A Door Into Ocean offers the reader a mixed bag of delights and frustrations. Superficially, it is the story of a boy who, in seeking to avoid his uninspiring future, travels with two women to his planet's water-covered moon where he is introduced to the native society's notion of egalitarianism, that is, the idea that all resources everywhere belong to the collective society, neatly eliminating the rivalries and selfishness that arise from competitive capitalism. In this, Ms. Slonczewski successfully animates her characters, emotionally connecting them to us and making us care about the awful things that befall them. It's only on a deeper level that the story begins to collapse.
At some point in the future, humans inhabit an ore-rich planet which is dominated by a particularly avaricious form of capitalism. And though we don't spend much time on the planet, it is strongly implied that its society is locked into a kind of futuristic feudalism that has institutionalized corruption and cut out the rungs necessary for the lower classes to advance up the ladder of society. Meanwhile, on the planet's watery moon, a different kind of society has sprung up, one that has adopted the opposite approach of sharing everything and owning nothing. The differences between the two societies are only enhanced when the reader realizes that the moon, Shora, is an all-female society and that the planet, Valedon, is highly paternalistic.
When an author sets out to write social commentary and couch it in science fiction, which is what Ms. Slonczewski has done, that commentary cannot be so black and white. We know from bitter experience that there is not one, perfect social system. Virtually every possible permutation has been tried and most have failed for one reason or another. Every notion has its flaws. And so, when Ms. Slonczewski represents her egalitarian moon-dwellers as perfect, pacifist, socialist angels being defiled in the face of rabid, voracious, capitalist warmongers, cognitive dissonance yanks the reader out of the story. Capitalism certainly has its faults; it would be foolish to argue otherwise. But Ms. Slonczewski has gone the other way and tried to argue that it has no virtues which is equally wrong. Capitalism is rapacious, but so are human beings. The systems we create are manifestations of our ideas, our wants. Those flaws are in our systems because they are in us. They aren't exogenous. It seems to me that Ms. Slonczewski has tried to blame the system, not the people, that the system creates the people, egalitarianism = benevolent, capitalism = predatory. And that's an oversimplification that the book is not good enough to withstand.
In summary, Ms. Slonczewski has penned a wonderful book which has quite a rare problem. It's wonderful characters are perfectly and even painfully three-dimensional, but the polarized settings in which she imbeds them are two-dimensional generalizations. Nonetheless, the feminism here is intriguing and Shora's pacifism in the face of such devastation is heartbreakingly poignant. A flawed diamond. (3/5 Stars)
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