Sometimes very big elaborate novels start with a simple or basic story prompt that is hard to believe was the seed of a very, very different finished product. It seems to me that is what happened here with Hella, it seems it started life as a desire to write about Dinosaurs. There are only a few ways to do that in hard sci-fi. Your options are time travel or invent a world, and a hard sci-fi take on a colony world has been done before but Gerrold brings an experience and a sharp science-fictional focus that makes this a fun trip.
Hella as a title is funny but in the context of this very well-thought-out colony world, it makes hella sense. This is the story of a human colony on a world that is what Texas likes to think it is – a place where everything is bigger. Trees a mile tall, roaming dinosaurs everywhere, huge animals, mountains, and a gravity unlike ours, a year longer than one on earth, seasons that last a greater amount of time. Gerrold uses lots of subtle and smart world-building to make it feel real. It comes with an appendix that gives a hint of how much deeper Gerrold has thought about this even beyond what we see on the page.
One of the major themes of this novel is laid out on page 209 when two characters talk about watching “old” (modern to us) Science Fiction movies.
“When I was little, Jamie and I used to watch movies every Seven-day, almost all morning long. Sometimes we would have friends over. We liked old movies best because we would make it a contest to see who could find the most mistakes. The obvious one was the “Earth-like planet.” You don’t get points for that one, it was too obvious. Jamie liked to say, “There are no Earth-like planets. There are only lazy writers.”
This exchange is David Gerrold on the nose telling the reader the mission statement. He might as well underline it or typed it in BOLD letters. While it might be a little bit of a round peg being forced into a square hole, I like that he came out and said it. It is a little thing however if I an editor working on this book, I might have ended that paragraph at too obvious. The rest is clearly David Gerrold talking not Jamie.
Hella is a first-person narrative and anyone who follows my reviews knows it is my least favorite of the story-telling paths. When it is done well, I forget about it and lose myself in the story. The story is being told by Kyle, and he helps really elevate the novel. Kyle is an augmented human and at times he comes off as a super-genius, a Spock-like character. The reader paying close attention will notice that Kyle is not neuro-typical, this is welcome in Science Fiction. At the same time, it is not exactly groundbreaking. I have like many others have grown to the conclusion that Spock is on the spectrum. That inclusion could and should be important. I know that is a digression back to Hella.
Kyle is a very relatable character; he is curious and somewhat emotionally unavailable. Gerrold plays with this is very smart and subtle ways throughout the narrative. No matter what else the novel is it is far from the stereotype of idea-driven sci-fi. All those elements are there but the characters are just as strong. In that sense, I forgot about the POV most of the time because I was involved in the story.
The way the narrative is structured the story starts with a slow build that is focused on world-building if the in’s and outs of what makes Hella interesting is boring to you this might seem slow. Personally, I didn’t need the plot to kick in so soon. Because the fictional and creative alien ecology was gee-whiz enough to keep me turning pages. There are so many neat elements to this part of the story I was totally in.
David Gerrold is not a lazy science fiction writer. The ecology and science of Hella are so detailed and researched. I think Dr.Moya McTier of Exolore (a podcast where they just make-up planets) would be impressed. It is the kind of world you wish you could see on screen.
“Ahead in the distance, scattered clusters of pink-trees waved in the wind. They stuck out of the yellow sea, towering thirty or forty meters high. The pink-trees are very thin, they don’t have low branches, only high ones with broad leaves of orange and red, sometimes shading all the way down to deep purple, sometimes so dark they look black. But their long necks are mostly pink that is why they are called pink-trees.
They aren’t really trees. Even though they are rooted, they’re part animal, and instead of bark they have layers of pale skin, thin as paper.”
The balance of ideas and characters are the greatest strengths of Hella, but Gerrold has also thought about the political and social drama that this colony world would deal with. In the second half, we get murder and conflict. This stuff works but it may come in too late for some readers. I didn’t have this problem. I think Gerrold was right to give us time to learn Hella and Kyle.
This novel has a few LGBTQ themes and what excites me about that is David Gerrold while being out for decades is a part of the science fiction old guard. There is an excellent movement towards radical and unique voices in the genre so none of this is shocking or Hella-shattering. That said it has extra meaning coming from a veteran of the scene who has been around long enough to have invented Tribbles.
Characters in Hella can and do change genders whenever they want to and, in this future, and this planet it is delightfully just a thing. I think the differences are more biological than any kind of assigned gender roles. Consider this from page 89…
“Mom is old-fashioned about babies. Maybe it’s because she was born male, but changed so she could experience her own pregnancy with Jamie, and then with me. I asked her why she never changed back and she said she was having more fun this way, she said I should make up my own mind…”
There are some really forward-looking ideas here about gender., Sci-fi has been dealing with this for decades most famously in Leguin’s Left Hand of Darkness. Progression and time have aged some of Leguin’s finer points to the point she had to ret-con some of the gender politics in later novellas and stories. The generation gap however does rear its head when this passage continues. The problem is this passage is followed up with a binary affirmative statement.
“Mom says it is a good thing for people to know both sides. It makes people happier.”
It seems that on a planet where gender is so fluid that pronouns and s/he titles would be less meaningful than ever. This was one aspect of the novel where I was taken out of the story. Kyle our main character was born female even uses his gender as a tool to annoy his mother. While this seems like very accurate teenage behavior the gender politics seem clumsy here. It was the one and only thing that I didn’t really enjoy about the novel.
Indeed Fox News TV hosts would hate this novel for normalizing gender non-conformity. If this book was mainstream enough, they would rail against it like they do gender-neutral bathrooms. That said I think the modern sci-fi community would find the novel's binary affirmative language super cringey, I mean I did. I loved the novel overall but it is a thing that really highlights a generation gap.
Hella overall is a fine piece of Science fiction. Gerrold is an author I greatly respect, who is responsible for one the greatest time-travel novels ever and the popular and uncompleted series The War Against the Chtorr. The most impressive thing to me about this novel is the balance. The world-building may seem to dominant the story to some readers but I found the characters and plot to be just as compelling.
This book is for Science fiction readers and I am not sure it will crossover to the mainstream like a Old Man’s War for example. That said if you are taping your foot waiting for more Chtorr stuff take a trip to Hella. I really enjoyed the experience.
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