Status
Available
Call number
Publication
New York : Tor, 1998.
Description
"The Dazzle of Day is a brilliant and widely celebrated mixture of mainstream literary fiction and science fiction. Award-winning author Molly Gloss turns her attention to the frontiers of the future, when the people of our over-polluted planet Earth voyage out to the stars to settle new worlds, to survive unknown and unpredictable hardships, and to make new human homes. Specifically, it is a story about Quakers, people who have grown up on a ship that is traveling to a new world, and about the society and culture that have evolved among them by the time they arrive at their new home planet"--
User reviews
LibraryThing member wealhtheowwylfing
A loose, slow-paced novel about a small colony of Quakers who have finally arrived at a habital planet after 175 years in transit. Slowly but surely, they reach a consensus about whether to colonize the planet or stay aboard the colony ship that is all they've known for generations.
This book really
I did like the discussions that took place about whether or not to stay on the Dusky Miller. But that was literally the only thing I enjoyed in this entire book. And considering how fascinating the premise is, that is a damn shame.
Contains suicide, various bodily indignities due to old age and illness, rape, and the death of a child. There are numerous POV characters, all people of color, and most of them are middle aged or elderly women, which is a nice change.
This book really
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frustrated me. It was so unfocused, and although all sorts of exciting things happen (crashlanding on a planet! a desperate rescue mission! a plague!) they all happen in the peripheral vision of the characters. Even when a POV character is trying to pull someone from a surging sea, they've got page upon page of stream of consciousness about how they feel about their daughter's marriage and how they used to ski on a nearby mountain and such. The constant ruminations not only slow the book down to a snail's pace, but they feel completely unreal. I'd buy that one or two people undergo long thought processes during stressful life-or-death moments, but to have the entire book consist of characters thinking about their feelings and half-remembered memories and inconsequential opinions about people the reader doesn't know--it strains belief and a reader's ability to stay interested. The characters are, by and large, unpleasant people in a very minor, understated way. They think uncharitable thoughts about those they're surrounded by, or blame others for not mysteriously understanding things they've never mentioned...I know that some people are like that, but *all* of them? It was too much, and listening to their POVs left me in an unpleasant mood.I did like the discussions that took place about whether or not to stay on the Dusky Miller. But that was literally the only thing I enjoyed in this entire book. And considering how fascinating the premise is, that is a damn shame.
Contains suicide, various bodily indignities due to old age and illness, rape, and the death of a child. There are numerous POV characters, all people of color, and most of them are middle aged or elderly women, which is a nice change.
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LibraryThing member Cheryl_in_CC_NV
Couldn't do it. Read the whole first part and felt nothing, couldn't follow along the second part at all. Gorgeous writing, but I found nothing & nobody engaging. Readers who appreciate *L*iterature, and writers who dream of same, will probably like it better.
LibraryThing member satyridae
I wanted to like this book. It's very well-written, but the author's style doesn't resonate with me. There's a sort of remove present, wherein I can see the characters, almost hear their voices but can't connect.
LibraryThing member JenneB
Quakers! In! Spaaaaace!!!
So interesting to have what is basically a hard SF premise (generation starship) done in a very intimate, character-meditation way. Kinda loved it, even though it was uncomfortable to read at times.
So interesting to have what is basically a hard SF premise (generation starship) done in a very intimate, character-meditation way. Kinda loved it, even though it was uncomfortable to read at times.
LibraryThing member RealLifeReading
Molly Gloss has written an intriguing, quiet book that speaks volumes in The Dazzle of Day. This is a very international book. Escaping from a dying Earth, Quakers from various countries (they speak Esperanto!) have found themselves a home on board the Dusty Miller, a self-sustaining but ageing
“He had thought in the filmcards he had studied of unbounded landscapes, of storms and snows and seas, there remained no surprises. It hadn’t occurred to him, the vast depth of the third dimension. He hadn’t thought he would fear the sky.”
The funny thing about The Dazzle of Day is that nothing seems to be happening, although things are actually happening. The crew crashes on the frozen planet, someone dies when out working on the sail, all major events that are but a sideline to the relationships, to the tales of the daily lives of these Quakers, such as Bjoro’s wife Joko and son Cejo, these people who work the fields, who cook in the kitchen houses, who take part in meetings and discuss their future on this frozen planet, who look after their families and each other.
