Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
New York: Tor Books, 2015; $25.00 hc; 304 pages
Sandra Lindow
Carolyn Ives Gilman’s Dark Orbit is a first contact planetary romance in the tradition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Telling. Set in the same universe as Gilman’s previous, groundbreaking 1998 novel, Halfway Human, it describes how a crew of scientists from Capella II are sent to Iris, a newly discovered planet, expecting it to be uninhabited only to find a village of five hundred humans living in total darkness in caves underground.
Right from the start, we are given a wealth of evocative names. “A capella” is song without accompaniment, and Discovery ship Escher is profoundly alone, 58 lightyears from its home base. Escher, a ship oddly constructed with doors and halls in peculiar places, seems to come out of an M.C. Escher drawing. “Iris,” too, is packed with senses, denoting the colored membrane of the eye, a flower known for its beauty, and the goddess of the rainbow, sent to earth as a messenger of the gods.
The villagers on Iris appear to have developed sensory talents that allow them to have meaningful lives despite their inability to see each other; however, violent fluctuations of dark matter and energy called “riffles” and “fold rain” may soon annihilate this innovative, anthropologically important culture.
As in many universities, the scientists on the corporate-sponsored expedition have a number of issues hampering their work, primarily an experimental management strategy, a disparate combination of academic disciplines (Descriptive, System, Intuitive, and Corroborative Sciences) and a for-profit status that limits their research to work that might eventually generate income. Further complication is brought by an embedded public relations director who reduces every activity to the lowest common denominator; think Geraldo Rivera or Doonesbury’s Roland Burton Hedley III.
The novel is constructed in a mode that Le Guin styles a carrier bag, ranging across examinations of the psychological ramifications of faster-than-light travel and hypotheses regarding the possible nature of dark matter, interweaving research on sensory deprivation and the personal aftereffects of repressed memories in post-traumatic stress disorder. It is character driven rather than plot driven. The viewpoint character, Sara (Magister Saraswati Callicot), is an exoethnologist, self-defined as disrespectful of authority, “the lodestone of her life” (9), and for this reason she has been hired as a double agent, superficially to deal with any unexpected first contact issues but primarily to deal with the volatile political nature of the mission while secretly protecting Thora Lassiter, an especially vulnerable diplomatic emissary from an elite culture. Saraswati’s iconoclastic nature makes her highly critical of elitism of any kind, yet she is also attracted to the aesthetics, refinement, and civility characteristic of old money, an attraction that also draws her to the mystical Thora when they first meet.
(Sara’s family name points to the novel’s thematic concerns: J. Baird Callicott is considered the leading contemporary proponent of environmental philosophy as initially explicated by Wisconsin’s Aldo Leopold. He taught the first course in environmental ethics, at UW-Stevens Point in 1971.)
As is common in romances, there are two opposite-sex love interests: Dr. David Gennaday, immediately identified as a man “of quick intellect, ironic, competent” (25), and Dagan Atlabatlow, “tall, thin, ebony skinned” (33), the head of mission security and implicitly the kind of authority figure Sara loves to oppose. When an apparent murder occurs on the ship, Sara immediately becomes suspicious of Atlabatlow. Her relationship with him becomes even more complicated when Thora Lassiter disappears on the planet, and Moth, an apparent teenager from the village, is discovered and taken up to the ship.
Even though her eyes and optic nerves are healthy, because Moth has grown up in darkness, she has never learned how to see. Learning to see is a complicated neurological process best experienced by infants in the first three months of life. Contemporary research into restoring sight to the blind has been explored and popularized by neurologist Oliver Sacks in his books The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, An Anthropologist on Mars, and The Mind’s Eye, and he indicates that retraining the brain to see after a life of blindness can never be fully successful. Furthermore, it may actually be emotionally devastating to the patient because the brain’s perception has organized around the blindness to emphasize other senses such as sound and touch; however, because Moth has been trained from an early age as an explorer or “wender,” she is determined to explore the ship. So Sara and the doctor work together to help her negotiate an illuminated world. Sacks has written that “The cortex of an early blinded adult ... has already become highly adapted to organizing perceptions in time and not in space” (Anthropologist 140). Eventually Moth’s possibly extrasensory neurological reorganization of time and space proves key in saving the village from the violent dark energy storms that are tearing apart the planet. On a parallel psychological level, Thora Lassiter is also dealing with a kind of memory blindness caused by medical treatment for extreme psychological trauma experienced on a planet where gender relationships have taken a dangerous, sadomasochistic turn. Her own dark orbit beneath Iris’s surface helps her come to terms with both memory and destiny.
