am Breen is a typical twenty-something youth of the year 2959. Up to his ears in college debt; a member of a subculture whose members are called "pugs" for their practice of ritualistic violence; recently separated from his cynical lover, Lisa; and uncertain of his goals or talents. So naturally he chooses to "simplify" his life by signing up with a Peace Corps-style program which mandates that he teach English to aliens for a year. And to further enhance his self-pitying martyrdom, he chooses the world of Octavia, a nowhere planet whose super-oxygenated fluid atmosphere supports eight-armed octopoid sentients.
Even before leaving Earth, Sam loses his expensive, irreplaceable language-translating device. This loss will be pivotal, for once forced to become fluent in Octavian, Sam will experience total immersion in the Octavian culture, becoming a reluctant, then finally enthusiastic, convert to their strange lifeways.
But first, Sam has to get through a training period where he bonds in his own surly fashion to three classmates: a Lunarian named Hugh, a fellow Earthman named Matthew, and a Roboman named 9/3. Assigned to other planets within the same interstellar precinct as Octavia, these comrades will crop up throughout Sam's tenure, each of their fates ultimately as weird as his own.
Once on Octavia, in the small city of Plangyo, famed only for its alien cucumber crop, Sam must adapt to life "underwater" and surrounded by curious nonhuman citizens. Thankfully, his mentor, Mr. Zik, is a friendly, considerate, wise older Octavian. Established in his apartment—balky droid cleaning unit and all—Sam begins teaching, finding himself dealing with giggling octopoid schoolgirls, drunken adult-education students and suspicious bureaucracies. His pug training brings him to the brink of violence several times, but he always manages to halt his worst impulses. Little by little, much to his surprise, he discovers himself grokking the Octavians, until he finally falls in love with one, a grad student named Jinya. With this emotional bond, Sam finds himself torn as his stint draws to an end. His ultimate decision to stay or go is influenced by a surprising climax involving Matthew and 9/3 as they all search for some R&R on Pleasureworld 33.
Artful angst among the aliens
Jim Munroe has fashioned here a true hybrid. Blending several diverse strains of fiction, he ends up with a unique offspring that's a bit gawky and possesses the odd extra limb or so, like most chimeras, but which is also excessively charming in its piebald fashion.
Take Bel Kaufman's famous high-school novel Up the Down Staircase (1969) and mix in some of Bret Easton Ellis's angst-filled Less Than Zero (1985). Then inject liberal genetic sequences from such SF humorists as Robert Sheckley, Ron Goulart, David Garnett and Harry Harrison. Finally, spice with the Japanese cultural ambiguity of Haruki Murakami and a little Anthony Burgess ultraviolence. That's the unlikely yet ultimately successful recipe for this book.
Munroe is scrupulous about honoring all these diverse lineages, and in convincing them to cooperate to produce a coherent narrative. (He's aided in this by utilizing a first-person voice, for Sam's engaging personality, a mix of bravado, confusion, humility and pride, is our strongest bridge across any inconsistencies.) The schoolroom scenes, such as when a nervous Sam is induced to sing for his students, are lively and believable. The cultural misunderstandings are intractably real. And the societal anomie and confusion which Sam's generation feels is sensitively depicted.
Most importantly for the SF readership, all the tropes and methods of our genre are honored. Munroe is not one of those ham-handed outsiders who feel they can bull in and reinvent the field. Plainly, he's internalized his share of SF, as evidenced by such riffs as the one on Philip Jose Farmer's The Lovers (1961). Munroe allusively builds a convincing backstory regarding the intergalactic culture where Earth is top dog after a series of wars. (And the hidden political implications of Sam mastering the Octavian language form a clever subplot.)
He never forgets that Sam is functioning underwater, inserting many details such as leaving the payment beads for one's restaurant meal inside an empty cup so that the money does not waft away in currents. The pug subculture dovetails neatly into the scenario of an ecologically wasted Earth. And of course the weird anatomy of the Octavians—"eight-legged bags of soup"—is fleshed out intimately. And as far as humor goes, Munroe deftly sets up one deadpan, mordant, humiliating situation after another for poor Sam to endure. Why, just the scene where his special human toilet has to be transported across Plangyo is a small masterpiece!
On one level, this book reads as a critique of American cultural imperialism in the present. On another, it resembles some lost Heinlein young adult novel. And that's a trick equal to speaking fluent Octavian!
