Halfway Human [Paperback]

Carolyn Ives Gilman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 28, 2010

"The best science fiction novel I've read in a long time"-St. Louis Post-Dispatch **** A Starflight Reader nominee for best book of the year **** Tedla is a 'bland,' an asexual class of people that exist only to serve their fellow beings. **** Val is an expert on alien cultures but has never seen a bland before. They come together after Tedla is found light-years away from its home planet-alone, isolated and suicidal. Val's mission is to help Tedla recover. But the more she learns about the beautiful alien being, the more she discovers about the torment Tedla and its kind suffer on their planet. **** Little does the rest of the universe know of the hidden world of the blands, a world that hides shocking secrets and unspeakable crimes. **** Halfway Human is a mesmerizing look at an intricately created alien world which is strange and distant, yet hauntingly familiar. **** "Beauty, pain, wit, and wisdom all suffuse this powerful novel, as it uses imagined futures to reveal our own world in starkest clarity...and yes, with a whisper of hope." -Locus

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In the spirit of groundbreaking books that deal with gender, such as The Left Hand of Darkness, Carolyn Ives Gilman gives readers Halfway Human, the story of a "bland" named Tedla. Blands are gender-neutral inhabitants of Gammadis, a planet that also has traditional male and female sexes. In Gammadis society, blands are less than human, objects to be owned and used, brutally trained for a life of servitude and obedience. No bland has ever left Gammadis, until Tedla turns up on Capella Two, where it lands in the care of a xenologist named Val. As Val tries to help Tedla recover from a lifetime of misuse, readers come to learn Tedla's life story, a tale that is at times difficult to take but that is fascinating nonetheless. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Carolyn Ives Gilman has been publishing fantasy and science fiction stories for 10 years in numerous magazines and anthologies including The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Universe, Interzone, Realms of Fantasy, Full Spectrum, and most recently, Bending the Landscape. She was a finalist for the Nebula Award in the novelette category in 1992. She lives in St. Louis where she works as a museum exhibition developer. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 328 pages
• Publisher: Phoenix Pick (February 28, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1604504404
• ISBN-13: 978-1604504408
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,657,080 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A gender-bending sci-fi novel, June 2, 2002

By 

Michael J. Mazza - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Halfway Human (Mass Market Paperback)

Carolyn Ives Gilman's science fiction novel "Halfway Human" is a work very much in the tradition of Ursula K. LeGuin's classic "The Left Hand of Darkness." Each novel envisions an alien society in which gender and sexuality differ radically from that of the ordinary human world. Ives' vision is as bold and as fully realized as that of LeGuin, and daringly different on certain levels.

The heart of Ives' story takes place on the planed Gammadis, where a neuter third gender, known as Blands, serves as a slave population to the males and females that comprise the rest of the population. The situation is further complicated by the fact that all children of Gammadis are essentially neuter, with gender not manifesting itself until puberty. The story opens with Tedla, a Bland refugee from Gammadis, meeting a xenologist from another world. Tedla tells "its" life story to the sympathetic Val.

"Halfway Human" is a gripping drama filled with political intrigue and populated by a fascinating group of characters. Gilman fully fleshes out the complex culture of Tedla's world. The novel deals with such compelling issues as prejudice, slavery, sex, power, and the relationship of an underground subculture to a dominant culture. The story also looks at education and empowerment, hypocrisy and lust, and the longing for a love that transcends vast gulfs of difference.

There are some really horrific and painful scenes in this story, but there is also much that is life-affirming. "Halfway Human" is a brilliant contemporary fictional version of a slave narrative, a genre which has played an important role in American literature; good companion texts for this novel would be such 19th century works as "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass" or Harriet Jacobs' "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl."

