Category: discussion

Nebula Project: Rendezvous with Rama

In the 22nd century, humans have spread out all over the Solar System, colonizing everywhere from Mercury to the moons of the gas giants. But in spite of their expansion, the fabled ‘space drive’ has still eluded scientists and many believe it’s not even possible to construct.

The Nebula Project returns from hiatus with a guest panelist (K’s husband Bob, able to, among other things, provide a male perspective) and a discussion of Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama.

In the 22nd century, humans have spread out all over the Solar System, colonizing everywhere from Mercury to the moons of the gas giants. But in spite of their expansion, the fabled ‘space drive’ has still eluded scientists and many believe it’s not even possible to construct. All is thrown into question by the appearance of a strange object which enters the Solar System on a course to swing around the sun. The object is clearly artificial — the work of another race. The spaceship Endeavour is the only ship within range of its projected path and thus its crew is given the task of making contact with the object, now named “Rama”, and attempting to collect as much information as possible before its path goes too close to the sun for humans to follow. Though the collective governments of the various human settlements are excited by this unprecedented arrival, they are also quite nervous: is Rama a threat? The Endeavour crew will need to try and discover that as well.

J: I’d read some Arthur C. Clarke when I was a teenager. I thought Rendezvous with Rama would be easy to read and interesting. But.. not so much. My overall impression after having read it is that it would’ve made a far more interesting short story.

B: I could certainly see this being adapted to a short story form, although it would mean cutting some things out. And you could probably cut out things like the lengthy explanations of the politics of the situation, or some of the background technologies that could have just been left for granted. But I actually kind of appreciate having them there, even it means the story progresses at a glacial pace.

K: It definitely does progress at a glacial pace. But I actually did like that: I agree with J that the story could easily have been shortened, but it would have ended up a much different story in that case. It was clear that Clarke had given a lot of thought to what technologies might be found in this environment and why and he wanted to get across very clearly the issues that humans were going to encounter when attempting to understand a completely alien species with nothing but a single (very large) artifact from which to draw conclusions. So I felt like the pace was justified, and I didn’t find it too boring. Slow, but not boring. Though I also had a hard time shaking a feeling of forboding; it really really read in parts like a horror novel, and I couldn’t help but keep waiting for something inexplicably awful to happen.

J: If the characters had been.. actual characters, I wouldn’t have minded so much. I guess I’m just not into the ‘explore this strange thing’ as the main driving point of a novel.

B: The characters were fairly generic, I will give you that. They did not go far beyond the archetypes they were modeled after, other than little personal touches like the captain’s multiple families, that engineer guy’s religious background, and so forth. But expanding on K’s point, not only did Clarke go to great lengths to write about the challenges of exploring an alien environment, he also spent a lot of time on the background challenges as well — getting the approval of governments, getting funding, maintaining public support… I cannot think of many examples of stories that go that far into the depth of the situation. It comes at the expense of interesting characters, certainly, but if you can get past that, there is a lot there that is still interesting.

K: Yes, the characters were absolutely generic. Even though there were some passing efforts made at establishing a backstory for them, they didn’t add much, if anything, to the story. Things were just stated about them – such as the random existence of plural marriage – without explanation or context. I didn’t exactly want an infodump on the socioeconomic status of the Solar System, but if you’re going to bring up interesting social points, you shouldn’t just lob them out there and let them thunk on the ground without further attention. It was distracting. I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out things about the various planetary/colonial societies when that was neither the focus nor the purpose of the book.

J: I was definitely hoping to see these wives of the captain. Why they married him, since he’s such a jerk about it, writing them generic letters. And that, yea, I think it’s _one_ mention of these other two guys who are together and have a wife/girlfriend back home. Instead the guy who seems to get the most attention and screentime is the guy who flies around.

B: Well, Jimmy (of course his name was Jimmy) was just about the only character who saw any actual action. Everyone else mostly climbed up and down stairs, looked through telescopes, or cut into things. (Alright, I’m oversimplifying a little — there was a lot of background activity — but almost none of it was anything I would call action.) Also, until the very end, he is the only one who actually discovered anything concrete about Rama. It was his trip that really provided the most clues, by a large margin, about what Rama was actually doing out in space.Getting back to the sociopolitical info-dump for a second though, I think that was Arthur C. Clarke, Futurist, seeping through into the story. I read a bunch of other essays of his with much of the same kind of thing — in the future, there will be fewer social restrictions, buildings will be way sturdier, people will stop wearing clothing, etc. As far as what goes on in the story, though, you can pretty much ignore all of it.

K: That is interesting. I’ve not really read a great deal of his writing, so I just had this to go on, and I found it very difficult to pin down his views from here. (On social issues, that is.) On the one hand, societies which allow a man to have more than one wife are typically regressive and patriarchal. But here we also have the suggestion that women can have more than one husband — though he then sort of negates that by suggesting the guys may have come up with the idea and that they’re also bi. (Progressive in and of itself, but it doesn’t speak toward the status of women.) So there was progressiveness, but it wasn’t pervasive in all aspects of life. Judging just from this book alone, I can’t say I’m impressed with his future thoughts on the place of women in society. Yes, they are there on the ship – there’s even more than one – but their authority is either low or outside the general command structure. And there appears to be only one female scientist on the big Alien Encounter Council they convene (though for a few minutes I thought there would be zero, so at least we avoided that scenario.)

J: Yup. And his wives are both at (separate) homes taking care of the kids. Just a very typical arrangement, especially for a ship captain. He just happens to have two of them. Along with women, the society or societies if you want to call all the other planets/colonies that seemed also very white American/European. Despite calling it Rama, which we can discuss by itself, I only saw like one or two character names that could’ve been Indian or Asian. Even though it would’ve been dead simple to throw in names from all over. And for character descriptions, I don’t think he ever bothered to specify what race people were. At least for the most part.. my memory may be iffy here.

B: This book certainly does not come off as a shining example of progressive thinking, but it’s definitely farther than it could have been. If it were rewritten now, the captain would probably have been a woman with multiple husbands, and there would have been a greater diversity of ethnicities, genders and ages. Then again, he leaves so much to the imagination as far as the characters go, they really could have been any ethnicity, if not for their names. (Come to think of it, Jimmy’s last name, according to my five minutes of internet research to refresh my memory, is “Pak” — so his ethnicity could be debatable.) On the other hand, we are talking about a book from almost 40 years ago, so the progressive movement wasn’t as far along as it is now, so I’ll give him at least some credit there.

K: I definitely read Jimmy as of Asian ancestry of some sort. Perhaps because of the last name, or maybe it was even stated, I’m not sure. In any case, I think it’s true that most of the characters have so little information provided that there’s no reason they had to be white, though one might get the impression Clarke imagined them to be so. But I don’t think there’s any real proof either way. He was definitely far more interested in the thought experiment of the aliens.

J: Clarke had been living in Sri Lanka for more than 10 years by that point. Which makes me think he could’ve done a better job of making things appear global. From what little I know/remember of his other work, he is big on aliens. And on aliens that are more advanced than us. And the way those machines were eating things, it’s very easy to visualize this as an anime.

B: I definitely agree there: this is a story about humanity exploring an alien landscape. The actual representatives of humanity in the story are generic and forgettable — you can basically replace any of them with someone else and not affect the story in any significant way, as long as their actions are the same. But it’s all about human curiosity and the drive to investigate and understand everything trumping all of the forces that hold us back, like fear of the unknown, or fear of investing resources into pure science with no guarantee of a practical return. Really, the explorers in the story got nothing actually useful out of Rama — they didn’t bring back any new technologies, didn’t gain any really useful scientific knowledge — but the overall feeling from the story was that the trip was worth taking anyway.

K: Didn’t gain any immediate insights or scientific knowledge. I think it’s important to keep in mind that they didn’t expect to make any big breakthroughs while they were there; they weren’t equipped for it or trained. They were just collecting samples and data. And they did collect quite a bit of that. Of course, the book ends with the setup for the sequel, so I don’t know whether or not we get to see there scentific progress based on the fact that scientists now -know- this space drive is possible; that three legged creatures are a viable evolutionary branch; that organic machines are a way to achieve long-term space flight etc. etc.

J: It was surprising to me that the.. I think it was a xenoanthropologist? He just decided in the middle of the exploration that there wasn’t going to be anything of interest and wandered off to do whatever he usually did. Teach grad students or whatever. It wasn’t worth his time to sit and watch the exploration recordings and talk to his colleagues! Dude, just because there doesn’t appear to be any living sentient creatures doesn’t mean there isn’t things to study once it was clear it wasn’t a natural object. But anyway, at least some of the people thought they should be investigating it as a potential threat. And we humans love to investigate potential threats. We’ll commit all sorts of resources to that. Especially if it’s a potential imminent threat, and Rama was moving pretty quick.