“For 175 years they had gone on talking and thinking and making ready for leaving this world. They had lived for 175 years in a kind of suspended state, a continual waiting for change, but it was a balanced and deep-grounded condition, an equilibrium. They knew their world, root and branch, knew its history and its economies. The human life of the Miller and the life of its soil and its plants and animals revolved together, in a society that was well-considered, a community that was sustaining. Some people thought they had lived for 175 years in a world that was a kind of Eden.”
But there are no answers. Or at least the book doesn’t leave us with any firm ones.
The Dazzle of Day is a book best described in opposites. There is an ending, but it is not really the end. It is a story of beginnings and endings. The words are quiet, but also full of strength and understanding.
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spaceship. A crew has been sent out to explore a frozen planet as a possible future home. Bjoro is among the crew, and the planet isn’t something he’s prepared for:“He had thought in the filmcards he had studied of unbounded landscapes, of storms and snows and seas, there remained no surprises. It hadn’t occurred to him, the vast depth of the third dimension. He hadn’t thought he would fear the sky.”
The funny thing about The Dazzle of Day is that nothing seems to be happening, although things are actually happening. The crew crashes on the frozen planet, someone dies when out working on the sail, all major events that are but a sideline to the relationships, to the tales of the daily lives of these Quakers, such as Bjoro’s wife Joko and son Cejo, these people who work the fields, who cook in the kitchen houses, who take part in meetings and discuss their future on this frozen planet, who look after their families and each other.
“For 175 years they had gone on talking and thinking and making ready for leaving this world. They had lived for 175 years in a kind of suspended state, a continual waiting for change, but it was a balanced and deep-grounded condition, an equilibrium. They knew their world, root and branch, knew its history and its economies. The human life of the Miller and the life of its soil and its plants and animals revolved together, in a society that was well-considered, a community that was sustaining. Some people thought they had lived for 175 years in a world that was a kind of Eden.”
But there are no answers. Or at least the book doesn’t leave us with any firm ones.
The Dazzle of Day is a book best described in opposites. There is an ending, but it is not really the end. It is a story of beginnings and endings. The words are quiet, but also full of strength and understanding.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Multnomah_Quakers
Quaker Business Process in The Dazzle of Day
Here’s a challenge: Write a novel in which a Quaker business meeting is the dramatic pivot point . . . and make it a compelling read.
That’s the challenge that Molly Gloss meets in her science fiction novel The Dazzle of Day.
The story begins in a
Science fiction readers recognize that the Dusty Miller (named in unpretentious style for a simple foliage plant) is a “generation ship.” In a universe that respects Einsteinian physics, the speed of starships is limited by the speed of light. Without wormhole or warp drive as a convenient work-around, a ship will take decades or generations to reach even moderately close star systems The generation that launched the ship will die before it reaches its destination. Only their grandchildren or great-grandchildren will see a new world. In the meanwhile, successive generations live in a massive ship-world that is large enough to maintain a fully functioning ecology.
Driven through space by vast light sails, the Dusty Miller is a wheel with a central hub and a habitable ring that maintains gravity and supports dense rural settlement on the interior of its floor and sloping sides. Its 3000 or so residents have farmed, gardened, maintained mechanical systems, and waited for the voyage to end at what a promised land. Now the ship has arrived at a solar system with a disappointingly marginal planet. It is cold, rocky, and inhospitable, greatly unlike the subtropical interior of the ship with its gardens and vineyards, but it is a place where voyagers could survive if they are willing to adapt and trade their semi-tropical biosphere for the equivalent of Iceland or the Hebrides
Molly Gloss is a Portlander who writes both science fiction and historical fiction. Set in the American West, her historical novels highlight strong independent women. The Jump-Off Creek is the story of a widow who homesteads by herself in the mountains of eastern Oregon in 1895. The Hearts of Horses follows a young woman who succeeds as breaker and trainer of ranch horses during World War I, when men who had done the work were off to war. In The Dazzle of Day, women are the glue that keeps the supremely isolated community functioning.
