Biting the Sun

Biting the Sun by Tanith Lee was suggested to me by my cousin's husband. He raved about it and I had a bit of trouble tracking it down. I special ordered it through work and it took forever to get in. From the first line, I knew this would be interesting:

"My friend Hergal had killed himself again..."

This is a futuristic society, Four BEE, where pleasure is everything. The world is run with the help of a lot of robots who are there to make sure the humans are as happy as can be. There is a lot of slang used in the book, which has a helpful glossary at the beginning. Young people, or Jang, are encouraged to steal and get married as many times as they wish. They can change their body after a certain period of time to whatever they wish - guy, girl, and look however they want. And if they don't want to wait for the prescribed time period, they can always kill themselves and get a new body that way.

Our main character (who remains unnamed) steals, takes drugs, kills herself, returns to life in a new body she has designed to be incredibly beautiful, eats exotic food, has sex with pretty much everyone she knows and yet is unfulfilled. She's mostly female, but does spend a few stints as a guy.

"I can hardley remeber the laughing and the running now and the playing an dthe dancing but I remember the happiness, the happiness like a wound, that bleeds the life spark."

The narrator (who I called Ooma - or darling) tries her best to make herself happy. She tries to be an adult and get a job, tries to have a child, but remains hopelessly unhappy. Ooma has a great connection with a pet she steals; he is wild and mean but she cannot help but cart him everywhere she goes. She eventually takes an expedition out to Four BAA and then to the wilds of the desert, which turn out to be too domestic for her. Ooma continues to push boundaries until the government finally cannot take anymore.

"Do not bite the sun, traveller, you will burn your mouth."

This book was fascinating. The characters kept changing in appearance over and over and even the other characters had a hard time telling who people were at times. There was humor and heartache. Two characters have a hard time because one loves the other for her essence and the other remains transfixed on outward appearances.

I was so surprised that this book isn't talked about more. As far as dystopias go, this was a really good book. The slang was a lot easier to get around than A Clockwork Orange, so I didn't have much of a problem with that.

Note: this book was originally published as two works, Don't Bite the Sun and Drinking Sapphire Wine, but has since been combined in this volume.

Apparently, you've developed a soul

"When man's freedom equals zero, he commits no crimes. That is clear. The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom."

We was written before 1984 and Brave New World and influenced both works. This is a futuristic society where people are referred to as numbers and where they work in unison for the One State, ruled by the Benefactor. In this society, the sum of all parts is greater than the individual; a single person is nothing without the whole. Personal freedoms are extremely limited and all must sing the praises of the One State. Guardians are among them, watching over them in case any should defy the laws. One State. D-503 is our narrator, he is writing notes to be put upon the Intergal, a space ship he is building to bring the One State's ways to other worlds.

In this society, everyone has the right to have sex with anyone else, all one need do is register for that person and receive a pink ticket to lower their blinds. This is one of the only instances of privacy they have, as the buildings are made of glass. The society is encased in a dome, the Green Wall keeping the outside world apart since the 200 Year War.

D-503 meets a woman, I-330, with whom he falls in love with. She is part of a group called Mephi, which is trying to organize an uprising against the One State. D-503 struggles to justify his actions with I-330 with the ideals that have been instilled in him. She challenges the rules and ideals of the One State, and while D-503 claims that he hates her, he cannot but do what she tells him to do.

"You are afraid of it because it is stronger than you; you hate it because you are afraid of it; you love it because you cannot subdue it to your will. Only the unsubduable can be loved."

What interested me a lot about the beginning of this book was D-503's interest in mathematics, and his fixation upon the square root of negative one. As an imaginary number in a very cut and dry world, D-503 cannot wrap his mind around this concept and even recalls throwing a fit in school when he learned of it. Imagination is not desirable in this society, and there is talk of an operation to remove it from the brain.

"Now I no longer live in our clear, rational world; I live in the ancient nightmare world, the world of square roots of minus one."

The appearance of math in dystopian literature is really interesting to me. I just finished reading Dostoevsky's Notes From the Underground (I'll try to blog my thoughts on that soon) and one thing that stuck out there was the notion that 2+2=5 (this notion is not exclusive to Dostoevsky, but also connects to Tolstoy, Orwell, and Turgenev, among others - interesting wikipedia entry here). In Dostoevsky, he uses the equation to assert his free will over logic.

We has some great imagery in it. According to the Table of Hours, every number wakes at exactly the same moment, chews the same number of times in precision and marches down the streets in time with each other. The great Benefactor's machine deals with those who rebel by vaporizing them in front of a placid crowd. He is able to describe the women in the story almost exclusively by describing their mouths.

Obviously this novel has some deep allusions to communism, an issue that Zamyatin was dealing with in Russia. In the novel, private property isn't an option anymore, even children are considered property of the state. Nothing is private, even voting is done out in the open, in front of everyone.

To me, a dystopian novel can have but one ending, and that is not a happy one. This one is no different; and even though I could see where the book was heading, what fate lay in store for I-330 and for D-503, it did not lessen the impact.