Resources Roundup: Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Lois Lowry

Vegan rebels of the bio-apocalypse in “Year of the Flood”: Book review by Annalee Newitz (io9)

Playing human in Octavia Butler’s Imago: Essay by Erika Nelson (Tor.com)

In praise of banned books, day 4: The Giver: Essay by Rebecca (The Book Lady’s Blog)

Related:

• Retrospective: Octavia Butler
• Review: The Giver
• Review: The Year of the Flood

Review: The Giver by Lois Lowry (1993)

Cover of The Giver

It is true that most habitual readers acquire the habit when they are young. I have my father to blame for my addiction to books, who actually gave me an Isaac Asimov novel when I was in the fourth grade (from which I learned several choice curse words, although I was totally incapable of following the plot).

Like many young readers, I was hooked by the gateway drugs of science fiction and fantasy. My favorites when I was a pre-teen were the Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis, the Chronicles of Prydain series by Lloyd Alexander and A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels byMadeleine L’Engle.

Unfortunately, I had long abandoned my childish ways by the time The Giver was published. I read it for the first time recently and realized that this was a book my younger self would have loved. It depicts a dystopian society where all choices have been eliminated. Everything from what your job is to who you marry is decided for you. But one person in the society, the “Receiver,” must be selected as the keeper of the society’s collective memories. His job is to remember what life used to be like, with war, tragedy and pain, yes, but also with true emotions, extended family and even colors. Each new Receiver receives the memories from the previous Receiver, who thus becomes the “Giver” of the title. While a bit too simplistic for the adult reader, the novel provides a nice introduction to some weighty themes for younger readers.

The Giver won the Newbery Medal in 1994. This is the first book in a loose trilogy called the Giver Series that includes Gathering Blue (2000) and Messenger (2004), both set in the same dystopian world.

Note: This review was based on a version previously published on my books blog Books Worth Reading.

More information:

• Official web page
• Teachers’ guide from the publisher
• Wikipedia article
• Suicide book challenged in schools (USA Today)
• In praise of banned books: The Giver (The Book Lady’s Blog)

Review: The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer (2002)

Image via Wikipedia

Note: This review contains mild spoilers.

The House of the Scorpion is a novel intended for young adults, but it is only distinguishable as that by the youth of its main characters and the sometimes simplistic straightforwardness of the writing. The themes it addresses — the outsider, the moral obligations of those in power, the determination of nature vs. nurture — are much more complex and will appeal to readers of any age.

The House of the Scorpion is set 140 years in the future, in a dystopian country called Opium or Dreamland, located between the U.S. and Mexican (now Aztlan) borders. Opium was founded by a drug lord named El Patrón in a deal with its bordering countries to eliminate illegal immigration and funnel the drug trade to Asia, Europe and Africa. El Patrón rules Opium absolutely, modeling it on a fantasy version of his childhood Mexico. His Farm Patrol captures illegals and lobotomizes them, turning them into slaves called “eejits” or “zombies” to work the opium fields. El Patrón keeps himself alive by harvesting organs and tissue as needed from clones of himself, whose brains are also destroyed.

Except, in his hubris, El Patrón decides to keep the brain of of one his clones, a boy named Matt, intact. The novel is divided into sections based on Matt’s age and important periods in his life, from youth to middle age to old age. Never intended to have a long life, Matt’s “death” — and most critical turning point — comes at age 14, when he discovers that his true purpose is not to take over the family business from El Patrón, but to supply his next heart. The House of the Scorpion is Matt’s coming-of-age story, and at this point when Matt escapes to Aztlan, he begins the final process of becoming himself: no longer a despised, inferior clone, an outsider, but a true leader.

Sharing El Patrón’s genetics, Matt also shares many of his characteristics: pride, innate leadership, the drive to do what is necessary to achieve his goals. For most of his youth, although he is largely ostracized, Matt is not completely alone. Three people highly influence him: Celia, the woman who raises him and loves him unconditionally; Tam Lin, his bodyguard, who teaches him about the world and who believes in him; and Maria, his childhood friend who shows Matt that he is capable of being loved, despite being a clone. These are influences that El Patrón lacked. So when Matt comes into his own as a leader, he has the potential to do what El Patrón never could: to correct the egregious moral sins of his culture.

The House of the Scorpion won many honors, including the Newbery Award and the National Book Award for young adult literature.

More information:

• Official homepage
• Publisher page with reading group guide and excerpt
• Wikipedia article

Resource Roundup: Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin

A 2009 Interview with Margaret Atwood: Space Squids and Talking Cabbages: a podcast (Agony Column).

