Janet Russ, The Female Man (1975; 1970)

I approached Joanna Russ's The Female Man with some trepidation.

I had hoped that the reputation the work has earned as a cornerstone of feminist science fiction since its publication in 1975 (written 1970) would find expression in a subtlety of argument that transcended the bludgeon and bluster of the politics of gender of forty years ago.

Sadly, it does not.

Let's be clear about this. If we are asking 'does this work have an historic significance?' then the answer in my opinion is yes, it does. However, if we are asking 'does this novel have any merit as a work of science fiction, and is it still worth reading?' then I would have to answer 'a scant amount', and 'frankly, no' respectively.

Although incoherently presented, the four fictive worlds which overlap in The Female Man through the persons of Joanna, Jeannine, Janet and Jael invite productive reflection on the part of the reader with regard to their relation to the author, whom they may be interpreted as being facets of. Whilst such a reading effectively elevates Russ to the status of an Everywoman figure, which was doubtless not her intention, the trope allows for the consideration of possible futures and alternate histories of the female subject which are thoughtful and engaging.

However, it is easy for the reader to be sympathetic to the novel's concepts when considering them outside of the textual contexts within which they are presented. The Female Man wavers stylistically between the hectoring, the overwrought, the juvenile, and the unreadable. When the narrator observes 'This is the lecture. If you don't like it, you can skip to the next chapter' (loc. 466) I suspect that I could not have been the only reader to have concluded that not just the chapter in question but rather the entire novel reads like a testy diatribe against The Evil That Men Do and were left 'numb, numb with boredom' (loc. 2610-11) while struggling through it.

The Female Man is a curio you may wish to dip into for any number of reasons, but it really isn't something you need to take the time to read or study, and is a dubious addition to the SF Masterworks series.

Do not get glum when you are no longer understood, little book. Do not curse your fate. Do not reach up from readers' laps and punch the readers' noses. Rejoice, little book! For on that day, we will be free. (Lo. 3154-56)

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Philip K. Dick, A Maze Of Death (1970) SFMW 57

When marine biologists Seth and Mary Morley volunteer for a new post on the frontier world Delmak-O, they arrive to find a leaderless group of twelve other colonists with no idea as to what they are doing there. The situation is made worse by the malfunction of the satellite that is supposed to detail them as to the purpose of their assignment.

Then the colonists begin to die.

The fact that the chapter summaries in the prefatory matter of A Maze of Death bear no resemblance whatsoever to the events depicted in the book is hint enough that nothing will prove to be as it first appears in the next 180 pages.

All of Philip K. Dick's works have an eerie way of making you think they have been written with you in mind, which is both unsettling and yet also entirely in keeping with throb of paranoia that pulsates at the heart of almost all of his novels in some way. Hence, on the day I read A Maze of Death I had bought the ingredients to make a lamb curry (p. 24), and had taken delivery of a bottle of Seagrams whisky (p. 31) only a day or two before.

Dick's trademark ‘justifed paranoia’ suffuses the work. As usual, the author hints that there is a something outside the text that is trying to get into it: 'They’re experimenting with us, [Seth Morley] thought wildly. That’s what this is: an experiment. Maybe there never were any instructions on the satellite’s tape. Maybe it was all planned’ (p. 50). The characters share an uncomfortable sense that they are under observation, in much the same as Dick appears to have envisaged his readership pontificating over the factual basis of his relationship with the thematic concerns of his oeuvre: ‘He did not like the mixture of artificial life forms with the real ones; the mixing together of them made him sense the whole landscape as false… as if, he thought, those hills in the background, and that great plateau to the right are a painted backdrop. As if all this, and ourselves, and the settlement – are all contained in a geodetic dome. And above us Treaton’s research men, like entirely deformed scientists of pulp fiction, are peering down at us as we walk, tiny-creature-wise, along our humble way’. (p. 101)

