2015 books: 30-34

[the_siobhan]

    

Always Coming Home by Ursula K Le Guin This is an odd book. It describes itself as being about "people who might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California." Only about a third of it is the actual story - the rest is local legends, customs, poetry and stories. The plot follows a woman who grows up in a anarchic tribal culture based on agriculture and limited cottage industries and goes to live with her father's people, who are military and hierarchical. The biggest shock is her change in status from an actual person to a piece of property that is not allowed to the house of whichever male owns her at the time. (First her father and then her husband.) She eventually decides to leave and her father helps her escape her husband's house and return home to her mother's people.

There is some discussion of the larger world - there is a worldwide computer network that is self-sustaining and has mines on other planets to maintain itself. Interaction with the network is possible but minimal - the humans on the planet don't seem to really rely on it much. This is way past peak oil, most transportation is by animal or on foot and although the military society does use the network to get information on building war machines, the fuel has to be obtained from plants normally used for food so the effort leads to widespread hunger among their own people.

In some ways this book reminds me of The Dispossessed - a small group of humans who live in an anarchic society that is able to survive only because it is somehow segregated from the larger, more powerful and destructive culture.

    

Nature's End by Whitley Striber and James Kunetka The year is 2025, the population is 7 billion and the environment is on the verge of irreversible collapse. Weather is fucked, trees are essentially extinct, untreated water is poisonous (and only people who can pay have access to treated water - hello Detroit). Environmental disasters are standard fare; from temperature inversions that trap smog and wipe out an entire city to massive fires that do the same. Innovations in agriculture have made food available to everybody but soil exhaustion means it has no nutritional value. Meanwhile rich people continue to consume the majority of the world's resources and entertain themselves manufactured moods and drugs. The depopulationist movement is becoming politically powerful and if succesful it will randomly wipe out one third of humanity. However, computer simulations claim that a population crash is about to happen anyway due to environmental collapse and the additional loss will wipe out the human race. The main characters are a group racing against time to discredit the leader of the depop movement and present the world with an alternative that will teach humanity how to fix the damage that's been done and save the species.

OK, so there were things I liked and disliked about this book.

The good: The authors pulled articles that addressed issues like deforestation and extrapolated their effects into the future so the incidents they talk about are entirely believable. Even the computers that think like humans are a hell of a lot more believable now than I thought they were when the book was first published in 1986.

The bad: The background racism. The premise that the population explosion is due to making food available to poor people. The depiction of the "illegals" that cram every city. At one point a woman who lives in the dust bowls of Idaho even says that they don't need fewer people there, they need more only a paragraph after saying that there are as many "illegals" there as there are farmers who have left. So if the illegals are not people then what are they, bears? AND then the book describes a group of children by saying there is a black boy, a Chinese girl, and two "strapping blonde boys" who are the epitome of the all-American kid and have the authors ever actually been to America?

I also have some trouble with the original premise - the simulation claims that the population will go down to 1/16 of it's pre-crash level, which will lead to human extinction. Even if it's 1/16 of what's left after the depop slaughter, that would still leave over 200 million, yes? We started with less than that, so I have trouble believing that we wouldn't survive, even being as spread out as we are now.

I also ended up finding the conclusion unsatisfying. The book introduces us to groups who are doing things like breeding trees that can survive the toxic conditions and other efforts but the final saviour of the world comes across as too Deus ex machina for my taste.


    

Radical Utopias Apparently I got this in 1991. It's actually a collection of three novels about very different futures. Having read the book I can only assume the use of the word "utopia" was intended to be ironic. Walk To The End Of The World by Suzy McKee Charnas is a post-apocalypse world where most of the human race is assumed to have been wiped out. The "unmen" who are deemed responsible for the catastrophe have been wiped out, with the exception of Women who are kept as slaves and used for breeding. Animals have also been wiped out, all food comes from hemp and seaweed, "rovers" are men who are kept drug-addicted and perpetually adrenaline-fueled and used as guard animals and women are used as pack animals. I really enjoyed Charnas' writing, but I found the story a little limited after a while. The society she describes is fascinating but it's also really insular, and the motivations of the main characters, are, to be honest, not all that interesting. Apparently this led to three sequels which focus more on the "wild" women who have escaped slavery, so the conflict between the two cultures would probably be a lot more fun to read.

