Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson

Prehistoric life was horny and boring

California author Kim Stanley Robinson is known for his science-fiction visions of the future, but his 2013 novel Shaman is set in prehistoric times. During the Ice Age, a young man named Loon reluctantly undergoes training to become his tribe’s shaman. Like many a teenager coming of age, he feels forced into a future he didn’t choose. The only aspect of the job that really interests him is cave painting. The story takes place at a time when homo sapiens, such as Loon and his people, coexisted with Neanderthals, referred to here as “the Old Ones,” so maybe around 45,000 years ago. Though no place names are stated, geographical features indicate that the story takes place in Europe.

Shaman is science fiction only in the sense that it is based on archaeological and anthropological science. The book contains no elements of fantasy or speculative fiction, with the exception of Robinson’s ridiculous choice of a supernatural narrator. For the most part, Robinson aims for a realistic depiction of prehistoric man. In fact, his take on Ice Age living is so realistic that, but for the fact that the characters have names, more often than not Shaman reads very much like a textbook: This is the way early man hunted and preserved their food. This is the way they executed cave paintings. This is how they undertook their seasonal migrations. This is the way they made snowshoes. The characters perform these actions for the reader as if they were mannequins in a natural history museum diorama. If I want to know about how ancient man lived, I would rather read an actual textbook, such as Handbook to Life in Prehistoric Europe by Jane McIntosh. Fiction, on the other hand, should offer drama, characterization, and plot, all of which are scanty qualities in Shaman.

Nothing resembling a plot shows up until halfway through the book, at which point some characters travel to distant lands, where we get another textbook on another tribe’s way of living. The fictional content of the book is sparse and rather dull. There is a chase scene, for example, that lasts eight chapters, and it’s largely just descriptions of snow and ice. I like the fact that Robinson didn’t go in for soap-opera melodrama or new-age mysticism like The Clan of the Cave Bear, but he should have done more to make this story interesting. He wants to convince us that stone-age humans were people too, but then he delivers very little conflict between the shallowly drawn characters as they act out some questionably Edenic caveman fantasy camp.

Something else Robinson wants you to know about prehistoric people is that apparently they were obsessed with genitalia and bodily functions. I don’t know why it is that when authors these days write about the ancient world, they feel compelled to load their prose with bodily fluids of the reproductive and digestive systems, but Robinson is only one of many who have gone that route in recent years. Is that supposed to be cutting-edge realism? Prehistoric communities probably had more open attitudes about sex and sanitation than we do, but I also think they had other things to think about, like survival.

Robinson is so concerned with describing everything in minute detail that there is little room left for a story, and what there is moves at a glacial pace. As a result, reading Shaman feels like a very long haul. The time period and subject matter would seem to offer some interesting narrative possibilities, so it’s hard to understand why this book turned out to be so boring.
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