Customer Reviews

Master of None

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Rebeccasreads recommends MASTER OF NONE as an adventure in space-cum-soap opera role reversal, heavy on the socio-economics. Imagine what life might be like if you were male & you'd landed in a nation where your gender is not only despised, it is proscribed: from the way you look, what you eat, where you go, how you walk & talk. N. Lee Wood has created such a world & we watch as Nathan must learn his place in the scheme of things, or meet a fate worse than death.

Underneath this seemingly perfect female-friendly society on the planet Vanar, something is brewing & Nathan's skill in botany turns out to be the reason why he was enticed there ... if he can make anyone listen to him. & that's the problem: this is a society who distrust anything males have to say. How can he make them listen to the news of their impending doom?

MASTER OF NONE is all about relationships, power plays & saving the world. You will have to learn another language & another world view.

In the distant future, mankind has colonized many planets, but it is the Nine Families of Vanar that control the worms, artifacts made and abandoned by an ancient race that enables female pilots to fly to three hundred systems reducing interstellar distances. The Vanar take other ships with them as they traverse the universe with their monopoly. On the planet itself the women citizens are the ruling class while the men are slaves needed to help produce the next generation females.

Ambitious botanist Nathan Crewe convinces a space pilot to take him to Vanar where he plans to pick specimens to prove his theory. The authorities catch him within an hour of landing and inform him he will never leave. Nathan is adopted by one of the powerful Nine Families and is forced to marry into one of the Nine Families. Although he is less than chattel, Nathan feels Vanar is home and begins a legal fight to make changes to the social caste system.

MASTER OF NONE is an in depth look at a society in which women hold all power while men need permission to simply leave the house, are unable to attend university, or hold a job beyond breeder. Nathan coming from the outside thinks initially the planet is backwoods, but begins to change his mind as he gets to know people. Could he be suffering from the Stockholm syndrome or just believe that Vanar is home? He wants to make change so that his gender has rights paralleling much of the civil rights movement. Women on Varna are not evil or deliberately cruel; instead they have been raised to believe they are superior. This is a masterful science fiction tale that cleverly spotlights social inequities.

Harriet Klausner

This is the first book by N. Lee Wood that I've read and I was impressed. The main character is a man who finds himself trapped in a society where men are vehemently regulated to second-class citizens. There is great commentary here on gender roles in society, misinformation, oppression and the elite. Wood used this engaging story about politics and relationships, with angst, vivid imagery and unexpected plot turns, to drag me from chapter to chapter to a satisfying ending. In times like these, when we've had our consciousness raised about oppressive cultures and groups like the Taliban, this book is especially poignant.

If you're familiar with them, the story, writing, and social commentary was on par with Sherri S. Tepper's "Gate To Women's Country", Valerie Freireich's "Testament", C. J. Cherryh's "Foreigner" series and Joan Vinge's "Catspaw". If you're not familiar with them, I recommend them as well as Master Of None.

Some SF books are brilliant in both their storytelling and in their examinations of big questions, such as the role we each play in our societies. There are some well-known examinations of gender roles (such as the Left Hand of Darkness) and the workings of matriarchal societies (Tepper wrote a good one, whose name I can't recall at the moment). Master of None doesn't really measure up to those SF groundbreaking moments, but it's a good story... and in the end, that's what matters most.

The basic tale is relatively simple: our hero, Nathan, is a botanist who is so anxious to make a name for himself in his profession that he ignores planetary rules: men are simply not allowed. Once he arrives, he is not permitted to leave. The book is about Nathan's experiences as he first resists Vanar society, then embraces it, then -- well, I'll leave you to read about THAT.

One thing I particularly enjoyed about this book is that it doesn't ignore communication difficulties. Nathan is a botanist, not, as he insists, a linguist; as a result, he has an awful time trying to learn a new language, particularly one that reflects its society so carefully. (For instance, there are different verb tenses for addressing someone of more- or less-importance than you.) Most books seem to arm-wave over this difficulty, but Nathan's difficulty made the story more believeable.

