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Monday
Aug232010

After you fail to conquer the Earth - John Ringo's The Tuloriad

DateMonday, August 23, 2010 at 12:47AM

I enjoyed The Tuloriad on a number of levels. It was a sympathetic exodus and rebuilding story... about the man-eating alien invaders. Which in no way minimized or forgave the fact that they, you know, used to eat people.

The Posleen/Legacy of the Aldenata series starts with man-eating alien centaurs who are well-nigh unstoppable roaming the Earth and eating people. The Posleen, as they are called, have very little mercy or empathy or culture of their own. How could beings like that have a society let alone reach the stars? In the later books, culmnating in The Tuloriad, Ringo and Kratman go back and look at the earlier books and say, basically, no they couldn't, that's not natural. Something changed them and made them that way.

This leads to the central question of the Tuloriad: Who did it to them, why, and can the Posleen change themselves again, this time into something better?

Defeated alien general Tulo'stenaloor survives the mutually disastrous invasion of Earth to limp off into exile with a remnant population of his people in search of a more sustainable, less destructive way of life. Along the way on their space journey of nearly Homeric proportions, the Posleen learn that their vanished gods, the Aldenata, were not gods at all but a fellow alien species that tinkered with their genetics and destroyed their culture in order to use them as perfect killing machines. How best can they recover from this? Do they seek to reclaim past glories and paste together a culture made up of best guesses and approximations, imitate the other species they see around them, or make up something new?

Meanwhile, Father Dwyer and his sentient Artificial Intelligence wife Sally are leading a ship full of missionaries from Earth's various major religions on a mission to bring the civilizing influences of faith to the species that almost wiped out humanity. The motley crew includes the eccentric Reverend Guanomarioch, a fervent Posleen convert to Christianity, eager to save the souls of his fellows.

The Tuloriad is in many ways a story about religion, what people want from it and what it can do for society. Frankly, that doesn't bother me in the least. This is xenoanthropological science fiction far more than it is space opera, and in human societies religion has played a very powerful role in shaping how people see themselves and the world around them - it makes sense that it might be the same for aliens.

Is it a little funky about gender at times? Well, yes. There are a few digs about how feminism would take a fatal blow and a period of polygyny would be absolutely necessary in the wake of an alien invasion that killed a huge percentage of the Earth's population and a disproportionate percentage of the men.

Apparently the idea that a larger female population in a post-industrial, post-gun world might equal a more female-dominated society was not a possibility that occurred to the authors, and nor did the idea that actually, in a population-depleted male-deprived environment, same sex relationships make perfect sense and are actually very socially responsible if you allow for turkey basters. But that didn't particularly bother or surprise me because, quite frankly, they're straight male science fiction authors. That's about what I would expect and it was easy enough to handwave away as what a Catholic priest born in the early twentieth century (the viewpoint character during those segments) really would think. By those standards, it's positively liberal!

No, while some might need to be warned for that, what actually bothered me - though not enough to ruin the book for me - was this:

Background, the Posleen are a one-gendered, one-sexed species, universally and functionally hermaphroditic. They do, however, vary as to sentience. About 95% of them are mere wild animals, no smarter than the average hyena, and beyond that, there are many who are about as smart as a chimpanzee. Only a very few are fully sentient, but those who are are fully capable of language, speech, and all the things that you and I can do. It is perfectly natural and indeed expected for Posleen to mate between intelligence levels - they're all members of the same species and it has no impact one way or the other on the possible intelligence of the offspring.

The Reverend Guanomarioch got lonely and decided to buy a chimp-level mate off of Ebay (long story). So far, so good. Then he (and they all do use he in human languages, as a convenience) decided that as his single life-long mate and co-parent was clearly his wife and decided to refer to "her" exclusively with female pronouns - something Posleen do not usually do, choosing rather to use he or it.

This is perhaps not surprising or offensive coming from an alien who A) is a fervent convert to evangelical Christianity and B) has only an alien outsider's understanding of human gender, culture and relationships. It's the humans (both fictional and authorial) who have me headdesking.

No one sees anything weird about this! None of the humans, men or women, comment even in private on the dubious terminology or implications of this. Of course the one with animal-level intelligence is "the wife". Of course she should be referred to as she! She does an admirable job of tending their offspring and having sex with Guanomarioch, what else does a wife or female need to do?

Oh, John Ringo, no. 

AuthorKate Fitzsimons | Comment14 Comments |
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Reader Comments (14)

This is why I don't read Ringo anymore, and indirectly, why a Baen Barfly de-friended me: I am very vocal why I hardly Ringo anymore, or will only read with great reluctance, and in anticipation of getting a headache from slamming my head against a desk.

It's like he's a vast nexus of genderfail, a great deal of the time.

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