Heart of Gold | ||||||||
Sharon Shinn | ||||||||
Ace Books, 360 pages | ||||||||
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A review by Victoria Strauss
The world of Heart of Gold is divided by skin colour (there are three races, one blue, one gold, one albino)
and by gender (the indigos follow a rigid matriarchal caste system, with women holding all property and power, while
the guldens' clan-oriented, patriarchal social structure glorifies virility and severely represses women). In the
indigos' busy, high-tech capital, the races work side by side but live in apartheid-like separation, and racial
tension is never far from the surface. Slow progress toward tolerance has been made, with restrictive racial laws
abolished and an easing of segregation. But the indigo government's recent campaign of territorial expansion has
given rise to a wave of gulden terrorism, and indigo fear and hatred of the gold-skinned people is once more rising
to fever pitch.
In this climate of social and political unrest, Nolan Adelpho, a high-caste indigo man whose mother has reluctantly
allowed him to follow his talent for biology into a career as a researcher, works with a race- and gender-mixed
group of scientists to find cures to the various diseases that afflict the races. It's a job that has brought
him face-to-face with his prejudices and preconceptions, and caused him to question his own inevitable future
of marriage and child-rearing. Meanwhile Kitrini Candachi, daughter of a pioneering indigo anthropologist who
flouted convention to live and study among the gulden, schemes for ways to see her gulden lover, who has been
imprisoned for acts of terrorism. Kitrini knows more about the gulden than any indigo living, and passionately
detests her own people for their prejudice.
Then Nolan accidentally discovers a secret, something so appalling it makes gulden terrorism look trivial, and he
and Kitrini are thrown together in a desperate attempt to avert an impending disaster. The resulting odyssey
tests both of them to the limit, challenging all their social and racial biases and working changes so profound
that neither will ever be able to return to the life they lived before.
Like all Shinn's novels, Heart of Gold is smoothly written, with an easy story flow that carries the reader
effortlessly along. Shinn has a talent for creating vivid, sympathetic characters; she brings not just Nolan
and Kitrini, but her large cast of secondary characters -- all of whom represent very different outlooks
and agendas -- strongly to life.
While the world building isn't always as deep as it could be (some elements, such as the third race of albinos,
are present without adequate explanation, and though the indigos' culture is fascinatingly fully-realized, the
guldens', with its puzzling combination of high-tech industry and archaic social customs, is less so), it's
consistently interesting. Shinn's treatment of her theme of bigotry is nuanced and intelligent, from the
relatively mild repression of indigo males within their matriarchal society, to the guldens' often brutal
treatment of their females, to the profound racial and class prejudices deeply woven into the fabric of both
societies. One of the book's strengths is that Shinn doesn't pick sides, portraying the assets and weaknesses
of each culture in equal measure, and illustrating that even repugnant customs can have social utility.
Elements of category romance are always strongly present in Shinn's novels, and Heart of Gold is no
exception. Nolan and Kitrini don't really encounter each other until a bit over halfway through the book,
but the experiences and realizations they undergo beforehand are essentially setup to make it possible for
these two very different people to fall in love. Appealing as this romantic theme is, it does create some
problems for the story. To bring the two together, and to keep them together initially, Shinn must make
some big leaps of emotional logic. While it's believable that Kitrini and Nolan would fall in love, the
situation in which they do so is never quite credible, and this stands out as a weakness in this otherwise
well-imagined book.
Quibbles aside, I can recommend Heart of Gold as a thoroughly entertaining reading experience -- another
worthy outing for this skillful author.
Victoria Strauss is a novelist, and a lifelong reader of fantasy and science fiction. Her most recent fantasy novel The Garden of the Stone is currently available from HarperCollins EOS. For details, visit her website. |
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