Review: Patternmaster by Octavia Butler (1976)

The time is millennia in the future. The place is unnamed. (Although the flashy back cover of my copy proclaims ONCE THIS LAND WAS SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, it’s not explicit in the book, and I’m more comfortable with the text’s assumption that our current geographic definitions are long gone.

Homo sapiens have evolved into three species: Patternists, mutes, and Clayarks. Patternists are the ruling elite, who possess powerful telepathic abilities and constantly vie for power. Mutes are humans just like you and me, who work hard, express themselves through ritual, and rely on their Patternist masters for protection. Clayarks are savage, gun-wielding mutants who constantly raid Patternist territory. Into this harsh world are united Coransee and Teray, blood brothers and sons of the immensely powerful Patternmaster whose power controls the whole civilized world. As the younger and more naïve brother, Teray must use all his wits to retain his life and his freedom from Coransee, who with all his being craves becoming the next Patternmaster and will stop at nothing to destroy his younger brother if his ambition becomes threatened.

From the very beginning, I appreciate Butler’s ability to have us meet the book on its own terms. Although every fiber of the setting is science fiction, the plot begins on page one and doesn’t stop for lengthy explanations. Yet even the most outlandish concepts were not convoluted enough to send me back to reread previous sections for illumination. This is one of the most important goals when writing speculative fiction, and probably the most difficult to achieve. It takes many skills, especially good pacing and solid, intelligible creative concepts. All the core creative concepts of Patternmaster are contained my short summary above; the rest is detail.

The story is somewhat more tortuous. Again, I don’t normally judge a book by its cover, but the ‘70’s pulp sci-fi cover on my copy screams out in illustration and capital letters that the main conflict will be between Teray and Coransee. They meet as soon as enough exposition has happened, but after some initial squabbling, their feud is left waiting just offstage for many, many pages. This is a nice touch in that it kept me turning pages while also surprising me with the emergence of smaller woes and struggles that befall Teray for more or less the whole book.

Finally, of course, I have a word on the politics. Butler speaks as a black woman in 1970’s California to me as a white man in 2010’s New York about many issues which we bemoan continuing to live with, but which are actually timeless. Consider the political structure of this Southern California: a small, elite class controls a large, less powerful class, and the two live together to protect themselves from a third, alien class. This skeletal archetype, devoid of ideological context, is reflected all throughout human history on many scales, and through Patternmaster Butler presents that it will still be the basis for societal interaction thousands of years hence.

I can’t help but compare Octavia Butler with Ursula K. Le Guin, who was also writing paperback science fiction on the West Coast around the same time, and whom I know much better. To Butler’s credit, she is worthy company to Le Guin. Where a woman writes original science fiction about human nature and society, you’ll find me on board.

Review: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein (1966)

In the year 2075 "Luna" is a penal colony for Earth, and revolution is brewing. Four conspirators decide to overthrow the Authority that rules them; Mannie, a Jack of all trades and third-generation "Loonie"; Wyoming Knott, a surrogate mother with a personal vendetta against the Authority; Professor de la Paz, an anarchist by profession; and Mike, a self-aware computer, the only one of his kind, who controls all the electrical systems on Luna. The foursome pool their skills to concoct a scheme that will forever change life on the moon and politics on Earth.

They don't give out the Hugo award for just anything; this book has a lot to say about human nature, politics, and power. Its stance on human nature is classically comedic: the characters have many flaws and trivial affairs, but there is hope for all of them. Heinlein makes the plot believable by combining these very human characters with intricate descriptions of physics and sociology; of all the science fiction books I've ever read, this is one of the few I half-expect to come true.

I'd like to spend some time on where the Lunar society intersects with our current social struggles. Despite being founded on a population of convicts, Luna is mostly a peaceful society where crime is low and war is impossible. However, there are instances which are commonplace there but shock visitors from Terra (Earth); the concept of "eliminating" wrongdoers, and the Loonie response to violence against themselves. Elimination is a certain kind of murder in which a group of Loonies forces someone out of an air lock and onto the vacuum of the moon's surface. There are no written laws on Luna, but everyone seems to know whether someone deserves to be eliminated. New conscripts often face this fate due to social blunders. Even more violently, there are several scenes in the book when agents of the Lunar Authority attack, and when this happens, Loonies of all ages drop whatever they're doing and fight with whatever they have at hand until every last offender is dead. Women literally tear rapists apart, and children fearlessly wield kitchen knives against intruders with laser guns. It's an interesting outcome of the setting's effect on social understanding, and I appreciate the fact that it doesn't seem to be driven by a political agenda.

