the debt owed to common humanity

Floating Worlds (Cecelia Holland, 1976)

Floating Worlds (Cecelia Holland, 1976)

This book popped up in a letter I read here in Oregon—basically somebody wondering if anybody else had read this book and saying it felt like a combination of Joanna Russ and Ursula K. Le Guin.¹ So, well. I felt I had a duty. If somebody said that about a book now I’d write it off as hyperbole. This mention felt a little different. Now that I’ve read it, if I were trying to do a “it’s X meets Y” pitch for Floating Worlds, I would say: “It’s The Dispossessed meets Dune.”²

Before I actually discuss the book, though, I do want to say… sometimes a post about a forgotten book will have an air of “why did we all forget about this,” a push for revival, and so on. Why people forgot about Floating Worlds is actually very easy to answer: Holland only wrote one sci-fi book. Her publisher withdrew the hardcover from the Nebula nominations for unclear reasons,³ and when they resubmitted the paperback the book had lost its momentum. Also, the book is not revivable. This book will never have a big moment where everybody’s reading it à la I Who Have Never Known Men. If you’re curious why, read the footnote.⁴ In terms of its reputation, it is already where it will always be—a cult “if you know you know” favorite.

Floating Worlds takes place in a far future where the Earth has become so polluted that people live in special underwater domes; if you leave the domes and go to the surface, the poisoned air will kill you in minutes. Earth is an anarchist and pacifist society, though there is a Committee that acts as a kind of informal government, adjudicating disputes and making treaties. Aside from the domes and some other futuristic touches (like robotic body parts), the Earth is also not all that technologically advanced.⁵

Over the centuries, the solar system has been colonized. While people on the Moon, Venus, and Mars remain recognizably human, the people who live on Uranus and Saturn (the Styth) have mutated to become eight feet tall, clawed, and very sensitive to light. They are also extremely violent; they operate a slave society and practice a near total exclusion of women from public life. The Styth want to rule the solar system and are beginning to act aggressively toward Mars. In turn, they are the subject of considerable hostility from the Martians, the government of which is fomenting much anti-mutant sentiment through a group called “The Sunlight League.” The plot of the book is largely a threeway struggle among the Earth, which wants to find a way of bring the Styth into the larger community; Mars, which wants to eradicate them; and the Styth, who nurse grand imperial ambitions and want to bring the rest of the galaxy under their rule. Do these goals seem a little unbalanced to you? Does the Earth seem to be bringing a plate of cookies to gun fight? Well.…⁶

Floating Worlds eventually grows to cover the whole solar system (and beyond), but it starts small, with Paula Mendoza, our heroine, looking at ruins in Manhattan with her pretentious boyfriend, Tony.⁷ While Tony is showing off to a painter, Paula looks around and thinks about how there used to be something more than ruins here:

Paula looked straight up overhead. The light was diffuse. It fell in pale sheets through the height of the dome, here blue and there definitely more yellow. It was hard to realize that the ocean covered them. Tony was discussing Art with the painter. He sounded knowledgeable but Paula did not understand anything he said. She went across the street. From here she could see through the broken walls to the next row of ruins, and through them to the next, all huge, the biggest buildings she had ever seen. The people who had built this city had dominated the Earth for three centuries, by money, by force, and by guile; they had colonized Mars, reached as far as Uranus, cracked atoms and made whole cities out of polymer, and Manhattan had been the heart of that empire.

Paula wants a baby, with Tony if he’s around; Paula has bummed around the galaxy and bit and even done a stint in a Martian prison; Paula feels like her life is over. Then the Committee calls on Paula and offers her a job. They want to start negotiating with the Styth and they know she learned Styth in prison. How about it? The money is good. Paula says yes. The story that ensues is either a story about how one person can destroy everything or how one person can fail to save anything. Maybe it’s both.

Paula is, at least within my own reading experience, a sui generis female lead. For the first third or so of the book, her sole motivation seems to be the desire to see what happens next. When she meets with a Styth crew on Mars, she sleeps with their leader, Saba, thus fitting herself into the only flexible social role an intensely misogynist society like theirs can give her: she’s a courtesan. (Saba offers to marry her; she refuses.) She gets pregnant and she decides to keep the baby, and in so deciding also goes to live on Saturn for ten years. She lives in Saba’s harem, in places where everybody else who is human like her is enslaved, and uses her social ambiguity to pass from one tier of Styth society to another. Nobody trusts her, most Styth don’t even like her, and she is constantly threatened by people twice her size. Saba beats her when she violates taboos. She grits her teeth and then she just does it again.

Eventually, Paula develops some larger goals, but throughout the book she is frequently reduced to conditions of mere survival. Even when handed the option, she does not lie down and die. As she says to Saba early in their relationship, she is interested in the hard things. She wants to have a hard life. That is one of the ways in which she’s driven by curiosity. Many of the heroes of science fiction are people who are thrust into situations they did not cause and do not want. Paula is not one of those of people. She puts herself into situations that are entirely avoidable.

