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In 2002, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt lost the Hugo award to Robert Sawyer’s Hominids, a book I won’t be reading due to its graphic and gratuitous depiction of rape. Instead, I chose to read this alternate history, which details what the world might have looked like if all the Christians/Europeans had died out in the black plague. Geographically the story focuses mostly on the Chinese and India, Muslim Arabia and the Middle East, with some focus also on Native Americans. As a narrative device, the book makes coherent its jumps across time and space by following a group of characters reincarnated through all the chapters and identifiable by the first letter of their first names. The reincarnation serves not only as a plot device but also as an example of the way alternate constructions of history itself might look like.

From the author of Red Mars, it is reasonable to expect an incredibly rich and detailed narrative that focuses both on the characters as well as the world around them. Robinson certainly delivers on this front – his book is richly populated with intriguing characters and somehow the plot device of reincarnation never comes to seem trite. But, as we’ve seen before, one of the most interesting conceits of alternative histories (and there is definitely room to debate whether these are even science fiction at all) is that the author is given carte blanche to create a new world. On this front, Robinson fails.

The Years of Rice and Salt reads as a catalog of human scientific discovery, except with the discovery being done by Muslims and the Chinese, not Europeans. These discoveries, however, often lead to exactly the same ends, such as The Long War, a 67 year war between the Muslims and the Europeans that eerily resembles WWI. Similarly, the Chinese discovery of the Americas leads to a smallpox epidemic that wipes out a large portion of the native population and invasions of South America to overthrow the Incas and take their gold. One notable difference is that somehow the Muslims and the Chinese manage to avoid dropping the atomic bomb, but China still ends up a country revolutionized by a philosophy the sounds exactly like the peasant-centric communism of Mao Zedong.

At one point, Robinson even has one of his characters argue against the kind of counterfactual history he is creating in his own book:

“It’s such a useless exercise…What if this had happened, what if that had happened…The historians who talk about employing counterfactuals to bolster their theories, they’re ridiculous. Because no one ever knows why things happen, you see? Anything could follow from anything. Even real history tells us nothing at all. Because we don’t know if history is sensitive, and for want of a nail civilization was lost, or if our mightiest acts are as petals on a flood, or something in between, or both at once. We just don’t know, and the what-if don’t help us figure it out.”

“Why do people like them so much then?”

“More stories.”

For The Years of Rice and Salt, the alternate history just serves the purpose of more stories, especially since historical events parallel the actual timeline, even with different players. The use of reincarnation as a plot device suggests that all of our lives are endless iterations of more stories, stories that advance the same inevitable history that may come in a foreign garb but when undressed is all the same. Because the alternate history of The Years of Rice and Salt is so close to our own, the book can be difficult to read through, as Robinson becomes lost in his stories and loses sight of the alternate histories he’s creating. The book moves from intriguing to dull and back again, over and over, like the reincarnations of its characters.

Published in 2002, it’s hard to ignore the timeliness of a book about a world where Muslims rule half of it. Robinson’s Muslims are artistic and interested in the hard sciences, they search for the truth about the Koran and believe in equality for women, and let Hindu and Buddhist beliefs about reincarnation color their own religious experiences. With the book’s timely proximity to the events of September 11th, it’s hard to know exactly how much that day affected Robinson’s book. It’s a thick tome, so it’s hard to believe he wasn’t working on it before 9/11. But his mission, regardless of external events in our real history, is to portray Muslims and the Chinese as vibrant, learned civilizations, not backwater barbarians as our history so often paints them. Left unchecked by religious wars and imperialism, The Years of Rice and Salt demonstrates how these societies may well have developed into imperial powers themselves, driven by science, without losing their religious identities.

The Years of Rice and Salt is an interesting read, even if Robinson doesn’t grab the reins allowed him by alternate history and run with them. That’s not his goal here. For those interested in rich character studies and imagined lands populated by familiar cultures, this is the book for you.

It’s hard to know where to begin in dissecting this out-of-print Nebula winner. It’s another time travel story, and as we’ve already established with historical fiction and alternate histories, using such a device allows the author carte blanche when constructing a plot around their unique timeline. No Enemy but Time uses this latitude to create a novel that rewrites our understanding of our distant past. Whether this journey 2,000,000 years into Earth’s past is successful enough for the reader is up for debate.

