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Dec. 6th, 2020 01:48 pmThis month's book club read was Joan Slonczewski's Door Into Ocean, a 1986 feminist sci fi novel of which I had previously never heard.
This book grapples with several common topics of interest in feminist sff, including but not necessarily limited to:
- all-female society! what's THAT like
- human violence: why are we like this. why are we so fucked
- subcategory: resisting human violence: is there a viable alternative besides 'more violence' or are we all just equally fucked
- hey did you notice that capitalism and colonialism kill planets or
... and is actually significantly more nuanced and messy on all these points than I expected from the premise, which is "humans fuck up a neighboring planet of nonviolent lesbian fish aliens."
The standard-issue humans and the lesbian fish aliens are actually both far-future descendants of a human race that colonized a billion planets long ago, most of which are now destroyed, and most of the remainder of which are (with the exception of the lesbian fish alien planet) monitored by a far-distant patriarchal figure who keeps watch on all the remaining planets and occasionally destroys them if they get too technologically advanced. This is all largely irrelevant to the plot except inasmuch as distant patriarchal pressures are acting on everyone throughout the book.
At the start of the book, the humans' attempts to do capitalism with the lesbian fish aliens over the past few decades have been going steadily south; things escalate from there, with two humans ending up in the middle of the conflict. The first is a noblewoman with a deep affection for lesbian fish alien society who's been working for years to promote equitable trade, but whose careful balancing act between the two cultures is becoming increasingly unstable; the second is a lower-class teenage boy who ends up doing a sort of summer internship in lesbian fish alien society as an intercultural experiment on the part of the lesbian fish alien who's most invested in trying to figure out a way to bridge the cultural gap.
There are two things that make the book really interesting to me. The first is just the specificity of lesbian fish alien culture: it's not an easy utopia, there's a lot of really interesting cultural and linguistic (!) worldbuilding that goes into the makeup of it, which feels fully realized and well thought through. But the other thing that's most interesting to me about the book, I think, is that it's also really specific about the ways that the lesbian fish aliens attempt to resist the violent colonization of their neighbor planet, and the arguments about whether to resort to violence themselves, and the ways that their tactics both escalate and deescalate the response. As a result, the resolution doesn't feel like a parable, or like it's proffering an answer to any of the questions the book is posing; the outcome is the result of a thousand small factors, any of which could have played out differently in slightly different circumstances.
(I did find the beginning fairly difficult to settle into but I suspect this is in large part because the last so-called feminist anticolonialist anticapitalist novel about humanoid fish people I read was Sheri S. Tepper's Fish Tails and it took a while for my shoulders to relax from being up around my ears.)
This book grapples with several common topics of interest in feminist sff, including but not necessarily limited to:
- all-female society! what's THAT like
- human violence: why are we like this. why are we so fucked
- subcategory: resisting human violence: is there a viable alternative besides 'more violence' or are we all just equally fucked
- hey did you notice that capitalism and colonialism kill planets or
... and is actually significantly more nuanced and messy on all these points than I expected from the premise, which is "humans fuck up a neighboring planet of nonviolent lesbian fish aliens."
The standard-issue humans and the lesbian fish aliens are actually both far-future descendants of a human race that colonized a billion planets long ago, most of which are now destroyed, and most of the remainder of which are (with the exception of the lesbian fish alien planet) monitored by a far-distant patriarchal figure who keeps watch on all the remaining planets and occasionally destroys them if they get too technologically advanced. This is all largely irrelevant to the plot except inasmuch as distant patriarchal pressures are acting on everyone throughout the book.
At the start of the book, the humans' attempts to do capitalism with the lesbian fish aliens over the past few decades have been going steadily south; things escalate from there, with two humans ending up in the middle of the conflict. The first is a noblewoman with a deep affection for lesbian fish alien society who's been working for years to promote equitable trade, but whose careful balancing act between the two cultures is becoming increasingly unstable; the second is a lower-class teenage boy who ends up doing a sort of summer internship in lesbian fish alien society as an intercultural experiment on the part of the lesbian fish alien who's most invested in trying to figure out a way to bridge the cultural gap.
There are two things that make the book really interesting to me. The first is just the specificity of lesbian fish alien culture: it's not an easy utopia, there's a lot of really interesting cultural and linguistic (!) worldbuilding that goes into the makeup of it, which feels fully realized and well thought through. But the other thing that's most interesting to me about the book, I think, is that it's also really specific about the ways that the lesbian fish aliens attempt to resist the violent colonization of their neighbor planet, and the arguments about whether to resort to violence themselves, and the ways that their tactics both escalate and deescalate the response. As a result, the resolution doesn't feel like a parable, or like it's proffering an answer to any of the questions the book is posing; the outcome is the result of a thousand small factors, any of which could have played out differently in slightly different circumstances.
(I did find the beginning fairly difficult to settle into but I suspect this is in large part because the last so-called feminist anticolonialist anticapitalist novel about humanoid fish people I read was Sheri S. Tepper's Fish Tails and it took a while for my shoulders to relax from being up around my ears.)
