Aboriginal Science Fiction, Issues 57–58 — page 43: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

females as “girls,” much less to write a passage like this: Like most females of her caste, Jholaa Kitheri had been kept catastrophically ignorant, but she was not stupid. Allowed to see nothing of genuine importance, she was keenly observant of emotional minuti- ae — astute enough to wonder, even as a girl, if it was malice or simply thoughtless cruelty when, at her father’s whim, she was allowed beyond her cham- ber and permitted to recline silently on silken cushions in a dim corner of an awninged courtyard during some minor state gathering. But even on those rare occasions, no one came near or even glanced in her direction. “I might as well be made of glass or wind or time,” Jholaa cried out at this indifference when she was. only ten. “Srokan, I exist! Why does no one see me?” “They do not see my most beautiful lady because she has the glory of the moons in her!” her Runa nursemaid said, hop- ing to distract the child. (p.53) If the ten-year-old “girl” has such completely human emo- tions and lies on silk under an awning in a courtyard and com- pares herself to glass, it is all too easy to forget that she’s got a tail and may one day eat her nurse- maid. So what we have here is a descendant of utopian and Lost Race fiction, in which the “alien planet” is really a foreign coun- try. The story, serious though it may be, is a kind of social/politi- cal allegory, not a convincing speculation about life on another planet. It is set on another plan- et merely because all the plausi- ble locales on Earth have been explored or otherwise used up. There are speculations here, particularly about the nature of a predator/prey society, but the aliens themselves are no more convincing than Star Trek aliens (who might be summed up as a facial problem and an attitude). Books Not surprisingly, the passages in both books which are entirely about the human characters are much more vivid and gripping. I am far more convinced by Russell’s 21st-century Italy than by Rakhat. The core of the novel, and its predecessor, is, contra Blish, genuinely theological. It is about what is variously called the Problem of Pain or the Problem of Evil or the Cruelty of God. It is about why God, who is allegedly all good and all know- ing and all powerful, allows the seemingly pointless suffering of innocents. Father Sandoz is ulti- mately an innocent, as much as any of the alien babies who get eaten when the _ interfering humans enable the prey species to reproduce. beyond its carefully balanced limits. The book is about very pro- found questions of right and wrong, and its theological argu- ments sometimes eerily echo those used by the defense when God is put.on trial in James Morrow’s Blameless in Abbadon, about which, more anon. Is Children of God genuinely science fiction? Yes. If these aliens were more alien, every- thing would still work out the same. The alien experiences would still echo the human ones. Father Sandoz would still suffer and grapple with God. The plot does not depend on the flimsi- ness of the science-fictional trap- pings, as is so often the case on Star Trek. No, this is the real thing. And theological, too. Rating: evrvrcr Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman By Walter M. Miller Bantam, 1997 434 pp., $23.95 Certainly some of the jitters that produced, Walter M. Miller’s classic, A Canticle fer Leibowitz, were other than chiliastic or the- ological. Written at the height of the Cold War, at a time when school children went through meaningless atomic. air-raid drills and “brinksmanship” was Aboriginal Science Fiction — Summer 1998 the order of the day in interna- tional relations, Miller’s book grew out of the image of post- Holocaust, neo-medieval monks carefully preserving scraps left over from the lost technological age, things the monkish scribes no longer understood but, they believed, were vitally important: a grocery list, a wiring diagram, etc. The key idea was that reli- gion might become, again, the instrument for preserving secu- lar knowledge in a dark age. But the book is about a lot more, and has proven to be one of the most durable of all SF novels, and cer- tainly one of the key items in any consideration of science fic- tion about religion. Now, almost forty years later, we have the sequel. Miller became, apparently, silent after Canticle was published in 1960. Rumors abounded. I heard vari- ously that he had lost or gained his faith, or that otherwise he had undergone a change in his life which took away the need to write. But the truth of the mat- ter seems to have been that he was writing a huge, substantial, often brilliant sequel, and he got 90% of the way through it and then got stuck. He described his attempts at completing the book as being like trying to spit through a_ screen door. Ultimately (though not for this reason alone, I am sure), he killed himself, and left the book unfinished, not a mess of notes and drafts, but a polished (or almost polished) final version that stopped just before the end. Terry Bisson was called in to write the last few chapters, and so here we have it. It’s actually (to steal a bastard term from I don’t remember whom) a “middlequel,” since the action takes place during the era of the middle section of Canticle. We are in a neo-Middle Age, in which the Papacy (in exile in about what used to be Oklahoma) is in conflict with the Texark Empire. The Church has become powerful and politically important, but it is also still in competition with “pagan” belief- systems of the Plains Nomads. CORMICMOOCKS Gann