B: Or assume that it is a threat, and try to blow it up — the good old 1% doctrine. Anyway, yeah, I guess I wasn’t thinking through all of the potential scientific benefits of the investigation, including the not-to-be-underestimated boost in support for science when people see what it is capable of when it is allowed to advance. That kind of goes along with other things I remember from the essays I read — how, for example, many inventions and technologies people use in their everyday lives came directly from technologies developed by NASA for the space program. The implication in the story was that if humanity had not been as active in space as it had been, there was no way we could have made it to Rama.

K: Or even been able to get a very good look at it from afar.

K: I did find it interesting that he spent a good bit of time during the first portion of the book talking about near-space collisions with asteroids and kind of attempting to justify why they might be looking for objects like Rama. Because scientists do that all the time nowadays, don’t they? It’s always in the news that some comet might have hit Earth but its trajectory will take it past without any issue. Was that started up after this book? Was it started because of this book?

J: I wouldn’t be surprised if Clarke was behind that somehow, if not this book in particular. It’s nice to think we’ll have the capability of blowing stuff up if we need to. Which I don’t think we currently do at the moment. So we’re watching for stuff, but we can’t do anything about it except shout ‘Duck!’.

B: I actually think I may have read something about near-earth objects in one of those essays as well, or I may just be imagining it, but I also wouldn’t surprised at all if Clarke was influential in getting that program going, at least by drawing attention to the need to have it. And of course, if you listen to scientists, they will tell you it is not a question of *if* we will one day have to contend with an actual planet-killing asteroid headed our way, but when. Not that listening to scientists is fashionable these days. But that is one of the reasons stories like this are good to have — because it’s one thing to say, “Science says we should be doing this,” but it’s another to create an interesting narrative that actually gives reasons why.

K: I suspect if you talked to the average person about planet-killing asteroids, they’d have more to say about Bruce Willis or Elijah Woods than Arthur C. Clarke.

K: It’s always interesting to me what sorts of bees authors get in their bonnets. Clarke obviously had several here: objects approaching Earth; a realistic scenario for an alien encounter (ie, one without any actual aliens); the way in which humanity may respond to perceived threats. But he also visited another trope none too dear to my heart. Yes, I’m afraid Rendezvous with Rama saw the return of the Perky Space Boobs. What the hell is the fascination with this idea?

J: It’s mandatory for any science fiction novel that takes place partly in space or low gravity. Though curiously you never see it mentioned on coverage of actual space missions. ‘Bill, please tell us what the astronauts are wearing.’ ‘Who cares? Look how perky those boobs are!’

K: It’s ridiculous! First, I sincerely doubt the ‘lift’ would be all that noticeable, and in practical terms most women wear something to keep them in one spot anyway. Seems to me men are far more likely to have something unrestrained to float around. But that never seems to be mentioned.

B: I’m going to refrain from analyzing this one, except to say that personally, I don’t care if this trope lives or dies.

J: I’ll bring it back to the name Rama then. All the Roman and Greek Gods were used up, so they moved to Indian ones. But that’s a living religion. Unless it’s not in the future of this book? I just can’t see people saying ‘Hey, here’s this weird thing coming. We’re up to J on the rotation. Shall we go for Judas or Jesus?’

K: Well, yes. Who do you think named it Jupiter? It wasn’t the Pope! It was the Romans trying to honor their god. So I don’t find the use of Rama incongruous at all.

J: Well, Jupiter is a big planet, which is hanging around. This is more on the order of an asteroid or comet that wandered by. I just think it’d make more sense to me if it was named after someone more minor. Or if it was Hindus doing the naming.

B: Well, since Christianity only has the one god, you wouldn’t want to go naming it Jehovah unless you want the name to have world-ending implications, so the nearest equivalent would be to pick from the names of angels, which would have seemed appropriate enough. But I honestly can’t say I know enough about Indian religions to judge just how appropriate Rama is as a name. My traditional five minutes of internet research when I do not know something has not brought me any closer to figuring it out, so I’m going to have to defer to people who know more about it.

K: I don’t think we’re given any indication that Indian astronomers were not part of the international body that decided on how to start naming these things. Though the Roman names won out for most of the planets, we still use many of the Arabic names for stars; the Chinese and the Indians had their own traditional names for the planets and stars and other visible objects, many of which were, surprise, the names of gods. I just really don’t find it to be disrespectful or outlandish. Maybe a Hindu person would disagree, but I really cannot make that call.

J: So there is a movie planned, right? I guess I’d be interested in seeing it. Though I hope it’s not as dull as 2001! I think I might have to wait for the DVD though. In case it is very dull. I can do something else while I watch it.

K: It might be more impactful on a big screen. Or 3D IMAX. It seems like the kind of movie that would be improved by increasing the sense of size.

B: It definitely has all of the components needed for a good movie. I’m sure it’d get the Hollywood treatment — lots of CGI, romantic subplots, more perky zero-G boobage — but I’d probably still be willing to give it a chance.

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Nebula Project: The Gods Themselves

In the late 21st century, humans were contacted by beings from another universe. These beings provided what looked to be the answer to Earth’s energy problems: an endless source of power with only minimal side-effects.

What follows is a spoiler laden discussion of the book The Gods Themselves. Beware if you’re worried about such things.

In the late 21st century, humans were contacted by beings from another universe. These beings provided what looked to be the answer to Earth’s energy problems: an endless source of power with only minimal side-effects. A consequence of this development was the near canonization of the man who happened to be there when the contact was made, and many scientists (more worthy, at least in their own minds) resent this. Thus there is much to be gained by someone who can discover and prove that the “electron pump” is not nearly as perfect as it’s been made out to be.

K: We’ve both just finished The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov, the next winner in our Nebula list. Considering Asimov’s relative fame, it’s about time he showed up in the list! As far as I can tell, this book is a stand-alone unrelated to any of the series he worked on. Its plot centers around something called the “Electron Pump”, which has been established recently on Earth as a pretty much limitless source of energy. The book is divided into three sections which all tell parts of the story but which are only pretty loosely tied to one another.

J: Yea, in a way it was like reading 3 short stories. Or maybe novelettes. Not sure how long they all were individually. It felt to me kind of like reading Connie Willis (only more boring), followed by James Tiptree, followed by hrm.. not really Samuel Delany, it wasn’t weird enough by half. In short, they were all quite different in tone, POV, plot, everything.

K: They were definitely longer than short stories. And I can’t really compare them to most of those authors, though I have to disagree with your assessment about their differences. Part 2 was definitely distinctly different, but parts 1 and 3 were very similar, even though they focused on different characters.

J: Oh, they were definitely fairly similar. But they didn’t fit the same pattern. Part 1 was ‘scientists blather on about something’. Part 3 was ‘living on the moon is weird’. It actually surprised me when they were on the moon. Was there any hint in part 1 that there were people living on the moon?

K: See, that’s not how I read part 1’s pattern. To me, part 1 was ‘academic infighting’. And part 3 was ‘academic infighting on the moon’. So they were the same, just the scenery was different. I can’t say as I had picked up in part 1 that there was a lunar colony, though, no.

J: Should we take this in sections and talk about part 1 first?

K: Let’s. So part 1 we have a young scientist who has managed to tick off Dr. Hallam, who has managed to accrue all of the credit for ‘inventing’ the “Electron Pump”. As a result he has enormous influence and can easily ruin careers. The young guy is understandably annoyed at this so decides he’s going to try and find a flaw in the Electron Pump and bring down Hallam.

J: If you say so. No, I mean, I followed the plot okay. It was just so dull. It was a lot of talking heads. Except once I think someone pulled an orange out of his pocket to eat it. And while it wasn’t quite ever ‘as you know, Bob’, it was darned close to that for most of the first few sections. And the only woman in the whole section was a ‘graduate student’. So, yay for being a graduate student. But she was only mentioned as someone’s date. And we never see her or anything. It briefly got interesting when they were talking to people on the other side of the pump, but I was quite ready to speed read my way through the rest of the book if it was going to go on like that. It seemed to be all idea and no substance.

K: I agree it was not interesting as presented. I thought the idea of the pump was interesting, and I had to read it a few times before I had that settled in my head, but the characters were indistinguishable from one another. Completely. Pete and Myron and Bill and Bob and whatever. In my head they were all nerds in white shirts with ties and pocket protectors. I was both annoyed and disappointed to see that Asimov’s imagination couldn’t stretch far enough to include any women among the scientists at all — I just skimmed through and couldn’t spot the graduate reference, but my feeling is she wasn’t a scientist at all but some kind of humanities student. But that’s it. The senator? A dude. The environmental activist? A dude.