It's also written rather well. The author does a good job of holding back plenty of the characters' backstory; Wood doesn't fall for the trap of trying to tell everything, all at once. Not all of the characters come to life, but sometimes that's a reflection of Nathan's perceptions. For example, I never understood one particular because I could never fathom why she wanted to marry him; Nathan obviously never figured it out either, but the result was that the woman never because quite real to me.

Don't take that criticism too strongly. This is a well written novel that grabbed my attention and didn't let go. The author could easily have fallen into predictability, but avoided the trap; I was surprised by what happened, on more than one occasion.

This book won't blow you away, but you'll be glad you read it.

I didn't think that I was going to find the book all that great just from reading the back cover and seeing some of the quotes on it.

"In the bestselling tradition of Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Sheri S. Tepper comes a compelling novel of power and gender on a planet ruled exclusively by women."

"It's a long time since I've seen an SF novel as centered as this one in the vital debate about gender and power relationships." Suzy McKee Charnas

A man finds himself stranded on a planet where women are in charge. He's a second class citizen now. It's just like our world except backward! Oh my! The front cover quotes made it out to be the first refreshing feminist utopia novel in decades! Decades, I tell you.

Now, here's my thing: I have not read a lot of science fiction compared to many of the people in this community. I have not read a lot of feminist fiction, speculative or not, but I plan to read more. Given my limited experience with this topic, it seems like a bad sign when even I look at the premise and think it's a cliché. I know there have been books that did this role-reversal thing quite some time ago and were really good. Hell, Steven Barnes' Lion's Blood was pretty much the same premise except the reversal was between whites and blacks. So, from the outset, I knew I might be in for an eyeroll fest with this book. But I was hoping that it would rise above the cliché premise and be really interesting (not unheard of). Master of None gets about halfway there.

Okay, so we have the basic premise: Typical man who acts just like typical men do in the present (even though this is supposed to be the future) finds himself on a planet where women are in charge and act like typical men. Or something to that effect. This planet, Vanar, is just about the most powerful planet in the intergalactic community because they control the only means of traveling long distance in space. Anyone can have a ship, but if they want to get from one planet to another in less than a thousand years they have to rely on this weird ship technology that only specially bred and engineered women can operate. And these women are all Vanar. This means that every woman on Vanar essentially has a Room of Her Own. They are a powerhouse, so they get to be as cantankerous and PMS-y as they want.

We follow Nathan as he bumbles his way through this world where men are treated really shabbily and women can have what amounts to a harem and men have very few rights and women really just need to learn to relax and be cool, baby. It's very much a character-centered novel. There is a plot, but it's only there to give us a viable reason for following Nathan around as he goes through his character development and the author goes through her worldbuilding. Some fairly major changes happen in Vanar society because of him, but I suspect only because internal changes are only so interesting to most book readers.

The maddening thing about this book isn't just that it's a standard role-reversal with not much else to recommend it, but that the core message seems to be: women will act just like men (or worse) if they got to run things. The real solution is to be egalitarian. I have problems with this. Firstly, I think the whole argument that if women ran things they would act just like men is bullpucky. Second, the whole conclusion that egalitarianism is the way to go is an old, old conclusion come to long ago. N. Lee Wood has now added absolutely zero to the conversation.

Here's the real kicker: Vanar is not only a planet run by the womenfolk, but they are dark-skinned womenfolk. Arabs, maybe, since we have the whole harem thing going on. Nathan is, you guessed it, a muscular blond white male. Handsome, too. Here comes the white man to fix everything yet again. Only the white man can solve the problems of the dark-skinned society ruled by women. And he does it, too. Yay for him.

I might have been able to overlook some of the books flaws if it hadn't been for the boring conclusion + white man commin' in to fix everything bits. Once I caught on that this book wasn't in any way plot-driven, I was able to relax a little more into it. I was enjoying the view of this world even though it is a flawed world and the view skewed. I just kept hoping that the story wasn't going to come to the conclusion that it did. Somehow I imagined it veering off into the profound suddenly and unexpectedly. I suppose I was hoping for more.

In the end I feel that Master of None has some very deep flaws. Not on the sentence level, or even a structural level. The execution is flawed. Dare I say that the ideas are also flawed. The basic premise is, in my opinion, way flawed. But it is an excellent example of a character-driven book that doesn't need a lot of plot cookies to entice the reader forward.