The Dazzle of Day

I must enter a review to address the comments of other reviewers. First, I don't believe this novel was ever intended to be "typical SF". Molly Gloss writes about deeply rooted issues having to do with relationships and people's lives. Dazzle of Day turned out to be a most entertaining story because she explores the interaction of people in the face of crisis and challenge and she set it in a world well beyond the ordinary. The setting enhanced the personalities, the challenges and the gripping details for the reader. I found her descriptions of the ship, the agriculture, the homes, the people to be fascinating. Don't read this as a SF novel. Read it as an analysis of people facing fear, conflict and uncertainty. In short, people facing life.

This is indeed an engrossing, character-driven tale of life aboard a multigenerational starship, told from the perspective of several women at the onset of the journey, towards the end of the voyage, and once the colonists have disembarked. Molly Gloss' sparse, lyrical prose is quite akin to Ursula K. Le Guin's. Much to her credit, Ms. Gloss gives an invigoratingly fresh look at the old multigenerational starship saga, told from the viewpoint of the common folk, not the community leaders or the starship's command crew. Anyone interested in a mature vision of science fiction shall not be disappointed with this slender tone. I eagerly await publication of Ms. Gloss' subsequent science fiction novels.

It took me 3 tries over 2 years to get beyond page 50 -- but it was well worth the effort. Since I don't generally read SF, I initially had a hard time envisioning the future world that Gloss describes -- the sails, the ship, the neighborhoods, etc. Ultimately they were incidental to the plot; this is a novel about the lives of people and the decisions they make. Some readers have written that it's a "woman's" book. I think that's entirely off base. There are some central female characters but there are central male characters as well. I thought it was fascinating to learn about the Quakers, the dilemmas they faced, their interaction, their decision making processes, etc. It was a very very interesting book and throughly engrossing.

Being a Quaker I was stunned when this book was given to me by a friend. Molly Gloss captures the essence of Quaker (known within as the Society of Friends) society. It is a fascinating book which uses the tool of science fiction, the suspension of disbelief, to examine the human condition. Thought provoking and deeply human, I found this book drew me in. It is not for those who are into fast ships and nifty gadgets. I highly recommend this book.

The Dazzle of Day is a wonderful, wonderful book. I feel Gloss approaches the same place Le Guin does in, say, Always Coming Home and which McIntyre does in Dreamsnake. She hands me an egalitarian future and then deals with how a genuinely egalitarian society might function. How are decisions made? How is the sense of community, the needs for support, love, family, privacy, maintained? I was thoroughly charmed by this novel. Each chapter is told in limited third person from a new character's point of view, though occasional characters are revisited later. The emphasis is on older women (though perhaps I particularly warmed to the presence of a few of them and assumed they were being emphasized). The opening is a woman just down the road, elderly and without children, trying to make the decision to voyage off into space with a colony ship from earth. This is a post-holocaust sf novel, the world is in a sorry state. The next chapter jumps ahead 170 years to another mature woman who faces with her community the discovery of a marginally habitable planet. Do they deplane and begin a new life on this chilly unknown world or keep looking while enjoying a relatively easy and carefree shipboard existance? The final chapter again plunges us forward to a mature woman rescuing survivers of a downed space shuttle bringing salvage from that same colony ship. In between Gloss shows me fathers and mothers, husbands and wives; she visits passion, compassion, and a rape; she takes me into selfish, frightened, and courageous hearts. I care about these people and their lives and dreams. The Dazzle of Day has the same plain-spoken grit of Jump off Creek but is richer and more poetic, more hopeful in the broader story it tells. This is not one woman making solitary decisions, but individuals struggling to keep the human heart alive in community.