Reviews for POLLINATORS OF EDEN (PAN SCIENCE FICTION)

The average rating for POLLINATORS OF EDEN (PAN SCIENCE FICTION) based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-10-27 00:00:00 Eric Lamoe Every so often I semi-randomly pick up a second-hand science fiction book about which I know nothing, because otherwise one can get into canonical ruts. This one made the cut through having a cover which looked like Roger Dean after he’d been at the Bosch (have I ever mentioned how much I love Pan’s covers?), and a raised-eyebrow blurb trying not to get too overexcited while praising the lesbian scene between a human and an orchid. Because yes, this book was published in 1969 – the rudest sounding year of the sexual revolution – and boy, does it show. Early on, the pushy young researcher tells our heroine that she might as well put out because he’s going to tell everyone she did anyway – and this is treated as ‘Ooh, you are a caution!’ rather than cause to lamp him. Later, she’s slipped a soporific/aphrodisiac herb so that she won’t panic during her first act of human/plant congress – and learning this the next day, she’s happy to regard it as a sensible precaution on her companion’s part. And so on. At first, I just took this sort of thing (which like the workplace sexual harassment, and all non-spaceflight technology, seems not to have progressed between the mid-20th century and the mid-23rd) for a hilarious/horrific artefact of the time in which the book was written. Which was stupid of me, because it’s exactly the sort of assumption I rail against myself when others fall prey to it – assuming, just because a piece of art doesn’t conspicuously signal itself as highbrow, that any prejudices apparent within it are endorsed or implicitly accepted by it. Very much not so. A big part of what Boyd is getting at here is that even if humans do jack in science, ambition, our own civilisation, and fuck off to the Planet of the Flowers to live in pastoral ecstasy as symbiotic pollinators for sexy flowers…is that really so much worse than the situation we’re already in? Organisational structures reduce humans to drones, without being half so much fun. Marriage can be seen as a slave relationship every bit as much as subjection to the plants of Flora. I’m not going to claim that everything suggested here would be entirely compatible with modern thinking on eg consent, but this is nonetheless a profoundly (if sometimes clumsily) radical response to unjust and unpleasant social systems. It’s also an awful lot better than most science fiction of its era when it comes to the actual business of science. Yes, the end results are doubtless full of holes (it doesn’t help that Freda is described throughout as a cystologist when I’m fairly sure she’s meant to be a cytologist; the idea of plants seeing is treated as crazy in the mid-23rd century, when we now know it’s accepted fact in the early 21st). But in terms both of experimental method and academic politics, this is streets ahead of the usual handwaving, or the token scene where the lone genius has a moment of inspiration and immediately works out that the unstoppable alien beast is vulnerable to washing powder or something. Perhaps too much so; I imagine the testing of hypotheses in xenobotany may have got a bit much for some readers who were just after the sexy sapphic flower aliens. Still, connoisseurs of novels about bureaucracies and their failure modes will definitely find much to appreciate here. Though while much is still painfully recognisable, the terms on which the core debates are conducted are interesting: there’s a ‘Spartan’ faction opposed per se to giving humans access to paradise planets, lest they desist from striving and subside into sinful indolence. Can you picture that as an open agenda now, in the West? Sure, there are anti-porn laws and the like, the horrid emphasis on work as a virtue in itself, still riding on the poisonous old prejudices of a rotten and crumbling creed. But write a book about a seductive alien world now and the villains of the piece, assuming you didn't start with Da'esh establishing a global caliphate, would surely be bent on monetising Flora, not sealing it off altogether. Though I honestly don’t know, between the venal and the puritanical, which flavour of villainy I hate more. There’s more, of course; I’ve not even mentioned the sideline about Entropists and the plan to outlast the universe, or the style of the writing (a sometimes baffling mix of Shakespearean allusions with hip slang). It's a mess, sometimes it tries too hard, and in places it's outright creepy in ways I don't think were intended. But I’m certainly glad I picked this one up. Correspondences to Jerusalem, because they seem to arise in every book I finish while reading Jerusalem (except possibly the sub-par Doctor Who anthology, and the sex blogger's memoir, for which I skipped this bit): the disrespect for limiting authorities, whether that be Earthly governments or Time's determination to bring all to dust. Against the latter, especially, both books represent a determined attempt by Life to find a way.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-04-03 00:00:00 Shane Nugent It should have been good, but the style dented the weird human-on-plant erotica there was to be had. Also, for a novel that's taking place in the year 2237, things haven't really advanced that much. Yeah, there is space travel, sure, but back here on good old Earth we're still using standard mail, normal telephones, typewriters, paper, and film that has to be developed. But most annoying thing is that it's one of the those novels where everyone speaks in witty repartee and quips while all end up sounding like each other. I'm not saying it was all bad; there were a few good parts to it, and one kind of cool sexual bout with a plant, but on the balance of things this one came up high 'n dry.