I've been rummaging around in the mid 1990's and finding more good science fiction that I ignored at the time. I went to the bookstore to get a copy of this year's Best SF collection edited by Gardner Dozois, but when I discovered it cost almost twenty bucks I gave up on that idea fast. So I mooched around and came up with a Year's Best SF for 1997 edited by David Hartwell. I also picked up Amy Thomson's second novel, The Color of Distance. I'm not very impressed with the collection, but I loved the novel which totally surprised me.
Now, you have to understand, I've known Amy for about a gazillion years. We met when she moved to the Seattle area which is, of course, my hometown. And if familiarity didn't exactly breed contempt, I certainly didn't have high hopes of liking her writing because I wasn't particularly fond of her. So when I heard she had sold her first sf novel I was cautiously interested. I never know if I'm going to be able to set aside my personal feelings about someone long enough to give their writing a fair go.
I hated Virtual Girl. I must have been the only one. It won the Campbell Award the next year.
I never bothered reading the second one until I found it on the shelf last week and decided it looked pretty good after all. It is good. It's assured and polished. It has interesting, believeable characters. It has a delightful, detailed alien culture. It has subtext. It has a sense of wonder. It's good stuff. I do have one major problem with it, but I noticed the action (or lack of reaction, actually) that struck me as Not Right was consistent within the book so at least it didn't seem to be an error.
The plot goes something like this: A scientist is injured in a fall from a flying vehicle while traversing a heavily forested alien world. She is about to die of anaphylactic shock when some natives, called Tendu, find her. They save her life by altering her body internally and externally. The healing is achieved through an emotional and physical bonding process called allu-a which is an important part of Tendu life. Juna, the scientist, discovers the Tendu speak by manipulating rapid coloration of their bodies in displays reminiscent of octopi changing color to match the landscape. Unfortunately, her ship has left her behind and is en route to base, but she is able to communicate with the ship before it leaves the system, and they promise to return for her as soon as possible. She gradually becomes acculturated, going native in a literal sense of the phrase. The book is mainly concerned with exploring the Tendu culture, addressing the issue of how to retain a sense of self when you're the only one of your species around, and what survival might be like on an alien planet with an indigenous, intelligent population.
The one thing that bothered me, and it really did bother me enough to yank me out of the flow of the novel, was the odd lack of reaction on the part of Juna and the other humans upon discovering the profound physiological changes in her body wrought by the Tendu. She never has any dissociation from her changed body. She does react considerably to the emotional and sensual changes (her sight and hearing are vastly enhanced), but why doesn't she, and later the returning explorers, ever find it difficult to deal with the huge change in the external appearance? If I woke up with claws and green skin, I'd be flipping out and wondering who slipped the LSD in my drink. I don't care if it was a matter of survival, there would be more than one moment when I'd struggle with the idea of having been so altered. Other than this failure to react, I thought the book was terrific. I was sorry when it was done. It gave me plenty to think about.
After I finished Amy's book, I started on Hartwell's collection. Oog. I hate trying something, whether it be reading material or wine or a movie, that's been touted as the finest in its field, and then wondering why it was supposed to be so great. It makes me feel like Charly before his transformation in Flowers for Algernon. I'm either much thicker than I had previously believed, or I'm missing some educational background that would allow me to grasp the greatness of these stories, or, and naturally I'm inclined towards this theory, what David Hartwell thinks is superb just leaves me cold. After each of the first four stories I sat bemused. One of them was by Bill Gibson, whose writing I have always liked. I didn't understand what was science fictional about his story at all, not one little bit. The fifth, by Sharon Farber, was wonderful, so at least I'm not a total moron; I can recognise a clever time travel conceit as well as the next person. I'm willing to believe my inability to appreciate Hartwell's choices are a combination of the three factors I named above. I'm just not sure I'm going to make it through the rest of the short stories. There are so many other good things to read that I don't want to waste my time on something that I'm unaccountably unable to appreciate.
I've known David Hartwell for about a gazillion years, too, by the way. I like him just fine. I expected to enjoy his collection. Ironic that I didn't, isn't it? It just goes to show that I'm a dork. No, wait. It just goes to show that there's no accounting for taste. Hang on, that's not quite it. It just goes to show that there's probably a platitude for everything if you try hard enough to remember one. At least you can be sure that if you write a science fiction short story or novel I'll at least give it a try. I do like supporting my friends in their artistic endeavors. Even if I fail to understand the results.
Isn't that so, Algy?
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