Floating worlds

I first read this nearly 40 years ago and really liked it.

Coming back to it now, after so many years, I have been delighted to discover that it still captures me. Yes, it seems seriously weak on its imagining of technology so far ahead, but I don't care: the Shakespearean level of familial and political skullduggery on a solar system scale does it for me.

Gah. Ugh. Phew. That was gigantic. I need someone to talk about it with. Agh. I need someone to digest that all with! Are there essays about this book? There should be.

So much! So much is happening! I picked this one up for a bunch of reasons. It's a Strong Female Protagonist (weak Monty Python yey). It's social/political sci-fi, similar to (and loved by, apparently?) Ursula Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson, two authors I greatly admire. It's a “lost classic”, which is always appealing (pretty obscure; hipsterfood).

And just, wow. I feel a little emotionally exhausted.

The story is set in the Medium-Far Future, where the solar system is way different from how it is today. Most of the planets are colonized, and radically different. Mars is a consumerist-Fascist dystopia that kinda felt like a creepy Miami/Malibu to me - or like Mars from Total Recall. Earth is a giant anarchist commune, and also an eco-disaster (so people live in domes). The moon is a theocratic dictator state. And Uranus, Saturn and Pluto have this kinda Mongolian, kinda old-fashioned hill tribe thing going on, where the people there - “Styths” - have mutated/evolved due to Unexplained Future History stuff. They now live in interesting-sounding domes, and are a Mighty and Warlike Race blah blah. Also, they have claws. They're basically Klingons. Am I the only one who saw them as Klingons?

The hiro-protagonist of the story is Paula Mendoza, this tough-as-nails lady from Earth. Paula starts the story unemployed and dating this mansplainy jerk named Tony (TONY! fist shake), but then - through bizarre and interesting anarchist-commune labor-rotation stuff - gets a job with the Committee - the commune's semi-somewhat government stand-in thing. Which is, incidentally, run by extremely Machiavellian types! Paula is tasked with drafting an interplanetary treaty between the Styths and Martians, who hate each other. Wow, responsibility. But I guess that's how anarchists swing? Anyway, because she read that one paper by Paul Krugman, she writes an awesome treaty leveraging cool trade stuff. She also gets impregnated by one of the Klingons, and decides to go live in Stythsville for, like, ten years.

A war happens at one point. Shit gets really intense. Work camps, despair. I despaired. Spoiler? Whatever.

The book definitely carries very strong Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson vibes. It's Le Guin-ish during the whole Styth Living section; where we have the outsider visiting a far-off planetary culture that resembles a mash-up of Earth cultures (the Styths are apparently based on Genghis Khan et al.?) and is all about anthropology and development economics and racism. It's Robinson-ish because every character is SO. DAMN. POLITICAL. To the point of feeling just cruel, dude. Also, like Robinson, Cecila Holland (the author) kills people off pretty mercilessly.

Overall, it was gigantic, and I generally loved it. It's definitely a missing classic, since the scope is vast and I could pick apart the feminist themes forever. (Like, dude, Paula is a super-independent anarchist lady who spends 75% of the book under the heel - sometimes literally! - of her über macho Genghis Khan husband.) The writing style is also brilliant, in that it's completely spare, journalistic, telegraphic. There is NO exposition, and very little feeling. This is especially awesome when something very strange and alien is being described; Holland lets you fill in the blanks. Space flight was described with a vividness I've never seen in sci-fi, film or book. And the flights over Uranus were psychadelic, mind-bending. It was kinda like a very trippy Hilary Mantel at times (and Hilary Mantel is already pretty trippy - imagine it in a gas giant!). I loved (and was disturbed by) the moments when Holland opened up her already weird universe to a potential even freakier: the allusions to civilizations beyond this solar system; or the ambitious Styth, Tanuojin, and his freaky healer hands. What!

Some stuff I loved less: despite it being like 90% awesome, I did find a couple things tedious. The characters, as written by Holland, were ambiguous, complex, weird creatures who behaved unexpectedly. Cool. BUT! It felt like some of her secondary characters were very briefly sketched out, and mostly caricatures. I especially wasn't into the fat-shamey portrayals of one prominent Committee politician, and one of Klingon Dude's other wives. Seriously, stop describing the rolls of fat and how appallingly fat these two women were. It's getting old. I also spotted a few other repetitive phrases, but I'll live. Despite these relatively minor flaws, it is a pretty brutal, mind-opening epic, and should rightly sit aside Frank Herbert's Dune and the like.

Floating Worlds is Cecelia Holland's only SF novel. It is a good one, but I think she found there is more money in historical novels and fantasy.