J: I don’t think what she’s a graduate student in is ever stated or implied. So yea, I definitely wouldn’t give him any credit for making her a science student. He only gets points for not calling her a ‘coed’. And I had a hard time telling everyone apart too. Their characters were entirely defined by their relationship to this Pump idea. The scientific underpinnings of which I didn’t think about too hard. I trust Asimov to know his physics better than me. And if I wasn’t going to pick apart the science, then no reason to think about it too much. ;)

K: I suppose not. There’s plenty to pick apart otherwise. This whole section is meandering and unfocused; it seems to have two or three or even more primary purposes: One, to establish the history of the Electron Pump and how Dr. Hallam opportunistically came to power in scientific circles. Two, to float the possibility there may be soemthing wrong with the idea. Three, to engage in a confusing philosophical discussion of whether or not the entities in the para-Universe are smarter than humans or simply more technologically advanced. Four, to randomly talk about linguistic challenges. Five, to make you fall asleep. There were a lot of ideas packed in here which weren’t really given a chance to flourish — instead, they were all treated in the most cursory and boring way possible.

J: He did a good job on Five then! I have to say that Part 1, if it had been the entirety of the book, would’ve made me seriously question what the SFWA members were thinking when they nominated it, let alone voted it to win.

K: I’d have to agree with you there! Are you ready to move on to section 2?

J: Yup. Part 2 was just soooo much better. Not that it didn’t have things I take issue with. But at least it was interesting!

K: Part 2 was a big surprise for me, considering part 1. In part 2 we shift entirely to the para-universe and it suddenly starts feeling like a science fiction novel instead of something set in amongst present-day whiny scientists. There were definitely some issues I had with this section, but it fired the imagination in a way that neither part 1 nor part 3 did for me.

J: Yea, exactly. It was different. And that part of why it was different was it was doing interesting sex and gender stuff only helped make it interesting to me personally. As a bonus, I could like the characters.

K: I’m not sure if the characters were really three dimensional enough for me to like them, though I definitely was interested in them, and what they were going to do. I was also interested in their world, their species, and everything that was going on there. I liked the way Asimov tried to come up with a species that had three genders required for reproduction rather than just two; a lot of times authors will just throw the fact out there without actually explaining it. For me, that doesn’t work, because I have a difficult time imagining it. Here, we don’t have a lot of details, but enough to let you grasp the concept.

J: Not that I could adequately envision what they even looked like… Translucent blobs is the best I can come up with. I do take objection to which of the sexes he chose a male pronoun for and which the female. :P

K: That’s about what I came up with, though initially I had been confused by Asimov’s references to the ‘surface’ into thinking that they were living in water – hence my conflating them with jellyfish. By the end, it sounded more like they were living underground in some caves filled with air, but I still wasn’t positive. And, in fact, it didn’t really matter much. I think translucent, amorphus blob is enough.

K: And I also was annoyed by his assignment of genders. Even though he made up for it a little by having the ‘female’ be smart and brave, she was clearly depicted as being unusual; in fact the narrative makes a point of noting that the vast majority of “Emotionals”, as the females are called, are completely uninterested in anything useful beyond chattering and gossip.

J: And flirting/preening. I think the literal definition of female is the one who provides the egg. Which there didn’t seem to even be. Unless it was the Rational’s ‘seed’ that was the egg. In which case he should be the female. Either that or the incubator should’ve been the female. I don’t see how the catalyst or whatever she is would make her female. And yet.. that the two ‘males’ got together first and were flirting and whatnot was very appealing. So I would hate to have that go away by getting the pronouns more accurate.

K: Maybe, but I think here was very definitely a place where some new pronouns might have done some good. Since the assignment of ‘male’ and ‘female’ seemed otherwise arbitrary (Asimov does get points for giving the ‘Parental’ unit a male pronoun) and unrelated to our concepts of ‘male’ and ‘female’. Did he think he was being daring by having Dua, the female, essentially be the heroine of this section of the story? Would it have been different if Odeen, the intellectual male, had been an intellectual female instead, and Dua had been a male?

J: Definitely would’ve been different. Better, I dunno. There is at least one scene where Odeen’s telling her something about the para-universes and stuff and I’m thinking.. here we go again. Instead of ‘as you know, Bob’, it’s more of.. let me deliberately set someone up as the person who needs things explained to her. The role of the sidekick or lab assistant in many things. Like Robin in the 60’s Batman.

K: Yes, very convenient, that. But if you’re going to do an infodump of that nature, you really almost have to set it up that way, somehow. Because otherwise it’s just one char pontificating and all the others telling him/her to shut up, a la Brainy Smurf. I’m willing to cut a lot of slack for section 2, in spite of its defects, because I was really fascinated.

J: Yea. I was left very disappointed when we never hear about them again! Grr!

K: That was… pretty strange. It definitely contributed to the disconnected feeling between the three sections. I fully expected that after we got the backstory on the messages from the para-Universe we’d return to Earth where Lamont and that other guy were attempting to communicate with the aliens. But that’s not at all what we got.

J: Yea. We didn’t really get anything wrapped up at all. At least in my view. So in regards part 3, suddenly we’re back in our universe, but on the moon. And we get another girl! Who’s a tour guide. Sigh. Which means she gets to do a bunch of explaining about how people live on the moon. But then that gets flipped and Mr. Earthman gets to explain about the para-universes and stuff to her. And actually in this section, I do have things to say about the science. Or, at least about the science fiction.

K: Bra-less tour guide. Because everything’s more perky on the moon! And the moon people are naked, because uh, everything’s more perky on the moon? Rebelling against the (earth)man? It’s not really explained why to me. And don’t even get me started on her being named Selene. She even notes how lame it is to be named that in the text! So why do it?

J: Because the name is sex-ay. It’ll be interesting to see at what point in history we stop getting societies who like wandering around naked. Yea, no, just because your environment is pleasant doesn’t mean being naked is A) practical and B) something society is really dying to do given the first chance. As for her boobs, they are mentioned in nearly every, single, freaking scene. She brushes lint off one at some point! Why? Because… because she has boobs! Moon boobs!

K: And again, we have a girl who has been apparently bred to be magic somehow. But instead of lucky like in Ringworld, Selene’s superpower is intuition. But it’s a secret! So she has to stay a tour guide. ’cause some guy told her to. She couldn’t possibly become a scientist on her own and discover things.

J: Oh yea, that really ticked me off. And I made the same comparison to luck girl from Ringworld. Only now with the added bonus of intuition being a typically female trait already.

K: I was really puzzled by Dr. Neville, our lunar physicist. He was just so incredibly arrogant and snotty for no apparent reason. Egotistical with no justification, because he certainly wasn’t as smart as he thought he was. We’re given no reason at all to understand why Selene would listen to such a person, let alone sleep with him.

J: Yea. And then seemingly out of nowhere, we learn he wants to take the moon out into space.

K: I have to admit, I was pretty amused when the two Earth guys are all ‘yeah, so what?’

J: I can’t say as I was amused. I was boggling. Here I was trusting Asimov to have his science right and.. he didn’t foresee any problems to Earth with not having a moon suddenly? That’s sort of the whole plot to at least one series of books! Susan Beth Pfeffer’s books. And I’m pretty sure there’s a crappy sci-fi TV movie or miniseries with that as its focus too. Yea, no, I think we likes the moon right where it is. Preciousss.

K: Obviously there would be repercussions if the moon left, but in terms of what was being talked about here it was a moot point. In any case, I never felt that they really thought he was going to get to do it — they called his bluff, because really, he would never have been permitted to do it. By the Lunarites on the one hand, and frankly, by the Earth governments. We don’t really see much of government or the military in this book; there are vague references to some kind of crisis that killed 2/3rds of humanity, but we never find out what happened. Still, they surely exist and would step in if needed.

J: It was a world-wide war over who got tenure. Yea.. I dunno. I felt like this last part rambled more than the other ones. Did we need to see the gymnastics routine? No. Though I guess it’s better than people talking in offices.

K: I got the impression that, aside from the central section, which was very well structured and had development, that the beginning and the end just were kind of rambling onto whatever topic he thought might be interesting to discuss. The difficulty in speaking to a completely alien species? Sure. The effects of moon gravity on the human female form? Sure. The effects of gravity on sports and athletics? Sure. Jackassery in academia? Sure. But it was all very loosely tied together.

J: Yea. Which leaves me coming back to.. why did it win? But I guess we’ve had worse. Or at least books on par with it.

K: I dunno. I’d like to say it won for section 2, but who knows. People could have been really enthused by the idea of the energy pumps.

J: Or the boobs. Oh yea.. do you know why they couldn’t have sex? I couldn’t quite work it out. Was it because he’d be uncoordinated in low gravity or because her bones would break too easily under his superior Earth muscles?

