Glory Season - David Brin
I put off reading this one for a long time because of the premise - it's a sci-fi world ~~~ruled by women!~~~ I was afraid that it was going to be a poorly disguised feminist diatribe - or worse, anti-feminist diatribe. Instead, it was almost entirely about sailing and Adventure on the High Seas. Good old David Brin.
David Brin is a writer not without flaws, by any means, but he consistently writes exactly the sort of stuff I am interested in reading. One thing I particularly like about him (other than the fact that he's a giant dork who throws in indecipherable Gilbert & Sullivan references just for the heck of it) is that a lot of his work is genuinely speculative, and not thesis-driven. He's not making a point - he's just asking What if X? How would that work? How would the resulting world be? In the Practice Effect it's "what if the second law of thermodynamics worked backwards???" In Kiln People (which is excellent, by the way), it's "what if GOLEMS and divided consciousness?" And he always has a real story overlaying that: Rescue the Princess and Murder Mystery respectively. He's not writing Utopias or Dystopias - he's writing stories, first and foremost.
In Glory Season the What-If is: "What if humans worked like aphids, having the option of both sexual and asexual reproduction? And the story is Adventure on the High Seas. It's great. And then it devolved into exploring ancient ruins and deciphering puzzle doors and - yes? So very much yes. Not since "the Martian" have I had such a sense of a work being specifically tailored to appeal to my interests. Gah, I loved this book so much. It was a romp start to finish. And it's so nice to have a female lead in a story that is in no way about being female. It is significantly about the fact that she's a var - a non-clonal child - but she's still a Character first, and that's extremely refreshing. Brin writes in the afterword that if we accept without that female writers can adequately or even expertly portray the internal workings of male characters, it should in principle be possible for male writers to do the same with female characters. And, for all that there's the stereotype that adult men should never try to write from the perspective of a teenage girl, honestly he nails it. To use the stereotypical example, in the entire 300+ page book he mentions her boobs exactly once. And the context is "I was moving cargo off the ship with my shirt off (because it was a hot and sweaty job) and some men leered at my boobs and it was Weird." Oh yes, and in a book wherein Sex and Reproduction is absolutely central to the setting, there's...no sex. Like there's one attempted sex scene, in which the girls climb up to a window to spy on a mating ritual which entirely fails to include any actual mating (to everyone's disappointment), and one scene wherein our Hero observes that there is Sex Happening in Another Room and it's Weird (because it's out of season). I almost didn't proceed to Part II because I was afraid that, with the introduction of a male character, there was going to now be A Sex, but then there wasn't and it was fantastic. I can't express how much I appreciate the almost total lack of sex in this book entirely about sex. It's like Brin was like: well, what if instead of writing a sex scene involving a 15 year old, I instead saved room for even more pirates. A+ life choices, man. There was one bit where I was like "is this a sexual awakening happening?" but it turned out it was dissociation and, bizarrely, a mathematical awakening. At sea. With pirates. I frickin love David Brin and his obsession with sailing.
So, Maia is in some ways your typical YA heroine in that she is Not Like Other Girls. But that's because Other Girls are literally clones, and Maia isn't. Except for her with her identical twin sister Leie, whom Maia is also Not Like. The world of Stratos is a planned society governed by athenogenic reproduction, which is seasonally determined. Children conceived in the summer (when men are in heat) are a genetic blend of both their parents, whereas children conceived in the winter (when women are in heat) are clones of the mother. The idea is to capture the long-term stability offered by asexual reproduction without sacrificing the adaptability provided by sexual reproduction. Social prestige and power is associated with large clonal clans. Men are therefore rare and considered almost a different species, and by many a necessary evil (and by a few an unnecessary evil to be done away with entirely if at all possible. Vars like Maia are better off than men in some ways, in that they are women and therefore "people," and worse off in others, in that, unlike men who have a vital function to perform, their only societal function (as far as the clans are concerned) is as potential threats to the status quo. There's this really neat sense of deep time vs ephemerality. The unit of individuality is the Clan, the clones themselves being like cells within a larger organism. There's a lot of talk about vars not being able to plan ahead, because they're limited to a single lifetime, unless they win a social niche and are permitted to start clans of their own. Which - what a cool idea, this built-in notion of what the market, as it were, will bear. And men are incomprehensible because they are fundamentally ephemeral, with no hope of the kind of longevity that a clonal clan enjoys, so they have to find their self-actualization elsewhere. Which is to say, board games. (Oh yeah, this book features a board game (sort of) which almost never happens and I love it). The society is so differently and thoroughly set up that it avoids the trap of simply being "reverse sexism" - although Brin can't resist a couple of pointedly familiar moments: "what would there even be to talk about with a man?" or Maia assuming that an unknown interlocutor is female because that's just the default. There's also a huge social stigma against men fighting, which comes into play with the regulations controlling quasi-legal piracy - both of which are super duper interesting.
