blue skins, brown skies, alien sex

This is the first science-fiction I've read in a long, long time, which I felt genuinely introduced me to people with a world view that I, as a reader, can never fully comprehend. The setting is among people who have entered a post-human age, where physical presence is unnecessary to conduct a normal life, genetic manipulation is common and simple, and nearly everyone edits their perceptions and memories as a matter of course. Also, there is effective immortality.

I find myself terribly disappointed at the end, because when we solve the central mystery of the book, if people are acting for the reasons they say they are, they are all too human and understandable to me, without stretching. I disagree with them, as I think the audience is led to, but I can follow the logic. I was expecting the logic to be more difficult to follow, and also, to start from a set of values which would strike me as, at worst irrelevant, and at best, thoroughly novel. In the end, it boils down to something a lot like 'our children will run out of control, so let's not reproduce.' It's disappointingly mundane.

I'm also disappointed because the story isn't complete at the end of this book. We've reached a definitive stopping point, but it's clear that there's more to our hero's tale. I think that's a failing in a novel, even if it is intended to be part of a series or limited set. It's not a fault in a story like The Lord of the Rings, because none of the volumes are intended as standalone; it's a three book novel, not really a trilogy. This, on the other hand, is theoretically two separate novels closely connected, but instead turns out to be one big book. I feel cheated.

This is a difficult book because I'm unsure what the author assumes will disgust or attract his audience. The casual racism, sexism, and dominance of a heterosexual mindset are all profoundly disturbing to me, but in the first two cases it seems likely that the author either did not consider or felt he was writing in a fashion that was rather advance, and in the last, he either did not considered it or strictly rejected, although in a society such as he fashioned it seems unlikely to be a matter of concern, I think.

I think that the casual sexual exchange is supposed to repel readers, but I'm not sure. I know that it does not repel me. The fact that the relationships have little emotional content seems inevitable in a societ that stringently abjures against any intense personal relationships. The linguistic construction of 'having a girl' did bother me a lot, but that's because I found it both sexist and that it weakened his construction of this advanced society.

I am repelled by the wastefulness and consumerism of their society, but it is as a person who has lived through ecological movements and after the notion of zero population growth entered the mainstream consciousness. It seems to me that such a rigidly organized society should be able to survive without being a capitalist one, since they control their population so rigidly. Also, theirs is fairly uniquely a society where killing people in some lottery system ought to be socially acceptable and easy to accomplish. This constant expansion seems not only disgusting but also stupid and unnecessary, which in some ways disgusts me more.

In fiction, at least, I rather enjoy intelligently pursued villainy, and I find bumbling bad guys irritating if not played with fine comic timing.

As for the novel's central point, that happiness should not be the central goal of a person's life, I find myself unconvinced. Certainly, The Savage's argument to the contrary was unconvincing, since he lapsed into a fetishistic desire for pain, struggle, and torment, without seeming to either straight out enjoy such or find some sort of transcendence. If I had believed that he thought Truth, Beauty, Art, or God were served by struggling in life (a cheap metaphor would say something about pearls, oysters, and grit) I'd have been more sympathetic.

I was also thoroughly unconvinced by the argument for God. But then, most arguments for God seem to start with the assumption that having a God or Gods is more comforting than the thought that the universe is a creation of random chance, and I don't find that at all. If this is the best a sapient being could come up with, I'd rather wish they hadn't, but as serendipity goes, this particularl configuration is both not the worst of all possible worlds and no more likely than any other configuration.

This novel (as most dystopian tales are) is something of an invective on What Not To Do with subtly laced hints of What The World Ought to Do, and as such, it reads similarly to those rather nasty allegorical tales by the likes of Ayn Rand. I generally dislike allegories, particularly ones that use some of the common devices of the science fiction genre, because the devices almost invariably are poorly used and the stories poorly written on their shallowest level. This one is not. The science of it (hard and soft) is definitely creaky and getting creakier, but it actually holds up a bit better than a fair amount of the ridiculousness that came out of the pulps, so I'm not disgruntled on that end. And from the standpoint of pure writing, it's not bad and some of the language is actually very nice. (Some of the language choices made to illustrate the world as it is then were ridiculous. Champagne-surrogate? Charing-T? I'm laughing at you, Aldous Huxley!)