Martian Matriarchies and Metaphors.

Many readers will be familiar with Ray Bradbury's ' Fahrenheit 451 '. For those that are not, it

is a dystopian novel first published in 1953. Books are outlawed and ' firemen ' burn any that

are found. The book's tagline explains the title ' Fahrenheit 451 '-the temperature at which

book paper catches fire and burns...' The lead character Guy Montag, is a fireman who

becomes disillusioned with his role of censoring literature and destroying knowledge,

eventually quitting his job and committing himself to the preservation of literary and

cultural writings. The novel has been the subject of interpretations focusing on how book

burning  suppresses historical ideas and on the historical role of book burnings. In a 1956

radio interview the author said he wrote it because of his concerns at the time about the real

threat of book burning in the United States. In later years, he described the book as a type of

commentary on how mass media reduces interest in reading literature. ' Worldsoul ' was

published by Prime Books in 2012. The twenty-first century will be remembered by many

readers of the future as being the century where social media posts shrank the attention span

of the reading masses. Will libraries survive? And if they do what form will they take ? This

novel hooked me in its opening pages by taking a different slant on the burning of one of the

great wonders of the ancient world: The Library of Alexandria. Instead of having been lost

to the flames of antiquity, it is moved with the aid of a moving spell. We then meet one of

the most visually and interesting liibrarians of the future-one Mercy Fane.

.." Mercy Fane, librarian, a chess-piece study in black and white.."

The novel is set in Worldsoul, a nexus point between Earth and the many dimensions

known as the Liminality. In this place old stories gather, forgotten legends come to fade

and die-or to flourish and rise again. Once ruled by the Skein, who have now vanished, a

Barquess has left in search of them carrying Mercy's mothers. The city is being attacked

with lethal flower bombs from an unknown enemy. Things keep breaking out of ancient

texts and legends and escaping into the city. Mercy pursues one such nightmarish creature

and teems up with Shadow, an alchemist for aid and Duke. One of the hallmarks of

Williams' depiction of character is the strong female bonds that are forged between the

unlikeliest of groupings. Characters that are not whom they seem is another. One such is

Johnathan Deed, Abbot General of the Court, who is in reality a disir, as is his minion,

Darya. The name disir means '  the ladies and they are essentially ancestral spirits, but

some stories are not meant to last..." They have curdled and gone foul, like sour milk.."

He is under thrall to Loki, that old trickster god, whom he meets by taking the

Dead Road, not the only storyway, but one of the most dangerous. There is the most

delightful leonine creature called a ka, whose name is Perra, and who is Mercy's

ancestral spirit. Perra can enter storyways and gaps in stories that Mercy cannot cut

through, even with the aid of her Irish sword. Metafction -fiction in which the author

self-consciously alludes to the artificiality or literariness of a work by parodying or

departing from novelistic conventions and tradtiional narrative techniques-is quite

evident in this novel. Take this passage for instance:-

..." Perra and ka-kind along with others used the secret routes: the little-known

pathways of forgotten stories, the backdoors of tales, the null-spaces between

lines of text and sub-text. The route that Perra now took had brought the ka through

an ancient tale of a winged bull and the sun, a fragment of poetry from an Elizabethan

noble woman's writing desk, and a folktale about fox witches from nineteenth century

China..."

The cognitive estrangement that Science Fiction writers achieve by creating a world

that is dissonant with the reader's experienced world is taken to a new level in this

novel. It is as if the author is searching not just for the lost text from Section C, but

is also searching for a new way to tell stories, a new way for us to receive stories,

and a new way of looking at our perceptions of the other. As the left closes down

dissent and as the right capitalises on the gaps that those silences ferment in, it is

to Science Fiction writers that we will look to more and more for a space in which to

find new models of co-operation. 'Worldsoul' makes literal the metaphor of the book

and the story as a living entity, as a person if you will. The suppression of stories is

tantamount to the suppression of a person, and so I read her handling of Shadow's veil

with great interest. When books are suppressed, when stories are suppressed, we all

suppress dialogue. When we suppress dialogue we replace social interaction with

war.

                 

Where other writers have failed to emotionally engage me with their vision of Mars,

Winterstrike succeeds. This is a truly seminal novel. Hestia Mar is a Winterstrike spy.

She has been sent into enemy territory-Caud- to recover details of an ancient weapon.

