pauraque | Entries tagged with books: year: 1968

In the 32nd century, Captain Lorq Von Ray assembles a ragtag crew for a dangerous—some would say crazy—mission to harvest the superheavy element illyrion from a dying star. If they succeed, it would threaten tech megacorp Red-Shift's economic stranglehold on interstellar travel, inaugurating a new era of opportunity for struggling outer colonies. But Captain Von Ray's motives aren't just political, they're also personal, as flashbacks reveal his long history with the psychologically twisted brother-and-sister heirs to the Red-Shift fortune.

I really enjoyed this. The space opera plot is an effective backdrop for some nicely nuanced character work and social commentary. Money and class are still driving forces in this future, and people are shaped by that as much as they are by advancing technology and the cultural changes that have come with it. Besides the Captain and the Reds, the other focal characters are two crew members from Earth, one an emotionally guarded Romani kid who's gone against his people's prohibition on cybernetic implants to access job opportunities in space, and the other a socially awkward Harvard grad who has tens of thousands of notes for a novel (an ancient, dead art form) but hasn't yet written a single page. I love the development of their tentative friendship; it feels very honest about how hard it is to relate across cultural divides, and also very affectionate towards both characters. It's like the author is rooting for them even though he can't truthfully make it easy.

The worldbuilding really worked for me. There are enough surprising details and curious asides to make the galaxy feel lived-in and realistically messy, but not so many that it feels scattered. Delany has a very visual prose style and can convey exactly what he sees in his mind's eye, whether it's the unfurling sail of a glittering space yacht or the uneasy twitch of a character's cheek, and that adds to the vivid atmosphere.

I also appreciated the subtle exploration of disability in the context of a society where many things can be medically "fixed" that can't be in our own world. The author knows that this in itself would not "fix" people's attitudes about their own embodiment and others', and he knows that elimination of bodily differences is not a utopian impulse. Characters are allowed to have complex feelings about their physical abilities—the ones they're born with, the ones they've lost, and the ones they've gained through technology—and aren't required to fully explain themselves just because other people want to know.

Criticisms? I think the book has too many characters; some of the less foregrounded crew members don't get much attention and it might have been better to drop a couple so we could spend more time with the rest. The role of female characters is particularly limited, and when they do appear, sometimes their boobs are mentioned for no reason. (I am of course aware that Delany is gay. Perhaps he was subconsciously influenced by what he was reading from other writers at the time.) Other than that, this was a good read.

Content note: A character's pet is harmed, but recovers.

This is the third and final part of my book club notes on Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy & Science Fiction. [Part 1, part 2.]

"Paradise Last" by George Alec Effinger (1974)

( The totalitarian rulers of an assimilationist dystopia try to disperse the Jewish diaspora even further—to distant planets where they can't make trouble. )

"Street of Dreams, Feet of Clay" by Robert Sheckley (1968)

( A man moves to a model city run by an overbearing AI. )

"Jachid and Jechidah" by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1964) [tr. the author and Elizabeth Pollet]

( To those in Heaven, Earth is their Hell. )

"I'm Looking for Kadak" by Harlan Ellison (1974)

( Jewish aliens search for one of their own who abandoned Judaism. )

the end

There was agreement that this anthology is very much of its time and also reflects a specific narrow slice of Jewish culture (first or second generation American, Ashkenazi, not super observant, not Orthodox...) which is not a terrible thing but it makes you wonder what more could be added when thinking about Jewish SF more broadly. Several of the stories had very similar themes and some suffered for being presented together. It was noted that the way anthologies are put together has changed a lot in the subsequent decades; now there's more of an expectation that editors will go beyond authors they personally know and cast a wider net, and in that way you can get more diverse perspectives.

The group plans to continue with The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, an anthology of sf/f by Chinese women and nonbinary people.

The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards. From the towns in its high valleys and the ports on its dark narrow bays many a Gontishman has gone forth to serve the Lords of the Archipelago in their cities as wizard or mage, or, looking for adventure, to wander working magic from isle to isle of all Earthsea. Of these some say the greatest, and surely the greatest voyager, was the man called Sparrowhawk, who in his day became both dragonlord and Archmage. His life is told in the Deed of Ged and in many songs, but this is a tale of the time before his fame, before the songs were made.

I read this book as a child and it changed my life. I'd never read anything like it. Oh, I'd read fantasy novels with wizards and dragons and quests and all that. But I'd never read one that transported me like this one, that felt so grounded and real in its setting that I could nearly smell the crackling herbal hearthfires and feel the spray of the sea in a boat sailed by magewind. I'd never read prose with the mythic resonance of an ancient epic, and yet the clarity of a child's tale. I'd never read a fantasy that challenged the hero not to fight the designated bad guys in dark swirling cloaks, but to confront what is dangerous and frightening within himself.

( This is not just a book I loved, it's also the book that made me want to write. (cut for length) )

In the late 22nd century, humans have fled an uninhabitable Earth and spread across the galaxy in two parallel and interdependent societies: planetary colonies with agrarian economies and limited technology, and city-sized FTL ships built out of hollow asteroids where the privileged live a life of ease—but also of restrictive eugenicist rules.

As the book opens, Mia, a 12-year-old living on one of the ships, is beginning her two-year preparation for Trial, a coming-of-age ritual that will have her abandoned on a colony planet for a month to prove she can fend for herself. All shipboard children undergo this Trial. Those who survive are welcomed back as fully-fledged adults, and those who don't, well... that's considered a reasonable price to pay for weeding out the unworthy.

Mia is a wonderful POV character and immediately charmed me. She's earnest and smart and aware of her own shortcomings, while also being wry, sarcastic, and a bit of an age-appropriate jerk sometimes. She feels very real, and her character growth throughout the book is extremely satisfying. This is not a book about being young and thinking you know everything, it's a book about getting a little older and realizing you don't.

The primary theme is that nothing is as simple as it seems—not cultures and not people—and that growing up means learning to see nuance and look beyond the rigid assumptions and biases you accepted unquestioningly as a child. This is handled with great skill by the author, and never comes across as heavy-handed or lecturing. Neither the colonies nor the Ship are painted as simplistically utopian or dystopian; they're both societies made out of people, and people are complicated. There are no heroes or villains, and there are no redshirts—every person is a real person, not just fodder for bigger conflicts. And even when you start to be able to see the injustices around you, making positive change is just as hard and messy and slow as we know it to be in real life.

The book reads as surprisingly modern for the most part, though it does occasionally show its age. There is a clear effort made to include characters of color in important roles, and it is overtly stated that racism is a thing of the past. (I think it was wise to have this said by a Black character who reflects on the fact that his ancestors faced oppression that he does not, and to connect this with the sociopolitical landscape of the book in both obvious and subtly ironic ways.)

I think the author was shooting for gender equality too. Mia is a fully realized person who is very much the equal of her male peers and has her own goals and agency, and the culture of the Ship is certainly much less sexist than the real world in 1968. But there actually aren't any well-developed female characters besides Mia (the Bechdel Test is only nominally passed) and the mentors and authority figures she encounters are all men. In this way it reminded me of then-contemporary Star Trek, which made efforts that were similarly progressive for the time while having gaps in awareness that are pretty wide in retrospect, and similarly makes you wonder about the things we don't currently see which will be obvious decades from now.

This was a recommendation from

mywitch, who brought it up on the sad occasion of Panshin's death a few weeks ago. I hadn't heard of him before, and I greatly appreciate my eyes being opened to his excellent work!