One of the more intriguing first contact novels that I've read for a while. The alien here is just so... real? Biological? Fleshy? What's the correct One of the more intriguing first contact novels that I've read for a while. The alien here is just so... real? Biological? Fleshy? What's the correct word? An alien that feels truly corporeal. The whole book is just oozing sweaty, greasy, under-the-skin physicality. It's gross; it's marvellous. It's somewhere between Starfish and Annihilation. You will want to wash when you've finished reading.
And on top of that, there's a rollicking plot, every other chapter seems to be a cliff-hanger. Every other character is an immense badass with a secret backstory, whether that's X-men style powers or more normal government-granted powers. I raced through the whole thing - probably faster than I ought've, I daresay I would've done the SF aspects more justice if I'd slowed down a little, but I needed to know what happened next.
And when I was done I had that slightly sick feeling that one gets when one's read or eaten too fast. It all started coming back up. Was it really necessary to tell the story in multiple time-lines, flashing back and forward so much that I often found myself thinking, 'Wait, hang on a minute, is this before or after he went to magical boarding school spy academy?' I felt a bit like it was a cheap trick to allow more cliffhangers and plot-twists and have all the big reveals together at the end in a massive explosion of surprises. I mean, the trick absolutely worked - I was gripped - but it sometimes felt more like engineered attention-grabbing than necessary story-telling.
And I wonder if the bouncing timeline was part of the reason that I never really got a grasp on Kaaro as a character, even though I read the story in his voice, I still didn't feel like a knew him at the end. I know he likes sex and beautiful women and tits, but I never got a feel for him. I never understood why he risked so much in his early larceny career for trinkets and nights out in the club because I never really felt that he cared about trinkets or enjoyed clubs. At one point - in a moment of deep peril - he jokes with his captors that they'd better not harm his name-brand shirt. But it's the only time he mentions brand-names, he doesn't seem to notice other people's fashion, I just don't feel like he really cares about shirts. Despite the whole story being from his point of view, I never really felt like he introspected. It's just some stuff he did, that he wouldn't do again. I dunno, maybe it's me, maybe I was just reading too fast and missed the subtle character stuff.
Anyway, it was a fun and fast read, and behind all the action-adventure malarkey there's some intriguing SF stuff, whizzing by at top speed as the story barrels right through it....more
A young man in a small and primitive society dreams of something better. He dreams of going where no-one has ever gone before, over the mountains intoA young man in a small and primitive society dreams of something better. He dreams of going where no-one has ever gone before, over the mountains into lands unknown. Against the advice of his elders, he gathers a band of brave young outcasts and ventures into the darkness, with terrible and amazing consequences. Around this familiar and unoriginal plot-line, Beckett has constructed a very interesting novel.
Our young hero, John Redlantern, lives in a small tribe in a fascinating world. Eden is a planet without a sun. All life on Eden depends on bioluminescent plants which suck up heat and energy from the core, and provide the warmth, light, and food for every living thing. To venture beyond the trees is to venture into a frozen darkness. John and The Family are 500-odd descendants of two humans ship-wrecked on this tiny planet after an interstellar heist gone wrong. They live huddled around the original crash-site, following the command of Angela, the mother of them all, to stay here and wait for rescue from Earth. It's a simple premise, but it leads to a deep and subtle exploration of the evolution of myth, custom, and law.
In just a hundred years or so, we can see how Angela's rational hope for rescue is already calcifying into a religious command for her descendants. The crash-site is sacred; the lands beyond forbidden. It's clear to the reader that Angela was educating her children (as best she could) on the assumption that they'd all be going back to Earth soon - not on the assumption that they'd have to build a whole new civilisation from scratch. And it's fascinating and painful to watch these people try to build a whole social system with the off-hand remarks of two very unhappy castaways as their only precedent. While they look for social and moral guidance from their progenitors, they are already forgetting the practical knowledge of civilisation. Knowledge that you can't implement isn't really worth preserving, especially when you can't write it down - metal-working, electricity, agriculture - it's all becoming nothing more than fantasical set-dressing in the myth of Earth.
The Family know that incest is wrong - but how wrong can it really be when they're all descended from one incestuous origin a mere 5 or 6 generations ago? There are some pretty heart-breaking depictions of sexual abuse and loveless 'couplings' (for want of a better word) between women desperate for healthy sperm, and young boys able to provide it. These people, John especially, have a half articulated desire for deep and lasting relationships, and absolutely no cultural guidance on how to build that. John's wish that he might know for certain his own children is espcially heart-wrenching.
