The Heroine’s Journey I (Remnant Population)
Courtesy of the Heroine’s Journey thread over at Tor.com, about which I’ll say more once I’ve dug myself out from underneath Bayesian analysis, counterfactual models, causality, directed acyclic graphs, fractional polynomials, splines, and simulation of datasets … I’ve been rereading Elizabeth Moon’s Remnant Population. There aren’t many protagonists in SF like Ofelia, whom the Scots (and we should know) would describe as a cussed auld besom. She’s nearly eighty, one of the oldest inhabitants of a human colony thwarted in its development by repeated disasters; of Ofelia’s several children, only one son, Barto, has survived into middle age. The colony has endured but not grown or progressed; education is purely vocational and individual talent and aspiration suppressed. The social order is narrow: Ofelia’s community impresses on her her dependency and diminishing worth as an old woman, and Ofelia in turn passes silent judgment on disruptive, sexually promiscuous women like her neighbour Linda and childless women like her daughter-in-law Rosara.
But within the first pages of the novel the colonists learn that their colony has been judged a failure and is to be abandoned by its corporate sponsor. Within a month, the colonists will depart for another planet, decades away, leaving the work of forty years behind them. As a further imposition, the sponsors are refusing to pay for Ofelia’s passage, charging it to her son and daughter-in-law.
Enough, Ofelia decides. When the time comes, she will walk into the forest with enough food for a few days, and wait until she is certain the last shuttle is gone. The company representatives will not trouble themselves to look for one woman too old to work. She will live the rest of her life alone, and for the first time in her life she’ll have nobody around to tell her what to do and who to be.
And she does. Once she has restored power to the deserted colony and established a routine of gardening and foraging, she has everything she needs. She gets up to mischief. She pokes into other women’s cupboards. She sleeps in other people’s beds. She sheds the drab clothing of elderly respectability and dresses in gaudy colours, walks naked in the streets, weaves herself a cape of netting and beads, daubs her body with paints. She annotates the colony’s official log with the stories of sexual strife and violence that lie behind single line entries of moves between households or ‘accidental’ deaths. The narrow inner voice of social censure is gradually silenced by a new voice. (These acts of throwing off social convention, that argument between the inner voice of social censure and the new voice of true experience turns up in other womens’ novels, too. Top of my mind is Joan Barfoot’s Abra, a mainstream novel of a woman who also chooses solitude and self-sufficiency, but on this earth.)
But she does not remain alone. Months later, the colonists’ successors arrive. Disdaining the site of her failed colony, the new settlers set down elsewhere on the planet—and Ofelia, silently listening over the radio, hears their unanswered pleas for help as they are slaughtered to the last man, woman and child by aliens that no one knew were there. Ofelia’s initial intense fear, loneliness and vulnerability are gradually easing with the familiarity of her surroundings and routine when, in the middle of one of the planet’s violent storms, she comes face to face with a small wandering band of the aliens. The recognition that one of them is injured, and exasperation at seeing anyone or anything too foolish to come out of the rain, pre-empts fear, and she throws open her door.
They spend an uncomfortable night huddled together in the dark, and each party (the aliens’ collective voices are represented in brief interpolated passages) emerges gratified to find themselves unharmed by the other. Ofelia would be quite happy to go back to her solitary life, but the aliens are social and curious, and Ofelia finds herself shooing them out of the kitchen and out of the colony control room and power-plant, convinced they’ll do themselves harm, and pushing towels and mops into their hands when they track mud and water across her floor. Children, she thinks, having reached the age where everyone looks like children, and exasperated all over again at losing her precious solitude. But she demonstrates how light-switches work, and how domestic appliances work, and struggles—despite her own truncated education—to explain how electricity is generated. She makes music with them. She dances with them. An elder, a nest-guardian, the People decide in their turn, and summon one of their senior singers, a diplomat, to treat with her as a representative of her people. And, half-understanding, she finds herself appointed as guardian to the newborn babies of one of the band.
One of the marvelous aspects of this novel is that the important events happen in Ofelia’s old age. Many novels with an old person as protagonist (eg, Margaret Lawrence’s The Stone Angel, itself a groundbreaking book) take place as much in the novel past as the novel present, and youth’s adventures and dramas pre-empt attention. Age seldom gets all the adventure all to itself, as it does here. Despite the arrival of a team of experts, all shiny, knowledgeable, and oblivious to their own human foibles (Children, thinks Ofelia), Ofelia—old, ill-educated, eccentrically clad, and cussed—and the alien diplomat whom she calls Bluecloak, succeed in making the human representatives recognize the outrage that provoked the massacre, and establish the terms for colonization of the planet in full partnership with the People.
@Gmail: alixsin