She is aided in her escape from capture by the scissor women, the excissieres, one of

the best imagined female warriors in all of Science Fiction.

.." the excissieres, as they call themselves, do not use speech if they are within sight

of one another, but converse by means of the patterns of holographic wounds that

play across their flesh and armour, a language that is impossible for any not of their

ranks to comprehend.."

 All of Hestia Mars family look the same, as a result of ' snobbish and conservative

selection in the breeding tanks...straight black hair, grey eyes, sallow faces..."

She works for Winterstrike's  Matriarchy who are opposed to the Caud Matriarchy.

Her cousin Essegui is preparing for the festival of Ombre. Her younger sister

Leretui has been locked away and given the name Shorn in a room with no windows

or an antiscribe in case she finds a way of sending a message to the vulpen she was

caught consorting with last Ombre. Vulpen are the genetically altered remnants of

ancient man. They are the Changed. They are forbidden. Shorn has been dubbed

The Malcontent of Calmaretto, and I was routing for her from the start. She, and

her sisters Essegui and Canteley have two of the most horrendous mothers, named

Alleghetta and Thea. This world with lesbianism as the norm throws that reader who

is used to reading through the lens of heteronormative relationships to Mars' red winds.

The technology in this novel is probably the best realised of our futuristic possible

selves. Haunt locks, blacklight matrices, geise performed by a majike, and antiscribes.

Geas is a Gaelic word, and it means to be under a compulsion or spell. It features

largely in the motivations of many characters in old Irish tales. Diarmuid and Grainne

is one such. It was refreshing to find it having traversed into the future. In the

imagined world of Mars as written by Williams it means ' an ancient word for a

hyper-hypnotic suggestion, exchanged for a fraction of my essential being.'When Shorn

disappears again Essegui is put under a geise to find her. This quest introduces a

Centipede Queen from Earth, Mantis the Mad, the library, and the rather marvellous

demotheas. I do not want these blogposts to spoil the reading experience for any of you.

There is much more to think about after reading a Liz Williams novel than the mere

exigencies of plot. What would the world be like without men? Do matriarchies repeat

the same mistakes of patriarchies? Or are systems in and of themselves self-destructing?

Do all things tend towards dissolution? And why do all histories become suppressed?

There is a great freedom the mind is afforded when we read and write about worlds that

are and are not far removed from our own. We are allowed an objective distance, from

which we can look at ourselves and at each other with enriched perspectives.

With ' Bloodmind' we come full circle. We return to Mondile, the world we met in the first

of Liz Williams books. The novel opens with a corpse, the corpse of Vali Hallsdottir's friend

and mentor-Idhunn. Vali is an assassin for her homeworld of Muspell.

.." Whoever had committed this murder had taken pains to cover their tracks in the non-

      physical world, and if that was the case, then the likelihood was that they had also

     gone to the trouble to hide more tangible evidence, too.."

Her nation is in chaos, preparing to face invasion from the neighbouring country of Darkland.

Vali is held captive and under suspicion of murder by the invading Morrighanu, specifically

by the commander of the Morvern Morrighanu-Rhi Glyn Apt.

.." The person stepped forward. A black-and-silver uniform encased a tall female form.

   Her hands were gloved, but the dataflow of enhancements ran across the exposed

   skin of her face. Blue eyes sparked silver, set in a gaunt countenance. White birds

   , like albino crows circled around her head..."

Vali is rescued by the selk-a semi-sentient species who come down with the arctic melt

water and sing. The selk bring Vali across the northern ice field to the hostile glacier

territory of Darkland, where she meets Thorn Eld, one of the vitki. Vali's ex-lover, Frey

was vitki. In her ingsgaldir initiation she was sent to her death by Frey to kill a fenris.

Vali killed the Hierolath on Nhem where women are kept like the selk in a seni-sentient

state. The three planets and three women who interconnect with each other and with

whom this story is interconnected are Hunan from Nhem, Sedra from Mondhile and

Vali from Muspell. Who we are, why we are, and where we come from underpins the

plots of many Science Fiction novels, but what I loved about this one was the way in

which three women from three different planets come together to try to find the killer

Skinning Knife in order that they can help her or kill her if needs must. This tension

of chase and quest and query coalesces into a page-turning read. High octane thrills,

indeed.

