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cimoreneA couple of months ago, around the time I made these two posts, My tv and fandom consumption: a quest for diversity and Hollywood: But where are the gay people?, I was talking to my mother about the media we consume and how I think it's bad for us, no matter who we are, to see no one like us. The first post linked is about the domination of white middle-aged men in the tv and movies available to me; the second is about the domination of heterosexuality specifically.
It's easy enough, I was telling my mom, to escape into female-dominated books. I grew up with them, thanks to her - I never ran out of female protagonists. But the problem remains that these are almost universally straight white female heroines. It's better than straight white men, but if it's all evil/dead lesbians and white-washed futures, it's still painful.
So that's when my mom recommended
My parents don't own these books, and Varley isn't an author that I recall hearing them talk about. (My whole life, they've read what they buy, pretty much. But when they met in the Science Fiction Club at the University of Kansas, which had an SF major and a well-known SF writer on faculty as well as a special SF library at the time, they read a lot more widely.) So I was like, "Who's that?"
My mom called it something like "Lesbian first contact", and I learned from Google that the Gaea trilogy, consisting of Titan, Wizard, and Demon, is an acclaimed sf classic and a story of first contact with a sentient planet. Which sounded cool, and that was enough for me to buy the first one.
Varley's narration had a highly recognizable Second Wave Flavor, as I think of it - that je ne sais quoi common to books written from around the time my parents were in high school to the time I was a baby, the late 70s to early 80s. It wasn't exactly what I was looking for, but it's not a minus point, either. I adore Zelazny and Saberhagen from that period (they just tend to be short on female characters, not in a deliberately sexist or destructive way - more in a homosocial fantasy way; but it's sort of disturbing how little effect the female characters have in (for example) The Chronicles of Amber).
I found the beginning of the book a little hard to get into. It was interesting, intelligent, well-written and obviously meticulously planned out, but as the narrator was sort of plunged into, figuratively, an inexplicable Wonderland, the reader was required to keep going and going, building up a list of strange experiences that weren't wholly explained and waiting for the puzzle to be solved.
Around the halfway point was when it really started to grab me. The quantity of cool things were increasing, and they were sort of converging, and the deliberately uncomfortable interpersonal relationships started to rearrange themselves a little. I read the last quarter in one nail-biting session, staying up long past my bedtime, and the end result is that I really loved it.
Despite what my mom had told me, the beginning of the book had managed to fake me out regarding the lesbian content; I thought it was going to be confined to secondary characters, or superficial, or with a disappointing underlying kind of message. But Varley was ahead of me all along. The book wasn't even a romance, but I had several heart-clenching moments in there towards the end. (Which makes this the best lesbian romance I've ever read, barring![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
telanu's Devil Wears Prada fic. There was a deeply engaging lesbian sub-plot in Vonda McIntyre's polyamorous space opera Starfarers which I read in my formative years, but in retrospect all the most compelling relationships were male/female and male/male.)
Stretching the book out over a couple of weeks, though, was a good way to read it; the "sentient planet" concept was fascinating and provocative, and the way it's introduced is awesome, in my opinion. I'm a little disappointed that I will never know what it's like to get that part as a surprise; on the one hand it's part of what drew me to the series, the spoileriffic reviews and summaries, but it's not given away for free in the book and the way it's introduced is really cool. There's a lot of theology, an infinity of implications and allegories, to draw from Gaea and the many things they think and learn about her.
Anyway, I'm ordering the rest of the trilogy now. Count me impressed.
For spoilerphobes, I recommend Titan as a first-contact science fiction adventure with really cool world-building, cool philosophical/theological underpinnings, and lesbian romance featuring characters of color. However, it should come with a warning for brief and unpleasant though non-graphic rape. (I would have appreciated the warning. That's one part of fandom I definitely like.)
It's easy enough, I was telling my mom, to escape into female-dominated books. I grew up with them, thanks to her - I never ran out of female protagonists. But the problem remains that these are almost universally straight white female heroines. It's better than straight white men, but if it's all evil/dead lesbians and white-washed futures, it's still painful.
So that's when my mom recommended
My parents don't own these books, and Varley isn't an author that I recall hearing them talk about. (My whole life, they've read what they buy, pretty much. But when they met in the Science Fiction Club at the University of Kansas, which had an SF major and a well-known SF writer on faculty as well as a special SF library at the time, they read a lot more widely.) So I was like, "Who's that?"
My mom called it something like "Lesbian first contact", and I learned from Google that the Gaea trilogy, consisting of Titan, Wizard, and Demon, is an acclaimed sf classic and a story of first contact with a sentient planet. Which sounded cool, and that was enough for me to buy the first one.
Varley's narration had a highly recognizable Second Wave Flavor, as I think of it - that je ne sais quoi common to books written from around the time my parents were in high school to the time I was a baby, the late 70s to early 80s. It wasn't exactly what I was looking for, but it's not a minus point, either. I adore Zelazny and Saberhagen from that period (they just tend to be short on female characters, not in a deliberately sexist or destructive way - more in a homosocial fantasy way; but it's sort of disturbing how little effect the female characters have in (for example) The Chronicles of Amber).
I found the beginning of the book a little hard to get into. It was interesting, intelligent, well-written and obviously meticulously planned out, but as the narrator was sort of plunged into, figuratively, an inexplicable Wonderland, the reader was required to keep going and going, building up a list of strange experiences that weren't wholly explained and waiting for the puzzle to be solved.
Around the halfway point was when it really started to grab me. The quantity of cool things were increasing, and they were sort of converging, and the deliberately uncomfortable interpersonal relationships started to rearrange themselves a little. I read the last quarter in one nail-biting session, staying up long past my bedtime, and the end result is that I really loved it.
Despite what my mom had told me, the beginning of the book had managed to fake me out regarding the lesbian content; I thought it was going to be confined to secondary characters, or superficial, or with a disappointing underlying kind of message. But Varley was ahead of me all along. The book wasn't even a romance, but I had several heart-clenching moments in there towards the end. (Which makes this the best lesbian romance I've ever read, barring
telanu's Devil Wears Prada fic. There was a deeply engaging lesbian sub-plot in Vonda McIntyre's polyamorous space opera Starfarers which I read in my formative years, but in retrospect all the most compelling relationships were male/female and male/male.)Stretching the book out over a couple of weeks, though, was a good way to read it; the "sentient planet" concept was fascinating and provocative, and the way it's introduced is awesome, in my opinion. I'm a little disappointed that I will never know what it's like to get that part as a surprise; on the one hand it's part of what drew me to the series, the spoileriffic reviews and summaries, but it's not given away for free in the book and the way it's introduced is really cool. There's a lot of theology, an infinity of implications and allegories, to draw from Gaea and the many things they think and learn about her.
Anyway, I'm ordering the rest of the trilogy now. Count me impressed.
For spoilerphobes, I recommend Titan as a first-contact science fiction adventure with really cool world-building, cool philosophical/theological underpinnings, and lesbian romance featuring characters of color. However, it should come with a warning for brief and unpleasant though non-graphic rape. (I would have appreciated the warning. That's one part of fandom I definitely like.)
(no subject)
Date: 6 May 2009 11:12 pm (UTC)Thanks for the warning. Hmm. It sounds really cool, so this is definitely something I will think about putting on my reading list.
(no subject)
Date: 17 May 2009 06:54 pm (UTC)ps. did your version have the illustrations in?
(no subject)
Date: 17 May 2009 06:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 17 May 2009 07:01 pm (UTC)i really liked the one of Cirocco coming out of the ground.
(no subject)
Date: 17 May 2009 07:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 18 May 2009 09:30 am (UTC)