George Zebrowski, “The Omega Point” (1972) – This is a quick scifi read about Gorgias, close-to-the-last of his race of human-descended inhabitants of the Herculean cluster, who fought humanity and lost big time. The Herculeans are drawn roughly like standard fantasy elves- smaller, more elegant, more sophisticated than humans, but frailer and fewer. Gorgias has the best spaceship around and uses it to zoom around and do terrorist strikes- taking out a composer who wrote a suite about the Earth-Herculean war, zapping warp drive beacons, and so on. He’s being hunted by Kurbi, a sensitive earthling who wants to take his man alive, so as to reproduce the Herculeans. This is both as reparations for Earth genociding them and due to some theory that humans need a rival or other in order to grow, etc. Ultimately, this sort of philosophizing takes over the book. After Gorgias does his last stand, he’s absorbed into the collective unconscious or noosphere or whatever you want to call it, which is very seventies-trippy and, naturally, stored in the mind of an attractive alien lady. It feels both like Zebrowski, an old scifi (and Star Trek!) hand, both ran out of ideas and followed his vision i.e. whatever he was reading about at the time. For better and for worse, the sort of book published used to insert cigarette ads into, like my copy. ***’

Philip José Farmer, “To Your Scattered Bodies Go” (1971) – My first go at one of the grand masters of scifi and the beginning of the “Riverworld” series. It was… fine. Certainly the concept is arresting. Someone took the whole population of humanity and reincarnated them into new, young, naked bodies along the course of an endless river. Everyone who ever lived is there, scattered in quasi-random linguistic/temporal groupings. They get food (and booze, and weed) from magic lunchpails someone issued them, and other than bamboo and stone, there’s not much to make stuff with.

I emphasize that last bit because Farmer emphasizes it, a lot. Way more of this book than I would have figured is about the quotidian act of survival in this comparatively-easy-to-survive world. You’d figure given the sheer scope of the setup, Farmer would have jumped to the implications of their situation a little more quickly… but instead we get a lot of speculation about how much you can do with bamboo, rocks, and fish (and human!) parts.

Either way, we get our narrative viewpoint from the newly-reincarnated Richard Francis Burton, the Victorian traveler, linguist (he could supposedly speak twenty or thirty languages or something like that) and writer with many a legendary exploit under his name. Naturally, he takes charge of the surviving-and-organizing business of his little band, that includes the grown-up inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice (for whom Burton obviously gets horny), a Holocaust survivor, an alien, a caveman, some Italians, a know-it-all who provides periodic infodumps on Burton or assorted others, etc.

Burton had had a vision where he met with the organizers of the Riverworld, and is determined to find them again. He and his band make a raft and head upriver. Because this is midcentury scifi, naturally everyone has set to warring with one another, even though (because?) their material needs are basically met. One set of slaver warlords led by Hermann Goering capture Burton and his band. They escape, but it sets up a dynamic wherein Burton and Goering get killed and reincarnated time and again, generally in close proximity to each other. Burton is doing it because he thinks being randomly distributed somewhere on the river is a more efficient means of travel than trying to sail through the rival factions, so he kills himself over and over again, getting newly reincarnated each time. Goering does it because he’s addicted to both heroin and a special “dreamgum” issued in their rations and tries killing himself when he can’t kick successfully, even when he’s otherwise turned a new leaf.

Once it gets going the action is commendably out there, though with enough of that midcentury scifi flavor — the omni-competent ubermensch protagonist, the women and their hangups (Farmer was something of a pioneer in bringing explicit sex into science fiction), the faceless hordes fighting for no reason, etc. — to dampen the originality some. In all, good enough to have a look at the sequels. ***’

David Brin, “Startide Rising” (1983) – This was some pretty fun scifi about a sticky situation in which some slick critters find themselves. The first starship commanded by dolphins — well, genetically enhanced neo-dolphins, anyway — stumbles upon some ancient artifacts for which numerous powerful galactic civilizations will gladly kill. They hide out on a water planet and try to figure shit out while the various intergalactic factions — spider people, lizard people, bug people, etc — kill each other in orbit over the planet.

In this particular universe, humans play the role they often do of cocky new kids on the galactic block. Every other spacefaring civilization, it seems, were “uplifted” into tool use and other advances by a patron species, going all the way back to the Progenitors billions of years ago. The humans can’t trace back a patron, which makes them out of place in a universe defined by lineages and attachment to ancient knowledge. That doesn’t stop plucky humanity from uplifting chimpanzees and dolphins, though, and all three species are present in the ship. Can humanity and our mammal bros make it in a cold, hierarchical universe? Brin’s philosophical about it but not too much. In the classic scifi fashion, pluck and ingenuity find a way.

This is an enjoyably overstuffed scifi read, with a half dozen primary viewpoint characters, numerous places where they’re all at that get hard to keep track of, plots and subplots, efforts at fleshing out dolphin culture (kind of hippie-ish but very eager), so on and so forth. The final plan to get out of the trap the aliens have them in is pretty cool, and fails (and is fixed) in some fun ways. All in all, good clean scifi fun. ****’

Octavia Butler, “Xenogenesis” trilogy (1987-1989) – The premise of these books is a funny one — people have to have brain-sex with alien tentacle monsters to repopulate the earth after a nuclear war — but is played completely straight, with stakes of species-level life, death, and love. The novels “Dawn,” “Adulthood Rites,” and “Imago” explore a wholly alien society, it’s mixture with humanity, and questions of what life, humanity, and family are. Heavy stuff!

First, the aliens, known as the Oankali. They’re basically gene-stealing aliens but (notionally) benevolent. They go from world to world swapping genes with the species they find, modifying both themselves and the others to adapt to whatever circumstances they find. They do this with humanity after the species is almost destroyed in a nuclear war. Humanity’s choice is either accept the Oankali trade or die as a species.