.." The edge of Muspell's sun Grainne touched the horizon's line and a quick

flare sent a thousand suns into my sight......It was said to have been melting icecaps

and changing currents  that had led to the drowning of the world, forcing my own

ancestors to flee outward. They had found Muspell...something in me still mourned

old Earth..."

It transpires that Skinning Knife/Skadi is not vitki, but Morrighanu. Williams often

uses two names for her characters and this adds richness to the pictures she draws.

Skadi was created and born on Nhem. Her mother was Mondhaith. She was bred

with another girl pathogenetically. This is not the first novel where Williams looks

at the issue of genetic engineering. Here in Bloodmind she pushes the boat or the wing

out a little further, and asks a question by providing a fact, albeit a fictional one. Or

maybe not quite as fictional as all that.

" We sold information to the women of the Nhemish resistance -we hoped they could

breed in into the next generation of Nhemish women, release it as a mutogenic virus

so that when the women reached puberty, they would turn on the males. It has not

had time to work yet.."

What fascinates me about this answer are the questions that haunt its edges. Is this a

virus that is being worked on somewhere in some secret lab? What is intelligence?

Are those women who are held in thrall only to their biological functions part of an

experiment? Questions that do not hold sway in traditional discourse are allowed air

in Science Fiction. This is important. In fact it is vital. Science Fiction as it is written

by women like Liz Williams allow us a safe place to air these questions, to meet with

strong and complex women from the future, to remember that as we desecrate our own

planet with toxins and pollute the four elements Nature will give us consequence. That

consequence could be the converse of all that we have struggled for to date. Why is

the genome project only charting the male? Is a future being engineered for us? And

what part do we all have to play in it if we like the cattle women from Nhem acquiesce

in propping up semi-sentience/? Is political correctness like the computer a double-

edged sword? We have a lot to think about and much to celebrate when we enter the

worlds imagined by Liz Williams. In the Gaelacht of Darkland, in the Gaelic of my

own home county Donegal on the North West of Ireland-Buíochas.

The Alternate Worlds of Liz Williams

Science Fiction in general has repeatedly represented time as a spatial expanse, which

can be explored backwards into the past, into the future, or laterally into alternate histories.

Alternate Histories came into its own as a genre after World War Two, and that war, together

with the persistence of Byzantine or Roman Empires and the USA Civil War have persisted

as the most frequent subjects of this fiction. Liz Williams ' The Poison Master ' is for me a

classic in this field. The novel had its genesis in the short story ' The Banquet of the Lords

of Night', which first appeared in the June 2002 edition of Azimov's and was republished

in her first collection of stories entitled ' The Banquet of the Lords of Night & Other Stories'.

It is exquisite. Liz Williams is a craftswoman par excellence when it comes to character and

to plot, but there are layers upon layers in this novel that draw the reader back to re-readings.

The book opens in 1547 with John Dee's staging of Aristophanes ' Peace', which necessitates

the construction of a flying dung-beetle, on the back of which the hero of the play reaches

Olympus. This mechanical contraption brought into being with the aid of ropes and pulleys

coupled with the rage of Arabic arithmetic and the publication of De Revolutionibus with its

intriguing notion that the earth journeyed around the sun prompts Dee to achieve his real

work-that of a working flying machine. Alivet Dee is an alchemical apothecary who lives in

Latent Emanation, a cruel world where the mysterious Night Lords rule the Nine Families, the

Nine Families govern the Unpriests, and the Unpriests govern the rest of the people. Hundreds

of years ago, the Night Lords had spiralled down above the World River delta in a drift-boat

with a hold of human captives. It is the duty of every ordinary citizen to partake in the Search.

Dreaming menifew combined with opium is the drug of choice in the barn Alivet goes too in

the opening Section of the novel to see if she can find out where the humans on Latent have

come from. Each dream or vision is recorded, but Alivet chooses not to record the vision she

has of her twin sister Inkrietta, who has been enbonded to the Night Lords. She is devoting her

life to making enough money to buy Inki back. To that end she lives in a rookery and sends all

of her saved monies back to her aunt Elitta. She works for Genever Thant and when a client, a

certain Madimi Garland dies in the fume room after experiencing the drug sozoma, Alivet has

to flee. Pursued by the Night Lords, the Unpriests and a dark force that haunts her dreams,

she is rescued by Ghairen, a Poison Master from another world who offers her a chance to

save her sister-and humanity as well. How can she trust a professional assassin? The novel

is divided into eleven sections, mirroring in many ways the alchemical process itself. All

Science Fiction writers must world build, but it is the attention to detail here that marks it

above many other lesser writers. There are the anube with their ' brass cogs whirring in the

implants in its throat, below the bold jackal's jaws'. They are not interested in money, and

exemplify the dignity of work. There is the food served at the Night Lords banquet :-

  .." She prepared fondants of gloom, sorbets of shadows, and sherbets of dusk, each one

gathered from the unseen corners of Latent Emanation.."