Negotiating Difference in Octavia Butler’s Adulthood Rites: Essay by Erika Nelson (Tor.com).

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin: Book review by Gareth Hughes (Ad Fontes).

Happy birthday, Ursula K. Le Guin: A nice roundup of birthday celebration links (Feminist SF).

Related:

• Retrospective: Ursula K. Le Guin
• Retrospective: Octavia Butler
• Retrospective: Margaret Atwood

Retrospective: Madeleine L’Engle

Image via Wikipedia

Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quartet series was a huge influence on me when I was growing up. Here were exciting books written for kids that also contained real science and travel to other planets. Her books introduced me to the concepts of time as a fourth dimension and bending space-time to travel vast distances across the universe.

I recently reread A Wrinkle in Time (1962) to see if it was as good as I remembered. I was captivated once again by the story of three exceptional children escorted across the universe by the other-dimensional beings Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which and Mrs. Whatsit to rescue their physicist father. But what struck me this time was what a great role model the character of Meg must have been for young female readers like me. She is smart, resourceful and courageous when she has to be; she has flaws, which she sometimes uses to her advantage, and she doesn’t rely on others to rescue her from difficult situations. She can even do math and gets a great geeky boyfriend.

A Wrinkle in Time won the Newbery Medal in 1963, and it was adapted for television by Disney. The other books in the Time Quartet are A Wind in the Door (1973), A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978) and Many Waters (1986). In addition, L’Engle has published many more science fiction books for young readers, including The Arm of the Starfish (1965), which features Meg’s daughter Poly as the main character. Madeleine L’Engle died at the age of 89 in 2007, but her books continue to make a wonderful introduction to the genre.

About L’Engle:

• Official homepage
• Wikipedia article
• The Storyteller: Fact, Fiction and the Books of Madeleine L’Engle (The New Yorker)
• Madeleine L’Engle papers at Wheaton College

On the blogs:

• Thoughts on writing from Madeleine L’Engle (Gypsyscarlet’s Weblog)
• Where to start with young adult science fiction (io9)

Review: The Children of Men by P.D. James (1992)

Note: This review contains mild spoilers.

Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.

Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.

Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men.

For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.

Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep: in the morning they are like grass which groweth up.

In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth.

– Psalm 90, King James Bible

Image via Wikipedia

P.D. James is well known as a mystery writer, but she took a departure from her usual genre with this apocalyptic story. The Children of Men takes place in a near future 25 years after people have stopped giving birth and are, as a result, facing the end of the species. No explanation is given for the sudden loss of fertility — it is presented as having baffled scientists and doctors — but James seems more interested in its effects on the characters living out the last days.

The story is set in England, which has fallen under dictatorial rule in the name of providing the public with what they most want: security, comfort and pleasure. Criminals are shipped off to the Isle of Man, where they live in violent anarchy, and young, desperate immigrants are brought in to do the scut work as second-class citizens, only to be deported when they become too old or too useless. The British elderly are taken out to sea and drowned in group “suicides,” called the Quietus, much like unwanted kittens. The tone is bleak, hopeless, and filled with ennui and a sense that God has abandoned mankind.

The book is divided into two parts: Omega and Alpha. Once the reader learns that Omega is the name of the last year in which there was a birth, as well as of the last, spoiled, soul-less generation, it is simple to guess what Alpha represents: the first pregnancy in a quarter-century, a secret that propels forward the action in the second half of the novel.

The story is told from the point of view of Theo Faron, a professor of history at Oxford. Theo is so far removed emotionally from his life and the people in it that he is not even greatly affected when he accidentally kills his own baby daughter. This makes him very hard to like. He begins to change when he meets Julian, a young woman who is a member of a hapless, amateurish revolutionary group called the Five Fishes, formed to protest England’s dictatorial policies. Julian asks Theo to intercede with his cousin Xan, who happens to be the dictator, or Warden, of England. After meeting with her group and then witnessing a Quietus firsthand, Theo realizes that he can no longer be an observer, but must step on stage and become an actor in what’s happening to the human race.

The first half of the book alternates randomly between Theo’s diary entries and third-person narrative. I’m not sure why James felt that the diary sections were necessary, as the third-person chapters are also limited tightly to Theo’s perspective, and the diary itself proves not to be very important to the story. After one last entry, the diary literally disappears soon into the second half of the book.

The action ramps up as Theo joins Julian’s group on the run from Xan’s Grenadiers and discovers that Julian is nine months pregnant. Theo’s growing love for Julian and his awe at her maternal state transform him from a passive, apathetic observer into a passionate actor willing to lay down his own life for the cause. The scene when Julian reveals her pregnancy in an abandoned church and Theo gets down on his knees before her to hear the baby’s heartbeat is the most affecting moment in the novel.