The whole Oankali frame of reference, from its concept of time to the basic value it places on life qua life, is different from humanity. They think in centuries, are obsessed with genes (which they can read like text), and have three sexes- male, female, and ooloi. The ooloi sort of get between the other two, stick them with pleasure-inducing tentacles, and then mix up the baby’s genes before implanting it in the female.

The aliens fix earth and put people back onto it, but at a price. People can now only breed if they do it the Oankali way, complete with ooloi help. As it turns out, ooloi sex is deeply fulfilling, but it also seems wrong and vaguely gay to most humans, so they refuse to go along with it, instead running off to the woods to lead unhappy, sterile lives. Those who stay with the Oankali settlements live complicated but fruitful and long (the Oankali can easily fix most human diseases) lives.

I get that this is meant to be a tale of adaptation. The first novel in the trilogy, “Dawn,” is told from the perspective of Lilith, the first human to agree to be part of the Oankali program. She’s deeply conflicted about the whole thing, but agrees with the Oankali that the continuation of life — and the adaptations that entail — are more important than species pride. The next, “Adulthood Rites,” is told from the perspective of one of her “construct” — part human, but remixed by an ooloi — children, and the third, “Imago,” from another of her kids, the first ooloi born of a human woman. This is about new forms of life, life dedicated to the perpetuation and adaptation not just of themselves but of life in general. There’s a reason these books are a touchstone of the queer (and generally more diverse) turn in scifi.

I don’t see the Oankali as all that benevolent; moreover, I’m not convinced Butler did, either. Part of this, I admit, resulted from confusion on my part. I thought the sterility of non-Oankali-aligned humans at the end of “Dawn” was a side effect of the war or something. But then I realized midway through “Adulthood Rites” that it wasn’t- that the Oankali sterilized the other humans. That’s kind of fucked up! Akin, Lilith’s child, convinces the Oankali to let non-sterilized humans settle Mars, but still.

The excuse is our self-destructiveness. We have the capital-c Contradiction of intelligence and hierarchical behavior that, the Oankali insist, will doom is every time until they breed it out of us. But the Oankali clearly have a hierarchy too, which begins with Oankali>Human! Sure, they say they love us — they think we’re spicy and dangerous, genetically interesting — but the British said the same stuff about the people of India. Moreover, internally, the Oankali hierarchy is much flatter and fairer than most of ours, but it exists- older and more talented people have more power. Someone gets chosen for important tasks. That’s hierarchy. It’s inescapable- just like the other two principles of organization, exchange and communalism, are inescapable. Everything has a little of all three, admit it or not.

Lilith, to her and Butler’s credit, admits it, admits the Oankali used her without her consent, even as she falls genuinely in love with an ooloi and adapts to her hybrid society. She’s deeply ambivalent. I think this is a story at least as much about race, integration, and imperialism as it is about gender. Octavia Butler was the only prominent black woman scifi writer in her time. She was widely feted, but she tackled the contradictions and confusion of pluralism in her own life.

And she never came up with easy answers, which is possibly her greatest strength as a writer. The Oankali are right- people are self-destructive. Just look at us! Though it’s worth nothing the Oankali endgame for Earth is the kind of thing that Elon Musk would come up with, and for which we’d all mock him. The narrow-minded prejudice that drives much of human resistance to the Oankali is wrong, but from many of the resisters, it’s about living according to their own choices, not just space-racism. It’s complicated- much like the Oankali-Human reproduction system, which involves five beings and could probably use a diagram. And like it, it holds out the promise of radically new forms of life, endless possibilities.

I don’t think the reading that identifies uncomplicatedly with the Oankali is wrong. I think Butler’s strength is that, aside from the wantonly destructive, she allows us to identify with multiple radically different perspectives. To me, there are no good choices in this series — I’m not crazy about bending the knee to those who pretend to know what’s good for me, no matter where they’re from or what they look like — but there’s an array of stunningly-imagined possibilities. ****’

Kim Stanley Robinson, “The Years of Rice and Salt” (2002) – Kim Stanley Robinson joins the exalted company of Faulkner, Proust, and Garcia-Marquez in the category of writers that I respect but do not particularly like reading. He might be the only scifi writer in that category. He seems like a mensch. His ideas are interesting. It’s good someone is tackling big, hard scifi, be it about Mars colonization, interstellar travel, climate change, or in this instance, what modernity would look like not dominated by Europe. I respect the amount of research and work he puts into things. But his books run long and schematic. In “Years of Rice and Salt,” it was pretty easy to see what each part would be coming in in this history after the Black Death takes out almost all Europeans instead of a third of them. Samarkand alchemists, must be here’s the scientific revolution, here’s the world war equivalent, etc. etc.

Like most alternate histories it’s way too neat and schematic. This is probably an advantage over sloppy and dull (ala Harry Turtledove) but it usually doesn’t grab me. The players in the history are different — Chinese, Indians, Arabs, and Native Americans — which is a fine change, but the roles are mostly recycled. That might be part of Robinson’s whole Buddhist take- the idea is the characters are reincarnations of the characters in the first set, throughout history. None of it is bad and clearly a lot of it is well-meaning, depicting Muslims and assorted other “Others” of modernity as just as capable of enlightenment and modernity as anyone else. But it could have done more to show how modernity would have been different, beyond lines and names on the map and the demographics of who’s involved. Presumably those changes would have changed what modernity itself was all about. I give it credit for what I’m probably missing, because KSR seems like a good dude, and it’s good to have alternate history not about how cool the Nazis and/or Confederates were. ***