Terracentrism

I've been trying to decide whether to buy Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, an anthology in tribute to the late Octavia Butler edited by Walida Amarisha and adrienne maree brown, published by AK Press in 2015.  I like Butler's work, and I've seen positive remarks about this collection lately.  So I took a look at the preview on Amazon.

In the foreword, Sheree Renee Thomas writes,

Octavia E. Butler wrote in her novel Parable of the Sower that our "destiny is to take root among the stars." The activist [Martin Luther King Jr.] and the artist ... embraced a shared dream for the future.  Their work is linked by faith and a fusion of spiritual teachings and social consciousness, a futuristic social gospel.  In its essence, social justice work, which King embodied and Butler expressed so skillfully in her novels and stories, is about love -- a love that has the best hopes and wishes for humanity at heart.

I feel like a Scrooge picking on a passage so full of warm fuzzy sentiments, but Thomas seems not to have read Butler's work, the brief quotation notwithstanding.  I know that can't be true, since Thomas is the editor of an important anthology of science fiction "from the African diaspora," Dark Matter; but that means she's deliberately misreading and misrepresenting Butler.  What she says may well be true of Butler the person, but Butler's work, while not devoid of hope or love, is anti-utopian and harshly pessimistic.  (The Patternmaster series is often as violent as Mortal Kombat.) That's particularly true of her late works Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. which are set in a near future that resembles the worst of the world we know.  Even when Butler writes about love, it's ambivalent, as in her short story "Bloodchild," which she insisted was a love story.  It's about human refugees on another planet, who must maintain a symbiotic relationship with the people there, which involves implanting the latter's eggs/larvae to gestate in the earthlings' bodies.  It's also "my pregnant man story," Butler added, "a dramatic story of a man becoming pregnant as an act of love."  Butler's love stories are extremely anti-romantic, exploring the prices we pay for binding ourselves to others and them to us -- which is a good thing, but far from Thomas's huggyface-kissybear tone.

In the Parable books, it seems to me, Butler allowed herself some romanticism.  She wanted to write several more books in the series, but was unable to work out how to do it.  The projected third novel, Parable of the Trickster, was to be set on an another planet that people from the earth had colonized:

an alien world where [the protagonist] and most of her fellow Earthseed colonists are saddened to discover they wish they’d never left Earth in the first place. The world — called “Bow” — is gray and dank, and utterly miserable; it takes its name from the only splash of color the planet has to offer, its rare, naturally occurring rainbows. They have no way to return to Earth, or to even to contact it; all they have is what little they’ve brought with them, which for most (but not all) of them is a strong belief in the wisdom of the teachings of Earthseed. Some are terrified; many are bored; nearly all are deeply unhappy. Her personal notes frame this in biological terms. From her notes to herself: “Think of our homesickness as a phantom-limb pain — a somehow neurologically incomplete amputation. Think of problems with the new world as graft-versus-host disease — a mutual attempt at rejection.”

One of the many things I disliked about the published Parables was the protagonist Lauren Olamina's affirmational verses: "the poetry that drives the Earthseed religion actually mirrors the style of the daily affirmations, self-help sloganeering, and even self-hypnosis techniques Butler used to keep herself focused and on-task."  I'm not a fan of affirmations, and the one Sheree Thomas quoted is particularly noxious.  It's at odds with Butler's general pessimism about humanity, for one thing: she believed that what she thought of as our innate tendency toward "hierarchy" would probably be the trait that dooms us.  But as a lifelong sf fan, she apparently bought into the delusional fantasy of interstellar colonization as human "destiny."  If science teaches us not to see ourselves as the center of the universe, not the crown of creation, then we ought to recognize that we are already rooted among the stars.  The earth is among the stars, a miniscule planet circling a nondescript star in one galaxy among billions in the universe, and we human beings are rooted here.  Where else would we be?

The More It Changes the More It Stays the Same, Latest Iteration

I've had some interesting discussions with people about the Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game, which has now received several Oscar nominations.  One such discussion was with a straight friend who loved it because, he said, it was so refreshing to see a positive depiction of a computer nerd in a mainstream movie.  I think that's as questionable as the movie's depiction of a gay man, but I suppose he liked it for the same reason many people have liked its depiction of Turing as a socially clueless yet fearful closet case: because they agree that the only way you can win sympathy (or an Oscar) for Turing, as a queer or as a computer geek, is to make him hopelessly miserable and then put him out of his misery.

I would think it even more tragic if Turing had been shown as he apparently was: a gay mathematician who, despite his social awkwardness, could work with others, had friends, was unconflicted about his sexuality, and had a reasonably satisfying sex life -- but was brought down by the bigoted laws of his time and place. To show Turing in this way would take some imagination and creativity; treating him as The Imitation Game does takes the easiest possible way out, by falling back on every toxic stereotype about nerds and queers.

When I explained this, my friend replied that he thought the film "dealt with his sexuality reasonably well," and "didn't make a 'big deal' out of it" and "it was treated as a secondary struggle for him."  He conceded that "If one does a 'queer reading' of the film, I'm sure there are some problems," but he himself "found the character captivating and intriguing and the central tension of his character played well into the film's overall thematic purpose." I agree with that last point, since I think The Imitation Game's "overall thematic purpose" was to win sympathy for Turing by the use of homophobic stereotypes.  (This is not to say that any of the filmmakers were personally homophobic -- no doubt some of their best friends are homosexuals -- but that the way Turing was depicted used homophobic cliches that have long been part of popular culture.)

I think only a homophobic straight person could watch The Imitation Game and perceive it as not making a big deal out of Turing's homosexuality.  Indeed, it makes it into a crucial plot point, when the Soviet spy (whom the real Turing probably never met, let alone worked with closely) blackmails him into keeping silent by threatening to expose his homosexuality.  (Ironically, Turing's superiors certainly knew that he was queer, just as they knew about the presence of a Soviet spy at Bletchley and -- as someone tells the movie Turing -- chose what information he'd pass along to Stalin.  They would have investigated him quite thoroughly before admitting him to the team.)  As for "queer reading," my reading is structurally queer since I'm queer, but it doesn't use any of the concepts or tools of queer theory.  Of course it never occurred to my friend that his "straight reading" brought no agenda to his understanding of the film or of Turing as "struggling" with his homosexuality.

So I wasn't all that surprised when the authors of a new Young Adult science-fiction novel with non-heterosexual, non-white protagonists mentioned (in a "big idea" post at John Scalzi's blog) that "an agent offered to represent it on the condition that we make one of the protagonists straight or else remove his romance and all references to his sexual orientation."  They refused, and eventually found a home for the book at Viking Penguin.  I'm still a bit annoyed by the authors' repeated insistence that writing a story with such characters is "risky" -- there's not enough fiction out there with non-heterosexual characters of color, but there's still quite a lot of it, and "risky" has all kinds of connotations that I think go beyond the chance that an agent won't represent your work because of its content.

The writers also wrote a piece about their experience that was posted on a Publishers Weekly blog, inviting comments from writers with similar experiences, and got a lot of traffic.  (Though the writers didn't name the agency involved, it identified itself and responded, denying the writer's accusation.)  One author wrote that per "editor went through and deleted all gay references between my copyedits and the first pass pages without bothering to tell me.  I pitched a fit and my agent backed me up. The gay character stayed in the novel, as written."  Another commenter declared the need for fiction about Christian gay characters who struggle with their sexuality and ultimately "leave the lifestyle/choose to go on with their lives from a Christian standpoint."  Personally I think it would be interesting to read such a story -- it would be fantasy, of course, but we're talking about fantasy here -- and I wonder why Christian publishers haven't given us some examples already.  I'd even recommend the acquisition of such a book to my public library, and would welcome the change to discuss it here.

Despite the apparent decline in the US and Europe of homophobia and antigay bigotry, to say nothing of structural/systemic heterosexual supremacy, they're still with us.  It's good to be reminded, even if it's frustrating.

