Grown-up book! I picked this one up because the back reads, and I quote, “The rich and the privileged have fled the city, barricaded it behind roadblocks, and left it to crumble. The inner city has had to rediscover old ways — farming, barter, herb lore.” Near-future SF and self-sufficient urban community? Way to unintentionally feed my fetishes, Hachette Book Group USA!
I totally got more than I bargained for, though. This ain’t a book for the faint of heart (or stomach). If you are easily squicked — or even not-so-easily — run fast, run far. But if you don’t mind the horror, there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on here. The main characters are practitioners (willing and not, light and dark) of Caribbean spirit magic, so the book is full of magical tropes with which I was almost entirely unfamiliar. Not to mention the dialect of the characters — I had to read a lot of it out loud to myself because I loved the rhythm of the speech so much:
“Think about it little more, sweetheart. You nah see the power I did give [she]? Knife couldn’t cut she, blows couldn’t lick she, love couldn’t leave she, heart couldn’t hurt she. She coulda go wherever she want, nobody to stop she.”
I love when science fiction is about culture, and especially when it’s about cultures not my own. SF often assumes that the future has erased cultural differences and old traditions, so it makes me happy to find books like this.
Read-alikes: City of Darkness by Ben Bova (a childhood favorite that totally doesn’t hold up) for the blockaded city left to its own devices; Mockingbird by Sean Stewart for the voodoun/santeria/spirit possession (and for the awesome).
Octavia E. Butler would be an obvious choice to list here, except that the Xenogenesis trilogy didn’t feel rooted in a specific culture so much as “just” science fiction that doesn’t star a white guy. (The “just” is in quotes because there’s shamefully little of that, and Butler is an excellent and important writer.) Hilari Bell’s Songs of Power tries to do this with Inuit religion, except it so persistently beats you over the head with the contrast between religion and science that I hesitate to recommend it in this context.
Find me some more science fiction about traditional cultures!
9 responses so far ↓
1 jadelennox // May 22, 2008 at 9:11 pm
Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber is even better, I think.
2 jfpbookworm // May 22, 2008 at 11:14 pm
Octavia E. Butler would be an obvious choice to list here, except that the Xenogenesis trilogy didn’t feel rooted in a specific culture so much as “just” science fiction that doesn’t star a white guy.
Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents were actually the first similar books that came to mind.
3 Martini-Corona // May 22, 2008 at 11:29 pm
Most of Charles de Lint’s stuff could be described as touching on “traditional cultures,” if that includes Celtic, Russian, and, I dunno, “Misc. Southwest Native American.” But it’s more fantasy than sci-fi (no space ships). I’m thinking here of his Newford stuff. Not technically YA, but I read it all in high school.
That, of course, assumes that the phrase “traditional cultures” doesn’t give you the willies — which it does for me, being raised by an anthropologist and all. What is “traditional”? “Traditional” changes all the time. Can white people be “traditional”? Or is “traditional” for non-normative Others? Etc. etc.
4 Martini-Corona // May 22, 2008 at 11:30 pm
That said, the books sounds cool, though I suspect I might find the dialect speech more annoying than you did. I’ll keep an eye out for it once I read my stack of other things to read. :)
5 Marc // May 23, 2008 at 4:40 am
Have you read The Ear, The Eye, and The Arm by Nancy Farmer?
6 Sam // May 23, 2008 at 6:46 am
Bookworm:
I haven’t read Parable of the Sower — from the blurbs it looks like the “science fiction” part is just a way to get the main character back in time to slavery; is that not the case? Is there more futuristic context?
Marc:
I have, and I loved it! It definitely felt like it was set in a specific place (Zimbabwe), but… Oh! I was about to say that I didn’t remember anything about traditional cultures, but then I remembered about the village they get trapped in! That was awesome. Good call!
7 Sam // May 23, 2008 at 6:46 am
Martini-Corona:
Newford is kind of a guilty pleasure for me, especially the Celtic magic connections, but the fact that it’s already fantasy rather than sci-fi makes it easier to interweave the traditional magic. (And “Misc. Southwest Native American” is pretty accurate — which is to say that it’s a white-guy view of The Holy Native Americans, and therefore probably not terribly accurate at all. DeLint always seemed like a wolf-shirt-wearer to me. See “guilty,” above.)
And white people can absolutely be traditional! Celtic and Russian are good examples. Norse mythology. Christianity or Judaism would count for my purposes too; modern religions of course also have traditional “magic” (even if they wouldn’t call it that) and a mythology. What interests me is the intersection / combination of The Future (science fiction) and The Past (”traditional culture”).
8 Sara // May 23, 2008 at 7:22 am
Oh, yeah. Butler and Hopkinson are an interesting opposites; Butler is fascinated by biology and its role in interpersonal interactions, Hopkinson’s more concerned with *culture* and its role in the same.
There’s probably a paper to be written about how this reflects the different ways in which they are working through and metabolizing the Western idea of “race,” Butler confronting the biological-difference-as-destiny part of that idea and transforming it, and Hopkinson working with a more fluid, more modern idea of culture. But I don’t feel like writing it.
In part because Hopkinson is a great author I’ve never actually read. I’ve read *in* her books, but haven’t read *through* them. As with Butler, whose blurbs and covers I examined with fascination as a kid in the sf section (it was the copy that inexplicably features a white Lilith); I had to wait til I was ready. Maybe now’s the time.
…
ps: 1) if you want people to comment here, leaving a comments link at the bottom of the lj post would probably help.
2) no no, you’re thinking of “Kindred” — that’s the timetravel/slaver one. The “Parable” books are the dystopian future/syncretic religion ones. And I haven’t read those, either.
9 Sam // May 23, 2008 at 7:40 am
Sara:
Your thoughts about Butler vs. Hopkinson are interesting thoughts that I don’t entirely understand. :) Probably that’s because I haven’t read enough of either author to get a sense of what larger themes they keep returning to. I will say that I didn’t think Brown Girl in the Ring (despite the title) was about race much at all. The characters happened to almost all be of a race that is different from mine, and that is different from most writers and readers of science fiction, but there was almost nothing in the book about interracial interactions, or what it means to be Black or White or whatever (Hopkinson capitalizes those, so I will here too, even though I don’t normally). There were White people trapped in blockaded Toronto too; city/’burbs was more about class than race.
ps: 1) if you want people to comment here, leaving a comments link at the bottom of the lj post would probably help.
That’s not actually easy. The LJ post is a syndication of my RSS feed, which just pulls my Parenthetical posts whole and sticks them on LJ. I could add a comments link to the bottom of every Parenthetical post, which would be weird for people who read them not on LJ (but maybe I’ll do that anyway; that’s probably the simplest of a lot of klugey solutions). Or I could have another LJ account that isn’t a feed, into which I paste every post and add a comments link. Or I could go back to just having the feed run the “summary” of the post, which is just the first couple of lines and therefore not really long enough to entice anyone to read the rest. Or maybe there’s another option I don’t know about, like a WordPress plugin. (Anybody have any ideas?)
2) no no, you’re thinking of “Kindred” — that’s the timetravel/slaver one. The “Parable” books are the dystopian future/syncretic religion ones. And I haven’t read those, either.
Oops — you’re right! The only Butler I’ve read is Xenogenesis (which I read in high school), so I got confused.
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