Collaborators, by Deborah Wheeler

Collaborators by Deborah Wheeler

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Collaborators.
The first thought I had when sat down to write this review is what does this word mean? Traitors, opportunists, those French and Dutch and the others in Europe who supported the Nazis in World War II when their countries were occupied.

To collude, to conspire, to be in cahoots.

But, maybe I have seen too many World War II movies growing up.

I also remember that those who collaborate are those work together on an activity to create something. To cooperate, to join forces, to team up.

Collaboration is a term often used in composition circle as part of how to teach writing and to understand the writing process. To invent, to create, is a social act. Despite the romantic image of the poet in the garret, no story or poem or painting is solely the creation of one person. The books read and studied before, the people who influenced the creator—all contribute.

The second thought, or rather question I had was what does it mean to human? And how does one define being human? Just look in a mirror? We are homo sapiens, human beings, are we not?
But is human a state of the mind and the body? Does being self-aware count? Robert Heinlein in Star Beast offers a legal definition of being human: “Beings possessed of speech and manipulation must be presumed to be sentient and therefore to have innate human rights, unless conclusively proved otherwise” (167).

This broader context of what it means to be human is the one at work in this provocative novel. That Wheeler uses it to refer to the inhabitants of a planet that we—Terrans—would call alien, is, frankly, disturbing. These aliens, these citizens of Chacarre and Erlind (two nation states), seem to be like us—sort of, mostly, or rather just enough for assumptions to be made that aren’t questioned or examined until far too late. Their definition of “gender has a very different meaning and [their] instincts can drive a crowd to madness” (back cover).

Enter the crippled Terran spaceship and its well-meaning crew with all good intentions.

There are misunderstandings between the native species and the Terrans, misunderstandings that lead to violence and retaliation and interference and open conflict. “Soon everyone—scientists and soldiers, rebels and lovers, patriots and opportunists—are swept up in a cycle of destruction” (back cover). Who is at fault? And what does it mean to collaborate? To betray one’s species? Does loving an alien, as does Lexis, a Chacarran, and it seems, so CelestiniBellini, a Terran, make one a collaborator? And collaboration, cooperating, working together, joining forces, this seems to be the way to fight back—or is fighting the way to stop the violence? Can there be reconciliation? Peace?

Can something be created that is new and different? Of value? Is there common ground?

These two cultures, alien to each other, are explored in depth through the lives of such people on the planet as Hayke, a farmer, who follows a way of life, a philosophy—or is it a religion (there are echoes of Taoism and Christianity)—called the Way, Alon and Birre, lovers, then mates; their families, and Lexis, a professor who takes a Terran lover. On the ship, we find intense scientists, such as Vera Eisenstein, the resident genius, and her protégé, Sarah Davis, and Celestin Bellini, a soldier and Lexis’ lover, and the captain, Hammadi.

Can there be forgiveness? Compromise? Understanding? Will collaboration result in good or ill, no matter which definition is used, or is it somewhere in the murky middle?

This rich novel, with its “first-rate world-building from a writer gifted with a soaring imagination and good old-fashioned Sense of Wonder” (C.J. Cherryh, back cover) asks the reader to think and think again




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