372 pages, Hardcover
Published February, 1986 by Arbor House Publishing Company
John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (1987)
It is strange to realize that the first books I discovered purely through Google searches are now books I read decades in the past. A Door into Ocean is a book I was recently told is a SF feminist classic, but I honestly didn’t know others knew of it. I thought I had found a rare obscure gem. In 2000, I was volunteering at an anarchist bookstore in my hometown and a customer fresh off reading Leguin’s classic The Dispossessed asked me if any SF books were considered eco-feminist. A Google search uncovered this novel and Starhawk’s Fifth Sacred Thing, both of which I decided to read.
While on a road trip with my friend’s band, slinging T-shirts I read this book mostly on a drive back from the east coast. I remember liking it, thinking it presented powerful ideas. I remember having a long conversation with the woman looking for eco-feminist SF. Twenty-four years later when I was asked if I had an interest in being on a panel about the book at a conference I said yes, because I loved the idea of having a reason to re-read it.
I have also invited Joan Slonczewski' (JS after this) on the podcast so we are going to get lots of chances to celebrate this novel that is worthy of rediscovery.
ADIO is a fantastic work of multilayered science fiction that deserves to be remembered as an eco-feminist classic. I am not sure the mainstream SF canon remembers as much as it should. A comparison seems cheap, but if I had to make one it has the ecology-centered world-building of a novel like Dune, the political strength of a Dispossessed complete with a moon and planetary division that feels like homage to Leguin. It has a bit of “Way of Water.” The final hundred pages take on a different energy that was closer to what I wanted out of Ron Goulart’s SF comedy Flux, which was about protest movements written in the early 1970s.
The novel is focused on the Sharers of Shora, a nation of women living in a series of intentional communities called Rafts like floating communes. This far-future culture has long been separated from humanity on a distant moon. They are pacifists, deep ecologists who are intensely connected to the cycle of the ocean on their world. The comparisons to Dune are many, because the Sharers were founded by highly advanced founders, and as connected to the ecology, and as primitive as some of their ideals are, they are skilled in biological sciences and reproduce by parthenogenesis. The culture has no males—one of the reasons they have managed to sustain their utopia.
The conflicts of the novel erupt when a civilization from a nearby world is pressured by the (not so subtly named) Patriarch of the vast interstellar empire wants Shora to develop their ocean world. The Sharers are not exactly the native culture, victim to colonial expansion. They were humans. The Sharers however are so integrated with their world that the characters debate if they were ever human or if the patriarch has to respect their rights.
“Forgive me, she said withdrawn out irony, “I forgot that nonhumans are of no interest to the patriarch.”
“It's not that simple. Their genetic character allows a possibility that they are descended from human stuff.”
“More than a possibility,” she corrected with Ill-concealed contempt. “But who cares? 1,000 fools believe a lie and it's as good as truth.” (P.32)
Of course, the Patriarch comes to exploit, no different from the capitalists or colonialists of our world who are more than willing to exploit humans. The clash of cultures comes later in the novel, but it would mean little if the novel didn’t paint Shora vividly. JS being a biologist means the biology and ecology of the planet. The connection between the Sharers is everything.
“A mother is born when her child comes.”
Quote or if I swim in the sea, does the sea swim in me?”
“Does it not?” (P.37)
The characters who grew up on the rafts close to the ocean are important but Spinel, who grew up off-world becomes an important POV on the world of the novel. The Patriarch of Torr is the empire that Spinel comes from and if not for him early in the novel you might feel you were reading a fantasy novel, not Science Fiction.
“The man had no face there was only a pale, blank Oval where his face should be. “it's a servo!” Spinel was delighted. It was said that mechanical servitors did all the hard work in Iridus, Leaving the nobles free for leisure.” (p.37)
This comes back into the novel in the second half when the Patriarch invade…
“The next day, that Lady Berenice walked the skystreet of Center Way towards palace Iridium, ignoring solicitous hangcars as usual. Without newscubes to tell her, she might not have known that Iridus swarmed with the Pyrrholite refugees this winter and that food riots overran the older sections. (P.191)
Strange to think of these world-building details as grounding the novel, and Spinel himself grounds ADIO less in reality but in the future we come to expect in a typical science fiction novel. Spinel never comes to fully understand the Sharers culture but enough that he can “translate” when the oppressors come. JS gives us this novel’s take on the clash of cultures.
The larger galaxy is interesting, not a focus of the novel but important details nonetheless.
“Oh, no, Starling; I used to run the malachite ship. At your service, here to Torr decades at lightspeed were but days to me.”
Spinel looked up.
“You See, I was just a starling like you when my home world -” he bird whistled the name, “burnt to a cinder in the brother wars. After that, why, I wanted to get as far away as time and space allowed. So, I took the Torran route and ran it for centuries period until they retired me to this hole.” he said.
“The brother wars that was before the Patriarch. What, are you one of the primes?” those men live like gods this whole troll was one?”
