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So I have a habit of watching bad movies and live tweeting as I go along. Usually my commentary ends there, but I think I have more to say about my most recent subject, Showgirls.

A round table article found in Film Quarterly on JSTOR presents many different takes on the film. The authors try to unpack Showgirls through the lens of trash or cult cinema, attempting to analyze the film as a serious text, even though most admit the film is terrible. Sometimes, though, we can learn the most about ourselves through the products of our culture that we deem to be the worst. As this film came out in 1995, I’m not going to try to historicize it in my analysis. I was only 10 years old, and all I remember about the movie’s debut was trying to reconcile the Saved by the Bell reruns I watched with this snark that was circulating about poor Jessie Spano.

What I do want to do, however, is share briefly my thoughts on women and power in this movie. It’s no secret that this movie was a deliberate exploration of the sexual power of women. Nomi, he main character, is presented as a bad ass chick who no one should fuck with, but all of the power she has in the film is physical, be it sexual power (which is most of the time) or when she’s quite literally kicking ass. There’s no in-between for Nomi – it’s either fight or fuck.

All the power women have in this film comes from their overt sexuality. Nomi’s sometimes rival, Crystal, loses her power when her body is physically damaged, which also renders her sexual power inert. On the flip side, Nomi not only dances her way to the top, she fucks her way to the top, and orchestrates Crystal’s downfall by pushing her down the stairs. She is the agent who damages Crystal’s sexual power in order to bolster her own.

So what does this sexual power tell us? Should we celebrate this film as a triumphant unleashing of women’s sexuality, or is it simply softcore porn working to stroke the patriarchal male ego? All the positions of power are, after all, fulfilled and guarded by men in this film, and the way Nomi gains her power is partially through fulfilling the sexual fantasies of the men around her through lap dances or actual sex.

There’s also the troubling subject of rape in this film. One character who has no control in the film at all is Nomi’s African American roommate portrayed throughout the film as asexual and, as noted in the round table discussion, fulfilling a service role. When her character attempts to become sexualized, she is punished by being gang raped. Like in real life, no one calls the police on her attackers, in large part due to the fact that one of them is a famous pop star. Even though the film presents the act as wrong, it doesn’t right the wrong by seeing legal recourse.

The narrative is further problematized when Nomi enacts a rape revenge fantasy, literally kicking the shit out of Nomi’s most famous attacker. Here again we see female power being demonstrated through physical prowess, but the troubling nature of the rape itself, which could play like a fantasy in its own right, overshadows Nomi’s actions, leaving them as more problematic than cathartic.

At the end of the day it’s hard to read this film as any sort of liberation for women in general or for the women in it. Some of the authors in the round table discussion argue that Showgirls is purposeful camp, that Jessie Spano’s overacting is mean to embody Nomi’s over the top character. It’s hard to find agency for Nomi outside her sexuality, which leaves her to be rather one dimensional, and the patriarchy reins supreme as men take up positions of power and dictate things like whether or not someone can report a brutal rape to the police. Nomi and the women around her are more trapped in the system by their sexuality than liberated.

In any case, Showgirls is an interesting, if sometimes baffling watch. It’s a difficult film to unpack, and I don’t know if I agree that it was purposefully campy. But then again, it’s hard to discount the theory that the director didn’t know he was making a film so over the top.

On the cover of my edition of this 1991 Nebula winner, the blurb from the New York Times Book Review reads, “Engrossing…enigmatic…playful, erotic, and disturbing.” I heartily agree with most of these adjectives. The one word missing, at least for me, is impenetrable.  Like C. J. Cherryh, Swanwick throws the reader into his world assuming that they already know the way it’s structured and all its rules, and expects the reader to figure out any details he provides on their own. There’s no generous exposition here for most of the book, only a plot that skips along at a breakneck pace, keeping up with the protagonist the bureaucrat in his fevered search for the outlawed Gregorian, an apparent wizard of some sort.

On the planet Miranda a phenomenon known as the jubilee tides drowns the continents every so many years, sending her inhabitants fleeing. But this time Gregorian is promising that he can change human being so that they can live in the newly risen oceans. Whether this is magic or technology is never revealed, but it is unacceptable to the extraterrestrial ruling body the governs Miranda from afar, denying advanced technology to the Mirandan civilization. Hence why the bureaucrat, working for that government, is dispatched to find the wizard and hunt him down.

