Robson, Justina: Natural History
Natural History (2003)
Written by: Justina Robson
Genre: Science Fiction
Pages: 325 (Trade Paperback)
When it came to adding a Justina Robson title to the May Book Challenge poll, I was torn between this book, which I didn't own, and the one I did, which is Silver Screen. Both books fit the theme of having been nominated for the Philip K. Dick award, but I ended up choosing Natural History because it had more of a space opera premise, which fit the unspoken theme for the challenge as well, as all of the books selected were, in some way, space opera.
At any rate, even when Robson's stories haven't grabbed me, I've always admired and enjoyed her prose (is it wrong to think of her as the Catherynne M. Valente of SF? I don't know many SF writers whose prose could truly be called POETIC), so when you selected Natural History for May, I didn't mind picking it up. It means I now own every Robson book published! Bwa-ha-ha!
The premise: ganked from BN.com: IMAGINE A WORLD... Half-human, half-machine, Voyager Isol was as beautiful as a coiled scorpion-and just as dangerous. Her claim that she’d found a distant but habitable earthlike planet was welcome news to the rest of the Forged. But it could mean the end of what was left of the humanity who’d created and once enslaved them.
IMAGINE A FATE... It was on behalf of the “unevolved” humans that Professor Zephyr Duquesne, cultural archaeologist and historian of Earth’s lost worlds, was chosen by the Gaiasol military authority to uncover the truth about this second “earth.” And her voyage, traveling inside the body of Isol, will take her to the center of a storm exploding across a spectrum of space and time, dimension and consciousness.
IMAGINE THE IMPOSSIBLE... On an abandoned planet, in a wrinkle of time, Isol and Zephyr will find a gift and a curse: a power so vast that once unlocked, it will change the universe forever. With civil war looming, Zephyr’s perilous journey will lead her to a past where one civilization mysteriously vanished...and another may soon follow.
Review style: I know for a fact that some of you had some difficulties with this book, so let's sit down and talk about the pluses, the minuses, and how all of it adds up on the end. I want to talk about some pop culture influences I see in the book, as well as its themes of slavery, individualism versus community, and what the price of change and evolution really means. Spoilers? Yes. But this may be a book you want to be spoiled for, and I don't mean that in a bad way. Sometimes it helps to know where a book is going so that you have a focus when you start, you know? At any rate, if you want to avoid spoilers at all costs, then just skip to "My Rating" at the bottom of the review and you'll be fine. :)
I know I talked about the prose in the intro, but I just want to say how much I enjoy reading Robson's prose. She takes scientific terminology and blends it with such poetic language in a way that I can't imagine doing. I'm not saying that SF can't be poetic, but Robson has the gift of language, and her prose moves along with such a lovely rhythm that even if you don't know what the hell is going on, it's pretty to read!
That's not to say this book is without substance. Yes, it's hard to get into. It took me a while to understand that Isol wasn't a human, but rather a spaceship, and even once I got that through my thick head, I had to take my time reading and really pay attention to what was going on. Or what I thought was going on. Because another one of Robson's strengths (says she who's read four other of her books) is writing from the POV of the other, and I don't mean the Other in terms of blue aliens on the planet Pandora that really think like humans so they're really easy to relate to, but rather, OTHER. As in, while some characters certainly have identifiable human emotions, their perspective is alien. Isol is a great example, as is and especially Gritter. And Corvax. When you think about it, any third person, limited POV should accurately reflect the thought-process and mannerisms of the POV character. Not the author, and not just some generic voice the author uses for every character, no matter how familiar or alien that character may be. Robson excels at this, so some scenes were just awesome for how alien they were, and I'd delight in little details from certain POVs because OF COURSE said character would act this way, think this way, etc.
If you're a writer seeking good examples of writing from a non-human yet sympathetic/interesting POV, Robson is the one to turn to. This book is a great example.
The story itself is a little hard to follow at the first. At least it was for me. Robson has beautiful prose, but at times, that hindered my understanding of what was really happening on the page. I suspected I'd need time to read and process this book, which is why I started reading in the middle of the month. That said, it took me a little while to get invested in the story. My interest perked when we met Zephyr Dequesne (yay for a heroine of color!): her job and her life interested me on many levels. Her interest in the Forged and her view of them as slaves (quite appropriate) contrasted to her discomfort at meeting any Forged in person and inability at first to reconcile them as both human and tool. I also liked the twist that Zephyr's long distance relationship was with a man who'd she'd never seen, never met, and whom she suspected was Forged (she was right). Her sections helped ground the narrative for me, as they raised interesting questions: what does it mean to be human? And just because your lot in life is to be a functioning member/tool of society, should that degrade your humanity in any way? Should that affect your emotional ties to members of your society, both human and Forged?
