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livAuthor: Tanith Lee
Details: (c) 1976-1977 Tanith Lee; Pub Hamlyn Paperbacks 1979; ISBN 0 600 33001 X
Verdict: Don't bite the sun / Drinking sapphire wine has some interesting ideas but feels dated and heavy-handed.
Reasons for reading it: I thought I had read somewhere that Lee is very good at explorations of sexuality, but it's possible I'm confusing this book with something else.
How it came into my hands: One of the very fun Charing Cross Road second-hand bookshops.
In some ways Don't bite the sun / Drinking sapphire wine feels very much like a response to Brave New World, in that it sets up a dystopia where people's physical needs are met and they are artificially manipulated by the authorities to feel happy, but it's impossible to have any sort of meaningful life because there is no freeeedom. A pretty big chunk of the first novella especially is just descriptions of life within the robot-run domes, and a lot of it just felt unconvincing to me; it doesn't hang together, there was no reason within the story for any of the various customs or amenities to exist, and it's not the kind of book that actually explores the underlying tech, it's just totally post-scarcity because they have magical matter transmuters. Also, the conlang is just awful; there are a bunch of specially made-up words which are glossed as being impossible to translate, but they don't refer to any concepts that shed light on the fictional society, they are just endearments or curse-words or the words for units of time(!).
The main reason that DBtS / DSW struck me as very much of its time is that its central concern seems to be about the commodification of youthful idealism. You've got a society with a literal generation divide between the conventional, submitted to authority Old People, and the Jang who think they are rebelling but their challenges to the system, rather than being suppressed, have been diluted into "youth culture" and then repackaged and sold back to the gullible generation as entertainment. Like many political dystopias, DBtS suffers from the problem that a world where everybody is materially comfortable and happy is in many ways better than the real world, even if the authorities are extremely paternalistic. It was hard for me to get extremely worked up about the terrible tragedy of being forced to live in a world with too much material abundance and too much leisure and no pain.
The magical transmuting technology means that people can redesign their bodies at any time. There's some exploration of that which I think is one of the most original parts of the book. People choose beautiful bodies, or outrageous bodies, or sometimes deliberately ugly bodies. And of course they can switch physical sex as well. I think Lee is trying to go somewhere with this, but to a 21st century reader her exploration of sex and gender feels hopelessly narrow and unimaginative. I mean, you've got this promiscuous and supposedly completely sexually liberated culture, and it's not just taboo but apparently entirely unthinkable for anybody have any kind of sexual or romantic relationship with someone in a body of the same sex as theirs. Even though people swap sex as easily as changing hairstyle and the narrative is very keen to emphasise that a person is still the same person whether they happen to have a male or female body and one's entirely temporary sex doesn't determine one's fate or personality! Nobody comes up with the idea of a body that is neither male nor female, or an ambiguous one, or invents a new sex.
Part of my problem is that I found the first-person narrator extremely irritating. In some ways this makes her a successful portrayal of the kind of teenager who thinks they are a special snowflake and above all those sheeple who like mainstream culture, because what they consume is alternative and they haven't noticed that it is just marketed to a different target group. And she does get to do some growing and learning and starts to see other people as people, so there is some degree of Bildungsroman going on.
Don't bite the sun felt more emotionally successful to me. The stakes are lower, but in spite of my irritation, I was invested in the narrator's personal growth, and her search for authentic experiences. There is some powerful writing depicting how a rather spoiled kid experiences real pain rather than ennui, real danger rather than theme-park thrills, and forms a connection with her "pet" and touches transcendence out in the desert. The transcendence is rather well described, which is certainly a difficult thing to do well. The second of the pair, Drinking sapphire wine, turns into a dramatic adventure which honestly seems tacked on to simply exploring the world. There are long sections which seem like a Burning Man manifesto: authenticity means going out into the desert and having ecstatic experiences while building things and making art with your own hands (and staying stubbornly oblivious to the fact that your building materials, your transport to get into the desert, your physical safety in a harsh environment are all products of the high tech consumerist society you claim to despise). Though it turns out that DSW was written before Burning Man itself was invented, but I'm sure there must have been similar things going on in the 70s. And the narrative does seem somewhat self-aware of the problems of the go off and found a commune response to a corrupt society; for example, you get people showing up to join the community who basically see it as just another, hopefully more thrilling, variety of entertainment, and want to spend all the time off their heads on Ecstasy and having orgies, with the added piquancy of being out in the desert rather than safe in the cities.
