j – Page 4 – Triple Take

J’s Take on The Strange Case of Origami Yoda

The Strange Case of Origami Yoda by Tom Angleberger isn’t exactly what I was expecting. But it was surprising in a good way.

I thought it would be shorter. I also thought it would be paperback. It’s not overly long, but it wasn’t something I could read on one bus trip or lunch break. And it’s a very nice hardcover. Reminds me of the Doctor Who tie-in novels and The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities which you should totally buy, yo. A very nice look and feel to it.

Also, how can you resist that origami Yoda on the cover?!

For bonus points, I read this while listening to Weird Al’s “Yoda”. Yo-yo-yo-yo Yoda.

This book is laid out as case files, as the main character, Tommy, tries to work out if Origami Yoda is magic, or what. Origami Yoda is a Yoda origami puppet that a strange classmate of his, Dwight, made and designed himself. He wears it around on his finger and it gives sage advice to those who ask. In a bad Yoda voice with questionable Yoda syntax. (But the book makes a point of pointing that out!)

Other classmates have contributed to the case files, and added their thoughts and comments. And doodles.

I really have very little negative to say about this book. I liked that the pages were all crinkly (well, the design on them was of crinkly paper, the paper wasn’t actually crinkly). There are little tie fighters and X-wing fighters in the corners of the pages. The doodles are believably drawn by a kid, and funny! The one of the squirrels struck me particularly.

The book was just geeky enough for me, with Star Wars references, Shakespeare quotes, mention of Tycho Brahe. There are girls in here who don’t come off as idiots. (Although they do seem the goal of most of the male characters.) There’s even a hard-of-hearing girl, though she doesn’t get to write a case file herself.

So to my two problems with the book. First, the kids are in sixth grade, and they seem rather obsessed with girls and a PTA Fun Night dance that happens every month. That’s not the sixth grade I remember. (Though admittedly I am far from typical.) I wonder if it’s because it’s part of a middle school, whereas my sixth grade was still elementary school.

My origami Yoda — Imagination you must use

The other is the origami Yoda instructions at the back. I was worried I couldn’t follow them well, but in the end, I think I came out with a decent origami Yoda. I didn’t cut the paper in half and in half like it said, so he’s a large origami Yoda. He’s also not green.

Buuuut… it’s also not the Yoda(s) in the book. If you expect to make one like the Yoda on the cover, you’ll be disappointed. I wish the author had included two different versions of Yoda instructions. One easy one and one more complex one that looks nicer. I probably would’ve failed to make the good one properly, but hey.. I could try!

There’s a sequel out soon (already?) and I’m rather interested in seeing the return of the origami Jedi.

Nebula Project: The Left Hand of Darkness

What follows is a spoiler laden discussion of the book The Left Hand of Darkness. Beware if youâ€™re worried about such things. This discussion also veered briefly into the sensitive topics of rape and sexual assault.

First Mobile Genly Ai is on the planet Gethen, otherwise known as Winter, to convince the inhabitants to join the interplanetary Ekumen, for mutual benefit and exchange of ideas, etc. Coping with the harsh cold environment is the least of his problems, as he seems poorly equipped to deal with the planet’s governments and its people. The fact that they all exist in a non-gendered state most of the time, until they enter kemmer once a month when they can be come male or female, leaves him questioning his own masculinity.

K: So this month we have The Left Hand of Darkness, by our first female winner for best novel, Ursula K. Le Guin. (Is it Le Guin or LeGuin? I’ve seen it written both ways. On my copy it’s pretty consistently with a space.) And once again we have a book about which I knew little more than its title. In fact, for some reason I have a lot of trouble in my head with ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ and ‘Heart of Darkness’. Perhaps because I’d read neither.

J: I’ve seen it mostly with a space, I think the space is the proper way. Which isn’t how I tend to type it automatically. The trouble I have is between The Left Hand of Darkness and Children of a Lesser God. Which they don’t even share a common word except ‘of’! As for me, this is another book that I’ve actually read before. In this case, at least twice, and for two different classes in college. Though I’d forgotten quite a lot.

K: The book is pretty much the tale of a ‘first contact’ mission by the interstellar alliance known as the Ekumen with a long lost group of humans. There’s some backstory, obviously, which isn’t really touched upon too much here, though I didn’t find it to hinder the understanding of the story.

J: Yea, I’m not sure how much her Hainish books really tie in to each other or rely on each other. I’ve read a few and they don’t seem to really need you to read the others. Of the ones I’ve read, they seem concerned primarily with introducing you, the reader, to a new society and world.

K: Which means that all we can use to judge the Ekumen by is their sole representative who has any sort of role in this book, an Earthling by the name of Genly Ai. Who I was disappointed to discover was a male, since his name said nothing to me. And who I was further disappointed to discover is something of a jackass.

