Book: Becoming alien
Aug. 30th, 2012 01:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: Rebecca Ore
Details: (c) 1988 Rebecca Ore; Pub 1988 TOR; ISBN 0-812-54794-2
Verdict:Becoming alien is a satisfying and imaginative first contact book.
Reasons for reading it: I was travelling, and wanted something both reasonably easy to get into intellectually, and in the physically sensible format of an old-fashioned, 300-page small paperback.
How it came into my hands: There was a bookseller in the Eastercon dealers' room last year who did a kind of hard sell thing, but since what he was pushing was 50p paperbacks I wasn't too offended. Basically he asked me to describe the kind of SF I like, and this is in fact pretty close to exactly the book I described, so he didn't do a bad job.
Becoming alien has lots of genuinely different aliens, who have biology, and culture, and individual personalities. The plot is mainly there to showcase lots of different aliens interacting with eachother and the human protag, but I found it interesting enough to keep me reading. The aspect that makes this more than just the 20th century equivalent of those fantastical travellers' tales is detailed exploration of the actual experience of trying to work together with a whole bunch of sapient aliens who somewhat break your assumptions of what a person is. I do like the way that there are tensions and issues between aliens who are different from eachother, and aliens from the same origin planet who have political or personality clashes, it's not all centred on the human versus everybody else, even though the book is entirely from his POV.
The choice of POV character is interesting too; Tom is a teenaged hick from extremely rural Virginia. He's intelligent and compassionate, yes, but he's also immature and sometimes narrow-minded or impulsive, and not particularly ultra-super-awesome. In some ways BA is a kind of coming-of-age story; a fair amount of Tom's character development is learning that there's more to life than his previously narrow experience, which would be true even if he didn't get whisked away to be a cadet working for an inter-planetary Federation with all kinds of exotic aliens. There's a fair amount of stuff about the development of his sexuality, among other issues.
jack said that it was very obvious that BA was published in the 80s, and I think he's right, I think it's a lot less common these days to see books which just showcase a bunch of anthropoid animal type aliens. The worldbuilding clearly has more depth than Star Trek, but it's definitely in that sort of mould. I particularly appreciated the way that the narrative doesn't really take a moral stance, there's no faction which represents the "good guys". The Federation itself is definitely morally ambiguous, and planetary or species chauvinism are portrayed as understandable. The aliens are successfully imaginative; they succeed in actually presenting more diversity than between different earth cultures, which is rare enough. They're not hugely plausible in a hard SF sense, but I was certainly happy to suspend disbelief, especially as Ore avoids the mistake of trying to over-explain the xenobiology or the history of the Federation (or indeed the other tech referred to in the book; for something published in the 80s, BA is remarkably successful at avoiding completely stupid descriptions of futuristic computing tech).
BA is the first half of a pair, but works well as a standalone, with a satisfying ending. The sequel is pretty clearly going to be Further Adventures of Tom Red Clay and the Aliens, but I'm very much ok with that. The prose style isn't much to write home about, but the characterization is good. In general I'm happy that the bookseller picked this out for me as I hadn't otherwise heard of it and it's definitely my sort of thing.
Details: (c) 1988 Rebecca Ore; Pub 1988 TOR; ISBN 0-812-54794-2
Verdict:Becoming alien is a satisfying and imaginative first contact book.
Reasons for reading it: I was travelling, and wanted something both reasonably easy to get into intellectually, and in the physically sensible format of an old-fashioned, 300-page small paperback.
How it came into my hands: There was a bookseller in the Eastercon dealers' room last year who did a kind of hard sell thing, but since what he was pushing was 50p paperbacks I wasn't too offended. Basically he asked me to describe the kind of SF I like, and this is in fact pretty close to exactly the book I described, so he didn't do a bad job.
Becoming alien has lots of genuinely different aliens, who have biology, and culture, and individual personalities. The plot is mainly there to showcase lots of different aliens interacting with eachother and the human protag, but I found it interesting enough to keep me reading. The aspect that makes this more than just the 20th century equivalent of those fantastical travellers' tales is detailed exploration of the actual experience of trying to work together with a whole bunch of sapient aliens who somewhat break your assumptions of what a person is. I do like the way that there are tensions and issues between aliens who are different from eachother, and aliens from the same origin planet who have political or personality clashes, it's not all centred on the human versus everybody else, even though the book is entirely from his POV.
The choice of POV character is interesting too; Tom is a teenaged hick from extremely rural Virginia. He's intelligent and compassionate, yes, but he's also immature and sometimes narrow-minded or impulsive, and not particularly ultra-super-awesome. In some ways BA is a kind of coming-of-age story; a fair amount of Tom's character development is learning that there's more to life than his previously narrow experience, which would be true even if he didn't get whisked away to be a cadet working for an inter-planetary Federation with all kinds of exotic aliens. There's a fair amount of stuff about the development of his sexuality, among other issues.
jack said that it was very obvious that BA was published in the 80s, and I think he's right, I think it's a lot less common these days to see books which just showcase a bunch of anthropoid animal type aliens. The worldbuilding clearly has more depth than Star Trek, but it's definitely in that sort of mould. I particularly appreciated the way that the narrative doesn't really take a moral stance, there's no faction which represents the "good guys". The Federation itself is definitely morally ambiguous, and planetary or species chauvinism are portrayed as understandable. The aliens are successfully imaginative; they succeed in actually presenting more diversity than between different earth cultures, which is rare enough. They're not hugely plausible in a hard SF sense, but I was certainly happy to suspend disbelief, especially as Ore avoids the mistake of trying to over-explain the xenobiology or the history of the Federation (or indeed the other tech referred to in the book; for something published in the 80s, BA is remarkably successful at avoiding completely stupid descriptions of futuristic computing tech).BA is the first half of a pair, but works well as a standalone, with a satisfying ending. The sequel is pretty clearly going to be Further Adventures of Tom Red Clay and the Aliens, but I'm very much ok with that. The prose style isn't much to write home about, but the characterization is good. In general I'm happy that the bookseller picked this out for me as I hadn't otherwise heard of it and it's definitely my sort of thing.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-02 01:26 pm (UTC)Would you consider submitting this review to the SF Mistressworks blog, which often reviews books like this (SF by women authors, which I've never heard of, but which I think I'd enjoy). I believe it meets the criteria (SF, 20th century or earlier, by women) http://sfmistressworks.wordpress.com/about/
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-02 04:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-06 11:41 am (UTC)Also a quick google of Ian Sales doesn't provide a helpful source of contact info either. So bah, I thought your review would go well on that site; but if the person running it is making it too hard, then why bother?