The Governors, still battling ecological collapse on Old Earth, are very interested in the secret energy technology of New Amazonia, one of the few worlds not under the thumb of the Governors. Twenty years ago, Old Earth tried to steal the tech with a military expedition, but they were roundly defeated. Now they're going back diplomatically.
The latest mission to New Amazonia consists of two "gentle" (gay) men: Vincent Katherinessen, the ambassador, and Michaelangelo Kusanagi-Jones, his attache. Both men have empathetic talents that they can use to manipulate people. In addition, Kusanagi-Jones is a trained killer and spy. Just to complicate matters, the two men were lovers decades ago, but were forcibly separated by the authorities as punishment for misdeeds. They have not seen each other since. The ancient romantic tensions between them threaten to complicate their mission.
Once on the planet, they meet many of the women who run it as a matriarchy, including Claude Singapore, the current elected ruler, and Lesa Pretoria, one of her security honchos. Vincent and Angelo—referred to with the universal honorific of "Miss"—are also introduced to the male underclass: studs and domestics and workers who advance through brutal physical Trials.
As Vincent and Angelo attempt to carry out their mission, they find their loyalties shifting, and they discover that there are factions among the women of New Amazonia as well, with Lesa serving as their closest ally.
But perhaps the most disturbing new datum might be the survival of the native race of Dragons, long thought extinct, but now discovered very much alive—and with plans of their own.
An unusual battle of the sexes Fans of C.J. Cherryh, Liz Williams and Karin Lowachee will find much to admire in this mix of space opera, feminist utopia, spy thriller and yaoi tale. It's a unique blend from a young writer who seems determined to extend her limits with every new book.
Let's look at each aspect of the novel separately, realizing that they cohere quite well into an organic whole. (My only complaint is that the native carnival that gives the novel its title is completely scanted, with few scenes of any unique festivities given and no sense of any real cultural bacchanal conveyed, as the author initially promised.)
The space-opera aspects of the book are nicely done. The backstory for Old Earth is both plausible and horrifying, explaining well how the current culture could turn out so rigid and cruel. The Dragons prove to be some very neat aliens, and their brane technology is pretty cutting-edge. All in all, the realpolitik among the star empires comes across quite believably.
As feminist utopias go, the New Amazonian model is pretty lightweight compared to such classics as Joanna Russ'
The Female Man (1975). But it's not insulting or dumb or exploitive. I'm just maintaining that it's a bare-bones sketch that serves the purposes of the story honorably without really adding much to the history of the trope. In fact, I kept thinking not of classics by female writers during my reading of this book, but rather of such programmatic novels by males as Edmund Cooper's
Five to Twelve (1968) and
Gender Genocide (1972) and Norman Spinrad's
A World Between (1979). This is not to knock Cooper, Spinrad or Bear, all of whose books I admire, but merely to establish affinities where they might lie.
The book's credentials as a spy novel are pretty sturdy as well. The Machiavellian back-and-forth, plotting and counterplotting, is unpredictable and exciting, and we get a rich diet of ambushes, duels, kidnappings, escapes and poisonings.
Finally, I thought Bear handled the yaoi—or gay love-affair angle—of her tale quite convincingly, including some hot sex scenes between the men (curiously, however, not balanced by any among the women, who come off as rather low-libido types).
Forging a neat hybrid of all these subgenres is no mean feat, and Elizabeth Bear succeeds in taking another step forward with her strong career.