I’m not sure I have much to say about this book because it was so dense and experience for me. I feel neutral about it in terms of whether or not I liked it; someone to discuss the book with would have made it a richer experience. The book is, in a way, a meditation on the matter of the self, what’s real in the world around us and what is illusion. The bureaucrat is constantly attempting to undercover whether or not the native Mirandan phenomenon he encounters are real or simply hallucinations.

The one commentary I can offer on this book is the use of tantric sex, or sex magic. Having read another of Swanwick’s books I can tell that he is into writing about sex as a form of power, especially when it comes to women. In Stations of the Tide, Undine controls the bureaucrat through sex magic, opening his mind to the possibilities of magic on Miranda by manipulating his body. But this seems to be the only power that Swanwick offers to women, which in my opinion made the sex scenes seem a bit gratuitous and in a way, a let down. Sexual power for women is all well and good, but when that’s their only trait it leaves the characters extremely one dimensional. But then again, what do I know. Books of science fiction are, in many cases, romance novels for men, and the audience of this book felt distinctly masculine in the way the novel read.

As to how to historicize this book, again I am unsure. Previous civilizations on Miranda had enjoyed advanced technology, and this and their battle with the extraterrestrial government over advanced technology hints at Swanwick’s own ambivalence about the place of technology in human society. It gets away from us, he says, but it can also save us. This could be read as an allegory for the massive technological changes happening at the beginning of the 90s, especially the coming revolutions in personal electronics.

There’s also the issue of the haunts, a native Mirandan species wiped out by human presence. There are hints of environmentalism in the government’s obsession with finding the haunts, through there’s also a hint of the sinister in the air, as it’s never stated why people are so bent on finding out if the haunts are truly extinct.

As my read was mostly unpleasurable, I don’t feel I can recommend this book. At the same time, I do want to recommend this book. I do think there’s a lot here to unpack, especially when it comes to the world building Swanwick does. There is a lot of beautiful imagery in this book, and the glimpses of Mirandan history we do get are fascinating. I would love to hear about someone else’s reading of this book. Perhaps it wasn’t as troubled as mine.

When I worked at Half Price Books in Berkeley, Red Mars was one of those books that we sold out of regularly. Being two blocks from UC Berkeley, college students interested in buying and selling their books made up a large portion of our customers. Somewhere along the line we’d acquired the knowledge that Red Mars is required reading for students up at Cal, which always excited me: science fiction on a syllabus! So, one day, as I helped a girl find a copy of Red Mars, I asked her which class she was reading the book for. I expected her to name some upper level English course focused on science fiction, but what came out of her mouth was a long string of large scientific and technical words, astrobiology being one of them. I felt incredibly impressed by this young woman. Turns out they read Red Mars in upper level science classes (hard science classes!) at UC Berkeley to learn about what terraforming a planet might be like. That’s right, this work of fiction is used to teach actual science.

If that knowledge didn’t clue you into the fact that Red Mars is a masterpiece of hard science fiction, then I will state it outright. Robinson goes to amazing lengths to create a story that depicts what the terraformation of Mars would look like if we could ever get off our terrible, ignorant asses and actually try to do something so bold and amazing. But ignoring the hard science that makes this book required reading for actual scientists, Red Mars is truly an opus about space exploration and colonization. Kim Stanley Robinson has found a new frontier in this western in space, not only in science, but in human societal relationships. Just as the colonists must deal with the nuts and bolts of getting to Mars and building a livable human habit on a foreign planet, they must also struggle to create or recreate human society on Mars. Expanding Red Mars beyond scientific discovery to explorations of cultural, societal, and interpersonal relationships is what makes this book such an important contribution to the field: Robinson remembers the human element. Beyond the amazing science in the book, Robinson’s attention to the human species is another reason those undergraduates are required to read this book: they’re not just learning physics and biology, they’re reading about how the human dimension of space colonization might look.

