Book Review: Juniper Time

Kate Wilhelm's 1979 novel Juniper Time continues the fascination in Science Fiction with Linguistics that kept cropping up in the 70s (see The Ophiuchi Hotline, The Embedding, Looking Backward from the year 2000, and, most famously Close Encounters of the Third Kind).

The story felt a lot like Christopher Nolan's Interstellar (2014), as it takes place on an earth at the end of environmental disaster and focuses very strongly on issues of parent/child relationships. The novel covers about thirty years of time and focuses largely on Jean, a Linguistic scientist and Cluny, an astronaut, both children of world famous astronauts themselves.

Much of the novel focuses on issues of priorities; in a world were resources are quickly being depleted Cluny ends up in a consistent race to get resources for a space station orbiting the planet, while Jean attempts to advance linguistic theory without attracting the attention of big business or the military, both of which have the right to effectively conscript her into work for life.

As the world gets into worse and worse shape, New Towns (the inhabitants of which are called newtons in the book), are formed and it is in these that society quickly begins to crumble; Jean's residence in one quickly turns nightmarish and underlines how terrible things can get under the guise of playing fair.

As with her previous work Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1977), the book is a wonderful look at the big questions Science Fiction can attempt to answer as a genre, and the questions the book left me with will probably stay with me for quite some time.

Genre Character of the Week: Mark

Last month I turned 35, and as was demanded in some local by-law (I’m pretty sure), it required me to take a good look at my own mortality. Here’s the thing, at 35 I’m somewhere between a third and halfway through my expected life span (The guys in my family tend to die of natural causes somewhere between age 56 to their late 70s), and even considering the fact that I don’t drink or smoke, It is pretty safe to state that I’m either nearing the top of the roller coaster or beginning to head down the other side (which is, after all the really fun part).

Last weekend I finished reading the 1977 novel Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm, and I’ve got to say the book is pretty cool. The premise is pretty simple – as the end of the world begins to become apparent to a well situated family, they decide the way to ride out the coming storm is through cloning. The novel follows (mild spoilers) the human creators, their first batch of clones, a later batch of clones and eventually, this week’s genre character, Mark.

Yesterday I spend some time thinking over how best to describe what appealed about the character – he comes generations after the first protagonist has died, and in his own way, may be the savior of a future human race. He is an outcast in a society of clones (his parents created him the old fashioned way), and although he has a lot of loneliness and anger to deal with, he really loves the people who he shares his world with.

I know that in the long view, I have put my faith in my kids to live a good life, hopefully telling their kids and grandkids a little about old Great-Grandpa Bookmonkey, and maybe, just maybe, leave their world a little better than it will be when they first show up.

In the end, that's all I'm hoping for myself.