Subject: Slonczewski: Daughter of Elysium

From: [email-masked] (Dani Zweig)
Date: Wed, 3 Aug 1994 21:35:42 GMT

Joan Slonczweski's "Daughter of Elysium" is something of a sequel to "A
Door Into Ocean" -- set centuries later in the same milieu.  The milieu
is more important than the story, which at times seems to serve as
little more than a vehicle for allegory.  Primarily, the story provides
viewpoint characters:  Raincloud, a linguist who has been brought to
Elysium because she is one of the few who can speak the language of the
warlike Urulites, her husband Blackbear, who has been invited to
participate in an immortality- research project, and their young
children.

Elysium itself is a community of twelve cities floating on the ocean
world of Shora.  Its inhabitants are bioengineered for longevity:  the
oldest of them are now about a thousand years old.  A side-effect of
longevity is sterility, and children are lab-born and raised
communally.  Elysium is exceedingly wealthy, and functions as an
interstellar center of banking.  (It's not clear what the source of
Elysium's wealth is, unless it's the banking itself.)  Most of the
services in the cities are provided by intelligent machines.

(A weakness of the novel is that, possibly because the author is more
interested in the ecological implications of longevity, little effort
is made to explore permanent or social implications.  You can't tell
whether the characters are forty years old or forty decades old from
the way they act, and aside from the scarcity of children, most of the
quirks of Elysian society seem to be a consequence of wealth, rather
than longevity.  For the most part, the only way we can tell that we're
dealing with quasi- immortals is that we're told so.)

The parallels between the milieu of the Fold and our own world are
drawn aggressively.  L'li, for instance, is a caricature of the third
world, as seen from the first:  It's desperately overpopulated,
desperately poor, it's a sinkhole for public-works loans that wind up
in private hands and then get defaulted on and 'rescheduled', and it
even has interstellar boat people who embarrass all concerned by trying
to sneak onto wealthier worlds.  (Its inhabitants are dark-skinned,
which, for story purposes, is made to vaguely matter.)

L'li is only the most overt expression of the population pressure which
all the worlds face.  Urulan, the poorest and most marginally habitable
world, maintains an equilibrium through infanticide and war -- for
which it is condemned by the other worlds.  Bronze Sky, a recently
terraformed world, has a frontier ethic of large families which is
going to cause serious trouble in a couple of generations.

Elysium itself is an odd case:  We learn in passing that their treaty
with the Sharers (who gave them their longevity techniques and
permission to settle on Shora) limits them to one child (defined as
being under the age of twenty-one) for every ten adults.  This
translates (back of the envelope) to a population growth of about 0.5%
per year (assuming minimal death from accident or illness), which means
that their population is approximately doubling every century and a
half.  If longevity proves to break down after a millenium or so (there
is evidence that it might), this becomes a doubling every two centuries
or so, which is still not a sustainable rate.

A concern for the sanctity of life and for the rights of sentients and
potential sentients makes choices more difficult.  Aside from the fact
that emigration doesn't have the potential to relieve planetary
population pressures -- just create new ones -- terraforming involves
wiping out the old ecosystem and replacing it with a more user-friendly
one, and this is sort of slaughter is frowned upon.  (It might be more
accurate to say that the Sharers, who are horrified by it, have managed
to exercise something of a veto.  Though there is evidence that the
Sharers themselves bioadapted the Shoran lifeforms to better suit
humanity.)  Urulan's use of Sims -- intelligent human/ape hybrids -- as
slaves is deplored, but Elysium routinely uses Sim fetuses for
biological experimentation, as this is perceived to yield the benefits
of human experimentation without the ethical difficulties.  And now the
machine intelligences (who, btw, have sown the seeds of a population
explosion of their own) are demanding their rights.

The only society we see with long-term prospects for stability is that of
the Sharers, but we have little basis for judging whether they represent
an example that could work for us.  Theirs is an all-female society in
which pregnancy requires a medical intervention, which makes population
planning practical.  They maintain a small population base, but they are
also assumed to have a biotechnology advanced enough that more aggressive
cultures can't shoulder them aside.  As part of their balance of nature,
they accept dangers to human life which our society does not.

If plot, character, and story seem to be getting lost in this
discussion of background, much the same is true in the novel, as well.
The novel opens, rather effectively, with a portrayal of the Windclan
family as culture-shocked newcomers from a small village on an
as-it-were small planet.  Fairly quickly, however, they are relegated
to the position of viewpoints from which we can listen to speeches,
read philosophical texts, watch newscasts, and sit in on
negotiations..  "Daughter of Elysium" is a thought-provoking book --
worth reading for that reason, and well written besides -- but the pot
of message doesn't leave much room for a story, so readers who prefer
more character- or plot-oriented novels should be warned.

%A Slonczewski, Joan
%T Daughter of Elysium
%I AvoNova
%C New York
%D August 1993
%G ISBN 0-688-12509-3
%P 521 pp
%O hardcover, US$25.00

-----
Dani Zweig
[email-masked]  [email-masked]

   The inability of snakes to count is actually a refusal, on their part,
    to appreciate the Cardinal Number system. -- "Actual Facts"