From /tmp/sf.4146 Tue Aug 9 02:13:16 1994 Xref: liuida rec.arts.sf.reviews:630 rec.arts.sf.written:72286 Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews,rec.arts.sf.written Path: liuida!sunic!trane.uninett.no!eunet.no!nuug!EU.net!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!newsxfer.itd.umich.edu!zip.eecs.umich.edu!yeshua.marcam.com!charnel.ecst.csuchico.edu!csusac!csus.edu!netcom.com!postmodern.com!not-for-mail From: dani@telerama.lm.com (Dani Zweig) Subject: Slonczewski: Daughter of Elysium Message-ID: <31orns$bhi@asia.lm.com> Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Sender: mcb@postmodern.com (Michael C. Berch) Organization: Telerama Public Access Internet, Pittsburgh, PA USA Date: Wed, 3 Aug 1994 21:35:42 GMT Approved: mcb@postmodern.com (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) Lines: 108 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 dani@netcom.com dani@telerama.lm.com The inability of snakes to count is actually a refusal, on their part, to appreciate the Cardinal Number system. -- "Actual Facts"