Red Mars won a Nebula but it did not win a Hugo, though its two sequels, Green Mars and Blue Mars did win Hugos. It’s entirely understandable why this book is so acclaimed and is considered to be a standard text not only in science fiction, but among actual scientists. Robinson clearly did his homework, and at times this book reads like a textbook. At 572 pages, most of the book is detailed description of the scientific nuances of terraforming a planet or, less frequently but with just as much pedantry, long bits of narrative minutely detailing the political and cultural situation on the planet.

At this point I’m going to admit that I did a whole lot of skimming as I read this book. The science I found to be fascinating but as it went on and on I lost interest. That’s not fault of the author – I think someone more interested in that nuance than I am would be lost in a dream of realistic speculation. I am simply not so inclined. So, for readers like me, that made this book very slow in a lot of places. Normally this is where I’d say that Robinson needed a better editor to rein him in (I’m looking at you, George R.R. Martin), but in this case I think all of the scientific detail Robinson has included is not only necessary, it’s incredibly compelling. The book’s reception in the scientific community confirms this, but if you’re not a lover of science textbooks guised as sci-fi novels, this book might not be for you. That said, I think this is probably the best hard sci-fi book I’ve ever read. Though packed with information that can go on for pages without advancing the plot, the science stuff never seems long-winded or out of place. It is necessary for Robinson’s project. And it’s well written, so that when I felt like tuning in I found myself both interested and able to understand the scientific language.

That said, I do have real issues with Robinson’s attempt to weave politics and interpersonal relationships into the story. Yes, colonizing Mars would have a huge political dimension to it, and I think it’s a good thing that Robinson included that reality in the novel. Exploring the way Mars and Earth, as well as the colonists, would interact with each other, and further, the ways in which nations would attempt to redraw their boundaries (or not) on Mars, enriched the novel beyond the simple wonder of postulating how science might allow us to live on Mars. Robinson also goes out of his way to create a cast of characters who have differing visions as to what Mars should look like, from the extreme environmental conservasionist, Ann, to the terraformer, Sax, to the utopian revolutionary, Arkady, to the two idealistic American leaders Frank and John, who are just trying to bring everyone together, to Nadia, the engineer who doesn’t give a fuck about anything other than her machines, and so many other characters I could list. And that’s not even getting into the competing cultures that emerge as new groups of settlers arrive.

Refreshingly, Robinson’s Mars is multi-national and multi-ethnic. Everyone has their own vision for Mars and takes sides in the developing factions that arise as more Terrans emigrate from Earth and corporations try to take over operations on the planet to take advantage of natural resources. There remains a unique bond among the first 100 colonists, all scientists who share the same basic belief that Mars should be its own governing entity, free of any mercantilist system with Earth. Beyond that they do disagree on what a Martin government should look like. And so the explicit parallels are drawn between the mercantile relationship between imperial England and the American colonies and the subsequent revolutionary war, where the colonists in both American and on Mars resort to revolution to overthrow the mother country/planet in order to form a more perfect union. Red Mars shows us the colonization and revolutionary phase of this struggle, whereas I assume Green Mars and Blue Mars go a bit further into setting up the new Martin government.

The way Robinson writes about politics tends to remind me of Ayn Rand. I’m not accusing him of being an Objectivist. I don’t think he is at all. My comparison is stylistic. He tends to use the same literary devices to get his political views across: long, rambling monologues or debates between characters that are really just vehicles to get his ideology out there or explain positions or events to the reader in detail that characters in the book already know about. I’m not honestly sure what Robinson’s ideology is, which may be a point in Robinson’s favor. At the end of Red Mars , violent revolution hasn’t worked to drive out the unwanted interlopers from Earth, but the corporations and the UN are still enemies of the first 100 and Mars itself, both physically and socially (the physical and social landscape/well-being are always explicitly linked in the book). The true path to political and physical salvation may be revealed in the book’s sequels. Robinson does enough of a song and dance that the differing political views he offers seem to be a genuine exploration by the author of how competing viewpoints might come about and be expressed. But obviously he favors one, it’s just in trying to ferret out which one that is.