A Maze of Death returns to another of what we might call 'Dick’s ticks', namely the structure and function of religious belief. On this occasion, Dick begins by positing that a god exists and that prayer is effective if ‘electronically transmitted through the network of god-worlds so that all Manifestations are reached’ (p. 52). Not surprisingly, this is not a hypothesis that the extraordinary conclusion of the work can necessarily affirm, but it does makes for a fascinating frame-within-a-frame through which to view the text. From the author’s foreword: ‘The theology in this novel is not an analogue of any known religion. It stems from an attempt by William Sarill and myself to develop an abstract, logical system of religious thought, based on the arbitrary postulate that god exists’ (p. 3). The visible manifestation of the power of faith is a reality in this novel: ‘I can understand there being widespread atheism in previous eras, when religion was based on faith in things unseen... but now it’s not unseen, as Specktowsky indicated’ (p. 88)

The core text in the colonist’s religion is Specktowskty’s How I Rose From the Dead in My Spare Time and So Can You (p. 9), which reconstructs the christian trinity in the form of the Mentufacturer, the Intercessor, and the Walker-on-Earth, opposing the death-urge personified in the Form Destroyer: ‘The thing about the Mentufacturer[…] is that he can renew everything. He can abort the decay process by replacing the decaying object with a new one, one whose form is perfect. And then that decays. The Form Destroyer gets hold of it – and presently the Mentufacturer replaces that[…] But I can’t do that. I decay and the Form Destroyer has me. And it will get only worse’ (pp. 10-11)

The vertiginous final chapters wherein the mystery of the shared tattoo, ‘Persus 9’ (p. 168), is revealed and the narrative is shown to have been part of another sequence of events altogether reveal the events that preceded it to have been ‘a comforting web[…] in particular the postulate that god existed’ (p. 181). However, when Seth Morley says ‘I wish to God[…] that there really was an Intercessor’ (p. 184), he should have been careful what he asked for. The reader is left to their own devices to try to make sense of what is happening as perceptions clash and fictive realities overlap in the work’s concluding pages.

If A Maze of Death has a theme, it could be said to be that in making a life for oneself among the ruins of our shortcomings (namely, our susceptibility to failure, our destiny to decay, and our universal ignorance), the ability to retain a sense of perspective is everything.

Whilst I am entranced by the idea that one should be motivated to walk away from a life that you have made for yourself on the basis that ‘the cheese is terrible here’ (p. 14), there are bleaker themes to muse upon. When the colonists are forced to consider their isolation on Delmak-O they concede that ‘we have one vast fear, and that is this: there is no purpose to us being here, and we’ll never be able to leave’ (p. 31)

Each of the colonists characterises a different shortcoming, and there is a little of the author - and also the reader - in all of them: ‘The thing we have in common is that we’re failures. Take Tallchief. Couldn’t you tell he’s a wino? And Susie – all she can think about is sexual conquests. I can make a guess about you, too. You’re overweight; obviously you eat too much[...] Babble is a hyochondriac. Betty Jo Berm is a compulsive pill-taker: her life is in those little plastic bottles. That kid, Tony Dunkelwelt; he lives for his mystical insights, his schizophrenic trances[…] Maggie, here,’ he gestured toward her. ‘She lives in an illusory world of prayer and fasting, doing service to a diety which isn’t interested in her.’ To Maggie he said, ‘Have you ever seen the Intercessor, Maggie?’ (p. 79)

The destructive work of the Form Destroyer also stalks the novel: ‘Maybe they were alright before they got here, and something here made them change. If that is so, it will change us, too[…]. Eventually.’ (p. 40) Accompanying this observation is a tangible fear of neither understanding how, nor even being aware of, such changes, and realizing that only those who observe you will notice. Except they too are changing in turn, and the processes of decay are perpetual and reciprocal.

It is also difficult not to become aware of the novel’s insistent reminders that humanity has reached a point in its evolution where it is not only wilfully ignorant, but also quite content to be so: ‘Each of you seems to be living in his own private world. Without regard for anyone else. It’s as if[…] all you want, each of you, is to be left alone’ (p. 76). ‘We live in a world created and manufactured from the results of the work of millions of men, most of them dead, virtually none of them given any credit[…] It wouldn’t matter[…] if this whole colony, everybody in it, died. None of us contribute anything. We’re nothing more than parasites, feeding off the galaxy’ (pp. 80-81).

