The Maze Game

by Diana Slattery
Deep Listening Publications, Kingston, NY, 2003
486 pp. Paper, $10.95
ISBN: 1-889471-10-0.

Reviewed by Dene Grigar
Texas Woman’s University

dgrigar@twu.edu

"What does it mean to move through a maze of language?" (Glide: An Interactive Exploration of Visual Language). This question lies at the center of Diana Slattery’s The Maze Game, the epic tale and first installment of a trilogy about four companions growing up in a future civilization whose members attain immortality. These four belong to an elite group of young dancers who retain their mortality and dedicate their lives to entertaining the immortals in a game enacted as a dance on a maze, an act that ultimately results in their deaths. The novel––and its accompanying electronic work, The Glide Website, which hosts the Prologue and Chapter One of the novel as well as "descriptions of the language, and interactive playspaces for exploring Glide language" ("The Glide Project")––explores the notion of a visual language, one that Slattery sees as a natural outgrowth of evolutionary intellectual progress in humankind.

It is difficult to talk solely about the book, so closely knitted are its other components. But the length of the novel and the complexity of the world it presents make it impossible to address the entire project Slattery undertakes in this 750-word review. This reviewer encourages those interested in the conceptual framework underpinning the novel to visit "The Glide Project" site (http://www.academy.rpi.edu/glide/). For those who simply want to read a brilliant piece of science fiction, the book is most satisfying on its own. It fully envisions a world whose inhabitants embody their own language, philosophies, and ideologies, yet one carefully crafted by the author so that readers are easily drawn into it and need little to comprehend it. The "Glossary," list of "Characters," and "Glide Glyphs Core Meanings" provided at the beginning of the novel aid readers interested in developing a deeper appreciation of the book but are not necessary for enjoying it.

"The Prologue," however, is important to one’s understanding the plot. From it, we learn about how immortality was attained (We mapped the human genome and discovered a way to stave off death through the "Immunity Virus"), the being known as Oh-T’bee Outmind who emerged as the synthesis of all human consciousness and acts as the provider of all human needs, the Maze Game that evolved (from the harvesting of a very potent hallucinogen that grew on lilies) in response to such caretaking by Oh-T’bee Outmind, the development of the Glide language born from the movement made when the slaves called "Glides" harvested the lilies, and finally the creation of the cult surrounding the "Dance of Death" that provided the entertainment for the immortals. As we learn in the book, "The Maze Game that became the unifying force of Lifer civilization emerged from the bottom muck of a vast lily pond" (17).

While the Prologue takes us from the present time to 2000 into the future, the novel focuses on that moment in the Glide history when "cracks in the vast and complex structure of the Maze Game began to appear" (3).

Holding all of these ideas together in The Maze Game is the theme of love. When we meet the four companions––Daede, the Swash Dancer; T’Ling, the Glide Dancer; Angle, the Chrome Dancer; and MyrrhMyrrh, the Bod Dance––they are children studying the dance under the tutelage of the great dancemaster Wallenda. In their youthful stage, they pair off into lovers and develop deep friendships with one other, and it is these relationships––both eros and agape in nature–– that are challenged and provoked in the game the four strive to play as adults for the immortals. In this way, the Maze Game becomes a metaphor for the torturous journeys we all take as humans as we risk ourselves on the pyres of love and the edges of loyalty.

It comes to no surprise that because we follow the four through their training and their shifting love affairs and loyalties, we become immersed in the tension leading up to their Dance. Like us, they are mortal and their deaths, inevitable. What is meant to be different between them and us is that they turn their deaths into art, an ultimate sublime act that renders them heroes in the eyes of their fans. But, of course, Slattery surprises us here. Without giving away the story, the second major theme that emerges in this novel about Death Dancers is, ironically, the impetus toward life and living. And as such the novel ends with a door open to the next installment.

While fans of science fiction will be fascinated by Slattery’s vision of the future, others will find her exploration of language and life important in the conversation about what it means to be human, particularly as we engineer our bodies into posthuman states.