J: And idiot. Don’t forget idiot. But I was surprised he was black. I didn’t remember that.

K: I was lucky the text kept reminding me at intervals, otherwise I would have forgotten. Not necessarily because I was assuming him to be white but because character descriptions just don’t stick in my head very well. I don’t usually picture characters that way in my head, like a movie.

J: Yea, there’s one part where he’s frostbitten and his face is grey and everything and a little bit beyond that I was reminded he was black and went back to reread that bit. Kind of wondering if she’d also forgotten. But I couldn’t find any evidence she had. I don’t even really picture real people in my dreams. I just sort of know they’re them. I think I’d suck as an artist, even if I had the technical skill.

J: How long did you think he was female for? Because I knew he was male going into it, so I didn’t have a surprise there.

K: It’s not so much that I thought he was female but that for the first part of the first chapter, it’s all told in strict first person with no reference to his gender at all. It’s not until one of the other characters calls him ‘Mr. Ai’ that I knew for sure. And I was sad.

J: I get sad when that happens too. It’s a disappointment when it’s not a female main character.

K: Yeah. And here we had not just a male main character, but one who felt to me as pretty misogynistic. He was constantly disparaging the Gethenians by comparing them to women.

J: Yea, I was disappointed in Earth. :P Get out into space and join the wider galactic community and you still haven’t solved your gender issues.

K: I did wonder if it wasn’t meant to be a symptom of sexual panic – he found the Gethenians oddly attractive and so he had to cast them as women or else the gayness ohnoes!

J: Maybe. Which ties in to one of my major disappointments with the book. No sex!!!

K: For a book that was so very much about talking about this weird sexual evolution of the Gethenians, yeah, there was no sex at all on camera. Almost everyone we actually encountered was strangely celibate.

J: Even when Estraven is in kemmer in the tent, it was never clear to me if ‘he’ had gone female or not.

K: No, it wasn’t. And it didn’t make a lot of sense either — they were traveling for 81 days. That’s not one kemmer, that’s like, three.

J: Yea, it was suspicious that it so happened to be like exactly 26 days into the trip. If she had just said, anywhere, that being in dothe or a hard trek across the ice on low supplies might delay it. Which seems perfectly reasonable, but we shouldn’t have to assume..

K: Since he didn’t seem to be in it right before the trip started. I don’t know. The whole kemmer business seemed biologically unlikely to me. I know the story hints that it may have been some sort of abandoned experiment by the ancients, but… I don’t know. It just seems… unlikely.

J: The plausibility or implausibility didn’t bother me.

K: It did me a bit. Because part of the book was about how the Gethenian sexual cycle — the fact that they were essentially asexual for large portions of the time — came to dominate their society and dictate their progress. Because apparently without sexual urges (the drive for men to impress women??) society progresses at a very slow rate and there’s no real ambition or progress.

K: Le Guin equates asexuality with passivity.

J: And no war.

J: Genly and the woman whose notes we get in one chapter aren’t clear on if the slow progress and lack of war are due to their lack of gender or to the environment of the planet. Do you think Le Guin was maybe being hedgy? Not coming right out and laying it all at the feet of gender.

K: I don’t know. I felt the society was pretty uneven: they’ve adapted very well to the cold, even invented super awesome batteries that anyone on Earth now would just kill for. But there’s no sense of industry or advancement, so where did these inventions come from? My experience in our society is that one invention leads pretty soon to another as other people have their ideas sparked by it, and it’s kind of like a snowball rolling down hill as long as there are materials and conditions that allow people to concentrate on inventing. And nothing we’re shown suggests to me that there -aren’t- these conditions, in spite of the difficulty of -travel-, they all seem to be pretty well set otherwise.

J: I think it’s a common theme in stories about all-female societies. Progress is slow or nonexistent and there’s no war. I don’t know what’s up with that! It’s easy to lay war on men, but I don’t believe they have a monopoly on it. Just like they shouldn’t have a monopoly on science, technology, invention, art!

K: No. I think those things might be -different-, but certainly not disappeared. Though I will note that one of the few things Genly can come up with to say about women when asked is that they aren’t usually scientists or inventors! Frankly, society isn’t yet at the point where we can say -what- the potential of women are in those areas, because I don’t think they’ll achieve that potential in the same -way- as males and there just isn’t the right kind of societal support for that yet.

J: Ah, was it him who said that? I knew I’d read it recently, but I’d filled my head with a couple other books and blog posts all around the same subject since I finished reading it. But we already decided Genly was an idiot and a jackass. Why they picked him to be First Mobile, I have no idea. If it were me, I would’ve picked someone intersex or genderqueer. Someone who’d have a chance of not being so gender-biased. And maybe someone who understood politics better. Unless this was all a test of Gethen. ‘Can you handle this guy who’s all caught up in being macho?’