K: I think it was a combination of both. That he would overcompensate because he was used to having sex in higher gravity and she would get broken. Plus he’s way older than her and all saggy, though that doesn’t seem to enter into it.

J: Now you’ve got me picturing the saggy, baggy elephant. :)

K: Hahaha.

J: I wish I could say something optimistic about our next one, but it’s Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke. Which just makes me fear some sort of mix between Ringworld and The Gods Themselves. But with any luck, nobody will be naked.

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Nebula Project: A Time of Changes

When a man from Earth introduces prince-in-exile Kinnal Darival a telepathic drug from Kinnal’s own planet, he has a revolutionary epiphany. He takes the subversive and obscene step of writing his autobiography — in the first person, as part of a crusade to share this drug and this worldview with others.

What follows is a spoiler laden discussion of the book A Time of Changes. Beware if you’re worried about such things.

When a man from Earth introduces prince-in-exile Kinnal Darival a telepathic drug from Kinnal’s own planet, he has a revolutionary epiphany. He takes the subversive and obscene step of writing his autobiography — in the first person, as part of a crusade to share this drug and this worldview with others.

J: I’d never heard of A Time of Changes before. And though Robert Silverberg is really prolific, I’d never read one of his novels before either. So I had no idea at all what to expect. Yet somehow I still managed to be disappointed.

K: I also went into this with what I must describe as complete ignorance of the author and the title. I had only just heard of him coincidentally a month or two prior to us coming to this book in the list. Unfortunately, I’m going to have to agree that this book was a disappointment on several levels.

J: I felt it was very similar to Left Hand of Darkness in a lot of ways, but with nothing at all in it to make it interesting. And a few things to actively dislike.

K: I’m again going to have to agree — the parallels to Left Hand sprang to mind almost immediately, with the surprising result of making Left Hand appear retrospectively way more progressive and daring than it felt at the time. There’s also a fairly unflattering (to A Time of Changes) comparison to Dune to be made here.

J: In what way? Other than being a colonized planet? And there really must be a term for that subgenre, but I don’t know it.

K: A colonized planet with a strange ‘native’ religion, people using drugs to achieve telepathy/communion with others, a person who comes in from the outside and begins imposing new ideas on the locals. It’s far more similar to Left Hand in plot shape, but I think the similarities to Dune are there.

J: I forgot about the drugs in Dune. And yea, again with the telepathy!! It’s like.. it’s not science fiction if someone’s not reading someone else’s mind.

K: That is getting pretty old. As are the long-lost/out of touch/vaguely medieval colonies from Earth. TIP: Just because you threw in a spaceman and set your story on a colony doesn’t make it seem like any less of a fantasy as compared to science fiction.

J: Agreed! Even the whole ‘can’t use I’ thing was sort of done in Babel-17, so there’s not much new here at all. But I do have to say that out of all the ones we’ve read so far, this one seems the most obviously dated to a time and place. Even moreso than Flowers for Algernon, which was pretty much set on contemporary Earth. Because it just screamed ’60s-70s drug culture’ and ‘let’s open our minds’ ‘let’s all love one another’.

K: It’s very dated. Very very dated. Though Silverberg admits in the preface that he discovered other languages already had constructs that avoided using the concept of ‘I’, it’s clear this was written very much from a position of western male privilege.

J: Oh, don’t even get me started on the gender stuff! I disliked the main character pretty quickly, right about the time he was all ‘I have a big penis’ and the backhanded insult he gave to himself about ‘women all over the place will attest I have no stamina’. I was ready to be sympathetic to him again when he was recounting his childhood, but that didn’t last long. And then it had utter fail right near the end with his bondsister. Spare me. She’s all pure and innocent and beautiful and youthful just because she never married or had a kid.

K: Well, of course. Because women aren’t actually people with interests and passions and thoughts of their own. They’re sperm receptacles. That was made completely clear when our main character Kinnal takes his telepathy drug with a woman — and instead of learning about her hopes and dreams and character, the only thing he learns about is her anatomy. Because apparently that’s all women can think about. Which means it makes complete sense that Silverberg rounds out our character by giving him the massive massive character flaw of premature ejaculation.

J: Like he wasn’t flawed enough by being a big old arrogant jerk! Which I have trouble thinking was entirely intentional. We never learned enough for me to be convinced there was anything particularly wrong with their society that ‘I’ was going to fix. Although the whole bondsister/bondbrother and drainer thing seems like a copout. If you’re going to keep yourself to yourself and not even have a self, well.. you need to do it all the way.

K: The whole society made very little sense to me, but I suspect most of the confusion resulted from Kinnal’s maunderings about how you can’t truly love anyone unless you love yourself. Which is incredibly trite and Oprah-ish to be the central point of any novel, let alone something which managed to win the Nebula Award. Especially when it’s not particularly well-explained how this so-called Covenant prevents people from loving themselves. Just because they don’t go around telling people their innermost thoughts? There were several parts where the philosophy was explained which I had to read over more than once and I still couldn’t follow some of the logic. Apparently, having a firm grasp of your inner self can lead you to make other people do things for you instead of standing on your own two feet? I swear that’s what it said at one point.

J: Some things I felt he hadn’t thought through very well. If you’re bonded to a bondsister and a bondbrother at or near birth, then it’s unlikely everyone’s going to be linked that way in a vast chain encompassing everyone. More likely you’ll get a closed loop of people about the same age, with maybe a few people lacking one or the other especially in geographically remote areas. And for all the main character says his relationships with his bondsister and brother are mutual, it just always feels one way.

K: Exactly. The bond-sibling thing was definitely not really thought through as well as it could have been — he mentions that high ranking children were often bonded to other high ranking children to try and create alliances. Okay, fine. But then to foster this ‘bond’, they all have to grow up together, so if they’re from far-flung locations, two of the bond-siblings have to come live with/near the other one. Okay, fine. Except -their- other bond-sibling presumably also needs to grow up near them, and that person’s other bond-sibling would need to grow up near them — even if eventually this turns into a closed chain, as you said, it really doesn’t make sense that suddenly the parent of child Y is responsible for some number n children where n>5 just due to all these bond-relationships.

J: Yea! And what happens if your bondsister and bondbrother both die, especially as children? Oh well, too bad for you.

K: Right. It really just didn’t make sense. Especially since Silverberg seems to go back and forth about how close the bond-siblings really are. Is there constraint between them or not? At times it’s suggested that these function as intimate friends and there is no such thing as self-baring between bond-siblings. But that’s clearly not true; the only set we see are incredibly formal with one another and for all they’re supposedly so close they keep secrets and completely flip out as a result of the ‘selfbaring’.

J: And it doesn’t seem to me he knows his bondsister any more than he knows his wife or that particular woman he was keeping on the side. But while I’m talking about her again, let me just say I’m sick of random suicides! Meant to like.. teach the main character something? Or something? Though it doesn’t seem to have worked in this case. He’s still ready to share some dope with whoever he can coerce into it.

K: Yes, he pretty much writes it off as a character weakness in her. He feels bad about it, but he seems pretty able to rationalize it in his head with ‘if only he’d known she was so fragile, he could have saved her’. Except, uh, you should have known that dude. You’ve known her for years and you were just inside her head.

J: Seriously. Maybe ‘I’ is exactly right. It was always only about him, and the drug isn’t so much about sharing with other people, it’s about making sure he shoves his worldview down everyone’s throat. Like, you think I’m only a younger son of a septarch, but I’ll make myself the most important person on the planet.

K: He definitely has that attitude. And not in a humble, messiah sort of way, even though it seems like he’s being cast in that role. Or rather, he’s making quite an effort to put himself in that role. But I’m sorry, dude, you can’t make yourself a martyr just because you think you’d be an awesome one.

J: *laugh* Yea. Exactly.

K: Getting back to things that didn’t seem particularly well thought out. I started to wonder very early on if this concept would work in a language which has a wider variety of personal pronouns. English has a very limited set, which is why people are constantly trying to invent new ones. But a language like Japanese, where I can think of 7 words for ‘I’ off the top of my head, all with their own nuances — how the heck would you even really translate this?

J: ‘One’ is a particularly interesting pronoun. I was reading a nonfiction book right after this and the author used ‘one’ and then in the same sentence used ‘my’ meaning.. yea, he was really the ‘one’ he was talking about. I wonder what languages it was translated into. I don’t know an easy way to check that. Wikipedia and ISFDB didn’t tell me, except that it seems to have been published in French. Mais le francais a ‘on’, alors c’est facil. In fact I think the French use ‘on’ more often than we use ‘one’, so maybe it didn’t even seem so weird.

