review of
Orson Scott Card & Kathryn H. Kidd's Lovelock
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 25, 2015

Another "too long" review - this time about a bk I didn't even like that much (but still found 'redeeming' value in). See the full review, called, not aprticularly cleverly, "LoveLessLock", here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/395715-lovelesslock

Some popular fiction, Science Fiction in particular, is sometimes notorious for having misleading covers. If the contents of the bk aren't likely to completely appeal to the marketing niche then a cover that does appeal to that marketing niche might be called for. Hence, this bk has a hi-techie 'outer-space adventure' look to it: there's a spaceship approaching a space stn w/ the Earth & the Moon in the background.. - &, yeah, there's some of that in the bk.. but it's mainly contextualizing to enable plot devices.

Otherwise, the bk's pure 'Peyton Place'. How many readers of today remember that expression? Is it still in use? "Peyton Place" was, 1st, a 1956 novel, &, 2nd, the 1st American Soap Opera on primetime TV from 1964 to 1969. It was a very popular series full of drama & sexual themes. As an expression, something was "Peyton Place" if it was melodramatic. This bk isn't Space Opera, despite its largely taking place off-Earth, it's Soap Opera that isn't selling soap.

I've seen Card's name on bk covers, I didn't know anything about him, the bks always struck me as probably lo-end SciFi b/c they're usually serials - serials don't have to be conceptually lo-end but they're often marketing niche products meant to suck the reader in in the same way that soap operas do - thru engagement w/ cliff-hanger situations for protagonists, that sort of thing. As such, I didn't have much interest in him. I'm more interested in bks w/ substantial ideas rather than consumer-engagement psychology.

Nonetheless, I'll usually give a SF writer a whirl - esp if I get one of their bks cheap, as I no doubt did this one. I'd never heard of Kidd before. Sure enuf, this is the 1st bk of a trilogy. Hopefully, I'll be resistant to the psychological manipulation & I won't read the following 2 bks. I don't think they'll be worth my time.

There's a "Foreword: On Collaboration" by Card in wch he writes about some of the forces behind such bks: "I realized this when a book packager approached me with the idea of putting together a series of "collaborations." My job would be to come up with a plot outline and some basic world creation for science fiction novel. then a young, unknown (i.e., desperate) writer would be engaged to do the actual word-by-word writing." (p ix) Fair enuf, he acknowledges the "collaboration" as a business strategy.

He goes on to explain that he chose Kidd b/c she "had been my friend since back in the days when she was a reporter for the Desert News and I was an assistant editor at The Ensign in Salt Lake City. I had been a witness at her wedding to Clark Kidd. And I had goaded her into writing a Mormon novel to help me launch my small publishing company, Hatrack River Publications. that first novel of hers, Paradise Vue, has gone through three printings and has given a new shape to Mormon publishing". (pp xi-xii) I admit to almost putting the bk down &/or trashing it immediately. A Mormon SF novel?! Gimme a fucking break.

Still, once I start reading something, I usually give a bk a fair chance. I even have a peripheral scholarly interest in Christinane attempts to co-opt Science Fiction in what I consider to be an attempt to reel-in believers thru popular media that currently provides mythology that wd've previously been mainly provided by religion.

So, eg, I have a bk that I haven't read yet called Cloning Christ. I've watched movies like Left Behind & Lost City Raiders. None of what I've checked out has been particularly compelling. At a more serious, non-SF, end of the movie-making spectrum there's Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski's Dekalog based on the "Ten Commandments".

I actually expected to like & respect the Kieslowski work b/c I'd seen
some of his movies around 1995 & thought they were well-done. HOWEVER, checking him out again in the 2010s I've found his work utterly insufferable. They're so obviously designed to make their viewers feel sick & 'sinful' that they're just sickening. In fact, for me, they reinforced the feeling that Christians are the real Satanists, the people ever on the move to degrade & enslave their fellow humans to make a buck. I'm sure Kieslowski got plenty of money from the Catholic Church.

