Deep Strata – The Keeper of the Isis Light – Unsettling Futures - Issue #11
This is Part 1 of an occasional series in which I talk about some of the books that shaped me as a fan, reader, and writer of science fiction and fantasy. It will be intermittent and fairly random.
CanCon and Rocket Ships
Canada, as the famous analogy created by Trudeau pere goes, is a mouse sleeping next to an elephant. The big elephant to the south dominates our cultural space in a way that is hard for Americans to appreciate.
This includes book publishing. When I talk about the books I grew up with, whether it's picture books by Bill Peet or Maurice Sendak, or extruded book product like Hardy Boys or Choose Your Own Adventure, or YA/middle grade fantasy like Diane Duane's Young Wizards or Tamora Pierce's Song of the Lioness, or Diana Wynne Jones's Archer's Goon, 95% originated south of the 49th parallel, or in Britain.
But there were a couple of Canadian writers who were working middle grade/YA science fiction in the 1980s. Monica Hughes was among the most prominent.
Hughes doesn't seem to have started publishing books until she was in her late forties; the bulk of her output would be written when she was in her fifties through to her seventies.
She wrote undersea colony and moon colony stories (Crisis on Conshelf Ten and Earthdark), she wrote stories about strange societies that had survived a global apocalypse (Devil on my Back, The Dream Catcher) but she was best known for her Isis trilogy, starting with The Keeper of the Isis Light.
The trilogy is still in print as an omnibus, so I checked out the first novel for the first time since I was maybe 12 or 13 years old.
The plot: Olwen, sixteen, has lived on the planet Isis all her life, cared for by her android parental figure named Guardian since her parents died when she was too young to remember them. The family were essentially lighthouse keepers, left to man a weather/radio station, and Olwen has inherited their title and post, although Guardian takes care of most of the actual work. She has a ferocious looking native animal named Hobbit as a pet, and he and Guardian have been her only companions for well over a decade. Until they get word that a shipload of human colonists are set to arrive.
(Why doesn't society just use the super-smart and capable androids to man the Light stations? Why was a tiny infant left to be raised by a robot without being rescued by a passing ship? It's never explained, but I'm guessing there's not much in the way of social services in this future.)
Olwen, who is acclimated to the thin air and high UV radiation of the Isis mountains, and who has grown up in a house without mirrors, hint hint, is told she'll have to wear a full-body encounter suit, complete with opaque mask, to meet the colonists. Guardian insists. They could have nasty Earth viruses.
She gets a major crush on Mark, a teenage colonist, and he likes her. When Mark sees her without her protective suit on, he falls off a mesa in shock and almost dies.
Surprising no one, Olwen was genetically modified as a child by Guardian to better survive on Isis. She has bronze-green skin with a scaly texture, extra-large nostrils, a brow ridge, and a nictitating membrane over her eyes. So of course the colonists see her as a monster. (Honestly, none of this sounds terribly shocking, these people are just assholes.) And then her robot parent never told her she looked different for her own good or something?
Things actually get worse; Olwen's pet Hobbit gets shot by some colonists who think it's dangerous, and she loses her shit, throwing rocks at their settlement and freaking them out.
Of course, then there's a big storm, and Olwen rescues a young colonist child from a storm, and they're prepared to accept her and it's all a happy ending…
…except it's not.
Olwen rejects that awkward, half-hearted outreach of the colonists. She turns her back on them completely and returns to her life of isolation, moving to a distant valley where she'll never see them again.
Maybe you could write that ending in a middle-grade or YA novel today, I don't know the market well enough. It certainly goes against the grain of what's expected. The message seems to lean towards "People are going to be dicks about appearance and you can't fix it" rather than "People can learn to accept difference," that's for sure.
The other notable thing about The Keeper of the Isis Light is its writing style. The dialogue tends towards the old fashioned, reading more like a British children's book from the 1950s than the 1980s. (Olwen starts a lot of sentences with an exclamatory "Oh!") What still feels modern are the descriptions of Isis. Hughes spends a significant amount of time with Olwen just glorying in the natural world, its peculiar plants, the mesas and mountains, the storms. It makes you understand why she'd turn her back on humans and opt for living in the wilderness at the end.
There's a very 1980s-Canadian vibe to all of this – the '80s in Canada had a strong current of environmentalism becoming mainstream. A concern with the natural world, pollution, and clearcut logging was embedded into the national conversation, to the extent of filtering down to children's books like Eric Wilson's middle grade mystery novels, as well as major family TV shows like The Beachcombers and Danger Bay. It's hard not to see The Keeper of the Isis Light as part of that tradition, with its lush descriptions of an unspoiled planet, and its main character's anxieties about what colonization will bring.
This book, and the sequel, The Guardian of Isis, helped cement my love of colony/lost colony books, a genre that was once a huge chunk of mainstream SF, from Le Guin's Ekumen novels to McCaffrey's Pern series. It's a book that's ambiguous and even cynical about whether people can change or learn tolerance, which is a pretty heavy message for something intended for ten year olds.
The only question I have is – how influential was it? The books were widely read in Canada; excerpts were in reading textbooks for years. (As were excerpts for other Hughes books, like Devil on my Back.) So if the books had a brief life outside of Canada, they had a much longer one within it. At least a couple generations of Canadian science fiction nerds grew up reading them. Did they have a wider audience? Or is it just a mouse next to the elephant of U.S. science fiction.
Obligatory self-promotion
I actually have something to promote for once! My latest published story, The Acheulean Gift, appeared in the March/April edition of Analog Science Fiction and Fact. Jo is attending a summer camp for kids who were engineered, for extremely dubious reasons, with the genes of extinct near-human relatives such as Neanderthals and Denisovans. It's left them with several unusual neurological features. Are their changes a curse, or a blessing?
The story is now up at Curious Fictions to read for free.
And look – I made a kind of… logo thingy for it? After Aidan Moher tweeted about writers creating merch, I thought I'd give it a try. It's not bad for something I knocked out in 15 minutes over a lunch hour. If you'd like it on a coffee mug or a T-shirt… I'm not doing that yet! But maybe someday!
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