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 Cover of Rejoice, a Knife to the Heart

This book was the strangest reading experience I think I’ve ever had.  While reading, one part of my mind was going “I can’t believe this ever got published” and the other part was sinking into it like a warm bath, getting all emotionally gooey.  It’s the most self-indulgent, wish-fulfilling fic I’ve ever read, of either pro or fan variety.  Or it could be considered a terrifying dystopia.  Your mileage may vary!

The novel would be categorized “near-future” SF but it’s really “this very moment” SF – the major world leaders and political movers-and-shakers are exactly who they are today, with names changed and in a couple of cases gender-swapped (not sure why).  The political situation is pretty much as it is now, although the story doesn’t dwell on specific issues.  Some reviews refer to this book as satire but I think the portrayals of these real life people are spot on, no exaggeration necessary.

The set-up: An SF writer named Samantha August is abducted by aliens in a very public manner off a city street – there are lots of cell phone videos of her vanishing in a beam of light, and the alien ship is clearly visible above.  While the rest of humanity is going predictably nuts about this below, Samantha wakes to find herself orbiting Earth in the spaceship with only an AI as companion.  The AI explains that three alien races are working together on an “Intervention” for humanity.  There’s a fair bit of backstory about this Intervention and why the aliens are doing it.  More to the immediate point, they want Sam to be their envoy to the rest of humanity. 

There are several steps to the Intervention.  First, many ecologically important areas of Earth are invisibly protected by forcefields – all humans gently but implacably ushered off and away, while animals remain to do as they will.  Second, all violence is stopped at every level, large and small.  No weapons will function, not even knives or fists.  Those are just the initial steps. 

The book has been described as a First Contact novel where we never have contact.  It’s not really about the aliens, it’s about how we react to having Utopia forced upon us.  Can we still find some way to fuck it up?

It’s a very talky book – especially when Sam converses with the AI, who develops an understated but engaging personality.  The self-indulgence I mentioned is not just the author’s fictional wish fulfillment, but also his torrent of personal philosophy.

There are many moments of extremely satisfying fan service for old-school SF fans.  Again with the self-indulgence, but so very fun.  My husband read the book first and he was almost literally bouncing while I was reading because he was impatient for me to get to those bits – he wanted to yell about it together.  It’s a great book for discussion afterward.  If you read it, I'd love to know what you think.

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Way back in the days of LJ, my husband was EccentricOrbit.  I don't know if he'll ever return to using social media, let alone get an account here, but I'm going to use that name for him for lack of anything better.  

Recently EccentricOrbit and I were discussing the recent SF series Murderbot Diaries, by Martha Wells.  Actually we were having a fairly heated disagreement – heated for us, which is not all that warm – about the sentience or lack thereof of one of the side characters.  Since a goodly number of the characters are robots, including the main POV character, it’s not a simple question. 

But what struck me was how both of us used specific pronouns to refer to the POV character.  Murderbot is the narrator and never indicates any gender for itself.  When other characters refer to Murderbot, the author adroitly avoids he/him/she/her by using “cyborg” or “SecUnit” or whatever.  So when I heard myself saying things like “…she does this…”  and EccentricOrbit said things like “… but he never does that…,” it took me awhile to realize we were using different pronouns to refer to the same character.  We both saw Murderbot in our own image.  There’s nothing in the text to indicate any gender at all, so this was entirely our own doing.  If I hadn’t had this argument with EO I wouldn’t have realized this unspoken assumption we both made. 

It made me appreciate how skillfully Martha Wells had eliminated all trace of the POV character’s gender in her own writing, and also made me realize what a dilemma Ursula Le Guin had with The Left Hand of Darkness.  Much has been said (by Le Guin and others) about why she opted to use masculine pronouns referring to her genderless Gethenians.  Due to the novel’s structure and themes, she couldn’t use the first person trick with that book.  It makes me wonder how different my reading experience would have been if Le Guin had used they/them.  Maybe if she was writing it today she would have.  Oh well, it was still an absolutely remarkable book and ground-breaking for its time.

By the way, I found the Murderbot Diaries very reminiscent of a lot of fic about Bucky Barnes – many of the same themes about the struggle to form an identity of one’s own after being used as an impersonal tool.  Great books.


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