But quite apart from any of that, the story was the sort of rolicking adventure that I just really enjoy. Board games, secret codes, wilderness survival, ancient ruins, and the ocean. Often at the same time. There's a long captivity sequence which is excellently done, and which involves plenty of ingenuity, macgyvering, astronomy, and passing secret coded messages back and forth with a fellow (but entirely unknown) prisoner. It reminded me of Captain Grey which I read as a child and loved for precisely that kind of thing. There's an awful lot of mucking about with boats. Opening puzzle doors by understanding the people who made them in the first place becomes a major plot point about 2/3 of the way through. There's some significant marooning. The storytelling is just so bright and colorful and...fun. That's the main thing. The book was thoughtful but more than that it was fun. There's some meditations on time depth and the nature of individuality and societal cyclicity, but there's also a lot of rapelling down cliffs and underwater knife fights and getting angry at trashy novels. It was just such a wholly enjoyable read (and wholly unspoilt by sex scenes or self-congratulatory politics!)
I found the ending somewhat abrupt - which is a common problem with David Brin - and I don't think I ever really understood what was going on with the Ice Ships and the Human Phylum (the rest of the universe that Stratos seceded from thousands of years ago). I liked how well he sold the idea of Stratoin society being pretty self-correcting, although, being used to stories about dramatic upheaval, the ultimate conclusion that nothing really changes (despite the heroism displayed) was a little ...not frustrating per se but...sombering? It skirted a sense of futility, but that was sort of part of the point. Because Maia changed and grew, and that's not nothing. But the ultimate conclusion was very small and personal, and not the triumphant fanfare that you typically expect with this sort of story. The story is a snapshot of one moment that is slightly different (and therefore interesting) in an otherwise unchanging expanse of history.
But yeah, I liked it an awful lot. Good times all around.
David Brin is a writer not without flaws, by any means, but he consistently writes exactly the sort of stuff I am interested in reading. One thing I particularly like about him (other than the fact that he's a giant dork who throws in indecipherable Gilbert & Sullivan references just for the heck of it) is that a lot of his work is genuinely speculative, and not thesis-driven. He's not making a point - he's just asking What if X? How would that work? How would the resulting world be? In the Practice Effect it's "what if the second law of thermodynamics worked backwards???" In Kiln People (which is excellent, by the way), it's "what if GOLEMS and divided consciousness?" And he always has a real story overlaying that: Rescue the Princess and Murder Mystery respectively. He's not writing Utopias or Dystopias - he's writing stories, first and foremost.
In Glory Season the What-If is: "What if humans worked like aphids, having the option of both sexual and asexual reproduction? And the story is Adventure on the High Seas. It's great. And then it devolved into exploring ancient ruins and deciphering puzzle doors and - yes? So very much yes. Not since "the Martian" have I had such a sense of a work being specifically tailored to appeal to my interests. Gah, I loved this book so much. It was a romp start to finish. And it's so nice to have a female lead in a story that is in no way about being female. It is significantly about the fact that she's a var - a non-clonal child - but she's still a Character first, and that's extremely refreshing. Brin writes in the afterword that if we accept without that female writers can adequately or even expertly portray the internal workings of male characters, it should in principle be possible for male writers to do the same with female characters. And, for all that there's the stereotype that adult men should never try to write from the perspective of a teenage girl, honestly he nails it. To use the stereotypical example, in the entire 300+ page book he mentions her boobs exactly once. And the context is "I was moving cargo off the ship with my shirt off (because it was a hot and sweaty job) and some men leered at my boobs and it was Weird." Oh yes, and in a book wherein Sex and Reproduction is absolutely central to the setting, there's...no sex. Like there's one attempted sex scene, in which the girls climb up to a window to spy on a mating ritual which entirely fails to include any actual mating (to everyone's disappointment), and one scene wherein our Hero observes that there is Sex Happening in Another Room and it's Weird (because it's out of season). I almost didn't proceed to Part II because I was afraid that, with the introduction of a male character, there was going to now be A Sex, but then there wasn't and it was fantastic. I can't express how much I appreciate the almost total lack of sex in this book entirely about sex. It's like Brin was like: well, what if instead of writing a sex scene involving a 15 year old, I instead saved room for even more pirates. A+ life choices, man. There was one bit where I was like "is this a sexual awakening happening?" but it turned out it was dissociation and, bizarrely, a mathematical awakening. At sea. With pirates. I frickin love David Brin and his obsession with sailing.
