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Expect only questions, no answers from this book.

Have you ever read one of those stories where after the apocalypse, or maybe on an uninhabited island, one person is left, seemingly the only person left alive at all? And the whole story arc is about them dealing with loneliness and trying to find another human? Usually they do, usually one of the opposite sex, the implication being that they'll procreate, thereby solving the loneliness problem for at least two generations. Have you ever thought about that second generation? The siblings who will either have to resort to incest or dying out one by one? I often did. I wondered what it would be like for the last sibling, truly the last person on earth now.

I Who Have Never Known Men is about that last person, an account of her life, and it's as bleak as you would expect it to be. Everywhere this is grouped as a feminist novel, which I think is a bit shallow. Sure, the topic of gender comes up, and all the characters are women, but it's one of those stories were if the genders were flipped, if it was about a sole male surviving the apocalypse, no one would see that as a statement on gender. Really, in my opinion, it's about the meaning of life, and how much would be left of it without the rest of humanity. What use are the women's attempts at rebuilding a semblance of their previous lives, at finding out why what happened to them happened to them, at passing down knowledge to the one child among them, if there are no other people to share it with, no next generation to pass it down to? The pointlessness is soul-sucking. And it never abates.

It takes a special kind of person to enjoy a book like this, but if you like bleak, questioning, open-ended narratives, with the grace to be short reads, you should definitely give this one a try.

The novella makes an odd counterpoint to Little Fuzzy: In this case the humans recognized the natives' sapience right away -- barely -- but decide to enslave them and clear-cut their world anyway.

It bounces between several viewpoints: one of the natives who has escaped from slavery, a sympathetic human scientist...and the villain, a gung-ho military type who thinks he's the best of humanity, but shows himself to be among the worst.

It's a tragedy, a train wreck, a slow-moving avalanche, and yet every time there's a chance to pause and maybe resolve the situation, Davidson chooses to escalate things instead.

While it's directly a response to America's actions in the Vietnam War, the themes of colonial exploitation, dehumanization, psyops, asymmetrical warfare and environmental degradation are still very topical.

It's not nuanced. It won't make you think about new ideas like The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, or The Lathe of Heaven. (The Athsheans' dream state is interesting, but not explored deeply and not the point of the story.) But it will make you angrier at the people who are still doing the exploiting.

Cross-posted from my website, where I go into a bit more detail on the Terrans' dehumanization of the Athsheans, and current events.

The cover blurb makes it sound like a cautionary tale about our highly-tech-dependent world (even in the 1990s!), but it's not the technology that's the problem. It's the homogenization of culture, and the insistence that there be one perspective, and only one perspective, that really matters.

Think of how we travel and find the same chain stores, chain restaurants, the ISO standard Irish Pub with its bric-a-brac decor, and how our TV and movies are full of endless reboots, spinoffs and sequels.

We see it first in Sutty's memories of Earth, controlled largely by a theocracy until contact with alien civilizations kicks their support out from under them. And then in the world she's trying to understand, one that's undergone a complete transformation in the time it took her to travel there at relativistic speed. She knows there were flourishing cultures here before she left Earth. She studied the few fragments that made it offworld during first contact. But she finds a world that has discarded its past and modeled itself on the one she left.

It's largely a story of discovery: Sutty, frustrated and depressed, trying to figure out what the heck "The Telling" actually is and what it means, and the government agent shadowing her also discovering what it is he's trying to suppress and why. A lot of it takes place in small villages, but there's also a long trip through mountains that feels like counterpoint to the glacier expedition in The Left Hand of Darkness.

Well worth the read!

(Slightly condensed from my website.)

I looked it up, "Who Fears Death" isn't a debut novel, but it feels like a debut novel in the best possible way. It's emotionally raw, and slightly unfinished in the sense that you can feel the author poured all her ideas and feelings and all the themes she wanted to explore into this book to the point she couldn't possibly get to all of them. The result is something that's brimming with creativity and life. While the book reads mostly like something targeted at a YA audience, it's frank and direct in its discussion of sex and female sexuality in a way that you wouldn't expect to see outside of adult literature, but it lends a lot of power to the story overall. This is something that matters to the author, and you can tell.

The setting in which magic exists next to the left-over technology from an implied pre-apocalyptic society is very well-developed. Especially the magic system is well-thought-out to the point that I wonder if it's based on a real belief system. It reminds me a bit of the books on witchcraft in Africa I read back when I studied anthropology.

For me, the only real flaw of this book - and this feels like a downside of the same creative force that makes it so enjoyable - is that the second half of the book takes on a bit of road trip plot with way too many stops. While they're all interesting individually, they are too loosely connected and the story loses much of its momentum in this section. It makes me wish that Nnedi Okorafor had had a very stern editor who could've put their foot down and forced her to kill her darlings.

I've seen that she's still a very productive author, and purely based on the covers and descriptions her new books seem to be a bit more mainstream YA fantasy fare. I'd like to pick those up to see what I think as well, but I'm a bit apprehensive. I'd be surprised if they contain the same raw, frank emotional force as Who Fears Death, as that is, admittedly, not its most sellable quality. But I can't imagine Okorafor's work not suffering from sanding down those rough edges.