![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
A fascinating science fiction novel in which all the characters are amphibious aliens at a Stone Age technological level, struggling to cope with biological, ecological, and cultural changes which they can only understand to a limited degree.
As is slowly and naturally shown, the characters have a complex life cycle involving multiple metamorphoses and habitats. This is really well worked out, inspired by frogs and sea turtles and whales and probably other creatures as well. The adults (landlings) are basically humanoid. They live on land in small tribes near the beach, and the females lay eggs in tide pools. The eggs are washed out to sea, where they hatch as swimmers who live underwater, guarded by the old ones - landlings who undergo a final metamorphosis back to aquatic, seal-like beings. The old ones sing to the swimmers, teaching them what they need to know about life on land. When the swimmers lose their gills and grow lungs, they swim ashore and join the other landlings.
At least, that's how it's supposed to work. But things are changing on the very first chapter. A normal and welcome event, the landing of the swimmers, goes wrong when only a few swimmers return, immature and lacking in their usual knowledge. One female is so small that she's left behind to die rather than helped back to the tribe. But one of the adults, Rintu, feels sorry for her and gives her his fur cloak.
As Rintu notices, one of their two suns, Smallsun, has stopped coming out, making the weather - and the ocean - much colder than normal. He suspects that this may have caused the problem with the swimmers. One old male knows a joke about how Smallsun sometimes vanishes for the period of a landling's full lifetime on land... but he doesn't know the point of the joke, and no one takes much notice.
The stunted female survives against the odds, gets a name (Embri), and basically forces her acceptance into the tribe. Because she missed most of the teaching of the old ones and had to live in the forest for a while without learning anything from the tribe, she's had to figure out a lot on her own and so has a bunch of new ideas. This mostly comes across as very off-putting to the other characters. But as the weather gets colder and colder, the swimmers stop returning, the old ones die in the freezing ocean, and it becomes clear that the tribe will have to adapt or die.
Caraker works out this premise beautifully. The POV rotates as time goes on, showing all sorts of different aspects of what's happening. Embri figures out how to save the swimmers by keeping them in closed-off pools and caring for them, which causes the ripple effect of parents knowing who their children are and even of monogamy and shared homes becoming a practice. Nithrin, a female from the same landing as Embri's, is her counterpart and opposite: beautiful where Embri was damaged from her rough start, determined to stick to tradition, but secretly just as different as Embri is, with the ability to see through solid objects.
The book spans Embri and Nithrin's entire life on land, and a little bit beyond; we see the changes caused by Smallsun's departure affect a second generation, then a third... and then Smallsun's return, when the necessity of returning to the old ways causes every bit as much resistance followed by acceptance as its departure did. (We also meet another tribe with quite different customs, one which did transmit the knowledge about Smallsun and what to do when it goes away.) The ending, in which Embri and Nithrin become old ones in a warmer sea, is very beautiful.
In a concise 214 pages, Watersong tells an epic story on an intimate scale. The worldbuilding is just fantastic. This is an excellent book which is exactly the sort of thing that science fiction can do and nearly nothing else can, and it deserves to be much better-known.
As is slowly and naturally shown, the characters have a complex life cycle involving multiple metamorphoses and habitats. This is really well worked out, inspired by frogs and sea turtles and whales and probably other creatures as well. The adults (landlings) are basically humanoid. They live on land in small tribes near the beach, and the females lay eggs in tide pools. The eggs are washed out to sea, where they hatch as swimmers who live underwater, guarded by the old ones - landlings who undergo a final metamorphosis back to aquatic, seal-like beings. The old ones sing to the swimmers, teaching them what they need to know about life on land. When the swimmers lose their gills and grow lungs, they swim ashore and join the other landlings.
At least, that's how it's supposed to work. But things are changing on the very first chapter. A normal and welcome event, the landing of the swimmers, goes wrong when only a few swimmers return, immature and lacking in their usual knowledge. One female is so small that she's left behind to die rather than helped back to the tribe. But one of the adults, Rintu, feels sorry for her and gives her his fur cloak.
As Rintu notices, one of their two suns, Smallsun, has stopped coming out, making the weather - and the ocean - much colder than normal. He suspects that this may have caused the problem with the swimmers. One old male knows a joke about how Smallsun sometimes vanishes for the period of a landling's full lifetime on land... but he doesn't know the point of the joke, and no one takes much notice.
The stunted female survives against the odds, gets a name (Embri), and basically forces her acceptance into the tribe. Because she missed most of the teaching of the old ones and had to live in the forest for a while without learning anything from the tribe, she's had to figure out a lot on her own and so has a bunch of new ideas. This mostly comes across as very off-putting to the other characters. But as the weather gets colder and colder, the swimmers stop returning, the old ones die in the freezing ocean, and it becomes clear that the tribe will have to adapt or die.
Caraker works out this premise beautifully. The POV rotates as time goes on, showing all sorts of different aspects of what's happening. Embri figures out how to save the swimmers by keeping them in closed-off pools and caring for them, which causes the ripple effect of parents knowing who their children are and even of monogamy and shared homes becoming a practice. Nithrin, a female from the same landing as Embri's, is her counterpart and opposite: beautiful where Embri was damaged from her rough start, determined to stick to tradition, but secretly just as different as Embri is, with the ability to see through solid objects.
The book spans Embri and Nithrin's entire life on land, and a little bit beyond; we see the changes caused by Smallsun's departure affect a second generation, then a third... and then Smallsun's return, when the necessity of returning to the old ways causes every bit as much resistance followed by acceptance as its departure did. (We also meet another tribe with quite different customs, one which did transmit the knowledge about Smallsun and what to do when it goes away.) The ending, in which Embri and Nithrin become old ones in a warmer sea, is very beautiful.
In a concise 214 pages, Watersong tells an epic story on an intimate scale. The worldbuilding is just fantastic. This is an excellent book which is exactly the sort of thing that science fiction can do and nearly nothing else can, and it deserves to be much better-known.
From:
no subject
This sounds lovely; thanks for the heads-up.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
*
Oh my wow.
(do we ever find out why Smallsun went away? And/or what level of spoiler is that?)
From:
Re: *
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
My library doesn't have a copy of the book, but it does have Elina, Mistress of Laukko, which appears to be a multigenerational story about Finnish-American women.
In the interlibrary loan system, I could request The Faces of Ceti, which is clearly SF. But if I want Water Song, I'll have to persuade the librarian to go outside the usual area.
From:
no subject