Floating Worlds

By: Cecelia Holland

Narrated by: Kristin James

In the far future, an Earth-born woman must negotiate with a fearsome mutant race: "On a par with Ursula LeGuin or Arthur C. Clarke" (Chicago Tribune).

Two thousand years into the future, runaway pollution has made the earth uninhabitable except in giant biodomes. The society is an anarchy, with disputes mediated through the Machiavellian Committee for the Revolution. Mars, Venus, and the moon support flourishing colonies of various political stripes. On the fringes of the solar system, in the gas planets, a strange, new, violent kind of human has evolved. In this unstable system, the anarchist Paula Mendoza, an agent of the Committee, works to make peace and ultimately protect her people in a catastrophic clash of worlds that destroys the order she knows.

©1976 Cecelia Holland (P)2023 Tantor

Like the Antebellum South but set in space

Cecelia Holland is an author mostly of historical fiction and, in this book, brings that knowledge and perspective to space opera.

Most fiction has a classical theme that asks, and then investigates, a moral question. This book is about a lot of things. It's about slavery, love, war, abusive relationships, family connections, toxic masculinity, stoicism, feminism, racism, power, politics, and anarchy. But those aren't its theme. For a while I thought "hope" was the theme. But then I finished the book... and was forced to admit there's no hope in this story. Sure, the characters carve out moments of happiness out from the corpus of struggle. It's almost too realistic in this way. I think it's a work of fiction but in the style of nonfiction (or maybe historical fiction, a genre I'm not familiar with). Instead of a classical theme we simply get a picture of the world. The picture of the world in this book is grandiose and full of imagination.

One of the best sci fi books ever written. Have read this ten times at least.

Read this when I was 15 yrs old in 1976. Became one of my life long obsessions. This one and Dune. Now at 65 I got to hear it in audio format. Wow!! Narrator does a very good job. Excellent world building. Very interesting characters. Not sure I’ve ever liked Paula. We have very little in common and her decisions are not what I would make. I’ve rewritten this book in my head a bunch of different ways which I’ve never done with any other book. Fifty years and I’m still obsessed. Wish author would write a sequel. It needs one!! You don’t want this story to end!!