The Best of All Possible Worlds, by Karen Lord
Title: The Best of All Possible Worlds
Author: Karen Lord
Publisher: Del Rey
Format: Ebook
Year: 2013
Pages: 233
Genre: Science Fiction
Subgenre: SF Romance, Soft SF
Full Disclosure: I received this ebook free through NetGalley.
Jacket Description
Karen Lord’s debut novel, the multiple-award-winning Redemption in Indigo, announced the appearance of a major new talent-a strong, brilliantly innovative voice fusing Caribbean storytelling traditions and speculative fiction with subversive wit and incisive intellect. Compared by critics to such heavyweights as Nalo Hopkinson, China Miéville, and Ursula K. Le Guin, Lord does indeed belong in such select company-yet, like them, she boldly blazes her own trail.
Now Lord returns with a second novel that exceeds the promise of her first. The Best of All Possible Worlds is a stunning science fiction epic that is also a beautifully wrought, deeply moving love story.
A proud and reserved alien society finds its homeland destroyed in an unprovoked act of aggression, and the survivors have no choice but to reach out to the indigenous humanoids of their adopted world, to whom they are distantly related. They wish to preserve their cherished way of life but come to discover that in order to preserve their culture, they may have to change it forever.
Now a man and a woman from these two clashing societies must work together to save this vanishing race-and end up uncovering ancient mysteries with far-reaching ramifications. As their mission hangs in the balance, this unlikely team-one cool and cerebral, the other fiery and impulsive-just may find in each other their own destinies . . . and a force that transcends all.
My Review
This novel is simultaneously deeply subversive and disappointingly conventional.
It obviously owes its premise and much of the feel of its world to Star Trek. It's set in a universe where the speed of light is no barrier, where there are quite a few practically-human species capable of star flight, whose planets interact the way countries here on Earth do (meaning there's immigration to and from, they form alliances and declare war, and there's trade) and all of them can interbreed. The Sadiri, the victims of the genocide, are definitely Vulcan-like; though they have not rejected emotion in favor of logic, they have epitomized restraint and morality to the rest of the galaxy, and they attribute their superiority in those fields to the way they have developed their telepathy through meditation and mental exercises.
Interestingly, though not particularly relevant to the story, this is a galaxy without Earth and humans-as-such; Earth is apparently under an interdiction, and the rest of the humanoid species have no contact with it other than the occasional snapping-up of doomed groups to be brought into the galactic fold for their useful genetic diversity.
The first sign that this is much more than just Star Trek-influenced cross-cultural-contact SF is the information, right off the bat at the start of chapter two, that Cygnians and Sadiri (who make up nearly the entirety of the cast of characters) possess "eyes, hair, and skin all somewhere on the spectrum of brown." There is one character, late in the book, that I would identify as white; he's so minor that I've forgotten his name, and what role he played.
The second sign is the nature of Cygnus Beta, the planet almost all of the action takes place on, and the home world of the protagonist. It is a planet of refugees, one of which the protagonist says "There isn't a group on Cygnus Beta who can't trace their family back to some world-shattering event. Landless, kinless, unwanted. . ." It is a poor planet, and one that the rest of the galaxy views as superstitious and backward. But it is not the violent, gang-ridden techno-poverty of the sort that is so often fetishized in cyberpunk, and it's not the picturesquely feudal and martial poverty of, for example, Lois McMaster Bujold's Barrayar; it's just the poverty of being a people whom circumstance and hostile action have rendered relatively resourceless.
The third sign is the breezy, confiding tone of Grace's narration. Lord's first novel, Redemption in Indigo, took that same tone; there, it was the obvious choice, a folktale fantasy narrated as it would be around a fire on a winter's night. But that tone, when transposed to a distinctly science fictional setting, becomes in itself somewhat revolutionary. Much of science fiction, particularly science fiction with pretensions at seriousness, adopts an objective tone, a distant faux-historical viewpoint that is meant to give it gravitas. That tone often hides as much as it highlights, encouraging the reader to look away from all the things that are missing (brown people, poor people, oppressed people). Grace's voice, warm and occasionally exasperated and always distinctly personal, makes this book feel real, aliens and telepaths notwithstanding.