This agenda's back seat to the story is somewhat opposite to what I have to criticize about Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (you knew I couldn't get too deep into science fiction without bringing her up). In fact, the setting itself is ideal, even metaphorical, for creating a politically clean slate upon which to see politics afresh, as though experimenting with a control group. The characters hail from every nation on Earth. Because of their polygamous family structure, it's impossible for most of them to be sure of their ancestry, in contrast with the ethnically segregated United States. Rather than taking a swing at a particular ideology or group, Heinlein suggests that we all share the blame for political oppression by showing that the Lunar Authority is made up of nationally diverse politicians. This suggestion is cemented by the scheming that begins among Loonies almost as soon as they begin to envision life without an Authority. These characters are as close as they can be to a political and physical vacuum, but they go on being political creatures just as they keep on breathing air.

Into this mix is a personal note: one of my biases toward the book is the fact that Prof, one of the best fleshed-out characters, shares my political views more than any fictional character I've ever read. He adheres to "rational anarchism," a term Heinlein apparently invented. Essentially, he believes that political systems are imaginary constructs, and that with each person lies his own responsibility for his own actions. This viewpoint reinforces three things: the Loonies' ability to envision a society with a different kind of government than what history has shown them; Earth's ability to set aside political differences when they believe their economy is threatened from above; and Heinlein's ability to imagine people accepting or rejecting an ideology even when doing so is the hard choice.

From the stance of science fiction, my fascination was drawn over and over to Mike the computer. His name is short for Mycroft, the brother of Sherlock Holmes, and his motivation for participating in the coup is to test the limits of his intelligence. We see him do various incredible things, such as divide his personality, invent CGI, and calculate probabilities for future, qualitative events. It is a credit to Heinlein's writing that these are described with such emotion and curiosity that we can believe they are happening for the first time in human history. Moreover, in many ways, Mike is the most sympathetic character in the book. The first scene details Mannie patiently, fraternally explaining humor to Mike one joke at a time; much later, when Mike has learned and practiced enough to control and calculate far more than anyone ever expected of him, he still longs for a simpler future when he and Mannie can go back to trading jokes.

Read this book! It's a wonderful monolith of science fiction, and you'll be sure to learn something about your own relationship with society.

Review: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (1974)

Shevek is a physicist from the planet Anarres, which has a single society without government. Everybody is raised from infancy with the teaching that every individual must have freedom, but that nobody may own possessions or impose upon each other. Objects, food, ideas, and even sexual partners must be shared in order to prevent an imbalance in societal benefit. Thus Shevek is not just a physicist; he contributes whatever his society needs of him at the time. Yet when he arrives at a theory that could result in teleportation technology, he gradually realizes that the eternal bogeys of human nature, including envy and an instinct toward selfishness, cannot be eradicated. Although Shevek remains a faithful citizen, he encounters opponents who believe that his Principle of Simultaneity must be stifled in order to prevent it from falling into the hands of the people of Urras, the twin planet of Anarres. On Urras, there are such things as nations, capitalists, communists, possessions, inequity, and war, all of which are antithetical to Anarres's society. Shevek, steadfast in his belief that all good things must be shared, resolves that if his own people will not use Simultaneity, he will deliver it to the Propertarians, as the Anarres call those on Urras. Thus does Shevek become the first of his kind in more than a century to visit Urras, but he quickly finds himself out of his depth, among people for whom manipulation is a way of life. Unable to comprehend the reality of social inequality, he must learn how to survive while standing for people who stand for nothing at all.

Although I haven't always agreed with Le Guin's arguments, I find myself coming back for more. So far, all of her work I've read, with the exception of one novella, falls between 1968 and 1972 (this includes the first three Earthsea books as well as The Left Hand of Darkness.) In the tradition of hate being a variation of love, I think I'm so attracted to her writing because it handles the touchier subjects I appreciate in almost exactly the way I would handle them. She's the most talented science-fiction writer I know, so why does she fall short by just an inch?

Good news: in The Dispossessed, I think she finally hits the bull's-eye. And it's not for lack of trying, or for shirking the juicy stuff; once you wrap economic policy, sexual values, and science in the same package, there's nobody who's uninterested. If anyone's playing with fire, it's this lady.

