Review: Halfway Human

Halfway Human by Carolyn Ives Gilman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Oh gee, I need to convey how much I loved this book to you but I must admit that I found it a terribly tedious read at times. I suppose I might sum it up by saying that it's just the kind of thing I look for in scifi while also being almost exactly not the kind of thing I'm looking for in storytelling.

I'm going to start with what I loved about it because the story deserves that and I'll probably bang on long enough so that most people won't read to the bottom of this review.

But first, a quick warning. There's a whole chapter that describes a vicious gang rape and some readers may be advised to skip it (chapter 4). I believe you'll still thoroughly enjoy the book without putting yourself through that chapter.

Alright. I love that this is so far in the future that Earth doesn't even come up. There's a society on Gammadis and another on Capella. It's sort of like a first contact scenario from both ends. When some Capellans make contact with the people on Gammadis it slowly but surely goes wrong and a little over 50 years later when the Gammadis delegates arrive at Capella it's basically another first contact about to go wrong because the original expedition had been covered up.

The cultures are both fairly alien to us, but in different ways. They both appear to be remotely related to us Earthlings but it's never discussed in great detail.

The Capellans resemble us in a future where information is a commodity, such that what you know about almost anything can be bought and sold. This seems at first a subtle difference but is eventually revealed to have far reaching consequences.

The people on Gammadis have also changed the structure of their society but it appears to have come about as a result of a genetic change in the species. Children are born without gender and even though differentiation occurs in puberty some individuals remain genderless for life. Those who remain without gender enter the bottom of the class structure.

Ethical values on both planets seem positively strange to us. A good example of this is that on Gammadis they say a person has "made room" for the rest when they die and the dead are celebrated but not publicly mourned.

So. As the blurb describes, a suicidal Gammadian is found on Capella and a mental health worker is employed to the task of helping this individual. In the process it is revealed that the events leading up to that situation involve corporate interests and interstellar politics gone awry.

The characters are sensational and the tricky political BS is delightfully woven into the narrative. In both societies there is an element of secretiveness which fields excellent justification for things that we as readers might find outrageous in principle. It's satisfyingly frustrating. It's enough to make you want to push on in the hope that somebody will eventually talk sense, but I also felt it respectfully suggested that our idea of the sensible or ethically correct path is not intrinsically so. Just perfect in that regard.

So I adored the characters and I was keenly interested in learning about these cultures right from the beginning. The dialogue is exceptionally mature and that's something I always appreciate. I loved the discourse and when the story was flowing it was entirely compelling.

Onto the tedium. There were two main things which made this a challenging read for me. The chapters are quite long, which doesn't bother me so much now that I mostly listen, but in this case it had the affect of amplifying the parts I didn't love.

Firstly, there was a whole lot of chapter-long exposition. This took the form of either one character retelling their version of events, or another character reading through the mission reports from that initially covered up expedition. Almost every second chapter was made up of the former, while a large portion of the remaining chapters were made up of the latter. When the story was in the present and events were moving it was so much more pleasant to read through.

The second thing is that being a story which involves a species with a genderless community, there was a lot of discussion of and description of sexual activities and I just generally don't enjoy a lot of that. The discussion could lead to very interesting insights, especially from alien perspectives, but the descriptions could be fairly graphic at times. The long chapters didn't help.

Well that's all I can think of right now. I'm sure there's a lot more good that I could say but I didn't take notes while listening. So I'll just note that even though I could describe a large chunk of the reading experience as tedious, I still gave this my 5-star rating in the end.

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