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A Door Into Ocean (Elysium Cycle, 1) Paperback – October 13, 2000

4.4 out of 5 stars 146

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Joan Slonczewski's A Door into Ocean is the novel upon which the author's reputation as an important SF writer principally rests.

A ground-breaking work both of feminist SF and of world-building hard SF, it concerns the Sharers of Shora, a nation of women on a distant moon in the far future who are pacifists, highly advanced in biological sciences, and who reproduce by parthenogenesis--there are no males--and tells of the conflicts that erupt when a neighboring civilization decides to develop their ocean world, and send in an army.


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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"In her ambitious second SF novel (after Still Forms on Foxfield) biology professor Slonczewski has created an intriguing ocean world with its own culture and biological adaptations. Particularly ingenious are the clickflies, insects that collectively serve as both a living computer and a communications network. But the book has problems with its rigid ideological structure. On one side is the planet Valedon, a patriarchal, capitalist, mechanistic and militaristic society. On the other is Valedon's watery moon Shora, an all-female society based on life sciences and the principle of sharing. It gets by without any government, shuns the mechanical and, knowing its limits, lives in harmony with nature. In the inevitable confrontation, Shora uses Gandhian techniques of passive resistance to thwart Valedon's troops. Fortunately, this schematic political framework is enlivened by the full-blooded characters who negotiate between the two cultures."

About the Author

Joan Slonczewski is the author of The Highest Frontier, The Children Star, and A Door Into Ocean. She lives in Gambier, Ohio and teaches biology at Kenyon College.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Orb Books; First Edition (October 13, 2000)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0312876521
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0312876524
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.15 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.92 x 8.5 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 out of 5 stars 146

About the author

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Joan Slonczewski
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Joan Lyn Slonczewski is a microbiologist at Kenyon College and a science fiction writer. She is the first since Fred Pohl to earn a second John Campbell award for best science fiction novel, "The Highest Frontier" (2012); her previous winner was "A Door into Ocean" (1987). "The Highest Frontier" invents a college in a space habitat financed by a tribal casino and protected from deadly ultraphytes by Homeworld Security. According to Alan Cheuse at NPR, her book invents "a worldwide communications system called Toy Box that makes the iPhone look like a Model-T Ford."

Slonczewski's classic "A Door into Ocean" depicts an ocean world run by genetic engineers who repel an interstellar invasion using nonviolent methods similar to Tahrir Square. In her book "Brain Plague," intelligent microbes invade human brains and establish microbial cities. She also authors with John W. Foster the leading microbiology textbook, Microbiology: An Evolving Science (W. W. Norton).

Author blog: ultraphyte.com

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
146 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on November 2, 2015
"Door Into Ocean" is a subset of sci-fi, "varying humanoids on multiple planets." It follows a young adult human from a patriarchal planet as he interacts with the single-sex pacifist egalitarian race of the nearest planet, becoming involved in their efforts to maintain balance on their planet and resist exploitation. It includes themes of: ecological balance, consensus versus coercion, economic exploitation, phallocentric perceptions of sex versus relational perceptions, language as it creates and defines culture, definitions of mental illness, and responsibility as it relates to adulthood, self-knowledge, and civic identity.
Honestly I can't express just how intensely I love this book. I just finished my fourth re-read, and I got more from it than ever before. It is an amazing allegory on so many different levels, most of all about the nature of hierarchy and reciprocity. I love the thoroughness of world-building, the depth and evolution of characters, the variety of personalities, and the many layers of meaning. If I could get everyone to read one fiction book, this would be the one I would choose.

Content note: a possible trigger is a rape that happens on page 266. It's very briefly described, and in terms of the victim's point of view. No detail or attempt at glamorizing.

Characters: The characters are all cis, all non-disabled, almost all normatively sized. The main characters consist of: Spinel, a poor, occasionally homeless dark-skinned straight man; Merwen, Usha, and Lystra who are queer, agender, bald, purple female humanoids with webbed hands and feet (Sharers); Lady Berenice who is an upper-class, rich & powerful straight white woman; and Realgar who is a rich & powerful straight white man. The characterizations are complex, showing not only who the characters are now and through the events of the book, but also enough history to deeply understand their motivations, even for the antagonists (without being so much history that it distracts from the flow of the plot).

Point of view: 3rd person, following Spinel, Merwen, and Berenice by turns.

Imagination: Concepts I hadn't seen before 
] included language with no subject-object relationship where instead all relationships are reciprocal; a single-sex race who reproduce exclusively through genetic science; clothing as a shameful kind of dishonesty; skin-dwelling microbes that function as a scuba tank; microbes designed to eat pollutants; insects and cetaceans used to communicate over distance; carved stones used to signify rank and occupation throughout the culture (even among the poor); many other aspects!  ]

This is the most imaginative book I have ever read in the sense that the author created a unique humanoid race and considered their environment thoroughly in relation to the design of their bodies and the development of their culture. As a pacifist, egalitarian communal culture, there were NO obvious inconsistencies.

