Halfway Human
By J. Stephen Bolhafner
Published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Sunday, March 8, 1998
Halway Human
Carolyn Ives Gilman
Carolyn Ives Gilman's "Halfway Human" (472 pages, Avon, $5.99; paperback) is the best science fiction novel I've read in a long time. That this is Gilman's first novel makes it all the more extraordinary, although she's been publishing short stories for a decade.
Val Endrada is a xenologist living on Capella Two, an expert in alien cultures. She's called in on a special case, an attempted suicide by a "crazy alien" that has no genitalia, a natural asexual. Such beings exist only on one planet, a planet that has been closed for decades since a disastrous first encounter with other humans.
The alien, Tedla, tells Val about its life, and she reads the account of the xenologist who visited the planet with the first and only expedition. Interwoven with these tales is the escalating intrigue Val finds herself involved in by befriending Tedla, who turns out to be a pawn in a dangerous game played by deadly opponents.
Not since Ursula Le Guin has the field produced a writer this finely attuned to the myriad of subtle nuances that make up what it is to be human.
NOTE: I haven't done this with any of my other articles or reviews published elsewhere, even though some of them were fairly heavily edited. But this one was essentially cut in half, so I'm attaching the original version of the review as it was written:
Val Endrada is xenologist living on Capella Two, an expert in alien cultures. She's called in on a special case, an attempted suicide by a "crazy alien" that has no genitalia, a natural asexual. Such beings exist only on one planet, a planet that has been closed for decades since the disastrous first encounter with other humans. No native has ever left that planet, so Tedla cannot be from there.
Except it is, of course. It tells Val about its life, and she reads the account of the xenologist who visited the planet with the first and only expedition. Interwoven with these tales is the escalating intrigue Val finds herself involved in by befriending Tedla, who turns out to be a pawn in a dangerous game played by deadly opponents.
The story of Tedla's life is heartbreaking and terrifying. The "blands," as they are called, are basically slave labor. The society differentiates between "humans" and "blands," as if the latter were not human. And indeed, after almost two decades away from its home planet, Tedla still doesn't consider itself to be fully human. Its only desire is to serve a human master.
It would be easy to condemn Gammadis, as Tedla's planet is called, but Gilman consistently pulls the rug out from under our expectations. It is not simply a metaphor for slavery or oppression of minorities, although of course it is that. It is much more complex than that. Tedla insists that it wants to return, for instance, and its attempted suicide certainly argues against the idea that 17 years in Capellan society has been better for it.
I haven't even mentioned the Capellan "information economy," or the wonderful way in which Gilman shifts voices between her narrators, allowing Tedla and the expedition xenologist to recount completely different versions of the same event, raising but never really answering the question of whose version is "right," because in fact all memory is subjective.
I initially picked up this book because I like to give local authors a break, but Carolyn Ives Gilman needs no condescension of getting a plug because she's from St. Louis. Not since Ursula Le Guin has the field produced a writer this finely attuned to the myriad of subtle nuances that make up what it is to be human. This is a great book.