There are the dangerous water-children and liches, the monsters of the marshes. There are

the Unpriests scarab fliers. Against this world, there is the past of John Dee, his escape

from the clutches of Bishop Bonner's desire to burn him as a sorcerer, and quite simply the

best description of rescue by an angel in literature today:

...." Its face was blank and cold as marble, and as Dee stared, it turned slowly on its own

axis so that he could see that it had not one face, but four. Two of the faces were female,

the lips set in an awful fixed smile. The other two faces were male. It wore robes and it

was transparent, as if made of some vitreous substance. Its mouths stayed closed and it

continued to revolve slowly, like a planetary orb..."

The Elizabethans took from the Middle Ages the modified view of the universe, which

Platonic and Biblical in origin, radically differed from our own. For them all creation

was ranged in an unalterable order from the angels down to man-for whom the world

existed-and thence to the beasts and plants.Dee's search for meaning in the fields of

mathematics and devotion had ramifications for Latent Emanation and its citizens quest

for their origins. Liz Williams has called this her kabbalistic novel, and there are echoes

of the most ancient book of the Kabbalah- ' The Book of Creation ' in her novel. There

is an assertion made by many Science Fiction writers that they are not writing about the

future, but that history in this fiction is actually giving ' distortions of the present'. This

is certainly true of ' The Poison Master', but it transcends this distortion too by offering

its readers an alchemical experience of their own, reflected in the structuring of each of

the eleven sections of the novel, named after the alchemical processes themselves. I am

stunned that this book did not garner every available award at the time of publication. It

certainly deserves wider readership, and will I think remain as one of my favourite reads

of all time. A classic on every level.

From the mid nineties until 2000, Liz Williams lived and worked in Kazakhstan. ' Nine Layers

of Sky' reflects upon her experiences there. Elena Irinova now cleans office buildings, but she

was once a Soviet rocket scientist. She crosses paths with Ilya Muromyets, an eight-hundred

year old bogatyr. Bogatyrs are stock characters in medieval East Slavic legends, akin to a

Western knight-errant. Ilya is now a heroin addict dreaming of a death that will never come.

The rusalki prevent him dying.. Rusalka are female entities in Slavic folklore, resembling our

mermaids.All Science Fiction texts are intertexts in that they generate their meaning with

reference to other texts. The intertextual dimension is particularly strong here. The Epic of

Manas is a traditional epic poem dating back to the 18th century, but claimed by the Kyrgyz

people to be much older. Manas is not quite as heroic in this updated version of him. Ilya and

Elena are brought together by a mysterious artefact, a piece of technology, which offers a

glimpse into another dimension-creating a dangerous breach in a world Elena thought she

knew. One of the most recurrent themes in Science Fiction is its handling of new if not

bizarre tecnhologies, allowing us to confront our fears of displacement and on a more prosaic

level our simple technophobia. The standard tropes of stepping into a parallel world, and

immortals living among us belong very much in the field of fantasy but Williams wields a

powerful sleight of hand with her pen, and we believe the conceit. As in all of her novels,

there is an acknowledgement towards the power of the poet and poetry in general. This can

only improve interstellar relations in all our uncertain futures. The imagery in her writing is

strong enough to transcend the page and be presented in film form in I hope the not too

distant future.

....Dreams of technology and the future are as powerful as any fairy story ever was.."

