Rebel Sutra

Though few people suspect it, the forsaken colony world of Maya - "Illusion" - is aptly named. This frigid, volcanic world is dominated by a twin human settlement: the Mountain - a domed city of the genetically-altered Changed, worshipful of their deranged AI god - the Exchange; and Babelion - the slum city of the would-be wardens to the Changed - the petty, idling humans. What no one on Maya knows, however, is that they are not the only remaining colony - indeed, a whole interstellar Empire has sprung up and fractured while the denizens of Maya shared their delusion. Now the Empire is all but dead, usurped by the Pretender Emperor - and it is up to a hapless scientist to save the last Cloned Empress embryos to perpetuate the rightful bloodline. In clandestinely giving one of the cloned embryos life among the elitist Changed, Suu-Suu has made a fateful miscalculation - for though Della went power-mad without her training as Empress, her mixed-blood son - Anselm - was destined to uncover the true extent of Maya's illusion - even at the cost of chaos.This sophisticatedly twisted melange of "Ender's Game" and "Fahrenheit 451" is passionately, exhaustively well-written. Shariann Lewitt has adopted an interesting internal structure - the book is told in two halves from two characters' perspectives. Della's story is presented first, in the form of a memoir. It begins at the finale - the revolution - and goes on essentially backwards through Della's time with the Tinkers (Suu-Suu's mysterious band of banished off-worlders) and her brief tryst with Arsen - the young revolutionary from Babelion - Anselm's father. Anselm's story is told in a more conventional fashion - it begins with his forced flight from the treacherous Mountain (the secret of his mixed-blood parentage is anathema to the Changed) and continues on through his time with Babelion's meandering, petty revolutionaries, his tutelage under the Hindu priests, and his final confrontation with his fate. Indeed, Anselm's story is a search for meaning and self-discovery, a quest for identity, a struggle against his own dehumanization and needless symbolism, his battle against those who would have (knowingly or not) made him a mundane pawn of the old . Ultimately, his is a search for truth.The novel deftly interconnects its parts by having all stories told by knowing first-person narrators in the past tense - there are numerous internal redundancies, parallels, cases of deja vu, and so on. Lewitt interestingly infuses her tale with Hindu mythology and philosophy - and makes it perfectly accessible to the reader. Her voice as a writer has a tasteful twang of femininity - similar to LeGuin's but less labyrinthine. At times, "Rebel Sutra" had me literally spellbound in its clutches.It does have several flaws, most obvious of them being the numerous allusions to Anselm's apparent homosexuality - which is fine in itself but doesn't quite fit with the story (did she retain this tendency from her participati

Pretty good read. A litle strange. I'd say definitely worth reading.