K: It was he who said it. And it made me sad. It made me sad to remember that people were STILL saying the same thing 40 years later (I’m looking at you, Larry Summers) without understanding any better -why- that might be true. Now, as far as Genly’s fitness as First Mobile, I have no idea. Perhaps it was indeed a test of the Gethen. ‘If you don’t murder this dude, maybe you can join us.’

J: *laugh* Yea, sort of.. if you can handle us at our typical (or even sliding towards not-so-great), we’re good to go. But look at what that woman’s report said. “The First Mobile, if one is sent, must be warned that unless he is very self-assured, or senile, his pride will suffer. A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation.” And I’m like.. what? Um, no. Not that I don’t think I wouldn’t be surprised and caught off guard if I went to Gethen and was treated not as a woman, but as a person, but I don’t think I’d be bothered by it. My pride would not suffer. Though, really, wouldn’t they treat me like a pregnant woman? And that /would/ bother me!

K: Yeah. It was really that chapter and having a second character say something so idiotic that I knew that my excuses for Genly’s behavior really were just that, excuses, and it probably wasn’t a well-thought out effort on Le Guin’s part to make him that way on purpose to highlight how dumb it all was. Unless she’s trying to say all of human society is blinded by gender and never will manage to get over it. Ever. That’s just depressing.

J: Well, to some extent she probably picked a man with ‘typical’ 60s ideas on purpose. And it was radical only to make him black. That one chapter actually surprised me when it was revealed to be a woman. The whole book up until that point had been male. Even the Gethenians were ‘men’ and ‘he’. So to find it was written by a woman surprised me. I don’t know if it was meant to.

K: I wasn’t sure what to think of it. It seemed a token chapter in an otherwise nearly female-free book. What was its purpose? To show there were female scientists? To shock us with female scientists? To show us something about Ekumen society? Whatever it was I was puzzled.

J: I think.. to give us a female viewpoint of Gethenian society? By.. having her talk about sex. As an excuse for there being none?

K: I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. I wonder if there had been sex (which by definition would not have exactly been straight) would the book still have won the Nebula? -Talking- about alternate sexualities and actually -showing- them are definitely not the same thing.

J: I think it would’ve counted as straight. The /relationship/ wouldn’t have been heterosexual, but the sex would’ve been.

K: In any case, it’s a moot point.

J: Well, to mention my other big disappointment with it, was that the male pronouns were continued throughout. It actually surprised me. That Genly would use them, okay. But Estraven? Bah! Estraven’s chapters all read more Earth human than I thought they should’ve.

K: Yes, that was odd. I guess we have to assume the Estraven entries were originally in Karhidish and they had a pronoun which we don’t, and the translation made it ‘he’, but the fact is they kept using Karhidish words like shifgrethor, so there was no reason they couldn’t have just used the proper pronoun.

J: And things like ‘man’ or ‘son’ which could’ve easily been ‘person’ or ‘child’. I know Le Guin has since stated that the one thing she’d change about the book is to use some gender neutral pronouns of some sort. And I wish they’d release a version like that.

K: Yeah, there was really no reason to be using man and son in the non-Genly chapters especially. I’m not usually a big fan of revisions in older books, but this one would actually improve things.

J: Well, an author revision.. where people could still read the old version if they wanted. And this wouldn’t be dumbing it down for the sake of kids, which a lot of them are. My favorite parts of the book are actually the folktales. Which are also male pronouns. Sigh.

K: Ahh yes the folktales. I didn’t dislike them, but their inclusion, and then the abrupt shift to Estraven’s POV in Chapter 6 did make me far more aware of the -structure- of this book than I normally am when reading. So I broke it down hoping to see some sort of pattern, but there wasn’t: Ai, Tale, Ai, Tale, Ai, Estraven, Science Chick, Ai, Tale, Ai, Estraven, Tale, Ai, Estraven, Ai, Estraven, Tale, Ai, Ai, Ai

J: During that long slog across the glacier, I wish there’d been more than one interruption with a folktale. Even if it was Estraven telling it to Genly while they were hanging out in the tent. I suspect the only pattern was ‘I need to tell people about this now, and this the best way to do it’.

K: Maybe so, though I do wish they had been more tied into the text if that was the case. If they really are just random infodumps, they may be creative, but they’re barely disguised.

J: I guess I mostly liked it because I knew the next chapter was likely to be different from the one I was reading. The whole story from Genly’s point of view would’ve been dull.

K: That is definitely true. And incomplete, since there were things going on of which he was not at all aware.

K: Though that comes back again to how unsuitable he seems to have been for the position of First Mobile.

J: Yup. I bet he wasn’t even from Iceland or Canada, which also would’ve made some sense.

K: Hmm. Now I feel like he said where on Earth he was from, but I can’t remember when he said it and skimming through I can’t find it.