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Provocative exploration of slavery and gender issues, September 5, 2000

By 

Richard R. Horton (Webster Groves, MO United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Halfway Human (Mass Market Paperback)

Halfway Human is pretty darn good. It's set in a rather well worked out variation of a common idea: sometime long in the past (story past, our future), Earth humans have colonized and terraformed many alien planets. After a period in which the planets fell out of contact, a subset of them have rediscovered each other, and have apparently formed a very loose confederation, including Capella Two, the planet (or actually a moon) on which the nominal viewpoint character, Valerie Endrada, lives. Travel is by matter transmitters, and is (logically) light speed. (The fairly rigorous insistence on light speed travel and the corresponding simultaneity problems is a good decision, and is used well in the story.) The tech behind all this is very much backgrounded (quite appropriately). At the time of the action, none of the unmanned probes which are trying to rediscover the colony planets have reported back in some time, except for the one at Gammadis (Gamma Disciplins), which is 51 ly away from Capella Two, and which harbors an odd variety of humans. The original mission to Gammadis ended 63 years previously in disgrace, with the ambassadors thrown off the planet (and arriving back on Cappella 12 years prior to the main action).

That's the setup, but what about the good part, the reason to read this novel? Well, the strange thing about Gammadis humans is that they are born neuter. At puberty, about 1/3 (very roughly, and the ambiguity about the actual numbers is a point of the novel) stay neuter, and the others turn half into males and half into females. There is no way to tell whether a given child will be male, female, or neuter. The kicker is that the neuters, also called blands, are condemned to life in "grayspace", literally underneath and "behind" the "human" world, and they live lives of slavery, performing the menial tasks of their society, leaving the "humans" free for the more intellectual and artistic pursuits. This is regarded on Gammadis as natural: neuters are supposed to be stupider, and less energetic, and literally to have no souls. The whole setup is monstrous, and at the same time quite clearly analogous in many ways to slavery in the US, and in many other cultures. In fact, though the novel seems to be promoted as a novel about gender roles, it really isn't. Certainly Gilman makes some such points, and it's not without value for its exploration of gender, but the central issue is definitely slavery and not gender. And it seems to me that many opportunities for a more probing (no pun intended, God help me) exploration of gender issues are missed: but I should emphasize that that's not a weakness, just a different focus than one might have expected.

The book works because of the believable but horrifying society revealed on Gammadis, with its uncomfortable parallels with our history and even to an extent our present. There are many disturbing scenes, and many moving scenes. The portrayal of the bland society, and the secret behind the Gammadian characteristics, is very well done, and at times has a "Ones who Walk Away From Omelas" sort of message to it: they have created a near-Utopia, at one level, and they try so hard to ignore the "screaming child in the back room": except it's not one child but 1/3 of their population. Much of the characteristics of the Gammadian society are very nicely shown, instead of told, and some important details are very subtly planted in the background. Details which seem trivial take on powerful new meaning later in the novel, after we understand the society better.

I had a few reservations with this book plotwise, but all in all it's a first-rate read, and very provocative. In many ways, this is a pure SF novel, in that its value derives mostly from the ideas it explores, rather than a particularly exciting plot (though the story moves nicely), or any outstanding "literary" values (though it's certainly well-written, and decently characterized.)

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating, August 7, 2003

By 

E. L Wagner (Sacramento, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Halfway Human (Mass Market Paperback)

This book flows well even with frequent changes in the point of view. The characters and their responses are believable and well drawn, from the behavior of the blands in slavery to the relationship between Val and her dissertation advisor. I had to smile when her advisor told her some of the same "politically cautious" things that I remember mine telling me back in grad school and after. I liked the fact that, even without going into a huge amount of detail about their pasts, she managed to portray even some of the more minor characters as complex and multidimensional. This is an amazing accomplishment for a first novel! Despite being set in the distant future, the novel is quite believable and the societies quite plausible. She doesn't explain every little thing about the world that the characters live in though, and there are many unsolved mysteries and some loose ends (like what it was that Tedla had done that resulted in their making it a bland), but the reader can draw his/her own conclusions. I find it refreshing for a writer to leave some things to the reader's imagination, but I suppose that some might find it frustrating and wish for a sequel. The book doesn't need a sequel, but one would work. It's been a while since this book was published, and I hope that Ms. Gilman writes more novels someday. I saw something on the net that said she is currently working on a completely new book, and I hope that this is true and it gets published. In these times of the mass marketing of established authors and endless sequels and series, it's frustrating to see how rarely completely new authors with completely new ideas, even those with considerable talent, get the exposure and publicity that they deserve.