         

Mars has been imagined over the years by writers as well known as Edgar Rice Burroughs,

Arthur C Clarke, Alexander Bogdanov and more recently by Kim Stanley Robinson. The

subject of Mars continues to attract Science Fiction interest due in part to the wealth of

information sent back from the landers tantalizing writers with the possibility of life on that

planet. ' Banner of Souls' is one of these imaginings of Mars, and is a worthy member of

the field. In the far distant future a flooded and shattered Earth is governed by the iron hand

of the Martian Matriarchy. A Martian warrior, Dreams-of-War is despatched to Earth to

guard a young girl called Lunae form an unknown threat. Lunae ages with unnatural speed

and has the special talent of being able to bend time. At the half-ruined city of Fragrant

Harbour, where Lunae resides with her malignant grandmothers and a kappa ( kappa are

genetically modified) Dreams-of-War encounters a host of intrigues centring on the very

sinister presence of an alien mission nearby. When her protégé is nearly assassinated, the

Martian warrior is forced to flee with Lunae to the flooded norther waters of what was once

Japan. When the child and the kappa go missing en route Dreams-of-War is determined to

return to the plains of Mars to discover the truth about Martian rule over Earth, and the

nature of all the secrets behind it. There are a host of fascinating characters. I loved the

animus that was attached to the assassin Yskatarina Lye, and the malevolent Aunt Elaki

from Nightshade.Haunt ships and excissieres, Dragon Kings and gaezelles-women with

speckled skin and tails...It would ruin your entry into this female dominated planet if I

were to reveal too much more. The way in which Williams plays with our received truths

and forces us to look at things from a slanted angle is essentially the poet's skill. I think

that is one of the main reasons I am attracted to her work so much. Take this passage for

instance:

.." What would you say if I told you that there is a legend that it was not you Martians

who colonized this world, nut the other way around? Men and women of Earth who

travelled to Mars in distant antiquity, before the Drowning, and set up settlements? Who,

over the course of a millenium, created an atmosphere and terraformed the planet until

what had been barren, freezing desert became the lands of seas and plains and cities that

you know today? That there were no great canals, only ancient stories, which were later

held up as truth?"......

                                          To be continued.................







 

The Science Fictions of Liz Williams.

               Part the First.

At a lecture in 1970, Theodore Sturgeon compared the history of Science Fiction to the handle

of a suitcase. Science Fiction it would seem had emerged from the body of literature, the body

of the suitcase, and like the handle, would eventually emerge back into it. There is no

doubting that the output of one of England's most prolific Science Fiction writers would need

a suitcase to carry her oeuvre. The first book I bought on Kindle was the first in her Detective

Chen series: Snake Agent. I read it one sitting, and was immediately hooked. The novel is set

in Singapore Three. The city is the supreme embodiment of technological construction, and

for this reason Science Fiction has been a heavily urban literary mode. Different renderings

of the city means that Science Fiction authors can use it as a laboratory for technological

change. What Williams so cleverly does with Singapore Three that is refreshingly different

is to use it as the locus point between the here and now of Earth, Heaven and Hell.

When a soul goes missing, Chen, the occult detective is called upon to go to Hell to retrieve it.

..' To Chen's experienced eyes, everything seemed to be in order: the immigration visa

   with the celestial authorities, the docking fees of the ghost-boat, the license of passage

   across the Sea of Night..'

The case has also attracted the interest of Seneschal Zhu Irzh of Hell's Vice Division. Even

in Hell taxes must be paid, and the ghost trade that the missing soul of Pearl Tang leads

this unlikeliest of pairings to uncover cost the perpetrators much more than tax. One of the

skills of an accomplished writer is not to paint their characters in monochrome shades of

black and white. To this end Zhu Irzh is the most delightful demon in literature, being

afflicted as he is with a conscience, of which he hopes a remedy maker will help him remove.

."You've got two souls...one is called the hun, and the other is called the p'o. The hun tries

  to find its way to heaven-usually it just wanders about until it gets reincarnated. The p'o

  used to remain with the corpse for about three years, before the other worlds speeded up

  their bureaucracies more in line with modern times.. "

Both Chen and Zhu Irzh use spells to aid them in their quest for the truth. Chen is under

the protection of the goddess Kuan Yin, although his relationship with Inari a demon on

the run from hell makes this problematic. One of the more delightful touches is the

character of Badger who is Inari's familiar spirit and who transforms into a kettle on a

regular basis. The title of the book comes from the sobriquet given by the Vice Squad

to an undercover agent-Snake Agent. The resultant case of soul-trafficking results in

both Chen and Zhu standing on the backward facing feet of some of the most powerful

denizens of Hell. Feng shui, séances and spell casting all abound, as does the most

subtle nod to new technologies..'small phial containing the flatscreen' which is poured

over Chen's desk panel. In the spirit of inter-realm co-operation Zhu is sent to Earth

on a three month posting at the end of the novel. This series addresses the existential

angst many of us have, moves the reader to turn the page to find out who did it and

why in the tradition of the nest private eye stories, and confounds the simplistic

utopic/ dystopic tradition in much Science Fiction writing with its depiction of Hell

and Earth. The series continues with ' The Demon and the City '  ( Zhu works his

first homicide case and meets Jhai Tserai, the deva who will become the love of

his afterlife), ' Precious Dragon' ( Chen and Zhu accompany the Heavenly Mi Li Qi

to Hell on a diplomatic mission, but soon after they check into their hellish hotel

