The Braided World [Mass Market Paperback]

Kay Kenyon has established a reputation among science fiction writers for her ability to create "other worlds" that is well deserved. Less often mentioned, is her skill at developing the secondary characters in her works and how well she incorporates them into the plots. Braided World is loaded with intrigue at many levels as over a dozen characters deal with the issues of personal power, changing societies, duty, loyalty, and tolerance. The remarkable part of the novel is how clearly it depicts these issues without getting bogged down or becoming confusing. Although the book is founded on the scenario described in Kenyon's prior novel, Maximum Ice, the characters and setting are completely different. If you are getting bored with science fiction that features mostly a lot of whiz-bang and golly-gee, and want to read something that is exciting but a bit more literary, The Braided World is highly recommended.

"The Braided World" returns us to the universe of Kenyon's "Maximum Ice," but a long time after the ending of that novel, and with none of the same characters.

Quickly, almost adventure game like, Kenyon sets the stage (you may think you've missed a novel in the sequence; you haven't), and then plunges you quickly into the world of the Dassa--humanlike, but not human, with a totally different way of reproducing.

Kenyon constructs this alien world so carefully (and with all of its beauty and all of its cruelty well thought out) that maybe you'll think she's actually been there. The characters are fascinating; the science seems plausible, and Kenyon hasn't lost her ability to do action scenes convincingly. (Some aren't for the squeamish, and definitely not for the under-13 set.)

What's most intriguing, however, is the way Kenyon turns the classic quest story on its head. When the humans find what they're looking for, and it's time to head home, some of them begin to think that perhaps that's not the best idea after all.

Read the tale; find out why.

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.

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