J: I don’t remember him saying. Probably something stupid like Hawaii or the Sahara Desert.

J: Shall we talk about things with didn’t disappointment me, but annoyed me quite a lot instead?

J: Minor annoyance – the word ‘bisexual’ to mean a society with two sexes. Is that the right word, even though it sounds wrong? Larger issue.. the Zanies, which are referred to in the same paragraph as ‘insane’, possibly ‘schizophrenic’, and then, bizarrely ‘psychopaths’.

K: Well, I think ‘bisexual’ does mean that, in the same way that ‘bipedal’ means moving about on two feet. But the more common usage has shifted lately to mean being sexually interested in two sexes.

K: Actually I stand corrected. Bisexual used to mean the same as hermaphrodite. So it’s not used correctly.

J: So McCoy was right that tribbles are bisexual?

K: Apparently so!

K: So I’m not sure if there is a single word that describes the fact that humans have two sexes. Binary sexes is the closest that springs to my mind.

K: The issues of insanity and madness was pretty strangely treated. Genly insists that the King of Karhide is ‘mad’, but I didn’t really see why he felt that way.

J: Yea, the king didn’t seem very mad. Oh, you know it bugged me we never got to see him pregnant. He was pregnant, but we never got to see it.

K: In fact, he went into complete seclusion while pregnant. Why? We’re not told if this is normal, if being pregnant is somehow considered unclean or embarrassing, or what. It didn’t make any sense at all except to make him look weak (because he was now a woman?). And then to top everything off, the baby died. Of what cause we don’t know.

J: You would’ve thought, if the kingship was passed down biologically, that there’d be a lot of pressure on him to get pregnant. So why did he wait so late? For one thing, couldn’t he have deliberately put himself around males in kemmer to make sure he was female?

K: It does seem like, even if Karhide wasn’t into the hormones the way the other countries may have been, there were ways to make himself end up female in kemmer. It definitely shouldn’t have been left to chance until he got biologically elderly.

J: Right!

K: So was there anything else that annoyed you?

J: Hrm. Annoyed or puzzled.. back to that chapter written by practically the only woman in the whole book. How is rape impossible?

K: I asked myself that same question. And I came to the same conclusion as you: Uh, what? Because there was no reason given, just this random assertion.

J: I’ll quote. Not that it’ll unconfuse us. “There is no unconsenting sex, no rape. As with most mammals other than man, coitus can be performed only by mutual invitation and consent; otherwise it is not possible. Seduction certainly is possible, but it must have to be awfully well timed.”

K: That still doesn’t even make any sense. I don’t think the very fact of going into estrus is the same thing as invitation and consent; that opens up a whole other can of worms which is, are animals sentient enough -to- consent. I’m not philosophically or biologically or ethically equipped to answer that question. But I do wonder why they are trying to equate the Gethenians to ‘lesser’ mammals.

J: Right. Being.. ready for sex and interested in sex is not.. being willing to have it with a particular person! Plus.. I don’t see any reason someone in kemmer couldn’t rape someone not in kemmer. It does not require a vagina. Which we don’t even know if they have or don’t have when not in kemmer, because we don’t have quite enough detail about that.

K: Yeah. Do they have a smooth area? Are they Ken? But it doesn’t matter, since as you say, rape doesn’t require a vagina. Any kind of orifice will do, and of course sexual assault or molestation doesn’t even require that much.

J: “The genitals engorge or shrink accordingly.” Which says to /me/ that they have something on the outside, but Estraven says something to contradict that later.

J: You’d think forcing someone into kemmer would also be a form of sexual assault. Whether you did it chemically or by putting them in proximity with someone else in kemmer.

K: Yes, I agree. And these are sentient beings — humans — so just because they’re essentially in heat doesn’t mean they /have/ to have sex or want to have sex with /you/. I saw no evidence (and a lot of direct contradiction) that they were overwhelmed by lust with no control over themselves and willing to have sex with whoever was there.

J: Yea. Vulcans they’re not.

J: One last thing I had. Estraven dying seemed abrupt and pointless. I didn’t see it coming. (And since I’ve read this at least three times now, I should’ve!) Just.. dying for the sake of the main character learning something about himself. Or something. :P

K: It did seem kind of useless. Aside from Genly not having to go visit Estre at the end, I’m not completely sure what the use of the death was. Genly’s non-death was what brought about the change in governments; his ship was called before Estraven went on his suicide run; no one other than Genly seemed really to care.

K: Speaking of which, were we ever told why the Gethenians were so against suicide?

J: I don’t think so. Does that sort of thing need a reason?

K: Yes! The taboo against suicide in Catholicism is because you’ve committed a grave sin (murder) without being able to repent of it and confess and be cleansed. So you have no chance of going to heaven. Entirely logical if that’s your belief system. If you don’t have some reason, why would anyone care?