In an online article ( http://www.christiantoday.com/article/ten.amazing.christian.rapture.and.apocalyp... ) called "Ten amazing Christian rapture movies that culture Left Behind", author Martin Saunders writes about the DVD packaging for A Thief in the Night: "The first of four films about the rapture, presumably involving a big clock, a van, and a woman with a melting face. If that's not scary enough to get you into church, nothing is." - & there you have it: the idea is to scare you into church. Forget about having some sort of ethics that binds you to yr fellow human beings, that's ultimately beside the point, eh?!

Card concludes his foreword by claiming "we wanted you to know that whatever flaws this book might have did not result from having a junior writer do the real work on an outline written by a senior one. This a true collaboration from beginning to end." (p xiii) That might be the case but it doesn't really seem that way to me. Given that I haven't read either of their work before but I 'know' that Card's a SF writer & that Kidd, before this, was a straight novelist it seems fair to me to conclude that the outline context is Card's & the soap opera drama filler is Kidd's. In other words, sorry, Card, I'm not convinced by yr claim.

What was ultimately strange for me in this &, therefore, somewhat engaging, is that the bk is an atheist's 'nightmare': religious people being launched off-planet in an "Ark" to colonize another planet w/ all the stupidest behavior - not their stated motive, of course, but the gist of a major part of it. What made it particularly strange is that almost all of the narrator's observations about human nature critique the worst characteristics of religious people that I noticed as a child growing up in almost exclusively Christinane surroundings.

The narrator is an enhanced monkey who's been programmed to be loyal to the scientist that he serves as a "witness". The monkey's isn't necessarily religious (it's somewhat ambiguous) & he's definitely snarky:

"The most obnoxious mourner was, of course, Mamie, the she-human who gave birth to Red. At least Stef's chatter showed that he had mastered the rudiments of speech. Mamie went around touching everything, caressing it, as if she thought by stroking the pewter tea set on the dining room buffet she could wake it up and entice it to tag along with us. Touching—grooming—that's a primate behavior that I indulge in. But I'd never groom a metal pitcher." - p 5

Right away, we get a sample of the intelligence-enhanced monkey's contempt for the family matriarch. What surprised me was that the observations so neatly jive w/ my own observations about human nature at its most underhanded & hypocritical & manipulative & that women are esp targeted. The authors don't take an explicitly Mormon standpoint, a central character, Carol Jeanne, is Catholic & she bids farewell to her nun sister before leaving Earth:

""I know your covenant is for a lifetime," said Carol Jeanne, "but don't you think you can serve God out there, too? Don't you think people will need you there?" And then her voice breaking a little, she added the words that were hardest to say. Don't you think I'll need you?"" - p 9

A "covenant is for a lifetime", what a perfect way to trap well-meaning people into slavery. Shd they take the Inquisition w/ them off-planet too? B/c, let's not forget, Giordano Bruno was tortured & burnt at the stake in public by the Catholics for contesting the Aristotelian notion that the Earth was the center of the universe, right? I mean, every good Catholic knew that the Sun revolved around the Earth. Just try using that belief when you're making the math calculations for getting a spaceship off-planet. No, the space pioneers 'need' a nun along like a hole-in-the-head, a trepanation hole in the head.

Still, what's weird about this bk is that if both the authors are Mormon why are they using a monkey as the narrator? & why is the narrator saying things like this?:

"I had my own ideas about what God, if he existed, must think of me. If he had wanted creatures like me to exist, he would have arranged it himself. There was no one like me when Adam was naming the beasts. If there was anyone like me in the mythical Garden, it was a certain talkative snake." - p 12

So what exactly is the authorial POV? Are they using the monkey & the monkey's perspective to ultimately debase the intelligence of the monkey's POV?, the potential atheistic/scientific POV? Or are they just Mormons who're accepting of the Mormon society they live in? Maybe going for the Mormon dollar?

