Beggars In Spain by Nancy Kress

My Rating: 5.0 / 5.0

Amazon Rating: 3.90 / 5.00

Goodreads Rating: 3.96 / 5.00

As mankind’s understanding of genetics progresses it becomes possible to choose not only the appearance of your child, but also to give it improved abilities. Some parents choose enhanced intelligence or strength, but others opt for the newly developed ability to grant a Sleepless existence. At first it is believed that the extra time available will make the Sleepless more productive, but it soon becomes clear that they are also gifted with higher intelligence and near perfect health. At first, they are welcomed into society, but their ‘unfair advantage’ leads to jealousy and their unusual lifestyle creates tension with even the most tolerant of Sleepers. As they inevitably rise above their Sleeper contemporaries, excelling in all fields of study, innovation and business, the animosity becomes more overt and many of the Sleepless chose to withdraw to the closed community of Sanctuary.

Leisha Camden is one of the very first Sleepless and is in the unique position of having an unplanned Sleeper twin, Alice. As the two children age, it becomes increasingly apparent to Leisha that she and Alice can never truly understand each other. We follow Leisha as she makes her way through life, encountering bigotry, unconditional love, betrayal and conspiracy. Largely because of her attachment to her sister, she always tries to integrate with the Sleeper community and argue against withdrawal from mainstream society. Unfortunately, she is in a tiny minority and the divisions between Sleepless and Sleeper threaten to tear the US apart.

I have to thank Kristin’s Women In SF&F Month at Fantasy Cafe for this recommendation. The event has provoked me into reading more female authors and I am so very pleased that I chose this title as one to attempt this year. For a list of the authors recommended in the event for the last two years, you can check out my Page. I chose to read this title as part of Worlds Without End’s 2014 Masterworks Reading Challenge, which helped me to select which lady authors to try.

This title won a number of awards when it was first published, including the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novella, so I was expecting quite a lot going in. I was not disappointed. In fact, I would go as far as to say that I devoured this book and was constantly delighted by the ‘hard’ Science Fiction on display.

The premise sounds very intriguing: an exploration of the strains placed upon American society by the development by a group that is unquestionably not “created equal”. I mention the Declaration of Independence here, because it is a cornerstone for much of the political and sociological debate in the book. The concepts of freedom, responsibility, equality and community are explored in depth throughout the story and the characters repeatedly refer to the Declaration of Independence as well as the writings and speeches of Abraham Lincoln. I found this far more interesting than I would have imagined, because it sounds like it would be rather dry and dull. However, the author keeps such discourse to a minimum and presents the arguments in such a way that they hold the attention and provoke contemplation of the issues involved rather than causing the eyes to glaze over and the mind to skip over these sections. I feel educated by this book, and that is not something that I can say very frequently.

The choice of the near future as the setting was a wise one, as it allows the author to use our contemporary world for much of the detail whilst adding some interesting futuristic developments. One that I would very much like to see in real life is the revolutionary cold fusion technology that has made energy both cheap and clean. The choice of the inventor to patent and license his technology within the US places the country at a massive commercial advantage, although the effects of his generosity are somewhat unexpected. His philosophy of the relationship between the individual and their community, called Yagaiism, is popular and adopted by many of the Sleepless because of its logical basis and apparent fairness. However, it does not answer the question of what to do about the Beggars in Spain of the title. If one sees one beggar it is easy to give that individual a small quantity of money. However, what happens when there are a hundred beggars, or a thousand?

The essential fairness and morality of societies and communities are explored as the need to be productive becomes decreasingly important or even desirable in a world where technology allows almost all manual labor to be mechanized. By the time that Leisha reaches the age of about sixty, American society is mostly made up of Livers, who do absolutely nothing but party and have a fun time. They are entertained, fed and cared for by the Donkeys, who run the government and business. Livers can no longer read and are only interested in politics because politicians compete to buy their votes. In this society, the Yagaiist ideal of the individual being a productive member of their community has been truly destroyed. I found this an interesting extrapolation of modern society in the US, with its allegedly growing subculture of the permanently unemployed. However, the Livers are not condemned as a drain on the economy: they are the most important section of society because they hold the majority of the votes.

There are other parallels with the modern US not just the mind-dulling entertainment that is piped into the Liver homes. The Sleepless are a neat analogy for the super rich in today’s America, with their gated communities and total separation from their ‘inferiors’. Their lack of interaction with the Sleeper community fosters a mutual distrust that eventually erupts into violence and open bigotry. This also reminds me rather forcefully of the violence surrounding the Civil Rights Movements of the 50s and 60s. In both cases, the differences between the two groups are impossible to change because they derive from their genetic make. Their inequality is inborn and therefore impossible to reverse. This is not to say that the groups cannot work together to forge a more equitable society, just that they are powerless to change who they are.