The conflict with the robot authorities just didn't work for me at all; it just seemed like a very shoehorned in way of raising the stakes, and the twist of the robots turning out to be evil after all didn't really improve the dystopian setting. For me, it would have been more creepy if the robots had been genuinely working in what their programming concluded was humanity's best interests, namely preventing any suffering at the expense of also preventing any kind of meaningful experience or freedom. The actual climax seems to imply that the robots are secretly plotting genocide against all the humans, only they go about it in a really ineffective way (involving apparently tens of millennia of running a complex society to keep everybody as slaves to perpetual bliss) because they are constrained by some kind of variant of Asimov's laws, which just doesn't make sense. And I was disappointed by the ending; the heroine discovers the great revelation that true love transcends mere physical appearance, which I would have thought would be pretty bloody obvious to anyone growing up in a society where people can change their bodies at will! And ends up happily and authentically pregnant, though apparently not quite so authentically that she runs a meaningful risk of dying in childbirth or from perinatal infections.
Basically, my feeling is that this book has some strong elements but really hasn't aged well.
Details: (c) 1976-1977 Tanith Lee; Pub Hamlyn Paperbacks 1979; ISBN 0 600 33001 X
Verdict: Don't bite the sun / Drinking sapphire wine has some interesting ideas but feels dated and heavy-handed.
Reasons for reading it: I thought I had read somewhere that Lee is very good at explorations of sexuality, but it's possible I'm confusing this book with something else.
How it came into my hands: One of the very fun Charing Cross Road second-hand bookshops.
In some ways Don't bite the sun / Drinking sapphire wine feels very much like a response to Brave New World, in that it sets up a dystopia where people's physical needs are met and they are artificially manipulated by the authorities to feel happy, but it's impossible to have any sort of meaningful life because there is no freeeedom. A pretty big chunk of the first novella especially is just descriptions of life within the robot-run domes, and a lot of it just felt unconvincing to me; it doesn't hang together, there was no reason within the story for any of the various customs or amenities to exist, and it's not the kind of book that actually explores the underlying tech, it's just totally post-scarcity because they have magical matter transmuters. Also, the conlang is just awful; there are a bunch of specially made-up words which are glossed as being impossible to translate, but they don't refer to any concepts that shed light on the fictional society, they are just endearments or curse-words or the words for units of time(!).
The main reason that DBtS / DSW struck me as very much of its time is that its central concern seems to be about the commodification of youthful idealism. You've got a society with a literal generation divide between the conventional, submitted to authority Old People, and the Jang who think they are rebelling but their challenges to the system, rather than being suppressed, have been diluted into "youth culture" and then repackaged and sold back to the gullible generation as entertainment. Like many political dystopias, DBtS suffers from the problem that a world where everybody is materially comfortable and happy is in many ways better than the real world, even if the authorities are extremely paternalistic. It was hard for me to get extremely worked up about the terrible tragedy of being forced to live in a world with too much material abundance and too much leisure and no pain.
