Subject: Review and Critique of Rebecca Ore's "Alien" trilogy

From: [email-masked] (David Cortesi)
Date: 21 Jun 91 04:11:51 GMT

%A Ore, Rebecca
%T Becoming Alien
%I TOR Books
%C New York
%D January 1988
%P 313
%O $3.95
%G ISBN 0-812-50313-9
 
%A Ore, Rebecca
%T Being Alien
%I TOR Books
%C New York
%D September 1989
%P 277
%O $3.95
%G ISBN 0-812-54792-6
 
%A Ore, Rebecca
%T Human to Human
%I TOR Books
%C New York
%D November 1990
%P 282
%O $3.95
%G ISBN 0-812-50045-8
 
The central concern of Rebecca Ore's trilogy is loneliness: the tragic 
loneliness to which each thinking being is condemned because it can know 
the mind of others only through external signs. We already know 
how hard it is to commune with another human. How much harder would it 
be (Ore asks) if the other were something like a thinking bat? Or like a 
bird, or a bear? Given good will, she concludes, and watchful containment 
of the inevitable fear, it may not be so hard. In the end it might be easier 
to trust, even to love, the scaled or feathered nonterrestrial than one's own 
kind. But what if, once you were at home with the alien, you found that 
your own people needed you more?
 
Questions like these -- questions of divided loyalty, of alienation from 
one's birth culture -- could easily be posed in a mainstream novel. But it is 
the nature of good science fiction to co-opt a simple, even trite human 
conflict and use it as a sort of engine to drive a much larger mechanism of 
speculation, like a plain electric motor driving the dizzy motions of a 
kinetic sculpture.
 
In Ore's trilogy the visible structure is a richly-imagined, entertaining 
assemblage of aliens. She lifts their physiologies and root behavior 
patterns from earthly zoology, but extrapolates these into credible social 
usages and speech patterns in the best style of speculative fiction. 
Examples: The civilized and crafty bird who, when he comes to your house 
for dinner, brings along crop stones folded in a clean napkin, and after 
digesting the meal, regurgitates them and gives them in the napkin to a 
servant to clean.  Or the folk who as infants are reared in a pouch, and who 
keep soft, cylindrical couches to crawl into to sleep.
 
Among the hundred-odd species in Ore's Federation are not a few descended 
from brachiating apes, as is our human kind. It ours is but one of a number 
of species that have not yet mastered the "gate" technology that makes a 
species elegible for contact.
 
In _Becoming Alien_, Tom is an alienated teenage dropout in rural Virginia.  
He saves a real alien from a wrecked Federation vehicle; hides him; 
befriends him. Then, in part through Tom's inability to judge human 
nature, the alien is killed, not long before a rescue party traces him. It 
develops that the alien has in his journal left Tom a legacy: a 
recommendation that he is enough of a xenophile to be what the alien 
was, a cadet in the Institute for First Contact, covertly studying sapient 
species and inducting them into the Federation when they discover the 
space "gates" for interstellar travel.
 
Tom accepts. Through the rest of the book he is schooled by the Institute 
and takes part in two First Contacts. One goes disastrously wrong; the 
other succeeds after Tom spends weeks in alien hands, working through 
fear and distrust on all sides. By the end he has achieved responsibility and 
a place in the society of Karst, the Federation capitol planet.
 
In _Being Alien_ Tom returns to Earth on a dual mission: overtly to study 
parallel cases of culture-contact shock in human society; semi-officially to 
find a mate. He is stationed in Berkeley, California, a place where Tom, 
redneck kid, feels as alien as would any other resident of Karst. Indeed 
some of the other aliens (there are quite a few surgically-altered aliens 
among us) are more at home in Berkeley society than he is. (Ore has quite a 
bit of fun with the idea of aliens passing unremarked in California life.) 
Nevertheless Tom manages to make contact with a woman who will accept 
him and his offer of a life off-planet. He takes her and her sister and 
brother-in-law back to Karst. The bulk of the book is about how these 
people find successes and intimacies in alien society that had eluded Tom, 
and the conflicts that result.
 
Again, comparable emotional situations could be played out in an ordinary 
novel; but again Ore uses them to propel, to add emotional tension and 
credibility to, an overt plot sequence of alien infiltration, difficult first 
contacts, and Federation politics.
 
In _Human To Human_ Tom and his wife and 8-year-old son are asked to 
take into their home and study a family of suspicious, possibly 
treacherous, aliens whose species has rejected Federation contact. This 
intrusion raises the tension in what is already a tense household. 
Ultimately there are tragic consequences that stem in part from Tom's own 
lack of patience and self-insight. However, Earth has just mastered gate 
technology. As either a punishment or a last chance to make good, Tom is 
assigned to the Earth contact team. He does not botch it even though 
operating under an ignoble inner conflict: if Earth enters the Federation, 
there will be many more humans on Karst, some more handsome or clever 
than he, and he is insecure enough to fear losing his authority, or wife, or 
perhaps only his uniqueness to them. At the end he returns to Karst and 
achieves a difficult reconciliation with his family and his life.
 
(Review ends; critical discussion begins; spoilers may appear.)
 
Becoming Alien was Ore's first published novel. I didn't need Ben Bova's 
preface to tell me so; "first novel" is written clearly throughout.  If you 
have read work by beginning writers, as an editor or as a member of a 
writing circle, you will find the weaknesses all too familiar: awkward 
transitions; fuzzy descriptions; major plot points scanted while trivial 
ones are written out at tedious length; dialog such as no human could ever 
speak; conversations that never reach a climax or a point. What was 
published as _Being Alien_ should have been treated as a first draft; the 
story deserves better telling.
 