What first impressed me was the ambiguity with which each character is portrayed. Shevek's description is simple for a long time. His life, habits, and tastes are each human and objective, and they build to a whole that is not a symbol for anything. In fact, it could be this uncertainty that makes him a perfect candidate to go to Earth. Anarres is held together by a solid goal of survival; Shevek intends to share his discovery, but he doesn't know what he wants, which makes him an outsider in both worlds. Similarly, all of the inhabitants of Urras are established like humans we all know, which makes them indescribable and alien to Shevek. But since we've already learned to relate to our protagonist, it's like looking in a mirror for the first time, without any disguise or prejudice, and not knowing what to think.

It's also great to see the underlying instability of Anarres. The subtitle for this book is An Ambiguous Utopia, and it shows. At first everybody is cheerful and cooperative, and you might be tempted to hail the society as the success of socialism's giving spirit or to damn it if you're suspicious of socialist tyranny (that's before Shevek meets real-life socialists and can't tell them apart from capitalists). But he discovers, with some help, that the manipulation of information, especially concerning his theory, is only mankind's oldest demon wearing new makeup. Power is never equal; even a supreme effort to level the playing field only distances the arbiters from the people playing the game. It warms my heart to hear a dedicated liberal like Le Guin understand this principle; there's an uncontrollability of life that the majority of the twenty-something demographic can't understand. In a way it makes Shevek all the more noble, because he would rather face the unexpected than allow his principles of indefinite equality to destroy something that could do a world of good.

Review: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (1969)

Genly Ai is an emissary to the planet Winter, which is covered in ice and whose inhabitants are all humanoid hermaphrodites. His mission is to befriend these people and persuade them to join the Ekumen, an alliance of planets designed for the sharing of culture and information. But his dubious position as an outsider keeps him on shaky ground, and when global politics repeatedly get the better of him, his only chance for survival comes in the form of Estraven, a former prime minister banished for treason. Together, these two exiles undertake an epic voyage across the ice that gives Genly a closer look than ever at the minds and values of these androgynous people.

If you've seen my selection of Le Guin's blog, you already know that while I respect her as one of the most insightful speculative fiction writers I've ever had the luck to read, her outlook frequently falls just short. This could be disappointing, but it's more important to look at the massive questions she does ask. This book is crammed with those.

The main issue raised in the novel is that of the differences between our visions of gender. Her foreword, which is a beautiful little piece about the use of fiction to frame real life, explains that science fiction and its cousins test our capacity for thought by contrasting what we think is impossible against what we cannot conceive at all. With a detailed explanation, it's easy to imagine someone who can transition between biological femaleness and biological maleness, and perhaps even exhibit both at once, but can you imagine someone who is psychologically a man and a woman at the same time? I don't know enough psychology to dispute which traits Le Guin identifies as feminine and which as masculine, but I give her all the credit I can for not pretending that women and men are the same people with different plumbing downstairs. I don't know about other parts of the world, but a lot of Americans have slurred this latter one together out of a strange need to justify civil rights. (Psst: Treating people well is not at all like treating them the same, and you don't need to make up an excuse to do so.)

Given a pretty good sense of what makes men and women different, Le Guin does quite a job of uniting these behind an alien mindset. This happens mostly because she shows it in the characters rather than describing it, for the most part. So while it's established here that competitiveness is primarily masculine and hospitality is primarily feminine, Genly the narrator cannot quite figure out what's motivating a Gethenian (as the aliens are called) in any given action. It's a function of Le Guin's subtlety that there's still an obvious, complex difference between Genly and the Gethenians that stems from the difference that while they are both male and female, he is only ever male.

Put The Left Hand of Darkness high on your list. It should be up there with Dune on the list of complex and intelligent science fiction creations.

The Problem

Since my main quarrel with this book is one of ideology, and didn't make me enjoy it any less, I'm separating it from my recommendation. If anything, it makes me like the book more for arousing the scrappy, perhaps competitive (heh) literary critic I wish I could be.

Taken as a whole, The Left Hand of Darkness turns into a panorama of wishful thinking. You may have read Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, which envisions the result of a profound problem with human civilization. The Gethen Le Guin creates here is a formal inverse of the dystopia; it's almost Edenic, but its circumstances are not what would really bring about paradise on Earth.