Me and the Boys

Among the writers collected in Daughters of Earth is Gwyneth Jones, and the paper following her story made reference to Deconstructing the Starships: Science, Fiction and Reality (Liverpool, 1999), a collection of Jones's critical writings.  Some of the quotations interested me, so I checked the book out from the university library and gobbled it down.  It's a lot of fun, written with little jargon, and has a lot of intriguing insights into writing, reading, and gender.  I just ordered my own copy (autographed, according to the online seller).

I may have more to say about her later, but for now I want to quote what Jones wrote about "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill Side," the James Tiptree Jr. story included in Daughters of Earth.  In a review of Sarah LeFanu's study of feminist sf, In the Chinks of the World Machine (Women's Press, 1988), Jones wrote:

Alice Sheldon, otherwise known as James Tiptree Jnr [sic], is a key icon in this [Le Fanu’s] study, the woman who fooled the sf establishment with her straightfaced presentation of male stereotypes – and was bitterly entertained, it is clear, when her victims responded with ecstatic little cries of recognition.  But while Alice Sheldon the feminist woman was surviving in her disguise – in the chinks of her male persona – Sheldon/Tiptree the writer achieved, for a while, megastar status in the sf establishment: and this is the paradox of feminist sf.  The successful women writers in sf are few, and feminism is certainly marginal; but the success, the stature and the influence of those few is about of all proportion to their numbers [123-4].

Specifically on "And I Awoke and Found Me Here..." she remarked in a review of another anthology where it appeared:

Almost any story by James Tiptree Jnr [sic] would add something to an anthology called Alien Sex.  The one Ms. Datlow has chosen, “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hillside…” is precisely about the alien sex fiend as a human fiction.  The aliens are here, and they aren’t interested.  Frankly, they don’t give a damn.

“And I Awoke…” is a story written by a woman who was pretending – for a whole cocktail of reasons – to be a man.  It foregrounds the plight of the male – cynically, satirically, and maybe just as a marketing ploy [144].

I think Jones would agree with me that the man who holds the stage in the story is an unreliable narrator.  It's comforting to find that I'm not the only person who's noticed that.

One more quotation from Jones, on another subject, reviewing Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash:

It has been said that popular taste cannot handle the idea of there being more than two viewpoints on any subject.  Anything more complicated than bad guys vs. good guys and you lose the mass market.  And then there’s the American liberal, who cannot handle one viewpoint.  Mr Stephenson, who I feel certain would sign himself a liberal, refuses to be labelled and docketed, nobly declines to take sides in any debate whatsoever … [151].

Such lovely snark.  But she's good on a number of things: I enjoyed very much her discussion of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis as children's authors, and also what she has to say about sex/gender and why everyone gets confused about it/them.  I'll probably be referring to her again as I wrote more about that latter topic.

In the Future Nobody Will Be Queer! -- Except Me

I'm reading Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century (Wesleyan, 2006), edited by Justine Larbalestier, a collection of sf stories by women that support feminist readings, paired with critical essays on each one.  A nice idea: the essays provide background, though as one would expect they're uneven.  I finished the book last night, and want to single out "The Evening and the Morning and the Night" by Octavia Butler, which I think is not just one of the great science fiction stories, it's one of the great stories period.  (And wow: it's available online, but also in several other collections, including Butler's Bloodchild and Other Stories [Seven Stories Press, 2005].)

But what I want to write about is another story in the collection, James Tiptree Jr.'s "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill Side", originally published in 1972, and the accompanying paper about it by Wendy Pearson.  (The story is also, conveniently, available online.)  I don't believe I've ever read this story before, though I probably have a copy of it in one of Tiptree's collections.  It's typical of Tiptree's tough-guy mode ... but first I should probably provide some background for those who don't know.  James Tiptree Jr. emerged as a rapidly rising star in science fiction during the late 1960s.  He kept to himself, though he corresponded with fans and other sf writers, and rationed personal information that made fanboys (of various ages) swoon.  As I've written about him before:

It was known that he had worked for the US Army's photointelligence unit in World War II, had later joined the CIA, but returned to school for a doctorate in experimental psychology. Oh, Mary, how butch! It was like James Bond had begun writing science fiction. On the other hand, Tiptree wrote with sensitive attention about women, so some fans speculated that he might be female ... And of course, it soon emerged that Tiptree was a 61-year-old woman named Alice Bradley Sheldon.

Sheldon also wrote some stories under different pseudonyms, notably "Raccoona Sheldon."  But it was the Tiptree stories, with their generally macho male narrators, that won the attention and acclaim.  "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill Side" is one of these.  The viewpoint character in this case is a young Australian reporter whom an older man tries to talk out of his fascination with "aliens," extraterrestrials from other star systems who are visiting or resident on the earth.  The older man warns the reporter, who clearly isn't paying much attention, that many humans -- including the narrator himself -- find aliens erotically fascinating, with outcomes destructive to mind, body, and soul.  He tells of one young woman who'd "been making it with the two Sirians, y'know.  The males do it in pairs.  Said to be the total sexual thing for a woman, if she can stand the damage from those beaks.  I wouldn't know.  She talked to me a couple of times after they finished with her.  No use for men whatever" (165).  A couple of pages later we meet the older man's wife, who seems to be that woman, "limping slightly", "one of her shoulders was grotesquely scarred" (167).

But the older man would know about the erotic fascination of aliens:

The first Yveir I saw, I dropped everything and started walking after it like a starving hound, just breathing ... I spent half a cycle's credit sending the creature the wine they call stars' tears. ... Later I found out it was a male.  That made no difference at all [165].

He wants the reporter to sound the alarm to all Earthlings: "Our soul is leaking out.  We're bleeding to death!"

... What I'm trying to tell you, this is a trap.  We've hit the supernormal stimulus.  Man is exogamous -- all our history is one long drive to find and impregnate the stranger.  Or get impregnated by him; it works for women too.  Anything different-colored, different nose, ass, anything, man has to fuck it or die trying.  That's a drive, y'know, it's built-in.  Because it works fine as long as the stranger is human.  For millions of years that kept the genes circulating.  But now we've met aliens we can't screw, and we're about to die trying ... Do you think I can touch my wife?  [166].

But, of course, the reporter isn't interested.  He wants him some aliens too.

Pearson does a good job of situating the story in its time and cultural context, and calls on gender, queer, and post-colonial studies approaches to draw out its meanings.  She addresses, for example, the question of "men's" vs. "women's" writing.  Enough writers had passed for the other sex via pseudonyms that you (or I, anyway) would have thought no one would be surprised by Tiptree, but I guess people never learn.  And despite such lessons, many people of both sexes and various sexual politics believe that men and women write differently.  Pearson writes:

It is up to each reader to decide whether such work is a feminist subversion of the more stereotypical elements associated with masculine writing. Is it proof that male and female styles are, at most, cultural constructs that may not even exist?  Does it suggest that a masculine style of writing does actually exist because Tiptree is able, apparently, to internalize and reproduce it so well -- whether subversively mocking it at the same time, or not? [178]

It's not surprising that people try to assign gender to writing styles.  After all, we do the same to just about everything.  I suppose one can speak of masculine and feminine styles of writing, but they are (like any style of writing) cultural constructs; that seems pretty obvious to me.  (It's largely a matter of definition whether styles or any other cultural constructs "exist," for some version of "exist.")  One could ask whether genres exist, or forms -- does the sonnet actually exist because some poets are able, apparently, to internalize and reproduce the form so well?  The tricky part is whether there is a link between sexed body and gendered "style."  I would say there isn't.

And I'd ask whether every writer's style is all that gendered.  Tiptree's style could be called "masculine" because it's extreme, even a caricature.  I'd guess that most writers' styles aren't so distinctive, so readers and critics gender them by the author's name and by subject matter, which obviously relies on stereotypes that don't hold up most of the time.  But most of the time, nothing happens to upset the applecart.  What would happen, I wonder, if it turned out that all the writings of someone like Virginia Woolf -- a stereotypically feminine writer -- had actually been written by a man? 

The application of postcolonial theory to this story is more interesting to me.  Pearson invokes

the specter of the "Third World woman."  The Third World woman, in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's famous formulation, is the subaltern who cannot speak.  She can only be spoken about or for by others.  The figure of the woman silenced by gender, race, and colonization is a specter that also haunts Tiptree's story ... [178-9].