J: Well, I could theorize reasons. Harsh environment and low birth rate means everyone able to work and/or contribute to society is needed. But yea, I don’t think it’s explained.

K: Well, on the flip side, if you kill yourself, they no longer need to provide for you. So you’ve saved them energy and food and resources. So I’m not entirely sure that works — in any case, I just thought it was a weird little thing that got thrown in.

J: I think that about covers everything I wanted to say. I have a book of Joanna Russ reviews and essays and there’s at least two places in that where she talks about this book. So I’m interested in reading those and seeing her take on things.

K: I’m still not sure what I really think of this book. It definitely had a lot of different ideas in it, but on the other hand, I cannot say I enjoyed it or found the story coherent enough to pass my own personal threshold of ‘good’.

J: I liked it less this time than before. Well, maybe. I saw more flaws. But I also saw other things I’m sure I didn’t see before. All the political stuff that was going on and how the two nations were different.

K: Yeah. She did illustrate that pretty well, though in the end it wasn’t clear to me what the government of Karhide actually did for the people.

J: Threw parades for them.

K: Heh. So the next one up is Ringworld, which is another one I confuse with other books. Riverworld and Discworld both sound too similar!

J: It doesn’t just make you think of Ringworm?

K: That too.

J’s Take on Skyfall by Catherine Asaro

Skyfall comes first in the internal chronology of Asaro’s Skolian Empire series, but was not the first book published in it. This is the first one I’ve read, though I will eventually have to read more to catch up to Quantum Rose, which won the Nebula in 2001. (Look for it in The Nebula Project in October of 2012 if we keep up our current pace.)

I didn’t know too much about the book or the series going into it. Just that it was classified as space opera, and that there were quite a lot of books. And that it was written by a woman. So parallels to Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga were inevitable. I liked that, so why shouldn’t I like this? And why haven’t I read any of this before?

I’m not quite sure what to make of Skyfall. On the one hand, I did enjoy parts of it, and might even enjoy it more on a second read. But mostly throughout the book, I had a feeling of… I don’t know where this is going. We start out with an important woman on her way to an important vote. And then the whole plot where I thought we were headed seems to get derailed as she ends up on this out-of-the-way planet and then.. gets kidnapped/wanders off into the mountains rather than wait for her ride home. Then it seems to be this bizarre romance story.

We start switching points of view between her and her son, and I start thinking about Dune. And what’s with all these books about men and their mothers?

Nearing the end of the book, it got really good. And by the time I finished reading it, I finally felt like I understood where all the earlier stuff had been headed and why it was there. Which is why I think I might enjoy it more on a reread. I think especially if I reread it after having read more of this series.

Because I do think, from my limited perspective at this point, that this book would’ve made more sense and been a more enjoyable read, had I had some background in this series before. So that maybe the proper way to read this series isn’t internal chronology, but by publication date.

But, I don’t know. I could be wrong. Barring memory disorders, you can’t read a series for the first time both ways and do a true comparison.

I did sneak a peek at the family tree at the back of this book. Enough to realize I did not want to look at it closely! There must definitely be spoilers in there for what comes ‘next’ (‘previously’). There’s a definite spoiler in there for this book, so I’ve warned my fellow TTers. I hope they heed the warning. I know the extras like this are more tempting for others than they are for me. I didn’t even look at the other supplemental information. Spoilers = Bad!

Will I read more of this series? Yes. But if I didn’t have Quantum Rose scheduled on my plate, I probably wouldn’t go back to this series so soon. I’m not dying to absorb all of them one after the other. To be fair though, I still have 2 Vorkosigan books I’m behind on. And I do love those. Maybe I’m just not much of a series marathoner.

Doubletake: J on I Am J

You might guess why I Am J by Cris Beam caught my eye. I am J! How much more awesome was it when I learned it was about a transgender teen? Though I have to tell him, J is not a good artist name. Bad Googlefu. I even wimped out on my name badge at work and wrote it Jae. People can handle two initials. AJ, PJ, etc. But one letter just doesn’t work so well.

Case in point, while reading it was easy to mistake J for I. Just like 3-letter names that look a little too much like You aren’t good either.

This book starts off using the male pronoun for J, even though at the beginning, he hasn’t yet articulated to himself that he’s transgender. He just knows that, even though he has a crush on his female best friend, he’s not a lesbian. I sort of liked that. Sometimes books like this just start out with the teen knowing who they are and only having to go through the process of convincing everyone else. In this one, he was still wrestling the idea of his own identity.

All is not sweetness and light in the land of J either. Full of angst! He runs away, then comes back. Then runs away with more planning, and gets hooked up with a teen shelter and an LGBT high school. Then gets dragged back home. He tells his mother, who then basically (but nicely, if manipulatively and sneakily) kicks him out.

