Otherwhere [Paperback]

Margaret Wander Bonanno (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 17, 2000

What if Columbus had stumbled upon a 21st-century civilization in the New World? Otherwhere, like its predecessor The Others, explores the inevitable conflict that arises from such a clash of cultures through the eyes of two women, each from either world, whose loves and courage transcend time and ideology.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In The Others , Bonanno chronicled the encounter between the People, a colorful and violent species, and a colony of high-tech, nonviolent aliens (Others) discovered on the People's planet. This sequel opens after a cultural backlash has killed all but 9413 Others. The survivors hope to establish a refuge in the arctic wastes, and Lingri the Chronicler alternates between recording their journey and remembering the interactions that brought them to this state. Lingri herself was perhaps the major factor in shaping the current Other/People relationship, so her remembrances are highly revealing. Bonanno writes with a verve that makes both sequences easy to follow--provided one has read The Others --and hard to put down. Unfortunately, a disjointed plotline undercuts the effectiveness of the novel's philosophical speculations; perhaps the next book will bring things together again.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Seeking refuge in the polar regions of their world, the peaceful race known as Others strives to remain hidden from the humans who have nearly succeeded in exterminating them. Bonanno's sequel to The Others ( LJ 9/15/90) continues to explore the causes of a war-to-the-death between two intelligent races--one of which refuses to fight. Most of the "action" in this thoughtfully written novel takes place in the past; the final chapters serve as a teaser for a third volume. Recommended, along with the previous title, for most sf collections.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: iUniverse (October 17, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0595007325
• ISBN-13: 978-0595007325
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,517,933 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A modernist variation on Star Trek's Vulcans, August 6, 2000

By 

Jean-Francois Virey (59500 DOUAI France) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Otherwhere (Hardcover)

The most literary of all Star Trek writers, Margaret Wander Bonanno showed a marked fondness for the Vulcans and their culture in her two novels, *Dwellers in the Crucible* and *Strangers From the Sky*. But it was probably her experience with *Music of the Spheres*, almost completely rewritten and then published under the title *Probe* without any explanation, which led her to shun the Star Trek franchise and develop her interest in the Vulcans in a new context. Thus she created the Others, extraterrestrials sharing with the Vulcans not only their philosophy of pacifism, vegetarianism and devotion to science, logic and emotional control, but also many physiological peculiarities (such as the pointed ears and the mating cycle) and cultural traits (such as, for the initiated, the equivalents of kas wahn and tal shaya).

In the *Others* trilogy, this offshoot of the Vulcan race (who knows itself to have been seeded on the planet by offworlders from a desert planet) has undergone the same process of cultural evolution as its forefathers: hundreds of thousands of years of bloody warfare until their conversion to a life of peace of logic. But this hard-earned peace may not last forever, for the Others are not the only inhabitants of the planet: far from their prosperous and technologically developed Archipelago, on the Mainland, lives an indigenous race, the People, similar in many respects to the humans, in whose midst, out of sheer curiosity, the Others send their Monitors, cultural observers bound by some equivalent of Starfleet's Prime Directive.

The protagonist and narrator of this saga, an "intellectually challenged" (by Other standards) woman named Lingri the Inept, who describes herself as "a poet among a race of scientists", is one of these Monitors, and the *Other* trilogy is the story of her life and the fate of the two civilizations as the People finally discover the existence of the Others.

The *Others* trilogy is a strange literary entity. Modernist in its style, it is written as a collage, in the manner of John Brunner's *Stand on Zanzibar*, alternating elements of narration with extracts from documents internal to the world described- such as Chronicles, news reports, etc. The narration itself does its best never to be linear, though not to the point of dissolution, as in many modernist novels: the main thread is always interrupted by stories within stories, flashbacks, intruding memories, giving to the series a very introspective dimension, verging on rumination and what I would be tempted to call emotional pornography (i.e. a kind of almost obsessive wallowing in intense emotions.)

The potential reader of this series should also be warned about the author's aggressive feminism, her penchant for wordplay and sometimes pointless neologisms, archaisms and typographical oddities, and her morbid fascination with torture, genocide, rape, famine, prostitution and all the extremes of human (or Other) suffering. Those who already found *Dwellers* harrowing, for instance, will probably meet the limits of their endurance, all the more so as, contrary to the professionally published Star Trek novels, the *Others* is not limited in its use of foul language, explicit sexual references, scatology and depictions of "graphic and gruesome" brutality.

However delighted I was to discover a treatment of the Vulcans emancipated from the stifling editorial policies of the Star Trek novels, and however haunting and rhapsodic I concede the series to be, I must say my overall opinion of it is very mixed, and I would only recommend it to amateurs of (superior) modernist literature, women with a deep-seated resentment of their male counterparts and, of course, Vulcan completists.