The two main features of Gethen are its ice-age climate and its inhabitants' bisexuality. Genly occasionally chronicles the differences that have arisen between Gethen's civilizations as a whole and that of his own Terra (Earth). For example, from fighting against such bitter weather conditions, Gethenians have cultivated the value of permanence rather than our 20th- and 21st-century preference of progress and innovation. But then Le Guin drops the fact that although Gethenians murder each other from time to time, the planet has never experienced a war in its several millennia of recorded history. This is partly, as she says, because the weather is already so good at killing them, but also has something to do with never having learned violence as a result of their androgynous physiology. Most importantly, it is physically impossible for one Gethenian to rape another. A large part of the plot deals with the fear that Gethen's first-ever war will break out soon, but that quickly fizzles, both in terms of the plot and of the narrative's interest.

It's all as if Le Guin is saying that there would be no violence, neither war nor rape, if we were all sexually equivalent and if our planet beat us back rather than vice versa. These ideas were fun at the dawn of the 70's, around the time of the book's publication, just as they are now. But the circumstances are impossible. And to pin strife on theories of gender and ecological destruction distracts from the reality that greed and selfishness are demons we all have to fight. Just as there doesn't need to be an excuse for selflessness, it can be harmful to disguise that its opposite is not also an inextricable piece of human nature.

Ursula K. Le Blog

The following is my comment on this blog post by fantasy author Ursula K. Le Guin:

I could hardly pretend to be a fantasy nerd without admitting there are those authors who know more about it than others. Tolkien and Lewis, Gaiman and Beagle: the best writers recognize that in an age where ideology is trickier, quality fantasy is not genre-driven, but has necessary tools built in. These tools are the implicit admission that anything goes, that neither the reader nor shallow, specialized criticism is the ultimate arbiter. The key is walking the tightrope of humility between existentialism and agnosticism.

Ursula K. Le Guin ranks near the top of fantasy theorists, in my esteem: on par with Joseph Campbell, and with a similar perspective. This short post of hers accurately catches why fantasy is so relevant to modern science and ideology in certain ways not even science fiction can do, but it misinterprets a handful of key points.

   I've always had difficulty grappling with speculative fiction's role as a metaphor for reality. And it is a metaphor, in exactly the same way that any fiction is a metaphor for reality. As I rant nearly constantly, the coinage of the term "speculative fiction" implies that there's fiction that isn't speculative. (The term refers to fantasy, sci-fi, horror, dystopia, or anything else that doesn't limit itself to current scientific understanding.) This split wasn't always there. Shakespeare didn't care whether fairies were real when he wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream, but he needed a love potion to confuse Lysander and Demetrius. Mary Shelley was a sci-fi writer in her time because Victor Frankenstein would have lacked depth if he'd just had an ugly kid. College professors still assign these because they've been canon for so long, but a genius like Vonnegut has to be treated with the tongs of postmodern criticism, and that's because he takes the time to wink and tell the reader exactly what he's doing. Most writers just expect you to keep up.

   My only problem with Le Guin's argument is that it wavers between points of nihilism. She admits that "somebody's geometry" has to be in play in a fantasy story. That is, the reader has to understand it. But beyond that, anything goes. I disagree. I would replace her assertion, "It doesn't have to be the way it is," with a question, "Is it really the way it is?"

  Le Guin gives science the benefit of the doubt, and I find that perfectly reasonable. Science is a broad enquiry, a humble admission that we don't yet know everything. And we never will, with emphasis on the everything. The pursuit of knowledge is undoubtedly noble, but the contention that we're already there is the worst hubris I've ever seen firsthand. It's unscientific to say, "Look back at those medieval chumps, how they believed in spontaneous generation!" Science is a process, and as individual people we try to do our best with what we have. The best scientist, just like the best fantasist, is someone who always has questions. In another thousand years, 2012's understanding of the universe will seem just as primitive as people without microscopes. The potential stagnancy, the feeling that we've done it all, fits the status quo that Le Guin protests.

Interestingly, and she admits this, both of the authors she mentions were Catholic. There are many people who place religion and science as opposites, but both Tolkien and Chesterton knew that science and religion are both tools to discover deeper meaning. Le Guin, who has one of the broadest knowledges of anthropology of anyone I've ever read, probably sees religious people as those grasping at air. Some probably are. But most religions, as well as non-religious spiritualities, are not generated spontaneously, but rather founded on real experiences that clash not with science, but with old discoveries that we call "laws." The monk, the fantasy author, and the researcher are now equally Galileo.

And, as with all science or math that has any value, fantasy shouldn't exist for its own sake. Dungeons and Dragons is pure neurosis if role play isn't included. Le Guin's stories stretch beyond the Archipelago to our own fears of being locked in the dark or lost at sea, and our own hawkish pride. This is the geometry that fantasy preserves: the physics don't have to make sense when they sit on the shoulders of the moral.