In contrast to Parrotfish and Luna, this gets quite heavily into the nitty gritty. For instance, just as I was wondering what happens if you start taking testosterone and then stop, the book tells me. I wouldn’t say it’s exactly a how-to manual, but it does answer many questions you might have about the whole thing.

I did find a couple of things difficult to believe. He reads up on testosterone on the Internet, and then something like a day later, he’s thinking of it as T. Isn’t that something you’d pick up after being part of a community? And why didn’t he reach out on forums and things to other transmen? He just decides one day to go to the clinic and try to get some ‘T’. Like.. didn’t anything he read online tell him you can’t just do that? I think even Oprah (aww, she just had her last show) knows you need a brain doctor to approve that sort of thing.

And then to just be able to waltz into an LGBT high school! Jeez, must be nice to live in a big city where they have high schools for everything! That’s almost like living in a fairy tale. It’s hard for me to believe those even exist. When my choice of high school was the public school or the Catholic school in the next town. Is there even an LGBT college? Hrrm.

Speaking of colleges, his mother is all ‘Apply to college. Here’s some applications I got for you.’ And then he carries those things around for awhile, and I’m like.. what? What year is this? Paper! Paper applications?! Snail mail?! I mean, I suppose some of them might still exist, but not the big schools.. not most schools?

All in all, I’m glad this book exists. There definitely needs to be more like it. When the only two I can think of are also the only two listed in the additional reading at the back of the book, well… Still, I did enjoy Parrotfish much more. So if you only want to read one, read that one.

I Am J is another voice in a very small crowd, and I’m glad it exists. Plus, still gotta love that title.

Nebula Project: Flowers for Algernon

What follows is a spoiler laden discussion of the book Flowers for Algernon. Beware if youâ€™re worried about such things.

Tying with Babel-17 for the Nebula in 1966, Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes tells the story of Charlie Gordon, a man with an IQ of 70 who works in a bakery, and how his life changes when he undergoes a procedure to increase his intelligence. He learns to look at his former life differently, even as he tries to fit in with the people around him as his intelligence catches up to theirs and even surpasses it.

J: I think I may’ve read the novella (was it a novella?) version of this in high school. And only a couple of years ago, I read the novel. So here I was reading it again! But while I remembered the generalities, I didn’t remember the specifics. So it wasn’t too bad reading it again.

K: I also found I had a very poor memory of the story. The vast majority of it seemed new, even though I remembered the basic plot structure. I could have sworn I’d read the novel version, but honestly I have no idea given how little of it I apparently retained. I guess that’s understandable given that it must have been 20 years ago, but I was a bit surprised.

J: Yea, that idea occurred to me briefly too. That maybe I’d missed something before.

K: I do remember reading it very quickly last time. I’m not sure why. I think the subject matter — someone gaining intelligence only to have it ripped away from him — made me uncomfortable at the time. And as a parent of a multiply disabled child I have to say it made me even more uncomfortable now.

J: I can’t really remember my first reaction to the concept, since it was high school. But I know I wasn’t a fan of the idea. And this reading, I wasn’t reading for enjoyment at all. I was reading it to find fault with it. Mainly in his portrayal of Charlie to start with.

K: I can’t say I was reading to find fault; I was more reading to get through. But I was definitely looking to see if the portrayal felt well-researched and not exploitative in some way. I can’t say my conclusions are definitive in either way. I read that Keyes based Charlie on intellectually disabled children that he had worked with, but somehow what came through to me on the page felt very much like an outsider’s view of mental retardation. What someone -thinks- it must be like. Not necessarily what it really is like.

J: Yea. It kind of made me want to read something(s) actually written by someone of Charlie’s ability. There must be a collection like that out there somewhere, right? Maybe? It’s really easy to fall back on spelling, grammar, punctuation as a ‘gimmick’ to demonstrate it. Like how the movie is called Charly with a backwards r, even though he spells his own name correctly in the book. Same thing with Hagrid, actually. In the movie, it’s made out like he can’t write properly. Nice and visual for a movie, I suppose, but..

K: Yeah. But the backwards letters suggests different disabilities to me than what they were going for in the book. So even though the book is told from Charlie’s point of view, I was suspicious of his point of view at the beginning. It didn’t feel entirely authentic to me. Even though I have no real information upon which to base that opinion.

J: Right. One thing I started to take objection to was that they kept referring to him as like a child. And that just didn’t sound right to me. In one aspect, perhaps, but mostly, no, he’s not like a child, he’s an adult. And although Charlie’s really good at saying the ‘old’ him was a person, he never said he was an adult. He went along with the child analogy.

K: You’re right. I hadn’t really thought about it, but I do wonder about the whole ‘eternal child’ stereotype. In one sense, I suppose, yes, perhaps it’s true that he hadn’t developed emotionally or intellectually the qualities one associates with an adult. But he was an adult physically, working with adults, living with adults.

