This 1969 novel is a parable about sex, rationality, and free will, set in a story about exobiological research.

As a piece of technological and political prognostication, the book is full of obvious and somewhat comical defects. For instance, typewriters and carbon copies are vital to the academic industry of the 2200s. Audio recording is all done on tape, of course. Interstellar travel is startlingly convenient, and its basis goes largely unexplained. Space exploration involves serious competition between the United States and Russia. But these are really incidentals to the story being told.

Much of the first part of the book is a farce on bureaucracy and office politics. Dr. Freda Caron is a beautiful and ambitious young scientist with an aversion to sensuality, whose dilemmas at a California research facility are centered on her discoveries about a species of singing extraterrestrial tulip. A central narrative theme of conscious/unconscious compensation is extended into the social realm: in addition to a thriving and vital underground press, there is "underground science," anonymous rumors contain critical information, etc. The characters are distinctive, and the dialogue is often very witty, and full of curious intellectual allusions.

But, readers like me will want to know, does this book live up to its jacket copy promising "a brilliantly bizarre novel of outer space sensuality"? Somewhat surprisingly, it does, although not until the last section. As a resolution of tensions that build through the first ten chapters, Dr. Caron finally goes through a series of initiatory ordeals, ultimately with intimations of apotheosis. The sex that does take place in the story is not very explicit -- at least, the sex between humans. But I found my prurient and philosophical appetites both satisfied by the final chapters.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1343991.html

This is the book which begins by describing its heroine as 'blond [rather than blonde] and ovately willowy'. I guess I am convinced that she is thin with wide, childbearing hips, but it is possible to imagine a more comprehensible description.

Anyway, Freda Caron is a botanist working on some strange flowers from a newly discovered planet. That's basically the plot. Boyd appears to be trying to say deep things about sexuality and sexual politics, and the nature of humanity, but it really doesn't work. I was surprised to discover that the book dates from as late as 1969; it feels of an earlier 60s vintage. The ending is particularly silly. ( )