The Marq'ssan
Cycle
What Would It Take
to Change the Way Postmodern Societies Work?
L. Timmel Duchamp writes about the Marq'ssan Cycle:
My political imagination in the early 1980s could fairly be said to have
been primed by feminist sf of the 1970s. But although representations of
feminist revolution and utopia excited me, after a time they began to
frustrate me, too. How, I wondered, could we get to "there"—i.e., a
desirable situation in which to live, boasting a viable, vibrant polity and
a minimum of hardship and suffering for the many rather than the few— from
"here," viz., our current political reality of plutocracy and a savagely
exploitative capitalism that ensures widespread misery, deprivation, and
constriction of people's lives? The question haunted me. Feminist sf
offered me a few stories about revolution, many stories about fairly good
places, and a lot of stories about really bad places. But like the bad
places, those good places existed chiefly to offer us a lesson in what was
wrong with our world, combined, maybe, with a little indulgence in
wish-fulfillment. And images of revolution tended to skip the long hard
process of collective change that sustained creation of a different world
must in reality entail. History, after all, has repeatedly shown that
neither regime-change nor even form-of-government change alone will remake
the world.
I wanted a more direct, explicit vision of how it might be possible to
change human thinking as well as social and political interactions; I
needed to believe that a world in which the thriving of human life in every
case supersedes the profit motive is theoretically not only possible but
also achievable—without having first to start from a post-holocaust
slate wiped clean of recent human history. I decided that I would begin
from a dystopian baseline to keep my experiment from becoming an easy
fantasy of wish-fulfillment (and also because three and a half years of the
Reagan Administration had made me pessimistic about future life in the
US). And so in October 1984, I sat down and began writing the Marq'ssan
Cycle, a series of five novels totaling roughly one million words: first
Alanya to Alanya (October—November 1984); then Renegade
(December 1984—April 1985);
Tsunami (June—September 1985); Blood in the Fruit (October
1985—February 1986); and finally Stretto (March—July 1986).
During the composition of the third and fourth books (Tsunami and
Blood in the Fruit), I worried that the difficulties of imagining
the creation of lasting, desirable change might be insuperable. Still, I
had noticed early on that each book in succession had radically altered my
understanding the previous books. In the course of writing
the final book, Stretto, forced to stop and reflect at length on this
pattern of continual re-visioning, I grasped that I simply hadn't realized
that the desired change was a process already at work in the series, one
that could only become visible through this other process of constant
re-visioning. When I finally finished writing the fifth book, I found that
my first reader, Kathryn Wilham, had independently come to understand this,
too. She told me that she could see where, if I had decided to write a
sixth book, it would have had to go. The series, she said, is finished. You
can trust that any reader who has been able to read through to the end will
have "gotten" it. In other words, the experiment did not only require that
I, the author, envision and depict the process of change, but it also
required that the series' readers' very activity of constantly revising
their understanding of what had gone before be the vehicle for their being
able to imagine and comprehend the process themselves.
—from the Afterword to Alanya to Alanya
Special Honor for the Marq'ssan Cycle
"The 2010 James Tiptree Award jury wishes to extend a special honor to L. Timmel Duchamp's Marq'ssan Cycle, noting the importance of this stunning series, which envisions radical social and political change. Published over a period of four years, this five-book series began with Alanya to Alanya (Aqueduct Press, 2005) and concluded with Stretto (Aqueduct Press, 2008).
"
And the jury comments:
"After reading the thousands of pages in L. Timmel Duchamp's five-volume
Marq'ssan cycle (Alanya to
Alanya, Renegade, Tsunami, Blood in the
Fruit, and Stretto,
following decades of changes across the world in both large-scale politics
and the everyday interpersonal beauties and violences of individual lives,
you don't emerge quite the same as you were when you went in.
"Gender is a central focus, as we experience a very gender-segregated
society largely from a female point of view and occasionally from that of a
post-gender alien species. But any separation of one of the cycle's themes
must necessarily be a shallow depiction of what it is like to read these
novels.