Ursula K. Le Guin has called Dark Orbit “intellectually daring, brilliantly imagined, strongly felt.” Suzy McKee Charnas, Karl Schroeder, Gwyneth Jones, and Joan Slonczewski have given it high praise as well. Yet Publishers Weekly criticizes the novel as “a jumble that doesn’t know what it is trying to say.” Part of the reason for such divergence of opinion may come from the novel’s carrier bag structure, which does not attempt to neatly wrap up everything at the end, or perhaps its possibly problematic title. To some readers, the title could imply a deep space adventure rather than Dark Orbit’s chatty, introspective narrative regarding the interpersonal problems involved in meeting and relocating a unique culture. Gilman works as a curator of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington D.C., and her focus is on anthropology, a more human science than cosmology or physics. Her title suggests a process of coming to terms with difference and ignorance, paraphrasing I Corinthians 13:12, seeing in the cultural mirror darkly but then face to face. I would argue that Dark Orbit is masterfully constructed, a colorful tapestry of interwoven issues and ideas in the tradition of Le Guin, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Eleanor Arnason. It does indeed know what it is trying to say, but, as in our real world, everything is in medias res, and there are no easy answers.
Sandra Lindow lives in Menomonie, Wisconsin.
Works Cited
“Dark Orbit.” Publisher’s Weekly, May 4, 2015.
Gilman, Carolyn Ives. Halfway Human. New York: Avon Eos, 1998.
Sacks, Oliver. An Anthropologist on Mars. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1995.
——. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. New York: Summit Books, 1985.
——. The Mind’s Eye. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 2010.
Michael Levy
Carolyn Ives Gilman isn’t a very prolific writer, but I’ve liked everything of hers that I’ve read, particularly her fine tale of gender exploration, Halfway Human (1998)—which definitely deserves reprinting—and the more recent The Ice Owl (2012). Her science fiction novels, set in a loose future history called the Twenty Planets, are anthropological sf and, with her training as a historian and museumologist (she’s a curator at The Smithsonian’s Museum of the American Indian), Gilman is adept at the portrayal of unusual human societies.
In the Twenty Planets series, humanity has gradually spread across part of the galaxy by sending unmanned, sub–light speed questships out on exploratory missions and then, when a likely planet is discovered, teleporting human explorers out to those worlds using technology based on quantum entanglement. Surprisingly every world that humanity has reached has already been colonized by heretofore unknown human civilizations that have apparently been there for many centuries. The assumption, though there’s no definite proof, is that humanity had a long-forgotten golden age when we went to the stars in some fashion and then fell back into barbarism, only to rise again and begin to rediscover our heritage.
Magister Sara Callicott is an exoethnologist, an expert on the human cultures of the twenty planets. She’s also a free spirit, raised in a culture that hates following rules or accepting outside authority. Having badly flubbed her last mission by failing to fill out necessary paperwork and thus costing her Big Pharma employers lots of money, Sara is in need of a job, so she jumps at an offer from an old acquaintance—her former faculty advisor, who has now risen to become an important man in the government—to join an outbound expedition to Iris, another newly discovered, inhabitable planet. Iris, however, is odd in that it’s the only world yet discovered that is capable of supporting human life but apparently has none. This would seem to make Sara a fifth wheel on the expedition, but she’s given two other jobs, one official, the other covert. Ostensibly she will be studying the other explorers, doing research on the way their own small society evolves. Covertly, she will be playing babysitter for another member of the team, Thora Lassiter, a former trade mission emissary who barely survived a mission gone horribly wrong to the planet Orem in which she helped lead a women’s revolt against the intensely misogynistic rulers with whom she was supposed to be arranging trade. Lassiter, who is viewed as an important person by the government, has had major mental reconstruction done to help her regain her sanity and, although now returned to competence and duty, is still viewed as fragile in ways the government doesn’t want the rest of the crew to be aware of. Thora’s diary, however, reveals that while on Orem she may have been (or at least believes herself to have been) taken over by a vengeful goddess who forced her to lead the revolt. It also shows her to be in constant danger of tipping into some sort of mystical solipsism.