There are numerous false starts and dead ends on the path to enlightenment within A Maze of Death, most notably in the form of the tench, which appears to be a ‘great globular mass of protoplasmic slush’ (pp. 171-72), but isn’t. The tench answers questions in a circular manner redolent of the I Ching: ‘I’m asking, “Why are we alive?”’ [Maggie Walsh] placed the paper before the tench and waited. The answer, when they had obtained it, read: ‘To be in the fullness of possession, and at the height of power’. (p. 127)

Ultimately, the author suggests that if we are prepared, or perhaps capable, of appreciating it for what it really is, there may be a redemptive spark within us that could be fanned into life: ‘Something to save us,[…] something to doom us. It – the equation of everything – could go either way’ (p. 89)

In the last instance, an assessment of A Maze of Death is a question of perspective: what you see, and what you want to see; what you accept and understand, and what you are trying to efface from memory and turn your thoughts away from. You will accept assistance in propagating the former’s illusory states of being until a time comes, as it does for Seth Morley in the penultimate chapter, when you realize you have to make a change. Assuming it ever arrives, the much-desired change may be neither what you expected, nor what you hoped for. Sometimes, it may even be a logical impossibility (‘But we invented you!’ (p. 187)), but that will not stop it happening. Beyond it, however, will be something else: the kernel of change to come.

As if perceived through distorting mirrors, the ways in which the thematic and narrative perspectives of A Maze of Death will be elongated in the stunning final two chapters of the work break out into the novel around half way through, although you do not realize this when reading it for the first time:‘You know, Specktowsky speaks about us as being “prisoners of our own preconceptions and expectations. And that one of the conditions of the Curse is to remain mired in the quasi-reality of those proclivities. Without ever seeing reality as it actually is’ (p. 102)

Bleak, confusing, and seductive, A Maze of Death is a fine entry in the SF Masterworks series and one of Philip K. Dick's most satisfying novels.

‘I am outside and isolated. But in a sense all of us are’ (p. 126)

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Poul Anderson, Tau Zero (1970) SFMW 64

What is man, that he should outlive his God?

The Leonora Christine is nearing the third year of her journey from Earth to colonise Beta Three 'when grief [comes] upon her' (p. 63) in the form of damage to her Bussard drive's declerator. As a consequence, the ship is unable to slow down. The work focuses on the ways in which the crew come to terms with their situation and endeavour to find a solution, whilst dealing with the fact that 'at each crisis, the folk had ralled. Yet each upsurge of hope peaked lower than the last, each withdrawal to misery went deeper' (p. 165).

Despite Anderson's training as a physicist, rather less of the novel than you might expect is in fact taken up with hard SF exposition. Perhaps reflecting the preoccupations of the era in which it was written, there is a good deal of borderline soap-opera melodrama revolving around the bed-hopping antics of the fifty crew members of the ship, although the reader is left at the cabin door.

Of the remainder of the work's scant one hundred and ninety pages, Anderson explores how he imagines the crew would react under the despairing circumstances they find themselves in. Many different angles are examined as the elite scientists that the man the ship deal with the fact that 'have lost Earth, lost Beta Three, lost the mankind [they] belonged to,' and are left only with their 'courage, love, and yes, hope' (p. 84).

The crew eventually grope their way towards an outcome which will allow a spacewalk to rectify the damage: 'if we can find a region where gas is practically nonexistent, we can safely shut down the shields, and our engineers can go outside and repair the decelerator system' (p. 86). With the drive repaired, and deceleration once again a possibility, the crew now have to confront the fact that they are spatially and temporally far beyond their original destination, and that they must find a new planet capable of supporting life. With some techinical innovations allowing them to gather and analyse data at the unimaginable speed they are travelling at, they 'lay out a course that takes [them] hard by the most promising suns, in sequence, while [they] continue to travel near light-speed. In cosmic time, [they] have hours or days to check whatever planet interests [them]' (p. 124). Accelerating the Bussard drive by using the matter that they fly through as fuel, the crew endeavours to 'push tau down as low as can be, no matter what the dangers. Not simply to make the trip itself short enough for [them] to endure. But for the psychological need to do [their] utmost [...] Don't you see? It's [their] way of fighting back at the universe. Vogue la galère. Go for broke.' (p. 132)

