From +SF/Reviews Thu Oct 10 16:53:59 1991 Path: herkules.sssab.se!isy!liuida!sunic!mcsun!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!swrinde!ucsd!ucbvax!hplabs!pyramid!infmx!cortesi From: cortesi@informix.com (David Cortesi) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf-lovers Subject: Review and Critique of Rebecca Ore's "Alien" trilogy Message-ID: <1991Jun21.041151.24502@informix.com> Date: 21 Jun 91 04:11:51 GMT Sender: cortesi@informix.com (David Cortesi) Organization: Informix Software, Inc. Lines: 184 %A Ore, Rebecca %T Becoming Alien %I TOR Books %C New York %D January 1988 %P 313 %O $3.95 %G ISBN 0-812-50313-9 %A Ore, Rebecca %T Being Alien %I TOR Books %C New York %D September 1989 %P 277 %O $3.95 %G ISBN 0-812-54792-6 %A Ore, Rebecca %T Human to Human %I TOR Books %C New York %D November 1990 %P 282 %O $3.95 %G ISBN 0-812-50045-8 The central concern of Rebecca Ore's trilogy is loneliness: the tragic loneliness to which each thinking being is condemned because it can know the mind of others only through external signs. We already know how hard it is to commune with another human. How much harder would it be (Ore asks) if the other were something like a thinking bat? Or like a bird, or a bear? Given good will, she concludes, and watchful containment of the inevitable fear, it may not be so hard. In the end it might be easier to trust, even to love, the scaled or feathered nonterrestrial than one's own kind. But what if, once you were at home with the alien, you found that your own people needed you more? Questions like these -- questions of divided loyalty, of alienation from one's birth culture -- could easily be posed in a mainstream novel. But it is the nature of good science fiction to co-opt a simple, even trite human conflict and use it as a sort of engine to drive a much larger mechanism of speculation, like a plain electric motor driving the dizzy motions of a kinetic sculpture. In Ore's trilogy the visible structure is a richly-imagined, entertaining assemblage of aliens. She lifts their physiologies and root behavior patterns from earthly zoology, but extrapolates these into credible social usages and speech patterns in the best style of speculative fiction. Examples: The civilized and crafty bird who, when he comes to your house for dinner, brings along crop stones folded in a clean napkin, and after digesting the meal, regurgitates them and gives them in the napkin to a servant to clean. Or the folk who as infants are reared in a pouch, and who keep soft, cylindrical couches to crawl into to sleep. Among the hundred-odd species in Ore's Federation are not a few descended from brachiating apes, as is our human kind. It ours is but one of a number of species that have not yet mastered the "gate" technology that makes a species elegible for contact. In _Becoming Alien_, Tom is an alienated teenage dropout in rural Virginia. He saves a real alien from a wrecked Federation vehicle; hides him; befriends him. Then, in part through Tom's inability to judge human nature, the alien is killed, not long before a rescue party traces him. It develops that the alien has in his journal left Tom a legacy: a recommendation that he is enough of a xenophile to be what the alien was, a cadet in the Institute for First Contact, covertly studying sapient species and inducting them into the Federation when they discover the space "gates" for interstellar travel. Tom accepts. Through the rest of the book he is schooled by the Institute and takes part in two First Contacts. One goes disastrously wrong; the other succeeds after Tom spends weeks in alien hands, working through fear and distrust on all sides. By the end he has achieved responsibility and a place in the society of Karst, the Federation capitol planet. In _Being Alien_ Tom returns to Earth on a dual mission: overtly to study parallel cases of culture-contact shock in human society; semi-officially to find a mate. He is stationed in Berkeley, California, a place where Tom, redneck kid, feels as alien as would any other resident of Karst. Indeed some of the other aliens (there are quite a few surgically-altered aliens among us) are more at home in Berkeley society than he is. (Ore has quite a bit of fun with the idea of aliens passing unremarked in California life.) Nevertheless Tom manages to make contact with a woman who will accept him and his offer of a life off-planet. He takes her and her sister and brother-in-law back to Karst. The bulk of the book is about how these people find successes and intimacies in alien society that had eluded Tom, and the conflicts that result. Again, comparable emotional situations could be played out in an ordinary novel; but again Ore uses them to propel, to add emotional tension and credibility to, an overt plot sequence of alien infiltration, difficult first contacts, and Federation politics. In _Human To Human_ Tom and his wife and 8-year-old son are asked to take into their home and study a family of suspicious, possibly treacherous, aliens whose species has rejected Federation contact. This intrusion raises the tension in what is already a tense household. Ultimately there are tragic consequences that stem in part from Tom's own lack of patience and self-insight. However, Earth has just mastered gate technology. As either a punishment or a last chance to make good, Tom is assigned to the Earth contact team. He does not botch it even though operating under an ignoble inner conflict: if Earth enters the Federation, there will be many more humans on Karst, some more handsome or clever than he, and he is insecure enough to fear losing his authority, or wife, or perhaps only his uniqueness to them. At the end he returns to Karst and achieves a difficult reconciliation with his family and his life. (Review ends; critical discussion begins; spoilers may appear.) Becoming Alien was Ore's first published novel. I didn't need Ben Bova's preface to tell me so; "first novel" is written clearly throughout. If you have read work by beginning writers, as an editor or as a member of a writing circle, you will find the weaknesses all too familiar: awkward transitions; fuzzy descriptions; major plot points