I'm afraid Pearson has this a bit mixed up.  It has been awhile since I read Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?", but I don't recall that she called Third World women the subaltern who cannot speak.  She did insist on a place for women in Subaltern Studies, the study of history from below, dissecting some of Michel Foucault's writing about India and Indian women and exposing some embarrassing blind spots on his part about race and empire.  She also concluded, rather notoriously, that "The subaltern cannot speak," which upset a lot of Third World students writing from the metropole who apparently hadn't read her with any care.  Her point as I understood it was that the subaltern cannot speak by definition: once the subaltern becomes literate, attends university, and starts to publish, he or she is no longer subaltern.  I remember (and must track down) an interview in which Spivak seemed to confirm my understanding, criticizing academics from the Third World who wanted to see themselves as subaltern despite their considerable privilege.  I've run into some such people myself.

Now, one might ask who is "subaltern" in Tiptree's story.  I presume Pearson wants to nominate the older man's wife, who appears at the end of the story looking sullen as well as scarred, and who doesn't say a word.  Fair enough, though not speaking is not the same thing as not being able to speak.  It's possible to imagine a story in which the wife tells her experiences with aliens.  (Tiptree's most famous story, probably, is "The Women Men Don't See," which does let women speak, and of course feminist sf has given voice to many women, writers and their characters.)  But one could just as well nominate the aliens in "And I Awoke and Found Me Here": we hear one human male's side of the story, but not theirs.  Pearson seems not to consider the idea that the older man is what critics call an "unreliable narrator," that what he tells the reporter is not the whole truth.  Pearson seems to take his jeremiad at face value, which is like taking the word of the macho male narrator of "The Women Men Don't See" as gospel.

Pearson also does a good discussion of "sex tourism," but she's not clear on who the sexual tourists are in Tiptree's story.  Ordinarily, in postcolonial discourse, the white male is the sexual tourist who travels to poorer countries to exploit non-white sex workers for his depraved sensual pleasure -- although in fact Japanese men have long been major players in East Asian sex tourism, and I'd bet that Chinese businessmen are giving them a run for their money nowadays.  In "And I Awoke and Found Me Here," the older man sends mixed messages about the aliens, who supposedly are not at all attracted to or interested in copulating with humans, but who often do it anyway, or allow themselves to be paid by adoring, lust-crazed groupies. We don't learn anything about their motives. Is it the aliens who are the sex tourists here, or is it the humans who adore them, visit their planets, and try to capture their interest?  The older man sees the human erotic obsession with aliens as a danger to human survival, not through the aliens' doing but by biological (evolutionary?) accident.  He talks as though all human beings have succumbed to this obsession, but that seems unlikely a priori, just because human beings are not all alike and do not respond equally to the same erotic stimuli -- why would all of us want to be sex toys for the Sirians?  I suspect that like anyone who says "Everybody else is doing it", our informant is overgeneralizing wildly.

Further, there have always been men who blamed their erotic obsessions on women (or on boys): the heartless seductress who leads them on and delights in their abjection and destruction.  If they are attracted to someone, it is because she (or he) is sending out a tractor beam: they themselves have no agency, no will.  The title of Tiptree's story comes from a canonical example of this trope, Keats' ballad "La Belle Dame sans Merci": a knight is seduced by a faery lady and then dumped, after which he mopes on a hillside, "alone and palely loitering".  Given some less-than-impressed remarks about her male colleagues and critiques which Pearson quotes from Alice Sheldon, I doubt the author meant the reader to take the man's complaint totally at face value.

What conclusion Sheldon meant us to draw, however, I don't know.  I was reminded of another of Sheldon's stories, written under the "Raccoona Sheldon" name rather than Tiptree's, "The Screwfly Solution."  In that story, aliens seeking to wipe out humanity, perhaps to clear the planet for colonization by themselves, introduce a mutation that causes men to kill any and all women they encounter.  Is "And I Awoke and Found Me Here" a variation on that story?  Are the aliens responsible for the self-destructive behavior of their groupies?  They don't seem to be.  Another possibility is that Tiptree's story is simply a fable about evolution and the chance factors that can extinguish a species.  If I believe the informant's diagnosis, it's just accident that human desire for the stranger has led them to this cul-de-sac; but as I indicated, it's not plausible, since it's unlikely that all humans would succumb to the alien's charms.  Those humans who, for whatever reason, didn't want to copulate with aliens would continue the species.  It could also be a turnabout story in which the effects of trade and travel, from which Europeans have often benefited at the expense of other cultures, turn back on us.  If so, it's a rather dull one, but that may just be me.  Sheldon would have known better than to see imperialism and colonialism as purely European practices.  I had the impression that "And I Awoke and Found Me Here" is basically a gross-out tale, calculated to inflame masculine paranoia, and I wasn't grossed out.

Taking Jobs Away from Tape and Giving Them to Microchips

I just read Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano, originally published in 1952, because David F. Noble had recommended it strongly in his Forces of Production.  I've read several of Vonnegut's books over the years, and am still a fan of Slaughterhouse-Five, but I've always been ambivalent about most of his work.  Usually I enjoy it well enough as I'm reading it, and say to myself, Hey, I should read more of his books -- but as soon as I've finished a book I move on to other writers I like better.  Still, I have by now read most of his novels published through the 1980s or so.  Mother Night is his only other early book I still need to read; no hurry.

Player Piano was inspired by Vonnegut's time working in public relations for General Electric, when he was disturbed by the effects of automation on workers' jobs, whether they were rendered unemployed or merely de-skilled.  It's the story of Paul Proteus, the son of an industrialist, who is rising through the hierarchy as an engineer in a company based on General Electric.  It takes place in an unspecified period in 1952's future, when the United States has been though widespread domestic uprisings which led to centralized industrial planning, the sorting of all citizens according to aptitude and intelligence tests graded by "the machines," with some chosen for college training to join the elites, and most shuffled into the military to keep order.  The city of Ilium, where the novel is set, is divided by a bridge into the factory sector, and the other side where the lower orders stumble along.  (I'm not clear where the elites live.  It's apparently on a different side of the bridge, but doesn't seem to be the same as the proles' sector.)   Unemployment is high, but the unemployed get free goods, food, medical care and education (within the limits of their tested ability).  Not too surprisingly, this doesn't compensate for their having been cast off as useless, and there's considerable unrest among them.  It's the army's job to come in and suppress any rebelliousness.  Paul Proteus is uncomfortable in his elite place; he's sympathetic to workmen, machinists, and other (male) workers displaced by "the machines."  For some reason, he's the guy who's always dispatched across the bridge to get contraband in the bad neighborhood, which brings him into further contact with men he knew as a boy and respected for their ability, but who now can do little but drink, join fraternal organizations, and worry about the future of their sons.

I have mixed feelings about Player Piano.  I may have read it wrong because I was expecting something else, but I'm not sure what I expected.  I agree with Vonnegut's rejection of the myth of inevitable "progress" at the expense of the majority of people; I like his sympathetic pictures of men displaced from work they valued and thought valuable to their society.  But much of the book sits badly with me.  I think Vonnegut sentimentalizes the past, though he also mocks Proteus's brief craze of reading romantic pulp fiction about strong manly men who stand on their own two feet, self-sufficient and independent, and his fantasies about becoming a yeoman farmer on the frontier, with his wife Anita at his side.

But some things rub me really wrong.  Stuff like this (page numbers from the Library of America edition):

The great tradition of the American rifleman survived only symbolically, in volleys fired into the skies over the dead in thousands of military cemeteries [230].

Oh boo hoo hoo: the American rifleman, ethnic cleanser of the plains, was put out of work!  Of course the development of firearms itself also depersonalized war, if that's the word for it: you didn't have to see the whites of your opponent's eyes.  Soldiers no longer slit the enemy's throat up close and personal, or gut them with stabbing weapons.  I recall an article on the US air war in Vietnam, published around 1970, which lamented that Americans weren't any good at person-to-person combat such as biting out an opponent's throat with their teeth, unlike the noble Vietnamese guerrillas.  This is a damned if you do / damned if you don't situation, I realize, but that's because it dodges the issue of whether killing strangers en masse is justifiable in the first place.  I know that Vonnegut was a disillusioned World War II veteran, which he later expressed full-blown in Slaughterhouse-Five; maybe he hadn't sorted out his attitude to war when he wrote Player Piano.

