Mission Child [Hardcover]

Maureen F. McHugh (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1998

Young Janna has lived her fourteen years on the icy northern plains of a world that has forgotten its history. Now the arrival of Earthers -- descendants of the humans who first settled the planet many centuries before -- has violently upset the fragile balance of a developing civilization. The offworlders' advanced technologies and cruel indifference to local life have brought despair and destruction to Janna's home, robbing her of family, husband, child, and self. Haunted by a dead past -- mysteriously altered by the gift of three alien artifacts -- Janna must now redefine herself on a devastated planet she no longer recognizes, as she embarks upon a remarkable, transcendent journey into an uncertain future; moving steadily through this strange new world toward a startling realization about her role in the great cosmic order.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Mission Child is an expansion of Maureen McHugh's "The Cost to Be Wise," a fascinating novella from the original anthology Starlight 1.

Janna's world was colonized long ago by Earth and then left on its own for centuries. When "offworlders" return, their superior technology upsets the balance of a developing civilization. Mission Child follows the journeys of Janna after she and her young partner escape marauders who attack their hometown. The girl, fast becoming mature beyond her years, sets off across the planet on an odyssey of adventure, poverty, hard work, war, famine, and rebirth. Janna uses her meager skills to eke out a living in a changing world; she gains and loses a husband, a child, friends, jobs, and more.

McHugh weaves together anthropology, sociology, psychology, and gender relations in this wondrous journey. Janna assumes the guise of a boy for protection, but eventually becomes "Jan" to herself as well as others. Reminiscent of Ursula K. Le Guin's insightful works set in the Hainish universe, Mission Child will doubtless be nominated for a Tiptree Award for its exploration of Janna's gender identity. --Bonnie Bouman

From Publishers Weekly

Issues of gender and humanity infuse this beautifully written saga of a woman's journey of self-recovery. On a distant world, in the far northern reaches, the Hamra clan village is an "appropriate technology" settlement, where the descendants of a long-ago Earth colony live peacefully?until the village is attacked by the marauding Teske clan. The only survivors, teenager Janna and her boyfriend, Aslak, flee across the icy plains, wandering from village to village. Janna becomes pregnant and gives birth to a daughter, who soon dies, as does Aslak. Alone, "Jan of no clan" makes her way to a refugee camp, where, emaciated, she is taken for a boy, a guise she adopts at first for protection, and later because it feels right. Afraid of being found out, Jan moves on to the city of Taufzin, where her ability to speak English attracts a job working for offworlders. Busy, grim, impersonal Taufzin is the opposite of peaceful Hamra; isolated and lonely, Jan falls in love with a criminal, to whom she reveals the secret of her gender. A tragedy ultimately sends Jan to yet another part of the planet, the hot Southern islands; there, though still a foreigner in every way, Jan finds her place in the world. Fans of Ursula Le Guin will find much to admire in McHugh's (China Mountain Zhang; Half the Day Is Night) intelligent, carefully wrought novel of a world that is familiar yet very alien.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 385 pages
• Publisher: Eos (T); 1st edition (December 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0380974568
• ISBN-13: 978-0380974566
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,008,235 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Maureen F. McHugh has spent most of her life in Ohio, but has lived in New York City and, for a year, in Shijiazhuang, China. She is the author of four novels. Her first novel, China Mountain Zhang, won the Tiptree Award and her latest novel, Nekropolis, was a Book Sense 76 pick and a New York Times Editor's Choice. McHugh is working on two novels, BabyGoth and Coming of Age in America. BabyGoth is a mother-daughter story: the Ya-Ya Sisterhood meets Alcoholics Anonymous. Coming of Age in America is a near future coming of age story -- and a romance. Chloe is a trailer park girl at a nice college. Derek is a rejuvenated 72-year-old returning student. McHugh teaches writing at the John Carroll University in Cleveland and at the Imagination and Clarion workshops. She and her husband and two dogs used to live next to a dairy farm. Sometimes, in the summer, black and white Holsteins looked over the fence at them. Now she lives in Austin, Texas.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars McHugh's best: adventure, tragedy, wit, beauty, January 26, 1999

By 

Sean Stewart ([e-mail]) (Monterey, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mission Child (Hardcover)

Maureen McHugh has already proved herself to be the single best builder of lived-in sf worlds working in the field today. Her talent for capturing ordinary people is stronger than ever in Mission Child, but those ordinary people are living very adventurous lives. McHugh has added a lot of beauty to her always spare and graceful prose. This coming-of-age story features war, guns, reindeer, alien hi-tech, pirates, Laplander cyberpunk, and a cross-dressing shaman who is one of the most memorable characters in SF this decade. My favorite SF book of the last five years.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great writer who can involve readers in any scene, August 16, 2004

By 

Duane Simolke "author, The Acorn Stories, Deg... (Lubbock, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mission Child (Mass Market Paperback)

A colonized world develops a unique identity and culture. Years later, one of its citizens develops a unique identity as well, adapting to her culture by taking on the identity of a man. Soon, she finds that her gender-blurring actually appeals to her in ways beyond what her situation demands of her.

I love Mission Child as much as McHugh's more popular novel China Mountain Zhang, which received the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Locus Award for Best First Novel.

McHugh is a great writer who can involve readers in any scene, regardless of how much or how little action that scene contains. The language seems descriptive to an extreme, but she still manages to tie those descriptions into the thoughts and feelings of the characters.

Before reading her work, I read reviews that included complaints about her supposedly not focusing on plot. Readers can find countless formulaic, plot-driven science fiction and fantasy novels, but they won't find many original and evocative writers of McHugh's caliber.

McHugh's other novels include Nekropolis and Half the Day Is Night.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Challenging, consistently engaging novel., April 28, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Mission Child (Mass Market Paperback)

This episodic speculative novel is a consistently surprising story about a young woman named Janna, her struggles to find a place in her world, and her identity in that world. A character driven story, it will remind you of LeGuin & Dickens, as Janna winds her way through an interesting myriad of personalities. I really liked the way this author handled the material with such unflinching sincerity and confidence, that she never felt she had to justify or overexplain the world, the social system, the character motivations, or the gender issues that arose. A prophetic book? Possibly. But definately for the thoughtful reader.