Book: A door into ocean
Oct. 13th, 2014 12:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: Joan Slonczewski
Details: (c) Joan Slonczewski 1986; Pub The Women's Press 1987; ISBN 0-7043-4069-0
Verdict: A door into ocean has some excellent world-building but I found it a little depressing.
Reasons for reading it: I've consistently heard this recommended, both as hard SF with plausible biology, and as feminist SF. I've been looking for a it for a while, and not finding it. I know these days you can pretty much get any book published in the 20th century for £3 from Amazon, but I am always reluctant to resort to giving money to the evil empire unless I get desperate.
How it came into my hands: Happily,forestofglory gave me a copy as a present, which was really exciting, it's so nice to get a book you've been meaning to read!
These past couple of months I've not been in as much of a reading mood as I usually am, but even considering that I found A door into ocean a bit slow going. Which is not to say I didn't like it, I cared a lot about the world and the characters, and I found the story compelling, but somehow reading on kept feeling more like work than like pleasure. I think it's partly because the writing style tends a little didactic; Slonczewski tends to explain to the reader both how her (undoubtedly very interesting and cool) world works, and what makes characters tick. I am not sure, I think it may be external things rather than the book itself that made me feel like it was hard to get into. It's very, very much the sort of thing I like.
The biology is in fact excellent, and it's not only accurate for real world biology, it makes plenty of sense in the somewhat post-technological setting. And I'm an easy sell on human living in alien culture stories. I really enjoyed Spinel as a character; he's an obvious trope in a way, the young man from a backwards provincial town who dreams of something grander than just joining the family business. And I like the way that he's not a Mary-Sue or an idealized fairy-tale hero, but realistically adolescent, impulsive, ignorant, needing to learn that other people are people. He's also not there to save the poor primitive Shorans, Pocahontas-style, nor are they there mainly to support his personal growth. (It helps, I think, that he isn't white; aDiO avoids the error of having purple-skinned aliens standing in for indigenous people and then making all the human characters white.) The character of Lady Berenice / Nisi is really fascinating too, the high-born lady who is genuinely torn between her home culture where she has real privileges as well as being stifled, and the Shoran culture she admires but never quite fits in to.
I think the Shora culture is perhaps a bit over-idealized; Slonczewski tries to show the flaws in their non-violent way of life but keeps falling back to telling the reader how wonderful everything is. aDiO is also one of those books that I've often seen critical commentary about but rarely actually encountered, about a female-only planet. I do like that a wide range of different people are portrayed, it's not as if Shora is all one homogeneous "alien" culture. The story is clear that the Shorans are biologically human, so it's very impressively done that they are understandable to the reader but clearly different from people in late twentieth century urban America.
It's really interesting to see the usual expansionist high tech culture colonizing a primitive world from the point of view of the colonized. The Valan characters (aside from Spinel) are given some viewpoint time, and have personal motivations beyond just being randomly violent evil conquerors, but their oppressive acts are clearly condemned by the narrative, it's not a matter of asking the viewer to sympathize with their white man's burden problems and their manpain over "having to" use force to subdue the natives. It's not too much of a message book about how colonialism is bad, though there are some subtle and not too heavy-handed parallels with the European conquest of the New World. Particularly that the Shora culture is in many ways more technologically sophisticated than the Valedon culture, but that Valedon has military tech and metallurgy and no compunctions about destroying the ecology of the planet they're trying to conquer, which means that the confrontation between them is uneven.
This makes it a pretty hard story to read in many ways, especially the last part. The Shorans non-violent resistance is effective in that they do eventually retain their independence from the Valans, but not without huge damage to their planet and considerable loss of life, including developed, established characters not just red-shirts. There's rather a lot of torture and a couple of rapes, which are never sexified or portrayed in titillating detail, but it's a much more realistic account of what successful non-violent resistance against military occupation looks like than many. There are also several characters who are unable to maintain their pacifist approach and find themselves retaliating against the would-be occupiers, I found it hard to find the ending positive, in this context.
Details: (c) Joan Slonczewski 1986; Pub The Women's Press 1987; ISBN 0-7043-4069-0
Verdict: A door into ocean has some excellent world-building but I found it a little depressing.