Or again,

That much of a fine old American military tradition, Paul supposed, would always be alive -- send me where the tail is [231].

This line is at least partly sarcastic, I suppose, but there's tail everywhere: soldiers know how to look for it, and American armies have 'traditionally' insisted on sexual service from the women and boys of the countries they invaded.  In anthropologist Laurel Kendall's account of the Life and Hard Times of a Korean Shaman (Hawai'i, 1988), the title informant recalls how she preferred the Communists to the American soldiers during the Korean Civil War (1950-1953), because the former weren't always demanding women like the latter were.  Separate, segregated bars and brothels were maintained in South Korea for black and white soldiers.*  David Ellis writes in his memoir (on my mind because I just read it) about similar arrangements for American soldiers in France.  American soldiers seem to be notorious for this, and it's a worldwide pattern, "a fine old American military tradition" if you will, of building an infrastructure of sexual service (or "comfort") for the troops.  "The tail" is procured for them, no matter where they go.

Speaking of fine old traditions, there's a lot of male anxiety in Player Piano, a familiar theme in 1950s fiction by male authors. Paul's wife Anita is a typical 1950s "bitch goddess," though not a femme fatale.  "Anita had successfully combined the weapons of sex, taste, and an aura of masculine competence," Vonnegut says early in the novel (35).  In the end she turns out to be one of Player Piano's bad guys, though I think Vonnegut was trying to empathize with her somewhat.  We're told that she comes from a low-status family, not bright enough to go to college, so she has to attach herself to a successful elite man in order to have the standard of living she wants.

Which brings up something that probably wouldn't have been noticed by most critics until feminist criticism arose in the 1970s.  The novel implies that women could, in principle, score high on the IQ tests and go to college themselves -- but there are no women in the book who've done so.  The engineers are men, and women are secretaries or wives.  Engineering is still a male-dominated field, to put it gently, as it was in the Fifties, but it seems like a failure of imagination that Vonnegut didn't think to put in a few token women elites.  Probably his editors and publisher would have objected had he done so, but even the Noble Engineer Heinlein was doing better than that in his science fiction in the same period: he took for granted that women were intellectually capable, even if he usually had them quit work when they married and had kids.  In this respect, Vonnegut is more like his fellow technophobe Ray Bradbury.  I don't remember that his women characters became any better in his later work either.  So Player Piano is in this and other respects a rather typical masculinist outcry of its day, against the emasculating effects of modern society, with women seen as collaborators with the System.

The Library of America edition includes in the same volume with Player Piano a later essay of Vonnegut's in which he complains that after the publication of Player Piano he was typecast as a science fiction writer, which really honked him off.

I supposed that I was writing a novel about life, about things, I could not avoid seeing and hearing in Schenectady, a very real town, awkwardly set in the gruesome now. [Except that it’s not; it’s set in a gruesome near future. -- DM] I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled “science fiction” ever since, and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.

The way a person gets into this drawer, apparently, is to notice technology. [Writing about the future helps, too. -- DM] The feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works, just as no gentleman wears a brown suit in the city … And our most impressive critics have commonly been such English majors, and they are squeamish about technology to this very day. So it is natural for them to despise science fiction [781].

Yeah, it's a drag being pigeonholed, but I can't sympathize too far with Vonnegut's soreheadness, even when I remember that the literary scene looked a lot different in 1952.  I recently read Starboard Wine, Samuel R. Delany's second collection of science fiction criticism, originally published in 1984 but reissued by Wesleyan University Press in 2012, and while he didn't have much if anything to say about Vonnegut there, a lot of what he said is relevant to Vonnegut's complaint.  Delany argued that science fiction is in many respects a way of reading, and that if one reads a science fiction story as if it were "mundane fiction", one will be hopelessly confused.

Part of my reaction to Player Piano might have been that I was expecting mundane fiction and got sf instead; it took me a few chapters to figure out what kind of story I was reading.  Not because of technology, but because of its setting in time: it takes place in a recognizably post-WWII America, but how "post" is it?  Contrary to Vonnegut's protestations, he was not writing about the present (except insofar as any writer, including sf and fantasy and historical fiction writers, is writing about the present) and the technology of 1952: the technology he described in Player Piano was several steps beyond what existed when he wrote the book, or now.  (One amusing motif is machines that "talk" to users with pre-recorded tapes: Vonnegut didn't foresee that audiotape would be rendered obsolete by microchips.)  For all that, there's nothing in the story that indicates Vonnegut knew "how a refrigerator works" either.  I don't agree that science fiction involves merely noticing technology: it uses technology in specific ways, ways which Vonnegut uses in Player Piano.  As Delany puts it, "How would the world of the story have to be different from our world in order for this to occur?"

Delany also claimed in Starboard Wine that until about the end of World War II, most science fiction was set in the far future.  After the war, more and more was set in the near future.  In this respect too, Player Piano would be fairly typical science fiction of its time.  No dates are given, but the story clearly takes place some years after 1952, because Vonnegut invented a recent history of upheavals and political changes that would have had to happen after 1952. The story isn't Where We Are in 1952, it's Where We Are Going If Things Don't Change.  Since Vonnegut went on to write more fiction using science fiction conventions, such as The Sirens of Titan and Slaughterhouse-Five and numerous short stories, his objections to having his writings classified as sf seem unreasonable to me.

Player Piano has its share of surprises, especially the ending (which I won't spoil here).  I can see why David F. Noble liked it, and made much of it in Forces of Production.  But it didn't do much for me.

*I first read about this in Katherine H. S. Moon's Sex between Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations (Columbia, 1997), but there's a big literature on the subject.  And here's an interesting recent article which shows that American sailors are still on the trail of "tail" worldwide.

The Power of Critical Thinking

One reason I'm so skeptical when people claim that the Internet has somehow sapped our precious critical fluids, and that people are now more credulous than they used to be is that I'm old enough to remember the days before the Internet.  One famous case is that of the petition allegedly filed with the Federal Communication Commission by the atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair to ban all religious broadcasting from the airwaves, so all faithful Christians should write the FCC right now!!!  As Snopes.com explains if you want the details, this hoax goes back to at least 1975, long before the Internet became accessible to ordinary mortals.  Though the hoax was debunked many times, the FCC received more than 30 million pieces of mail decrying the nonexistent attempt to ban religious broadcasting.  That's thirty million, and all without e-mail or Facebook.  It may well be that the Internet has made it easier for such rumors to spread, but word-of-mouth, photocopying machines, and radio evangelists did quite well without microprocessors and fiber optics, thank you very much.  In the absence of evidence that people are more gullible than they used to be -- which I haven't seen, and I don't know how you'd try to prove the claim -- I think it's fair to presume that people have always been willing to believe absurd things.  The history of religion alone gives plenty of evidence in favor of my opinion, and I'm inclined to cite the frequent and unsubstantiated claim that people are more gullible or more stupid than they used to be as more evidence in itself.

I've just begun reading Helen Merrick's The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms (Aqueduct Press, 2009), which attempts to trace women's participation in the world of science fiction not only through the women who wrote it, but through the women who participated in fandom.  I came across a reference to the book while I was rereading Joanna Russ's The Female Man last month, and so far I'm enjoying it.  Among much else, Merrick recounts the genesis of probably the first women's fanzine, Femizine, in England in the summer of 1954.  Also pre-Internet, you'll notice.  There were three editors, but the editorial manifesto in the first issue "was signed by the main editor, Joan W. Carr 'on behalf of all femme fans' (and co-editors Frances Evans and Ethel Lindsay)" (90).

Reading this zine for evidence of the interests and passions of female fans of the 1950s is, however, complicated by the fact that Joan W. Carr was not, in fact a woman, but a hoax, a fictional persona created by male fan Sandy Sanderson.  While Frances Evans was aware of Carr's real identity, co-editor Lindsay initially was not, and the hoax was not revealed to UK fandom and the readers of Femizine until May 1956 [91].