Jack puffed his chest out. “that's right, I'm a prime. I'm older than the patriarch of Torr and near as old as Shora. I was there when the new age began when they pulled all the plans together like lobsters in the trap. I can tell you.” (P.49)
The name Brother wars is not so subtlety named for men, implies a conflict that women smartly stayed out of. It would explain why the rulers of this empire would be called “The Patriarch.” And the idea of centuries-old Primes, makes sense in far-future interstellar civilizations. Of course the Sharers are not interested in all that. They have their world and choose to leave a wider planet spanning civilizations.
The culture of the sharers dominates much of the early pages of the novel. That is what the title means.
“No, silly,” said Flossa. “it's for the fish you ate, and for Rilwen and the others, whose bones will sink to ‘land.’ Shora said long ago that our song would help speed each soul through the last door.” Spinel’s scalp trickled. “What's it a door into?”
“Who knows? That's why it's last. You can't share it; You go alone, and never return to share the telling.” (p.141)
Everything is shared except that last door, and I suspect JS is implying this story, this novel is a Door into Ocean. A way to understand their lives, and the culture in this novel. For the second half of the novel to work you have to understand or relate to the way the Sharers live. This Utopia has to be challenged, that is the nature of the conflict. Spinel caught between both worlds is the novel’s view on the conflict.
“Spinel was thinking, he should have known from the start it would never work out. They were a race of man-haters, after all. No wonder the traders cheated them.
Lystra added, “The traders soon learned not to share rape. We applied ointment that stung on contact, so they shared the pain.”
Spinel replied, “We don't put up with rapists unveiled on. We put them away, or even hasten death for the worst ones.” (P.163)
The Sharers even as victims of brutal crimes can’t understand how the Patriarch deal with those being wronged. Their resistance is non-violent because that is the only way they have to fight back.
In the pages that stretch from 200-300 the novel shows us the typical colonial invasions, the taking of prisoners, and the misunderstanding of culture. This stuff is good but the last hundred pages when the Sharers non-violently resist is when the novel really cooks.
“Two days after the first prisoners were taken, natives at another raft system 100 kilometers away appeared at a Garrison asking after their sisters. Visitation soon spread to other bases, halfway around the globe. Even more annoying, the natives would not leave when put off, but grew in numbers and stayed by day and night until guards hauled them out to sea” (p.231)
ADIO is a novel built on the influence of the sciences and social movements that Joan Sloanczewski was a part of. Part of the non-violent Quaker movement resisting nuclear arms. In my interview with JS she focused on the use of language and how the Sharers spoke and how it related to their environment.
“We have to get a handle on these natives. They must have a weakness.”
“It's pathological,” Jade said. “They just don't know what fear is.”
“They have a word for it.”
“They think they do, but it's on a different scale from ordinary fear.” (p. 251)
The simple fact is that in their culture they didn’t understand or even have words for conceptslike exploitation.
“I don't know the sharer words for order or obey.”
Protector said nothing. Apparently, he did not know the words either.” (p. 282)
ADIO is a novel with two beating hearts, the world-building in a biological sense pumps blood into the second half which is resistance. The novel has many natural immunities to many of the narrative flaws of post-colonialist resistance stories. There is no outside savior and Sharers don’t have to forego their ethics to fight back. The most powerful moment of the book comes on pages 289-290.
Realgar of
the Patriarch, tries to as he sees it reason with Merwen about how many Sharers
will die to non-violently resist. In doing so even leverages the safety of her
daughter.
“Does she realize,” said Realgar, “that many more sisters will die?”
“Do you realize that others will die?” Spinel said Hollowly.
But many Sharers have died, physically, since the beginning of time.” (page 289)
Despite the pain, she is committed to the struggle. Sloanczewski studied the history of these movements and many of these scenes quote directly from the history of movements. How different is it to have novel influenced by Dune that ends not in an epic battle of guns but willpower. What greater expression of feminist theory in science fiction?
Realgar not only wants them to fight, so he has an excuse to kill them but he is asking them erase the thing that makes there evolution with this new complete. The Patriarch struggles because breathmicrobes that make ocean life possible brings disease to the invaders.
“Spinel said “He wants you to chase out the breathmicrobes.”
Merwen opened her eyes and considered this. “A sad wish, Spinel. If Valans intend to live in our ocean, surely they wish to swim as well as possible.” (p.290)
Life on Shora is something these women evolved to do, and life itself informs their ethics. Very few novels can convey radical ethics from pages 1 to 400 in the way this novel does.
“If we kill, we lose our will to choose, our shared protection of Shora, our ability to shape life. Our humanity would slip away, beyond even your own. ( p.354)
Modern science fiction has plenty of radical political statements. If this novel reminds me of anything modern it is the fiction of S.B. Divya, whose Meru about living starships played with biology and ethics in similar ways. I can only speak for myself but the mission and message of this novel is as vital today as when it was released.
I speak always of communication across generations through the novels and stories of science fiction. As our climate collapses worse than it ever has, A Door Into Ocean is more important than ever.
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