The Braided World

Just finished writing an Amazon review of a good book (The Braided World) I read a couple months ago. Had to rant about two annoying characters though.

I picked up Kenyon's latest, "The Bright of the Sky" from the new sci-fi shelf in the local public library and loved it so I went looking for more of her work.

The book takes place in the aftermath of a cosmic disaster which somehow "stole" information from Earth, including information in the form of genetic diversity. As a result, the human race is slowly dying off due to a lack of resistance against various infectious diseases. A mysterious message is received, giving directions to a planet in another star system. A small expedition funded by a wealthy retired singer, Bailey (forgot her surname) goes off to check it out.

They find a very Earthlike world, inhabited by humans with one startling difference: they, and other mammals, are not viviparous. They don't get pregnant. Males and females both eject their gametes into "birthing pools" and the babies grow inside symbiotic waterplants. Eventually we learn that this planet was created as a giant seed bank by some other extraterrestrial Good Samaritan to preserve Earth biology till after the passing of the "dark force" and the strange reproductive system was set up to speed up the restocking.

Sex, being totally dissociated from reproduction, takes place casually and publicly between friends (however, penetration is considered disgusting), which startles the visitors from Earth at first. The rest of the book is an exploration of how human culture might develop with such drastically different reproductive biology, while the original mission to recover Earth's lost genetic diversity becomes almost peripheral.

Despite the beauty of this planet - "The Braided World" refers to both the riverine kingdom of the Dassa and the interdependency of humans and the birth plants - it's no utopia. The Dassa and their neighbours are just as flawed, brutal, and prejudiced as Earth humans. Occasionally girls with fully functional reproductive systems are born as throwback mutants, called "hoda". Upon their discovery at menarche, their tongues are cut out and they become mute (or so we think at first) slaves for the rest of their lives. Hoda's lib becomes a passionate subplot and a personal mission for Bailey.

Readers who enjoy SF with good world-building will like this book. Although Kenyon's skills aren't as mature as in "The Bright of the Sky", the braided world is a fully fleshed-out planet. You know it's good when you wish it was a real place you could visit. Like Octavia Butler's works, this is a more bio-driven SF rather than the majority physics-driven type of story. Kenyon doesn't get in over her head with the science or let it drown out actual plot. My only quibble is that the plant-dependent reproduction is at different points in the book said to be faster than normal pregnancy OR much less efficient.

The only two major characters I found unconvincing and annoying enough to somewhat mar the book were the anthropologist Nick Venning and the biologist Cai Zhen, who are both horribly stereotypical. Venning goes from being a wide-eyed kid who wants to go everywhere and do everything against the commander's advice (think Daniel Jackson in Stargate: SG-1) to being a raving murderous bigot after incautiously taking several doses of a psychotropic drug.

Zhen was annoying on two levels: one, that she's simply a mean person and every sentence that comes out of her mouth is a snipe. This could have been justified if her dialogue was humorously sarcastic instead of just plain vicious, or if she contributed something to the plot. I kept expecting some sort of shocking revelation, like her being impregnated by one of the Dassa, but no such luck. I felt like I had been led on since the other characters make a big deal of protecting her, as the only fertile Earth "hoda" - Bailey is postmenopausal. Even her extremely minor role in the story, sequencing the DNA of native organisms, could have been filled by a friendly robot (and I mean this literally; back here in the 21st century there already are robots that do that sort of thing). The other thing is that Kenyon seems to have subconsciously written in the stereotype of the ice-cold Chinese dragon lady. I'm not accusing Kenyon of racism (the diversity of cultures and persons in her novels is beautiful and honest), but of a worse crime for a novelist: writing a BORING CHARACTER.

Before anyone comments, I'm highly aware of the irony of a Chinese female biologist complaining about a book character who's a Chinese female biologist who complains too much... I'll stop now. Read it, it's a good book.