K: It would probably have been more striking if Silverberg had omitted the whole ‘one’ business and gone with what showed up very briefly during Kinnal’s abortive visit to Glin — which is to speak without even mentioning yourself at all. Not even the copout ‘one’.

J: Yea, ‘one’ is definitely a copout. There are ways to use it where it isn’t a direct substitute for ‘I’, but mostly he didn’t do that.

K: Not at all. So in the end it didn’t really matter that they weren’t using one particular word, they were still referring to themselves directly.

J: It was actually jarring to me when they had no problem with ‘you’. It seemed to say.. hey, there’s a self, right there in front of me.

K: Yes! I noticed that too. More evidence of poor followthrough in the concept, or was it meant to be some kind of commentary on how an individual could acknowledge the existence of other people, just not themselves?

J: I don’t have faith it was meant like that. I feel like he thought ‘Let’s not use I’ and then stuck to that as he built up this society around it, without really thinking through the ‘we’ and ‘you’ at all.

K: I’m inclined to agree.

J: In the end, I think it’s a pretty forgettable book. And the title doesn’t help either. Unless I start thinking of it as the Menopause Book, I’m not going to remember it.

K: Ha ha ha. Yes, the title is pretty poor. There really didn’t seem to be much changing going on. No matter how many times we were told that Kinnal was shocked by the use of ‘I’ or was being a daring rebel, I never felt convinced he was any different than he always was. And in any case, I can feel the plot of this one already slipping into the plot of Left Hand, so little does it stand out in my mind on its own merits.

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The Feminine Mystique – A Discussion

In preparation for this month’s book, A Strange Stirring, we thought it would be a good idea to (re)read The Feminine Mystique. Here, J and K discuss The Feminine Mystique itself.

K: The Feminine Mystique first came out in 1963, though bits of it had been appearing in magazines for a year or so prior to its actual publication, so the public was well-primed for its arrival. The book has managed to achieve legendary status as the book that started the women’s liberation movement. I’ve actually read it several times before, but it had been a few years, and I wanted to refresh my memory before taking on this month’s Tripletake, A Strange Stirring.

J: Well, and I thought A Strange Stirring would make more sense if I read Feminine Mystique first, since I never had. But it was loooong. Worse because it had at least three introductions bfore you even got into it. I should’ve just skipped those. I frequently do.

K: As you know, I don’t typically skip introductions and epilogues or afterwards. I don’t even skip endnotes if they have additional information. (side rant: If you are going to include additional information in your endnotes, for God’s sake make them footnotes so they can be read inline with the text. It is so freaking annoying to have to flip back and forth between the end of the book and the middle I cannot even say. It’s even worse and more cumbersome in current ebook formats.) Sometimes I find they weren’t worth my time, but most of the time I find they add to the text.

J: If they’re footnotes, I’ll usually read them. Unless they’ve proven themselves to be uninteresting. If they’re endnotes, I won’t bother unless I’m really interested. So.. I did not read the endnotes. But I did read the epilogue. Which was one of the most interesting parts of the whole book, actually.

K: Now, I should note here that we both read different editions of the book and I believe some of our supplemental material was different. Mine is a reprint of the 20th anniversary edition which appears to have been put together in 1984. So it contains: “20 Years After”, “Introduction to the 10th Anniversary Edition”, the book, including the Preface, “Epilogue” and “Thoughts on Becoming a Grandmother”.

J: I’ve got a 2001 edition. Introduction by Anna Quindlen, Metamorphosis: Two Generations Later, Introduction to the Tenth Anniversary Edition, Preface and Acknowledgments. And then at the end just the Epilogue. I can’t even tell if I read the first Introduction. I might’ve skipped that one.

K: So let’s have a look at the book itself, since we can’t really compare notes on the extra stuff very well – aside from the epilogue, which we can talk about at the end. The book starts by describing the state of American womanhood. Or at least middle to upper-middle class (mostly white) American womanhood. And that state is just sad.

J: I wonder if it also isn’t skewed to the Northeast. She was mostly referencing studies of schools located in New England, wasn’t she?

K: Hmm. I didn’t really think of it that way, but flipping through the endnotes the references do seem a bit biased toward the northeast, if you dip down towards Washington and definitely include New York. But I’m not sure we can read -too- much into the origin of the studies. It is a fact that the Seven Sisters colleges were all located in the northeast, but studies of the alumnae of those colleges would take in quite a wide geographic area.

J: But it does add to the idea that.. this does not represent all women in America at the time. Though it’s also possible and likely that the Northeaster exerted an unequal effect on the culture of America at the time. A lot of the schools and academics were there. The magazines and advertising were mostly out of NYC, I believe. And things like that. Not that it isn’t still true to some extent, of course. But what might ring true for a white middle-class housewife in the suburbs of Philadelphia won’t necessarily ring true for a white middle-class woman in Topeka, or Honolulu, or Juneau. Especially as this really was just at the start of television uniting everyone. But, in any case, I’m glad I wasn’t alive then! I don’t know that I would’ve had the guts not to fall into that role and that pattern.

K: You and me both. I can see how seductive the whole idea would have been — you don’t need to go out and make your own way in the world, you can just stay home, have some babies, and then once they go to school… amuse yourself. And given that the economics of the time allowed for that, as long as you could find a husband who had a job, yeah, I can totally see it. And to be perfectly honest, without actually trying it and seeing what it felt like to be so constrained, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have been fine with it. I’m certainly capable now of frittering away my time on random stuff, so I’m not sure I would have been different then.

J: Yea. I had real trouble understanding the mindset that would spend the day… cleaning! Or baking cheesecakes or.. I don’t even know how they spent the 6 or so hours the kids were at school on housework. Or even shopping. Because they had all the appliance we did minus the microwave, pretty much. And some of the women even had a cleaning service or a housemaid or something! Like, what are you doing with your time?

K: Well, that was the subject of an entire chapter: Housework expands to fill the time available. And how many times have you seen that true anywhere else? If someone has a task to do at work, a task which really ought to take, say, 45 minutes if they concentrated and just did it — how often does that task somehow manage to take the entire day? Especially when if, on completion, it requires some thought as to what should be done next? And it’s not that they’re necessarily working the entire time, but time is wasted along the way. By becoming obsessed with an unimportant detail. Or stopping to organize something else before you really get going. Or to look at the back of this book you just picked up. But because you haven’t really done anything else the whole day, when you look back, all you see is that one task and how it took the whole day.

J: Well, I can certainly understand how it could take that long. I just can’t quite get why you’d /want/ it to take that long. You wouldn’t rather sit and watch daytime TV? Read a book instead of a magazine? I guess.. cleaning seems more productive, somehow? And you’re totally slacking off if you’re having fun while your kids at school and your husband’s working? It’s just strange to me that everyone bought into this idea. And that being a housewife was a permanent, lifelong thing. That even after the children left, they still filled their days with housework.

K: I’m not sure anyone really thought about it being a lifelong vocation or not. I didn’t get the impression it was as completely thought out as that — the idea was the women should make the home until the children were grown and out. And if you kept having babies until you were nearly 40, then you’d be practically 60 by the time that happened. And then your husband could retire and you could do retired people things. But Friedan even mentions there was some confusion on the part of the ‘authorities’ as to what older housewives should do: should they go to work? Should they stay at home and play bridge? Should they do volunteer work? It was obviously an unanwered and problematic question.

J: Well, I guess if you had enough kids over long enough time, you’d be a grandmother before you had to worry about it. So there’s your new role. I don’t think I would’ve wanted to be a man in this scenario either. But that’s because I keep picturing jobs rather than careers. You go, do your boring office job all day, come home, do nothing in particular. Spend your weekends on yardwork, exciting.

K: It’s definitely interesting how the arrangement seemed to infantilize both men and women. Women by giving them no choices and making them wholly dependent on their husbands for money, shelter, everything. And men because it expected from them absolutely no responsibility other than providing money, shelter, food for their families. They weren’t even required to be present. It was reading The Feminine Mystique that finally cleared up a confusing point for me at least. I never understood how families would “go to the seashore” or “go to the country” for the entire summer. Somehow I never picked up on the fact that it wasn’t the family: it was mom and the kids, and dad would occasionally pop in on the weekends.

J: Ahhh. So the rest of the time, while the family was away, he was spending his evenings pursuing his secret passion of splitting atoms in the basement! — But it’s interesting you used that word ‘infantilize’, because that was a big theme in the book. That nobody had grown up. And that also seemed to be Freud’s big thing. If you’ve got a problem, it’s because you’re not mature. And I just can’t agree with that. I think being an adult, acting an adult, feeling like an adult is a whole combination of things. You stick me in a situation where I’m responsible, I’m going to feel like an adult. And the women were certainly in that situation every single time they were alone with their children.