Then there are the interpersonal relationships among the first 100, specifically between Maya, John, and Frank, a love triangle that spans the book. I have to admit, this is my second time attempting to read Red Mars. The first time I got to the part where Maya fucks Frank then turns around and falls in love with John, the man Frank hates, and I just put the book down. I wasn’t interested in reading a 572 page book about a love triangle. The way Robinson writes about Maya is truly disappointing. Ostensibly she is the leader of the Russian delegation to Mars, but her only purpose in the novel is to serve as a sexual object for Frank and John, and for the author as well. Thankfully this book did not turn out to be a romance novel, but Maya’s only purpose whenever she was present was to have sex with one of those two men, or to make Frank resent that she wasn’t having sex with him to the point that it helped motivate him to murder John. The relationship between the three of them was really annoying, and I just couldn’t understand why Maya’s plotline had to exist when the rest of the book was so rich in characters. Another nice thread of science fiction romance for men, featuring the objectification of a sexually manipulative and therefore crazy woman, woven into to a densely factual novel.

I’m not reading into subtext here either. Robinson states more than once that Maya gained her position of power through using her sexuality to manipulate men. She is described by other characters and herself as purposefully playing Frank and John against each other. She is openly depicted as becoming crazed as a result of her mercurial feelings of “love,” which only ever manifest in sex. Her actions annoy the other characters, though only hers, never those of the male members of her trio. Taking a step backwards toward Maya’s sexual manipulation of men, this characterization actually extends to all of Russian society. Apparently, by 2026 Russian women turned the double burden on its head by making sexuality a weapon against men in order to gain positions of power. If you can’t beat the sexist system, join it? Or, there is a demographic imbalance of women vs. men in Russia so women use sex to take over the country? I don’t know. It’s a very strange reading of Russian history combined with a very sad understanding of women’s sexuality.

This book was published in 1993, right after the collapse of the Soviet Union, so that may have something to do with the strange femme fatale imagery. Hiroko, an Asian woman, is also highly sexualized and eroticized. Her only real role in the book is to have orgies and pop out babies. That’s her contribution to the revolution. Apparently that in and of itself is a revolution. Procreation is not #1 on any of the first 100’s lists except for Hiroko and her followers. In fact, population problems plaguing Earth are one of the key threats to stability on Mars. Despite the sexualization of Maya and Hiroko, two other female characters, Ann and Nadia are scientists and engineers before they are lovers and women. It is a very strange balance, but in Nadia Robinson crafts a character who is both a competent and brave worker as well as loving and sexual. Ann herself is tough as nail, a brilliant scientist, and also capable of emotion. Neither of these female characters is punished for being smart and capable – in fact, they are, in Robinson’s world, to be admired for who they are as individuals. Robinson’s creation of these strong, human female characters just makes Maya’s character seem even further strange,  unnecessary, and a little insulting.

What’s really at issue here is Robinson’s social and political critique of the Blue planet, Earth, as it stood in the early 1990s. The Soviet Union had just fallen, but as reflected in Red Mars, the ability of the UN to keep any sort of peace was a joke. Robinson explores the dangers of outsourcing government scientific projects to multi-national corporations but then asks, who else will provide funding? The importance of Arab settlers on Mars seems to bizarrely presage the post 9-11 world, down to an open debate about Women’s rights and Islam between the American Frank Chalmers, and the Arabic caravan that is hosting him as they wander the Martin desert. Perhaps most pressingly, beyond the blatant colonial metaphors, Robinson is concerned that the nation-states of Earth do not have the proper apparatuses in place to face the rising threats of overpopulation, depleted resources, and global warming. For Robinson, on Earth and on Mars, nation-states and nationalism are no longer the answer. Earth is lost, but Mars is the alien terrain that provides the setting for a rebirth of human civilization, and a dawning of a new system of governance not corrupted by nationalistic politicians and their corporate backers. Watching these dynamics play out through the spectacle of the colonization of Mars is what makes this book required reading not only for those looking to the stars, but back to Earth. Unlike the few lucky thousands who make it to the red planet in Red Mars, we’re still stuck her on our own on this dusty rock, but we’re facing all the same problems with even fewer answers.