So, Maia is in some ways your typical YA heroine in that she is Not Like Other Girls. But that's because Other Girls are literally clones, and Maia isn't. Except for her with her identical twin sister Leie, whom Maia is also Not Like. The world of Stratos is a planned society governed by athenogenic reproduction, which is seasonally determined. Children conceived in the summer (when men are in heat) are a genetic blend of both their parents, whereas children conceived in the winter (when women are in heat) are clones of the mother. The idea is to capture the long-term stability offered by asexual reproduction without sacrificing the adaptability provided by sexual reproduction. Social prestige and power is associated with large clonal clans. Men are therefore rare and considered almost a different species, and by many a necessary evil (and by a few an unnecessary evil to be done away with entirely if at all possible. Vars like Maia are better off than men in some ways, in that they are women and therefore "people," and worse off in others, in that, unlike men who have a vital function to perform, their only societal function (as far as the clans are concerned) is as potential threats to the status quo. There's this really neat sense of deep time vs ephemerality. The unit of individuality is the Clan, the clones themselves being like cells within a larger organism. There's a lot of talk about vars not being able to plan ahead, because they're limited to a single lifetime, unless they win a social niche and are permitted to start clans of their own. Which - what a cool idea, this built-in notion of what the market, as it were, will bear. And men are incomprehensible because they are fundamentally ephemeral, with no hope of the kind of longevity that a clonal clan enjoys, so they have to find their self-actualization elsewhere. Which is to say, board games. (Oh yeah, this book features a board game (sort of) which almost never happens and I love it). The society is so differently and thoroughly set up that it avoids the trap of simply being "reverse sexism" - although Brin can't resist a couple of pointedly familiar moments: "what would there even be to talk about with a man?" or Maia assuming that an unknown interlocutor is female because that's just the default. There's also a huge social stigma against men fighting, which comes into play with the regulations controlling quasi-legal piracy - both of which are super duper interesting.
But quite apart from any of that, the story was the sort of rolicking adventure that I just really enjoy. Board games, secret codes, wilderness survival, ancient ruins, and the ocean. Often at the same time. There's a long captivity sequence which is excellently done, and which involves plenty of ingenuity, macgyvering, astronomy, and passing secret coded messages back and forth with a fellow (but entirely unknown) prisoner. It reminded me of Captain Grey which I read as a child and loved for precisely that kind of thing. There's an awful lot of mucking about with boats. Opening puzzle doors by understanding the people who made them in the first place becomes a major plot point about 2/3 of the way through. There's some significant marooning. The storytelling is just so bright and colorful and...fun. That's the main thing. The book was thoughtful but more than that it was fun. There's some meditations on time depth and the nature of individuality and societal cyclicity, but there's also a lot of rapelling down cliffs and underwater knife fights and getting angry at trashy novels. It was just such a wholly enjoyable read (and wholly unspoilt by sex scenes or self-congratulatory politics!)
I found the ending somewhat abrupt - which is a common problem with David Brin - and I don't think I ever really understood what was going on with the Ice Ships and the Human Phylum (the rest of the universe that Stratos seceded from thousands of years ago). I liked how well he sold the idea of Stratoin society being pretty self-correcting, although, being used to stories about dramatic upheaval, the ultimate conclusion that nothing really changes (despite the heroism displayed) was a little ...not frustrating per se but...sombering? It skirted a sense of futility, but that was sort of part of the point. Because Maia changed and grew, and that's not nothing. But the ultimate conclusion was very small and personal, and not the triumphant fanfare that you typically expect with this sort of story. The story is a snapshot of one moment that is slightly different (and therefore interesting) in an otherwise unchanging expanse of history.
But yeah, I liked it an awful lot. Good times all around.