Ironically, the Sleepless that withdraw to Sanctuary finally create a race superior to themselves in their intelligence and intellectual capacity. These Supers are also excluded from the Sleepless community in some ways and begin to resent the inequality with which they are treated. And so the cycle of bigotry and alienation continues, although the Supers are far more tolerant than their Sleepless creators and more determined to live in a free and far society where all are accepted as they are.

The personal stories that are woven together this story are almost less important than the overall discussion, and yet the principal characters are interesting and sympathetic. Even those with whom I disagree are not two-dimensional baddies: they have perfectly understandable motivations and objectives, even if they do terrible things to accomplish their goals. There are many touching moments, and a heavy emphasis on familial relationships that humanizes many of the genetically enhanced characters. It could have been very difficult to identify in any way with these vastly superior humans, an yet their underlying vulnerability and desire to fit in and be accepted makes them sympathetic in the most part. This is especially true of the children.

I would heartily recommend this book to anyone who wants to read some quality Science Fiction that explores one of the most relevant questions of our time: what should we do with those who cannot, or will not, be productive members of society?

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The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

My Rating: 5.0 / 5.0

Amazon Rating: 4.10 / 5.00

Goodreads Rating: 3.97 / 5.00

In a frighteningly possible future, the United States government has all been assassinated and the constitution over turned. In its place there has arisen the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian Theocracy that ruthlessly imposes Old Testament ideals upon its entire population. The world is suffering from a sharp decrease in fertility and an equally worrying increase in non-viable babies being born. In response to this, a woman’s place in Gilead’s society is dictated by her ability to reproduce or fulfill another useful role in the production of viable offspring. All women are categorized and forced to wear clothing of a certain color to advertise their role in life. They must not stray from their roles, they must not question those in authority, they are forbidden to read and are encouraged to think as little as possible: they must simply accept the role that God has prescribed for them. This is especially true for the Handmaids who have proven to be capable of producing healthy babies.

If a high-ranking official, like the Commander, has the misfortune to have an infertile Wife he can be assigned a Handmaid. She is a non-person, a receptacle for carrying his baby and nothing more. She is known only by the word ‘of’ plus his name. She must do nothing other than receive the gift of his seed once a month and then carry his child. If she fails in this task than she will be passed to a different man, but if she has not had a child after the third man she will be discarded and sent to the work camps cleaning up the toxic zones: for the law states that no men are sterile and so the fault must lie with her.

Offred has already failed to become pregnant with two men and we follow her thoughts as she settles into life with The Commander. She remembers her marriage to Luke, who had divorced his first wife to marry her. This made their union illegal under the new regime and allowed the state to annul it and separate them by force. She also remembers her daughter who was stolen away and given to an influential infertile couple. Then there is her mother, the raging feminist, who became an enemy of the state for believing that women had the right to do things other than reproduce. She also remembers her friend Moira, the lesbian, who escapes from their Handmaid training camp in search of the resistance movement and a way to reach the utopia of Canada.

The Handmaid’s Tale is a book that I had been recommended many times and I remember watching the film version many years ago, but I was still surprised by its power. What surprised me the most, unfortunately, was how relevant it is to modern America, with its debates about access to birth control and abortion and the rape culture that commiserates about the sentencing of young men who make a ‘mistake’ while the victims are vilified for all the ways that they were ‘asking for it’. I am afraid that women’s rights are several decades behind those in my home country of Great Britain, which I find both painful and dismaying because in general I like living here in the US and I hate to criticize a whole country based upon some prevailing attitudes.

I have always considered myself a feminist in that I believe that men and women should hold equal value and that a person’s gender should never be the factor that determines their role in life. As a biologist, I am aware that total equality will never be possible because of the very unequal method by which we reproduce, but other than making allowances for this fundamental difference in physiology, I firmly believe that neither sex has an intrinsic superiority to the other. These beliefs made it very difficult for me to read about a society where women are either walking wombs or solely concerned with making babies or looking after men. The later revelations about the men who go against their own rules to visit prostitutes, whilst condemning any form of female sexuality was sadly all too predictable to raise much more than sadness from me.

