Highwood

Neal Barrett, Jr. Highwood (1972)
Internet research has revealed to me that Neal Barrett, Jr. had a reasonably respectable career as a writer following this early effort and - of more direct interest to me - was born in San Antonio; so I was well disposed towards this as I turned to the first page, or at least curious or hopeful or something. It came stuck to Barrington Bayley's arse as part of an Ace Double, and gets off to a tremendous start.

Highwood is a relative of Aldiss's Hothouse, or maybe something from Ursula LeGuin, or Ewok soft porn at the less complimentary end of the scale. It's set on a world where the trees are tens of miles high and home to entire communities of lesbian natives resembling lemurs. The males live in a separate segregated community, either in another tree or miles down on the forest floor - the author seems a bit vague about the details. Kearney Wynn comes to this world to study these natives and immediately finds herself at odds with Hamby Flagg, who seems to be some sort of colonial caretaker stationed on this peculiar world. Hamby is accompanied by Teddi, a robotic teddy bear who provides the counselling and emotional support necessitated by such a thankless and solitary posting. Of all the novels which have ever reminded me of Philip K. Dick, this one reminds me of Philip K. Dick a lot, at least up until the last couple of chapters - and in a good way, writing with the same sort of rhythm - expressive without getting too fancy - and characters who could easily be on vacation from Ubik or A Maze of Death or one of the others.

However, Highwood seems often wilfully vague in what it's trying to describe, and I made it right to the end without quite working out what had happened to the colony of male natives seen earlier, or - honestly - what the fuck was going on; and before it gets resolved, the author whips off the mask and reveals that we've actually been reading a very different book, one which seems to promise a lot but turns out to be ham-fisted bollocks. That lesbian Ewok colony was actually some sort of metaphor for women's emancipation, which Kearney realises is all a waste of time, and she only ever thought otherwise due to having had some funny ideas in her head - probably all that book learnin'.

She stepped back from him, thrust her fists stubbornly against her hips. 'No—you listen to me, Hamby Flagg. I didn't climb all over this damn planet and half a dozen others for my health—or for science, either, for that matter. I was looking for a man, Flagg. I didn't know that, of course, and I sure as hell wouldn't have admitted it to myself, but it's true, nevertheless. And now that I've found one, moth-eaten and grimy as you are, I kind of like what I've got. Though God knows you're not what I had in mind—or thought I had in mind, anyway. But I do not intend to waste all that time and effort just to—to provide a very unappetising picnic for those things!'

Highwood opens like some lost Philip K. Dick novella and ends like the sort of conservative and occasionally Christian science-fiction which has always made Analog magazine a bit of a lottery.

Never mind.