Gloss introduces Quaker practice gradually. We first sit in on a First Day Meeting for worship, attended by half the adults in what amounts to a small co-housing community. Over several pages the attenders offer a series of disconnected by still overlapping messages. Members of the Ministry and Counsel Committee, responsible for sensing the time to close meeting have been “erring on the side of inaction.” One character likes their “inefficient spiritualness,” better than earlier committee members who “were without sufficient silence.”
Gloss is a meticulous researcher. For her most recent novel Falling from Horses, for example, she pored over historic photographs to make sure that she put Los Angeles trolley stops at the right street corner. For Dazzle of Day, she put in time in the library of George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon. Not herself a Friend, she also read through a variety of meeting minutes found in the George Fox University and Northwest Yearly Meeting archives—when most of us struggle to review last month’s minutes from our own Meeting
As the story proceeds, Gloss reproduces other familiar aspects of Quaker process. A committee meets to deal with some practical matters and goes around in circles. Different clerks have different styles. One lets the opening silence at business meeting stretch longer than many prefer. Another gets flak for sitting atop a table so she can see everyone—isn’t she putting herself above everyone else?
The individual apartment complexes group into eight neighborhoods or villages with regular monthly meetings. Attendance at Alaudo Monthly Meeting is usually fifteen or twenty out of two hundred adults, everyone else being willing to leave things up to the few folks who either like to talk or to get things done. With the momentous decision about the ships’ future before them, however, seventy or even eighty have been turning out, leading to rambling meetings that the clerk can’t keep from straying into debates about details. “Lately it was the same dozen or so who would stand and offer their voices, people not known for the weight of their judgment but for not being timid.”
Like a cozy, ingrown Meeting, the Dusty Miller has become a mental cocoon through its familiarity. The ship encapsulates and protects its inhabitants, but at the expense of a quietly mounting sense of unease and dissatisfaction. Something has to be done. A decision will have to be made before the ship’s trajectory crries it past the planet.
In the crucial meeting for business, speakers voice practical concerns about the new planet and, simultaneously, their comfort with the familiar. If they are seriously thinking about dismantling their ship to reuse its elements on the new planet, why not stay in the ship and save the trouble? “What is the point of taking the Miller apart and rebuilding it down there? I think it’s crazy, this scheme. . . . If we’re going to go on living under a roof, we ought to just stay where we are . . . [where] people with arthritis can go on without the weight getting into their bones.” That comment triggers more: “I don’t see why we need to come out into the sunlight. We’re doing pretty well, after all. . . We ought to just stay right here.”
As the meeting continues, other voices rise. The voyagers may fear the new, but they also fear for the future of their ship. Social pressure can be intense in a community with no physical escape valve—no hills to head to, no rivers to cross. Many suffer feelings of loneliness and powerlessness that lead to depression and sometimes suicide. Systems may function smoothly from day to day, but as one says, “We’re living in a mechanical thing, eh? And we’ve got to work hard to keep it from going to ruin. People can’t be expected to carry such a burden, can they?—knowing it’s our human intervention prevents the whole world from collapsing.” Having started with ideas about reproducing a protected environment on the planet, then veering into arguments for avoiding the surface entirely, the group finally acknowledge that the Miller is frightening as well as comforting. They begin to hold up the value and excitement of taking the planet on its own terms and reentering the natural world: “We ought to be listening to this New World instead of asking it so many questions.” “We ought to be asking ourselves whether there’s a place for us there, and what it is.”
The meeting ends without obvious resolution or summarizing speeches, but with a growing sense that the ship has locked minds and spirits onto narrow tracks and that there is no option but to choose the planet. Gloss does not follow this understated climax with more dramatic action. She doesn’t care to show any details of parallel discussions in other villages or the follow-up decisions or the initial colonization—simply letting readers realize that things have fallen into place, that a sense of the community has coalesced. The epilogue skips ahead by decades to show the planet-born now adapted to a new life, having found through much trouble what kind of place the new world had for them.
Molly’s version of Quaker process is spot on in the essentials, even if a bit off in occasional details. She recently wrote me that “I took some liberties, since I was writing about the future and a community that had been isolated from Earth (evolving their own ways of doing things) for 175 years. And I gave myself leeway for things to work out well. Utopia, and all that. Fiction, and all that!”