Femizine turned out to be very popular, drawing up to 100 fan letters for each issue.  (The letters pages of sf magazines and fanzines back then were the forerunners of the computer bulletin board and Usenet decades later, both in terms of their style and of their demographic.)  The editors exploded the hoax themselves in the summer 1956 issue, and to their relief, "fannish reaction to the hoax was not the catastrophe Evans and Lindsay feared ... That the response of women fans was not as bad as the editors feared may have been due to the fact that many had secretly not found "Joan" as enticing as the men [did]."  One female fan commented that "Not everyone liked Joan wholeheartedly.  My own reaction was that she was another of those masculine sergeant-type women -- horribly competent and out to prove they are as good as any man by acting like a man!" (92-3).  Femizine stopped publication for a while, then restarted in September 1958 and ran for two more years.

This is a relatively benign and minor deception, but it shows that the written word, whether printed or mimeographed, can provide the same kind of anonymity that the Internet does now.  And people tend to believe what they read, and what they hear.  (Most of the time, anyway: the biblical scholar James Barr pointed out that though fundamentalist Christians deplore the materialist, secularist skepticism that doubts the literal reality of the biblical miracles, they are harshly and scornfully skeptical of miracle stories outside the Bible, whether in Catholic lives of the saints, "heretical" Christian writings, or "pagan" mythology.  Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett have nothing on them.)  In a way that's neither surprising nor foolish: we are social animals, and trust is the glue that lets us communicate with each other.  But it is also surprising and foolish.  One of the primary uses of language is to lie, and children figure out how to do it themselves before they learn to distrust their parents on Santa Claus or other official lies.  We couldn't survive if we decided to disbelieve automatically everything anyone says to us; but we'll get into trouble if we believe everything automatically.  We have to learn to use judgment, which means learning to use reason and evidence but doesn't stop there.  It takes experience and intuition, which must be cultivated throughout one's life.  But the right kind of skeptical, critical judgment will be discouraged forcefully by some or most of the people around us, starting with our parents, so it's hardly surprising that most people never really learn it.

You Know, I Learned Something Today

One of the disadvantages of reading a lot, over a period of years, is that I become a bit harder to impress. Not impossible to impress: I still find a good many books that delight me, and I never forget how ordinary the vast majority of published writing is.

There's a famous principle, Sturgeon's Law, named after the science-fiction writer who, when told that ninety percent of science fiction is crap, retorted, "Ninety percent of everything is crap!" It's a snappy comeback, but in fact, ninety percent of everything is just ordinary, run-of-the-mill, average, mediocre. There's no reason why it shouldn't be; the really important thing is that you never know in advance where the extraordinary, head and shoulders above the rest, above-average, brilliant work will come from. And one of the wonderful things, to my mind, about writing is that you don't need special training to do it well, nor do you need to come from a long line of writers. All you need is access to books that other people have written, followed by the conviction that you want to do it too; and after that, five hundred pounds a year and a room of your own.

It seems to me, however, that the level of mediocrity in science fiction and fantasy has risen in the past fifty years. By that I mean that even today's ordinary writers write better than ordinary writers did in the Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s. It's partially a result of rising standards among editors and writers alike, plus writing workshops and classes, and perhaps just that a lot more people are writing. What can't be taught, though, is originality -- let alone brilliance.

But readers change too. I didn't know, when I began reading science fiction about fifty years ago, that many of the stories I encountered were reworkings of themes that were already old: the first time I encountered them, I thought they were new. Partly because of the relatively limited amount of sf available to me, I read older work, including Golden Age SF from before I was born, and some of the first critical and historical work on the genre was also being done in the 1960s. So I began to get a sense of where SF had been before I started to read it.

Nor is it a bad thing to take another crack at an idea or theme that's been done before. SF has a number of basic ideas, and I think it was the Noble Engineer Heinlein who argued in the 50s that there are only three or four basic plots. In SF, writers often tried to write the definitive Time Travel Paradox story, for example. When Isaac Asimov began writing robot stories, he was aware of what other writers had done, and tried to put his own spin on the subject. The idea of extraterrestrials coming to earth to bring us the benefits of their millions of years of civilization was also old hat when I first read Edgar Pangborn's 1953 story "Angel's Egg," though I didn't know how old hat it was at the time.

As I got older, though, I began to notice recurring themes and cliches. I liked William Gibson's Neuromancer, for example, but I soon recognized it as refurbished noir, like a lot of SF: just put your hardboiled private investigator on another planet or in another galaxy, give him a blaster and a space suit instead of a .38 and a fedora, let the femme fatale be a Catwoman, and voila. (SF readers had been complaining about that syndrome for decades before Gibson updated it a bit.) I also recognized that, contrary to what a lot of people were saying, Gibson wasn't writing "hard" SF, the kind that's based in some scientific knowledge and extrapolation: Gibson knew nothing about computers when he began writing his cyberpunk stories. That didn't make them less fun to read: they were very well written and imagined. But they were no more 'about' computers or technology than a Philip Marlowe story: they were about male anxiety.

All this is just prologue to some comment on a new anthology I just finished reading, Human for a Day, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Jennifer Brozek, published a couple of months ago by DAW Books. It's an "original" anthology, in that none of the stories has been published before. I presume they were solicited to deal with the overall theme, that of non-humans who become human for a day. (Unlike many such anthologies, there's no introductory material at all, just writer bios at the very end.) That leaves a lot of wiggle room.

I'm not sure what I was expecting or hoping for, but I was let down. Of the writers I'd only heard of Tanith Lee before, but according to the bios they're all well-established and some have won Hugo and other genre awards. The trouble as I see it is that almost none of them have anything to say about the unifying theme. The stories are mostly ideas rather than stories, which set out their situations and characters, describe how the protagonist became "human for a day", and then turn him or her back; finis. One or two even feel like the opening chapters of novels, rather than stand-alone stories, which isn't good.

Almost all the stories are fantasy, rather than SF, which isn't bad in itself -- I like and have read a lot of fantasy. Still. If I'd been editor, the third story ("Cinderella City" by Seanan McGuire) would have opened the book. Here the being that becomes human for a day is the city of San Francisco, personified and humanized by an evil sorcerer, and even in human form followed everywhere by rats and pigeons. It's well done, and it entertained me better than the actual openers did. Ian Tregillis's "The Mainspring of His Heart, the Shackles of His Soul" (gratuitous Harlan Ellison allusion there) is set in an alternate universe where Dutch alchemists learned to build metal clockwork slaves with magical souls, and so came to dominate Europe and the Americas; the theme is the slave's desire to be free. The second story, "The Blade of His Plow," by Jay Lake, is about an effectively immortal soldier who'd been present at the crucifixion of Jesus and so must wander the world for thousands of years until he's set free. It's just military fantasy, full of details about soldiers' gear over the centuries. Several stories are built around war or swordplay, with severed limbs and blood geysers for the younger set. Anton Strout's "Tumulus" flaunts its writer's research on Celtic religion and magic. Tanith Lee's contribution, "The Dog-catcher's Song," is a cut above the rest in execution; Lee has been writing for a long time, so it should be. But the story itself didn't do much for me.

I was entertained by Laura Resnick's "Mortal Mix-up," in which a sophisticated New York vampire finds herself the victim of a body switch with a spoiled teenager. The spell is reversed, of course. I was not entertained by "Band of Bronze" by Jean Rabe, in which several statues from Central Park become animate for a day. Narrated by the Mad Hatter, who's accompanied by William Shakespeare and a soldier from a World War I memorial, it tells how the three take on muggers and purse snatchers, culminating in an exchange of automatic weapons fire and grenades with Crips and Bloods. Rabe has Shakespeare ("Bill") quoting his own plays, probably because she can't imitate Elizabethan English herself: she gets it wrong every damn time she tries, though I'll blame a subliterate copyeditor or a spellchecker for the time "Thou" is spelled "Though." ("Though abominable doghearted hedgepig!") The Hatter, for some reason, speaks slangy turn-of-the-21st century American English instead of the 19th-century British English I'd expect. There's a zombie story too.