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Aside from this novel, Holland writes historical fiction, and that is really what this novel reads like: good historical fiction.⁸ The comparisons to Russ or Le Guin are a little misleading. Floating Worlds doesn’t have Russ’s explicit ideology or verbal pyrotechnics, nor does it have Le Guin’s storytelling voice and quiet philosophizing. Its relationship to its own ideas is less direct.⁹

Even when the ideas are explicitly voiced, drawing the connections between one moment and the next is left up to you. Floating Worlds is a big book that expects you to remember what happens; it will not hold your hand if you forget. Early in the book, for instance, Tony tells Paula that anarchists like themselves cannot grasp Greek tragedy, because they don’t understand ritual. “You miss the whole absoluteness of the thing,” he tells her. “The whole sense that there is nothing else. The self-punishing aspect of nonconformity.” This little speech directly forces their breakup, and in the moment it feels like nothing more than a joke about a tiresome type of guy. Hundreds of pages later, though, Saba makes the case to Paula that she needs to defect from the Earth because the anarchists lack honor, arguing that “these people here can live like this, without wars and feuds and governments, because they give up the most important things in life. There are debts people owe each other out of the fact of nature. Just common humanity. The anarchists refuse them.”¹⁰

As with Tony, this speech precipitates a rift in their relationship, but Saba is also arguing here that anarchists do not have the sense that there is “nothing else” beyond people and the community.¹¹ Paula, a committed anarchist, is often accused of having no loyalties to anything but herself. The Styth and the Martians are both obsessed with their own racial purity, which is an ethos each can understand. Anarchists, though, are mutually beyond their comprehension, and beneath their respect. Even many anarchists don’t respect how they themselves live; they take it for granted.

Floating Worlds goes from Earth outward and then back again (and then out again) and so continuously returns you to this society you think you’ve come to know and let you see it again. Is this a world of dead ends and limited ambitions, fit only for scavengers? Is this a world of real life and real freedom, where one can live a good life if one has the courage? Paula can’t stop leaving Earth, and she can’t stop coming back. She believes in a debt owed to common humanity. She just doesn’t know what it is.

In any case, this is a large and incredibly ambitious book. I found it gripping—I just had to keep reading it. I kept putting it down to do other things and then I’d pick it up again because I just couldn’t stand not knowing what was happening. When I was done I wanted to read it again. (It’s so big and so complicated that I have mixed feelings about sending out this post without having read it again.) It’s easy to pick up a cheap used copy and the ebook is $2. As I said in the beginning, it is always going to be a cult favorite… but the cost of joining the cult is low.

1. Did you know that there were analog versions of the group chat? Well, there were.

2. In Janus, Janice Bogstad wrote: “I could compare it to The Female Man and And Chaos Died for oft-complicated structure; to Dune for scape and complexity of plot.” It’s funny, because I definitely read this review before I read the letter, but somehow it didn’t raise my interest at all.

3. Just realized after sending this post that the person sharing the story about the Nebula is none other than

Rich Horton

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4. Floating Worlds is driven by the hatred that exists between the humanity of Earth and “the Middle Planets” and the mutated humanity, called the Styth, that has developed in the farther reaches of the Milky Way. Holland represents the level of hostility here with American English’s most offensive racial slur. Liberally. Very liberally! Don’t read this one on a plane unless you feel truly unselfconscious about people reading over your shoulder.

This decision is the most seventies thing about this book. People felt very free to use this slur in a provocative way in the seventies. I have run across letters (by white people) accusing somebody else (also white) of being a “house n——” and then there’s Patti Smith and John Lennon and Yoko Ono. So… it’s not really that surprising somebody did this in science fiction. It would not shock me if more than one person did. Anyway, I just don’t think a book full of slurs is going to be the next BookTok hit.

5. The Earth of this book actually reminded me quite a bit of Nausicaä.

6. As with most books I read where the plot involves a lot of political deals and side-switching, at a certain point I just pick somebody to root for and stop trying to follow the rest. In Floating Worlds, it’s very easy to know who to root for (Paula), because the Styth are a bunch of violent racists and the Martians are Space Hitler.

7. There are so many digs at Tony in the book’s early pages you’d be forgiven for thinking he was important. Here’s the gloss on his conversation with the painter:

He was really a critic, not a writer at all; he knew every pose.

Tony is writing a novel:

He was writing a metaphysical novel, of which she had already read three drafts. He was endlessly inventive without being especially creative, which made his books easy to read.

Tony’s response when Paula gets robbed:

Tony was unsympathetic. “You shouldn’t own something you can’t afford to lose. You’re a hostage to your possessions. Property is theft.”

Tony opines and Paula thinks:

She wondered if Tony ever enjoyed anything. It occurred to her that she had heard all this before from him, that he had already told her everything he would ever say to her.

Tony disappears around page 35, never to be seen again. (He is mentioned toward the end of the book in a flattering light.)

8. As James Nicoll points out, the Styth are clearly based on the Mongols.

9. I am pretty sure that I am stealing this belief from somebody else, but I think science fiction works best at short lengths—the short story, the novella, the three hundred pager—whereas fantasy (and historical fiction) really benefit from having a lot of space to play around and immerse you in their settings. (I had this conversation with a doctor once who agreed with the second part—she reads fantasy and she wants a tome.) For this reason, the author that I kept thinking of reading this book was C.J. Cherryh, who I haven’t read in… a really long time. But I remember Cyteen having a similar feeling and Cyteen is a big book. But I probably read Cyteen when I was sixteen or something,

Anyway, when I say that Floating Worlds feels more like historical fiction, I am referring to a certain texture to the reading experience, not making some kind of weird genre claim. It is, obviously, science fiction. (Cyteen even more so.)

10. One of the members of the Mars government also lectures Paula: “I believe in law and order and authority, right and wrong, little old-fashioned things like honor and responsibility and morality.”

11. It also marks the moment at which Floating Worlds itself becomes a much darker story.