I love this book.
I've loved it since the first time I read it, about 20 years ago, when it leapt off a library shelf into my hands. (I remember looking at the plain, elegant cover, and the beautiful, enigmatic title, and thinking, I'm going to like this ...) I have loved buying random copies, and presenting it to friends and students, over the years; I have loved rereading it for the first time in a while.
Why do I love it? Well, it's beautifully written, of course. But, let's be honest, beautiful writing is ten a penny: it's what you do with it. How the beautiful words, in a pleasing order, hang meat upon the narrative bones. For me, it's the way that this novel makes me feel thoroughly engaged with the lives of its characters, and builds up to a picture of what it means to be the "world entire," and at the same time a small cog in something much bigger than yourself.
For me, Gloss' narrative choices are ... well, dazzling. I love the framing device, of chapters set 175 years before and approximately 100 years after the main events and the main characters of the story, chapters which elegantly solve the narrative problems of putting the main story in a kind of context-- What's happening here? How did we get where we are? and What happened next?
The Prologue allows Gloss to do the heavy lifting of exposition without clumsy infodumps (or, perhaps I should say, without making the infodumps feel clumsy ...) It's the 1st person narrative of Dolores Negrete, a 60+ year old woman with no immediate family, who is struggling with her decision to join a group of Quaker emigres who are fleeing the environmental and political chaos of Earth on the generation starship Dusty Miller. With no family to pressure her either way, Dolores is an individual who is perfectly poised between clinging to the devil you know, and taking a leap of faith that will inevitably involve discomfort and danger, just at a time in her life when she'd be forgiven for wanting comfort, if not safety. Dolores' ruminations, as she takes one last (perhaps) walk around the village in Costa Rica she has called home, tell us all we need to know about the mess that the Earth is in, the basics of the Dusty Miller project, and about Dolores as a person who must live (and die) with her decision.
The main events of the novel take place about 175 years later, and follow the dramatic and mundane events of the descendants of some of Dolores' friends and neighbours, as the Dusty Miller tentatively approaches the first habitable planet they have encountered in their long, multi-generation voyage. Like Dolores, 175 years before, the question is, i>do we stay or do we go? -- the planet they are approaching is habitable, just, but hardly an Eden. The Dusty Miller provides them all with a marvel of sustainable living, but it's old, and the infrastructure is beginning to show its cracks. Whatever they decide -- to cut bait and stay, or to limp on for four or five generations to the next star with a "Goldilocks planet," in the hope that it offers something better -- they all know that they (and their children, and grandchildren) will have to live (and die) with their decision. And against this background, our characters go through the relatively ordinary dramas of life, small, large and massively life-altering. There are suicides, and family breakdowns, anger and rape, as everyone suffers a kind of depressive madness -- the simanas -- as the residents of the Dusty Millerstruggle mindfully with the pressure of the decision before them.
And then, in the final chapter, some questions are answered. And some are not. I love that too. It feels exactly right.
I also loved the worldbuilding. Gloss develops a society based on Quaker principles that is quite amazing. (In future, I want all committees that I belong to to have a Mindful Silence before the business of the Meeting begins, to allow the Sense of the Meeting to emerge ... Fat chance ... ) I love the model of sustainability that the Dusty Miller offers -- use everything, waste nothing, figure out clever workarounds, respect your environment. Not surprising that recently Kim Stanley Robinson offered this novel as his only fiction suggestion among his list of "the best books to help us navigate the next 50 years," as an example of a novel that "can also help us imagine a better future."
I love this book.
