Cry Of The Wind

Author: Sue Harrison

We all know what happens when aliens invade: there's a big fight and then the aliens are driven off, or humanity is reduced to servitude. Well, no. We've got enough experience of colonisation to know it's not usually like that. And the Aleutian Trilogy is the best work to date to consider alien invasion in the light of colonised and coloniser.In the first volume, White Queen, the Aleutians arrive quietly in Africa, but their arrival has severe political repercussions throughout the world. In particular, we see the world as exhausted, running down, and opposition to the mysterious, technologically advance newcomers is neither as complete nor as energetically pursued as most alien invasion stories would lead us to expect.By the second volume, North Wind, the Aleutians are more established but no less mysterious. One of the key features of this trilogy is that Jones has created truly alien aliens, beings whose motivations and intentions cannot readily be understood in human terms. But, typically, the human response to the invasion has been to splinter and war against themselves. We begin to see that one of the underlying themes in the trilogy is to reimagine gender terms. Now "men" refers to anyone, male or female, who is aggressive, attack-oriented; "women" refers to anyone who adopts a more peaceful, nurturing role; and there are "half-castes" who attempt to be as much like the Aleutians as it is possible to be.In the third volume, Phoenix CafÃƒÃ‚Â©, the aliens are preparing to leave, but humanity has become so dependent upon their masters that this loss of leadership could be devastating. The world has been transformed by the biotechnology that the Aleutians brought, while more and more humans are having themselves surgically altered to look as much like the aliens as possible. The inevitable conspiracy is more a sign of desperation than anything else, the colonised don't want to be free of the coloniser, they just want to remake themselves into their own image of the coloniser. White Queen won the James Tiptree Award, an indication that this is one of the finest works of science fiction that explores and rethinks gender issues. But it does so in a colonial context that makes it one of the most subtle, original and powerful works of alien invasion ever written.

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There's a pendant to the Aleutian Trilogy, though it is only obliquely connected to the original. Spirit, or the Princess of Bois Dormant is set long after the Aleutians have left. The Earth is now a place of emperors and warlords and grubby little wars, but it is also now a key player in interspatial politics. Spirit is, like Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination, The Count of Monte Cristo rewritten as space opera, though Jones is far more faithful to the original. We get the innocent victim of political skulduggery who is imprisoned for 20 years, but manages to escape against all the odds and in the process acquire an immense fortune which is used to exact revenge on all those responsible for the original betrayal. It's not as tight or as intriguing as the original trilogy, but it's still a fascinating book.

Much better is Divine Endurance, Jones's first novel for adults, set in a complex and despoiled South East Asia where matriarchies hold sway, but the arrival of an android called Chosen Among the Beautiful, and the cat, Divine Endurance, upsets the delicate power balance. Intricate political positions, changes in gender status, upsets to the status quo are consistent features in all her novels, perhaps most clearly shown in Kairos, set in a dystopian near-future Britain where fascism holds power, but in which a new drug literally changes reality.

If you are fascinated by the complex relationship between humans and aliens, colonised and colonisers, in the Aleutian Trilogy, you should also check out Sacrifice of Fools by Ian McDonald, in which sexually ambiguous aliens arrive in Northern Ireland, so that the response to the newcomers is coloured by sectarian strife and by the puritanism of community leaders.