k – Page 4 – Triple Take

A Strange Stirring (Stephanie Coontz)

The Plot
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan was published in 1963, at a time when the prevailing attitude in the U.S. was that women were ideally suited to homemaking and raising a family — and nothing else. The years that followed its publication saw the rise of the women’s movement, which managed for the most part to overturn this view and provide American women with a more level playing field in home, work and school. But how much did The Feminine Mystique really have to do with what came after? Stephanie Coontz examines the book’s trajectory and tries to trace its influence.

My Thoughts
I don’t exactly remember where I first heard of the book The Feminine Mystique. It may have been an episode of Quantum Leap, though I feel as if I’d heard of it before then. It doesn’t seem very likely to have been at school, where no social studies class ever managed to get much further than the (U.S.) Civil War and vast quantities of time was always spent on the pilgrims and pre-Revolution colonies. In any case, I had heard of it at some point prior to the summer after my sophomore year of high school. That summer I was attending a science program at UNH, and after I spent the first part of the summer plowing through Anna Karenina, I ventured to the university bookstore in search of something else to make me feel scholarly and well-read. The Feminine Mystique fit the bill admirably: it was paperback, it was fat, and I was curious to know what sort of amazing revelations it held.

Since that summer, I’ve read the book a number of times, each time finding something different. Every time there’s disbelief over the fact that such Victorian sounding ideas about the womanly sphere persisted until so recently. Once, I was shocked by Friedan’s comments about homosexuality, something which colored the entire book for me. The next time I read it, I had convinced myself there was an entire chapter ranting about how the Feminine Mystique was turning boys gay, and I was surprised to find the material I’d thought so pervasive was probably comprised of less than 5 pages all total. During my most recent reading, a couple of weeks ago, I began to wonder if Matthew Weiner had pulled the character of Betty Draper straight from its pages. But throughout every reading there has been the feeling that while I might have been 30 or 40 or 50 years removed from the time period Friedan was writing about, if I lived then, I, a somewhat over-educated middle-class white woman, would be her target audience. It has always made me think about what my life would have been like if I’d been born in 1936 instead of 1976.

So I was intrigued when I heard about A Strange Stirring, an attempt to examine the book in context: where it was successful and where it might have failed. And whether it really deserved to be hailed as a book that began a revolution.

Though I’m by no means a Stephanie Coontz superfan, a few years ago I did read The Way We Never Were and found it quite eye opening. But then, it’s never been any secret that politicians and pundits are happy to pick and choose from history to better illustrate their dogmatic points, whether or not they hold up on closer examination. In any case, she continues to publish works on the history of families and marriage in the United States — something which as far as I’m concerned, makes her eminently qualified to make this attempt to examine more closely The Feminine Mystique and its associated mythos.

Coontz begins by outlining the female facts of life in the 1960s: though people are inclined to look back upon the post-WWII era fondly, the fact is the legal system as regards to women was very barely advanced from the post-Civil War era. Many states legally defined the husband as the head of the wife (a status which I find hard to differentiate from ‘owner’ since it seems to have given him rights almost equivalent); possession of a vagina was actually considered a legal disability in setting up a business — many states required women to go before a judge before they could operate their own business; women had a very hard time opening bank accounts and obtaining credit; women could be denied housing without a male to co-sign the lease; some states made it illegal for women to wear men’s clothing; birth control was not a legal right, even for married couples; women often had no right to any of their husband’s assets in the event of a divorce, though a husband could forbid his wife from taking a job. Interestingly enough, Friedan herself does not dwell on any of these legal horror shows, and I guess I never had imagined it was really still this bad in the U.S. so recently. It’s barely two steps removed from some of the more oppressive regimes in the world today. In light of this, the tone Friedan took (which simultaneously blamed women for their own predicament and exhorted them to feel empowered enough to change their lives) is all the more astonishing. Far from being the man-bashing tome many have made it out to be, The Feminine Mystique is actually fairly silent on the question of what to do about the menfolk, and it actually calls for very little legal change.

As Coontz also correctly points out, there were significant populations of the U.S. who couldn’t see themselves and their struggles in Friedan’s descriptions. The self-deprecating twitter hashtag #firstworldproblem could definitely be appended to pretty much every sentence. But just because it’s a problem mostly for an affluent segment doesn’t negate the fact that it was a problem. And The Feminine Mystique managed to reach a group of women who might otherwise have been slow to join the push for women’s empowerment; it shone a light on their secret thoughts and concerns and made them far more receptive to the idea that even they, in their large houses and with their much-loved children, might be in need of and deserving of change. This is important: anyone who has had their genuine issues belittled by having someone else’s more horrific situation thrown in their face knows how easy it is to generate guilt for complaining when ‘people are starving in Africa’ or ‘there are homeless people living on the streets’ or ‘women in another country aren’t even allowed to go to school’.

