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This 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.)

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Ooh, I think I've heard of this -- the title is intriguing! -- but you made me want to pick it up.

Gotta say, no review I have ever read of Tepper's scifi has made me want to pick that up, which is whacky because I really liked her mystery series written as A.J. Orde and B. J. Oliphant. She's one of the few writers I ever read who Gets the southwest.

I think I knew at one point that she'd written mystery series and I promptly forgot it again, so it surprises me all over again to learn! I would strongly recommend AGAINST picking up her sff. Learn from my often-repeated mistakes ....

But this book, on the other hand, I did find compelling!

Interesting stuff, I knew the title, being around when it came out, but had never heard the details.

'Lesbian fish alien culture' would have been a lot more shocking in '86 than it is nowadays.

Edited 2020-12-06 20:28 (UTC)

It definitely felt like it was in dialogue with other ... hmm ... post-heterosexual Utopias of the time? Gate to Women's Country, The Female Man, some themes in Butler, etc. -- but saying this makes it sound like quite a different novel than it is, the book is actually much less About Gender than I thought it would be from the description, and much more about destructive human impulses in general.

I am so glad to hear of more people reading Slonczewski's work in general and this one in particular! Yay!

I'm very glad my book group proposed it, since otherwise I would likely never have heard of it!

the premise, which is "humans fuck up a neighboring planet of nonviolent lesbian fish aliens."

Possibly you had me at lesbian fish aliens.

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.

That's really cool.

Yeah, it's a really delicate balance that's consistently posing extremely difficult questions -- there's a sequence, for example, in which one of the sympathetic humans ends up kind of caretaking a bunch of hostage fish alien children, and then has to run up against the question of whether he's doing the right thing making sure the kids are all fed and calm and chill, or whether this is actually an act of collaboration and it's better for him to try and escape on his own, knowing this will leave the kids worse off, and unhappy. It's just a really thoughtful book about the fact that the 'right' course of action is often very muddy, non-obvious, and may not have the desired outcomes even with the best of intentions.

It's been a very long time since I read it; I should pick it up again. I remember being really impressed at how accurate it was in its depiction of a nonviolent resistance campaign, but the author was a Quaker, so probably well-placed to get that right.

It's one of the two best Quaker science fiction books I've read, despite no overt Quakers. (The other is Dazzle of Day by Molly Gloss, which is Quakers In Space running a generation ship by consensus.)

And Dazzle of Days is also now going on the list, thanks :D

Oh man, I had no idea she was Quaker but now that you mention it that makes perfect sense!

Hm, that sounds very interesting! I don't really think I'm cut out for any kind of 1980s scifi, but this sounds like a good one!

I think the only feminist anticolonialist anticapitalist novel about humanoid fish people I have read is Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl, which I have to say I didn't care for, if only because I hate mystical pregnancies.

sk;kdjf I had not heard of the Larissa Lai but I do love that there are least four novels that fall into this category ... I mean, two are by Sheri S. Tepper and should never be read by human eyes, but still. A thriving genre, apparently!

...wait, would Solomon's The Deep count also? I also have not yet read it, but it's on my list. Five!

Ha, you're totally right! The Deep should absolutely count. So that makes two I've read, and five overall! I love this highly specific Goodreads shelf.

ETA: which I have now created, for the good of humanity

Edited 2020-12-09 08:24 (UTC)

Oooh, I've read this one! Once for a class I took in college, and then again... wow, that's more years ago than I'm going to say out loud. Hm.

I seem to recall it was the first book in a trilogy, but I don't think I ever tracked down the rest of it to read.

Actually, more than three -- at least five books in the series, which for the first several books are very loosely connected in anything but the larger setting. The last three are more directly linked, with continuing characters.

Would you recommend the later books in the series?

I would, though the last one I read, The Highest Frontier confused me. Certain the next couple, I rec.

Yeah, I think someone mentioned that it was part of a series during book club, but it was also an intense enough read that we all sort of felt the need to take a break before continuing on! I am for sure curious, though.

Oh, how interesting. Someone suggested this for my feminist sci-fi book club, and someone else said (in our running GoogleDoc), "it’s in the vein of classic feminist sci-fi with all the gender essentialism that entails; it’s been too long for me to remember what other triggers it contains," and GR reviews from my friends (as well as the GR blurb itself) didn't really sell me on the book, but your entry is a compelling sell.