Issues: the biggest issue I saw was the conflation of mental illness and desire to control or cause harm. While it might make sense in a world that sees pacifism and respect as the healthy norm, it still reproduces the modern stereotype that says people who kill are all mentally ill and mentally ill people are dangerous. I think this should have been handled differently. I also was disturbed to note some fat-phobic description of the one person who was described as large - but that was only one line of the book.

Plot: The plot was a little slow for the first 20 pages, but then settled into a steady, active pace that got a little nerve-wracking but never so slow that I was tempted to skim. There was nothing I noticed that seemed superfluous.

Setting: Mostly this takes place on Shora, a world of ocean with natural rafts which grow on top of the water and form the dwelling places for Sharers. A small part of it takes place on Valedon, a planet of multiple cultures which serves the Patriarch. The Patriarch is considered a god, and acts as an interplanetary authority which enforces a certain level of scientific control to prevent humans from engaging in widespread damage (such as biological or nuclear warfare).

Dialogue: There's only a bit more description than dialogue, making this a fairly easy read. The dialogue is varied from character to character and through the development of the book, as well. It passes the Bechdel test with ease.

Writing style: The style is simple, clear, and matter-of-fact, with a good bit of omniscient exposition. Sensations and emotions are given by narration, which for me makes them feel more of a fact of the story and thus weaves all the characters together in a tapestry of feeling, thinking, sensing.

Length, cover: 403 pages in trade paperback. The cover pictures a bald pink-white person in a water tank, with webbed fingers and a tiny fly inexplicably in the water. The artist clearly did not read what the Sharers are supposed to look like. Why is there a white person on the cover? Sharers are dark purple most of the time. Why is the fly in water? Why is this person modestly covering their body in a way a Sharer would never do? I would guess it is supposed to be a clickfly, but they're supposed to be the size of a dinner plate. The original cover for the mass-market paperback is far better. The feel of the cover is weird, as the person is captured and a gun is propped against the door, but the person looks content and self-conscious. I don't know what message i am meant to take from it but I hate it.

Author: Joan Slonczewski, feminist, white, age 30 at the time of writing this in 1986, Quaker, cisgender, seemingly straight woman from northeast US.

Context of this reviewer: White, afab, genderfree, trans, queer, non-disabled, poly, add-pi neurodivergent, poor, intersectional feminist, age 32, from southern US.
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Reviewed in the United States on January 29, 2024
Brilliant and evocative world-building combined with deep treatment of issues of domination vs. non-violence, cultural and metaphysical relations to nature, and (of course) gender roles, A Door Into Ocean deserves to be as famous as any classics by Ursula Le Guin or Octavia Butler, for it is as good a story and as important philosophically as anything I've read by the feminist giants. Written decades before James Cameron's Avatar, it presents the by-now popular story of ecologically integrated indigenous people resisting rapacious imperialist invaders. Only, unlike the Navi in Avatar, the Sharers of Shora defend themselves non-violently, being culturally and constitutionally virtually incapable of intentionally killing another human.

The question at the heart of the novel (one of several, but arguably the most central) is a restatement of the one posed to Gandhi: Could non-violent action have stopped the Nazis? The brilliance of the novel is letting the reader struggle toward an answer through the minds and actions of the purple, amphibious, mono-gendered Sharers. To enter the beautiful minds of these wise aliens of our better nature is an escape that let's you return a better person to the all-too-real injustices in our world, and maybe with some better ideas of how to defend what's good in it.
Reviewed in the United States on September 20, 2016
First of all, the worldbuilding in this book is fantastic. The author is a scientist and put careful work into making one of the most fully realized science fiction ecosystems I've ever seen. The culture, too, is fascinating, and the way their language works and the role it plays in their attitudes and in the plot... definitely a world to spend time in. The characters, though, lack somewhat, especially the male lead. I would also have enjoyed seeing more of the protagonist culture's xenophobic our-way-is-the-only-way be challenged, though I felt the book made it clear that the villains' aggression was what left a lot of the potential for cross-cultural exchange unachieved. Still, a book worth reading.
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Top reviews from other countries

richard hadfield
5.0 out of 5 stars Believable world order and thought provoking
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 6, 2022
Read this first in 70s. Created a world of water and rafts for populations. Science which relies on biochemistry and rejects ‘stone’ elements. Clash of cultures of cooperative water planet and authoritarian larger planet. Excellent
DJ Wafra
5.0 out of 5 stars A fable for our time
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 26, 2018
I loved this novel, conceptually & for its remarkable characters. Much to think about & a story to provoke deep unsights about the current political moment.