K: I think I have to disagree with you there. Yes, they were responsible for the children, but they had never had to make a big decision on their own. They’d never had to support themselves. They’d never had to take a risk. Now that I’m 35, I think I can safely say there is no time in one’s life when you actually feel like a ‘grown-up’. You just feel like you. But it’s definitely when I’m doing new things, things where I might fail, things where I’m uncertain of the outcome that I feel most accomplished and proud of myself. And energized to go do more. And Friedan’s argument is that by taking away women’s choices and herding them without question into the housewife role, they never get that. It’s easy to just do what someone else tells you to do. It’s harder to have an interest and pursue it on your own.

J: I don’t think doing those things… pursuing a degree, working on a project of your own choosing, getting a promotion at work, make you more adult. I think they make you more a whole person, yes. I think they make you a happier person. And I can’t agree that taking a risk makes you more an adult either. Or you wouldn’t look at all those skydiving, cliffjumping, adrenaline-seeking people as being, in a way, overgrown adolescents. I guess perhaps ‘making a decision’ does count. And in that case, they weren’t making too many important decisions. They’d outsourced those to their husband and society and corporations.

K: I think that’s where the disagreement is. I don’t believe that ‘adult’ is the opposite of ‘infant’. I know plenty of supposed adults who are completely irresponsible idiots, even though they somehow manage to keep a job. There are really two continuums here: one, an aged based one, where baby and adult are on the opposite ends. And one based on self-actualization, where ‘infant’ doesn’t necessarily equate to ‘baby’, but rather to someone who really has not developed their core being to the point where they are — well, as you said, a ‘whole person’.

J: I just think it’s a term she took from psychiatry or psychology or whichever and ran with. Like ‘neuroses’. You hardly ever hear people talk about those anymore. And for all she spent a chapter debunking Freud, she later used some things he said to support a different argument. About gay men in that case, I think it was. And actually I wish I had read her chapter on Freud at the time I was reading Freud in a college class. It would’ve helped me look at his views on women more clearly. Instead of me thinking he was just smoking something (other than cigars).

K: Yeah. I hadn’t really though too hard about where Freud’s theories came from, but when it’s pointed out it seems incredibly obvious. He was developing his theories in not just an incredibly sexually repressed society, but also based on the people he was treating. Who were by definition in need of therapy, since they came to see a therapist — meaning they felt something was dreadfully wrong. Anyway, I don’t think Friedan just took the term and ran with it. I think she did quite a bit of research; she references Maslow’s heirarchy of needs several times, and her theory (which I don’t believe she actually deveoped but merely supported) was very explicitly based on it.

J: She mentioned lots of things several times. I found it all quite repetitive and/or long-winded. Maybe I wouldn’t have if it was a subject I was deeply interested in. Gender in science fiction? Be as long-winded as you like if you’re telling me something slightly new or in a slightly different way. Maybe there’s some nuance I’ll get if you come at it from a slightly different angle. And I’d really want to get lots of nuances. But this book, not so much. I can see its place in femininist history, but so much of it just doesn’t apply to me that.. I’m not sure what I can do with it, you know? I actually found it most engaging when she was saying things I completely disagreed with her on. But I guess that’s true of a lot of books.

K: The repetition is something I find amazing, because it’s not something I can do. I just do not have the skill set(?) to take a single fact and somehow spin it into three paragraphs. The writing style here is more colloquial than academic, since it’s meant to appeal to a wide audience, but it has a lot in common with academic papers — the expansion of the work to fill the pages allotted as it were. :P But in spite of the repetition, I find the book more compelling than you: obviously, since I’ve read it probably a half-dozen times already. One, I’m probably more interested in history and definitely feminist history than you. Two, I really can see myself in its pages in a lot of ways. The women she’s writing about could have been me. I almost went to Smith! (I got in there.)

J: I never once questioned that I’d go to college. Or that I’d go to study something I wanted to study. Even if I never did work out what that was going to be. At least, not narrowed down to one or two things. :) I didn’t seriously consider single-sex schools though. I think they just seemed so bizarre to me and not ‘the real world’. I just can’t imagine stopping because of getting married and/or having kids. Or working to pay his school. No way! Your school doesn’t come ahead of my school. When she was talking about the previous generation, before the one she’s talking about in the book.. I did sort of try to extrapolate. Well, how did all this affect my parents growing up and how they raised me. Where does our generation fit into this?

K: As a girl intending to go into the physical sciences, I was torn. I didn’t think I’d run into any weird sexism or roadblocks, but I couldn’t discount the possibility. And I was already aware of how weird it could feel to be one of two or three girls in a crowd full of boys. Not that they were discriminating against you in any way, but it just felt… odd. Like, our school participated in what was then called the U.S. First competition, where you had to build a machine/robot to perform a particular task, and then you would compete with other schools who had a robot that did the same thing. I was on the team, but I was one of the few girls, and I was also shy, so I was sort of doubly invisible — when it came time to actually build things or use stuff in the machine shop, I mostly ended up just watching. So this was something I knew about myself: I’m not great in crowds, especially when it feels like part of the crowd has more experience than me at something. In the end, that’s why I chose Wellesley over MIT. Girls compete with each other differently, plus the classes were considerably smaller, and I knew I’d get more out of it if I went there — because I wouldn’t be able to just float through unnoticed like I could have at MIT.

J: I knew I didn’t want a small school with small classes. I liked my anonymity I guess. Binghamton wasn’t huge, but it was a university and a state school, so it seemed a lot more familiar of an environment. And I didn’t get into Middlebury or Princeton. :) I ruled out MIT because of something stupid.. like not enough language classes or no creative writing or something like that. I was interested in math and science, but not committed to it enough to give up the other things, humanities, that I wanted. I was aware I was unusual in being a girl into math and science and computers, but I rather revelled in that. But I guess where I fall down in Friedan’s vision of new and improved 21st century women is that I never picked a career and sat down to pursue it with single-minded purpose. And then fully integrated a man and children into my life. I fell down on both fronts! Because.. I think maybe in our generation and the one after it in particular, there are those of us who want to do what we want to do when we want to do it. Working a 9-5 job to get ahead and get a promotion and whatnot is not me, and I don’t think it’s a lot of other people our age either. I think more of us want to be artists or freelancers or enterpreneurs. Do what interests us, be our own bosses, and be able to stop and switch to something else if we feel like it. And I think more of us would if we ever got health care straightened out in this country. :P

K: Heh. I tend to take a more cynical view of our generation, because I feel cynical about it myself: I know for a fact that working steadily at a 9-5 job for 30 years or whatever is no guarantee of anything at all other than whatever cash I take home while I’m working. For the people working in the 50s and 60s, the unions were much stronger — there were pensions, retirement plans, even the promise of healthcare when you retired. And the promise that someday you could retire! I do not believe it will be possible for our generation to ever retire completely; we’re all going to drop dead one day at our jobs as Wal-mart greeters. There’s no optimism left in me for the future, all I can hope is that it doesn’t get too awful before my time is up. And out of that comes this other view: if the future is bound to suck, and I have no indication that it won’t, I may as well try and enjoy myself now, while I still can.

J: True, true. You don’t wait to travel, because even if you’re healthy enough to enjoy it later, you’re not going to be any richer or have any more time later!

K: Getting back to a point you made a bit ago which I jumped past, I did think hard about what was going on in my own family at the time The Feminine Mystique was written. Without getting too specific, it didn’t really apply well to my mom’s family at all. They were working class, and from what I’ve gleaned, her mom generally had a job doing something or other. But my grandmother died in 1955 and after that the nuclear family model broke down even further. On my dad’s side, I think it was adhered to fairly closely. He’s the oldest, born shortly after WWII, grandpa was a vet, etc. Pretty much the perfect 50s picture, though grandpa worked for GE in the factory, not at an office job. It seemed to work okay for them, but perhaps they were a little different in that they hadn’t moved to suburbia: they lived in what was then a rural exurb of Albany and so did a ton of their relatives. They weren’t isolated in the same way as Friedan’s housewives were.

J: I don’t know that I really know enough about my family to know how well they fit the pattern. But they definitely weren’t in what you’d typically call the suburbs. A mill city and sort of the town/village end of farm country, respectively. It was interesting that Friedan seemed shocked and appalled both by suburbs and open plan living areas.