Theo, Julian and the rest of the group go on the run to find a safe place for Julian to give birth. Everything is stacked against them, of course, and one by one they lose their companions until Theo and Julian are alone, literally, in the wilderness, with Xan and his soldiers bearing down on them. The ending (which I won’t reveal) may seem to be a happy one on the surface, but I think it is much more ambiguous than that, and there remains a real question as to whether this new baby will actually restore hope to the world.

The Children of Men was made into a movie in 2006, but if you have only seen the adaptation, know that it differs greatly from the novel in many respects. While the basic premise and characters remain the same, the future depicted in the novel is not as brutal or chaotic as in the movie, but it is perhaps more quietly bleak and hopeless, a tone that rang truer to me. The ending of the novel is quite different from the movie and would not be spoiled by seeing the film first.

More information:

• Wikipedia article

Review: Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm (1976)

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

– William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 73″

Image via Wikipedia

In this post-apocalyptic novel, civilization has been destroyed by some unspecified means involving environmental degradation, pandemics and famine. But one extended family, seeing the end coming, has used their wealth to isolate themselves in a well-protected valley and has constructed the hospital, labs and mill they will need to survive. Short on food, they develop cloning techniques to produce more livestock. When they find that most of them have become infertile, they start cloning themselves as well, with unforeseen consequences.

The story is told in three parts, each following a similar arc, each ending in a main character leaving the family’s compound. In the first section, a brilliant doctor helps develop the cloning process but is ousted by his own younger clones, who are already exhibiting disturbing behaviors; they appear to be losing their individual identities. In the second part, a clone is separated from her sister clones when she goes on an expedition to look for supplies in the ruined cities. As a result, she develops an individual personality and an artistic vision that the other clones interpret as madness when she returns to the compound. She must flee to keep from living a life as a drugged-up “breeder.” In the final section, her son is being raised by the clones but clearly doesn’t belong among them. Only he has the ingenuity and creativity necessary for continued survival as the machines and systems set up by the original survivalists begin to break down, and he leads a group out of the compound to start a new settlement.

What I thought about as I read this book was recent news stories about children so micro-managed by their “helicopter” parents that they have no ability to cope with the real world and break down as soon as they get to college. The young clones in the story reminded me of younger generations so coddled that they cannot make a decision on their own. How can we survive and advance as a species when we lose our individuality and cannot think for ourselves? is the question.

This is exactly the dilemma faced by the clones. They become so used to a life where they never have to think for themselves that they lose all of their creativity and problem-solving abilities. They become dependent on machines they don’t understand, and when those break down, they cannot come up with creative ways to fix them. So they are doomed. Only those who can establish an individual identity through isolation from the main group are able to learn how to survive.

It may seem on the surface that this novel is a somewhat dated horror story about cloning. But look deeper–the story brings up issues that are very relevant today. Wilhelm is raising a warning flag that we should safeguard our individuality and nurture our creativity if we want to survive.

Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang won the Hugo Award in 1977 and was nominated for the Nebula Award.

Note: This review was originally published on my blog Books Worth Reading.

More information:

• Wikipedia article
• Publisher’s page
• Kate Wilhelm’s official website

Resources Roundup: Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson

Effective Dreaming: Jo Walton on Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (Tor.com).

Sleeping with the Enemy: Erika Nelson on Octavia Butler’s Dawn (Tor.com).

Octavia Butler’s papers donated to the Huntington Library. (LA Times)

Nalo Hopkinson is offering her services as a mentor to budding science fiction and fantasy writers. (Nalo Hopkinson’s blog)

Related:

• Retrospective: Ursula K. Le Guin
• Retrospective: Octavia Butler

Review: The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood (2009)

Please note: There are mild spoilers in this review.

The Year of the Flood is not a sequel to Atwood’s dystopian novel Oryx and Crake, but rather a companion to it. It takes place at the same time and depicts the same events, with many of the same characters, but from a very different perspective. Atwood’s vision of our future is of a bleak, corporatized monoculture, where everything has been made into a commodity, and human emotions all but done away with. Guarded, gated corporate-states churn out useless genetically engineered animals and unnecessary drugs while the poor eke out an existence in the vast malls and slums of the “pleeblands.” Then, a bioengineered virus pretty much wipes out humanity overnight, leaving only a few survivors to relate the two tales. Eventually, the two storylines merge, shedding light on the abrupt end of Oryx and Crake. Although it is not strictly necessary, I believe it would help the reader understand The Year of the Flood after already having read Oryx and Crake.

