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The Gods of Xuma
189 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 1978
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About the author
David J. Lake
20 books7 followersDavid Lake was educated in both India and England, then taught English in various countries, including Vietnam and Thailand; since 1967 he has been at the University of Queensland, Brisbane. He began creative writing as a poet about 1970.
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February 28, 2022
Australian SF writer David J. Lake takes up Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom (Mars) in The Gods of Xuma, the first of two lightly linked novels set on a planet in the Eridani star system that bears more than a casual resemblance to the fictional planet. Like Barsoom, Xuma is a desert planet laced with canals. Its inhabitants, however, are quite different; they pass through four sex stages across their lives: sexless children who on puberty transform into men, who later in life shift to women, and then end as again sexless elders. Men fight, women rule, and elders maintain the culture and science. Some children invert the two middle stages; they are regarded as "perverts" and used, during their female period, as sex slaves in government-owned brothels. Planet-wide Xuma's divided up into several states, often at war, and with different practices. Yelsai, the state where humans first make contact, is ruled by a Queen and a Council of Twelve Women; its enemy, Xarth, is under the rule of a male emperor--regarded in Yelsai as perverse.
Tom Carson narrates the story. He's sent down to Xuma to make first contact, with the help of Saimo, a native child the humans had captured. Carson makes the analogy to Barsoom and becomes entangled in local politics. His superior, commander of the Earth spaceship Riverhorse, wants to conquer Xuma and subordinated the natives; Carson slowly but surely turns against this plan, which he had his doubts about from the start. He also finds himself the victim of the lusty Yelsai Queen Telesin, who's very curious about the potentiality of sexual compatibility between humans and Xumans. (In an unusual twist, it turns out that Tom's stamina in the sack is no match for Xuman women's demands, as Telesin rather cruelly informs him after his efforts end long before she's satisfied.)
Two themes in The Gods of Xuma resonate with Lake's experiences as an Australian. Xuma's extensive deserts, with several empty, salt-encrusted sea basins, recall the great deserts of his home country. Nineteenth-century European explorers of the Australian continental interior hoped to find a vast inland sea, but encountered only rolling red dunes, vast stony deserts, and empty depressions that might once have held water but now only offered an endless vision of playa-like desolation. Xuma is very much the same.
The other theme embodies a critique of colonialism. Tom is all too aware of the cruelty and violence wrecked upon the Indigenous Australians by European settler colonists, and he is deeply troubled by the potential for a repeat on Xuma. Its inhabitants seem to him a people frozen in time, whose cultures have not changed in millions of years, whose peculiar ways strike him as primitive--children go naked, women and men topless, a long-standing trope in European exploration literature for "savagery" (not in the sense of violence, but rather of backwardness). But the moral dilemma--do the arriving humans, who are fleeing a vaguely described but clearly planetary disaster back in the Solar System, have the right to impose themselves as rulers over the Xumans, turning them into servants, even slaves?--chafes, until Tom in the end sides with the Xumans in a devastating response to human colonization.
The parallel evolution of Xumans and humans needs some generous suspension of disbelief; its rather absurd that the former have the same sexes and sexuality and appearance as humans who evolved on a distant planet. The convergence is necessary for the plot Lake's spun, and so somewhat begrudgingly I set aside my annoyance in favor of following Lake's game. And it's a good one, especially because in Tom Lake has conjured up a really human and complex narrator, conflicted in his alliances, naive, too ready to draw conclusions from too little evidence, and altogether a wonderful guide through the complexities of the Xuman-human clash. There's a bit of a deus ex machinaThe Gods of Xuma
Tom Carson narrates the story. He's sent down to Xuma to make first contact, with the help of Saimo, a native child the humans had captured. Carson makes the analogy to Barsoom and becomes entangled in local politics. His superior, commander of the Earth spaceship Riverhorse, wants to conquer Xuma and subordinated the natives; Carson slowly but surely turns against this plan, which he had his doubts about from the start. He also finds himself the victim of the lusty Yelsai Queen Telesin, who's very curious about the potentiality of sexual compatibility between humans and Xumans. (In an unusual twist, it turns out that Tom's stamina in the sack is no match for Xuman women's demands, as Telesin rather cruelly informs him after his efforts end long before she's satisfied.)
Two themes in The Gods of Xuma resonate with Lake's experiences as an Australian. Xuma's extensive deserts, with several empty, salt-encrusted sea basins, recall the great deserts of his home country. Nineteenth-century European explorers of the Australian continental interior hoped to find a vast inland sea, but encountered only rolling red dunes, vast stony deserts, and empty depressions that might once have held water but now only offered an endless vision of playa-like desolation. Xuma is very much the same.
The other theme embodies a critique of colonialism. Tom is all too aware of the cruelty and violence wrecked upon the Indigenous Australians by European settler colonists, and he is deeply troubled by the potential for a repeat on Xuma. Its inhabitants seem to him a people frozen in time, whose cultures have not changed in millions of years, whose peculiar ways strike him as primitive--children go naked, women and men topless, a long-standing trope in European exploration literature for "savagery" (not in the sense of violence, but rather of backwardness). But the moral dilemma--do the arriving humans, who are fleeing a vaguely described but clearly planetary disaster back in the Solar System, have the right to impose themselves as rulers over the Xumans, turning them into servants, even slaves?--chafes, until Tom in the end sides with the Xumans in a devastating response to human colonization.
The parallel evolution of Xumans and humans needs some generous suspension of disbelief; its rather absurd that the former have the same sexes and sexuality and appearance as humans who evolved on a distant planet. The convergence is necessary for the plot Lake's spun, and so somewhat begrudgingly I set aside my annoyance in favor of following Lake's game. And it's a good one, especially because in Tom Lake has conjured up a really human and complex narrator, conflicted in his alliances, naive, too ready to draw conclusions from too little evidence, and altogether a wonderful guide through the complexities of the Xuman-human clash. There's a bit of a deus ex machinaThe Gods of Xuma
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