The fear of the female ability to reproduce lies like a stink over Gilead, and it is a stink that also pervades modern America so I found it all too easy to believe that the great democracy that is constantly touted as the leader of the free world could be replaced by a misogynistic theocracy. It is too easy to see how such a society could arise from the absurd statements that we regularly hear in the media here about a rape victim’s body “shutting that whole thing down”, only “sluts” wanting contraception and masturbating male fetuses (that last from a pediatrician, no less). We are bombarded by so much moral criticism aimed at the female of the species that you would think that men had nothing at all to do with the reproductive process.

I fear that the American attitude to women and childbirth is reflected in the frankly appalling provisions that are made for pregnant women here. Coming from the UK, with its mandatory maternity leave of 39 weeks paid leave for the mother at the moment, plus 4 weeks for the father, and an employer’s obligation to hold a woman’s position during this period, I was shocked to discover the situation here. In the US, a woman is legally mandated to receive 0 days of maternity leave. That is correct – when a woman is pregnant in the US she is expected to treat it as if she has an illness, saving up her allocated sick leave so that she can actually take the time off work while she delivers her baby and recovers from a process that is accurately called ‘labor’. What does this say about the American attitude to women?

As a non-slut who made full use of contraception whilst finishing my university education and beginning my career as a high school teacher, I resent the implication that I, as a woman, am not allowed to enjoy a sex life without the fear of an unwanted pregnancy. I have to add that my partner at the time, the man who is still my husband, was equally unwilling for us to have a child at that time. He was also beginning his career and the financial burden of a child would have been hard for us, especially as it would have made it much more difficult for me to gain my qualifications and get a full time position. I resent the implication that we should simply have abstained when there were so many methods that could be used to allow us to have a non-productive sex life. It is not as if contraception is a modern invention. Papyri from ancient Egypt outline recipes for contraceptive plugs whilst the Greeks used an extract from the plant silphium so much that it was harvested to extinction. And I will not even begin to relate the number of things that have been used to make condoms.

However, women are not the only victims of the Republic of Gilead. The Sons of Jacob are given the opportunity to emigrate to Israel shortly after the democratic government is overthrown, although it seems that some enterprising captains would dump them into the sea after receiving payment and to increase the number of ‘passengers’ that they could carry. We also know that many Jews remain in Gilead but have to worship in secret because the Theocracy is exclusively Christian. The fate of the Children of Ham is far more disturbing. It seems that many of these African-Americans are considered suitable as the infertile Marthas who run the houses of their wealthy, white superiors. However, most are resettled into Homelands, mimicking the Reservations used to isolate and control the Native American population by the European invaders. No doubt these Homelands allow the people to live in the idle luxury that you would expect for those forcibly removed from a society. Again, this mirrors the continuing anti-immigrant rhetoric and racism that still pervades US society.

I imagine that when Ms Atwood wrote this novel in 1985, she saw it as a commentary on the US of the time or the recent past. We know that the feminism of the 1960s provoked a conservative backlash from the Christian right, and I am quite sure that she was inspired by seeing this during her studies at Harvard at this time. I can appreciate how her Canadian upbringing would have made her very aware of the power that religious groups wield in the US, which was a shock to me when I first arrived. I find it frightening to think that many in the States would actually like to make the country into something so scarily similar to Gilead, and it seems like a real possibility to me. Needless to say, I would be packing my car and heading north shortly after such a disaster occurred.

As a footnote, I was surprised and delighted that a revelation is made at the end of the book that shows that the grand state of Maine was a hotbed of moderates and people willing to help women escape to free Canada. As I live just outside Bangor, it was particularly gratifying that the city was marked out as a particular place of tolerance.

This was not a pleasant book to read, but it was powerful in a visceral, thought-provoking way that makes me understand why so many people rate it as one of their favorite books of all time. I would recommend that every person should read it, man or woman, because it shows us what could happen to the US if the right wing, religious conservatives ever get enough power to impose their beliefs on the rest of us.

I read this title as part of:

When Copper Suns Fall by KaSonndra Leigh

My Rating: 1.0 / 5.0

Amazon Rating: 4.00 / 5.00

Goodreads Rating: 3.68 / 5.00

Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book free from the author via a Goodreads giveaway, in return for a honest review.

Chela Prizeon is fifteen years old, living in one of the cities that are remnants of the US in 2067. She is part Angel, which makes her forbidden, because the Angels of Light and Dark and their agents triggered the war that destroyed most of civilization. Chela has a twin brother who fell from a fairground attraction a year ago. She is convinced that he was pushed but the official conclusion is that he tried to commit suicide. Now he is in a coma and infected with an incurable disease. Chela herself begins to see unusual children around her and suddenly manifests the power of the memories that she has inherited from her almost-angel, dead mother. This may or may not be connected to the curious blackouts that she has suffered since she was a child.