When the explorers port into the questship (appropriately named the Escher), they discover things to be in a very strange state indeed. The starship, though still functional, appears to have been cut up and put back together a few times. Major corridors dead end in blank walls. Doors open in ceilings. Corners of rooms narrow to perspective points like the Infinity Room in Wisconsin’s notorious House on the Rock. Even the local space around Iris is strange. Dark matter is present in unusual abundance; there are gravitational anomalies, and the local physics is definitely capricious. This also holds true on the planetary surface where strange structures that are easily be mistaken for plants (but aren’t) appear to bend space and reflect light in impossible ways.
Things almost immediately begin to go pear-shaped. The scientists on the expedition are interested in little beyond their own narrow research fields and the expedition leader, Director Gavere, is not particularly competent. His security chief, Dagan Atlabatlow, is dictatorial and paranoid. Mr. Gibb, the publicist, is a regular pain in the butt, constantly filming the scientists and asking them dramatic questions that entirely miss the point of scientific research. Then a security officer is discovered murdered in his locked cabin with his head nowhere to be found, and Atlabatlow becomes even more paranoid. Meanwhile two events on the planetary surface increase the tension. First, Thora Lassiter disappears without a trace, and then, a few days later, one of the supposedly nonexistent human natives of the planet walks into camp. Moth, we gradually discover, is part of a small tribe of humans, all of whom normally live deep underground and all of whom are blind. Thora has somehow fallen (or perhaps been teleported) into their world. As the novel continues, Thora explores the world of Moth and her people while Sara and Atlabatlow attempt to find her. Meanwhile the gravitational and other physical anomalies on and around Iris are getting more and more extreme, damaging the teleportation equipment that is the crew’s only way home and putting everyone on either the questship or the planetary surface (or underground for that matter) in imminent danger of being ripped apart like the supposedly murdered security officer.
Gilman’s themes in Dark Orbit are several. First, she’s interested in what effect her teleportation technology would have on society because the system is not merely a short cut for human travelers. A person is disassembled by the equipment, and her pattern is sent at light speed to her intended receptor where she is reassembled. This makes local travel practically instantaneous, but it’s different for interstellar travel. For the long-distance traveler no time appears to pass, but many years go by in the normal universe while they’re en route. If a traveler takes a job twenty light-years away, does the job for, say, a year, and then returns home, all of her friends and family will be more than forty years older, assuming they’re still alive. This has led to the creation of an entire class of rootless citizens who feel out of place and clueless even on their home planets.
Other sf writers have created human societies that are blind or live in total darkness from Daniel F. Galouye’s Dark Universe (1961) to John Varley’s “The Persistence of Vision” (1979), and Gilman builds on this tradition, creating a civilization where all of our sight-based metaphors and ways of thinking are meaningless. In Moth’s Torobe, walls are pretty much irrelevant to privacy, but door curtains are important. The texture of the pathway you walk on and the direction and humidity level of the breeze are all vital for figuring out where you are. Complete strangers immediately touch each other’s faces when they meet. The beauty of a room is judged largely on the basis of its acoustic qualities. For Moth the ability of the explorers to see, something she can’t really explain, equates with being able to predict the future. In all of its complexity the society of Torobe may well be Gilman’s finest creation in the novel.
Gilman’s political beliefs appear to be traditionally liberal, and she uses her novel to make a number of political statements. Violent societies need to have fewer guns. Women’s rights are vital to any truly civilized culture and are worth fighting for. To assume that people are nothing more than the sum of their birth or ancestral culture’s beliefs is racism. Disabled people should not be viewed as either innately inferior or without resources of their own. At the conclusion of Dark Orbit it eventually becomes clear that, though the blind people of Torobe seem primitive, their talents are as necessary to the survival of the scientists on the questship as the scientists’ abilities are to the survival of their new acquaintances.
Gilman’s novel does feels a bit random at times as is often the case in books that adopt Le Guin’s carrier-bag structure. The original murder, for example, turns out to be nothing more than an unfortunate accident. Thora’s mystical musings were sometimes a bit too abstract to maintain my interest. The wonders of the planetary surface were not as well explained as they might be. Overall, however, Dark Orbit is an excellent and thoughtful read, full of characters that will hold your attention, scientific mysteries that cry out to be explored, and beautiful language that makes the entire journey as rewarding as is possible.
Michael Levy lives in Menomonie, Wisconsin, and reports that he is not yet contemplating retirement.
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