K: I don’t know that I’d describe her as shocked and appalled, but she definitely put a finger on what was wrong with them as regards housewives: open plan means you can’t just clean a small area, you have to continually clean up a much larger one. And it’s true! If you clean up your open plan living room, you can’t leave the dishes in the sink because anyone who comes over is going to see the kitchen, too. The suburbs themselves were a problem because of transportation and lack of nearby resources. This is something I had not experienced myself, growing up in New England in areas that have been settled for hundreds of years: the towns I grew up in tended to have pockets of residential housing mixed up with commercial districts and multi-family housing and educational stuff. Whereas if you get one of those big planned communities, you could have just miles and miles of houses, meaning you’re tending to live near a lot of other families exactly like your own, and if your town is new enough, maybe other amenities haven’t even been added yet. Maybe you don’t even live in a town yet! Perhaps it’s county land and your taxes are lower, but that reduces even further the liklihood that there’s a community college or a museum or -anything- to engage your mind.

J: I can see how open plan would be attractive though. If you didn’t want to be ‘stuck’ in the kitchen. You could be doing your kitchen stuff, and… watching the living room tv. Or at least not feeling claustrophobic. But I do get the point. Moving to the suburbs would’ve been a chance for the women to make decisions, which we mentioned before. They’d certainly get a say in which suburbs, which house, maybe design the house. Interior decorate the house. Plant flowers in the garden. Etc. That’d certainly keep you occupied for a few months to a year.

K: Oh, I can see reasons for all those things. That’s why open plan is still very popular today, in spite of the fact that it really does require more work. There’s a reason houses used to have a “company parlor” that the kids weren’t allowed into on pain of death! And buying and decorating your own house is can really make you feel like you’ve ‘arrived’ as an adult. Much like a big ol’ princessy wedding or having a baby. But Friedan’s point is, no one would then look at the man and say ‘well, your life’s dream is fulfilled. You bought a house. Now just keep it clean.’

J: Good point, that.

K: I think that leads pretty neatly into one of the points of Friedan’s that’s still extremely relevant today, which is the way advertisers deliberately attempt to manipulate peoples’ insecurities to get them to buy things. Clorox wipes can kill 99.9% percent of bacteria and viruses! Read: If you fail to buy these and wipe down your doorknobs, it’s YOUR fault if your kid gets sick. But that’s very blatant: it’s obviously far more subtle than that, most of the time. Buying XYZ will make you more popular, talented, make your husband love you more, make your kids do better at school, etc.

J: Yea, I’d really love to have a look at some of that proprietary research ad agencies have done/paid for. I think it would be very fascinating.

K: Yes, I was pretty interested by the Institute Friedan visited and the consumer research they had done. I may actually be motivated enough to look into that further.

J: One thing I found interesting was.. while I knew that autism had been blamed on mothers and bad parenting, it was a very different matter to see Friedan doing that very thing right in front of my eyes.

K: It’s really only very very recently that ‘blame mom’ hasn’t been the go-to reason for an autism diagnosis. I knew you would catch that, though actually, I believe Friedan only mentions autism by name one or two times in the entire book.

J: I used to know, or think I knew, roughly what ‘schizophrenic’ meant. But between the use here and the use in Left Hand of Darkness, I don’t know anymore! She said autism was a type of schizophrenia.

K: At the time it was believed to be so. You have to keep in mind that the people diagnosed with ‘autism’ back then might not even have had what we would think of as ‘autism’ now. They definitely thought it was somehow related to schizophrenia — one old synonym for autism was ‘infantile schizophrenia’. Autism and its treatment has really changed a lot in the past 30 years.

J: That whole scientific field seems to have changed so much. And yet there’s only 4 editions of the DSM since 1952! So it’s sort of no wonder it causes controversy. Like when they finally remove hysteria as a female mental disorder, they add homosexuality. Looking at Wikipedia, it looks like the next revision might remove some of the types still listed under schizophrenia.

K: Oh, the next revision — they’ve been working on it for years and they are still arguing, even though it’s due to come out very soon. No one seems very happy with it. But I think that’s beside the point.

K: Before we end our discussion, let’s take a look at the epilogue, which I believe you said was the most interesting part to you. The epilogue was definitely written afterwards; I suspect it may have been added for the 10th anniversary, judging from its content.

J: That’s where she railed at the man-haters and the lesbians trying to derail the movement, right? And I thought it was also interesting that throughout the book she made a point of identifying prominent feminists and calling them ‘pretty’ or ‘beautiful’ and this one and that one was married happily with children. For someone identifying and naming this feminine mystique, she seems somehow closely invested in it. Or aspects of it anyway.

K: Is that how you read it? That’s now how I read it at all. Friedan was a vetran union organizer and socialist. She was trying hard to come off as ‘one of the girls’ and to make what she was saying as non-threatening as possible while still getting her point across. She went to great pains to say you didn’t have to not have children, you didn’t have to divorce your husband, but maybe you could feel better about yourself.

J: Why else mention these women were beautiful and pretty? Or that they stopped wearing bloomers in public ‘for a feminine reason: it was not very becoming’. It says to me.. we should fight for equal rights and equal pay, and still be pretty while we do it. Because we all know ‘man-eaters’ and lesbians aren’t pretty, or feminine.

K: Yes, that’s exactly what she’s saying. That’s the whole point of The Feminine Mystique in fact. That advertisers, sociologists, psychiatrists had all conned women into thinking that deviating even the slightest bit from their feminine role would make them unfeminine — they would turn into lesbian spinsters who die alone eaten by their cats. Of course the image is ridiculous as well as extremely offensive, but it’s an effective scare tactic once people have been properly brainwashed. Friedan was trying to make it clear: wanting more was not going to require you to give up your family, to give up being a woman. Most of the old time feminists, far from being the man-hating psycho-bitches you’d heard about were actually wives and mothers just like you who weren’t happy with society’s expectations. You have to understand what a big threat it was – over and over throughout the book, she has quotes from women who were on the brink of going to grad school, becoming a doctor, taking a fellowship — and they turn it down because someone tells them it will make them unattractive to men, make it harder for them to settle down and be a mother.

J: Well, maybe, then. She was writing to them, not to me. So that’s how what she said came across to me. So what she said, even in the smallest details, doesn’t hold up over time. At least not to all readers. Well, not even to all readers at the time. In my view it shouldn’t matter in the least if feminists are pretty or not pretty, married or not married, mothers or not mothers, straight or not straight. They don’t even have to be women. What matters is what they’re doing to change the world. So by saying what she does in the way she does it’s actually saying to all the other women: you don’t matter; I’m not talking to you.

K: Except that the women who already knew that were not stuck in the mystique, so exactly: she wasn’t talking to them, the book was not for or about them in the least.

J: No? What about the ‘50%’ (sic) of the population that was below average intelligence? Who she claimed were probably perfectly satisfied with a life of cleaning and housework? They weren’t also trapped in it?

K: I think now you’re misrepresenting what was actually said.

J: I really don’t think I am. I don’t want to argue it out though. We can quote it and let the blog readers draw their own conclusions.

K: Go ahead and provide a quote. While you’re looking it up, I will say something else:

K: Friedan was writing to all the women who were trapped by the ‘mystique’. The mystique was this: to find true fulfillment, women had to live a purely ‘feminine’ life: to devote herself to a man and raising his children. If she wasn’t fulfilled by this life, then something was psychologically wrong with her. Perhaps she was somehow rejecting her feminine role. Advertisers especially had an enormous investment in keeping women of all classes invested in this plan. To keep them buying cosmetics to look young and fresh, to keep them buying the latest beauty treatments and household products and gadgets. Women who had somehow managed to escape the mystique, by perhaps having progressive parents who encouraged their interests, or such strong devotion to a subject that they made a real career for themselves — they were still affected by it, but they were not Friedan’s target audience. Women who were content with their life also weren’t her target audience, though I think she felt there were probably fewer of those than surveys showed.

Housework, no matter how it is expanded to fill the time available, can hardly use the abilities of a woman of average or normal human intelligence, much less the fifty per cent of the female population whose intelligence, in childhood, was above average.

Some decades ago, certain institutions concerned with the mentally retarded discovered that housework was peculiarly suited to the capacities of feeble-minded girls. In many towns, inmates of institutions for the mentally retarded were in great demand as houseworkers, and housework was much more difficult then than it is now.

J: Except I will say her target audience was also the educators and psychiatrists and the doctors who were all teaching and treating these women. Which might have included some of the people she was excluding. What do you think a gay educator would’ve thought of her entire book after being slammed for being stunted in his growth and a mama’s boy? So I don’t think that it’s out of order for me to say.. here are people she’s leaving out and/or alienating. And in reference to the quote, I didn’t remember she included average intelligence women in her mention of housework there. But her math still bugs me! If half are above, then half are below, and nobody is average intelligence.

K: That’s no different than what I remembered. She’s being insulting toward housework, and pretty much toward anyone who finds it fulfilling and thinks it’s any sort of substitute for an intellectual challenge. Which anyone would be hard pressed to argue with! And yes — you’re right, she was not all inclusive. But you can’t read a book written in a specific time and place and expect it to reflect the values of a different time and place. I’m not going to argue with you regarding her statement about averages, except to say I don’t think it’s quite as wrong as you seem to think.