When I think of Mormons, I think of the murder of Travis Victor Alexander, presumably by his ex-girlfriend Jodi Ann Arias, & of all the sexual twistiness surrounding the Mormon angle on that. I also think of the movie Licensed to Kill about gay-bashers in prison, most of whom seemed to be gay themselves, &, specifically about a child who was adopted into a Mormon family who grew up to be a closet gay man who turned into a killer of gay men - largely perverted by his adopted family's suppression of his sexual identity. In other words, I think of Mormons as suppressing healthy sexuality in a way similar to the way Catholics do it - the result being a world full of child-molesting priests.

The funny thing about this bk, is that its 2 Mormon authors don't deny this sort of thing, they even seem to revel in its drama - so why stay religious? Do they think that it's basic human nature to be so confused & hateful? & that it's better to allow religion to control you b/c you're too stupid to 'improve' otherwise? I'm reminded of an anti-anarchist cliché to the effect of 'without government people would just kill each other!' Well, maybe not, maybe government & religion are actually 2 of the main forces that increase the killing. Modern day Islam certainly seems to prove that point - & let's not forget the mania for conquering that Christinanity has. This bk is full of references to "God":

"The shuttle was just like the suborbital space cruisers that ran the one hour intercontinental express routes. The same fetishistic cleanliness. The same simple opulence that made you think you were flying to meet God instead of just going to another conference." - p 14

From my POV, the authors really nail manipulative behavior that most people don't seem to want to talk about:

"As for comforting Emmy, however, that was not to be. Emmy wasn't fully human yet, but she could certainly tell the difference between Mommy and not-Mommy, and Mamie was definitely in the not-Mommy category. The crying continued without slackening.

""You dear child, there must be something I can do with you," she said. There was now an edge to her voice. Patience was wearing thin. After all this trouble to get across the aisle, it would hardly do if she were shown to be ineffectual as a grandmother." - p 23

Maybe this bk is just catty but the motives of most of the main adult women are completely hypocritical & false - just like they were to me as a child growing up in a Christinane environment. THEN, there's the debased Pavlovian manipulation of the "witnesses", the non-humans:

"I knew my feelings of persecution were absurd. I wasn't being persecuted in particular. I simply belonged to an oppressed species. Which, in Earth at least, included every species that wasn't human. Most nonhumans didn't mind, of course. Most
nonhumans didn't even know they were being exploited, domesticated, dominated, and spiritually annihilated by the master race. Only I and a handful like me." - pp 31-32

In other words, the authors are using the enhanced monkey narrator to put forth an animal rights position - one that I, an atheist (& carnivore), personally, agree w/ - & one that's as antithetical to Christinanity as much as Bruno's positions were to the Catholic Church. Humans, according to the bible, were created in God's image - end of story, beginning of justification of oppression by divine rights. So, what are the authors doing here? Are they in favor of animal rights? If so, how do they jive it w/ being Christinane? Or are they, as I've hinted at above, simply co-opting contemporary, in this case ethical, positions in the interest of making the church seem OK again?

The snarkiness doesn't stop w/ jabbing at the phony passive aggressive women, let's take a stab at the French, eh? "The person in charge was French; therefore she felt no need to explain anything to anybody." (p 34) No doubt ALL French people are like that. NOT.

Most Science Fiction manages to envision a future in wch the banal control-freak religions of the writer's age are going, going, gone - the end of a Dark Age. Not this bk. The monkey's perspective on the Ark:

"Dividing communities by language made sense to me. But it was a typical human absurdity that, after language, the next important set of divisions was religious. Muslims, Buddhists, Catholics, Jews, Hindus, Espiritistas: All had their own villages. Those groups with too few practitioners to maintain villages of their own—Baha'i, for instance, and Sikh, animist, atheist, Mormon, Mithraist, Druse, native American tribal religions, Jehovah's Witnesses—were either thrown together in a couple of catch-all villages or were "adopted" as minorities within fairly compatible of tolerant villages of other faiths.

