Robert Sawyer establishes the setup then runs with it.
On our Earth, Ponter Bonditt learns much about how the world turns out with homo sapiens in charge. He's fairly well horrified and fascinated at the same time. Gone are the mammoths and passenger pigeons so common in his world. Present are a multitude of air pollutants that offend his highly acute olfactory sense. Overpopulation seems staggering to Ponter, who wonders how we feed ourselves. Crime runs unchecked in our world, while for Ponter, the concept of war is utterly alien. To him, homo sapiens is an insane race, and it's a wonder how we survived in this world while his people died out.
The people of our world are similarly fascinated by Ponter. Neanderthals, having been more peaceful, interbred more readily in their past and therefore exhibit more homogenous traits than the modern humans of our world. Neanderthal men and women generally live apart—meeting mostly to mate. Bisexuality is a common practice. But most surprising of all is a total absence of supernatural beliefs. Neanderthals, in Sawyer's creation, not only do not believe in an afterlife, but also have no concept of a supreme being. This would appear to contradict current popular beliefs about primitive religion among Neanderthals, which are based upon archaeological discoveries of Neanderthal remains interred with remnants of garlands and bones arranged in patterns, but Sawyer points out more recent research which disputes many of these suppositions. Likewise, Sawyer points out that there is a distinct lack of solid evidence suggesting that Neanderthals displayed warlike behavior.
The part of the story that takes place on our world focuses mainly on the differences between our world and society and those of the Neanderthals. The part set on Adikor's side of the dimensional wall is more plot-driven as Adikor strives to prove his innocence. If he fails, he and all of his male relatives who share more than half his genetic makeup will be subjected to forced sterilization. In Adikor's half of the story, we see that the Neanderthal world is hardly an Eden. In addition to having a legal system that puts the onus of proof upon the accused, this society has very little in the way of personal privacy. All citizens wear biotech implants that constantly monitor their locations and activities, storing the data in a main computer. This practice is universally accepted in the Neanderthal world. Given this constant monitoring, it seems that crime should be nonexistent. The system isn't perfect, however (as we learn), and it still raises the issue of whether sacrificing privacy for safety is right—a very timely question in this post 9/11 world.
Adding weight to the privacy issue in Hominids is an event that occurs early in the novel. Mary Vaughan, before being called to examine Ponter's genetic makeup, is suddenly and brutally raped by an unknown assailant near her lab. Rape does not occur in Ponter's society. How could it? People are constantly on record, and violent tendencies are bred out existence by sterilizing the few violent criminals that appear. It's a system that could only exist in a speculative world.
Much of the science in science fiction is of dubious quality—faster-than-light drives, universal translators and so on—but it carries along the story's plot and ideas. Sawyer's science sometimes seems to work this way. Whether or not the quantum science in Hominids is real is almost beside the point. It's merely the vehicle that transports Ponter into our world. The technology behind the biotech implant may be generations ahead of our own technology, but it's the conduit for exploring issues of privacy and public safety. Sawyer makes careful use of archaeology and sociology, however, to create a reasonably postulated world of modern Neanderthals not only to show us a world that might have been, but also to allow us to examine ourselves through the eyes of an alien culture.
On the other hand, excessive scientific exposition can turn readers off. Sawyer avoids this problem by relating technical information in an easy-to-swallow manner and weaving it seamlessly into the storyline. Although there's much discussion of studies of early man and quantum mechanics, the reader is never in danger of choking on force-fed information. Better yet, the reader often learns something new, because Sawyer carefully prepares his subject matter using current research and goes to great lengths to make the science used in Hominids accessible to the reader. I don't know quantum mechanics from butterfly wings, but I was still able to follow the arguments in the novel and found them quite reasonable for the telling of the story. (Sawyer even includes an introduction in which he explains the issues concerning the Neanderthal and Neandertal spellings and pronunciations.)
Hominids includes much that will be familiar to readers of some of Sawyer's past novels (Flashforward, Factoring Humanity, and especially Calculating God): a multi-cultural cast of characters, environmental issues, religion vs. science, and so on. These Sawyeresque themes function well as springboards for the compare-and-contrast scenes between our world and the Neanderthals'. At times it seems like the Neanderthals represent an ideal, especially when heard from Ponter Bonditt's perspective. At others, we see that there is no real paradise as we follow Adikor's story. In the end Sawyer presents a balanced view, enjoying the opportunity to raise issues for the reader and not trying to force any one single answer.
Sawyer's balanced approach is especially important because, like Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio, Hominids addresses the highly controversial debate between evolution and creationism. Sawyer doesn't condemn one in favor of the other—at least not entirely. Fully aware of all the facets of the debate, Sawyer challenges the reader to think rather than accepting dogma and doctrine blindly. Readers may recall similar themes from Calculating God, which won both praise and harsh criticism from both sides for its handling of religion and science.
There are moments where the plot seems to take a break so Sawyer's characters can discuss the various issues the novel brings up, but they pass before they can become too didactic. Every now and then Sawyer also remembers to insert a little bit of humor to keep the novel from becoming too heavy. Many chapters begin with snippets of world news coverage over Ponter's appearance, including a manufactured Top Ten list à la David Letterman.
