much like the straw that’ll break the camel’s back, as they’re hunted from one world to another. It soon becomes apparent that the trouble Tigger found himself in was not entirely of his own making, but that he has made powerful enemies because of who he is.

Though a fairly standard sf plot, what makes Hellflower different is the melancholic atmosphere. There’s none of the romance of the usual science fiction smuggler/freetrader adventurer; Butterfly St Cyr is no Han Solo. She’s scrabbling for a living on the margins of galactic society and her odds for survival are low and getting lower. There’s a sense of realism there that you don’t see a lot in science fiction, that of knowing you’re winning if you can manage to keep your head above water.

What I also liked was the relationship between Butterfly and Tigger, who against all odds don’t become lovers or romantically engaged, something even rarer in genre fiction. Tigger admires and looks up to Butterfly, while she is equal measures annoyed and amused by him, but neither is attracted by the other.

Finally, what also sets Hellflower apart is the language, which has echoes of Delany and Zelazny in its richness.

Which all in all means that yes, if you like good, fun adventure science fiction, this is a good bet.