Take Daybreak on a Different Mountain (1984), Greenland's first novel. In this, he paints a vivid picture of a society in decay. Much like the Romans, the inhabitants of Thryn have built a wall around themselves, to shut out the world, or perhaps to keep it in, while they await their god, Gomath, who will return to perfect the city. Dubilier and Lupio defy the laws of the city and flee into the wilderness, living and travelling with the tribes, the so-called barbarians. Yet who is the more barbaric: the citizens of Thryn who lift not a finger to help themselves, or the tribes who have evolved a way to survive without the dubious benefits of life in the city? Dubilier and Lupio bring back a new, more complete vision of living and the groups are reconciled.
In the world portrayed in The Hour of the Thin Ox and Other Voices (1988) matters are far less clear-cut. A string of small Balkan-type states view one another with suspicion and their rulers find themselves caught up in an endless round of diplomacy, with alliances constantly made and broken. Fortunes are won and lost according to the signatures on the treaty and the world is in a state of political flux. Everyone seems to have their own solution but none of them will work together to achieve a lasting peace; Greenland embodies this in the exploits of Jillian Curram, instigator of a suicide mission to protect a group of people who are quite capable of taking care of themselves, thank you very much, not because they mean anything to her but because through this she can take her own revenge on the invaders who destroyed her livelihood.
Other Voices shows the flip side of this picture. While Bryland fights for its freedom, Luscany has been conquered and Princess Netta lives ceremonially on show, a move calculated by her Eschalan captors to reassure the populace. Again, intrigue flourishes and all it takes is one brief moment of anger for the peace to be shattered. Unlike Jillian Curram, however, Netta eschews the volatility of the heart for a more considered approach in her fight to regain her kingdom, although even she is drawn eventually into armed resistance.
Greenland's first three books ostensibly explored the eternal cycles which govern every society: peace and violence, dissatisfaction and contentment, but it also became noticeable that his female characters were gradually assuming control of his work. Some, like Jill Curram, fulfiled that age-old male stereotype, of the woman who acts first and then thinks, while others, like Netta, weigh the consequences of every move. We should perhaps have been warned...
But nothing prepared the world for Take Back Plenty which sprang joyously onto the SF scene in 1990. The cover proclaimed it a space extravaganza, and many readers felt this supported a trend towards literate space opera initiated by Iain Banks' Culture novels. Others enthusiastically praised Tabitha Jute, Plenty's protagonist, just your average spacer trying to make a living, and as it happened, female, and by virtue of that, a feminist statement. Too frequently, novels about women in space are overtly that but Tabitha's gender was entirely irrelevant in the context of the story, if of overwhelming importance to readers who were tired of seeing women portrayed either as screaming bimbos or as feminist stereotypes. In Greenland's future, women were just getting on with their work.
And yet the familiar concerns are also still there. Greenland's universe is inhabited by a range of alien species, each competing to take control, echoing the inter-state warfare of his earlier novels and indirectly posing the same questions as Daybreak. Who has the right answer? Much of Plenty is concerned with maintaining the status quo which, however dubious, is at least workable. The emphasis though is on plot rather than philosophy, with the cultural concerns moving into the background.
Instead we become involved with Marco, leader of a highly unorthodox cabaret troupe, who promises Tabitha the wherewithal to repair her beloved ship, the Alice Liddell, if she'll only take him to Plenty. It's not that Marco is a liar, you understand, just that "reality can be a little uncompromising sometimes" and by embroiling Tabitha in a complex web of lies, Marco plunges them all into a danger far greater than anyone can imagine.
But if Tabitha Jute is struggling to keep control of her life, Sophie Farthing, heroine of Harm's Way (1993) has entirely lost control of hers. Harm's Way might best be described as a Victorian melodrama with SF overtones. The formal language and recognition of the Dear Reader's presence sends us back to a world perhaps more familiar to readers of the Brontës.
Sophie is the classic orphan girl in jeopardy, the rich heiress born out of wedlock, the disgraced child doomed to make her own way in the world, the naive ray of sunshine who improves the lives of those around her. She is, as she notes, "in harm's way" as though Fate is working against her while she is a cork bobbing in the Flux. All is, of course, resolved in the usual appropriately melodramatic fashion but once again the familiar concerns lie under the surface, all the poignantly given the quasi-Victorian setting and the low status of women, who are forbidden to be Pilots in a world dominated by space travel and the constant to-ing and fro-ing of alien visitors.
"My dream is a big one" says Dubilier in Daybreak. "It's far ahead, calling me; and at the same time it's behind me, pushing me forward! I can't be satisfied with small dreams." The dream Colin Greenland offers is confusing but all dreams are confusing; it's in their nature. It's a dream in which women participate equally in a genre that has been traditionally the preserve of men, in which humans and aliens will mix unremarked, but equally it's a dream in which baser natures will break through from time to time, where the urge to colonise and appropriate will surface time and again, as if to prove that reality is indeed uncompromising.
- Maureen Kincaid Speller