Floating Worlds by Cecelia Holland
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Cecilia Holland is not a science-fiction writer. Any person familiar with the genre will notice her lack of grasp on some of the fan's favorite science-fiction features, mainly the scientific and the gadget sides. The novel use of paraphernalia is ridiculously poor and stamps it irremediably from the seventies: if we were to believe Holland, videophones and air buses would be the only technical innovations humanity could come up with in almost 2,000 years !
This aside, Floating World is a powerful evocation of the female condition - one that makes the best possible use of a utopic / dystopic Solar system. All planets from Venus to Uranus have been populated. In the most remote ones lives a mutated human population, organized in a male-based, extremely hierarchic, fascist society. This society happens to control the biggest source of energy of all the Solar system. This is not the only feature reminiscent of a Saudi Arabia-like civilization : in Uranus too polygamy is a men-only privilege, in Uranus too their wives have to go veiled in public.
Paula Mendoza is a small black woman who grew up on Earth. There, like on any other planet of the Solar system, humanity lives in bubbles. Pollution has rendered the atmosphere unlivable to human beings. Under the massive globes of glass covering London or what is left of New York, Earth's society evolved to a form of pacifist egalitarian anarchy : people are poor, social bounds are loose, passions are low, life has little prospect to offer other than one of chilled-out, low-key survival.
But Paula is ambitious. She wants wealth. And where to find it other than in Uranus ?
The shock between the small, black, anarchist, ambitious, incredibly resilient Earth woman and the big, sur-human, machist, fascist leaders of Uranus echoes throughout the 630 pages of the novel with a strength that never weakens. Ten pages from the end I found myself still entrapped into the action and unable to guess what the final situation would be. The only reason why I wouldn't give this book the 5 stars it deserves in so many aspects is the writing itself: dry, quick, factual, unemotional, it misses opportunities to develop landscapes promising to be stunning -the quick glances we get at the outer planets, at the cities of Uranus, made me long for more ; their dark, monochrome beauty deserves to be put in pictures, in a form or another-.
However, regardless of how much my romantic French soul suffered from poetry starvation, I can see how the dryness of the style serves to reflect the harshness of Paula's condition. The novel covers most of her adult life: kidnapped, beaten, "harem-ed", enslaved, raped, constantly despised, hated, bullied, she earns every single atom of respect she gets the hardest way. Paula's survival through constant struggle is her victory - the victory of the resilience of the oppressed, of men over merciless gods, of Anarchy over dictatorship.
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