And more to the point, to what extent are the Forged slaves, and in that regard, how far should they go to find their freedom, and is their freedom something to be granted?
It's a tricky subject: it's easy to sympathize with the Forged, to want to see them create a society for themselves. Honestly, I still have trouble wrapping my head around WHY it was so important that the Forged not leave, unless it boiled down to the fact that it meant humanity would once again have to pick up the dirty jobs, and that just wouldn't be good for the economy. That may very well be it, but I wondered if there was something more to it. After all, if the Forged were so important, why were they scattered so through-out the solar system? Why were some Forged, like Corvax, not persistently hunted down?
And there's the other question: while the Forged are essentially human spirits trapped in a form that clearly has a specific function, does that form deserve freedom? Does a hammer need liberation? Of course not, it's a hammer. It has no spirit. But what about a machine? Think about all of the stories we've read and seen where computers are tired of being enslaved to mankind, where computers revolt and remake the world in their own image. We see it time after time, and in many ways, I feel Robson is very much channeling this kind of story via the Forged. We see it symbolized in Uluru, where Corvax (as Tom) is struggling at first to make a plane fly, realizes it's broken so he keeps breaking it to fix it to never fly, and then finally is able to use technology to make the necessary adjustments to make the escape. I may not be making much sense, and to be honest, the first scenes in Uluru confused me and I kept asking myself why it mattered, but they tied together in the end in that Corvax was able to use the "magic rock" to transform himself into something that could escape the system.
At any rate, let's continue influences: I had a brief Transformers moment on page 303 when Kincaid and Bara were fighting each other (in fact, I had trouble seeing them as anything organic, and I don't know if it's because that's actually how Robson described them or because I just can't). But more interestingly was what appears to be an obvious Sandman influence in regards to Uluru, aka the Dreaming. Page 111 refers to the Morpheus function when Tupac is trying to explain herself and Uluru to Corvax, and then on page 45, Corvax is listing the "D's" that make the "magic stone" work: delirium, dream, death. In asking what the fourth might be, I immediately jumped to cataloguing the Endless and knew the obvious answer: desire. I have to say I love this influence/allusion, and I think any fan of the Sandman series will enjoy these nuggets as much as I did, if not more.
Getting back to slavery, we see different forms of it here. There's the obvious: one class of beings forced into second-class positions in society and treated less-than-human. The Forged. But there's also a different kind of slavery, the kind where conformity enslaves individuality and forces one to become a part of the whole. Bear with me here, because I still don't have all of this sorted out in my head (and I'll blame the fact that I read this while my brain was completely obsessed and focused on the final episodes of Lost, and I kept seeing Lost themes in the damn book when I'd get back to it, but not this particular theme). Isol fights against becoming "one" with the Stuff (of which the "magic rock" came from) because she's always been an individual, and to enter into that conformity is a kind of death to her. It's a kind of slavery, because once she accepts the Stuff, she's bound to it. She didn't know what she was getting into and once she does, she can't get out of it. She's enslaved to it and by it, her actions dictated by the Stuff altering her body in so many different ways.
Yet, the Stuff just doesn't conquer, take over, and use. One must accept the Stuff, even though they may not know what they're getting into at the start. I found this interesting in contrast to the nature of the Forged. The Forged don't have a choice to accept their lives, let alone select the bodies in which they'll function. They're created and forced into a world of slavery, of function, and it is from this world they're seeking freedom and independence of a sort, be it Isol's planet, the Stuff, or Uluru. In some ways, the Stuff doesn't enslave so much as colonize, and it doesn't colonize without permission.
It's fascinating stuff to chew on. The nature of Stuff is to change. It is change has much as it is a seething mass of intelligence. And the fascinating this is how literal Robson makes her commentary on change: the price of it is everything. One must reshape oneself, one's beliefs, absolutely everything, in order to change. Change is sacrifice. That is the nature of the Stuff. And it's cool that of all of our POV characters, only Zephyr and Corvax really knew what they were getting into by accepting the Stuff's offer.
