Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 by Damien Broderick, Paul di Filippo Read Free Book Online Page A

escape Birana, whose initial interest in the young man is a displacement of her infatuation with his sister.
    The early emphasis on Laissa, more or less dropped for the bulk of the book, is explained in the end, when as a historian she shapes much of the first-person testimony of these two star-crossed lovers into the book we’ve read. It perhaps explains a certain muted, almost sepia-toned calmness in the telling of events that do not lack in drama, tension, fear, intoxicated romance, terror, death, birth, and courageous perseverance. This avoidance of a melodramatic tenor in a narrative where it might seem an endless temptation is one of the features that draws the reader into a sympathetic languor, the kind of mood more often elicited by long Victorian novels than by survivalist thrillers, or even the chilling bleakness of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (Entry 84) . It is a little reminiscent of the long dying falls of George R. Stewart’s superb Earth Abides (1949), but Sargent tells a more confronting tale than history’s collapse into pastoral loss of memory.
    The women’s enclaves resemble more closely the sequestered, changeless city Diaspar, in Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars (1956). The youth who leaves Diaspar for the forbidden outdoors is Alvin, almost an anagram of Arvil, so perhaps The Shore of Women, with its hints of a rapprochement between the sexes and these mutually alien ways of life, is a kind of inversion of Clarke’s famous fable. The voice of that book, too, moved against the fall of night to a vivid stance opposing restriction and fearful stasis. In the end, this is the reality the women of Sargent’s enclave must accept, however resentfully: “We are being given a chance to reach out to our other selves. What we do will show what we are and determine what we shall become.”
    [1] Pamela Sargent, Women of Wonder: The Classic Years : Science Fiction by Women from the 1940s to the 1970s, Harcourt Brace & Co., 1995, 16, 20. This is a revised and extended version of the 1975 original.
     

9
    Joan Slonczewski

A Door Into Ocean (1986)

     
    BESIDES REPRODUCING the evocative Ron Walotsky art from the first hardcover edition, the first paperback edition of Joan Slonczewski’s A Door into Ocean , from 1987, adds an interior illustration showing two darkly tinted naked humanoids amidst lush foliage and exotic flying and crawling beasts. A naïve reader today might easily mistake the scene for an outtake from the film Avatar , a project some twenty-plus years unborn when that paperback appeared. And thus we get a lesson yet again in how Hollywood “honors” its prose antecedents with outright shameless, unacknowledged theft.
    And to compound the injustice, Slonczewski goes without fair credit for her influential, groundbreaking work even among hardcore readers. For although perceptive critics of the James Cameron movie cited many sf “contributions,” from Poul Anderson and Ursula K. Le Guin to the Strugatsky Brothers and Ben Bova, hardly any mention was made of Slonczewski’s important work, a finer accomplishment even than many of the other respected alleged sources, and one that stands to Cameron’s broad cartoony strokes as a Mary Cassatt painting to an animated advertising mascot.
    Two contrasting worlds are intimately linked: Shora, a large moon, an ocean planet populated by parthenogenic females only, who rely on bio-sciences and possess a complex Zen-style philosophy of integration with nature and rules for harmonious interpersonal dynamics; and Valedon, the primary world, a planet hosting a warlike, competitive society of traditional males and females, who rely on the usual “hard” technologies, and who seem bent on despoiling Shora.
    Two unofficial emissaries from Shora to Valedon adopt a young lad named Spinel and bring him back to their planet in an attempt to see if he may be “humanized.” A prior instance of such acculturation, a woman ambassador named Berenice, was a