scanted while trivial ones are written out at tedious length; dialog such as no human could ever speak; conversations that never reach a climax or a point. What was published as _Being Alien_ should have been treated as a first draft; the story deserves better telling. The second and third volumes are more competent, but Ore made one fundamental structural error that plagues all three: the customary beginner's error of opting for first person point of view. First person POV is not always wrong; any reader can rattle off a list of writers that used it well. (Start with Melville and "Call me Ishmael;" skip to Gene Wolfe and the Book of the New Sun; recall John D. Macdonald's "Travis McGee" novels; and on.) But Ore's trilogy demonstrates all the very cogent reasons why a beginner should never use it. The nature of first person is that the only story that can be told is the one witnessed by the protagonist; and it can only be told in the protagonist's voice. It follows that the protagonist must have freedom of movement within the story, able to be present at all its important events and privy to the secrets of the other characters. Even more important the protagonist must have a personality and turn of phrase that permits reciting the story with clarity, color and emotion. Alas, Ore's Tom lacks the needed qualities. He begins the story untravelled and unschooled and spends the whole first volume at the very bottom of the Federation's hierarchy. He can see only enough of the events around him to know that there is a lot going on that he is not in on. For the reader, seeing Karst only through his eyes is like watching a ball game through a knothole. Worse, Tom is a flat and unimaginative narrator. He recounts events but does not reflect on them, nor does he tell the story in interesting language. I am not sure to what extent this reflects shortcomings in Ore's own diction, and to what extent it results from her writing the story in character as Tom. But the net effect is what a psychiatrist would call "flat affect": exciting events and colorful scenes reported with an inappropriate lack of emotion, in a monotone. To finish drubbing the main character, it is especially unfortunate that we have to walk in his shoes for three volumes because he is simply not a likable person. His only virtue is a dogged persistence. His faults are many: he is perpetually insecure, holds grudges, distrusts his intimates, fears to love, is thoughtless and a prig. And he learns slowly if at all; the marital crisis at the end of the third volume is the result of tiresome attitudes that he should have outgrown in volume one. I came very near to not reading past the first volume. What teased me back was Ore's imagination. Weak though the writing was, her aliens tugged at me. They are a good-hearted, courageous, likable crew and Ore has imagined them into high relief. I found that I wanted to know more about them and their unlikely Federation. They bumble and agonize like humans, yet the distinctive character of each species has been carefully and credibly worked out. So too are the personalities of the main characters: Black Amber the ambitious polititian; Karriaagzh the crafty, visionary executive; Rhyodolite the tease; Alex who has stayed too long in Berkeley and gone native -- all nonterrestrials with fur, feathers, or unhuman musculature, yet with reassuringly human failings. In the end what is truly distinctive about Ore's vision is that she portrays an interstellar society that does not rely for its success on better hardware, but only on good will and constant striving for better understanding of others. She depicts a government whose response to armed attack is to kidnap a few of the opposition and put them out among its citizens as unwilling house guests, in hopes of learning how better to treat with them. This is to paint as exotic a political vision as anyone has ever proposed in science fiction. The Federation has hardware and to spare, but chooses to rule by the more difficult method of achieving concensus across every barrier of species or culture. It is hard to dislike a writer brave enough to put forward such a speculation, especially when she has peopled it with such inventive characters. From archive (archive) From: ecl@mtgzy.UUCP (Evelyn C. Leeper) Organization: AT&T, Middletown NJ Subject: BECOMING ALIEN by Rebecca Ore Date: 7 Mar 88 22:41:16 GMT BECOMING ALIEN by Rebecca Ore Tor, 1988, 0-812-54794-2, $3.50. A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper The science of linguistics has been largely neglected by science fiction, so I found it an odd coincidence (or for the Jungians out there, just another example of synchronicity) that I read in quick succession two novels dealing with the subject, the more so because one is a new novel and the other a four-year-old novel that I recently decided to read. The latter is NATIVE TONGUE, which I have commented on previously. The former is Rebecca Ore's BECOMING ALIEN. BECOMING ALIEN is a "Ben Bova Discovery" and considerably better than the two previous entries in that series. (You'd never know it from the cover, of course, which rips off ENEMY MINE to a fare-thee-well.) Tom fins a crashed alien ship and tries to save the occupant. He fails, but the beings who come after the alien decide he is not entirely xenophobic and recruit him for the Space Academy. Part--a very important part--of his training involves learning alien languages, and to do this effectively he must have his brain modified to cope with them. There is a lot more to his "becoming alien," but it's all connected to language. Ore does an excellent job of conveying alien ideas and concepts, although I found her choice of main character (the brother of a small-time drug dealer) to be less than totally satisfying. Bova and Spider Robinson both compare BECOMING ALIEN to THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, which may be overdoing it a bit, but it is a novel worth reading. (I would say it is infinitely better than NATIVE TONGUE, but that goes without saying.) Evelyn C. Leeper (201) 957-2070 UUCP: ihnp4!mtgzy!ecl ARPA: mtgzy!ecl@rutgers.rutgers.edu Copyright 1988 Evelyn C. Leeper