NOT using the
panel discussions of the most recent World Science Fiction Convention in
Helsinki, Finland in August 2017 (to which I be unable to go (until I retire
from education)), I would jump off, jump on, rail against, and shamelessly
agree with the BRIEF DESCRIPTION given in the pdf copy of the Program Guide.
But not today. This explanation is reserved for when I dash “off topic”,
sometimes reviewing movies, sometimes reviewing books, and other times taking
up the spirit of a blog an old friend of mine used to keep called THE RANTING
ROOM…
Carolyn Cherry had the first novel she’d written published (after the
SECOND novel she’d written) twelve years after the American Civil Rights Act of
1964. The novel was aptly titled BROTHERS OF EARTH.
One reviewer wrote, “If anyone knows what C.J. Cherryh was thinking
about when she wrote this, I'd love to know. It might have been something else
entirely. Or maybe she made it up out of whole cloth.” (http://smuhlberger.blogspot.com/2006/07/cj-cherryhs-brothers-of-earth.htm)
The reviewer takes it to be reminiscent of the interaction of three ancient
Earth societies.
Reviewers on goodreads (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57091.Brothers_of_Earth)
take an even dimmer view of her book: “Not great, but certainly good. The seeds
of her wonderful alien/human/various species thing is there…”; “I didn't find
any of the characters believable in their motivations and there was no real
characterisation/emotional realism, as well as the slow pacing.”; “Kurt rather
thick-headedly brings disaster down on everyone around him by his ignorance of
the ethnic tensions of the city, so that the suspense is about just how bad it
will be and how much will be salvaged.”; “But it piles improbability on
improbability until the storm in a tea cup becomes a full-fledged civil war,
amongst people with very long and difficult to pronounce names.”; “the plot is
pretty boilerplate sci-fi: lonely human finds himself marooned on an alien…world.
Gets involved in local culture and politics and so on. Conflict, both bloody
and cultural ensue.”; “a pulpy, adventure-centric novel like this.”; “fairly
simple plot and characters, reminiscent to some extent of Andre Norton.”; “this
book is over 30 years old and reads like it.”
I didn’t read any more reviews because they seem to flop in the same
vein…
A quick bit of background: I am a school counselor and was a science
teacher for thirty years before that. The school I work in is nearly 70% non-white,
borders a major metropolitan urban area (which also happens to be the “bad part
of town”), and about 85% of our students come from families that qualify for
free/reduced lunch federal programs. As a big, old, fat, white guy, I have
grown to be very aware of cultural, ethnic, and race issues. Equity is a major
issue in our district, situated as it is adjacent to a large northern city. I
refused to vote in the past election (national, state, and local) because I saw
little difference in the candidates being offered up for our election.
Maybe that’s why I saw the images I did when I read CJ Cherryh’s first
published science fiction novel. Twelve years (or less) after blacks were
legally protected from racism by the federal government, they had continued to live
as slaves to an economy and government controlled by the people who had either
owned them or condoned the owning of them by inaction.
The images I saw in BROTHERS OF EARTH were of a society on an alien
world that was little different from the one she was living in in 1976. Of
course she tweaked reality – the Indras had invaded Sufika land rather than
taking the Sufika from their land and bringing them to Indras lands.
But the effect was the same, and there are scenes and dialogue that were
very little changed in the US at that time. Take for example this scene from
Chapter 10 might have been a conversation written on Twitter last summer:
“You have taken us from our land, our gods, our language, our customs.
You accept us as brothers only when we look like you and talk like you, and you
despise us for savages when we are different…Here I am, born a prince of
Osanef, and I cut my hair and wear Indras robes and speak with the clear round
tones of Indresul, like a good civilized man, and I am accepted. Shan…does what
many of us would do if we did not find life so comfortable on your terms.”
“…the long-haired braid in the back, that is an ancient custom, the
warrior’s braid. No one has done it since the Conquest. It was forbidden the
Sufaki then. But in recent years the rebel spirits have revived the custom, and
the Robes of Color, which distinguish houses.”
While I haven’t finished the book, it’s clear where the lines of the
two cultures will intersect: civil war.
The main character’s job as I see it, is as an observer; a named
version of the unnamed viewpoint character in Ralph Ellison’s INVISIBLE MAN. He’s
not part of either society, yet has gotten himself entangled in what I think of
as the dominant “white” culture of this world. He has been victimized by the
subjugated “black” culture of the same world. The scope of course is in a city,
a microcosm of the society as a whole, and while the Indras are themselves a
despised offshoot of yet another superpower (American roots are…hmmm. And those
same people still can’t figure out whether to love or hate us (http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20857972)),
they are fighting a cultural battle that is fascinatingly predictive of Ferguson,
MO in 2014 and reflective of the Watts Neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1965.
I’m continuing to read and may update this essay later, but the
intersection in BROTHERS OF EARTH seems clear from this point. Far from being a
trivial story by a soon-to-be-famous speculative fiction writer, this books
seems to have laid out a scenario that is playing out in the second decade of
the 21st Century.
Oh, last point, I find that the title itself makes me think that Cherryh’s
intent was as much to spark conversation as to entertain. It seems to speak to
race relations in the US at the time better than it speaks to relationships
between two alien peoples. As far as I can tell, the people reading the book (then
and now) entirely misread it (out of ignorance or because they
found the message too pointed)……or I’m reading way too much into it.
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