Reviews and Comments

Max Liboiron presents the work of their research group CLEAR, in Newfoundland, with a focus on research into plastic pollution in the bodies of fish. This begins a complex journey through a history of how acceptable levels of pollution were first estimated, to how current research still uses this history despite its inaccuracy, to how this research can be improved, including ideas, thoughts and perspectives from many (not only colonial) scientific perspectives.

Liboiron is a storyteller and an adept researcher, picking the right moments to highlight issues that help emphasise the value of CLEAR's research. They are also a very witty writer, which helps take the sting from the heavier academic sections. The resultant book is hopeful but critical, and the critique is aimed at many areas, including colonial science and environmental action, among other areas. In the end, the long introduction is not really necessary, as the three strong chapters tell the same story of plastic pollution as a colonial action, only with more gusto. If I was to try to summarise the most important idea I found in this, it is that Land is not just earth, but the complex interweaving of critters and objects that form part of its varied self (a point made in this book with a nod to Robin Wall Kimmerer's writing on the same topic). So pollution of land is also pollution in and through these other connected parts.

I don't generally enjoy science fiction, and although I do love Ursula le Guin's theory and ideas I have never managed to finish any of her books before this one. Her writing is good, but I find that science fiction often gets too tied up in hammering home its analogies without remembering to tell a good story. The Word for World is Forest does not have this problem.

Ostensibly, this is a novel about two races of human. The first are Terrans (from Earth) who have landed on a distant planet and are cutting down its rich forested surface because there is no wood left on Earth. The other are Athsheans, who are colonised, enslaved in all but name, and are being forced to live their lives in a "terran" way by sleeping at night and working in the daytime, for example. The book weaves in the injustices of settler colonialism and the violence of technological war, telling a story that many of us are familiar with.

Although at times the book goes to great lengths to hammer its messages home, it remains interesting enough throughout. The real strength is in the way it presents "otherness". The Athsheans call their world "forest", and so all life comes from trees, just as terrans call their world "earth" as they are promethean, born from clay. Terrans cannot "dream" like the Athsheans without using hallucinogenics, and violence, once introduced as an idea to their society, cannot be unlearned.

Some of the analogies are unresolved. For example, all of the main characters are male, and no female character is given any prominent voice. Le Guin was not a writer who did things accidentally, but it's not clear whether she was critiquing how women are portrayed in similar novels, or how violence is a male obsession, or something else. Irrespective, this is still worthwhile, contemplative and an enjoyable book.

As a reader, I like short stories to have a thread in a book that joins them together. Whether the link is social, thematic, tonal, or anything else, it always feels like the best short stories connect together somehow. Cosmogramma doesn't do this, or if it does then the connections are not visible to me. The speculative fiction/science fiction elements alone are not enough to connect the ideas.

Some of the stories (Scarecrow in particular) build tension and connection to the characters well and are memorable, but others (such as the book's title piece) rely too much on explanation and don't allow the reader to infer anything, telling without showing. The writing is careful and readable throughout but never particularly daring or beautiful. In the end this was a book of disconnected parts for me, sometimes enjoyable but overall unrewarding. Might suit a science fiction fan more as this genre often forgives the points that I found unenjoyable.

Seed is described on its cover as a "polyphonic novel". It is told with two voices that jar with one another, a story of a protagonist that is becoming an adult. Her experiences as a woman are often stomach-churning, and there is a constant tension of threat that hangs over the words in this book, such as in an early passage describing the flowing yellow plant: "rape is an unnatural thing". That tension is effective in creating fear of violence constantly to the reader.

Unfortunately, the method of writing becomes too disconnected as the book continues. The voices tell too much and show too little, and the rhythm is slowed by the story. A story of sexual oppression of women is not really analogy here, just reality with a small bit of narrative tacked on, and that narrative gets repetitive and uninteresting quickly. The grittiness of threat of violence doesn't really need the imagination of a novel when told this way.

This book is a difficult one to review. On the one hand, it is a thorough and well researched anthology of anthropology and primatology that shows how human children (and some nonhuman) came to rely on the care of many actors, not just the immediate family or (as is popularly believed in anthropology) the mother. Hrdy writes well and accessibly, and questions accepted norms about child-rearing, particularly taking aim at this in the fifth chapter which finally confronts American bias toward a nuclear family (where the author is based).

On the other hand, the book makes some extraordinarily prejudiced assumptions that are themselves loaded with Western bias. There are repeated references to contemporary hunter-gatherer societies as if they represent past societies. Although Hrdy admires many of their traits, and she explores different systems of parenting and alloparenting, it is highly problematic that these societies are positioned as they are: At one stage she refers to modern African societies as "both post- and pre-colonial"; of course, all contemporary society is postcolonial. In some paragraphs there is a leap of logic directly from "primate" to "African" (with an inference that the next step is "something else") that is careless, although I suspect it is never malicious as Hrdy writes with care about her subjects.

I am not an anthropologist and accept that this type of thinking is more common in that field, but still found these moments of embedded bias highly jarring while reading, spoiling some very good ideas that themselves are rightly questioning bias. By the ninth and final chapter, Hrdy presents her convincing arguments of mutual care well. Mothers and Others has some brilliant ideas and great information, despite its persistent problems. But it should certainly be read with this cachet in mind.