Not all of the popular-culture references made in the novel work out as well as one might wish, but they're minor and don't trip the reader too much. The only real negative criticism about this book concerns the flatness of some of the secondary characters. The story focuses primarily on Ponter Bonditt and Adikor Huld, who are the most developed characters in the story, but I feel the novel's third major character, Mary Vaughan, could have used some more fleshing out.
Overall, Hominids is a technically smooth novel with a pleasing style and sense of balance that is also interesting and timely in its theme and content. The parallel-running plot is straightforward and sound, with enough surprise to be interesting but enough integrity to avoid any sort of deus ex machina.
Sawyer's latest novel stands well on its own while also providing the setup for the next two novels to come. As the first of three books, collectively called The Neanderthal Parallax, Hominids will be followed by Humans, which takes up the story a few days after the end of Hominids. The third book, Hybrids, by its title alone, suggests that Sawyer has some intriguing twists planned. (I recently met with Robert Sawyer at Readercon and mentioned this. He swears we're in for a surprise and nothing is as obvious as it looks.)
Given his track record, it will be an interesting and thoughtful read.
...a Neanderthaler is a model of evolutionary refinement. Put him in a Brooks Brothers suit and send him down to the supermarket for some groceries and he might pass completely unnoticed. He might run a little shorter than the clerk serving him but he would not necessarily be the shortest man in the place. He might be heavier-featured, squattier and more muscular than most, but again he might be no more so than the porter handling the beer cases back in the stock room.—Evolution, Time-Life Nature Library.
* * * *
John Teehan lives and writes in Providence, Rhode Island. He has recently sold stories which will appear in Men Writing SF as Women (Daw, 2003) and Low Port (Meisha Merlin, 2003). “The Literary Roots of Fantasy�
� appears in The Complete Guide to Writing Fantasy (Twilight Times, 2002). He also publishes the fanzine Sleight of Hand. His previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive. For more about him, visit his Web site.
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Joining Forces: Steven Barnes's Lion's Blood and Heather Alexander's Insh'Allah
Reviewed by J. G. Stinson
7/29/02
A Parallax View: Lion's Blood
Those who read and comment on science fiction have disagreed on whether alternate history is its own genre or a subgenre of SF. Some argue that without a science-fictional element such as time travel, an alternate history is a fantasy. But others claim it as SF because it asks and answers what could be called SF's prime question: What if? What would happen if these historical elements were changed? How different would it be from “actual” history, and what could it tell us about ourselves today?
For definitional purposes, I take the latter stance. To paraphrase an oft-quoted maxim, SF is whatever I point my finger at. I can't define it, but I know it when I see it.
Steven Barnes’ Lion's Blood is alternate history, and a novel that uses a major perspective shift to illuminate a prime failing of humanity, which is its tendency to make other humans into slaves. But Barnes doesn't go directly for the U.S. Civil War period, as did Harry Turtledove (in Guns of the South). Instead, he goes all the way back to the days of Socrates, tweaks some pivotal events, and follows through on them. What results is a world in the mid-to-late 1800s that is chiefly presided over by nations which are Islamic, not Christian. Christianity is a minor sect, Islam and Judaism co-exist peacefully for the most part (having signed a pact), and the slaves are European—in this case, Celtic peoples. Vikings are slave traders, as well as settlers in the New World, what we call the North American continent.
Aidan is a pre-adolescent boy in a Celtic fishing village somewhere in western Europe when Viking raiders come to his village, murder his father, and kidnap his sister Nessa, his mother, and himself. They are taken south by ship to an unknown port. When their captors try to separate them because Deirdre can write and her children cannot, Deirdre pleads to be allowed to keep her children with her. The trio endures a long, torturous voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World.
But there's no North America here, no English or French or Spanish colonies. The Abyssinian Empire has endured and prospered, as has the Egyptian rule by the pharaohs, and both are major colonizers of this new continent. Followers of an Islamic holy man called Bilal have settled a portion of this new land and called it Bilalistan. It is here that Aidan's family eventually lands. Nessa is sold off to another slave owner while Aidan and Deirdre are bought by the Wakil Abu Ali, a provincial government manager working for the governor in one of Bilalistan's four provinces. Aztecs are in power and in close proximity to the Wakil's province, and are a constant source of tension for him and his people.
The Wakil has two sons and a daughter. Younger son Kai needs a companion and body servant, the Wakil decides, so he selects Aidan for the position. Through adolescence to manhood, Aidan and Kai become less like slave and master, eventually earning each other's respect as men. But Aidan never stops searching for his missing sister or freedom. Kai is forced by events outside his control to view his life and family in a different light, and to choose a path that is morally acceptable to him.
Barnes’ choice of the Celts as one of the enslaved peoples of this alternate Europe (along with Franks and Gauls) is certainly an inspired one, because the Celts—more commonly known to us as the Irish—have so many historical points in common with the African slaves from our own history.