Reasons for reading it: I've consistently heard this recommended, both as hard SF with plausible biology, and as feminist SF. I've been looking for a it for a while, and not finding it. I know these days you can pretty much get any book published in the 20th century for £3 from Amazon, but I am always reluctant to resort to giving money to the evil empire unless I get desperate.
How it came into my hands: Happily,
forestofglory gave me a copy as a present, which was really exciting, it's so nice to get a book you've been meaning to read!These past couple of months I've not been in as much of a reading mood as I usually am, but even considering that I found A door into ocean a bit slow going. Which is not to say I didn't like it, I cared a lot about the world and the characters, and I found the story compelling, but somehow reading on kept feeling more like work than like pleasure. I think it's partly because the writing style tends a little didactic; Slonczewski tends to explain to the reader both how her (undoubtedly very interesting and cool) world works, and what makes characters tick. I am not sure, I think it may be external things rather than the book itself that made me feel like it was hard to get into. It's very, very much the sort of thing I like.
The biology is in fact excellent, and it's not only accurate for real world biology, it makes plenty of sense in the somewhat post-technological setting. And I'm an easy sell on human living in alien culture stories. I really enjoyed Spinel as a character; he's an obvious trope in a way, the young man from a backwards provincial town who dreams of something grander than just joining the family business. And I like the way that he's not a Mary-Sue or an idealized fairy-tale hero, but realistically adolescent, impulsive, ignorant, needing to learn that other people are people. He's also not there to save the poor primitive Shorans, Pocahontas-style, nor are they there mainly to support his personal growth. (It helps, I think, that he isn't white; aDiO avoids the error of having purple-skinned aliens standing in for indigenous people and then making all the human characters white.) The character of Lady Berenice / Nisi is really fascinating too, the high-born lady who is genuinely torn between her home culture where she has real privileges as well as being stifled, and the Shoran culture she admires but never quite fits in to.
I think the Shora culture is perhaps a bit over-idealized; Slonczewski tries to show the flaws in their non-violent way of life but keeps falling back to telling the reader how wonderful everything is. aDiO is also one of those books that I've often seen critical commentary about but rarely actually encountered, about a female-only planet. I do like that a wide range of different people are portrayed, it's not as if Shora is all one homogeneous "alien" culture. The story is clear that the Shorans are biologically human, so it's very impressively done that they are understandable to the reader but clearly different from people in late twentieth century urban America.
It's really interesting to see the usual expansionist high tech culture colonizing a primitive world from the point of view of the colonized. The Valan characters (aside from Spinel) are given some viewpoint time, and have personal motivations beyond just being randomly violent evil conquerors, but their oppressive acts are clearly condemned by the narrative, it's not a matter of asking the viewer to sympathize with their white man's burden problems and their manpain over "having to" use force to subdue the natives. It's not too much of a message book about how colonialism is bad, though there are some subtle and not too heavy-handed parallels with the European conquest of the New World. Particularly that the Shora culture is in many ways more technologically sophisticated than the Valedon culture, but that Valedon has military tech and metallurgy and no compunctions about destroying the ecology of the planet they're trying to conquer, which means that the confrontation between them is uneven.
This makes it a pretty hard story to read in many ways, especially the last part. The Shorans non-violent resistance is effective in that they do eventually retain their independence from the Valans, but not without huge damage to their planet and considerable loss of life, including developed, established characters not just red-shirts. There's rather a lot of torture and a couple of rapes, which are never sexified or portrayed in titillating detail, but it's a much more realistic account of what successful non-violent resistance against military occupation looks like than many. There are also several characters who are unable to maintain their pacifist approach and find themselves retaliating against the would-be occupiers, I found it hard to find the ending positive, in this context.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-10-15 04:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-10-15 04:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-10-15 04:14 pm (UTC)It's a book 'for' children, but if you haven't seen it, have a look out for The Conquerors by David McKee which has just as much a message for adults as his Not Now, Bernard.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-10-15 04:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-10-15 06:43 pm (UTC)