Birthstones.

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

Birthstones is Phyllis Gotlieb’s 12th work of science fiction, a fitting capstone, so far, to a major career in the field. Like most of her work, it takes up complex political and personal themes, recognizing how complicatedly they intertwine in any culture; and the culture she has imagined for the ecologically damaged planet Shar, where “the skies were dark ochre and the sun was red at noon,” is definitely a prime example of the Other.

Sometime in their not-too-distant past, the Shar people suffered a profoundly harmful mutation in which the females of species lost both minds and much of their bodies. At the time of Birthstones, many men are becoming sterile, and Gotlieb’s Galactic Federation (a sort of interstellar United Nations) is trying to help the natives return to a genetic norm, while also dealing with the many corporations exploiting the planet’s resources from their habitats in orbit.

Gotlieb fully understands and incorporate into her stories the confusions, power plays, stalemates, and compromises that are politics at any level from civic to interstellar. Here her characters range from a well meaning and visionary local leader on Shar to GalFed scientists and diplomats, all of whom have their own trials and tribulations to deal with. Some Shar were long ago moved to another planet, and their woman are still whole, so a plan is hatched to have them bear the possible whole women for a future Shar. There are those for and against the plan, both on Shar and back at GalFed Central. Gotlieb handles the various threads of her interwoven plot with compassionate craft.

A fascinating novel of alien encounter, and alienation in many different societies, exploring the politics of gender, race, and, always, economics, Birthstones stands as another fine work by one of Canada’s finest sci-fi writers.