The climactic business meeting reminds me of weighty decisions in my own meeting—how to deal with the question of same-sex marriage when it arose for us in the 1980s, whether to remodel our Meetinghouse or find another location. It is easy to favor the familiar. Sometimes it is the mild voices can call forth unexpected agreement. Decisions for change come with incremental steps and then seem to fall into place, leaving us to wonder why it took so long to get there. “If we want to live there,” says one participant at the pivotal business meeting, “it ought to be on the old terms, eh?” as the old Quakers lived, joining our hands to the world God made.”
Here’s a challenge: Write a novel in which a Quaker business meeting is the dramatic pivot point . . . and make it a compelling read.
That’s the challenge that Molly Gloss meets in her science fiction novel The Dazzle of Day.
The story begins in a
Show More
Quaker community in Costa Rica. Residents are trying to decide whether to join the interstellar journey of the starship Dusty Miller, which is about to embark on a multi-century voyage in search of a habitable planet. The body of the novel then jumps 175 years ahead, when the ship is nearing a star system with a planet that is habitable but far from ideal. The passengers will have to decide whether to risk adapting to a cold windswept environment or to continue their search in an aging and slowly deteriorating ship. Being steeped in Quaker ways, they will engage in a lot of talking before they decide—and a business meeting will mark to point of decision. Science fiction readers recognize that the Dusty Miller (named in unpretentious style for a simple foliage plant) is a “generation ship.” In a universe that respects Einsteinian physics, the speed of starships is limited by the speed of light. Without wormhole or warp drive as a convenient work-around, a ship will take decades or generations to reach even moderately close star systems The generation that launched the ship will die before it reaches its destination. Only their grandchildren or great-grandchildren will see a new world. In the meanwhile, successive generations live in a massive ship-world that is large enough to maintain a fully functioning ecology.
Driven through space by vast light sails, the Dusty Miller is a wheel with a central hub and a habitable ring that maintains gravity and supports dense rural settlement on the interior of its floor and sloping sides. Its 3000 or so residents have farmed, gardened, maintained mechanical systems, and waited for the voyage to end at what a promised land. Now the ship has arrived at a solar system with a disappointingly marginal planet. It is cold, rocky, and inhospitable, greatly unlike the subtropical interior of the ship with its gardens and vineyards, but it is a place where voyagers could survive if they are willing to adapt and trade their semi-tropical biosphere for the equivalent of Iceland or the Hebrides
Molly Gloss is a Portlander who writes both science fiction and historical fiction. Set in the American West, her historical novels highlight strong independent women. The Jump-Off Creek is the story of a widow who homesteads by herself in the mountains of eastern Oregon in 1895. The Hearts of Horses follows a young woman who succeeds as breaker and trainer of ranch horses during World War I, when men who had done the work were off to war. In The Dazzle of Day, women are the glue that keeps the supremely isolated community functioning.
Gloss introduces Quaker practice gradually. We first sit in on a First Day Meeting for worship, attended by half the adults in what amounts to a small co-housing community. Over several pages the attenders offer a series of disconnected by still overlapping messages. Members of the Ministry and Counsel Committee, responsible for sensing the time to close meeting have been “erring on the side of inaction.” One character likes their “inefficient spiritualness,” better than earlier committee members who “were without sufficient silence.”
Gloss is a meticulous researcher. For her most recent novel Falling from Horses, for example, she pored over historic photographs to make sure that she put Los Angeles trolley stops at the right street corner. For Dazzle of Day, she put in time in the library of George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon. Not herself a Friend, she also read through a variety of meeting minutes found in the George Fox University and Northwest Yearly Meeting archives—when most of us struggle to review last month’s minutes from our own Meeting
As the story proceeds, Gloss reproduces other familiar aspects of Quaker process. A committee meets to deal with some practical matters and goes around in circles. Different clerks have different styles. One lets the opening silence at business meeting stretch longer than many prefer. Another gets flak for sitting atop a table so she can see everyone—isn’t she putting herself above everyone else?
