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jeriendhalSummary: In this James Triptree Reader's Choice award winning novel, Thenet, an Eperu (neuter) of the tri-sexed Jokka, finds himself cast out the House where he has lived and served most of his life, and finds himself entering a desperate partnership with Dlane, an Anadi (female) on the run from her fate as a mother, an act that inevitably ends with Minddeath, as an Anadi's overstrained body destroys their intelligence.
Together they manage to find stability, and a measure of happiness, even as Thenet struggles to redefine himself after losing everything, and Dlane leads him on a quest to find the legendary Birthwell, where their race originated.
Review: No, seriously, I have fanfic ideas that involve her being dissuaded from carpet bombing the Jokka homeworld with uterine replicators. Because they desperately need them.
Micah Horgarth's (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
haikujaguar) Jokka stories fold out naturally from their race's biology, and that biology doesn't make for happy endings, especially if females are involved at all. The Jokka are presented as a dying race, a once great empire with cities reduced to disconnected towns. Females and Males are subject to the same biological vulnerability towards Minddeath, but with the painful difference that males can stop and rest when they risk being overstrained. Females have no such option in the midst of childbirth (even if a Cesarean procedure was possible with their race, Bronze Age medicine makes it an iffy proposition at best). And choosing not to breed isn't really an option in the culture. To allow females to opt out would likely inevitability end in the Jokka race dying out completely, and as a result they are usually treated as gently kept commodities rather than people.
About the only thing that gives the whole situation a measure of equality is a sort of double adolescence that Jokka go through, allowing the possibility of changing into one of the other two sexes twice in each lifetime. So females might gain the relief of becoming neuter or male, and males and neuters have the fear of Turning female. [1]
Into that comes Thenet and Dlane, both already Turned twice, staying neuter and female each time, and so locked into their biological roles. Dlane is definitely the prime mover at the beginning of the tale, dragging Thenet along with her and out of his/its despair. But the tale is from Thenet's POV and so when they finally reach safety and being to create a House of their own, where females might dwell without the fear of being bred and losing their souls to senility, he takes the center stage finally. Which is actually a bit of a relief because frankly Thenet does tend to wallow a bit overmuch in his angst, as Dlane shoves hard against his carefully maintained assumptions of how life is supposed to go.
SPOILER WARNING: Okay, if you really don't want to have the ending spoiled, stop reading here. Seriously. Because it's hard to sum up the book without mentioning that part. Suffice it to say I do consider it a worthwhile read, but see the caveat about this world at the start of the review.
END SPOILER WARNING
Of course the problem with Thenet's assumptions is that their mostly right. Dlane is a rebel against the System. Unfortunately the System in this case is mostly their race's biology. There is a guy trying to restart the Empire on the backs (or in the wombs rather) of the Anadi, and he's most defnitely ambitious and amoral, but the problem is that he's also mostly right in noting that allowing the continued backward slide of the Jokka to continue will result their race's death.
This results in Thenet and Dlane's small House of safety being destroyed, Dlane losing her mind as she's forced to bred, and Thenet's "victory" consisting of kidnapping his opponents children after slitting the throats of Dlane and rest of females of his adoptive family, and dooming the head female of the antagonist's her own Minddeath.
It's not a happy ending. This is not a happy book. But it's a damned compelling one, thanks to Hogarth's careful worldbuilding and well formed prose.
[1] In a later story Hogarth does explore what happens when a female that has already undergone Minddeath turns neuter, but I haven't rad that one yet.
Together they manage to find stability, and a measure of happiness, even as Thenet struggles to redefine himself after losing everything, and Dlane leads him on a quest to find the legendary Birthwell, where their race originated.
Review: No, seriously, I have fanfic ideas that involve her being dissuaded from carpet bombing the Jokka homeworld with uterine replicators. Because they desperately need them.
Micah Horgarth's (
haikujaguar) Jokka stories fold out naturally from their race's biology, and that biology doesn't make for happy endings, especially if females are involved at all. The Jokka are presented as a dying race, a once great empire with cities reduced to disconnected towns. Females and Males are subject to the same biological vulnerability towards Minddeath, but with the painful difference that males can stop and rest when they risk being overstrained. Females have no such option in the midst of childbirth (even if a Cesarean procedure was possible with their race, Bronze Age medicine makes it an iffy proposition at best). And choosing not to breed isn't really an option in the culture. To allow females to opt out would likely inevitability end in the Jokka race dying out completely, and as a result they are usually treated as gently kept commodities rather than people. About the only thing that gives the whole situation a measure of equality is a sort of double adolescence that Jokka go through, allowing the possibility of changing into one of the other two sexes twice in each lifetime. So females might gain the relief of becoming neuter or male, and males and neuters have the fear of Turning female. [1]
Into that comes Thenet and Dlane, both already Turned twice, staying neuter and female each time, and so locked into their biological roles. Dlane is definitely the prime mover at the beginning of the tale, dragging Thenet along with her and out of his/its despair. But the tale is from Thenet's POV and so when they finally reach safety and being to create a House of their own, where females might dwell without the fear of being bred and losing their souls to senility, he takes the center stage finally. Which is actually a bit of a relief because frankly Thenet does tend to wallow a bit overmuch in his angst, as Dlane shoves hard against his carefully maintained assumptions of how life is supposed to go.
SPOILER WARNING: Okay, if you really don't want to have the ending spoiled, stop reading here. Seriously. Because it's hard to sum up the book without mentioning that part. Suffice it to say I do consider it a worthwhile read, but see the caveat about this world at the start of the review.
END SPOILER WARNING
Of course the problem with Thenet's assumptions is that their mostly right. Dlane is a rebel against the System. Unfortunately the System in this case is mostly their race's biology. There is a guy trying to restart the Empire on the backs (or in the wombs rather) of the Anadi, and he's most defnitely ambitious and amoral, but the problem is that he's also mostly right in noting that allowing the continued backward slide of the Jokka to continue will result their race's death.
This results in Thenet and Dlane's small House of safety being destroyed, Dlane losing her mind as she's forced to bred, and Thenet's "victory" consisting of kidnapping his opponents children after slitting the throats of Dlane and rest of females of his adoptive family, and dooming the head female of the antagonist's her own Minddeath.
It's not a happy ending. This is not a happy book. But it's a damned compelling one, thanks to Hogarth's careful worldbuilding and well formed prose.
[1] In a later story Hogarth does explore what happens when a female that has already undergone Minddeath turns neuter, but I haven't rad that one yet.
