Joan Slonczewski
Completed 8/23/2020, Reviewed 8/23/2020
4 stars
I’ve read a lot of books featuring
a women’s utopia or dystopia. They’ve
ranged from mediocre to great. This is
one of the great ones. It has tremendous
world-building, a complex plot, and tackles themes like saving the environment,
non-violent existence, and passive resistance.
It takes place on Shora, an ocean planet. The women living on the planet have a purple
tint, are hairless, and reproduce parthenogenically. They live on “rafts,” large floating
platforms, and interact with the sea creatures in mysterious ways. Shora is about to be invaded by the Patriarchy,
an empire that controls all the people-bearing planets in the galactic
neighborhood. Their quandary is how to
fight off the Patriarchy while sticking to their peace-loving culture. This book was published before the major
LGBTQ book awards came into being, but it did win the Campbell award for
Science Fiction in 1987.
Spinel is a stone-cutter’s
son. He lives on Valedon, a planet in
the same system as Shora. (I wasn’t
quite clear on this, but Shora may be its moon). He’s directionless, not having had much
motivation to find a career for himself.
One day, he comes across two naked purple women from Shora who’ve come
to learn about Valedon. They’ve created
an uproar in the town, but have not met with much resistance. He becomes entranced with them and they offer
to take him back with them to Shora. At
first, he’s excited, but when they actually make a deal with his parents to
take him with them, he balks. Still, he
ends up going. On Shora, he has a tough
time integrating with women there, known as Sharers, but eventually becomes a
part of their culture. The Sharers are
not without their turmoil. They have
foreign traders living on the planet.
Then the invasion comes and they choose to fight the only way they know
how, by passive resistance.
There are so many interesting
things in this world that Slonczewski created.
The Sharers have developed an advanced medical practice where they use
genetics and local plants to heal people as well as manipulate their environment. For example, they’ve altered insects to carry
information. They’ve done this despite
eschewing modern technology. This causes
the invading cultures to consider them witches.
The Sharers have also developed a technique for dealing with grief and
pain. They go into a trance state where
their body turns white and they cannot be reached without force. It is considered anathema to try to bring
someone out of this state. They deal
with transgressions by shunning the transgressor with silence for some period
of time. Their language uses, some may
say overuses, the word sharing. It’s a
little annoying at first, but then begins to make sense. You realize it is essential in describing how
the Sharers think and act. Their decision-making
is by consensus in a process called Gathering.
The battle for Shora is not a
clear war along gender lines. Sure, the general,
Realgar, is a pretty evil male, and many of the people in power in the Patriarchy
are male. But Spinel is a male who
assimilates into Sharer society, and many of the male soldiers stationed on
Shora soften to the Sharer’s plight. And
there is at least one woman on the Patriarchy side who is pretty evil, Jade, being
the primary torturer. Realgar and Jade,
despite being bad, are a little more three dimensional than most of the bad
guys in science fiction, although Realgar becomes quite single-minded in his pursuit
of conquest.
I thought the character
development was really good. Spinel is
perhaps the best developed. Much of the
beginning of the book is from his perspective.
Of the Sharers, Merwen, a woman the Patriarchy sees as leader among this
leaderless society, is also well done. Much
of the rest of the perspective from the Sharers is through her eyes. Her sisters look to her for wisdom in dealing
with the invasion. Her partner Usha is a
healer of astounding talent. Merwen has
a daughter Lystra, who is headstrong and against the fact that Merwen brought
Spinel to live with them. Lystra
probably does the most growing as she first loses her partner, then falls in
love with Spinel.
I give this book four stars out of
five. I was engrossed with it by about
the fiftieth page and subsequently had trouble putting it down. For someone who generally doesn’t like space
opera memes, I really got into the politics of the invasion, particularly how
the Patriarchy dehumanizes the Sharers by constantly referring to them as
catfish, from which they may have evolved.
At the same time, the Sharers deal with their own question of their enemy’s
humanity, considering they have the morality of children and are obsessed with
death rather than life. There are three
other books in this series. I don’t know
if I’ll read them, as my TBR pile for next year is so large. But I’ll definitely consider it based on how
much I enjoyed this one.
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