A Fan's Playground

I have no idea how or where or when I first heard about this book, but I'm so glad I did, because it's so different from any other SFF I've read before. I've talked before, I think, about my frustrations with books so often being either Team Magic with no science allowed, or Team Science with no magic allowed, or sometimes about science versus magic, but that books are basically never on Team Science & Magic Together.

This book is Team Science & Magic! And it was amazing.

It's not a perfect book and I do have some complaints, which I will get to, but overall I just super respect what the author was choosing to do here and am so glad she did it (and that I got to read it!).

It is about a young woman named Elana in the far future who is part of a very advanced culture and is in the early stages of her career, the job of which entails helping preserve younger cultures from interference in order to allow them space to grow and progress for themselves.

Elana ends up as part of a small team on a planet where they must try to get the colonists of one somewhat-advanced Younger race to leave alone the planet of a much less advanced Younger race, without revealing to either of the parties involved that such advanced people as herself exist, so as to not interfere with their development.

In the process, we the reader get to know, along with Elana, some people from both the natives of the planet and the would-be colonizers. And I like how the author never looks down on the people from these less-advanced cultures as being less capable of both thought and kindness. Georyn and Jarel, the two men who are our main characters from the planet-natives and would-be-colonizer groups, are both clearly intelligent, insightful, and empathetic, while also inevitably being a product of the cultures in which they were raised.

And the author (along with the characters) uses what happens in the story to ask hard and important questions about the ethics of progress.

But here's the thing, I'm not actually convinced that the perspective the narrative comes down on is right. Is it really true that for a people to advance they must experience suffering? And if so, is the advancement really worth it at such a cost? And what is "advancement" really? Elana's culture, from what we see of it, seems somewhat utopian (hunger and disease are apparently totally unknown), but is the only way for a culture to reach some sort of utopian ideal to become science-magic spacefarers after going through the earlier stages of cultural development in the order described?

The book says that different cultures on a single planet inevitably shape each other because they will come into contact with each other, and that's fine, but on a planet-to-planet scale it's inevitably a bad thing. What's fundamentally different about it that makes it always bad on a inter-planet scale but fine on an intra-planet scale? The colonizers coming to Georyn's planet must be stopped for the good of the native population, but something like, say, the European colonization of the Americas in our world's history would be nothing to be really concerned about? Really? What's the difference?

Anyway I appreciate that the book is raising these questions as important ones to discuss, and even though it has an opinion, it also makes it clear that it encourages people to think through things for themselves and challenge what you're taught if it doesn't seem right. So I'm not mad at it the way I might be at a different book for having these kinds of opinions. It's not trying to be totally didactic but rather to open the conversation.

I am a little mad about the gender roles/distribution within the book though, since it doesn't interrogate what is doing with that at all -- but on the other hand it's SFF from 1970, it's doing pretty well just to have a) a female main character, who's b) also a person I like. But Elana, the main character, is the only female character in the entire book other than the woman who gets killed off to make a point in like the first chapter. Elana is also YOUNG and NAIVE and needs to LEARN THINGS from from an older and wiser man (her father, who's also her mission leader) and also she is part of another man's arc which involves him learning to see her as someone who needs him just as much as he needs her. So that's all a little like.... *rolls eyes*. Just make, like.....even a single one of the other major characters in the book female too and I'd be so much happier. Especially if it was her father or Georyn. Make that change and bam, problem solved, you're no longer having to have one character type stand in for all womanhood.

Oh well. I still did very much enjoy the book and am glad I found it.