Morrow's first novel, while offbeat, is more straight SF than I expected, even if the science if a bit flimsy. A scientific research spaceship on its way back to Nearth ("New Earth") lands a somehow unexpected other planet. In fairly short order, only two of the crew survive, rescued from brain-eating neurovores by the strictly pacifist Quetzalians, who are themselves the survivors of a human expedition. The meat of the story is how their pacifism is maintained in the face of the human tendency to violence, and how the two crew members respond.

As in more mature Morrow, we have a clear focus on a socio-philosophical question, with stronger characterizations than such essays often have. Where this suffers compared to later Morrow is in the busyness and forced nature of some of the plot machinations, and the relative lack of the dark humor that fills later novels.

Far from the best place to start Morrow, but still worth checking out. ( )

Not my favorite Morrow (that would be Towing Jehovah), but, as always, there are a few choice bits ...

“On Earth, where his remotest forebears lived, a person could be indisputably responsible for the deaths of thousands and still go down in the history books as some sort of great hero. … Why, he wanted to know, were the names of Samson, Napoleon, Joan of Arc, Ulysses S. Grant, and Julius Caesar not obscenities, spoken after dark in whispers of revulsion and shame?” p17-80

“The miners … expected retirement benefits from their Rationalist employer, John Donaldson. Mr. Donaldson went home, did the arithmetic, and called out the police because it was cheaper.

“The strikers, who had enthusiasm, attacked the police, who had yeastguns. The enthusiasm made martyrs; the guns, holes.” p109-110 ( )

James Morrow's first novel. I enjoyed it -- moments of humour alternated with moments of sheer horror. ( )

If I had read James Morrow's first novel The Wine of Violence when it originally appeared, I probably would have found it much more bizarre than I did in my actual encounter with it, after having read much of his later fiction. Although it is quite unusual for a science fiction novel, it is actually the conventional space opera context that most sets it apart from his larger oeuvre, while it exhibits many themes and features common to his work as a whole. These include bereavement of central characters, materialization of ethical and metaphysical concepts, and moral inquiry verging on gentle didacticism.

The principal character of the story is Francis Lostwax, an exo-entomologist whom we encounter with the rest of the crew of the spaceship Darwin on return from a successful interplanetary expedition in the UW Canis Majoris system, to which humans had emigrated from Earth many generations previously. The scientists are forced to land on an unexpected planet, where they encounter a quasi-utopian society descended from a lost colony-ship sister to the one that brought their ancestors to New Earth ("Nearth"). These pacifist Quetzalians live behind fortifications which protect them from the rapacious, cannibalistic Neurovores.

In keeping with its title, the book poses several central questions about aggression and the capacity for violence. Are they intrinsic to humans? Would we be better without them? Despite the fact that the characters are in some measure ciphers for answers to these questions, I did care about them as a reader, and I would recommend the book as a fiction as well as philosophy.

weird ( )