Into this scene come the Galactic Federation. They want certain natural resources from Shar, and in return offer to clean up the planet and, most importantly, restore normal sentient Shar females. For there exists a lost colony of Shar, the Meshar, and the Meshar females are equal in all ways with the males. So the GalFeds take a few Meshar females to Fthel IV, a government world, to see if they can breed true with Shar sperm.

But there are GalFed factions who seek to stymie the program, and, irrationally, even Shar elements who, after many generations of warped lifestyle, are equally reluctant to see the plans succeed.

Wrapped up in the complicated intrigue around this hopeful scheme we have Peter Delius, a diplomatic envoy to the Shar; Delius' wife, Natalya, a doctor in charge of the breeding experiment; Ruah, one of the Meshar females involved in the trials; Aesh Seven, leader of the Shar, and his mate Kohav, who have just "birthed" a son together; Aesh's rival for power, Argiv; Argiv's ambitious son Ayin; and the strange Vanbrennan clan on Fthel, humans whose relationship with the Shar borders on the sexually perverse.

Stark but hopeful

The blurbs on Gotlieb's new book—her 12th work of fiction in a long and illustrious career stretching back to 1964—summon up the names of Tiptree and Le Guin. These are certainly accurate and useful comparisons so far as they go. The "thick description" frequently associated with anthropological SF, which LeGuin pioneered, is here in full. The Shar culture assumes a rich palpability that the reader will savor. (The Meshar culture, though, is scanted.) And, of course, Tiptree's name is automatically invoked whenever any issues crop up regarding gender, exogamous feelings toward aliens or power struggles between the sexes.

But it seems to me that Gotlieb has other intentions and influences not deriving strictly from these two maternal figures.

Primarily, I would have to cite Cordwainer Smith and the effects of cognitive estrangement and myth that he explored. Consider his famous story "The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal," with its female-deprived culture and subsequent derangement of the males. Gotlieb successfully recreates some of that weirdness here. Then there are writers like C.J. Cherryh (in her early prime) and Jim Grimsley, who seek to fully inhabit nonhuman mentalities and societies. Gotlieb is working in this vein as well.

Finally, there's a flavor to her depiction of the GalFeds that reminds me of the work of Adam Roberts or Paul Park: human bureaucracies that have mutated to bizarre forms.

Add up all these tastes and you get a very potent brew that will keep you turning pages avidly. But the book never takes off into masterpiece territory, for a couple of reasons. There are some weak narrative moments, lapses of logic, such as when Ruah escapes and is repeatedly mistaken for some kind of weird animal. The citizens of Fthel IV, one of the most cosmopolitan planets in the galaxy, wouldn't suspect first off that they were looking at an alien sentient? And the aforementioned scanting of the Meshar is a lapse.

But what most disrupted the narrative for me was the multiplicity of points of view. I know that Gotlieb wanted to probe the Shar psyche firsthand, by inhabiting Aesh's mind. But doing so destroys any mystery inherent in Delius' interactions with the Shar. The monopole vantage of a human adrift in an alien society that makes little sense to him—so potent in LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)—is lost here.

Extraneous to the novel, I might mention that Gotlieb has just turned 80 years old. Her continued fluent productivity—like that of Tom Purdom, 10 years her junior—offers hope to any writer who dreams of staying hip and productive into her senior years.