Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful lost treasure -- highly recommended read, 8 Jun 2006
You've heard the praise too many times before: "This is one of the best SF novels ever written" etc etc. Too many fans praising too many works. And this particular novel sat on my "unread" shelf for a couple of years, put off by the sheer size of it and what seemed to be just another space opera. I began it reluctantly, and ended it enthralled. When there are so many poor, slight, workhorse novels clogging up the SF shelves right now, it's baffling that great works like this (published 1976) are now obscure. I guess that happens to everything. The pop charts are full of dismal soundalikes and great music is now only marketed to dads at father's day. Nobody wants to sell yesterday's news unless there's a nostalgia market for it.
Congratulations, then, to Gollancz for not one but TWO great series designed to bring many of those lost SF novels back into print. The "SF Masterworks" series scores higher for actually being numbered (appealing to those completists among us) but I'd argue the frustratingly unnumbered and harder to find "yellowback" series (in a fine facsimile of that original uniform Gollancz sleeve design) is the more interesting -- full of true classics. However, there's quite a bit of overlap, so if you wait a while you're sure to get an "SF Masterworks" version of "Floating Worlds". With releases of the Masterworks series now quite patchy, though, that could take a few years.
My first advice is, don't be put off. By the size, by the fact that you've never heard of Cecelia Holland, that this was her only SF novel, that it was criminally omitted from Pringle's list of 100 Best SF Novels, that it looks like an old-fashioned potboiler matinee cliffhanger space opera. Even that she's a woman writer with a woman lead character -- the now pretty standard and cliched "weak woman who becomes strong fighting against the dominant male universe". Put bluntly, that precis sums up the book exactly, but "Floating Worlds" is more than that. A hell of a lot more.
When you get used to Holland's clipped, simple, lightning-fast writing style (she's not one for descriptive passages and chains of adjectives) you wonder how she's going to sustain the plot for 540 pages. But she does brilliantly. Her heroine Paula Mendoza lives in a post-nuclear Earth 4000 years in our future. It's now an anarchist state, sheltering in domes from the radioactive wasteland. There are capitalist colonies on the moon and Mars, and an uneasy truce between them. But out on the distant gas worlds, huge, genetically evolved humans have made base -- so-called Styphs who are, significantly, eight feet tall, immensely strong, with flesh-raking claws for hands, and black. The Styphs raid the inner planets for resources and slaves and openly plan to conquer them. It becomes up to Paula to arrange a treaty.
She does this the only way a sweet innocent Earth girl can -- by sleeping with the Styph ambassador. When she finds she's pregnant with his child, she heads off to Uranus to live with him, and becomes one of his harem of wives -- little more than another slave, treated brutally. But Paula, in the rather simplistic way of things such novels have, becomes pivotal in all the earth-shattering events that follow over the next 17 years.
It all sounds dreadful. After all, the mid-70s was the "golden age" of huge potboiler sagas, including "Roots" and "Shogun", and this is just an SF equivalent. But somehow Holland pulls it off -- not only drawing you into Paula's world, but making you believe in it, care about the characters, and long for a happy ending. The book becomes riveting, a page turner. You'll spend every moment you're away from it looking forward to the time when you're back, and you'll miss it dreadful when it's over. You'll definitely read it again -- I intend to, a few years down the line.
It does have problems -- not least the Styph called Tanuojin, who has several too many magical powers and was a lapse of judgement (the novel doesn't need his mystic abilities and suffers from the dilution of "brutal reality"), a rather obvious intimation of life on other planets, and that whole black/white male/female stereotyping, which is of its age. But it's a great, satisfying read, immensely enjoyable -- and no greater recommendation is required.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Absolutely brilliant., 29 Jun 2006
I own three copies of this in case it goes out of print again and I lose it; it's that good. This book has everything. It's an SF classic, a feminist classic with the most ass-kicking heroine ever (Paula, who's short, black, in her late twenties and actually uses her brain to kick ass with!), a really plausible and interesting set-up (the Earth is a self-governed anarchy, Mars is a super-capitalist society where everything is fake and the Moon is a fascist dictatorship), and if none of that appeals, it's also a brilliant pan-galactic political space adventure spanning twenty-odd years and several planets, with plenty of battle action, seven-foot-tall mutants from Saturn who want to take over everything and a super-mutant who may or may not be a god. What makes it such a stand-out, though, is the quality of the writing; marvellously direct, tight, intelligent prose that's so vividly realistic you feel like you've actually lived through this when you've finished the book. No waffly expositions, no ropey dialogue, stuck-on soppy romance or flowery descriptions; this is the story of a believably real person with real struggles, and it's all gripping action from start to finish, with a thoughtfulness to it that stays with you for years. I can't recommend it enough.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Extremely under-rated novel, 23 May 2001
This is one of the best sci-fi novels I have ever read, and it's a travesty that it is not better known. The book captivates the reader right from the start and never loosens its grip, not even when the final page is turned. The characters and images from this book have stayed with me. I would strongly recommend anyone interested in sci-fi, or just good fiction in general, to read this novel...
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