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Courtship Rite

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Published first as "Geta", later as "Courtship Rite"--I think neither title does justice to this fine novel. It ought to be called "The Marriage of Six". Almost two books in one, the first part is a masterful piece of world-building. It introduces characters that shine with complex humanity and weaves their lives together in an engrossing adventure that builds to a harrowing climax. Other novels would end there, but this one, like life itself, moves on. "Who says beginnings are more interesting than middles or endings?" asks one character--and the author shows us that they aren't. Just as an old friend occasionally reveals a new bit of their past, shifting your perception of their entire history, the author saves some of the strangest and most fundamental revelations about his characters for the story's end. The last chapters are a beautiful and reflective coda to the first part of the book; they're a meditation on the many faces of love, the limits of loyalty, and the meaning of marriage. The people of Geta practice a unique form of polygamy, but this novel's emotional center--the quest of the central characters to form a marriage of six, the finest and most balanced team in their society--will ring true to anyone who has ever fallen in love and tried to create a family.

I know what you are thinking...you can't begin to count the number of people who have said; "I've read the greatest book and you have just got to get a hold of it." Well, I am not only making this claim for Courtship Rite, I have become one of those dogged fanatics who scour the used bookstores in the faint hope that I will catch a glimpse of a soft-cover book bearing a familiar Rowena rendering of the maran-kaiel. I first remember seeing a brief mention of this book in of all places, the opening comic strip in "Heavy Metal". I don't remember which issue (sometime in the early 80s) nor can I even tell you why the name caught my eye but here was this cartoon giving a favourable critique of a book. Intrigued, I found a copy and have not let it go since. This finely told story is not for the faint of heart as Kingsbury challenges many a puritanical taboo and establishes the realm of a single family in a few well placed strokes of black on a pale ivory canvas. The characters contained within the pages breathe as they struggle to forge a world from a place of hardship and ignorance. Yet they do so with the greatest of intelligence and compassion...which is what drew me first to the Scribe Kingsbury. The story centers on a marriage of five people (three of whom are brothers and have formed a family they call the maran-kaiel.). Over a period of time, each has taken a path to ensure the family's strength and success in a world of necessary brutality softened only by the acts of others. The brothers (Hoemei, Joesai and Gaet) have married two women (Noe and Teenae) and are courting a sixth, thus bringing the number of their marriage to the zenith for their culture. There is a catch. The woman that they are courting to become third-wife (Kathein) is denied them and they are offered instead a woman declared a religious heretic - Oelita - who has determined that the traditional ways of their culture can be cast off for other paths. The tale is a complex weaving of personalities and hopes. As the pages fly past your eyes, their world unfolds and storms ripple across their developing culture. The Kaiel and the other clans on this forsaken planet are masters at genetic manipulation, intrigue and resource management yet they lack simple tools that we take for granted...inventing things as they go and moulding their world as the stars revolve around them. It is a science fiction story about people and an anthropological study of ourselves. I have over a long period of years collected approximately seventeen copies of this novel and have been fortunate enough to give away as gifts almost every copy that I have found to friends who now scour the bookstores in search of that elusive Donald M. Kingsbury Classic. If you have the rare opportunity to find this novel. BUY IT. READ IT. But first, cast off the world as you know it and find the fascinating construct of a culture that could one day exist far from our own spinning rock in the ether....and walk through a doorway into the lives of five quite remarkable people and their struggle to bring the world around to their vision

Not for the faint of heart, as you learn within the first 100 words of the book that Geta is a harsh world with no source of food during a famine other than it's only source of meat -- other human beings. Though this idea is initially repulsive to our way of thinking, you soon discover an incredible morality of the people in this book that far surpasses our own. They cannot imagine a war where they could not eat those they fought. Wars such as we fight today are beyond horrific to them, the most vile form of evil. Makes you really think about our values, and about how easily we tend to accept war. A great read, if you can stomach it. One of my favorite all-time books.

Courtship Rite is one of those books that I have long kept on my bookshelf to re read to remind me that genius is seldom what we think it should be. This thought applies not only to the splended telling of the story of the family maran-Kaiel, but also to the story itself. Once you throw away the cultural taboos of our society, (plural mariage, canabilism, ect)and dig into the ethics presented, it makes for incredible reading. Written in the early 1980's, the parable deals with bioethics, war, famine, individual choice, weapons of mass distruction, and the ethical question "do the needs of the many out weigh the needs of the few or the one?" Insightful, enthralling, entertaining, and worthy of thought beyond one casual read.It is timely, and I wish that it would be taken out of mothballs and re released as our world dallies with many of these same issues
Like "Lord of the Rings" which could only become a movie with the digital animation available now, this is another book that could be synthesized into a compelling film. I wait for the day.

Also released through Panther as Geta (ISBN 0-586-05932-6) this novel is one of the few Science FIction novels which I've been drawn to re-read along with Banks 'Consider Phlebas' and Bears "Eon'. The world Kingsbury devises fulfills the true literary purposes of the genre; to present us with circumstances bizarre but people who are just like us. He challenges us to put ourselves in the place of these characters whose daily lives are different from our own but explicable. A hard to find book now, but worth searching out. It will occupy a priviledged place on your bookshelf, and become dog earned as you dip again and again into its' rich moral dillemas.