I should stop to praise David D. Levine's "Into the Nth Dimension," which I hesitate to summarize here because I really don't want to spoil it. It verges delicately on camp without quite crossing over the line, and sweetly confirms what you always suspected about certain comic-book characters. There are a couple of stories in this collection with passing gay content: it's not their central point, just something that happens to be there, and I appreciated that. On the other hand, it's another of the stories which can't conform to the overall subject, but maybe that's the fault of the subject.

Praise be once again to public libraries, the training grounds of socialism. Someone (I can't remember who, but it was online) recommended Human for a Day, and I'm glad I could check it out to read, instead of spending money on it. Maybe I'm just jaded. Maybe to some thirteen-year-old just discovering SF and fantasy, these stories will be small revelations. Don't take my word for it; read it yourself if you want. Some negative reviews absolve me of any obligation to read a book; others make me want to read the book myself, because I can tell that I'll like what the reviewer didn't. I'd like this post to do both, or either, as the reader finds useful.

Boy Culture in the Nineteenth and a Half Century!

I've been reading H. Bruce Franklin's Future Perfect: American Science Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (revised edition, Oxford University Press, 1978), which turns out to be more of an anthology than a critical study. It's worth reading because of the commentary he supplies; he's written a good many books on various subjects, including Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction (Oxford, 1980), which is out of print but worth tracking down.

Franklin begins by suggesting what I agree is a "good working definition of science fiction": "the literature which, growing with science and technology, evaluates it and relates it meaningfully to the rest of human existence." He returns to that definition in the book's second section, on Poe, who has often been called the father of SF. Franklin treats him respectfully with appropriate skepticism, especially his program (in a "famous passage from his review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales" [ 96]) for the writing of short stories:

The key word in Poe's argument, as his italics indicate, is "effect." The argument that fiction should be evaluated for its effectiveness, its success in achieving the objective correlative which the author desires, slides around the question of what it should effect. To say that the tale of terror is "effective" may not necessarily, in the long run, to praise it [97].

Franklin distinguishes two categories of science fiction in Poe's work,

the tale contrived like an electric coil to induce particular emotions in the reader and the tale contrived as a wheelbarrow to bring to the reader some scientific notion or knickknack. In the first, the science is merely a device; in the other, the fiction is merely a device [97].

Good enough, but Franklin goes still further:

Poe, then, may be the father not of science fiction but rather of what is so often associated with the term science fiction -- fiction which popularizes science for boys and girls of all ages while giving them the creeps [98].

He grants Poe more virtue than that, though, suggesting that Poe is better than his theory. I'm not so sure; I've never liked Poe myself, either as poet or storyteller. But Franklin makes a good point which connects to my own wariness of "extreme" horror movies in our day.

Yet surely those who find "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" of enduring value do not do so merely because they admire Poe for making a story which can horrify them. Would anyone who wants to be as horrified as possible turn to fiction? Or are horror stories merely safe escapes or releases from the terrors of the actual world? In 1854, the same year in which "The Facts in the Case of M. Waldemar" was published, appeared Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself. Douglass, who had been a slave boy in Poe's Baltimore, describes the incident which awakened him into consciousness of Maryland social reality, the whipping of his aunt, stripped naked to the waist and hanging from a hook, by his master, who keeps snarling "'you d____d b___h'" as he tortured her until she was "literally covered with blood":

The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood-clotted cowskin.

The man who invented the horrors of "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" preferred not to look at these other horrors. In fact he supported the slave system which produced them, as well as his own material comforts [98-9].

I'm not as sure as Franklin that Poe's fans don't necessarily admire him primarily for making a tale which can horrify them, though I would expect that his admirers value his tales for more than one reason. The fans of ultraviolent cinema seem to think that "effects" are all that matter, though. The late Thomas M. Disch, a poet, writer of sf and horror fiction, and swaggering leather boy, wrote a history of science fiction in which he attacked writers like Ursula Le Guin whose gore-and-creepy quotient didn't come up to his high standards. (Her feminism, he thundered, "is less overtly phobic of the male sex than that of Andrea Dworkin, but it is no less absolute. ... Ideology breeds nonsense and ... Le Guin's work has undergone a gradual PC ossification" [via]. Girl cooties, yuck!)

But I very much appreciate the questions Franklin raised here. He made me think again of the idea that Lawrence Block put into the mind of one of his characters, that the tears you shed while watching a movie aren't real tears, any more than the fear you feel while watching a horror movie is real fear. I have the same reservation about the genre that Franklin expressed: if you want to be horrified, why look to fiction? Something else is going on, but what? I'm certainly open to the idea that horror stories in any medium can point to some deeper (or at least other) meanings; I just don't know what they might be, because I haven't found any that work for me that way.

The Present Is a Disputed Area

I've been putting off rereading Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time for the same reason anyone hesitates to return to a much-loved work from the past: for fear it wouldn't be as good as I remember. But if anything, it's better.

I first read it in the fall of 1976, a few months after it was published. A friend had taken me to hear Piercy reading her poems, and then to hear her talking to a class, so she'd already made a big impression on me. Then a few people were passing around a copy of Women on the Edge of Time, and I read it twice within a few days before giving it to the next person. It was a slightly unsettling experience, because I'd never before read a book that felt like it was pandering to my politics. Most science fiction, let alone mundane fiction whether gay or straight, required a lot of filtering as I read it, to compensate for sexism, racism, and homophobia. Reading Woman on the Edge of Time was like stepping on a step that wasn't there; the adjustments had already been made for me. I felt enormously grateful to Piercy for the gift of such a story.

The frame story of Woman on the Edge of Time is set in New York City around 1975. Consuelo ("Connie") Ramos is thirty-seven, a Mexican-American woman living on welfare. She was born in Texas, but gradually migrated north to Chicago, and later moved to New York. When the novel opens she has already been institutionalized once, for abusing her young daughter Angelina while in a long despairing drunk following the death of her lover Claud; previously she'd spent some time in jail as Claud's accomplice as a pickpocket. When her niece Dolly's violent pimp Geraldo follows Dolly to Connie's apartment, Connie attacks Geraldo in Dolly's defense, and is railroaded back into a mental institution. Connie meets and befriends several other patients, and with some of them is drafted into a psychosurgical experiment typical of the period: the doctors hope to control "antisocial" behavior through direct stimulation of the subjects' brains. This is one major stream of the story.

We also learn that Connie has been visited by Luciente, who claims to be a visitor from the future, part of a time-travel project in 2137. Gradually, through telepathic contact, Connie is able to visit Luciente's world. Piercy leaves open the question of whether Luciente is supposed to be real or Connie's hallucination, though within the story it's clear enough. The other major stream is Connie's, and the reader's, introduction to twenty-second century Mouth-of-Mattapoisett in Massachusetts, a community patterned after Wamponaug Indian culture, though with a mixture of high technology -- Piercy had a better sense of where computers would go than most sf writers in the 70s -- and close-to-the-earth poverty.

"Our technology did not develop in a straight line from yours," Luciente tells Connie. "We have limited resources. We plan cooperatively. We can afford to waste ... nothing" (125). And: "We don't have big cities -- they didn't work" [68]. Sometime in the twenty-first century there was a major revolution, and now the ultrarich elites control only the Moon, the space platforms, and Antarctica; a war of attrition is still being waged. (Page numbers are from the Fawcett mass-market paperback, still in print after all these years.)

We get glimpses of a few other communities: Cranberry, based on "Harlem-Black" culture, and Ned's Point, "the flavor of Eastern European Jewry" (153). We're told that the First Nations have their own territory, and Connie meets a young Latina from Texas who tells her that things are somewhat different there too: "What we've done with adobe over the past forty years -- how it glows. We eat plenty of meat too, not like here, where they think one skinny cow makes a fiesta!" (210). The communities aren't isolated from each other, though: there's a lot of trade and other interaction between them, especially for educational purposes. Young people travel to study with masters in their field, and may settle in the masters' communities, move to others, or return home.