I am afraid that I cannot tell you any more about the plot or setting, because I did not finish the book.

The reason I requested a copy of this novel was quite simple: the premise looked interesting and original. Unfortunately, the book itself is confused, confusing and not particularly well written. 

As well as the part-Angels we also have genetically modified humans with supernatural talents. These are supposedly caused by radiation from the war. The story would have greatly benefited from choosing one of these ideas and discarding the other: personally, I would have ditched the genetic mutants because it is not original. Even without the ‘About the Author’ note that states that she calls her two sons “the X-men”, I would have spotted that blatant steal from Marvel Comics. However, I was intrigued by the idea of exploring a world destroyed by a war between two opposing factions of Angels and their offspring. I genuinely wanted to read that story, but I felt that the author was not confident enough in her writing to follow the old adage: Keep It Simple. She introduced too many concepts too quickly and with too little detail. For example, we are told that Alchemy is banned, but have no description of what it is, although there does seem to be a suggestion that it is the powers that can be used by the part-Angels.  

The plotting is poor and therefore stretches the suspension of disbelief to breaking point. For example, the first six chapters all take part during one day. In that time our heroine has time to visit her sick brother, argue with his doctor, work a shift for her friend, then go to meet that friend, have scary experiences at the fairground where her brother was injured, get stuck in a porta-potty, escape from a porta-potty whilst awakening her powers, use her powers again to make a door slam, get caught by the police, go to a club, witness a weird assault involving some other part-Angels, get her memory wiped, escape as the club is destroyed and then black out. This strikes me as a little too busy for one day and I am not even going to question her desperate rush to discover who pushed her brother one whole year after it happened.

The dialogue is clunky and the descriptions suffer from an overloading of adverbs, similes and metaphors. The writing feels as if the author is trying far too hard to make it dramatic, with the effect that it is cluttered and heavy-handed. Some of the lines had me laughing out loud, and not in a good way.

As for our heroine, Chela is your standard cardboard cutout “Spunky Young Gifted Savior”. She is different. She gets very angry, but controls herself because she must hide how amazingly powerful she is. Her mother is dead, but she has a not very nice stepmother. She is the only one who is right about her brother. Her father is someone important so she feels entitled to special treatment. No one understands her. She has had a life-long interest in fencing, so no doubt she is an Epic Warrior. She does Too Stupid To Live stuff all the time and yet survives. She has a hot male friend to be platonic with. People in positions of authority are never justified in speaking to her as if she is a fifteen-year-old child. I am absolutely sure that she will prove to be The Only One who can save the world. 

In short, there are some good ideas here, but the book needs some serious editing to simplify the plotting and the prose quite dramatically, while Chela needs a lot of work to make her more believable and sympathetic.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

My Rating: 5.0 / 5.0

Amazon Rating: 4.60 / 5.0

Goodreads Rating: 4.54 / 5.0

#1 New York Times Bestseller

#1 USA Today Bestseller

Wall Street Journal Bestseller

Publishers Weekly Bestseller

In the future, North America has been changed by un-named disasters. The nation of Panem arose from the ashes: with the Capitol in the Rocky Mountains and thirteen districts spread over the rest of the continent. However, about seventy-five years ago, the districts rebelled against the Capitol’s oppressive rule. During the Dark Days that followed the thirteenth district was totally destroyed and the other twelve were beaten into submission. In order to demonstrate its total control over the defeated districts, the Capitol announced the first Hunger Games. Each district was required to send one girl and one boy chosen by lottery from all the children between the ages of twelve and eighteen. These twenty-four Tributes were then placed in an Arena to fight one another until only one remained alive whilst the whole event was broadcast live to the nation. Since then the Hunger Games have been repeated every year.

In District twelve, sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen is struggling to provide for her younger sister, Prim, and their mother, who has been unable to function since the death of their father in a mining accident. Only two things have kept them alive: the food that Katniss hunts or collects illegally from the forest outside of the district fence and the extra food she receives by increasing the number of times her name is placed in the annual Reaping for the Hunger Games. When Prim’s name is drawn in the lottery, Katniss volunteers to take her sister’s place, even though she is sure that this will lead to her death. The male Tribute selected is Peeta Mellark, the son of the local baker, who once saved her family from starving by giving her some burnt loaves of bread.