I don't know how much sense I'm making here. Like I said, I was reading this while gearing up and watching the final Lost episodes, and I'd come to this novel full of Lost themes and questions and then try to apply them to the text. Not that I've brought them up in this review, of course, but I will say Zephyr's exploration of the city and the alien artifacts definitely gave me vertigo, as I thought I saw questions and themes overlapping. :)
My Rating
Worth the Cash: but ONLY to the more experienced science fiction reader. Rosbon's Natural History, despite being something of a space opera and something of a first contact story, is actually quite hard SF when you look at all the jargon. Oh, it's poetic jargon, no doubt, but the nature of the book is such that unless you're USED to reading harder, more technical SF, then this may not be the book for you, and it's certainly not the first Robson book you should try (for your first Robson, unless you're SUPER HEAVY into SF, I'd recommend Mappa Mundi or Keeping It Real). The book itself is good. It picked up, for me, in the middle and started moving in interesting intellectual directions, and it's the kind of book that, while not engaging me on an emotional level in regards to the characters, engaged me so on an intellectual level that I kind of want to read it again. Hell, I want to give the sequel another shot, now that I've read this. That'll be a future project, to read the two back-to-back, but as it stands, it's a good book, but rather difficult to get into. SF novices/light SF readers should start elsewhere in her collection.
And to my book club readers, I'm sorry: if I'd realized that this would be THIS intense in regards to SF, I probably would've selected Silver Screen for the poll instead! I'm sorry, I hope you forgive me, and I hope this hasn't scared you away from Robson's work. Her writing really is beautiful, so give her another shot. For me, okay? :)
Cover Commentary: Quite eye-catching! I love all the bright oranges (says she who drives a burnt-orange car), and I've always been entranced by the dragonfly-like-thing in the corner, which I interpret to be Isol. Quite lovely.
Further Reading: I worry that anyone who had trouble with this title has been irrevocably scared away from Robson's later work. Let me plead: DO NOT RUN AWAY. I've read five of her eight published novels, and I can safely say that Natural History is one of the hardest to get through (though I found Living Next Door to the God of Love much more difficult, but then again, it's the sequel to Natural History, and I didn't know that at the time of reading).
For fans of near-future, thriller-ific SF, I highly, highly, HIGHLY recommend Robson's Mappa Mundi. It's a book that still comes to mind with vivid clarity even though I read it back in 2006, and not only that, but it's on my Keeper Shelf. I thoroughly plan on re-reading it one day.
For fans of urban fantasy who don't mind a little bit of cyberpunk dashed in, I highly recommend her Quantum Gravity series. I've read two of the four books that've been released so far in the ongoing series, and look forward to the rest of it. It's sassy and fun but also very human in certain regards, and it makes fun of elves (while promoting a rock star elf)! For reviews:
Book One: Keeping It Real
Book Two: Selling Out
Book Three: Going Under (no review yet)
Book Four: Chasing the Dragon (no review yet)
The only other book of hers I haven't read is Silver Screen. Again, it's a book I own, but I haven't gotten around to it.
So if Natural History wasn't your thing, give Robson another chance. Living Next Door to the God of Love was my first experience, and it wasn't positive, but Robson's technical skill at writing and her poetic prose encouraged me to try something completely different (Mappa Mundi), and ever since, I've been a fan. I hope you can be too. :)
Of course, the THEME this month was "Philip K. Dick Award Female Nominees," so if you want to check out more nominees, then go here. Granted, this list is a mix of men and women, but note that author Chris Moriarty is NOT a man, so don't overlook her work, and don't overlook M.M. Buckner either! For my reviews of PKD winners, click here.
And here's a list of the female nominees that I've reviewed:
Elizabeth Bear: Carnival
Karin Lowachee: Warchild, Cagebird
Chris Moriarty: Spin State
Justina Robson: Living Next Door to the God of Love
More Reviews: check out the reviews book club participants have posted! If you reviewed this book but are not featured here, please comment below with a link to your review and I'll add it below.
logically: Review Here
pashte_chan: Review Here
pling: Review Here
temporaryworlds: Review Here
Book Club Poll: this is the only way I can really track participation, so if you follow this journal, answer, okay? :) If, however, you participated but do not have an LJ account, please simply leave a comment saying so. :)
Poll May Participation
If you started but couldn't finish it, please comment and talk about the reasons why. What turned you off from the book? How far did you go before throwing in the towel?
And as you already know, the June Book Club selection is Robin McKinley's Sunshine. Some of you may have started it already, but need additional details on the title, just click here. Don't forget to look for McKinley's guest blog at the start of June!