What I'm Reading Now

Suzette Haden Elgin, Native Tongue

This is a science fiction novel from the 80s. The science is mainly linguistics. The conceit is that in the 1990s, the United States disenfranchises women, and strips them of most of their legal rights. The novel is set a few centuries after that event. 

In the world circa 2200, women have the legal status of children -- they cannot vote; they can work only with the written permission of their husband or other male guardian; the jobs they are allowed to do are limited; they cannot control any money they earn; they cannot own property; they can be locked in insane asylums if two male relatives/guardians say they should be.

A small number of "Lines," or extended families, specialize in linguistics and in translation, particularly translations of alien languages. (In Elgin's future, Earth has many, many off-world colonies, and has encountered dozens of alien species.) Children of the Lines learn alien languages from infancy, by being with representatives of specific alien lifeforms for several hours each day; they also learn two or three human languages each from infancy on, by being exposed to people speaking those languages; and they add several more languages as they grow to adolescence. They begin work at about ten, translating alien languages in negotiations, and translating Earth languages for the aliens. Both male and female children do this work, though it's a given among the men of the Lines that women don't actually understand the things they're translating. They're like a translation machine, or a wire that transmits signals.

Women have their own culture, as we learn, which the men know nothing about. They pass on knowledge of women's history, and -- in this first book -- are sculpting a woman's language which, they believe, will change reality.

The first novel in the trilogy is one of the best books I've read in months, though it is a bit dogged and didactic at times. The linguistic stuff is the best part. Elgin was a linguist, so I suppose that makes sense. 

The second book in the trilogy, The Judas Rose, is readable but less interesting that the first. I could not finish the last novel in the trilogy at all -- Earthsong takes as its conceit that the big problem with humans is their deep-seated need for violence, which I can agree with, but then posits that the way to fix this is to end hunger by means of Gregorian chants (or any music, really) which humans use the way plants use sunlight. It was one impossible thing too many for me, though the writing remains good.

Rachel Parris, Introducing Mrs. Collins

I really wanted to like this one more than I did, and the first half of it is pretty good. It's Pride and Prejudice from the point of view Charlotte Lucas, later Charlotte Collins. That's a great premise, and at first the novel goes well. I'm thinking, this is a novel about someone who marries without romance and makes a good life by doing so. That's an interesting topic. And in the first half, Parris seems to be retelling Mr. Collins pretty successfully, so that we can see how Charlotte can manage to have a good life with him.

But then Parris decides this has to be a romance with a capital R, and Charlotte falls in love with Colonel Fitzwilliam, blah blah blah. Kills Mr Collins off, now Charlotte is free to marry again. The last half of the book was a real disappointment. Sigh.

Edward Ashton, After the Fall

Edward Ashton wrote the Mickey 7 books, which were a lot of fun and compelling at times, so when I saw this in the new book section, I picked it up. It's a B+ science fiction novel. Aliens have invaded because humans are destroying (really, have destroyed) the ecosystem. They wipe out most humans and keep a few as breeding stock, which they have been breeding for neoteny, basically, cuteness, small stature, that sort of thing. (That's a semi-impossible thing, but Ashton does say the aliens are working on the genetic surgery level, not just breeding the way we bred dogs. So I got past it.) These humans are adopted as puppies, um, toddlers and small children, by the aliens and kept as pets. Any that age-out, get too old for adoption, are "put down," casually and butally.

There's a plot of sorts, in which John (one of the pet humans) locates some feral humans -- those who escaped execution when the aliens took the planet. But mainly this book is showing us the world of the aliens and how humans react to it. On the whole, Octavia Butler did it better.

The Selected Letters of Laura Ingall Wilder, Ed. William Anderson

Wilder was one of the formative authors of my childhood, so I enjoyed this. It's what it says on the tin, letters chosen by Anderson from the time of Wilder's young adulthood (when she and Almanzo leave South Dakota) onward. Anderson is not a reliable narrator, so I don't know how much he messed with the letters, nor what he left out. Still, I enjoyed reading this.