Time, as you might expect, is a preoccupation of the work, as the crew hurtle 'five- or six-billion' (p. 161), then 'fifty billion' (p. 166), and finally 'more than a hundred billion' light-years (p. 170) from their point of origin. This, in turn, presents the crew with a new, and seemingly insurmountable, dilemma: having endured everything that they have done, they must now acknowledge that 'the universe - the whole universe - [is] dying' (p. 170), and that their existence will end with it.

The solution that Anderson conjures up is suitably overreaching, but entirely appropriate in view of the unimaginably large dimensions that the work moves within: 'we will not be able to stop before the death of the universe[...] I propose we go on to the next cycle of the cosmos' (pp. 172, 174). I don't think that there is any doubt that the author was aware of the preposterousness of this trope, even as he was writing it, leading one of his characters to opine 'but this is too much. We're - well, what are we? - Animals. My God - very literally, my God - we can't go on... having regular bowel movements... while creation happens!' (pp. 175-6).

Nevertheless, he rolls with the idea and makes a fist of conjoining the fact that there is infinite wonder to be found in the study of some of the smallest object in the natural world as well as the contemplation of the most cataclysmic events in time and space, and that both are as extraordinary as the other when considered in isolation: 'We can't deny what's about to happen is awesome. But so is everything else. Always. I never thought stars were more mysterious, or had more magic, than flowers.' (p. 176). Furthermore, Anderson impishly suggests that life beyond the end of time may be just as prosaic as life before it: 'I wonder if the biggest surprise in these next months isn't how stubbornly ordinary life will keep on being.' (p. 178).

The novel speeds up towards its end, much like the ship and the universe it exists within, until finally the crew sees evidence of 'the germ of the monobloc,' and a new beginning (p. 181). 'On the fringes of creation, through billion-year cycles which passed as moments, the ship of man flew' (p. 181). I'd be interested to know how many rewrites Anderson treated the scene within which the universe is created to, but he does a fair job, and it is worth quoting in full:

The screen blanked. An instant later, every fluropanel in the ship turned simultaneously ultraviolet and infrared, and blackness plunged down. Those who lay harnessed alone, throughout the hull, heard invisible lightnings walk the corridors. Those in command bridge, pilot bridge, engine room, who manned the ship, felt a heaviness greater than planets - they could not move, nor stop a movement once begun - and then felt a lightness such that their bodies began to shake asunder - and this was a change in inertia itself, in every constant of nature as space-time-energy-matter underwent its ultimate convulsion - for a moment infinitesimal and infinite, men, women, child, ship, and death were one. It passed, so swiftly that they could not tell if it had been. Light came back, and outside vision. The storm grew fiercer. But now through it, seen distorted so that they appeared to be blue-white firedrops that broke into sparks as they flew, fountaining off in two huge curving sheets, now came the nascent galaxies. The monobloc had exploded. Creation had begun. (p. 182)

The reader is left with the impression that Anderson didn't have a great deal of regard for the social, economic and political arrangements of the late 1960s. 'No matter how carefully you design a system,' one of his characters remarks, 'it will go bad and die' (p. 13). I don't think anyone could reasonably have predicted the solution he envisages having developed on the Earth that the crew of the Leonora Christine leave behind them. It takes an imagination of Anderson's stature to imagine (even in half-jest, as I suspect this is) a world where Sweden was in control. Only some of Scandinavian descent could: 'who can we trust with a monopoly of the plant killer weapons and unlimited powers of inspection and arrest? Why, a country big and modern enough to make peace keeping a major industry; but not big enough to conquer anyone else or force its will on anyone without a majority of nations; and reasonably well thought of by everyone. In short, Sweden' (p. 13). Why, of course! When the crew does finally emerge into the newly-born universe and identifies a suitably planet in the final pages of the book, the overarching idea is that they will 'need to take from the past what's good, and forget what's bad.' (p. 188). Despite the power that he has wielded during the voyage, Charles Reymont -- the emotionally robotic and 'inhuman' chief of security who acts variously as 'a fire, a whip, a weapon, an engine' (p. 162) to the rest of the crew -- suggests that the society that they may go on to develop is unlikely to be autocratic one: 'once a crisis is past, once people can manage for themselves... what better can a king do for them than take off his crown?’ (p. 190)

