I really enjoyed this book–well, I must've, I stayed up till 2 in the morning, devouring it in one sitting. And I didn't have disbelieve suspended nearly as badly as in Jovah's Angel . That book featured another gentle scientist, but passed beyond even the bounds of my suspension of disbelief when a nearly millennium old starship that had supposedly maintained itself for some six centuries needed a human to replace a circuit board. A circuit board? Would a multi-generational starship even have circuit boards? Never mind...

The sheer visual appeal of blue and gold and white people was so obvious and immediate (as well as philosophically necessary to separate them sufficiently from the caucasion/negro associations of our own culture) that I just assumed some heavy duty genetic tinkering in the past. Bright blue and yellow animals are usually poisonous in nature, and though some of characters’ behavior certainly qualified, it seems unlikely people would be dark blue or bright gold on their own.

It's very hard to pin down, exactly, where is their technological development is. On the one hand, the landowning Indigo are richer and more powerful than the technologically and mercantilically sophisticated Gulden. Landowners haven't been the financial or political powerhouses since at least the 1800s, yet these people are using computers and driving magcars. It's not the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

There are far more of the Indigo on this particular continent or part of it than Gulden, but the Gulden trade with people across the sea, which the Indigo don't. It isn't explained what sort of people the Gulden trade with–Albinos, perhaps? Other colors that we may get to meet in later books? Who knows? What we do know is that the Gulden leader is afraid of his people being exterminated by the more powerful Indigo. How did the Indigo get the upper hand on the more violent, technological Gulden? In all the history I've read, it's the folks with the better equipment (i.e. guns) that win wars, and yet the Indigo do not service their technology.

So their dominance doesn't make sense. The Information Age, more or less, appears to just be dawning: there's no mention of anything analogous to the world wide web, though newspapers are advertised on monitors, obligingly enough. But the monitors never so much as mention as of those other nations the Gulden trade with. We only know it's not other Indigo. Yet by the beginning of the 1900s, even in this country's most isolationist periods, ordinary people were still aware of the outside world. This lack of connection, along with the power of owning land, would seem to put the development back.

Yet at the same time, biologists are developing functional vaccines in a matter of hours or days. They understand the research of other scientists on a particular germ to the point of being able to completely recreate it after reading the notes three times–in a space of mere hours. Design a cure this morning, and your friendly experimental pharmacist will have a 100 samples for you by this afternoon. The mind boggles. That sort of biological sophistication is decades–more likely centuries–away. That nobody in the world would have thought of biological warfare until the science progressed to that point passes all bounds: a not so pleasant episode in American history a century in more ago, before bacteria had barely been sighted in the microscope and viruses still awaited discovery, involved the “gift” of smallpox infected blankets to American Indians.

So the technological development in the world doesn't hang together. That's a quibble, however, for the characters, and underlying racial and sexual themes they illustrate, do.

27may2012: added tags, summary, link back to origin essay.

Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.