That level of personal-ness is ultimately what I found so exciting about this novel. It is 100% science fiction, and the sort of science fiction I always find more satisfying, where the world is messy -- multiple types of telepaths, lots of different cultures and subcultures, the sense that the characters in the novel all have existences extending far into the past and the future, rather than existing purely for the sake of the plot. But it is also incredibly domestic -- ultimately, what the Sadiri need is to find a whole bunch of brides, because in the aftermath of the almost-genocide they were left with an incredibly male-skewed gender balance, and so the plot of the novel is taken up with a quest through Cygnus Beta looking for communities that have higher percentages of Sadiri bloodlines, so that the remaining Sadiri males can look for mates.
And that is where the novel becomes unfortunately conventional. Lord makes a point of how progressive Cygnus Beta is: there is a character of whom Grace says "Lian has chosen to live without reference to gender. This may or may not mean that Lian is asexual, though many of those who are registered as gender-neutral are indeed so. However, it doesn’t matter, because this has no bearing on our mission and is thus none of our business”; various comments indicate that bi/pansexuality is the norm; Grace jokes with her mother that the woman her mother is trying to seduce away from her husband actually wants Grace's mother to join in a triadic polyamorous relationship with the both of them. But there is absolutely none of that diversity of sexual and gender identity represented in the Sadiri and their plight: the Sadiri survivors are (almost) all men, and they are all going to be forced to enter into heterosexual monogamous relationships that are expected to be reproductively fruitful. And no one blinks an eye at that. It is a strange bit of cognitive dissonance, that Grace is so fully enmeshed in a non-heteronormative, non-monogamous society and yet is falling in love with a man from a society so much more rigid without even once questioning how willing his people are to abridge their right to self-determination.
(It is particularly galling, given that this is a science fictional setting, that Lord never addresses any potential technological fixes to the problem of a small, male-dominated survival group: no mention of genetic engineering, cloning, uterine replicators, anything beyond "get boy and girl to have sex, make babies".)
Still, aside from that conventional core, this novel is a delight. Grace's narration makes it a fast, enjoyable read. The quest plot takes the reader through quite a few very distinct subcultures on Cygnus Beta, the same way Isaac Asimov's Prelude to Foundation explores the various sectors of Trantor. There are several call-backs to Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, the Sadiri coming to Cygnus Beta intending to reshape it for their needs but ending up becoming rather more Cygnian than Sadiri in the process. There was also a significant reference to Jane Eyre, which seemed out of place. But most of all, I spent the novel thinking that Lord was doing much the same thing science fictionally as Lois McMaster Bujold was doing fantastically in her Sharing Knife quadrilogy -- they set up rigorous SFF worlds, and then they put those worlds at stake, positioned their cultures on the brink of extinction due to both external and internal forces; then they resolved the stories by having their characters settle down and make babies. This is, of course, an entirely fair resolution; if your culture is in danger of extinction, pretty much the only solution is to have children to carry it on. But it's a solution that sits oddly in the SFF canon.
A note on the cover: When I first saw this cover, my thoughts were pretty much "Hey! The person on the cover is non-white! Yay! But what's with the elephant?" I got to the end of the book and kind of wanted to *headdesk*. The elephant, surprisingly, was entirely relevant, was one of two symbols used heavily throughout (the other was a hummingbird, which made its way onto the British edition cover). But the woman on the cover, who I assume is Grace, has very definitely been white-washed.
My Rating
Overall Satisfaction: ★★★★1/2
Intellectual Satisfaction: ★★★★1/2
Emotional Satisfaction: ★★★★1/2
Read this for: The themes, the atmosphere
Don't read this for: The world-building
Bechdel Test: Pass
Johnson Test: Pass
Books I was reminded of: Embassytown, by China Mieville; Prelude to Foundation, by Isaac Asimov; The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury; Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga and Sharing Knife quadrilogy.
Will I read more by this author? Yes.