I noticed very forcefully on this reading how radical was Piercy's approach to sex/gender and race. Babies are incubated in a "brooder," because as one woman character tells Connie,

It was part of women's long revolution. When we were breaking all the old hierarchies. Finally there was that one thing we had to give up too, the only power we ever had, in return for no more power for anyone. The original production: the power to give birth. Cause as long as we were biologically enchained, we'd never be equal. And males never would be humanized to be loving and tender. So we all became mothers. Every child has three. To break the nuclear bonding [105].

On race, another character explains,

I have a sweet friend living in Cranberry dark as I am and her tribe is Harlem-Black. I could move there anytime. But if you go over, you won't find everybody black-skinned like her and me, any more than they're all tall or all got big feet. ... At grandcil -- grand council -- decisions were made forty years back to breed a high proportion of dark people and to mix the genes well through the population. At the same time, we decided to hold on to separate cultural identities. But we broke the bond between genes and culture, broke it forever. We want there to be no chance of racism ever again. But we don't want the melting pot where everybody ends up with thin gruel. We want diversity, for strangeness breeds richness [103-104].

These are still threatening ideas, not only in mainstream American society but also in multiculturalist circles -- to say nothing of other cultures.

Even more threatening, I think, would be Piercy's handling of gender. Piercy invented neuter pronouns, "person" and "per", for her future, and broke the bond between reproductive organs and gendered expression. (In Mattapoisett, people usually refer to males and females, instead of men and women, except when they're talking about historical conditions and struggles.) This leads to a lot of confusion for Connie, who sometimes can easily discern the sex of the people she meets in Mattapoisett, but more often can't. So we get scenes like this one:

"When I was born, I was named Peony by my mothers --"
"Peony sounds like a girl's name" [says Connie].
"I don't understand. It was the name chosen for me" [77].

And this one:

Finally she heard a high-pitched warning siren and a fast-moving vehicle flashing red lights came shrieking toward them about a foot off the ground. It came to an abrupt halt right outside the tent and settled with a hiss. White Oak [the pilot] hopped out and a person -- the voice [Connie had heard over an audio communicator] had been male, she thought -- about five feet nine, compactly built, slid out of the other side and strode with quick, slithery grace toward the tent. Bolivar, she supposed, had kinky hair worn in braids fully as elaborate as Erzulia's, but his skin was fair and heavily freckled with the sun. He wore a knee-length ... she could not call it anything but a dress, with stripes on the bias [160].

Many readers today, I think, would try to read characters like these as "transgendered," but that's a concept that would have no meaning in a society where gender isn't an important category. I see "transgender" and "genderqueer" as largely conservative if not reactionary trends, attempts to hold on to standard gender patterns -- partly, I suppose, as a result of the influence this book has had on me. (To clarify, however quixotically: this doesn't mean that I think people shouldn't be free to express and label gender, to dress and decorate themselves, and to modify their bodies, as they wish. Of course they should: that's an old Gay Liberation tenet that I still hold to. But I still think that many trans people are very conservative in their view of gender and sex. Someday I'll do a post on that.) A reviewer on Amazon referred to the future Mattapoisett as "a female dominated society," which supports my feeling that many people perceive sexual equality as female domination.

Beyond these matters, Woman on the Edge of Time is a very rich book. Piercy put a great deal of work into her future societies (there's also a chilling dystopian chapter that gives a glimpse into the culture of the "richies," which seems even less distant now than it did thirty-five years ago), but she also describes contemporary American society with a careful and critical eye. Piercy has been a political activist for many years, first in the New Left and then in Second Wave feminism, and in environmental and international solidarity movements since then. She gives a little of this background to Connie, who recalls,

Years ago I was living in Chicago. I got involved that way. Meetings, meetings, meetings! My life was so busy, my head was boiling! I felt such hope. It was after my husband Martín ... He got killed. I was young and naive and it was supposed to be a War on Poverty. ... But it was just the same political machine and us stupid poor people, us ... idiots who thought we were running things for a change. We ended up back where we were. They gave some paying jobs to so-called neighborhood leaders. All those meetings. I ended up with nothing but feeling sore and ripped off [154].

"Paying jobs to neighborhood leaders" ... that rings a bell somehow. Later, I think they came to call themselves "community organizers."

Piercy's depiction of the brain salad surgeons and their self-justifying prattle helped to harden my own distrust of psychiatry. Another reviewer of this novel on Amazon wrote, "I'm certain that back in the 70s, and even today, there are places like this, although I doubt that implanting devices into mental patients' heads (surely a plot device) has ever taken place." His doubt is seriously misplaced; psychosurgery and attempts to control "deviant" behavior by stimulating the brain electrically had a brief vogue in the Sixties and Seventies. It went somewhat undercover, partly because its most distinguished exponent left the US for Spain, but he recently came back, and he's tanned, rested and ready. The writer Arthur Koestler wrote a novel in 1972, The Call Girls, using the same procedure as a plot device, which I think far inferior to Piercy's; but then it's written from the perspective of the doctors, not the patients. (Koestler's question is: What if the technology breaks down?  Piercy's is: What if it works?)  The general mentality has always been with us, of course.

I should add, and stress, that the politics of the book didn't get in the way -- at least for me. If you disagree with them, they probably will. Science fiction and especially utopian fiction are literature of ideas more than action, and tend to be didactic. But Piercy is also good at depicting characters in difficult situations. Her characters are unusual for science fiction: women, people of color, poor people, mental patients. (If you find Woman on the Edge of Time excessively preachy, compare it to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which is at least as driven by sexual politics -- male-supremacist sexual politics -- and is every bit as preachy about the conditions of [male] mental patients. Their plight is, among other things, a metaphor for the suffering of men in a "matriarchal" society, a popular obsession in masculist literature of the period.)

Granted, Mattapoisett has the same weakness that most utopian societies do: it has no subconscious. The guide figure can explain everything to the visitor, and there's no underside; everything is as the guide describes it. For a comparison, imagine a normal, politically sound American of our day explaining the wonders of our society -- our racial and sexual equality, our wonderful economic system, our first-rate health care system, our peaceful coexistence with our neighbors -- to a visitor from a century past. (Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed, published in 1974, is as close as I can think of to an exception, but then it's subtitled "An Ambiguous Utopia.") This is a normal problem in the Utopian genre, though.

What impressed me most on this rereading of Woman on the Edge of Time was how little it had dated, both in its future and in its present; to me Piercy's politics seem more relevant than ever. And above all, it's a great read.

Have You Ever Seen a Grown Extraterrestrial Naked, Bobby?

Last night I saw Robert Wise's 1951 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still on a big screen for the first time. I first saw it on TV at the age of twelve or so, and one time on video as an adult. It made a big impression on me as a kid, of course, with its message of benign interplanetary missionaries bringing the good news of peace and brotherhood to the savage Earthlings. As an adult I mainly noticed its campiness, though just about every movie from the 195os looks campy now. For years I nursed a major schoolboy crush on Michael Rennie, the Brit dreamboat who played Klaatu, and even in my dotage I can still see why: those Hepburn cheekbones, the willowy build, the accent, the reserve combined with warmth. (It also seemed to me as I watched the movie last night that Rennie resembled David Bowie, or vice versa. Was Ziggy Stardust a younger brother of Klaatu?)

I think I'm going to look at some critical writing on The Day the Earth Stood Still later on, but for now I just want to write about how it looked to me this time around.

Which was not all that different from how it looked to me as a kid. The film studies professor who introduced the film talked about its Cold War context, which is obvious enough, and its similarity to other Cold-War alien-as-Other movies that followed. But Day actually rejects the Cold War. Klaatu is dismissive of both the American and the Soviet governments' excuses for not convening the international meeting he demands for the delivery of his ultimatum. The film makes it clear that both sides, the US and the Soviet Union, are to blame for the dangerous international situation, and what the Cold War regarded as world-historical political conflict is brushed aside as petty, childish squabbling. Characters who voice conventional political sentiments are shown as foolish, like Aunt Bee, I mean Mrs. Barley who says "If you want my opinion, he came from right here on Earth. And you know where I mean." The reporter who cut short the incognito Klaatu's remarks about the dangers of reacting out of fear rather than reason got laughs from last night's college audience; he's a reminder that the broadcast media have always preferred soundbytes to discourse. The sympathetic Helen Benson immediately dumps her oafish boyfriend Tom when he makes it clear that he cares only about notoriety, not saving the earth.

