The Wine of Violence by James Morrow
"The Wine of Violence" is a science fiction narrative centered on an interplanetary expedition that becomes stranded on Carlotta, a long-isolated world previously colonized by humans. The story follows the four-member crew as they encounter violent desert dwellers known as neurovores, alongside the unique culture of the Quetzalians, who inhabit a mysterious walled city. This civilization practices a pacifist lifestyle governed by a religion called Zolmec, which integrates their rituals with a moat filled with noctus—a substance that absorbs and manifests aggression in dream-like experiences.
As the expedition members navigate the challenges of survival, two of them—Felix Lostwax and Burne Newman—find themselves at odds over how to deal with the neurovores. Newman seeks to confront and defeat the neurovores, while Lostwax becomes enamored with the Quetzalian way of life. As the tension escalates, Lostwax makes a fateful decision to inject his lover, Tez Yon, with noctus, inadvertently unleashing a cycle of violence. The narrative explores themes of aggression, resistance, and the consequences of violence within a society striving for peace. Ultimately, Lostwax's journey leads him to a place of reflection and penance, highlighting the complexities of human nature and the struggle between pacifism and aggression.
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Subject Terms
The Wine of Violence
First published: 1981
Type of work: Novel
Type of plot: Science fiction—cultural exploration
Time of work: Several centuries in the future
Locale: Carlotta, a world in the asteroid belt of a distant solar system
The Plot
An interplanetary scientific expedition returning to Nearth (New Earth) is drawn off course and lands on Carlotta, a “lost world” colonized in the distant past but long isolated from contact with other outposts of human civilization. One of the expedition’s four members is soon captured and killed by savage desert dwellers; the others, driven away from their ship, discover a strange walled city whose moat is composed of a mysterious organic fluid. Having bored into the wall, entomologist Felix Lostwax experiences what seems to him to be an uncomfortably realistic dream.
The castaways’ first contact with the city dwellers is interrupted by another attack by the savages, who are identified as neurovores, or brain eaters. The two injured survivors of this second assault, Lostwax and Burne Newman, are taken into the city. While recovering in a hospital, Lostwax is told that all machinery is proscribed within the city-state of Quetzalia, whose inhabitants follow a godless religion called Zolmec. The heart of this religion and the locus of its rituals is a temple integrated into the fabric of the wall. The moat surrounding the wall is composed of noctus, a distillate of pure hatred that soaks up the aggressive impulses of the Quetzalians, giving expression to these impulses as cathartic “dreams” that are acted out in the temple’s “chapels.” Most of this is explained to Lostwax by the surgeon Tez Yon, who saves his life and with whom he subsequently falls in love.
Lostwax finds the pacifist society of the Quetzalians amenable, but Newman cannot wait to escape from it. Newman realizes that unless he can raise an army to destroy the neurovores, he will never get back to his ship or to Nearth. Most Quetzalians, having no wish to be rediscovered by their unpacifist neighbors, would rather he did not succeed in his mission, but they cannot stop the experiments by which Newman determines that injections of noctus can restore all of its dissolved aggressions to their natural site. He raises and trains an army of volunteers whom he eventually leads to a hard-won victory against the neurovores.
Tez Yon agrees to accompany Lostwax back to Nearth, so that Lostwax can deliver the prized specimen of Cortexclavius (the corkscrew beetle) whose discovery was the expedition’s main achievement. Lostwax fears that Tez Yon will be helpless on Nearth unless she is capable of aggression, and he secretly injects her with noctus. Unfortunately, she also injects herself and is driven by the double dose to embark on a career of murder within Quetzalia, a career only Lostwax can bring to an end. He hopes that he can do so without killing her, but she proves to be beyond salvation. Lostwax returns to Nearth with Newman but eventually returns to Carlotta as a chastened and penitent follower of Zolmec.