J: I was about to take objection to his lack of sexual maturity too, but then he’s got some childhood abuse stuff going on there to explain that. Which is a theme I could very well do without.

K: I don’t know. Maybe because I’m looking at this now from a parent’s perspective, but that whole subplot was the most authentic and genuine part of the book for me.

K: Not the whole sexual repression business, but the abuse and the way his family fell apart because of his disability.

J: I’m not saying it was unbelievable, especially at the time he would’ve been a child. Um.. 1940s? It’s just a theme I’m not a fan of in books.

K: I can see that. But while child abuse in general is kind of a popular theme, I think these particular circumstances are not always portrayed very accurately. Keyes did a good job there. The way his mom swung from the extreme of desperately trying to help him no matter what the cost to the other extreme of blaming him for not trying and taking out her frustrations on him — those are feelings I’m very familiar with, unfortunately. Especially with the complete lack o support and services a family at that time would have had. Even today it’s not really a whole lot better. The number of marriages that break down due to a very sick or disabled kid is incredible.

J: I don’t know how personal you want to get, but I think you and Bob are incredible at that. When something new comes up, you find a way to make things work.

J: In Charlie’s situation, from what limited knowledge of PKU I have, Charlie would’ve only been getting worse as a child, rather than improving.

K: Yes, I wanted to talk about that. I was surprised when they mentioned a specific reason for his retardation. My first thought, of course, was better not eat any aspartame.

K: The irony being that PKU can be controlled with diet and people with it can live a normal life if it’s caught when they’re born in an infant screening.

J: It is surprising he named it. And then did some weird pseudo-science handwavey explanation of the procedure. Why not leave it vague if you weren’t going to get very specific?

J: Or maybe the scientific/medical explanation was more explicit than I thought and it only seemed like it wasn’t to me. I know it involved implanting new brain tissue (from where?!) and enzymes, I think…?

K: No, the description of the procedure was oddly specific and vague at the same time. I wasn’t at all clear where the new brain tissue was coming from. But in the manner of speculative fiction, in some ways it almost sounded like stem cells if you took out some of the obviously dated technology.

K: And of course the ‘flaw’ that Charlie discovered really ought to have been that since he didn’t change his diet at all, even his brain transplant should have been damaged directly by his same condition!

J: Heh. Yea.

J: Here’s the quote. “But first, we remove the damaged portions of the brain and permit the implanted brain tissue which has been chemically revitalized to produce brain proteins at a supernormal rate.” And I think that’s pretty much it for explanations!

K: Yeah. It sounds like a transplant to me. But still there’s no clear source for the transplanted tissue. I suspect that the technobabble wasn’t really meant to be the point, hence the hand-wavyness of the idea here. On the other hand, PKU is real, it really causes retardation, and it really can occur in mice. So we have some really specific, accurate information and some hardly believable randomness.

J: Yea. Though given that description, as vague as it is, of the brain surgery, they were awfully blithe about ‘oh, no danger, not really!’

J: They all seemed certain the surgery itself would go just fine. No complications whatsoever. Because it worked on mice.

K: Yeah. I don’t think much of these scientists. They seemed to be operating without any kind of real oversight even though they were experimenting on a human.

J: Yea. That would’ve been more believable if they were actually at that institution he visited. All sorts of experiments went on in those places up until fairly recently, unfortunately.

K: Yeah. Though the brief glimpse we saw of it, the people there all seemed rather more sincere and altruistic than the group at the University.

J: I wondered why Charlie didn’t have any friends who were peers. He went to school for years, but never made friends with any of his classmates?

K: That was very strange. Certainly people greeted him when he went back to visit the school. He really didn’t seem to have any community at all — when we see him go out with those guys from the bakery, I didn’t get the impression that this was a regular thing.

J: Yea. Did we even see where he was living? I think he was living at the bakery or with the owner? Maybe?

K: No, it sounded like he was living in a boarding house or some kind of cheap apartment. He didn’t have to move after he got fired from the bakery.

J: So do you think it sounded like a genuine genius when he reached that level? Or like an outsider’s view of it?

K: He certainly sounded like someone’s perception of a genius. A little too geniussy, though. Picking up languages in a week, learning neuroscience in… a week. Composing piano concertos in… a week. There may well be people who are that polymathic but it strained credulity quite a lot.

J: And yet seemed perfectly able to remain intelligible in his progress report entries. Even though he made whatshername.. Alice feel like an idiot just by talking to her.

K: Except I didn’t quite see why, from the part of their conversation we saw.

J: Other than because she’s a girl?