This book is almost perfect, too nearly perfect to be out of print/out of stock. The fine portrayal of characters within a culture quite alien and yet quite human is a delight! The philosophic and social contructs of the Getan culture, the loving interactions of the Maran-kaiel, the cheerful and skeptic optimism of the author's creation here can only derive from a rare combination of intelligence and inspiration. The plot is adventure, the characters so charming that I frequently pick any chapter to re-read for a few minutes pleasure. Highly Recommended.

One of the best stories, genre or not, that I have ever read. It is HARD sf, none of this pseudo-fantasy stuff with time travel, FTL, telepathy, or whatever. But don't imagine a dry, techie story: the characters, the backgrounds, the problems really come to life. Imagine a mixture of JRR Tolkien, Hal Clement, and PG Wodehouse -- you won't come close to what this is like, but imagine it anyway. Some time in the far past a human colony was established on a poisonously alien planet, the only edible things being what they brought with them: the "Sacred Eight" food plants, bees -- and human beings. Now, dispersed over the planet and divided into a number of selectively-bred clans, their society has become truly alien. They are ruled by geneticist-priests, their bodies are covered with decorative scars (except for the Liethe, a clan of cloned prostitutes...), and in times of famine the Low on the List are invited to make their Contribution to the Race -- in the temple kitchens. They worship the spaceship that brought them to Geta as a god. Then someone recovers an ancient recording device, and God begins talking to them... The language used in the book is marvellously evocative, even whimsical at times: "A tug on his hair would lift off his head at the smile line." I found myself caught up in the problems of the Maran family as they struggled against foreign invaders, priest-killing heretics, and an alien ecology. I would rate this book well up in the top ten books of all time, and I cannot understand why it is so little known

I love this book, above all, for one scene: Oelita the heretic, who opposes her planet's custom of cannibalism and denies her planet's god, the starship that brought human beings there, has seen images of war from an ancient memory devices brought from Earth--and falls on her face in the mud, thanking her planet's god for rescuing her from Earth's horrors and giving her a world with nothing worse than recurrent famine and cannibalism. I believed in her feelings and empathized with them--and this kind of literary effect is what I read science fiction for. A fascinating book that deserves more readers.

I found this book to be fascinating and riveting. I cared about the characters and was fascinated by the cultures depicted. The people live on a very metal-poor planet where all of the native vegetation and animals contain toxins. There are no plants that produce anything analogous to wood. They have a very few (I think 7) "sacred" edible plants, which are all food plants, and which include corn, beans, squash, and potatoes. Tilling the soil is backbreaking work, with no metals for plows and nothing to make long-handled shovels or hoes with. There is nothing analogous to bees. The only milk is human milk, and humans are the only animal whose whole body is edible. Everything else is poisonous to a greater or lesser extent.

The people on this world live by a concept called kalothi. It means something like merit or worthiness. They work hard and compete (in lots of ways, often in formal contests) in tests of intelligence, speed, strategy, health, beauty, fertility, leadership, etc. to prove their kalothi. Different clans strive to increase their kalothi in different ways, leading to both obvious and subtle differences between clans. Kalothi determines who survives by natural selection as well as someone's kalothi rating affecting how people treat him or her in a multitude of ways, but especially their options with regard to marriage/breeding and their right in hard times to life itself. And life on this planet is always hard.

One of the things that impressed me with this book is that every scene advances the story of the main characters and advances the interesting political situation on this world at the time and also gives us information about the cultures and science of the people of this world. That's a lot of information, but the writing is so very nicely crafted that all of this information flows naturally as part of the story. It is well worth reading, so long as you're not too uncomfortable with either cannibalism or bodily scarification for personal decoration to focus on the story.

The story itself is the story of three brothers who survived what we would call a harrowing childhood (they see it as normal), who are rising in influence in their clan. They are in a group marriage with two women; they are seeking their third, and final wife. The shyest of the brothers has started courting a scientist they all like, but then they are ordered to marry a "clanless" heretic, with the expectation that this will allow them to somehow manage the effects of her heresy, which is growing in popularity. They are not happy with this order, so they decide to impose the most extreme Courtship Rite this society allows on this woman, who they have never met.

In part, their choice to subject her to a death ritual as their Courtship Rite is understandable rebellion--they don't want to be forced to marry this strange woman instead of the one they've already chosen--in part it is that they do doubt whether this odd, soft-hearted (not a compliment in their minds) woman is worthy of them. If she doesn't survive the rite, they don't have to marry her, and her heresy may die with her. But in implementing the rite, they have to get to know her, and try to understand her beliefs, and what her teachings will mean for their world if many people come to believe as she does. And she is a woman of very high kalothi, even if she has odd ideas.

The story keeps you wondering about the outcome of the various plots that intertwine through this book. I strongly recommend it.

When this book was written, it was recognized as one of the six best of the year, but it lost the Hugo Award when Isaac Asimov starting adding to his Foundation Trilogy. Nominated that year were books by Heinlein, Clarke, Cherryh, and Wolfe (they knew it was a great year for SF- usually, only 5 books are nominated!). 25 years later, I can still say Kingsbury above any of these other giants of the field, was ROBBED. This book is one I reread every few years, and it stands the test of time. This is the best SF novel of the era, and I only wish that Kingsbury wrote more stories of this world and society, because I found it completely engrossing, and I thought the ending cried out for more.