No Enemy but Time is really two stories about one character told in a twined narrative as the author moves forward through Joshua Kampa’s past being raised by his foster parents, and his future, where he travels backwards in time to Plieistocene Africa in the the fictional country of Zarakal. He goes because he has been dreaming of living there, in this same far-distant time period, his whole life, and somehow the time travel technology in this novel revolves around the vivid dreams Kampa has had since he was a small child. Only one who has “spirit traveled” can actually go back in time using the time travel device, White Sphinx. Kampa qualifies, and so he is sent back in time to observe the fictionalized proto-humans, Homo zarakalenis (referred to as Minids). The rest of this time travel part of the story focuses on Kampa’s adventures with the tribe of proto-humans he eventually becomes a part of. An intriguing premise, No Enemy but Time fails to reach the heights worthy of a Nebula.

The plot of No Enemy but Time is hard to summarize intelligently, as may be apparent from the first two paragraphs of this review. The book is long and winding, and while its two stories are connected through the shared character of Joshua Kampa, it’s hard to pin down why the story of his childhood and maturation is necessary, even if these chapters are the best written of the book. But what is most frustrating and banal is the way Bishop treats Kampa’s time in the past. The book reads like an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel without the excitement, and with a black protagonist. As Kampa successfully joins the Minids band, he becomes the all-powerful outsider, just as good, if not better, at practicing the tasks of hunting and gathering that his Minid companions are both evolutionarily and experientially more suitable for.

Even more problematic is the nature of gender and sexuality in this book. The Minid society is divided along gender lines, with the men doing the hunting and protecting and the females doing the gathering and the nurturing. They also pair bond monogamously along gender lines, implying that heteronormative standards reigned supreme in humans’ distant ancestors. That is, of course, until Kampa falls in love with one of the female Minids that he names Helen, a loner, physically larger than the other woman, who most often acts like a male of the tribe. But this is an uneasy role – Helen is shunned by the females and often takes to stealing other animals’ children in an attempt to play mother. In Bishop’s Pleistocene era, the key to true acceptance in society for a woman is still tied closely to her reproductive capabilities and her role in a heteronormative couple.

That’s right. If you haven’t guessed it by now, Kampa and Helen pair bond, have sex, and produce a child. Putting aside the possible scientific impossibility of this procreation (it is a novel about time travel based on dreaming, after all), I was quite put off by the sexualization of Helen, who I read to be basically an animal in comparison to Kampa. Their love scene read like lurid bestiality, and though I could see the relationship coming from miles away, that didn’t lead me to be any more disappointed in the author. The love scene and sexual bond between Kampa and Helen served no purpose in the plot other than to situate both Kampa and Helen in a monogamous, heteronormative relationship.

This book was published in 1982, during the rise of the New Right with a backlash against the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 70s. It’s hard to know if Bishop’s interest in pair bonding Kampa and Helen related to this backlash, but one of the most striking features of this novel is that Joshua Kampa is black. Further, he encounters prejudice and discrimination based on his skin color in scenes that are convincing enough such that they are uncomfortable to read. If Bishop was unwilling to relinquish heternormative relationships, he did explore the color barrier.

Also, the novel is set in Africa, an Africa that Bishop envisions as forward thinking scientifically, and that in the end gets its own space program. It is not a simple backdrop for a story about time travel, but instead is a character in its own right, as are the African politicians who play and support Kampa along the way.

As I said at the beginning of the review, this novel has an extremely interesting premise, I just wish it had been executed better. Kampa’s sexual relationship with Helen was a disturbing plot point that I couldn’t move beyond, and it was hard to feel immersed in the minutiae of the Minids society when most of their time was spent looking for food – realistic perhaps, but it didn’t make for riveting reading. Then Bishop glossed over one of the most interesting parts of the story – his return to the present with his hybrid daughter. Perhaps unwilling to imagine the prejudice she might face, or the mental handicaps she might have to overcome, she appears as perfectly normal in the final chapter, absconding to chase her own dreams of the future.

No Enemy but Time is lean on material where it should be thick, and dwells too much on seemingly mundane episodes. Further, it is hard not to feel disturbed by the eroticization of an animal. Poor females are always sex objects, even if they’re almost of a different species. This book is a romance novel for men disguised as a technical manual for wilderness survival disguised as a coming of age story. Follow your dreams, Bishop extorts his reader, they will lead your on wilder and more inappropriate adventures than you ever imagined.

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.