Because there are two sequels to this book that, as I mentioned, both won Hugos, I’m going to reserve some judgment here. Storylines are clearly unfinished, and sometimes in sequential books the weaknesses those loose ends leave are tied up quite satisfyingly in subsequent volumes. That said, I still think the portrayal of Maya was ridiculous and her storyline distracting and unnecessary. Otherwise this book is a great addition to the genre. There’s a lot to be digested in this book from all fields of study, and there’s some amazing prose to go along with that great scientific research. I’m going to take a break before I read the next two because the level of detail is just so intense and the plot is plodding as a result that I need a break from the kind of reading Red Mars demands – it’s almost like reading a dense, dusty historical monograph. That said, I do look forward to seeing what happens after the revolution.

When I ran the sci-fi section at HPB in Berkeley, my consumption of science fiction accelerated at an exponential rate. Berkeley and Oakland are sci-fi towns, and have produced many famous authors, including Philip K. Dick (who worked right down the street from me on Shattuck during his own retail days) and Ursula K. Le Guin, among other. It is a veritable mecca for sci-fi fans of all stripes, and being in charge of the sci-fi section in a heavily trafficked used bookstore in a sci-fi town meant I had to know my fucking stuff. Running that section is actually where my quest to work my way through all the Hugo winners began, and it only deepened my love and knowledge of a genre I was raised to adore.

HPB is also where I began to refer to science fiction books as romance novels for men. No matter how awe inspiring the plot of many of the books might otherwise be, they almost always involved some wild romantic or sexual fantasy, usually about women. Sometimes even the science fiction premise wasn’t enough to detract from what was really a veiled romance novel. Just like romance novels use conventions of their genre to explore the limits of gender norms and fantasies about the way couples should behave and act, male and female authors alike graft romantic and sexual tropes onto science fiction ones, consciously or unconsciously hoping to hide their fantasies about love and sex amidst fantasies about other, more fantastical worlds. I’ve already had a look at historical fiction disguised as sci-fi, and in Vonda N. McIntyre’s Nebula winning The Moon and the Sun I’ve managed find to a romance novel couched as alternate history, science fiction style.

Alternate history is always a tricky way to approach science fiction. I think it is extremely hard to do well, as most often it falls into the fan boy category, where the author is enamored of the time period they picked and gets lost in the fantasy of creating alternate storylines without offering anything really interesting to say in terms of historical commentary, if there’s any commentary at all. That being said, alternate histories, when written well, can be simply stunning. Philip K. Dick’s own Hugo winner, The Man in the High Castle, immediately leaps to mind, and fellow winner Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee has its moments. But both these novels explore alternate histories in order to say something remarkable, if not extraordinary, about history that already was. Further, they demonstrate just how tenuous the hands of fate or chance can be, in each case boldly displaying what disaster we may have averted or invited. Like all good science fiction, these authors use the convention of alternative history to teach us about ourselves.

The Moon and the Sun makes no such contribution to our understanding of our own history, past or present. In the interest of full disclosure, the last time I had a thorough history Louis XIV, at whose Versailles court this book takes place, I was a freshman in high school, and that was in 1999. When interacting with works of historical fiction I tend to think that ignorance is bliss – if I know little to nothing about the time period in question I don’t spend the whole time enraged by mistakes and inaccuracies (unless I’m watching Mad Men, which tends to hit every note pitch perfect, which sends me into a spiral of ecstasy). McIntyre supposedly painfully researched this book to recreate the court accurately, and I have no doubt that she tried her best, however, I think her focus on the details of chivalry and fashion are a great detriment to the book. The endless litany of minor noble characters is both confusing and distracting, and the amount of time McIntyre spends describing her protagonist, Marie-Josephe’s, outfits and other accoutrements, to say nothing of the rest of the court, is a ridiculous waste of time. The setting is sumptuous and rich and serves absolutely no purpose. In a way, McIntyre has written a love story about the unimaginable opulence of Versailles.

The twist in McIntyre’s presentation of the past is that sea monsters, creatures that resemble grotesque mermaids, actually exist in this timeline. Humans have been hunting and killing them for centuries, almost to extinction, believing them to be beasts and demons when really they are only peace loving, sentient beings. The crux of the novel hinges on the relationship that develops being Marie-Josephe and the female sea monster, Sherzad, that Louis captures and brings to Versailles, believing that if he eats the creature he will win immortal life. It’s up to Marie-Josephe to convince the god-like sovereign that to do so would be murder.