Both peoples were once conquered and governed by more technologically sophisticated cultures. The Celts were ruled for a time by the Romans, and then by the English. African cultures were subjugated by European colonizers and sent as slaves to New World plantations. But neither the Celts nor the various African cultures ever surrendered entirely. The Celts maintained their cultural identity through wave after wave of oppression, and the Africans who were captured and sold as slaves to European and American masters brought their cultures and spiritual beliefs with them in secret. Oral-history traditions are common in African and Celtic cultures; among a captured people, oral history is often the only way a to pass teachings on to new generations. The keeping of written records does not correlate to the sophistication of a culture. Memories, unlike books, are not easily found and destroyed. Nonetheless, one way masters kept slave races under control was to restrict or prohibit literacy, and both Africans and Celts knew this well from experience.
The Afterword contains an alternate (to our world) timeline. The novel's Web site includes an expanded version of this timeline, with the births of Christ and Mohammad and some interesting additions. Socrates flees Athens in 400 BC (perhaps with some assistance). Alexander the Great loses a leg in 390 BC and becomes a Pharaoh of Egypt in 378 BC. Saul of Tarsis dies in 30 AD from being “kicked in head by donkey.” Ethiopia conquers Europe and Charles Martel chooses Islam over Christianity at the Battle of Tours in 750 AD. Thus Barnes establishes the primacy of Islam over Christianity and of African cultures over European ones, and paves the way for Islamic Africans to settle the “New World” and become slave-keepers. Barnes also provides the date by two calendars—Islamic and Gregorian—at the opening of each chapter. In addition to exposing the alternative calendric system, the technique subtly implies a sort of double vision of the past in the viewpoints of Kai and Aidan.
There are several other points of connection, too many to discuss in detail here. Readers interested in this topic should consult some of the books Barnes lists in his Afterword to Lion's Blood.
It would have been too easy to choose the Zulus or another strongly led, populous African culture as the masters in this alternate world. Barnes wisely chooses not a particular culture, but a religious group—the people of Islam—as the masters. This is a neat mirror of how history played out in our own world, since the majority of the countries that colonized Africa had rulers who were nominally Christians. The followers of Mohammad and Christ both come from a wide range of nations and cultures.
The relationship between Kai and Aidan is the central source of the novel's story, and Barnes adds a few subplots to fill out what is already a densely imagined life for the two boys. Kai's brother Ali is the Wakil's heir, and bears the majority of the responsibility for maintaining and extending the Wakil's power in New Djibouti province. The Wakil wants to arrange a marriage between Ali and an Abyssinian noblewoman named Lamiya, who's been selected by the Empress of Abyssinia herself to be Ali's wife. The relationship between Ali, Lamiya, and Kai adds a romantic element that gives the story a richer texture.
Many historical elements from our own world remain the same in Lion's Blood. They provide a wealth of familiar touchstones that increase the story's verisimilitude, making Bilalistan a place we're sure we must have seen somewhere. Credit this to Barnes’ skill in weaving vivid but brief detail into the flow of the story, without halting the action to describe minutiae.
Spiritual beliefs often get short shrift in SF, but that's certainly not the case here. The novel would've been far weaker, if not an outright failure, had it ignored the interaction of spirituality with politics and technology. Barnes not only breathes life into Islamic society and Celtic proto-Christianity, he adds another element to the mix: the branch of Islam known as Sufism.
Sufis believe that nothing separates God from his Creation; that humans are blinded to the divine solely by their attachment to their material form. The religion teaches its adherents to purify their hearts, so that the Divine may manifest therein. As one scholar says, “Only then may man ascend from the level of his animal nature to the level of the true human being."1
Christian teachings also reflect this in their basis on a single creator who cares for humanity and the requirement to rise above one's “animal nature.” Hindus and Buddhists share the belief in seeking
a pure heart as a path to the divine, but the former has many gods, and the latter no specific deity.
The exploration of self as part of the search for the divine is common to both Christian and Islamic adherents. Barnes introduces Sufi beliefs as a way for Kai, as a follower of Islam, to give a new interpretation to what his ancestors did and said, and search for an acceptable moral compass by which he can guide his life. Barnes uses the Enneagram (the Sign of the Presence of God, or wajh Allah2), the visible symbol of the Sufi search, as an ever-present reminder to the reader that important spiritual matters are part of the story. He also employs the Enneagram as a martial-arts meditation and training device (he is himself a martial-arts practitioner) to layer more meaning into its presence.
A key element in the novel is a mystical reference to the “lion's blood” which is said to run in the Wakil's family. The power of this ichor brings on what some writers have called “battle fever,” in which the blood seems to sing in the veins as the warrior fights. The Vikings called such warriors berserkers, which connotes chaotic behavior. Barnes clearly prefers a more controlled approach, shaped and governed by years of practice, and blends it into both the well-drawn combat scenes and discussions of spirituality in the novel.
Another subplot involves Shaka Zulu, who's often been portrayed in books and movies as a brilliant tactician and field general with a megalomaniac's sense of self-worth. Barnes doesn't stint any of Shaka's “real-world” reputation in his novel, and his Shaka is every bit as arrogant, bloodthirsty and single-minded as any other megalomaniac in history.
Strange Horizons, July 2002 Page 16