Book Review

Despite the fact that science fiction has been a major genre of literature for almost a hundred years, women writing science fiction are still comparatively rare. Joanna Russ lead the movement to incorporate feminist points of view into the male-dominated field through her essays and novels, and Octavia Butler has sown that African American women can put their own stamp on the genre. Given this slow but unfolding trajectory, it was inevitable that a woman would also write a significant science fiction novel involving a protagonist with a disability. This came with the publication of Elizabeth Moon's The Speed of Dark. While disabilities advocates may argue about the political ramifications of the novel, it is hard to dispute that Moon's intelligent (and gripping) narrative about a young man with Asperger's syndrome has set a high standard for writers who follow.

It is in the wake of Moon's achievement that Nan Rosen and Carolyn Mineah cast their recently published novel, Voyage to Centauri. While Rosen and Mineah's lead character is also ostensibly a person with Asperger's, that is where all similarity between the two novels ends. Set in the vaguely distant future, Voyage to Centauri deals with a hodgepodge of characters with disabilities who embark on the spaceship Independence for a planet in a distant solar system called Centauri. The reason for their taking on this voyage is twofold. The first is that Earth has become a place whose treatment of people with disabilities has become increasingly oppressive. The second is that the voyage offers the chance to test accommodations for people with disabilities that are not restricted by some of the gravitational forces of Earth.

As the story opens, the narrator introduces herself:

I am Anita Kinner, the organizer of this group of mostly disabled computer geeks. We had been friends on the ComNet for years, but today was the first time we had actually met in person. There were eight of us, three in wheelchairs, most hoping for medical care in space that was not available on Earth.

In addition to being wheelchair users, members of the group have MS, hearing loss, and bipolar disorder. The narrator says of herself, "I was considered autistic as a child and had a mild hearing, loss" adding quot;I always felt more comfortable with computers and knew, as I watch my friends, that I would have to learn to relate to real people in person if I was going to survive this trip."

Voyage to Centauri is essentially a straight-forward, linear novel, divided into three parts: "The Independence", "Erin", and "Red Star". The first part of the book is taken up with the trip aboard the space ship. The narrative in this part centers around the discovery that someone is attempting to sabotage the ship and the efforts of the other crew members, including the narrator, to stop them. Part two, describes life on the planet Erin (a planet remarkably similar to earth), and introduces a race of beings called the Iramians, who also colonize the planet. A trial takes place to deal with the saboteurs and, that finished, the group heads out to explore the planet by boat, only to be stranded for six months by unexpected storms.

Part three finds the characters, after their rescue, a bit bored on such a peaceful planet, and heading off again on adventure. This time, it is to rid Erin of rats that the saboteurs had snuck aboard the Independence and that, now loose, threaten to destroy the ecological system of Erin. In their travels, the adventurers also encounter the stranded survivors of a colony on the planet Gaia, make a visit to the Iramian culture, and have to deal with escaped prisoners on a spaceship headed back to earth.

In many ways the novel follows the episodic structure of the Odyssey, but in the final two chapters many loose threads seem to come together. It would be unfair to the potential reader to say just how this works, but attitudes and motivations that seem a bit random come a much more into focus.

There is no doubt that Voyage to Centauri makes for pleasant reading. It has the feel of Rick Steve's travelogue (every one seems to always be eating) with perhaps a bit of "The Love Boat" thrown in. Despite the various worlds they explore there is always a feeling that there is only one degree of separation between these new worlds and life on Earth. Even the Iramians eat soup for dinner and have indoor toilets. At times the descriptions of these new lands are comfortably homey:

At first, John was quiet, but then he took a red nut and shyly told me to watch. "This is fun!" he said and held the nut over the fire. In a moment there was a loud pop and the nut burst open like a big puffy white flower. "We call these popnuts." He gave the flower to me and I found it sweet and very good.

"It's like popcorn," Barb laughed and put another nut on a skewer. We could hear the pops from other people cooking the nuts, and occasionally one flew off the skewer when it popped. Everyone laughed.

Though there are mishaps and misadventures along the way, the reader is never in any doubt that everything will turn out all right in the end.

If all of the characters had been able-bodied, middle class women on a holiday to space - even if one of them had been in a wheelchair - there would be little point in criticizing the novel. It always seems a bit of a cheap shot to take a book to task for not doing being what it never intended to be in the first place. However, by frontloading the novel with a cast of people with disability, Rosen and Mineah have raised expectations, and those who are familiar with Moon's book are going to be greatly disappointed at the lost opportunities for making Voyage to Centauri into something significant.