The movie's politics take a dive into sentimentality when Klaatu and Bobby visit the Lincoln Memorial and admire the conclusion of the Gettysburg Address. That Lincoln presided over one of the bloodiest and most destructive wars in history up to his time is tactfully left out of the story.

The biggest laugh of the night went to the doctor who tells a colleague that the life expectancy on Klaatu's planet is 130, confesses that "He was very nice about it, but he made me feel like a third-class witch doctor" -- and then offers the other doctor a cigarette, which is accepted. I was especially amused by the newscaster Drew Pearson's wearing his hat as he read the news on his television program, though he was the only media figure shown doing so.

Klaatu's initial announcement, "We have come to visit you in peace and with goodwill," is disingenuous -- he comes bearing a threat of planetary destruction if we don't clean up our act -- and Gort the robot is the forerunner of the Terminator. (Does "Klaatu barada nikto" translate as "I'll be back"?)* Or at least of Skynet, and of the Machines from the Matrix. Klaatu explains that his people created a "race of robots" to police them, stamping out any "aggression" as soon as it appears. And really, wasn't it foolish of Klaatu in his first encounter with human beings to hold out an unexplained object as he marched silently down the spaceship's ramp toward the crowd? Leaving aside his people's study of human behavior via radio before he was sent here, which should have given him some idea, it's important to remember that Klaatu's people aren't naturally pacific either -- that's why they built their robots.

The film studies professor's attempt to draw a connection to other sf movies in which the alien monster symbolizes the Red (or Yellow) menace seemed to me off the mark. The movie mocks the hoi polloi's readiness to imagine the Man from Space (whom they have seen only in his shiny spacesuit and mask) as a creature with tentacles, a Bug-Eyed Monster. Michael Rennie isn't the Blob, the Thing, or the Creature from the Black Lagoon: the trope of a slow-moving monster carrying a frightened human woman in its arms is performed here by the robot Gort. (It's the brunette Patricia Neal whom Gort carries, though, not this bare-shouldered blonde -- who doesn't appear in the movie.) Day belongs to another strand in science fiction, which was already well-established in the genre: the story about a Kindly But Stern intergalactic dog-trainer who comes to rub our noses in our poop -- but will we allow ourselves to be housebroken, or will we have to be put down? Damon Knight had already mocked the theme in his 1950 story "To Serve Man." Other examples that come to mind include Edgar Pangborn's story "Angel's Egg," published in the same year that Day was released, a milder version of the fable in which the author laments our human immaturity and allows his cute extraterrestrial visitor to drain away his memories. (If only all lesser breeds were willing to sacrifice their lives to their superiors to further scientific knowledge!) In 1958 Robert Heinlein published Have Space Suit Will Travel, in which an American teenager finds himself as one of several human specimens examined by an intergalactic tribunal, and responds to criticism of Homo sapiens with a "You and what army?" defiance. But hey, you don't look to Hollywood for innovative science fiction.

I also guess I'll finally grit my teeth and take a look at the 2008 remake starring Keanu Reeves, if only to see how they updated it. And really, who better than Teh Keanu to reprise Rennie as a beautiful, human-but-not-quite visitor from outer space who dies and is raised from the dead? (Other candidates for the original role, according to IMDB's trivia page, included Spencer Tracy and Claude Rains.) The Christ-figure symbolism in the 1951 version was deliberate, and Reeves had already played a dying-and-rising character who brings Good News to Modern Man a decade earlier.

*I know it doesn't, but an Ahnuld joke had to go in there somewhere.

A Woman of War

When I was much younger it was different, but nowadays I find that it's the passing of women that makes me feel like a chunk has been taken out of my life: Del Martin, Jill Johnston, Jane Rule -- and now Joanna Russ, who died this morning in an Arizona hospice after having suffered several strokes. Since I don't follow the science-fiction press or intertubes, I probably wouldn't have heard about her death for some time, but fortunately her longtime friend and fellow writer/teacher Samuel Delany is one of my friends on Facebook, and he passed along the news that she'd entered the hospice a few days ago, and was slipping fast.

There's quite a bit of information about her on this up-to-date Wikipedia entry, so I needn't add too much to it. I must confess that I usually liked her short stories better than her novels (though that's true of many sf writers), and her critical writings better than her fiction. Even her classic story "When It Changed", about a planet where all the men had died off centuries before, leaving women to carry on quite competently, is uneven; Russ herself said that she got the opening paragraphs quickly, as if by dictation, and then had to "finish the thing by myself and in a voice not my own." It shows, I'm afraid. "When It Changed" was the first thing I read by Russ, and it left me ambivalent, but then a friend referred me to an essay in which Russ argued that SF gave more scope to action by women characters than mundane fiction does, using examples of standard story modules with the sexes reversed: "Alexandra the Great," for example. That was what hooked me on Russ's writing, though I did track down and read all her fiction too. If I had to whittle down my library to its core, I'd certainly keep How to Suppress Women's Writing, (Texas, 1983), Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts (Crossing Press, 1985), and To Write Like a Woman (Indiana, 1995), though I'd probably also keep her fiction because most of it's out of print and hard to find.

One of the notable traits of her fiction is its anger, still unacceptable in women's writing to this day. A favorite exchange of mine comes from The Two of Them (Putnam, 1978), in which a female agent violates the Prime Directive by deciding to rescue/kidnap a brilliant, talented girlchild from a planet where girls and women are not permitted to be brilliant or talented.

"Which arm shall I break?" says the female jinn [Irene, the agent, from the perspective of the girl's father].

"If you break my arm, I will not be able to write the visa!" shouts 'Alee.

The female jinn says, "I will not break your writing arm." ...

He cries, "I am a man of peace!"

She smiles; she says, "I am a woman of war" ... [122-3]

I still find this funny, though many of my friends disapproved. Russ's writing helped me to come to terms with my own anger, for she struggled herself with the taboo on women's anger and (even fantasized) violence, and wrote about it brilliantly, as in her essay on man-hating in the collection Amazon Expedition (Times Change Press, 1973, pp. 30-31).

That bad things are done to you is bad enough; worse is the double-think that follows. The man insists -- often semi-sincerely, though he has some inkling of his motives because if you question them, he gets mad -- that (1) he didn't do anything, you must be hallucinating; (2) he did it but it's trivial and therefore you're irrational ("hysterical") to resent it or be hurt; (3) it's important but you're wrong to take it personally because he didn't mean it personally; (4) it's important and personal but you provoked it, i.e., it's your fault and not his. Worse still, he often insists on all of them at once. In this sort of ideologically mystified situation, clarity is crucial. Let us get several things clear: hurting people makes them angry, anger turns to hate when the anger is chronic and accompanied by helplessness, and although you can bully or shame people into not showing their anger, the only way to stop the anger is to stop the hurt. The cure for hate is power -- not power to hurt the hurter, but power to make the hurter stop.

It's a mistake to think that man-hating is a delicate self-indulgence; it's very unpleasant. ...

That was 1973, and it's still cutting-edge, as you can see in some of the comments (especially this one) on this 2010 interview with the editor of a book of essays on Russ's work. I've had enough debates in the past decade with well-meaning (I know they're well-meaning because they tell me so, quite insistently) males in sf / fantasy fandom to know that things haven't changed much in the genre over the past four decades. Anger is definitely out in the gay and feminist movements we now have, dominated as they are by their therapeutic / professional wings, but they were never really in, not that much.

But back to Joanna Russ. She didn't write anything in her later years because she suffered from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and arthritis. That was a loss, to her as much to her readers I'm sure, but the work she did manage to do is still with us, in used bookstores and libraries. Her short-story collections, especially the Alyx stories and The Zanzibar Cat, are probably the most accessible introduction to her fiction, and everybody should read How to Suppress Women's Writing. It's one reason I love books: even long after an author dies, even if I never met her in person, she can still speak to me on the page.

P.S. Nicola Griffith linked to this fine appreciation of Russ today.