The individual apartment complexes group into eight neighborhoods or villages with regular monthly meetings. Attendance at Alaudo Monthly Meeting is usually fifteen or twenty out of two hundred adults, everyone else being willing to leave things up to the few folks who either like to talk or to get things done. With the momentous decision about the ships’ future before them, however, seventy or even eighty have been turning out, leading to rambling meetings that the clerk can’t keep from straying into debates about details. “Lately it was the same dozen or so who would stand and offer their voices, people not known for the weight of their judgment but for not being timid.”
Like a cozy, ingrown Meeting, the Dusty Miller has become a mental cocoon through its familiarity. The ship encapsulates and protects its inhabitants, but at the expense of a quietly mounting sense of unease and dissatisfaction. Something has to be done. A decision will have to be made before the ship’s trajectory crries it past the planet.
In the crucial meeting for business, speakers voice practical concerns about the new planet and, simultaneously, their comfort with the familiar. If they are seriously thinking about dismantling their ship to reuse its elements on the new planet, why not stay in the ship and save the trouble? “What is the point of taking the Miller apart and rebuilding it down there? I think it’s crazy, this scheme. . . . If we’re going to go on living under a roof, we ought to just stay where we are . . . [where] people with arthritis can go on without the weight getting into their bones.” That comment triggers more: “I don’t see why we need to come out into the sunlight. We’re doing pretty well, after all. . . We ought to just stay right here.”
As the meeting continues, other voices rise. The voyagers may fear the new, but they also fear for the future of their ship. Social pressure can be intense in a community with no physical escape valve—no hills to head to, no rivers to cross. Many suffer feelings of loneliness and powerlessness that lead to depression and sometimes suicide. Systems may function smoothly from day to day, but as one says, “We’re living in a mechanical thing, eh? And we’ve got to work hard to keep it from going to ruin. People can’t be expected to carry such a burden, can they?—knowing it’s our human intervention prevents the whole world from collapsing.” Having started with ideas about reproducing a protected environment on the planet, then veering into arguments for avoiding the surface entirely, the group finally acknowledge that the Miller is frightening as well as comforting. They begin to hold up the value and excitement of taking the planet on its own terms and reentering the natural world: “We ought to be listening to this New World instead of asking it so many questions.” “We ought to be asking ourselves whether there’s a place for us there, and what it is.”
The meeting ends without obvious resolution or summarizing speeches, but with a growing sense that the ship has locked minds and spirits onto narrow tracks and that there is no option but to choose the planet. Gloss does not follow this understated climax with more dramatic action. She doesn’t care to show any details of parallel discussions in other villages or the follow-up decisions or the initial colonization—simply letting readers realize that things have fallen into place, that a sense of the community has coalesced. The epilogue skips ahead by decades to show the planet-born now adapted to a new life, having found through much trouble what kind of place the new world had for them.
Molly’s version of Quaker process is spot on in the essentials, even if a bit off in occasional details. She recently wrote me that “I took some liberties, since I was writing about the future and a community that had been isolated from Earth (evolving their own ways of doing things) for 175 years. And I gave myself leeway for things to work out well. Utopia, and all that. Fiction, and all that!”
The climactic business meeting reminds me of weighty decisions in my own meeting—how to deal with the question of same-sex marriage when it arose for us in the 1980s, whether to remodel our Meetinghouse or find another location. It is easy to favor the familiar. Sometimes it is the mild voices can call forth unexpected agreement. Decisions for change come with incremental steps and then seem to fall into place, leaving us to wonder why it took so long to get there. “If we want to live there,” says one participant at the pivotal business meeting, “it ought to be on the old terms, eh?” as the old Quakers lived, joining our hands to the world God made.”
Show Less
LibraryThing member SamMusher
Quakers in a generation ship! This is the quietest possible science fiction whose action largely takes place during town meetings. Predictably, I loved it, but it is not for everyone.
Subjects
Awards
PEN Center USA Literary Award (Winner — Fiction — 1998)
Oregon Book Awards (Finalist — Fiction — 1998)
Otherwise Award (Shortlist — 1997)
Language
Original publication date
1997
Physical description
256 p.; 21 cm
ISBN
031286437X / 9780312864378
Local notes
From the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy.