If you haven't partaken of the delights of any of the links on the Tolkien sarcasm page, you've been missing out!
Also check out this article on public vs private reading.
Showing posts with label J.R.R. Tolkein. Show all posts
Showing posts with label J.R.R. Tolkein. Show all posts
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
The Children Star
Joan Slonczewski is a friend of mine and has been for almost twenty years now, so my copy of her SF novel that is dedicated to me and Ron, The Children Star, was a gift from her in 1998. I reread it recently during the process of getting it ready to be re-issued as a print-on-demand book, and marveled again at the strangeness of the aliens.
At first the characters, some of them familiar from previous novels, don't even recognize the aliens as sentient life-forms. They don't realize the aliens are trying to speak to them. They don't understand the mechanism by which the life-forms control the weather on their planet. They don't even see them. They are as likely to kill millions of aliens as they are to swat a bug.
These strange aliens are from a planet called Prokaryon where everything is round and poisonous. Humans have to be "life-shaped" to live there:
"merely inhaling Prokaryan air would expose their unprepared lungs to poison; for the native life-forms had evolved all sorts of things that the ordinary human body was not designed to encounter, much less digest for food. Their triplex chromosomes were mutagenic, their "proteins" contained indigestible amino acids, and their membranes were full of arsenic."
The few human settlers on the planet contend with "wheelgrass" and "loopleaves" when trying to walk, and with "a whirr-clouded tumbleround" stopping outside their window, which "generally rooted and grew in one spot for a long while; but under certain conditions, perhaps nitrogen deficiency, some of its vines would root themselves in the ground at one edge, then contract, pulling the organism to tumble it over slightly. More vines then rooted down, and so forth; once the tumbleround got going, it could travel several meters per day, trampling and digesting whatever vegetation crossed its path. Scientists disputed whether they were more animal or plant, zooid or phycoid."
The scientists at first think that "singing-trees are the real intelligence controlling this planet" because they see bursts of light and correctly interpret them as language. "We did try to respond," one says, "but never caught on in time, and the natives gave up." Why they gave up becomes apparent when the "natives" of the planet begin corresponding with some of the main characters from inside their own bodies. The aliens turn out to be microzooids, capable of taking over the human nervous system and bestowing reward or punishment. Eventually they also turn out to be capable of "life-forming" a human to be able to live on their home planet, and what they want in exchange is space travel, undertaken over generations of microzooid lives and within human ones.
The children star, a myth told to a child before she is rescued from her dying home planet and taken to Prokaryon, turns out to be a world full of sentient microorganisms for whom time passes so quickly that within a few months, entire generations of their "children" have created unique cultures inside each human brave enough to accept a colony.
I'm amazed to claim as a friend a person who seemingly has such an easy time bypassing one of the traditional problems of science fiction, namely how to create an alien who will seem really alien, rather than just another form of a bug-eyed monster. And along the way, she makes suggestions on how to "confront the mutants before they destroy the earth" or any other planet, which gives this novel an exciting plot that makes the details of biology seem almost incidental, like the elven languages in The Lord of the Rings or the map of the world in Eragon.
Do you also like to read fantasy or science fiction based on a world so detailed that only a small part of the backstory makes it into the actual story, or that requires two or more sequels to explore the relationships between some of the most important details?
At first the characters, some of them familiar from previous novels, don't even recognize the aliens as sentient life-forms. They don't realize the aliens are trying to speak to them. They don't understand the mechanism by which the life-forms control the weather on their planet. They don't even see them. They are as likely to kill millions of aliens as they are to swat a bug.
These strange aliens are from a planet called Prokaryon where everything is round and poisonous. Humans have to be "life-shaped" to live there:
"merely inhaling Prokaryan air would expose their unprepared lungs to poison; for the native life-forms had evolved all sorts of things that the ordinary human body was not designed to encounter, much less digest for food. Their triplex chromosomes were mutagenic, their "proteins" contained indigestible amino acids, and their membranes were full of arsenic."
The few human settlers on the planet contend with "wheelgrass" and "loopleaves" when trying to walk, and with "a whirr-clouded tumbleround" stopping outside their window, which "generally rooted and grew in one spot for a long while; but under certain conditions, perhaps nitrogen deficiency, some of its vines would root themselves in the ground at one edge, then contract, pulling the organism to tumble it over slightly. More vines then rooted down, and so forth; once the tumbleround got going, it could travel several meters per day, trampling and digesting whatever vegetation crossed its path. Scientists disputed whether they were more animal or plant, zooid or phycoid."
The scientists at first think that "singing-trees are the real intelligence controlling this planet" because they see bursts of light and correctly interpret them as language. "We did try to respond," one says, "but never caught on in time, and the natives gave up." Why they gave up becomes apparent when the "natives" of the planet begin corresponding with some of the main characters from inside their own bodies. The aliens turn out to be microzooids, capable of taking over the human nervous system and bestowing reward or punishment. Eventually they also turn out to be capable of "life-forming" a human to be able to live on their home planet, and what they want in exchange is space travel, undertaken over generations of microzooid lives and within human ones.
The children star, a myth told to a child before she is rescued from her dying home planet and taken to Prokaryon, turns out to be a world full of sentient microorganisms for whom time passes so quickly that within a few months, entire generations of their "children" have created unique cultures inside each human brave enough to accept a colony.
I'm amazed to claim as a friend a person who seemingly has such an easy time bypassing one of the traditional problems of science fiction, namely how to create an alien who will seem really alien, rather than just another form of a bug-eyed monster. And along the way, she makes suggestions on how to "confront the mutants before they destroy the earth" or any other planet, which gives this novel an exciting plot that makes the details of biology seem almost incidental, like the elven languages in The Lord of the Rings or the map of the world in Eragon.
Do you also like to read fantasy or science fiction based on a world so detailed that only a small part of the backstory makes it into the actual story, or that requires two or more sequels to explore the relationships between some of the most important details?
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