"The whole thing struck me as absurd. Why didn't they simply limit the colony to rational human beings who were above the petty concerns of religion, and spare themselves all these meaningless dogmas and hostilities?

"The answer, of course, was that they couldn't have found enough rational human beings on Earth to fill the Ark. A man might be a brilliant scientist, but he was still a Hindu, and there was no hope of him living peacefully with a Sikh; or he was a Jew, and the Muslims would allow him only second-class citizenship at best. A certain woman might be the greatest gaiologist in the world, and perfectly rational, but she had grown up Catholic, and so her Episcopalian mother-in-law would always look down on her and "her people."

"Even most of the "rational" people—the ones who claimed to not have a religion—were just as chauvinistic about their irreligion, sneering at and ostracizing the believers just the way the believers treated nonmembers of their own groups. It's a human universal. My tribe is above all other tribes. That's what religion is—just another name for tribalism in a supposedly civilized world." - pp 37-38

It seems that the authors are putting their own thoughts into the monkey's 'mouth' - but, if that's so, why are they still Mormons (if they are)? & do they really find humanity so hopeless? I think there's hope for humanity & that religion is one of the biggest obstacles. Nonetheless, as an atheist I'd never call for the suppression of religion or the murder of someone based on their religion. That, of course, distinguishes me from Fundamentalist Christinanes & Moslems the world over whose blood-lust against atheists is called to my attn frequently enuf.

The mayor of the main characters' village on the Ark is also seen as disgusting. The size of her breasts is frequently alluded to in an insulting way. "She reached out a hand. Constricted by gaudy rings, here fingers were as bloated as sausages. I was tired. I couldn't stop my reflexes. I bit her." (p 40) "You can't be serious." Penelope's chest quivered when she talked. "It would be an affront to everyone in Mayflower Village. People will be here from all sixty villages, and Mayflower has to feed them all. Though I suppose you're so important that people will overlook it if you don't do your fair share."" (p 42)

The endless passive aggressiveness. & all this shitty human behavior is being exported to another world. Great. Just fucking great. I recently review Ron Moody's The Four Fingers of Death in wch the 1st Mars colony falls apart due to somewhat less banal human shittiness (see my review here: "The Middle Finger of Life": https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/394663-the-middle-finger-of-life ) but in Lovelock it's like the main hopes for humanity's future are such a small minority that one might as well give up hope from the get-go.

""There is a lift," Penelope said, turning her most helpful face toward Red and Mamie. "For heavy loads." Since Pink hardly qualified, the remark seemed vaguely pointed at Mamie—and from the look of faint disgust on here face, Mamie didn't miss the barb, either. It was pretty absurd, coming from Penelope; although Mamie was round, she was small enough that each of Penelope's breasts probably outweighed her." - p 46

Catty, & not convincingly the viewpoint of a snarky enhanced monkey, more probably the viewpoint of a woman author whose breasts aren't large. Then again, it is fiction. The authors take a dig at Presbyterians & Mormons both. That was vaguely 'fun':

""We're pretty open-minded here. Presbyterians are tolerant folks. All religions are the same, anyway, as long as they're Christian. In fact, we even have three Jewish families who live with us, because Bethel Village is too Orthodox for them, and there are also some Mormons because nobody else wanted them. They have their own services, of course, but otherwise you'd never know they belonged to a cult."" - p 51

As I was reading this, I kept thinking that the story wd get past the petty human nastiness & the religion & get to the science fiction part, but NOOOOO.. it goes on.. & on.. & constitutes the bulk of the bk's contents:

""I was a prayer partner of Odie Lee's," the woman said. "She was always the first to know who had a problem and lead the prayers on their behalf."

"I heard another woman's voice mutter in the row behind us, "That's because her husband couldn't keep his mouth shut." Someone shushed at here. "Cyrus told her everything we ever said to him in confidence."" - p 62 ( )

On the Ark, a colonyship bound outward across the stars, not everyone is a volunteer - or even human. Lovelock is a capuchin monkey engineered from conception to be the perfect servant: intelligent, agile, and devoted to his owner. He is a "witness", privileged to spend his days and nights recording the life of one of Earth’s most brilliant scientists via digital devices implanted behind his eyes.

