Master Of None
N. Lee Wood
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2004 Aspect Books
ISBN: 0446693049

On a world ruled by women an interstellar male botanist learns how to survive.

Nathan Crewe's smash-&-grab mission to steal a rare plant from the wilderness of planet Vanar, is betrayed & he is captured. Now his sense of self is all he has left, & that's under siege in this strictly matriarchal world.

Marooned, impoverished, & friendless Nathan is imprisoned by a society he can barely understand. After a member of an influential family, who controls the Worms through which all interstellar commerce is transported, takes an interest in him, he slowly adapts to their culture, & discovers an ancient malice buried deep in the history of the planet & its people, threatening him & everyone he has come to care for. Then he learns that his arrival on Vanar was anything but accidental...

Master of None is a tale of role reversals. Imagine what life might be like if you were male & you'd landed in a nation where your gender is not only despised, it is proscribed: from the way you look, what you eat, where you go, how you walk & talk. N. Lee Wood has created such a world & we watch as Nathan must learn his place in the complicated scheme of things, or meet a fate worse than death.

Underneath (literally) this seemingly perfect female-friendly society something is brewing & Nathan's skill in botany turns out to be not only the reason why he was enticed to Vanar, it is also his purpose for being there ... if he can make anyone listen to him. & that's a problem in a society which distrusts & discounts anything males have to say.

Master of None is a space-cum-soap opera, heavy on the socio-economics, rivalries between womanly tribes with complex social structures & a premise reminiscent of Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness, Sheri S. Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country, & Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. It is all about the relationships & taboos of a woman's world, complete with its own language. As a Stranger in a Strange Land Nathan succeeds, rather better than I did, although it is an absorbing tale of conflict resolution.

More from N. Lee Wood:
Bloodrights
Faraday's Orphans
Looking for the Mahdi
(08/29/04)

Rebecca