Miss Qi vanishes. The bowels of demonic bureaucracy have to entered to avoid

a political incident with Apocalyptic implications), ' The Shadow Pavilion' (Chen

is called to Heaven to find out who is trying to kill its new Emperor, Mhara) and

' The Iron Khan' ( The Book is missing-It has wandered off from Heaven taking

the secrets of the Universe with it). In these novels, the nature of difference and

the limits of identity are interrogated. Science Fiction is famous for doing so, but

the literary technique of explaining the supernatural slots into the Gothic genre

more readily. The hybrid mixing of forms works well in the Chen series. Much

of the power of Liz Williams' writings lie in the ways in which they destabilize

the polarities of life/death, human/ alien and time and space. The many and

varied controlling intelligences at work in the universes at play in Singapore

Three show the reader that there is something in the fictive world that is

dissonant with the materialist world. And a what if begins to coalesce as

part of that reader's lived experience, a what if that expands the inner world.

Strong characterisation is not a feature of all Science Fiction writers.Williams

is almost stand-alone in her depiction of strong female characters that will stay

with you long into the future.

'The Ghost Sister' ( Bantam Spectra) memorably brought some of these to light.

Mevennen is out of tune with her people's bloodmind on Monde D'Isle. She is

the narrator Eleres' ghost sister.

 ..." Her right hand was bare, apart from one little sign of her name around her

thumb: the road to the star. The other members of the family had their personal

signs given by the world. Mevennen wore rings to cover the lack,,"

The Mondhaith seek out the weakest of their prey at the time of the hunt, and

Mevennen worries that even Eleres will succumb to his when the time comes.

The landblindness Mevennen suffers from has precedent in the myths of their

land.

.." The only person I had heard of who had been cured of such a sickness was

said to be the lover of  Yr En Lai, that ancient Ettic lord who plays such a part

in the legends of the north, but maybe that was just a myth.."

Her brother, his lover Morrac and his sister Sereth set off for Outreven to find

the elusive cure, watched over by the two moons Elowen and Embar, and the

sun Damoth. Shu Gho is an anthropologist who has arrived on the ancient

colony of Monde d' Isle as part of an expeditionary force from Irie St Syre.

Her journal entries allow us the reader to learn that the colonists who came

to Monde d' Isle had terraforming equipment with them and that ReForning

should have occurred -

"...no evidence that the colonists kept to our Gaian Path of placing their new

environment in harmony with themselves.."

She is accompanied by Dia, her young acolyte Bel Zhur, the daughter of one

of Irie's most formidable priestesses, and the exobiologist Jennet Sylvian.

Three delazheni accompany this quartet, biomachines. Worldbuilding is an

essential part of good science fiction writing, and at this Williams excels. Ghosts

abound in the telling of this tale. Shu Gho is thought to be a ghost by Mevennen.

She promises to cure Mevennen, which is a promise that carries with it a terrible

price. Monde d' Isle is engineered to preserve the delicate balance between human

and animal. The question that was asked in much postwar Science Fiction on

computers was whether they facilitated or entrapped, The Ghost Sister answers

this in a rather chillingly satisfactory way.

Alien encounters on Earth are given an unusual twist in this novel. Millions of years ago alien

beings seeded Earth with their genetic strands to create a new outpost of intelligent life. Their

descendants are drawn back to Earth's skies by a human with the ability to tap into their

communications. That human is Jaya Nihalani. At the opening of the novel she is in hospital

ageing rapidly. A conjurer's daughter she has been a prophet, a crusader and terrorist for the

rights of her own despised untouchable caste. Alien encounters are frequently used as a

strategy of encounter, whereby readers are encouraged to examine their self-conceptions

as a result of confrontation with the Other. This novel continues that tradition with a central

female character who is neither cipher nor symbol..

                              To be continued..................