review of
Candas Jane Dorsey's A Paradigm of Earth
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 23, 2012

I got this bk marked down in price. It'd been marked down twice. I saw it on sale cheap at at least 2 bkstores. It seemed they were desperate to get rid of it. That's often a very good sign to me. My own bk, Not Necessarily NOT Very Important ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2598529-not-necessarily-not-very-important ), was remaindered almost immediately. I bought many of my favorite Mothers of Invention records in the cut-out bin at a supermarket. The sadly predictable thing about this particular bk being sold off cheap is that a probable reason for it is the way in wch the 'outsiderness' of the characters is treated.

W/ that aside, for the moment, I'm going to plunge ahead here & call this 'women's sci-fi'. Having written that, I'm already irritated w/ myself for doing so but I STILL think it's appropriate. I don't really LIKE or ENDORSE dividing any product or activity into 'men's' & women's' but I'm doing it here ANYWAY. What gives?! I certainly don't want to repeat the mistake of the SF author who wrote that 'only a man could write this' in reference to the writings of 'James Tiptree, Jr' only to have it turn out that Tiptree, the man, was actually Sheldon, the woman. What if Dorsey is actually a 'man'?

Nonetheless, I find myself strongly associating this bk w/ the work of other women SF writers: perhaps most notably Joan Slonczewski's A Door into Ocean, Pamela Sargent's Watchstar ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/869253.Watchstar ), Ursula K. LeGuin's Always Coming Home, etc.. But what's the generalization to be made here? Do I think that all SF written by women inevitably share certain characteristics? NO. I wdn't put LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven in w/ the list I just made - nor wd I put Tiptree's Brightness Falls from the Air there (others might). Are there works written by men that I might include in the list? Perhaps.. but I can't think of any at the moment.

When I 1st started reading A Paradigm of Earth I admit to being bored & even.. not caring that much to bother finishing it. Back in the 1970s when friends of mine & I got kicked out of a gay bar for "dancing too weird" (the norm was popping amyl nitrite & pretending to go down on yr partner) I used to say that I looked forward to when being hetero wd be a perversion (see Anthony Burgess' The Wanting Seed) since I was hetero but also a blatant pervert par excellence. Since then, the subcultures I move in have almost become queer-normative enuf for that dream to come true. The relevance here being that the main character here is bisexual & the world in wch she lives is the-world-in-wch-mainstream-society-somehow-thinks-it-has-the-right-to-poke-its-nosiness-into-the-consensual-sexual-practices-of-people-it-tries-to-scapegoat. So why was I bored? B/c it reeked too much of preachiness for political correctness - something that I've been inundated w/ enuf for a lifetime. BUT, it got better.

In other words, at 1st I was afraid this was a work of 'This-is-how-you-shd-think' more than it was a work of the imagination. The human-interest-story-in-wch-there-is-introduced-the-being-from-outer-space struck me as a bit thin. But, then, I ultimately liked it. Maybe the worst part about it was that the villain was so damned obvious from the get-go that it amazed me that it actually turned out to be them b/c there was no surprise to be had from THAT.

Back to the utterly unacceptable generalization that I'm fumbling for: why is this 'women's sci-fi'? B/c emphasis is more on experiences usually associated w/ women than w/ men?: the main character is a health-care worker turned child-care worker for an 'alien'. Even the rules of the commune she sets up I associate w/ the dreary matriarchal dictatorships that I've personally encountered (sorry (NOT), I'm an anarchist - I'm against patriarchy AND matriarchy).

In the end, I think the characters were well-developed & not oversimplified (except for, perhaps, the villain - the author might be advised to see the movie Licensed to Kill (1997) by Arthur Dong for a realistic look at gay bashers) & the grey areas of the interactions between the 'outsiders' & the powers-that-be were sensitively portrayed (Shd that be 'sensitivelyportrayed'? That phrase has been so overused that it practically deserves to become a compound word).

I even liked this in spite of the almost inevitable sex-w/-the-alien plot development that might've been fresh when Philip José Farmer wrote about it & was, at least, challenging when William S. Burroughs explored it, & wch might've been somewhat thrilling in Andrzej Zulawski's 1981 film Possession but wch is now well on its way to being a queer-normative cliché aimed at a demographic of people who think they've somehow invented the idea.

In short, this was too much of an 'alternative'-community-explored w/ too little of thinking-outside-the-new-box to really be more sci-fi than just-another-novel-about-social-manners-w/-some-murders-&-an-extra-terrestrial-thrown-in but at least it was well done enuf to get a 3 star rating from me anyway. ( )

I've anticipated reading this book for a long time. Dorsey's Black Wine was a book that I seriously loved, and kept recommending to people for years. Sadly, this book not only didn't live up to the expectations created by Black Wine, it frankly just wasn't very good. The premise sounds intriguing - an alien comes to earth to learn about humanity, and ends up in a co-op household full of non-conformists and artists. I liked a lot of the concepts - how the main character explores different types of love for different people through sexuality, etc. And some of the language and imagery is lovely. Still, maybe it has something to do with its near-contemporary setting (rather than the remote world of Black Wine), but the book felt more like a socio-political lecture than a novel. The messages, rather than working smoothly through the metaphors of fantasy, were very in-your-face and clunky. The characters felt like their traits were imposed on them by using a checklist (black, gay, disabled, lesbian, dancer, artist, etc.), rather than stemming from the experiences of real people. The protagonist's emotions were spoken of at great length, but didn't feel convincing. The antagonist was even more mystifying - with motivations which were nearly completely opaque, and unconvincing when admitted in an awkwardly-stuck-in, cliched confessional. The plot lacked tension, even when dramatic events were occurring. This may sound harsh, and it's probably much harsher than it would have been if I hadn't fully expected to be giving this book 5 stars - but I can't even come close to doing so. ( )

A Paradigm of Earth, by founder, and fellow SF Canada member Candas Jane Dorsey, is a remarkable work of literary science fiction.

Although the premise of first contact is not new, Dorsey brings to the discussion a complex, poetic exploration of what it means to be human. Through the characters of Blue, one of twelve aliens dropped on Earth to become the essence of humanity, and his mentor, Morgan, a woman immobilized with grief, Dorsey incarnates a story part CanLit, part SF, part crime mystery. Her characters are vivid and compelling, avoiding stereotype. Her premise suspends all disbelief with facility and elegance. The writing is tight and yet poetic; the pacing deceptively brisk. Further, Dorsey unfolds her tale without devolving to the kitsch tech-speak which is the failure, and alienation, of so many popular SF writers, and as a result Dorsey creates an emotional environment that will bring a tender heart to tears.

If you love the work of Ursula K. LeGuin, you will fall in love with this story by Candas Jane Dorsey. ( )

Will be thinking about this one for awhile. And about how I kept thinking of Blue as male, despite the author's goal to present Blue as non-gendered. Would I have felt the same if the main character had not been female? Interesting. ( )

This book was intriguing in concept, but it was just a bit over blown for me. There was too much imagery, melancholy and failed? introspection. So, while the book was interesting and enjoyable in its way I had trouble engaging with it. It felt a bit like a thought exercise rather then real people. In essence it is not really my thing, but interesting and I'm sure exactly what some people are looking to read. ( )