But Lovelock is something special among witnesses. He’s a little smarter than most humans: smart enough to break through some of his conditioning, smart enough to feel the bonds of slavery - and want freedom.

SIX REASONS WHY YOU’LL LOVE ‘LOVELOCK’!

I must read and re-read it:
Lovelock is a book that I read many years ago, in its hardback version, and these last weeks, I’ve re-read it, in its eBook version (I lost the printed book during a move).
I had felt a lot of pleasure reading it in the past, but during my last read, this pleasure was really exacerbated! Is it because, reaching an age of half a century, I’ve read it with a more experienced, mature mind? One thing is sure for me: the author wrote a text with a great depth, about the main character of the novel.

Not an ordinary protagonist:
And really, what a character…
A capuchin monkey flying toward the stars!
Well, not an ordinary male capuchin monkey, no… an “enhanced” one, genetically engineered by humans of the future. He is intelligent, efficient… but all these improvements have not been made to give to this capuchin monkey called Lovelock any personal advantage.
Lovelock is what is called a Witness, an animal which must follow a human being everywhere, in the case of the story a female celebrated Scientist, Carole Jeanne. But in fact, Lovelock is more a slave, a possession, like a personal toaster. His goal, for which he has been conditioned, is to please the Gaialogist (a Scientist seeing the ecology of a planet as a unique living being), and to notably record her life. That’s why micro cameras have been inserted behind the retinas of the monkey, recording her life in a memory bank, and the transfer of the data accumulated on external memories and TV screens, via a computer cable extending out of Lovelock’s head.
In this far future ear, it is customary for humans to have their witness with them, and when Carole Jeanne decides to help terraform a far distant planet, she is part of the interstellar journey going there, with her witness, her husband, their children, and her stepfather and stepmother.

Watching ourselves another way:
What is most interesting is that we discover the story through the personal and secret diary of Lovelock. This way of narrating the story using the first person instead of the third, and especially through the observations of an animal, is original, and very profound.

Like a nod to an old text of French literature:
His analysis of our human society, his observations and remarks, have a special connotation for me, a French reader and writer. I have a double French and English-American culture, and the text remembers me vaguely about, in my French part, a story written and published by Montesquieu in 1721, “Les Lettres Persanes”, “The Persian letters”. In it, two Persian noblemen travel through the France of the 18th century, and watch it through their foreign eyes and culture.
This more than an animal, which has been given by humans a higher consciousness, nevertheless judges us, humans, and our society. It’s interesting too, here, to see how its view of us through the filter of its mind can tell us many things about ourselves.

A fight for freedom:
The capuchin monkey gets progressively aware of his slave’s condition, and progressively fights against all his conditionings. He will work for his freedom aboard the interstellar Ark which is preparing for its fantastic journey, preparing his own future.

A change of perspective
I encourage everyone to read this memorable novel… after having read it, you will no more see your life and the world the same way!
Humanly, a rewarding experience…

Post scriptum:
This story was previewed to be the first book of the Mayflower trilogy, but the second and, foremost, the third one, were never written!
I loved so much Lovelock that, for me, it’s kind of dramatic…
Please, Mister Card, write the two next books, complete the trilogy!

Post scriptum 2 : Kathryn H. Kidd cowrote the book with him, sorry it I forgot that. ( )

The story did not interest me at all.

Reminded me a lot of Card's later Ender books. Although the action takes place in an exotic setting (on a colony ship, just about to set off in search of a suitable planet) the action really has to do with small-town dramas. (leaving one's old life behind irrevocably is very traumatic to relationships, Card theorizes). Against this background, our protagonist, an "enhanced" monkey, gradually comes to a sense of self-awareness - and a desire for respect and equality.
( )