Customer Reviews

Yaleen: The Book of the River, The Book of the Stars, The Book of Being

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Here's what Keiller had to say about Watson on April 20, 2004:

"It's the birthday of science fiction writer Ian Watson, born in St. Albans, England (1943). He grew up in England in the 1950s, at a time when realistic fiction about working-class British was becoming all the rage. Watson read novels by writers like Kingsley Amis, Alan Sillitoe, and Colin Wilson, but he grew tired of reading about depressed people living in
bleak towns. He started reading science fiction novels, and a few years later he started writing them.

His novel God's World (1979) is about a group of astronauts who set out to find heaven in a distant solar system. In The Jonah Kit (1975), the universe is discovered to be just a few microseconds old, and a whale is given the soul of a human. Watson's most popular books are those that comprise the Black River/Yaleen trilogy: The Book of the River (1984), The
Book of the Stars (1985) and The Book of Being (1985). In these books, a river divides two societies, one female-dominated and one male-dominated. Men from the male-dominated society who try to cross the river are driven insane."

You can find this at http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/docs/04_04_19.htm and scroll down to April 20th, and get the audio.

I'll add my two cents:

Yaleen is a brilliant work that shouldn't be possible because it succeeds on so many levels at once - it's deeply thoughtful while being filled with action, it's profoundly feminist while deeply honest and fair, it's a true classic while being enormously fun to read.

This book really started out pretty good, nicely paced to our dawning understanding of an extraterrestrial colony and how their society developed, but then devolves into a shuddering mass of pseudo-cosmic poop at the end (actually, like the whole final third). It's very unsatisfying when an author schemes up a story that culminates in situations-that-cannot-be-described, and we the readers are left holding the bag of whatever-it-is. Fortunately Watson's "Mockymen" is much more even.