The magical transmuting technology means that people can redesign their bodies at any time. There's some exploration of that which I think is one of the most original parts of the book. People choose beautiful bodies, or outrageous bodies, or sometimes deliberately ugly bodies. And of course they can switch physical sex as well. I think Lee is trying to go somewhere with this, but to a 21st century reader her exploration of sex and gender feels hopelessly narrow and unimaginative. I mean, you've got this promiscuous and supposedly completely sexually liberated culture, and it's not just taboo but apparently entirely unthinkable for anybody have any kind of sexual or romantic relationship with someone in a body of the same sex as theirs. Even though people swap sex as easily as changing hairstyle and the narrative is very keen to emphasise that a person is still the same person whether they happen to have a male or female body and one's entirely temporary sex doesn't determine one's fate or personality! Nobody comes up with the idea of a body that is neither male nor female, or an ambiguous one, or invents a new sex.
Part of my problem is that I found the first-person narrator extremely irritating. In some ways this makes her a successful portrayal of the kind of teenager who thinks they are a special snowflake and above all those sheeple who like mainstream culture, because what they consume is alternative and they haven't noticed that it is just marketed to a different target group. And she does get to do some growing and learning and starts to see other people as people, so there is some degree of Bildungsroman going on.
Don't bite the sun felt more emotionally successful to me. The stakes are lower, but in spite of my irritation, I was invested in the narrator's personal growth, and her search for authentic experiences. There is some powerful writing depicting how a rather spoiled kid experiences real pain rather than ennui, real danger rather than theme-park thrills, and forms a connection with her "pet" and touches transcendence out in the desert. The transcendence is rather well described, which is certainly a difficult thing to do well. The second of the pair, Drinking sapphire wine, turns into a dramatic adventure which honestly seems tacked on to simply exploring the world. There are long sections which seem like a Burning Man manifesto: authenticity means going out into the desert and having ecstatic experiences while building things and making art with your own hands (and staying stubbornly oblivious to the fact that your building materials, your transport to get into the desert, your physical safety in a harsh environment are all products of the high tech consumerist society you claim to despise). Though it turns out that DSW was written before Burning Man itself was invented, but I'm sure there must have been similar things going on in the 70s. And the narrative does seem somewhat self-aware of the problems of the go off and found a commune response to a corrupt society; for example, you get people showing up to join the community who basically see it as just another, hopefully more thrilling, variety of entertainment, and want to spend all the time off their heads on Ecstasy and having orgies, with the added piquancy of being out in the desert rather than safe in the cities.
The conflict with the robot authorities just didn't work for me at all; it just seemed like a very shoehorned in way of raising the stakes, and the twist of the robots turning out to be evil after all didn't really improve the dystopian setting. For me, it would have been more creepy if the robots had been genuinely working in what their programming concluded was humanity's best interests, namely preventing any suffering at the expense of also preventing any kind of meaningful experience or freedom. The actual climax seems to imply that the robots are secretly plotting genocide against all the humans, only they go about it in a really ineffective way (involving apparently tens of millennia of running a complex society to keep everybody as slaves to perpetual bliss) because they are constrained by some kind of variant of Asimov's laws, which just doesn't make sense. And I was disappointed by the ending; the heroine discovers the great revelation that true love transcends mere physical appearance, which I would have thought would be pretty bloody obvious to anyone growing up in a society where people can change their bodies at will! And ends up happily and authentically pregnant, though apparently not quite so authentically that she runs a meaningful risk of dying in childbirth or from perinatal infections.
Basically, my feeling is that this book has some strong elements but really hasn't aged well.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-04 10:35 pm (UTC)I take the entire thing as a SFnal allegory of adolescence; it makes enormous emotional sense that way. It asks, "Why are we surprised when adolescents are shallow, destructive, fickle, irresponsible, etc? How would we adults behave if were treated by society the way we treat them?"
(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-05 06:32 pm (UTC)Allegory of adolescence, that could well be! I felt that the Old People didn't come off too well either; they were infantilized eg by having pretend jobs where they pressed buttons to activate the computer programs, and they were clearly much too content with material comfort to challenge the status quo. But your "we" is really interesting here, because it didn't at all occur to me to project myself into the role of the paternalistic / evil robots. So the moral of the story is not so much that teenagers should be less shallow and self-centred, but that I should be doing more to empower the teenagers in my life. I like that, thank you.