I don’t usually read reviews of books before I write my own because I like to let my own brain juices flow without plundering other people’s thoughts. This time I found myself seeking out reviews before I’d even finished reading the book, so fed up with descriptions of ball gowns and period wigs that I needed to know what, exactly, Nebula voters found so compelling about this book. Where was the science fiction? The fantasy? One review interestingly described this book as a first contact story between humans and an “alien” species, only set in the past. I really love that assessment, but I’m not sure McIntyre lives up to the wonderful determination the reviewer bestowed upon the book.

The action of the book centers not around the sea creature, though she is a crucial part of the plot, but around Marie-Josephe and her struggle to find her place in Louis XIV’s court while maintaining her personality as a curious, intelligent, talented, virtuous, and obnoxiously perfect woman. Just as Sherzad is trapped by the King’s desire for immortality, Marie-Josephe is trapped by the cultural norms of 17^th century France which demand a woman be silent and demure instead of outspoken, inquisitive, and demonstrative. Marie-Josephe wants nothing more than to study mathematics, aid her Jesuit brother in his pursuit of natural sciences, compose extraordinary music on her harpsicorde, create beautiful artistic and scientific drawings to be presented to the king, and ride perfectly to the hunt on a spirited Arabian lent to her by a friend and protector at court, Lucien. When Marie-Josephe went from riding astride to side saddle without a second thought I lost all interest in the character – for me this small detail pushed my willingness to suspend disbelief too far. It may seem a little thing, but on the very balance of it was just how perfect a character McIntyre created – a perfect feminist construct trapped in the past who must prove the sea monster’s personhood to prove her own personhood as a human woman, and therefore free them both from the tyrannical men around them who would consume and abuse them and treat them as beasts.

The thing about alternate histories is that, again, the author is given carte blanche to create any scenario they wish because this is not actual history. If this book had appeared in the age of fan fiction, I think we would deem Marie-Josephe a Mary Sue. Ignoring the fact that the king doesn’t lop off her head or send her to a nunnery, she is a virtuoso at absolutely everything she does. But, conversely, she is also devoutly Catholic and incredibly virginal to the point of being prude. She knows absolutely nothing about sex and believes that it is an act god created to punish women for original sin. Then, she just happens to fall in love with a dwarf (Lucien) who only finds respite from the pain in his back caused by his skeletal structure when he’s having sex with women. You read that right. Fucking is the only thing that makes his back feel better.

McIntyre spends a great deal of time meditating on Marie-Josephe’s innocence, upholding it as desirable and incorruptible even though the book seems to also tell the tale of Marie-Josephe’s sexual liberation. The sea monster, an openly sexual being who sends Marie-Josephe a musical orgasm to get her attention, also represents the key to Marie-Josephe’s freedom from fear of sexual pleasure. But, in another strange twist, this only comes after she marries Lucien, who will hopefully forever find a cure for his back pain while he sleeps with his wife. The formerly notorious philanderer is tamed in marriage, just as Marie-Josephe is allowed to find sexual liberation behind its safe bonds. Here we see the norm of sex being contained within the family, a distinctly 1950s ideal recreated in this novel from the 1990s that tells the tale of a woman’s sexual liberation. It’s all very confusing, at least to me.

This love story, not the discovery and investigation of the sea monsters and their culture, is the true heart of The Moon and the Sun, and it’s why I would call this book a romance novel guised as sci-fi or, perhaps even more appropriately, fantasy. In the end traditional marriage safely contains sexual passion. Our princess finds her prince.

I find it difficult to see past the romantic conventions of this book. As I’ve said before, it seems to me Sherzad only exists as a conduit to Marie-Josephe’s own freedom. The history of sea monster and human interaction if laced with religious overtones – religion is the antagonist here, threatening Sherzad’s life and aiming to silence and control Marie-Josephe’s body and spirit. While I found the idea that humans would simply slaughter the sea monsters, intelligent or not, to be incredibly plausible (we have a poor track record with murdering each other, after all; we could see the sea monsters standing in as indigenous races wiped out during colonialism, a d-plot in this novel), the book simply felt too thin on exploring the fantastical situation McIntyre created, and too thick on making sure Marie-Josephe and Lucien fell in love and properly ended up naked together at the end of the novel.