It's John and his wish for something better that sets the whole story going. And the psychological exploration of John, rebel and iconoclast,and the people he gathers around him, is fascinating. Tina could be the love of his life - if only he could open up and share with her, but he can't quite bring himself to submit to the vulnerability that true love requires, and she only half wants him to get down off his pedestal anyway. But the relationship between John and Jeff is just as complex. Jeff is uninteresting to most people as either a sexual partner or a hunting fellow because of his clubfoot. This seeming misfortune frees him to focus entirely on understanding the world around him, which eventually makes him a useful and powerful man, and it's hilarious and painful to see John trying to evaluate Jeff as a friend or rival when Jeff has absolutely no interest in power-plays at all.
Overall, what starts off feeling like a standard YA space adventure ends up as a deep and nuanced exploration of humanity.
Despite being action-packed, thrillingly violent, well-plotted, somehow it dragged. It gets off to a slow start – with multiple chapters from differenDespite being action-packed, thrillingly violent, well-plotted, somehow it dragged. It gets off to a slow start – with multiple chapters from different POV characters, some of whom we never meet again. And then when our real cast of heroic cops and mavericks are set up, they seem to spent all their time contradicting each other. What was meant to be territorial, alpha confrontation, often seemed to me to be time-wasting bickering. I'm sure the whole book would've been smaller by a third if they'd cut that shit out. Or perhaps because when they weren't dismissing each others hunches, they were discussing genetics and masculinity. It reminded me a bit of romance novels set in the work place – an awful lot of talking about feelings and not much getting the job done.
I'm not sure that I bought the 'gender and genetics' theme. The eponymous Variant Thirteens are human men, genetically modified to be as violent and selfish as our pre-civilisation ancestors, and are consequently feared by all and tightly regulated: living on reservations or registered. The hero, Carl, is a Variant Thirteen who has bought himself a little more freedom by taking a job hunting down other variants.
The characters talked about genetics and variants in such black-and-white terms – as if there were a sharp distinction between modern, feminised men, and ancient violent men. As if there were just the one gene for being emotionally repressed, enjoying violence, disdaining co-operation, rejecting bullshit. But surely all of us are capable of violence, and enjoying violence, in the right context? People are not easily divided into never-violent and perptually-violent. The narrative occasionally reaches for a more nuanced understanding of genetics. The Variant Thirteens are brutally raised and trained to be killers, so there is some nurture in there too. And there are hints of free will: some thirteens are capable of love, start secret families, make long-term intelligent plans. Perhaps they're not all monsters? But the way the characters talk about it is so clunky. There seems to be an assumption that the elimination of violence was achieved by crowds of conformist, civilised people hunting down the variant monsters with torches and pitchforks as if they were Frankensteins – and that's the only evolution that's ever taken place:
'Leaders are charismatic. Persuasive, imposing, charming, despite their forcefulness. Easy to follow. Sexually attractive to women.' 'What if they are women?' 'Come on, I'm talking about hunter-gatherer societies here.' 'I thought you were talking about now.' 'Hunter-gatherer society is now, in terms of human evolution. We haven't changed that much in the last fifty to a hundred-thousand years.' 'Apart from wiping out the thirteens.' 'Yep, that's not evolution. That's civilisation getting an early start.'
This is, uh, not my understanding of how evolution works. It can work very swiftly, when the selection pressure is strong enough, and it certainly isn't stopped by civilisation. If there's been a reduction in violence and selfishness, it's not because crowds of people were somehow capable of identifying and lynching the archaic violent men. It's because the slow process of the law has been weeding out the violent via the death penalty – and because hard-working co-operative people have better reproductive success. Sexual selection isn't considered at all. Variant Thirteens are apparently catnip to all women, who cannot resist their programming:
His hands were on he shoulders, fingers hooked into her flesh, head jutting close, eyes locking into hers. They hadn't been this close since they fucked, and something deeply buried, some ancestor subroutine in her genes picked up on the proximity and sent the old, confused signals pulsing out. It was the part of herself she most hated.
But if violent masculinity is no longer adaptive, then women who prefer violent men would have reduced reproductive success, and over time would be a smaller percentage of the population. It's also entirely plausible that violent tendencies could be peacefully bred out of the population over time (no lynching needed) if women who prefer nice guys have greater reproductive success. It doesn't make any sense for the love of the violent to be ubiquitous in females.
It seems like the philosophical questions about genes and gender get put aside so that the hero can be a big damn chick-magnet. Likewise, all the tedious moralising about how men are all so feminised now falls pretty flat in a world filled with violent criminals, violent cops, sex-traffickers, and our hero, who seems to be succeeding pretty well by kicking everyone in the head. The theoretically feminine civilisation gets set aside so we can all enjoy the good old-fashioned world of gritty noir novels where male violence triumphs.
