Excessive Candour
Kings and Clucks

This book is sort of complicated to start, though before the end it gets simpler, almost fatally, not quite. Kay Kenyon's publishers have issued The Braided World as a singleton, and we open the first page in the belief that it begins what we have been asked to start. No such luck. We soon work out that a brief prologue (called "The Message") makes no sense at all unless it's a potted attempt to summarize backstory; and that The Braided World must be the continuation-at-a-far-fetch of Kenyon's previous novel, Maximum Ice (2002).

So we furrow our brows and pass "The Message" like an exam and matriculate into the real story, where we find that The Braided World has not really got very much to do with Maximum Ice at all, and that what it has got to do with Maximum Ice it shouldn't. So we forget "The Message," and the book gets simpler, though it does almost expire of mid-ship yaw between the 50,000th word and the 80,000th; but then it starts getting a lot better, and then it stops. There may be a sequel in the offing; but that's a problem for future generations of examinees. Right here and now, it might be enough to say that The Braided World stops better than it begins.

But we are going to have to begin at the beginning, all the same. In "The Message," we learn that Earth is continuing to suffer from the after-effects of an information-eating "Dark Cloud," "a rogue structure of dark matter" which had—10,500 years earlier, as we learn on page 112—sucked Earth's data store almost dry, leaving a genetically impoverished rump of humans protected under a "last-ditch defense called Ice." In Maximum Ice (which I had not read), this Ice is not a cyberspace data guardian out of William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), but something like real ice, which covers much of the planet.

If, because "The Message" does not make this clear, tyros like me tend to understand Kenyon's Ice as something rather more sophisticated than frozen water, so be it. In any case, it doesn't matter. The main message of "The Message" is a message: One hundred centuries after the Dark Cloud's departure, radio messages from deep space have informed the inhabitants of Earth that the information ingested by the Dark Cloud had been retrieved, and was stored on a distant planet. All that humans had to do—making use of the recently developed "subspace tunneling"—was to go and get it. But the World Council demurs. Only one private citizen, Bailey Shaw, a great but retired opera singer of immense wealth, cares enough to finance a ship. "The Message" ends.

Sex and the future city

The novel begins, elsewhere. Bailey's ship, the Restoration, is already in orbit around the target planet, which is called Neshar, many light-years from Earth, to which we do not return. Tragically, the captain—afflicted by one of the opportunistic viruses which, after 100 centuries, continues to goose-step through the weakened human gene pool—has died, without getting a foot onto the planet, or into the story. Bailey, who has come along, must select a new captain. She chooses young Anton Prados over young Nick Venning, causing a slow-burn rivalry between the two men, a guy thing Kenyon treats with vaguish anthropological bemusement, as though the behavior of beta males jostling to be alpha was, frankly, beyond understanding.

Nor does the only strategy she gradually evolves to deal with these mysteries of sociobiology do much, unfortunately, to clear the cognitive air. By making the two men consciously perturbed about each other—just as though they were two right-on women who only needed to share a sauna to transcend male hierarchical structures and become Norns together—she misregisters masculine behavior, because men, unlike women, are very rarely capable of admitting aloud that they do not head the pack. (Inside every man is a pack, which he leads.) In the end, as Anton and Nick cannot in fact talk together as women might, their fretting turns into whinge, into soap opera. It is a fretting that braids through the entire text.

Bailey, on the other hand, like all the female humanoids the crew of the Restoration meet on Neshar, is much more surely portrayed. She is raunchy, volatile, obsessive, accomplished (and if we can forget "The Message," and the fact that 100 centuries have passed, presumably in deep freeze under the Ice, we can probably forgive the fact that her repertory as a great diva does not extend beyond 1900 CE); and she keeps her mind on the task of attempting to work out how the natives of Neshar can have had anything to do with the Message which has promised Earth a renewed bath of information, and an enriched gene pool. The culture Bailey finds on Neshar is tripartite: the Dassa, ruled by the King, are the executors and fighters, and inhabit lands around the river Puldar; the Uldia, ruled by a matriarch, govern childbirth and child-raising, and dominate the Amalang River; the Judipon, ruled by a bureaucratic male, issue laws and allocate resources, and occupy the Nool River. Serving all three orders of the world are the hoda, bald female slaves. All three rivers are tributaries of the great River Sodesh. The land entire is a braid.

Very soon, it all gets very complicated—for the cast, because the humans are bewildered and affronted by Nesharian sexual practices; and for the reader, because Kenyon has landed herself with the task of portraying her three interacting braids as they were before the humans arrived, and as their whole world reels under the impact of the human incursion. Indeed, much of the considerable length of The Braided World is given over to mildly dramatized descriptions of the braids before and after, as seen through the eyes of enlightened or unenlightened Nesharians and/or similarly disposed or indisposed humans. Both humans and their Nesharian cousins face two main problems, which are in effect one problem: sex and the hoda slaves.

Hodas, we learn, are Nesharians who, in their adolescent years, develop into full human females, capable of bearing children in our fashion. The whole of Nesharian society, we are soon told, unites in one deeply embedded conviction: that the capacity to carry live young inside the body is an obscenity; that the only unobscene way to give birth is to mingle juices in the birthing pool, under the supervision of the Uldia; children are not so much born as podded out of what seem rather to resemble juicy coconuts. The shock of the human cast at so "unnatural" a form of childbirth is as unanimous as the abhorrence felt by Nesharians for human sexuality.

A Braid well worth unraveling

This balancing of shock between intruders and natives seems perhaps slightly lacking in the kind of humility that tales like Michael Bishop's Transfigurations (1979) or the whole of Ursula K. Le Guin's oeuvre have attempted to instill in writers engaged in imaginary anthropology; but you've not seen nothing yet. Not only do the humans (with the exception of Bailey) contemn Nesharian biology (non-hoda females have only a vestigial uterus); they also abhor Nesharian sexual practices, which they deem "promiscuous." Given the lack of any connection between sex and procreation, this promiscuity might seem natural enough, and Kenyon clearly takes sides with the Nesharians whenever one of her prig humans turns up his nose in disgust at the thought of humanlike natives of another planet engaging in non-monogamous activities. But this does not entirely excuse her from creating the situation in the first place: her humans are unprofessional, moralistic, whingeing and torpid. Kenyon's rendering of this sorry lot is minutely accurate; but in terms of the consensual verisimilitude developed by SF writers over the decades in their depiction of human behavior in a novum (and a new planet is surely a novum), her accuracy generates, in the end, a deracination in the experienced reader in 2003.

But Bailey—and a woman scientist who is the only dedicated intellect in the book—take matters in hand as the plot thickens and explodes in violence. The human incursion—and their insistence condemnation of Nesharian life—has triggered an internecine war. Lots of Nesharians die. The hoda turn out to be just like us and revolt. Almost off-stage, the secret of the Message is discovered in a Nesharian plant whose DNA or what contains thousands upon thousands of pages of ancient lore beyond our ken, and a lot of good new genes, and stuff. The novel ends on a note—literally, as Bailey has convinced herself to sing again—of hope.

Difficult stuff to endorse. But equally difficult to dismiss. Kenyon's heart (though maybe not her head) is always in the right place. The braids of river and tributary, sampan and pagoda, alien kings and human clucks, come at the reader like a Florida night before Florida died. Bailey is pretty lovable. The earnestness of the telling of The Braided World is redeemed by flashes of light like pearl, moments of caressing sex, a love of the author for the creatures of her pen. Every time this reader became irritated at the Restoration crew, some small miracle in the depiction of landscape, or a fragment of Mozart, coaxed the eyes onto the next page.

Kay Kenyon, it is clear, should not be given up on.