The narrative alternates between the points of view of the two main characters, Toby and Ren. Each woman is telling her story post-apocalypse, first relating a little of how she managed to survive, then flashing back to the events of her life before the virus swept through. Both begin their stories as members of the anti-consumerist cult God’s Gardeners (which also appeared in Oryx and Crake), but each has to leave the group for different reasons, and their storylines separate. Each section, alternating Toby and Ren, begins with a sermon given by Adam One, the leader of God’s Gardeners, followed by a hymn commemorating one of the cult’s saint days (there is one for every day). These sermons let the reader know the fate of the group after Toby and Ren leaves and the apocalypse, which they call the “Waterless Flood,” occurs. Eventually, Toby’s and Ren’s stories catch up to the present and converge as the two separated characters come together again.

Toby and Ren are both victims of the commoditized, dysfunctional world they inhabit. They are each left without means of support after their fathers die in spectacularly unpleasant circumstances and they are abruptly on their own. They start out as victims: Toby of a psychotic rapist who continues to pursue her after her escape into God’s Gardeners; Ren of her mother’s capriciousness, until she winds up working in a sex club. After the Waterless Flood, they must each overcome their victimhood and become self-sufficient. They discover how to be themselves. In fact, the apocalypse might have been the best thing to ever happen to them, as it releases them from their societally imposed prisons.

The Year of the Flood ends much as Oryx and Crake did, with the focal characters encountering a mysterious group in the deserted forest. As in Oryx and Crake, the ending is very abrupt and a trifle unsatisfying, which leads me to believe that Atwood — although disavowing her role as a science fiction writer — is writing in the great tradition of the science fiction trilogy. If so, I eagerly await the last installment.

More information:

• Wikipedia article
• Official website
• Book tour blog
• Review by Ursula K. Le Guin (Guardian)
• A Dystopia Sketched in Crayon (Literary Review of Canada)
• My review of Oryx and Crake (Books Worth Reading)

Review: The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (2003)

Clare: It’s hard being left behind. I wait for Henry, not knowing where he is, wondering if he’s okay. It’s hard to be the one who stays. – The Time Traveler’s Wife opening paragraph

The Time Traveler’s Wife is Audrey Niffenegger’s first novel, and it was highly successful, deputing at number 9 on the New York Times bestseller list. Many readers would not even classify it as “science fiction,” labeling it “romance” or “literary fiction” instead, but the central premise is that time travel is possible and it has a scientific explanation: it is caused by a rare genetic disorder (although this explanation is left vague). Niffenegger herself does not characterize the novel as science fiction but uses the time travel device to examine the difficult relationship between the two main characters. The novel was adapted into a film that was released in 2009.

The time traveler and his wife are Henry and Clare, who have been together, in one way or another, all their lives. The narrative structure alternates between Clare’s and Henry’s points of view. While the story is told linearly, because it involves time travel, some early incidents are not fully explained until later in the narrative. The repetition of key scenes creates a sense of reverberation, deepening the reader’s understanding of important themes, as well as the relationship between Clare and Henry.

Henry’s time-traveling ability is out of his control. He most often jumps around to various points in the past and future to see the people who are most important to him or to return to important events in his life. So Henry appears in the narrative as various ages and with more or less knowledge of his life’s events; in several scenes, he even visits his younger self. After he falls in love with Clare, Henry starts visiting his future wife when she is only 6 years old. By the time she meets him “for real,” in the present timeline, she has loved him for years, while he is only meeting her for the first time.

A story about time travel done well is a difficult thing to write, and this is one done well. Despite the overlapping timelines, the reader never feels lost. The novel unfolds and then folds again quite neatly, bookended by young and old Clare, always waiting for Henry to appear out of time.

Ultimately, this is a tragic romance, mainly because of Henry’s predestined death. But even more than that, the story is tragic because Henry appears to have no choices, no free will, in his life. Because he has already experienced what will happen, he has no power to change it; it has happened to him, even if it happened in the future. Which raises the question of whether Clare has choices too, such as the choice to move on after Henry has gone, or whether she is predestined to wait her whole life for him to appear one more time.

Note: A version of this review first appeared on my blog Books Worth Reading.

More information:

• Wikipedia article
• Audrey Niffenegger’s official website
• Forum for discussing the book
• The Time Traveler’s Wife Timelines (You Know Jack)
• Time Travelling for Dummies: A Physicist Looks at The Time Traveler’s Wife (Slate)