I also felt like that the full implications of this prejudice against archaic men weren't considered. The Variant Thirteens have been declared non-human due to their terrifying natures. But, there's been a lot of debate over the centuries about who counts as 'human'. Thirteens are clearly human by our standards, so if ethics have shifted so severely that some humans can be legally declared not-human I'd expect to see a revival in all the old fashioned discriminations too – i.e. a big resurgence of legal racial, ethnic, and caste discrimination. But most of the racism – even in the evil Jesusland – is no more than the overuse of the world 'nigger' and some white supremacist prison gangs. The racial and sexual politics is mostly the same as ours now – without any consideration for how genetic engineering could change what race and sex are.
Oh yeah, Jesusland is another part of the story that didn't quite ring true for me. It was a neat idea. The story is set in a future where the USA has fallen apart into the Rim States, the Union, and the Confederate Republic, known as Jesusland. Jesusland is poorer and more restrictive than the Rim States – and it would've been interesting if that had been used as a chance to explore the costs and benefits of rejecting ruthless capitalism. But instead, Jesusland is poor because it's bigoted, racist, and Christian, and everyone who lives there is apparently a moron. One POV character is persuaded that an assassin is actually the Second Coming of Christ because he looks like a picture of Jesus in a comic book. This is in contrast to the more generous and nuanced depiction of Islam in the character of Sevgi, who practises a moderate form of Islam and has earnest debates with her fellow Turks about feminist interpretations of Islam in its historical context. In his acknowledgements at the end of the book Morgan credits The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity, Islam: A Short History; and The Trouble With Islam Today: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith in his research for the character. In his research for Jesusland he credits the now famous Jesusland map meme created (according to Wikipedia) by one G. Webb on the message board yakyak.org. This disparity in respect and research really shows up in the novel, to its great detriment....more
Who'd've guessed that when it comes down to a struggle between humanity and a race of giant intelligent spiders that I'd be on Team Spider?Who'd've guessed that when it comes down to a struggle between humanity and a race of giant intelligent spiders that I'd be on Team Spider?...more
Now that Handmaid's Tale is being widely praised as a prescient critique of current political trends in the USA, some Goodread's friends have wonderedNow that Handmaid's Tale is being widely praised as a prescient critique of current political trends in the USA, some Goodread's friends have wondered just how realistic it is? I tend to agree with those who feel that it really isn't particularly realistic. The theocracy of Gilead (what little we see of it) isn't very much like American Christianity, even the fundamentalist stuff. And arguably, the strain of American culture that venerates the constitution is larger and more powerful than the religious strain.
So while this doesn't work much as criticism of the USA in particular, nevertheless, almost all the misogyny and sexism depicted here has existed in one culture or another. I think that's a lot of the point of the academic conference coda. Some find it pointless or jarring, but I think Atwood just wanted to take a moment to hammer home that these things really happen. She wasn't just making it up.
For example: the conference speech opens with a reference to a paper: 'Sumptuary Laws through-out the ages' to remind us that Gilead is not the only place that tried to restrain what is saw as excess luxury and decadence. In the 13th century prostitutes in England had to wear a striped hood.
Seems like separating the good women from the bad by the dress is an old tradition.
Then it references 'Iran and Gilead: Two Late 20th Century monotheocracies'. Drawing a parallel between the forced hijab and morality laws of Iran and the costumes and laws of Gilead. Here are Iranian women protesting the hijab when it was first made compulsory: that protest looks huge, but it had no effect at all.
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In the book Offred muses about the young daughters of the commanders and how they'll never know anything other than wearing compulsory modesty and veils, and I guess that's true now for a whole generation of Iranian women, and for others where conservative Islam has been replaced by wahabi and salafi extremists.
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The speech mentions 'Romania, for instance, had anticipated Gilead in the eighties by banning all forms of birth control, imposing compulsory pregnancy tests on the female population, and linking promotion and wage increases to fertility.' Which of course led to a huge rise in orphanages because people couldn't afford all these children.
[image] Romanian Orphans
Then the next paragraph mentions that 'birth services' existed prior to the establishment of Gilead. Here's a really painful article about Indian women who act as surrogates for rich westerners, and one that explicitly draws parallels with Handmaid's Tale. [image] Surrogate 'Hosts'
There wer a couple that I couldn't figure out. The speech mentions that the 'collective rope ceremony, however, was suggested by an English village custom of the seventeenth century.' Any idea what that's referring to?...more
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