This is a collection of four novellas: "A Fall of Angels, or On the Possibility of Life Under Extreme Conditions," "Fan," "O Happy Day!" and "The Unconquered Country." The last was published under its own cover, and I read it before, but the rest were new to me. "The Possibility of Life Under Extreme Conditions" could summarize most of these novellas, and indeed much of Ryman's work. There is a blurb from a review by science fiction writer Eileen Gunn on the back cover, and I'm going to let Ms. Gunn's words speak for me:

“[Ryman's books] acknowledge the horrifying pain that humans inflict on one another in large and small scale all over the world, and yet they encourage the reader to think that, even in a concentration camp, in a ward for the chronically insane, in Pol Pot's Cambodia, life is worth living; that death is untimely; and that the act of dying is the individual's transcendence of life, rather than life's desertion of the individual.... His books ... make peace with a universe that seems senseless.”

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My reaction to reading this collection in 1995. Spoilers follow.

“Introduction”, Samuel R. Delany -- Delany’s critique of Ryman’s four stories. He makes the observation that all four feature a central character trapped in some way and trying to break into a larger, freer set of circumstances. I think he’s right only in a very broad sense. Many stories involve a similar motif. It’s simply a very basic conflict.

“A Fall of Angels or On the Possibility of Life Under Extreme Conditions” -- An interesting, skillful story. Ryman tries, at the very least, to write a semi-hard sf story. He creates a complicated, plausible sounding, but fictitious, physics (some parts sounded like physics theory but most of it sounded like an elaborate lie with its talk of time starting to run backwards when the universe begins to contract and matter and anti-matter – “true” anti-matter not positrons – inhabiting the same space) to justify a society bent on practicing entropy control. Ironically, this religion of entropy control which purports to give purpose to human life is a form of totalitarianism. People have careers selected for them and are told their happiness is secondary to the duty of entropy control. The effects of this regime are seen in the life of Paul Kundara, a young biologist. He quickly realizes that Entropy Control (as per a narrative section cutely titled “Entropy Control and You”) has lied to him when it stated his superiors and co-workers at a research station are there because they can best serve there. Kundara finds them petty, time-servers. When life is discovered on a nearby sun, Ryman introduces a neat reversal on the usual cliché of the dedicated young researcher who happens to be on location for a major find in his field of expertise. Kundara studied science out of rote academic habit and has no enthusiasm or real talent for it. Instead, he finds a love of the culture of a nearby people and their music. The totalitarian aspect of Entropy Control also shows in their treatment of the very biblical entities Angels – disembodied entities who do survey work for Entropy Control as they flit godlike about the universe. As is so often the case with transcended humans in sf, Bee, an Angel, begins to despise his human origins. Eventually “Warrior Angels” destroy him at Control’s insistence though Control (the name baldly states their totalitarian nature) propagandizes that Angels are the ultimate personifications of Duty since they have sacrificed everything. A final interesting element is that the alien discovered on the sun is problematic as far as intelligence goes. It uses only nouns and passive verbs in its language and identifies itself with the universe. On the other hand, as Angel Bee explains, he may have good reason to do so give his perceptions of the true nature of the universe.

“Fan” -- A nicely written story on fan psychology and a new twist on ramifications of the Information Age. Ryman proposes a piece of interactive, self-programming software that replicates the personality of a pop star and tailors to the taste of each fan. In turn, the fan’s input goes to a central data clearinghouse where the mass-market image of the pop star is tailored for mass – and, ultimately – as the story’s protagonist discovers – hologrammatic appearance. There is some debate as to whether the replication owned by the protagonist is based on the model for the fictitious pop star or simply a version that deviates substantially from the others because of the protagonist’s taste. Ryman does a nice job of showing the pitfalls of fandom. The fan of the title comes to realize the pop star is just a reflection of fan’s fears and insecurities. The fan meets and becomes pregnant by a no-good man largely because he reminds her of the singer. Though somewhat suspicious of people passionate about art or almost anything else and skeptical about grand statements of art’s ability to instruct and uplift, I do find truth in the influence the singer exerts – for good and ill – on the fan.

“O Happy Day!” -- When I read this story seven years ago I found it a dark and vicious satire on more extreme elements of feminism and homosexual philosophy. That still seems a good summary as does my saying that the story is a plea to see people as more than political categories, that sex is personal and not political, that sexual desire should be genuine and not a political artifact. One of the lesbian overseers admits she had a girlfriend who could not generate the desire for women, that violence is not a male prerogative. The story seems implausible but is still memorable. I do find a curious lack of anger in this story in that only the narrator and Royce see their extermination of heterosexual men as evil. Even then Royce pleads to be allowed to stop on the grounds (perhaps the only pragmatic ones available) that extermination poisons relations between people, kills the soul. The obvious moral argument isn’t made directly (though it is made indirectly when the camp guards become violent with each other – violence, Ryman says, can not be thought of as a disease to be destroyed by wiping out its carriers).

“The Unconquered Country” -- Award winning science fantasy that features living houses, wombgrown machinery, and flying sharks – perhaps altered humans – that could perhaps be the result of bioengineering though it is never stated. There are also the spirits of the dead which lend a definite fantasy air. It didn’t do much for me. I don’t think it was as an exact allegory of recent Cambodian history as George Orwell’s Animal Farm was an exact allegory of Stalinist Russia. While I liked the final touch of protagonist Third finding peace in the Unconquered Country, that is the country of the dead inhabited by her dead lover and family. I thought Andrew Weiner’s “This Is the Year Zero” to be a much more effective evocation (though admittedly less inventive and subtle) of this chunk of history.

“Afterword” -- A not terribly informative (though I liked Ryman’s reactions to stories written by his younger self) set of notes on this collection’s stories. They raise the old problem of how much to value an author’s remarks – even as to theme and subject matter – about his works. For instance, Ryman makes the strange remark that “O Happy Day!” is “about prurience and its role in politics, in entertainment, in life”. That seems, at best, only a minor theme of the story. ( )