There is no doubt at all that McIntyre has a talent for description, and as I said, I believe that she must have spent a considerable amount of time researching Louis XIV’s court. But it seems to me at times she became too enamored of recreating the actual historical trappings of Versailles and neglected to fully investigate the intriguing 17^th century first contact scenario she created. Making Marie-Josephe defiant and forward thinking in every way except for her desire to adhere strictly to the tenants of the religion that so damaged and betrayed her (a betrayal she was conscious of), and her absolute need to fall in love and marry sends very mixed messages. I suppose one can be a powerful woman and have all of those things, though the belief in a church that demands women be both silent and dumb seems to be the most discordant of her traits. Whatever the mixed and tangled messages about the meaning of being a woman – which McIntyre does firmly demonstrate is NOT something to be ashamed of – the fault at the heart of this novel is it’s too perfect heroine and it’s too predictable love story that unfortunately distracts from the true marvel of alien cousins waiting to meet us in the depths of our own oceans. Plunked down in the setting when modern science was just awakening, this book had a chance to explore the crossroads in reasoning using a fantastic cast of characters, but instead of it chose to focus on making sure the heroine and her hero ended up rich and happily married. In the end, The Sun and the Moon is a run of the mill exploration of the past with some alien spice thrown in.

This cover is notoriously bad.

Let me preface this review by stating that I am a historian. I’ve always loved storytelling and being transported to faraway worlds, which is why I love science fiction. By the time I’d reached college I knew I loved history as well, passionately, both because it is a mirror of time that reflects back on ourselves, and because it transports us to faraway places both familiar and fantastical, all of which have the benefit of being real. I think many science fiction authors are lovers of history, if not consciously then latently – how can you write about the future without at least being enamored of the past? It makes perfect sense to me that an author might therefore combine a love of science fiction with a love for history in order to use the conventions of one genre to explore the meaning of the human past. That being said, I have no idea why Doomsday Book won a Hugo.

Doomsday Book actually received the Hugo as a co-winner, along with Vernor Vinge’s masterful far future, deep space adventure, A Fire Upon the Deep. Co-nominated with such a transcendent competitor, Doomsday Books’ win seems even more of a mystery. Clocking in at 578 pages long (Bantam revised edition, 1994), the novel, set in the near future, is a tedious, drawn out tale of historical fiction with the convention of time travel thrown in to predicate the action on a sci-fi premise.

Kivrin, a Medieval history student studying at Oxford, has the privilege (or luck) of being a historian after time travel has been discovered. This allows historians to travel back in time to observe events as they unfolded and, more importantly, to see how people truly lived. Obviously, Connie Willis is a fan of social history. It may not be the dream of every historian to time travel back to our chosen time periods, but I’d be lying if I said that thought hadn’t crossed my mind more than once. Not that this doesn’t raise a myriad of questions about methodology and subjectivity, but the nature of the historical profession is not being examined in this novel, nor shall it be in this review. Here, going back in time is the authoritative way to find out about history and Kivrin is going to do it. The only problem is that her chosen time period, 14^th century Europe, is rated a “ten,” or one of the most dangerous centuries, and is therefore off limits to time travel.

Doomsday Book is not 578 pages of Kivrin trying to get to the Middle Ages. In fact, she transports away rather quickly, too quickly, in fact, for her mentor, Mr. Dunworthy, a historian of the 20^th century who inexplicably knows more about the Middle Ages than any of the actual Medieval historians. In fact, thanks to the almost sinister bumbling of Mr. Gilchrist, Dunworthy’s rival, Kivrin is sent to the 1348 instead of 1320, right in the middle of the Black Plague. Oops. Luckily for our heroine, she has been inoculated against the disease in preparation for such a mishap, but she finds herself stuck in the past for a variety of reasons, one being that she has no idea how to find her way back to the rendezvous point (or “drop”) meant to teleport her back to her time, and the other being that as soon as she leaves, present-day Oxford begins to experience a deadly epidemic of the influenza virus that leaves everyone capable of bringing her back from the past incapacitated or dead.