One problem that the authors face in setting up their story is how to have a protagonist with a disability who is physically capable of accomplishing everything that they need her to do. Speech, sight, hearing and physical agility are all called upon at some point in the story. The solution is to have someone who "was considered autistic as a child." While this is bit of a parlor trick, the first chapter hints that social relationships are still difficult for Anita. Unfortunately, the implications of this struggle are never mentioned after the first chapter. One need only read The Speed of Dark or Mark Haddon's The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night to see how intriguing a portrayal of such a character is and how what a challenge it is for a writer to conjure up the imagined thought processes. Quite curiously, the authors never attempt to let the reader know what their narrator thinks, much less give insight into that process. If one were to skip the first chapter, they would never have a hint that Anita was dealing with any disability at all.

There are two characters in the book who are actually a good deal more interesting than Anita and who bring the writers much closer to exploring just what it means to be human. One is Harold Boreman; the other Angus Redlief.

Boreman, was so severely disabled that he lived in a specially designed life-support chair that helped him breathe and provided mobility. He used a brain implant device that gave him almost telepathic control of computers and similar devices.

In addition, various medical procedures have allowed him to live and extraordinarily long time. During the voyage, Boreman is able to develop his wheelchair into a machine that hovers, flies and so forth.

Angus Redlief has taken science much further. In fact, he no longer has a body. His mind has been encoded in a computer. People are able to hear and speak to him through implants in their brains. In the ship he is able to speak to listen to and speak with others through various walls. During the course of the voyage, Harold invents a sphere that is able to house Angus and fly around. Despite being called an AI at times throughout the book, he has all the personality, including a sense of humor, of any embodied person.

During the trial of the saboteurs in the second part of the book, it is revealed that one of terrorists, Josie Snyder, hates both Boreman and Redlief saying that they are not human. She believes that both have been kept alive artificially past the life span of a natural human being and that they need to be destroyed. From her point of view, they have crossed over the boundaries that separate human from machine and have ceased to be human. (She hates the Iramians as well and will not acknowledge them as the equal of humans.) Unfortunately, rather than give Snyder cogent arguments for her viewpoint and, thus, force Boreman and Redlief to present defending arguments, she is presented as an out-of-bounds hothead. When Redleif is about to testify, she screams, "Get that machine out of this courtroom. Mechanical creatures have no right to testify against human beings!" Shortly after that she is on her feet again yelling, "He is a monster! They are both monsters. No human being has the right to live as long as they have!" In the process, what could surfaced and important ethical and philosophical argument is summarily dismissed. In fairness to the authors, it is later revealed that Josie does have her own psychological motivations, but along the way, the opportunity deal with this much more interesting and genuinely important issue has been lost.

Rosen and Mineah are also likely to catch some flack from feminists, especially those familar with the work of Russ, Butler or Connie Willis, who have carved out a niched for mine in science fiction. To the authors' credit, the majority of the characters are women and Anita is the physical and intellectual equal of any male character in the book. Unfortunately, when not in mid-adventure, she seems more interested in food, fashhion and furniture than anything else - not a prtralal that is likely to break sterotypes.

Voyage to Centauri has the feel of a debut novel (Elizabeth Moon is not going to be squirming) and, despite borrowing from, Heinlein, does not seriously pretend to be hard sci fi. It would be much more accurately said to inhabit a space somewhere between LeGuin and Bradbury, but without the social and philosophical insights that give weight to their writing. Those afraid of thorny writers like Dick or Gibson, however, will find Voyage to Centauri a much more comfortable read. The novel allows readers who would be interested in following the exploits of characters with disabilities the chance to do so without venturing too psychologically far from home. True, one wishes that the novel would have taken some chances to illustrate the kind of contributions writers with disabilities can make, coming from a perspective not available to able-bodied writers, but in a genre where, with the exceptions of cyborgs, characters with disabilities are rare, any attempt to portray them commands at least some respect. Besides, first novels are about learning, and writers need readers who will take a chance on them in order to allow them the opportunity to continue with their exploration in to areas that try to break new ground. So get out the popnuts and enjoy it. Voyage to Centauri is available from Outskirts Press or through Amazon.com.