Glory Season

Rating:
Summary: Awe inspiring, like a locomotive with no brakes.
Review: A first rate adventure, set in a wonderful example of world building. The world, Stratos, built around cloning and pastoralism, is vividly portrayed and influences all in both subtle and direct ways. The adventure just keeps on accelerating, utterly without mercy, until you are just as ready to drop as the main character, Maia, is. Some don't like the end of the book, they say it has loose ends and drops off in intensity. That's how it was intended because along with the adventure, it is a coming of age story that doesn't bother with illogical finalities. IMHO Brin's best work, which is saying alot.

Rating:
Summary: Mating season
Review: A REALLY peculiar idea: Brin postulates a pro-feminist world which has found a middle way between rule of women and rule of men. The men are pretty normal but due to genetic tampering they have a mating season; the same genetic tampering makes the women birth clones during part of the year and normal genetic-variant children during the rest. Mankind transposed into a minor key and half-submerged in a feminist society proves to be a stable setup: they've survived intact while their matriarchal or patriarchal neighbors have collapsed, while they survived almost totally due to the unchanged ferocity of the men. It's a nice dream, but somehow I feel that Man is a creature with two sexes, and any so-called patriarchal society will be found to have women at the top, telling us men to go take out the garbage, hunt down a mammoth for supper, and get busy inventing shag carpets and vacuum cleaners. I don't wanna get off on a rant here, but the day we try to 'improve' mankind will be the day the lower animals inherit the earth. Still, it's a GREAT idea, and done fairly well. Read it and disagree with it yourself.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent development of a future society with a weak ending
Review: Brilliant development of a matriarchal society and some lovely reflection (as is normal in Brin) on the nature of life, society, and intelligence. Contrary to some of the other reviewers, it's not a feminist 'utopia' - there are distinctly unlikeable aspects to the society, even for the most hardcore of feminists - it's different, not better. Some of Maia's emotional development is a little forced, and the ending is weak, but otherwise the book is great.

Rating:
Summary: A fun and thought-provoking read
Review: Brin has a great ability to play with scientific concepts in an understandable way. And in this novel he toys with a world in which the basic rules of genetics and reproduction have been altered - in favor of the dominant female class. Although he explores and tweaks some scientific concepts, the story is enough in itself to keep anybody entertained.

I loved the inclusion of the game of Life - not your typical Parker Bros. board game, but the mathematical one. What a concept! That you could actually have a strategy for it. This book keeps you thinking.

Rating:
Summary: Couldn't wait to put it down
Review: Brin is an excellent author but I think he missed it on this one. Glory Season held my attention well enough that I was able to stick with it until the lame ending but I'll be more careful next time I buy a book of this lenght by this author. There were very tedious attempts to describe the strategy of a game I'll never play and the end of the book seemed like the author was getting as tired as I was and just quit. The redeeming aspect of this book was that Brin made the matriarchal society very belevable. As a standard phylum male, I feel that I could have run amuck on that planet. I was not surprised to read in the afterword that Brin based this book partly on his observation of aphid sex. You'll have to read it yourself to understand that comment. KK

Rating:
Summary: THE FIRST FEMINIST SF NOVEL WRITTEN BY A MAN
Review: BRIN IS ONE MY FAVORITE SF NOVELIST. GLORY SEASON IS A CLASSIC SF NOVEL. BRIN TAKES US INTO A WORLD WHERE CLONED WOMEN RULE AND WOMEN BORN NATURALLY(VARS) ARE SECOND CLASS CITIZENS AND MEN ARE THIRD CLASS CITIZENS.HE THROWS IN COMING OF AGE STORY, A MALE ALIEN FROM EARTH AND NEAR REVOLUTION

Rating:
Summary: Glory Season is a feminist Utopian novel, very readable
Review: Glory Season follows the beginning of reintegration into the human family of the hidden planet Femina, whose founders explicitly re- engineered women's biology to allow parthenogenesis (same device as the 1915 feminist Utopian novel Herland used for reproducing that all-female society). Their motivation was simple: the problems that caused women to need the protection of good men were almost all caused by bad men, they considered, so ------ they decided to dispense with men and simplify life. This feminine civilization turned out to be heavy on crafts and light on machinery, which is plausible. Clans of identical clones formed, which specialized in specific economic niches. The least convincing point in the novel to me is that Brin (who also wrote The Postman, which was made into a recent Kevin Costner movie) makes some women pirates and soldiers, as if every function in our world would have a feminine equivalent there, but I very much doubt that would happen. Echoes of the classic Herland are obvious throughout this modernized and readable version, which takes the point of view of the women, not the interlopers.

Rating:
Summary: Glory Season (review)
Review: Glory Season is perhaps David Brin's best work to date (Nov-2000). Lyrical, principled, thought provoking, and even well-plotted, Brin--always a political author--obliquely questions some of his most fundamental programatic axioms.

Rating:
Summary: Glory Season (review)
Review: Glory Season is perhaps David Brin's best work to date (Nov-2000). Lyrical, principled, thought provoking, and even well-plotted, Brin--always a political author--obliquely questions some of his most fundamental programatic axioms.

Rating:
Summary: Speculative fiction at its best.
Review: Glory Season is socially conscious, broad in scope, and well considered. Brin does not restrict his vision, but allows it to run where it will, carefully considering the likely results of speculative concepts, positively littering his books with miniscule gems, any of which might be the entire concept of the work of a lesser writer.