Don't Bite the Sun by Tanith Lee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Dystopic Eutopia; or Having Everything (Except a Meaningful Life) Is Droad In some future on some planet in a dome-enclosed city called Four BEE, the anonymous 25-year-old first-person narrator (who’s usually but not always female) introduces us to the hedonistic, empty lives of her culture’s Jang (youth). Thanks to their post-scarcity civilization’s advanced technology, including robot servitors and QR (Quasi-Robot, or android) caretakers, the narrator and her fellow Jang are immortal and work-free, but without anything meaningful or real to do they spend their time going to the Dimension Palace (to experience umpteen dimensions) or to the Dream Rooms (to design and experience dream sagas) or shopping (and in the narrator’s case shoplifting) or taking drugs like “ecstasy” or eating by “meal injection” or having sex (“having love”) with each other physically or telepathically (though usually they get briefly “married” first). Attended by their personal “bees,” little floating machines who keep an eye on them, they get about via things like the movi-rail or the Body Displacer (which disorients them and may result in a lost mole) or personal bird-planes (which they often intentionally crash). When overly bored, they indulge in sabotage or suicide (the novel begins, “My friend Hergal had killed himself again”). If they manage to kill themselves, they wake up in Limbo in a new body. In fact, they can change gender and physical appearance as often as they wish (including getting bodies with wings or two heads etc.), though the QRs may make them wait for sixty “units” (days) if they’ve donned too many new bodies too soon. The Jang speak their own language—the novel has been translated into our English—with some words remaining untranslated like drumdik (ghastly), farathoom (bloody fucking hell), droad (bored), and derisann (beautiful). Diligent readers will find themselves either learning the slang or consulting the glossary. The Jang may have “makers” (parents) from among the Older People, the narrator’s being “kinky,” not because they’re currently both male but because they decided to stay together with her, though they don’t seem to spend much time advising or educating her and don’t recognize her when she shows up at home in a new body. The novel concerns the narrator’s quest to find a way to live a fulfilling life amid all that “eutopic” ultra-hedonism. This involves her trying to mature out of the Jang category (the QR counselor advises her to wait at least another quarter “rorl” or century), to find meaningful work (the few jobs consist of pressing buttons or turning dials at the direction of computers), to make a baby (the act requiring a male partner she can’t presently drum up), to have an archeological desert adventure (the glar, or professor, in charge just wants to lecture to his volunteers). And so on. She’s unhappy, ending the first part of the novel crying all night after exiling herself from her own social circle. Luckily, she has a dry, self-deprecating sense of humor, so it’s fun to read her escapades accompanied by her furry white pet, a bit like a dog, a bit like a cat, a bit like a naughty child, given to biting on a whim. As the narrator takes it all for granted, Lee gives no detailed “scientific” explanations for the super technology of her brave new world. She does write some passages of austere, sublime sf beauty, like this: “Night bloomed over Four BEE, and I went out walking along ancient, non-moving paths, the pet dogging my heels, playing with its shadow and mine, blackly cast from us by the big stars and the jeweled signs sizzling between the buildings.” It’s a funny book, as in the following passage: “Anyway, I told him I'm here now so you might as well go on with testing me. I suppose I'll have to pay whatever happens. He looked slightly embarrassed, but rode it well. Of course he could, he said, if it would set my mind at rest. (Bland Diplomacy in Dealing with Jang Female Barbarian.)” It’s a compact novel and for 1976 a bit risqué in terms of gender, sex, and drugs. Lee is exaggerating the late hippy-era culture of the 1970s, free to do anything but unable to find anything meaningful to do. The frequent gender changes and hedonistic future civ recall Samuel R. Delany’s Triton, also published in 1976. Speaking of gender, a dated aspect of Lee’s novel is that they can only make a viable human baby with a soul from half of a female maker and from half of a male one, which seems odd given all the gender switching going on in their future. And you can only make a baby by combining the “life-spark” from two different genders AND from two different people: you can’t give half of your self as a female and then later change into a male body to give the other half. After all, it’s a binary gender world. Although anyone can change gender back and forth any number of times, everyone is always either male or female, with one or the other gender being “predominant,” such that the narrator usually chooses female bodies, her friend Hergal male ones, and so on, but nobody chooses gender neutral or gender ambiguous or hermaphrodite bodies. It ends up feeling confining rather than liberating (which may be the point). Finally, Lee’s future world is a dystopia because the “good” elements are oriented around appearance rather than fulfillment, so that even though the benevolent QRs want the best for their human charges, they haven’t devised a way to make them happy by providing them meaningful things to do or vital ways to grow. The novel is a plea for authentic, living life, as opposed to our virtual realities of media and art, as when the narrator, in the desert outside her dome city for the first time, says, “It’s all beautiful and real, and throbbing and singing and alive!” I’d like to see what Lee does with all this in the sequel, Drinking Dandelion Wine (1977). View all my reviews
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