The Female Man by Joanna Russ

I found this book super confusing. It's supposedly about four women who are actually the same woman but from alternate realities. In one WWII never happened and the world is still in the Great Depression. A second is from a future society where men are extinct due to a plague. A third is a solider in a world where men and women are at war against each other and have been for centuries. (No explanation of where trans, non-binary and intersex people end up in all this.) The forth is supposed to represent the reader I guess, and appears to actually be a ghost.

The story isn't terribly linear and I found it difficult to track what was happening to who until I finally figured out that the speaking voice was a different character than the other three. I also got tired of the constant banging on about the pressure on women to get married and be subservient to their men, yes I get it. Show don't tell. Apparently I had forgotten just how much of it there is.

So great premise, but I didn't like the format and it didn't age so well.


Triton by Samuel R Delaney
So obviously from the title, the main character lives in a colony on Triton. (I will save you the trouble of looking it up if you don't know off-hand, it's one of the moons of Neptune.) There is a war going on between the outer colony and the inner worlds.

This book drove me nuts, because the future it describes is really fascinating. The differences in culture that arises between planet and satellite colonies, the technology, etc. It makes for a really interesting universe. What spoiled it was the main character who is a whiny, self-involved prat, and even worse, a boring whiny, self-involved prat. Like I end up skipping pages just to get past the parts where he's whittering on about his problems. So if you aren't into self-indulgent main characters, I'd say give this one a miss.

Comments

[wild_irises]

Not often I see Whitley Strieber and Ursula Le Guin reviewed in the same list.

You might find more variation and interest in Suzy Charnas' later Holdfast books.

[greylock]

The Le Guin sounds awful.

Nature's End by Whitley Striber and James Kunetka
The year is 2025, the population is 7 billion and the environment is on the verge of irreversible collapse.

Woah.

AND then the book describes a group of children by saying there is a black boy, a Chinese girl, and two "strapping blonde boys" who are the epitome of the all-American kid and have the authors ever actually been to America?

Striber was abducted by aliens in the US, so I say yes. :)

Even if it's 1/16 of what's left after the depop slaughter, that would still leave over 200 million, yes? We started with less than that, so I have trouble believing that we wouldn't survive, even being as spread out as we are now.

I read somewhere this week you need a population of 18 to revive a species. Just saying.


The Female Man by Joanna Russ

I've long meant to read this, never found a copy second hand, and in the years since the new copy I have on my wishlist has doubled in price.

I've also read a scattering of Russ' less well known works.
She's "problematic" as the kids say, but I don't feel annoyed by having read her...

which leads me to:

Triton by Samuel R Delaney

I own this... and I have half a shelf dedicated to "Chip", but fuck me, Delaney's Babel-17 was a steaming shitpile of a book and I have no real desire to explore more. Oh, so preachy.


A lot of these books are so 1970s. I think there's a "dangerous vision" vibe in them, experimenting with form when they should never have touched it.

[the_siobhan]

The Le Guin sounds awful.

I think she's the best writer of the batch, and I normally love her world-building. I could have used a little more story and a little less world in this instance though. It felt very much like she was experimenting with what she could do and it fell a little short for my tastes.

I read somewhere this week you need a population of 18 to revive a species. Just saying.

I think we've managed with less for some endangered species, but their breeding was controlled to an extent. Really our biggest problem would be the diaspora.

[greylock]

I think she's the best writer of the batch, and I normally love her world-building.

I think you're right. I recently read or re-read or the Earthsea books, and there's just this amazing progression of writing and world-building there. So much so I didn't mind that there really was no plot in the last Earthsea book.

I enjoyed Lathe Of Heaven (although it's tragically 70s) and I am intimidated by The Left-Hand Of Darkness.

But I also read an Ekumen short and hated it.

[ironed_orchid]

The main character in Triton is SO annoying. And so fucking clueless.