The second and third volumes are more competent, but Ore made one 
fundamental structural error that plagues all three: the customary 
beginner's error of opting for first person point of view. First person POV is 
not always wrong; any reader can rattle off a list of writers that used it 
well. (Start with Melville and "Call me Ishmael;" skip to Gene Wolfe and 
the Book of the New Sun; recall John D. Macdonald's "Travis McGee" novels; 
and on.)  But Ore's trilogy demonstrates all the very cogent reasons why a 
beginner should never use it.
 
The nature of first person is that the only story that can be told is the one 
witnessed by the protagonist; and it can only be told in the protagonist's 
voice.  It follows that the protagonist must have freedom of movement 
within the story, able to be present at all its important events and privy 
to the secrets of the other characters. Even more important the protagonist 
must have a personality and turn of phrase that permits reciting the story 
with clarity, color and emotion.
 
Alas, Ore's Tom lacks the needed qualities. He begins the story untravelled 
and unschooled and spends the whole first volume at the very bottom of 
the Federation's hierarchy. He can see only enough of the events around 
him to know that there is a lot going on that he is not in on. For the reader, 
seeing Karst only through his eyes is like watching a ball game through a 
knothole.
 
Worse, Tom is a flat and unimaginative narrator. He recounts events but 
does not reflect on them, nor does he tell the story in interesting language.  
I am not sure to what extent this reflects shortcomings in Ore's own 
diction, and to what extent it results from her writing the story in 
character as Tom.  But the net effect is what a psychiatrist would call "flat 
affect": exciting events and colorful scenes reported with an inappropriate 
lack of emotion, in a monotone.
 
To finish drubbing the main character, it is especially unfortunate that we 
have to walk in his shoes for three volumes because he is simply not a 
likable person. His only virtue is a dogged persistence.  His faults are 
many: he is perpetually insecure, holds grudges, distrusts his intimates, 
fears to love, is thoughtless and a prig.  And he learns slowly if at all; the 
marital crisis at the end of the third volume is the result of tiresome 
attitudes that he should have outgrown in volume one.
 
I came very near to not reading past the first volume. What teased me back 
was Ore's imagination. Weak though the writing was, her aliens tugged at 
me. They are a good-hearted, courageous, likable crew and Ore has imagined 
them into high relief. I found that I wanted to know more about them and 
their unlikely Federation.  They bumble and agonize like humans, yet the 
distinctive character of each species has been carefully and credibly 
worked out.  So too are the personalities of the main characters: Black 
Amber the ambitious polititian; Karriaagzh the crafty, visionary executive; 
Rhyodolite the tease; Alex who has stayed too long in Berkeley and gone 
native -- all nonterrestrials with fur, feathers, or unhuman musculature, 
yet with reassuringly human failings.
 
In the end what is truly distinctive about Ore's vision is that she portrays 
an interstellar society that does not rely for its success on better hardware, 
but only on good will and constant striving for better understanding of 
others.  She depicts a government whose response to armed attack is to 
kidnap a few of the opposition and put them out among its citizens as 
unwilling house guests, in hopes of learning how better to treat with 
them. This is to paint as exotic a political vision as anyone has ever 
proposed in science fiction.  The Federation has hardware and to spare, but 
chooses to rule by the more difficult method of achieving concensus across 
every barrier of species or culture.  It is hard to dislike a writer brave 
enough to put forward such a speculation, especially when she has 
peopled it with such inventive characters.

From archive (archive)
From: [email-masked] (Evelyn C. Leeper)
Organization: AT&T, Middletown NJ
Subject: BECOMING ALIEN by Rebecca Ore
Date: 7 Mar 88 22:41:16 GMT

			BECOMING ALIEN by Rebecca Ore
		       Tor, 1988, 0-812-54794-2, $3.50.
		      A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper

     The science of linguistics has been largely neglected by science
fiction, so I found it an odd coincidence (or for the Jungians out there,
just another example of synchronicity) that I read in quick succession two
novels dealing with the subject, the more so because one is a new novel and
the other a four-year-old novel that I recently decided to read.  The latter
is NATIVE TONGUE, which I have commented on previously.  The former is Rebecca
Ore's BECOMING ALIEN.

     BECOMING ALIEN is a "Ben Bova Discovery" and considerably better than
the two previous entries in that series.  (You'd never know it from the
cover, of course, which rips off ENEMY MINE to a fare-thee-well.)  Tom fins
a crashed alien ship and tries to save the occupant.  He fails, but the
beings who come after the alien decide he is not entirely xenophobic and
recruit him for the Space Academy.  Part--a very important part--of his
training involves learning alien languages, and to do this effectively he
must have his brain modified to cope with them.  There is a lot more to his
"becoming alien," but it's all connected to language.

     Ore does an excellent job of conveying alien ideas and concepts,
although I found her choice of main character (the brother of a small-time
drug dealer) to be less than totally satisfying.  Bova and Spider Robinson
both compare BECOMING ALIEN to THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, which may be
overdoing it a bit, but it is a novel worth reading.  (I would say it is
infinitely better than NATIVE TONGUE, but that goes without saying.)

					Evelyn C. Leeper
					(201) 957-2070
				UUCP:	ihnp4!mtgzy!ecl
				ARPA:	[email-masked]
					Copyright 1988 Evelyn C. Leeper