K: There were some girl issues, but I’m not sure that was it. Keyes seemed to want to equate genius with taking no pleasure in normal things, but somehow living on a higher plane. Charlie felt like he was above all those common people talking about their common philosophies and topics in the cafeteria. It was kind of annoying — like, by being smart, you -couldn’t- be interested in normal stuff anymore. Which is complete nonsense.

J: And that all academics are so deep in their speciality that they can’t converse on tangents related to it.

K: It was a very stereotypical view of a genius disconnected from the real world. And a pretty cynical view of academia.

J: I agree.

K: And then the girl issue. I did have to keep reminding myself we were in Mad Men era, but I still wasn’t really thrilled by the female characters. Not that any of the supporting male characters were much better, but they at least seemed to have personal agendas.

J: The girls really bothered me. Especially as we do see the example of Babel-17 which won /in the same year/. And that was so much better on that front.

K: It really was. Even though Rydra has a lot of issues, they weren’t a -lack- of motivation and agency. Here we have Fay, who pretty much exists to drink and have sex with, and Alice, who pretty much exists to angst over, pick up his room, and have sex with. Rose, his mother, is portrayed as almost pathological for her completely natural (if ultimately abusive) reaction to Charlie’s retardation — and in the end, we see that she’s also lost her mind and ability to function, just like Charlie.

J: And again, like Dune, we have.. mother, sister, lover, lover. Plus added to that, it’s teacher, some nurses. When we have a chance to see some actual women scientists, maybe, they’re all busy jumping on chairs and screaming because a mouse is loose.

K: I didn’t even notice any women in that scene. Heh.

J: You didn’t? It was pretty obvious. Hrrm. Are there differences in our copies?

K: No, no, I probably didn’t read it very closely. But let me look

J: “..until a woman at the table screamed, knocking her chair backwards as she leaped to her feet.” “Some of the women (non-experimentalists?) tried to stand on the unstable folding chairs while others, trying to help corner Algernon, knocked them over.” “Seconds later, half a dozen women came screaming out of the powder room, skirts clutched frantically around their legs.”

K: Yeah, I just found that section. I really didn’t read the whole escape scene very closely. I remember feeling I was skimming it when I read it, but I couldn’t tell you why I did.

J: He made that paranthentical after I had been wondering what the heck scientists were doing being freaked about a mouse. And I see that the second quote may have meant some of the women where trying to corner him, ineffectually. No excuse for that bathroom bit though!

J: You know, I skimmed it too. I just must’ve started my skim later than you did.

J: I had to actively go back and reread ‘wait, why’s he in the bathroom?’. I remember that. And then I wasn’t paying attention to the last bit of that section either.

J: So, no, not a skim for me. I just spaced out.

K: I remember thinking, when I got to the end of it, I never saw him pick up the mouse even though I know he had Algernon in his pocket or something. But I didn’t go back and look at it again.

J: Then I was busy wondering how he got a mouse on a plane!

K: I did read the part before the escape, because it describes again the whole theory of what they were doing.

K: Ha. You can still do that NOW. No surprise he could do it in the 60s.

J: Do you think he knew it was going to be a movie at this point? Did he add the scene for its movie comedic potential?

K: I don’t know. We’d probably have to compare the original with the novel version.

J: Do you want me to borrow the movie? I sort of want to see it and I sort of don’t.

K: I don’t have any particular interest in the movie.

J: Nice how this book gets shelved in our ‘classics’ and is also labeled ‘fiction’ by the publisher. No, nope sci-fi here, move along please.

K: Yeah. I wouldn’t have pegged this as science fiction, though I can see the argument for that classification. But in the ‘you know it when you see it’ category, I can see why this book is so popular as a school assignment.

K: Otherwise, I’m not sure how this book holds up. Obviously the actual problem described (PKU) has been ‘solved’ in some sense, because there is infant screening for it and a diet which can mitigate most of the damage.

J: While there are still people researching how to make people smarter. Still, in today’s climate, they’d be facing so much scrutiny that I don’t think this experiment would ever get off the ground. At least outside of mice.

K: This particular experiment, no. But they are doing a lot of work with stem cells to heal brain injury. Which might help with my daughter’s disabilities at some point. But brain transplant is definitely not happening any time soon.

J: I just envision a lot of pushback them doing it on adults who, at least with Charly, only seem to have a low IQ. He doesn’t suffer from the seizures that Wikipedia (a good source!) says is fairly common for PKU.

K: Yes, I can see that. But if you’re trying to heal a brain injury rather than ‘cure retardation’ you have a much wider source of subjects. And it also sounds a lot less controversial.

J: Very true.

J: I just realized I spelled it Charly. Dangit. Is it just the English major I once, momentarily, was that makes me see the whole thing as a metaphor for children growing up to surpass their parents? In this case, the scientists as well as the actual parents.

K: Nope. Because I read that Keyes was basing it a bit on being the English speaking/well-educated child of immigrants.

K: So good catch.