Floating Worlds

1976 Holland, Cecelia [Anastasia] (b. 1943). Floating Worlds. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 465 pp. Rpt. as the Collectors’ Edition. London: Gollancz, 2000. 542 pp.; and as SF Masterworks Edition. London: Gollancz, 2011, with an “Introduction” by Graham Sleight (vi-vii). viii + 628 pp. PSt

The novel begins in an anarchist eutopia with some problems on a future, overpopulated, polluted, but high-tech Earth contrasted with Mars, which focuses on law and order. The protagonist of the novel is an anarchist woman in her late twenties living on Earth who can speak Syth, the language of aliens who threaten Earth and Mars. She is hired by the Committee for the Revolution to meet on Mars with Syth leaders to negotiate a truce, which is complicated by the fact that the Syth consider females inferior. The novel begins in Manhattan, which is below the surface of the ocean and is a tourist destination, and then moves to the largely underground, dome-covered, New York, where the woman lives in a commune and looks for temporary jobs to pay her minimal expenses. Men have a “plug” to keep them from impregnating a woman and must have a signed document from a woman to have the plug temporarily removed. The Committee for the Revolution has become a “vestigial government” to which people turn rather than dealing with problems themselves (10/Gollancz 2011, 10/Gollancz 2000, 12). The novel moves quickly to interstellar conflict. Female author.