I actually expected more and worse gender essentialism than I got, tbh -- like, definitely Slonczewski does not really have much of a concept of gender as existing outside of a binary, but the book also clearly doesn't think that men and women have, like, inherently different personality traits or anything, and the way that interactions and integration with the lesbian fish aliens play out among the different humans has much more to do with class, gender, age, and expectations than it does with gender. For example, the lower-class teen boy is more successful in many ways at internalizing the philosophy than the noblewoman who's explicitly made it her goal to join lesbian fish alien society.

(That said, it does contain a bunch of triggers, especially in the back half when the campaign against the lesbian fish aliens escalates to more or less attempted genocide. I'd be happy to be more specific if you want.)

I read that Fish Tails entry and WHAT THE FUCK DID I JUST READ.

Ahem. I love Slonczewski--she was a GOH at Wiscon some years ago and is just a really intelligent, kind, unassuming person. I haven't actually read this one, but I have read and would definitely recommend Still Forms on Foxfield, one of exactly four Quakers in Space books I know of, and Brain Plague, which is still one of the most interesting depictions of the creative process I've come across.

+1 for Brain Plague, which I read with no prior context and really enjoyed.

Oh, fascinating! I'm loving that this post has generated a bunch of recs for Quakers in Space, a subgenre I had not previously realized existed but I am so glad to learn that it does.

I actually wrote up both Still Forms on Foxfield and Brain Plague back in the day, now that I look. Still Forms on Foxfield is my favorite of the two Quakers in Space books I've read; I still have Pennterra and The Wall Around Eden on my TBR pile.

Edited 2020-12-09 04:41 (UTC)

Pennterra is strikingly similar to Still Forms on Foxfield and not quite as successful. I still haven't gotten to The Wall Around Eden, I'm a little ashamed to say.

Have you read Dazzle of Day?

I have! I liked it a lot, though I somehow had gotten the wrong notion about the basic setup (I thought there were aliens). I kind of prefer Foxfield in some ways, but Dazzle is a very clear-eyed look at what living in an isolated community is like and it is also deeply Quaker in a different way than Foxfield.

I should probably reread Foxfield.

I am going down a wormhole of your Sherri S. Tepper entries and WHAT THE FUCK. (Also I'm so impressed that you managed to read multiple Tepper books, I think one would have broken me for life.)

The thing is that I read a ton of them when I was too young to realize that 'books that made me confused and uncomfortable' might actually be ... bad ...... like, they were interesting! I wasn't bored! I did not yet recognize this feeling of 'not bored' as 'a wish to fight Sheri Tepper personally.'

I've read more than a few Tepper novels (back when they were published) but not that one, and that's really fine. Yai.

Apparently, the Slonczewski book I've read (much later than when it was published) is The Wall Around Eden, which I half-liked in 2006 and do not now remember much about. My post isn't worth a link--too shallow.

I have read a large number of Teppers and many of them were bad, but -- with all my heart -- that one was the worst, both on an ethical and a technical level. And I don't say that lightly!

(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.)

Sometimes the last paragraph of a review serves as an entire, detailed, additional review of another book.

My normal stance is 'to every book its reader,' but I do believe, with great sincerity, that no human should ever put Fish Tails into their eyes.

"nonviolent lesbian fish aliens."

SOLD. I really need to read more pre-90s scifi by women...

I often disagree with it in key influenced-by-the-past-forty-years ways, but it's always an interesting experience, and this one I disagreed with significantly less than most!

oh this sounds FASCINATING and I defs need to add it to my list!

It was a really interesting read! And extremely thoughtful about, like, what a commitment to nonviolence genuinely means, and what it costs. I'd be really interested in your thoughts if you read!

This book sounds like SUCH a wild ride, I may have to check it out!

There's a LOT going on! A lot of people in our book group found it rough going in the beginning because it just kind of dumps you into the middle and expects you to swim (metaphorically) (much as the protagonist, eventually, is also forced to -- you know) but once it hit the middle I found it really compelling.

I had never heard of this book but now I am intrigued

I think it's a really interesting read and is really good on, like, actionable resistance tactics, for a sci-fi novel -- but I should probably warn that it does not fully meet your current criteria for a total lack of het relationships since the teen intern does end up dating a fish alien (and at first I was like, oh, of course he does, fine, I guess, if we must, and then I was like, well, if you're a default-lesbian fish alien dating outside the normative relationship in your society there's technically an argument to be made that that is kind of inherently queer, and then I was like, well, Joan Slonczewski, it is quite funny that you went out of your way to specify that This Relationship Might Be Technically Het But Nobody's Having Penetrative Sex I Swear To God. Anyway.)

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