We follow the Tributes to the frivolous luxury of Capitol where they are prepared for their roles in the Games. Once they have been waxed, styled, interviewed and given minimal training, they are sent into the Arena, which this year is a forest, much to Katniss’ delight. Despite the dangers, she survives because of her mental strength and hunting experience. She tries to avoid killing the other Tributes, and even forms an alliance with Rue, the tiny girl from District eleven, but eventually she is forced to confront the other Tributes in order to stay alive. All the while she cannot forget that to become Victor she must kill them all, even Peeta, who has declared his love for her and to whom she already owes her life.

Wow! So many people had told me that this was a great read, but I wasn’t prepared for how seriously good it was.

I know that it is billed as a Young Adult title, but I never once felt that the author pulled her punches because of the intended audience. In this respect it reminds me much more of Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy than J.K. Rowling’s ‘Harry Potter’. This title has real grit: we follow Katniss through blood, sweat and tears to Hell and back again. The first-person perspective and usage of present tense increases the sense of immediacy and tension as we are insulated from any outside knowledge. In fact we are kept ignorant of many details, just as Katniss is. The fact that some of the Tributes make no impression on her, so that she knows them only by their district numbers, whilst others are quickly analyzed makes the stream-of-consciousness so much more realistic than an endless pile of exposition. I’m not normally a fan of either first-person or present tense, but here they added to my connection to the character, rather than being a barrier.

Katniss herself is a wonderful, sympathetic character, but the secondary characters are fleshed out beautifully as well. They fell real, which makes it even more difficult to read some of the sections in the Arena. Indeed, the underlying cruelty and sadism in Panem can make for harsh reading. This is a society where the majority of people are barely able to survive starvation, whilst the privileged few in the Capitol enjoy a luxurious, hedonistic lifestyle.

“I open the parachute and find a small loaf of bread. It’s not the fine white Capitol stuff. It’s made of dark ration grain and shaped in a crescent. Sprinkled with seeds. I flash-back to Peeta’s lesson on the various district breads in the Training Center. This bread came from District 11. I cautiously lift the still warm loaf. What must it have cost the people of District 11 who can’t even feed themselves? How many would’ve had to do without to scrape up a coin to put in the collection for this one loaf?”

Collins makes many references to Ancient Roman culture. The nation’s name is taken from a phrase used by the satirist Juvenal: ‘panem et circenses’. This is often translated as ‘bread and circuses / games’ and bread certainly plays a pivotal role in the life of most of the people in Panem as they desperately seek to feed themselves. The circuses / games were the amusements that the privileged classes would stage to entertain the masses. These often occurred in an arena and could be as simple as a pair of gladiators fighting one another or as ornate as the recreation of an event from history, complete with set and costumes. Bread was usually thrown to the crowd as part of the proceedings. The arena also served to demonstrate the power of the nation to the masses, though the Romans saw this more as a celebration of their military prowess against the barbarians, rather than being used as a way to subjugate its own citizens. 

Seeing the events in this context, I have to disagree with Sarah at Bookworm Blues when she finds the whole idea of the Reaping to be unbelievable. Children have been given away out of necessity throughout human history, and still are in some parts of the world. We are told that in District eleven, where they harvest food, that to steal any piece of food is punishable by public execution. In a world with that kind of brutal dictatorship in place, I don’t find it so unbelievable that the misery of two families would be outweighed by the general population’s fear of reprisals for disobedience. This also meshes with the presence of the Career Tributes ‘allowed’ from some of the wealthier districts – where the Capitol has no doubt encouraged the idea that being a Tribute is a huge status symbol for the child’s family.

One thing that Collins does very well is to show the societal effects of the Games. As AnimeJune says at Gossamer Obsessions, we are constantly reminded that many of the most brutal and demeaning aspects of them are televised live, so that Katniss is always aware of how she must appear to the audience in order to win them over to her side. We see that if the Tributes are not being entertaining enough the Gamemakers will manufacture a natural disaster or provoke confrontations by offering a boon. Also, we get to hear how even Katniss’ prep team fail to see the Tributes as real people, instead viewing them as actors in an entertainment. I found this to be one of the most chilling aspects of the book and an intriguing statement about the celebrity culture surrounding reality shows. We see this most clearly in the 'romance' between Katniss and Peeta, which is used to manipulate the audience quite shamelessly.

This emotionally-engaging and action-packed book is highly recommended to all adults: young or otherwise.