Courtship Rite – Donald Kingsbury

Belated Reviews: Unnumbered #2: Circus World

Donald Kingsbury published Courtship Rite (****, on an uncalibrated four-point scale) in 1982, and didn’t win the Hugo award for best novel. Don’t ask me why not. It’s one of those rare books that creates a society that really is different – and manages to tell a good story in the process.

One suspects, though we aren’t explicitly told, that Geta was settled by colonists who couldn’t travel farther and find a better prospect. They were only able to transplant the thinnest and most fragile of ecologies – a handful of Earth plants, bees, and humans. Native plants tend to be inedible or poisonous. Geta is an arid world, and famine is never far. It’s a world which could generate powerful evolutionary pressures – biological and social.

Geta is also a world where the nation state never took hold. There are clans – think of them as inbred, semi-autonomous guilds – but they are often geographically dispersed. Warfare never took hold, either. If a clan of priests (the nearest thing there is to political leadership) wants to attack another clan, it has to do so itself or, at best, pursuade other clans to help. (Priesthood is only marginally a religious matter. The term also comprehends genetic engineering and – during famines – deciding who gets to eat and who gets to be eaten.)

“Courtship Rite” focuses upon a critical time in Geta’s history – one which sees rapid technological, social, and philosophical change – and upon one family, the Maran Kaiel.

The Kaiel are a priest clan which rewards foresight: Those who are most able to negotiate workable policies, and to correctly predict the results of those policies, become leaders, and also get to make the greatest genetic contributions to future generations. The least able get to contribute more immediately, via the stewpots. (Other clans think the Kaiel carry this to extremes, but a clan’s internal eugenic arrangements aren’t really seen as anyone else’s business.)

The Maran are one of the most successful Kaiel families. As the book opens, the five of them (three husbands and two wives) are courting the preeminent physicist of their generation, when the Prime Predictor forbids the marriage. He plans to expand Kaiel influence to the sea and, to further this goal, he orders the Maran to court Oelita – a heretic of considerable prestige. (Her heresies? She’s an atheist: She believes the God of the Sky to just be a natural satellite – though any competent astronomer can see that it doesn’t always obey orbital laws. She believes humans to be products of natural evolution – though any competent geneticist can see that this is impossible. She doesn’t approve of cannibalism.) The Maran do not take kindly to this interference, and decide to test Oelita’s worth with a Courtship Rite.

The rite has a certain charming simplicity: If the person being courted can survive seven attempts on her life, she’s worthy. (You may appreciate that the rite is not very popular, and isn’t often used. If nothing else, it’s likely to sour the target on the people doing the courting.) Nothing else turns out to be simple, unfortunately, not least because another priestly clan is also trying to extend its influence into the same region.

“Courtship Rite” comes out of the best tradition of thought-experiment sf, and presents a society which is not just a variation on old themes – without sacrificing story to message. It’s a society whose customs we might sometimes find distasteful, but the characters who people it are sympathetic. The book also has a great deal to say about our own society, without doing so too intrusively. (Kingsbury also wrote the less successful The Moon Goddess and the Sun (**), a near-future sf novel in which lectures and expositions do overwhelm the story.)

The machines mainly supplied the creches but Noe, Oelita 
thought, would be the kind of woman who would use a surrogate
mother to carry her own children.  She'd have a batch of maybe 
six and keep the finest of the lot for herself after careful 
tests had sent the remaining five to a temple abattoir.  How
was it possible to reach a woman like that?

This review was missing from the internet archive. I copied a copy of the review from https://decnotes.datacellar.net/showtopic.php?conf=1060&userno=1038&topic=1073742356

Dani Zweig dani@netcom.com

Watership Down:
You’ve read the book. You’ve seen the movie. Now eat the stew!