What follows is a duel narrative tracing Dunworthy’s struggle to reach Kivrin admist the epidemic and Kivrin’s frantic attempts to find the drop point, unaware both of the crisis going on in her own century and of the oncoming bubonic plague. Having insinuated herself in the household of a minor noble family, she is forced to watch with horror as the grotesque disease rips through the population of the house and village adjoining it. Meanwhile, Dunworthy runs endlessly between his office and the hospital, spending most of his time making phone calls that don’t get through and trying to pry information out of the deathly ill technician who may be the only one that can save Kivrin from being trapped in the past.

To my eyes, this book reads more like a work of historical fiction than a work of science fiction worth holding a candle to A Fire Upon the Deep. As I said, most of the plot is extremely detailed historical fiction, though Willis’s description of 14^th century England is very conveniently predicated upon the fact that she can change things at will. Remember, Kivrin is experiencing history as it “really” was, not as it was written about. This gives the author carte blanche to fill in gaps or alter details however she desires. Unfortunately, Willis does not use this self-made latitude to create any multidimensional or human characters. Instead of exploring gender roles, for example, Willis creates stock female characters capable of one emotion that limply advance the plot and little else (shrewish mother-in-laws, petulant brides-to-be, etc.), and men cut to fit the mold of disgusting, elder suitor and longing white knight. All the characters seem to have rather modern attitudes about very ancient things. A true historian explores the subjectivity of the lived experience of the historical agent, but in Willis’s past what we expect to find is exactly what we get. What’s the point of time travel, then? It’s easy to be trapped by Willis’s unimaginative tropes because they are familiar to us – so familiar that they’re as worn out as they are enticing in their familiarity. Continuing to harp on well-worn themes, Willis spends an inordinate amount of time making sure to describe the appearance and effects of the black plague in gruesome detail. If this book has a point, more than anything else it seems to be that the black death was really gross and really DID suck for all those involved, though again, I’m not sure we needed time travel and 578 pages to prove that to us. Luckily, the influenza virus in present times is nowhere near as graphic in its manifestations.

Other flaws abound. The characters in this novel are, for the most part, poorly drawn and two dimensional. The villains are so cookie-cutter evil that it is almost insulting to the reader, Dunworthy has no characteristics other than constant anxiety over Kivrin’s whereabouts, and even the unhappy betrothal between a too-young bride and her fat suitor comes right out of the most cliché of storybooks, though how she is saved from an unhappy marriage presents a bit of a twist.

Better, I guess.

If Willis does move toward anything like interesting commentary beyond gore and the pain of losing a loved one, it is in her brief exploration at the end of the novel as to how people find meaning in the midst of a crisis such as a plague. For Willis this manifests in the character of Father Roche, the village priest who believes Kivrin is an angel sent to save them, and Lady Imeyne, the unbearable mother-in-law who rules over the house Kivrin stays in, who is obsessed with status and religion, and believes Kivrin is a sinful witch (because she is a single lady) who has brought the plague upon them. Kivrin, educated in science, knows that the plague is caused by an infectious disease, not a curse sent from God, nor can it be cured by prayer. But, as she struggles to save those she loves from a truly gruesome death, she finds herself confronting the God she so strongly believes, has to believe, isn’t punishing the wicked. Is this kind of death senseless, or does it serve a purpose? Where are those who promised to protect us from such things? In a way, the entire novel takes on our fear of being lost and alone, facing impossible odds. Facing our dooms.

This kind of nuanced questioning brings a level of meaning to Doomsday Book, but it takes 578 pages to get there and is overwhelmed by all the other truly petty concerns that Willis dwells on for most of the book. The interlacing story arcs are so repetitive that surely some of the running back and forth waiting for the phone to ring could have been cut out, as could Kivrin’s waiting by the window for a guide to the drop and her “journal entries,” which in many cases merely summarize events that have already occurred. Doomsday Book is a story with a lot of content with little substance. Unveiling the ending to the mystery Willis builds may have its riveting qualities, but there’s not much else here that bears any remarking upon.