This is the first work by Poul Anderson, who died in 2001, that I have read, and his only appearance in the SF Masterworks series to date. I would be interested to spend more time with his oeuvre for a number of reasons, not least of which would be to discover a little more about his view of the cosmos and the actions of the human animal through the mouths of his characters.This site declares him to have been agnostic, but I get more of a sense of humanistic atheism emanating from his work. I enjoyed the idea planted in the work that the characters in Tau Zero are participating in an analogue of 'the Wild Hunt of the damned' (p. 136), as well as Anderson's invitation for the reader to hear the echoes of Melville resounding through his work: 'did you ever read Moby Dick?... That's us. We've pursued the White Whale. To the end of time. And now... that question. What is man, that he should outlive his God?"' (p. 171).

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Larry Niven, Ringworld (1970) SFMW 60

Between the finite and the infinite

Larry Niven's Ringworld has a mundane plot. A party of adventurers crash on an alien artefact and attempt to escape from it. The plot, however, is to all intents and purposes irrelevant. I am gripped by the conviction that Niven envisaged the artefact in question and simply wanted to come up with a vehicle to describe it over the course of 280 pages or so. The construction in question is a solid band circling a planet, a million miles in radius which has been terraformed by architects whose presence is still felt despite their absence, and which has now fallen into decay. Niven muses over the intricacies of its form and function, from the foundation material to the cloud squares which separate night from day, and constructs a wholly convincing environment in so doing. A few paragraphs of scant description will not do his successes in this regard justice, and I would recommend reading it for these evocations of a vast alien environment alone. Ringworld's habitats remind us of our own, yet are described as being of such a scale as to make the reader feel insignificant even within the pages of the book. On closing it, our own world seems rarer and less familiar, increasing in magnitude as we ourselves diminish, overturning the familiar trope of 'the shrinking world' and letting us once again revel in the scale of nature. Iain M. Banks' Consider Phlebas reworks the idea of the ringworld to great effect, but Larry Niven got there first.

Winner of the 1971 Hugo Award, Ringworld is also noteworthy for some (but not all) of its characters. The four adventurers are (ostensibly) led -- or, more accurately, hired by -- Nessus of the Puppeteers, who resembles a large semi-plucked turkey with two necks, a brace of python heads, and bipolar disorder. Speaker To Animals is an oversized brawny ginger tom cat of the warlike Kzin race, which has battled mankind for centuries and been overthrown as a consequence of the Puppeteers technological intervention on behalf of humanity. As it turns out, the Puppeteers have been manipulating both races for their own ends, a fact which Niven (hilariously) tries to deploy as a plot twist; but the clue is in the name, isn't it? The two humanoids, Louis Wu (chosen for his experience) and Teela Brown (chosen for her supposed luck) are, frankly, tedious, and the exposition regarding their relationship slows the book to down to a crawl in a places.

In summary, whilst I could hardly recommend Ringworld for the telling of its story alone, Niven's peerless description of an alien artefact of almost incomprehensible enormousness is what makes this book so satisfying. Take his conjuration of some of that wonder from it and see your own world through it. The SF Masterworks edition's cover is absolutely stunning, too.

Note: Ringworld was the eighth entry in the 2001 hardback SF Masterworks series (second cover image above), and the sixtieth entry in the numbered SF Masterworks series (first cover image; 2005). A printing error saw the volume bear the number '72'.

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