Rebel Sutra
Shariann Lewitt
Tor, 351 pages
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Hostile, barren Maya is a backwater colony world, all but forgotten by the galactic Empire of which it is a
part. The two races that have settled there--an elite genetically-enhanced group known as the Changed, which lives
a luxurious sheltered life in the artificially-controlled environment of the Dome, and a larger population of ordinary
humans, who eke out a precarious existence in the teeming, dilapidated city of Babelion--have lost knowledge of
their origins. They believe the Empire perished in the violent social upheavals that long ago forced them to flee
Earth and seek out a new home.
Every year, as a sop to the humans the Changed consider vastly inferior to themselves, a ceremony of selection
is conducted, in which a group of human adolescents is allowed to test alongside the Changed for full citizenship
within the Exchange, the artificial intelligence that runs Maya's infrastructure. The Changed know the ceremony
is a fake: humans don't have the genetic enhancements that will allow them to interface with the Exchange. Still
they keep the tradition, as a way to pacify the humans, and also to teach them their proper place.
Then one year a human boy named Arsen comes to the Dome for testing. Arsen is charismatic, gifted, and deeply committed
to revolution. It's his belief that the Changed can and should be overthrown; for him, participation in the testing
is a way to learn to know the enemy better. He gets more than he bargained for, in the form of Della, a Changed
teenager with whom he has a brief affair. Della isn't like the rest of her people, in ways more significant and
less obvious than her overtly rebellious nature. Their child, Anselm, inherits both his mother's secret genetic
birthright and his father's passion for revolution--a combination, ultimately, that will change everything, not
just for Maya but for the Empire itself.
Rebel Sutra is an odd amalgamation of action-packed interstellar epic--complete with cloned Empresses, despotic
Pretenders, AI-driven starships, and galactic storm troopers--and leisurely, discursive memoir. The bulk of the
book involves Anselm looking back over the course of his life, and dissecting his own inner journey; there's also
a shorter memoir from Della, and expository interludes by yet a third first-person narrator, Auntie Suu-Suu (in
which most of the interstellar story is told). With the subtlety that's one of the novel's strengths, these accounts
are highly relativistic. Anselm, Della, and Suu-Suu possess not just different pieces of the puzzle, but very different
views of the same things--making all of them, on some level, unreliable, and leaving it to the reader to find the
point where everything fits together.
Lewitt draws an effective parallel between the process by which Maya passes from its colonial isolation to a dawning
comprehension of the larger galaxy, and Della's and Anselm's separate struggles to reach past the confines of their
limited understandings to a wider view of self and universe. It's an absorbing story, even at its most digressive
(Della's and Anselm's reminiscences are often very circular), with a complex setting and interesting, fully-realized
characters. There's no particular explanation for why the dominant religion of the humans of Maya should be a variant
of Hinduism; nevertheless, the discussions of spirituality are fascinating, and Anselm's ambiguous explorations
of the numinous, through the medium of both flesh and spirit, are among the most striking portions of the book.
The trouble is, Lewitt doesn't seem to have made up her mind as to whether she was writing a space adventure or
a Bildungsroman. This is evident especially at the end, which reads more than a little like a Star Trek
episode, and includes plot elements that give off a strong whiff of deus ex machina. I found this very jarring--as
indeed I did all the Auntie Suu-Suu interludes; interesting as their content is, they seem shoehorned into the
narrative. On the other hand, a reader with different biases might be thrilled with the adventure, and find the
spiritual portions of the story tedious. The point is that these two aspects of the book never quite gell. Even
the character of Anselm, who with his spiritual questing and genetic connection to the Empire seems meant to be
a bridge, isn't enough to forge Rebel Sutra into a cohesive whole.
In sum, a puzzling, frustrating, absorbing, and at times inspired novel, which despite its flaws is well worth
reading.
Copyright © 2000 Victoria Strauss
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