J: Except I can only read it as a 2011 reader. Would I think it was awesome and mind-blowing if I was caught in the mystique myself at the time? Probably yes. However, what would I have thought if I was a gay man reading it? Quite possibly I would’ve been hearing things I’d already heard and either being depressed or angered or both by it. In either case, I’m only imagining it, picturing myself in that situation. And this is way more meta than I thought this conversation was ever going to go. Points we agree on — It’s an interesting historical feminist book that explains an interesting historical phenomenon. It’s an important book. It’s worth reading now and it was even more worth reading then.

K: All right. I’m happy to leave it at that. I’ll be interested to see what you think about A Strange Stirring, which strives to both evaluate it and put it in a wider context.

J: I’ll tell you, right about now I wish A Strange Stirring was a mystery that takes place at a Starbucks.

K: I… would not be surprised if next year there was a book by that title with a similar premise. Series mysteries are out of control!

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Nebula Project: The Sixties in Review

J: So from 1965 to 1970 is a short decade, but there was a tie in there, so it was actually 7 books. And the first thing I notice about them right off is that they’re all science fiction. Various kinds of sf, but not a single fantasy in there.

K: Mmm. Yes, you’re right. I hadn’t really thought about it, but they are all science fiction — that is, fiction based around some kind of scientific idea. With the possible exception of Dune, which takes place so far in the future that in spite of the fact that they have advanced technology, it’s almost a fantasy.

J: Well, to me the one that felt the most like fantasy was The Einstein Intersection. That was just bizarre.

K: Okay, that one was pretty weird also, and had very little obvious science in it. But the argument can definitely be made without much trouble that these were all science fiction.

J: I just had to look up if SFWA maybe started out as just science fiction. But while the name only had Science Fiction in it and not Fantasy, it does say on their site that it was understood to cover both. They just.. didn’t reflect that when they were handing out Nebulas to novels.

K: And I don’t know enough about what was published at that time to know if there was any fantasy coming out that I would find more deserving. Though it wouldn’t take much to be more deserving than one or two of these books.

J: World Fantasy Awards didn’t start until 1975, so there’s no easy way to find out that way. The Hugo Awards have some nominees in there that look like they might be fantasy. I couldn’t point to one and say for sure though. I don’t think it’s because fantasy was nonexistent. I don’t even know that it was really being written by a different set of writers. SF/F writers have always crossed from one to the other as a general rule. If not in their novels, then in their short fiction.

K: Then we’d have to examine the short fiction lists to see if the exclusion was complete, and that’s a bit beyond the scope of this project. I think we just have to take it as an interesting fact and see if the trend continues as we move forward.

J: Well, one obvious trend is towards male writers! We’ve only got Le Guin so far.

K: I can’t say I’m surprised, though. One expects it to be this bad in the 60s. What was more surprising was the relatively diverse casts of the books. Certainly nothing approaching realistic, but we had far more racial diversity than I would have predicted. And even a few female main characters.

J: Yea, that was really surprising to me every time I encountered it.

K: I have to say that’s why Ringworld stuck out like such a sore thumb. Not all of the plots treated their female characters very progressively, but I can’t think of another that actively disrespected them to such an extent.

J: Yea, it was horrible. And it didn’t do well on race either! Just treated Earth like one giant melting pot so Louis Wu isn’t really anything. I don’t know what people saw in that. I really don’t.

K: Well, I will say that Niven wasn’t the first person to speculate that increased contact between parts of the world would lead pretty much to a pale brown colored human race without too many defining ethnic characteristics.

J: It’s an idea that sunk into my head at an early age.. and I wonder it didn’t just get into other people’s heads and reused without them stopping to think about it much. One other trend I noticed, which did not surprise me was psi powers. Mostly telepathy, even seemingly randomly in Left Hand of Darkness. But also prescience. I expected it to such an extent that one passage in Flowers for Algernon actually confused me because I thought he was getting into someone else’s head. But instead it was just him dissociating as Charly. That book and Rite of Passage are the only ones lacking that as an element.

K: They are a common plot element, and I agree they seemed pretty randomly tacked on to Left Hand of Darkness, though perhaps there was some symbolic reason for them there I was just beyond attempting to fathom. Any thoughts on why that is? They’re certainly something I find intriguing to think about, and they can be used in a lot of different ways.

J: I don’t know.. maybe it’s like vampires. People are drawn to the idea and I guess there’s a lot of things to explore around them. I think they were particularly big in the 60s and 70s. Maybe all those drugs and meditation in the culture at the time? Cold War ESP experiments? Men staring at goats and the like. Not that they don’t pop up in places now, Twilight, Harry Potter, but it doesn’t seem quite so pervasive. Not in 5 out of every 7 sf/f books, surely.

K: Things do become cliched and played out after a while. Not that that’s stopped the vampire/werewolf crowd in any way. It would be interesting to see the prevalence of certain tropes over time. Like the social security name popularity index. Psi powers are the Madison of the 60s.

J: *snicker*

J: I think, despite the flaws I can see in it now, and how much I can see how it could be better and wish it were better, Left Hand of Darkness is still my favorite of the 7 of them. Followed by Rite of Passage. And the rest.. don’t even come close. Which one’s your favorite?

K: Hmm. Favorite, I think I’d have to say Rite of Passage barely manages to edge out Dune. I think we’re both in agreement over which one was the worst of the lot, so I’ll just come out and say it: Ringworld, by far.

J: Oh yes, no question. Which is good news for The Einstein Intersection.

K: Yeah, that would be second worst, though not by the sort of distance Ringworld managed to achieve. Now, moving on from the novels as a whole, who was your favorite character? Can you pick one?

J: Mmmm. Estraven from Left Hand or Mia from Rite of Passage. Depending on my mood, I think. I can swing either way.

K: I guess I shouldn’t find your choices surprising, but I do. I have a hard time picking out any of the characters from these books as ‘favorite’, but if I had to, I would probably land on Lady Jessica or Princess Irulan (who wasn’t even really a -character- in the first book).

J: Well, your choices don’t surprise me much. Why did mine surprise you?

K: Just… I don’t know. They’re obviously very much your type of character, Estraven moreso than Mia, though neither is a wildly uncharacteristic choice. Maybe it’s just that I disliked Left Hand so much, and mainly because I did not engage with the characters.

J: Well, Estraven’s definitely not an easy character to get to know. It’s all filtered through Genly, for one thing. There’s definitely a distancing there. Maybe it’s more that I found “him” intriguing. And at least “he” was intelligent! Unlike a lot of the characters in these books. Oi. (Or should I say Ai?)

K: He was certainly more intelligent than Genly – and perhaps Genly’s superiors, who dispatched such a fool on an important mission. Maybe they just didn’t have any other volunteers.

J: I bet I can guess your least favorite character! It probably would’ve been Genly, until we got to Louis Wu. :)

K: Ha. So is your guess Louis Wu?

J: Yes, with or without his Motley Crew.

K: Hmm. I guess in one way you’re right — he’s the character whose behavior and attitude I liked least, though Genly was definitely up there. But the crappiest character as a character was definitely Teela Brown. She was pointless and useless. If she had been omitted from the book it would have been far less offensive.

J: I had trouble even seeing her as an entity, I guess.

K: Exactly. So who would you pick as the worst character?

J: Louis Wu ticked me off and is fresh in my mind. But the most offensive one was that bad guy from Dune.

K: He was pretty bad, I agree, though he was obviously designed to be offensive.

J: I don’t think he was designed to be offensive in the way he was offensive to me. He was fat, which was a sign of.. depravity I guess. And he was.. I think supposed to be a gay pedophile or something. Which was also a reason you were supposed to dislike him.

K: Well… yes, it was obvious the gay thing was supposed to count against him, but pedophile is still nasty regardless of whether it’s little boys or little girls.

J: I didn’t get the impression they were little boys. Maybe 15-16? Or were they younger? Because if it was a teenage girls, that just wouldn’t get the point across that he was evil quite so well.

K: It’s been a while. In any case, it was obviously non-consensual.

J: I’m not saying it would’ve been /better/, but I do think he was using gay as a shortcut for ‘a guy you should detest’. But anyway.. which story do you think had the best, most interesting idea behind it? If science fiction is at least partly, if not entirely, about big ideas.

K: That’s a good question. And looking at all 7 of our books this time, I’d have to say the one that seems most original and interesting to me from that perspective would have to be Babel-17.

J: Me, I have to go with Left Hand of Darkness. That’s a world and a biology I want to know more about. That I could see myself writing fanfic in.

K: I’ll be interested to see how these first books stack up against the coming decade — next up is the 70s.

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