"Some readers will focus most on the story of human engagement with an
utterly different alien race, determined to alter the course of human
politics yet determined to be something other than colonizers. Some will be
most fascinated by the tale of the Free Zones, anarchist enclaves where
co-operative, anti-authoritarian politics develop over decades in the US
and elsewhere. These communities are not utopian but are filled with
conflict and occasionally violent, yet they remain optimistic
nevertheless. For other readers, the most memorable aspects of the cycle
will be the near-future dystopian image of an intensely class-divided
United States, with its startlingly prescient depictions of torture,
imprisonment, and political violence, told with an unsettling understanding
of the oppressors' perspective and yet never without losing sympathy for
the victims. And for yet more, it will be on the level of character that
Duchamp's work inspires: her many point of view characters—almost all
women—whose personal and political transformations, power-laden
interpersonal, frequently sexual relationships, and critical analyses of
the world, drive the many intersecting narratives."
Fran Michel Reviews the Marq'ssan Cycle
"...[T]he presentation of the intimacies of power is consistently compelling.
"Let me stress that. These books are hard to put down; as a reviewer of the
fourth volume put it, 'This is worth stating at the outset, because it
would be very easy to describe what Duchamp is doing with the Marq'ssan
Cycle in terms which would make it all sound eminently worthy and improving
and provocative of deep thought, and what we all should be reading, while
neglecting the absolutely visceral impact of each volume as a narrative
which grabs and does not let you go and leaves you breathless at the end.'
"The books have been praised by other science fictions writers including
Samuel Delany and Cory Doctorow, and have been compared to work by HG
Wells, George Orwell, Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, and James Tiptree, Jr.
"Like works by those writers, Duchamp's speculative fiction torques our
world to make it strange to us, yet recognizable; it investigates the
complexities of inseparable political and personal relations; and it
recognizes both the necessity and the difficulty of creating fundamental
change in human social organizations." (read the whole review)
—Frann Michel, KBOO radio
Regime Change is Not the Answer
Seattle, February 2076. The The Marq’ssan bring business as usual to
a screeching halt all over the world, and Professor Kay Zeldin joins
Robert Sedgewick, US Chief of Security Services, in his war against
the invaders. Soon Kay is making rather than writing history. But as
she goes head-to-head against the Marq'ssan, the long-buried secrets
of her past resurface, and her conflicts with Sedgewick and Security
Services multiply. She faces terrifying choices. Her worldview, her
very grip on reality, is turned inside out. Whose side is she really on?
And how far will she go in serving that side?
2077. The Pacific Northwest Free Zone may be a haven from the Executive's
civil war, but it seethes with division and power struggles and is subject
to paramilitary covert action teams working to destabilize its civil
order. The formidable Elizabeth Weatherall, now running Security Services,
is determined to capture renegade Kay Zeldin, who boldly ventures outside
the Free Zone in search of dozens of missing scientists. When the two women
come face to face, each risks all she has become in no-holds-barred, mortal combat.
Spring 2086. In a world recovering from war, the Free Zone's Co-op,
beginning to extend its influence outside its borders, faces a crisis
within when ugly, long-buried secrets are dragged into the painful light of
day. In the US, the Executive, now reunited, turns its attention to
reconsolidating the power it has lost to regional warlords, even as popular
discontent with executive rule spreads.
October 2086. The US Executive, seriously losing ground, resorts to
desperate measures. A flood of renegade executive women establish a
high-security fortress inside the Free Zone. Are they a threat to the Free
Zone, or will Free Zone activists subvert them? And what, really, are they
up to?
2096. The Free Zone is stable and thriving, while in the US, the
career-line women who have taken over the Executive attempt to enact a
reformist, liberal agenda. Can their liberal policies hold the line as a
new wave of activism sweeps the US and the barriers between the Free Zone
and the US begin to crumble?
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