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

less-than-sufficient proof of concept—although she will continue to play an integral and touching role in the story.
    Spinel adapts with no small reluctance and frequent misunderstandings, even falling in love and mating, tantric-sex-style, with Lystra (whose name, echoing the famous story of Lysistrata, is not be overlooked by the reader). After half a year on Shora, events compel Spinel’s return to Valedon, where culture shock with his old home further enlightens him. A campaign of brutal suppression is undertaken on Shora, and even Spinel’s return as interfacing man-of-two-worlds might be inadequate to secure peace.
    The lucid gravitas of Slonczewski’s prose is matched by her even-handed comprehension of every viewpoint shared by her disparate cast, and her story—as well as her intricately fabricated ecology—contains numerous surprises and epiphanies, as well as plenty of Thoreauvian heartfelt paeans to the power of nature—a decided rarity in the “steel beach” catalogue of sf.
     
In the cool water, branch shadows wove fleeting patterns upon the hide of the young starworm. Lystra admired the sinuous trunk that stretched several swimming-lengths ahead of her, though barely a third as long as the maturer specimens of Raia-el. The mouth stalks of the starworm spread in a perfect star around its lip, none broken and regrown as on older starworms…. The young starworm had lone streamers of filters within its mouth, because it was not yet large enough to digest squid or large fish, only plankton and fingerlings. As Mithril’s cousins raked debris from the filters, Lystra swam up to the surface to get the net full of fingerlings that could be fed into the star-rimmed mouth, a handful at a time.
     
    In the best manner of sf dialoguing, Slonczewski confesses to several inspirations, works she wished to respond to: Le Guin’s The Word for the World is Forest , Herbert’s Dune , and, surprisingly, Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress . She plucked from these models a set of polarities which she would embody in an alluring narrative, resolving their seeming incompatibility into a whole, organic synthesis.
    Besides its generally acknowledged prominent place in the lineage of feminist sf, A Door Into Ocean fits neatly into three other equally valid traditions, conferring on it a quadrupled strength and complexity.
    First is the utopian strain. Attempting to imagine and depict a society that confers maximum freedom and sustainable necessities for all, Slonczewski evokes any number of ancestors, from John Uri Lloyd’s Etidorhpa , through Le Guin’s The Dispossessed . And extending her influence forward, we reach descendants like Kim Stanley Robinson.
    A second tributary of theme and topic might be deemed the literature of transcendental refusal, a much tinier stream in the canon than the utopia, but still significant. Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener and Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang come to mind.
    Lastly, the third extra-feminist lineage shared by Ocean is the biopunk, or ribofunk one. Biology has always taken a back seat in sf to the so-called hard sciences, and works such as Damon Knight’s Masters of Evolution and T. J. Bass’s The Godwhale shine out all the more for their stance that squishy is powerful. Slonczewski’s training and expertise as a professor of biology lend her work a sophisticated plausibility and ingenuity found only at the top of this subgenre.
    Feminist/monkey-wrenching/utopian/biopunk sf: now, that’s a standout combination that only a masterful writer could bring off! And Slonczewski does it superbly.
    Slonczewski reportedly took eight years to craft Ocean , and her newest book (as of this essay) was separated from its predecessor by eleven years. But like the patient lifeshapers of Shora, what counts in her work is not speed and volume, but elegant living results.

10
    Paul Park

Soldiers of Paradise (1987)
     
    [Starbridge Chronicles]
     

     
    BRUCE STERLING, Jeff