Review: To the Resurrection Station, by Eleanor Arnason

Review: To the Resurrection Station, by Eleanor Arnason

by Rich Horton

Eleanor Arnason is one of my favorite writers, but until now I had really only read her short fiction. I love almost all her Hwarhath stories, perhaps most particularly "The Lovers", "The Actors", and "The Potter of Bones"; and also her Lydia Duluth stories, especially "Stellar Harvest". She has written many other excellent shorter works: very recently, "Mr. Catt"; early in her career, "The Warlord of Saturn's Moons"; and in between, stories like "Mammoths of the Great Plains", "My Husband Steinn", "The Grammarian's Five Daughters", "Kormak the Lucky", "The Scrivener", "Knapsack Poems", and many others.

You might think I'd have started in on her novels with the Hwarhath one, Ring of Swords; or with her Tiptree winner, A Woman of the Iron People; or with Daughter of the Bear King, also highly regarded. But a couple of weeks ago, with my grandkids staying with us (which is lovely but absolutely exhausting), I wanted something shorter and lighter, and picked up her second novel, To the Resurrection Station (1986). And I need to warn in advance -- I have a feeling my reading experience was reflected first by reading it in very small snippets in between getting up to calm a screaming toddler, and later by finishing it while suffering from what turned out to be Covid.

The story opens on the planet New Hope, which had been lightly colonized by humans a few centuries earlier. A young woman, Belinda Smith, has been summoned from New Harvard college to her uncle and guardian's place, Gorwing Keep. There she learns to her shock that she is not named Smith but Hernshaw -- and that she is a descendant of the Captain of the ship that brought humans to the planet. Also, that she is ALSO a descendant of one of the planet's natives. For New Hope has an indigenous population, though it should be said they are extremely human-like. Worse, native law requires that she marry one of them -- a man named Claud. Worse still, they soon realize that they each have lovers in the big city, Port Discovery, and that the lovers are the same person -- Belinda's roommate Marianne. 

This all seems like potentially a wacky comedy, but though it's lightly funny at times, and there's plenty of underlying satire, it's not really a comedy. Belinda and Claud mutually agree they don't want to marry, though they soon learn that Marianne herself is actually married to someone else. Strange things keep happening -- notably, Gorwing Keep turns out to contain a spaceship, which they twice use to escape potential death or prison. There are encounters with natives (their relatives) and with humans, including a crazy policeman. And they are accompanied by a robot who claims to be Godfrey Hernshaw -- Belinda's ancestor, the original Captain, who had his brain uploaded to the robot as he was dying. They decide to flee back to Earth, even though it is a ruined planet after war broke out between humans and robots. On Earth, the robot hopes to find one of the "resurrection stations", which can transplant brains back into android bodies. Belinda and Claud aren't sure what they want.

Earth, it turns out, or at least the ruins of New York City, is occupied by crazy robots, crazy uplifted rats, crazy humans, and poetry-loving dolphins. And the threesome from New Hope, soon joined by a rat they rescue, keep searching for the resurrection station, which apparently is in Brooklyn. But will that really solve their problems?

I found the novel a bit hard to get into for the first half or so (on New Hope.) I didn't find the natives or humans very interesting characters, for the most part, and the action seemed haphazard and often silly. This is explained, mind you, by a psi power Belinda seems to possess, but I didn't find that satisfying. Things get more interesting on Earth, especially in the final section of the novel, which is sometimes quite funny and even moving. The ending is -- I think on purpose -- rather unresolved (and possibly a sequel could have been written, though perhaps the themes of this book had been sufficiently examined.) The science and worldbuilding don't hold together much, but I don't think this was meant to be that kind of novel. On the whole, a lesser part of Arnason's ouevre, for sure. I probably wouldn't start here if I was planning to investigate Arnason -- read some of the stories I mentioned above! For myself, I should probably get to Ring of Swords next.