But for the women who saw themselves in Friedan’s book, it was a revelation; a relief to know they weren’t alone. And even though the book was not groundbreaking — Coontz traces its origins through several scholarly works published in the decade prior — it made an impact because it was written in a readable style, it drove home its points well, and it was marketed not as an academic treatise but directly to the public. Excerpts appeared in the most popular women’s magazines. The target demographic was made very aware of the book, and thus its message was able to penetrate the public consciousness in a way that other books had not. Did it single-handedly start the women’s movement? No. But did it get the word out and get people talking about what was going wrong with American women? Yes. And in that way, its contribution, though not as much as the myths might claim, was hardly unimportant.

In Short
Somehow, prior to reading this book, I had heard that Coontz ‘blasts’ Friedan for, among other sins, leaving working-class and minority women mostly out of The Feminine Mystique. “Of course she did,” I grumbled to myself. “The book’s focus was suburban housewives, not women in general.” So I went into A Strange Stirring with a wary eye. I needn’t have worried, however, as Coontz is not a pundit but a scholar, and she has no agenda here: she fully acknowledges the narrow focus of The Feminine Mystique while she simultaneously examines the reactions of women outside the target audience. She paints a fuller historical picture of Friedan’s background, the state of U.S. women in general, and the state of the women’s movement at the time The Feminine Mystique was published, allowing the reader to see why the book was not a thunderclap appearing out of nowhere, but nonetheless an important book published at the right and needed time.

Nebula Project: Ringworld

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

On his 200th birthday, Louis Wu is recruited by an alien to join an expedition to an unknown destination. The reward is the plans for a spaceship drive beyond anything the human race has yet invented. He and the other recruits soon discover their destination is Ringworld, a sort of modified Dyson sphere which consists of a single ring spinning around a sun. Louis, his girltoy, and two aliens soon crash into Ringworld and must try to discover just what it is, who made it, and how they can escape.

K: Up for discussion is Ringworld by Larry Niven, winner of the 1970 Nebula award. This book was also apparently popular enough to spawn a franchise, but I think before we even get into discussing the plot or the details, we have to start by looking at the massive massive genderfail/misogyny that pervades this entire novel.

K: I was so astounded by it that I really am not sure where to begin.

J: This is another one of the books I’d actually read before. This one I believe I read in junior high, maybe early high school, when I was just blowing through things in the SF section of the local library. My memory of it was really limited to ‘hard science fiction, some aliens, a ringworld, boring’. So it surprised me when it was actually readable. But I also hadn’t remembered there being women in it! Or.. women-like objects, more accurately.

K: Yes, that’s really a perfect description. They certainly weren’t fully realized characters with agency or any sort of purpose. In fact, the “main” female character in the book, Teela Brown — it seems in the end her entire reason for being in the book was her complete -lack- of agency. Things just happened to her (and thus to our far more important male or apparently-male characters) without her knowledge, consent or even interest. Now, given that she was a completely rubbish female character to begin with, apparently on the trip because our protagonist couldn’t go without sex for a couple months without being tempted to rape one of his alien male companions (Oh yes, very funny joke, Larry Niven. Ha ha.). She has no training, no brains, no abilities beyond spreading her legs.

[At least I never slept with Prince Adam.]

J: But occasionally surprises the main character with how smart she is! At infrequent times. And just when she disappears, (and he thinks she’s dead), another woman comes in to have sex with him. Because we wouldn’t want him to go without.

K: The magic hooker with the unpronouncable name! Does she have a heart of gold? I’m not sure we actually saw enough of her to decide, but I’m leaning toward yes. At least the hooker was apparently a few hundred years old, a far more appropriate age for our 200 year old “hero” than a 20 year old ingenue whose great-grandmother he slept with. There’s no other way to describe that situation except gross.

J: And if their whole characterization wasn’t enough, he also goes and sells whatshername the first girl to the Ringworld guy! Rather than, you know, convince him that he doesn’t own her. Just.. oh, it’s easier if I sell you to him. ‘Okay!’

K: I was completely baffled by that. Now, we do have some evidence (see: magic hooker) that the Ringworld society wasn’t exactly egalitarian prior to the collapse of civilization. But it’s extremely telling that Niven’s take on the collapse of even an unequal civilization is that their first step is to make women literal property. Why? Seriously, why? He doesn’t even attempt to dress it up with the idea of a dowry or a bride-price, or explain why, and no one questions it. It’s just: ‘oh, women are slaves? Ok, well, here, let me sell you to him’.

J: Oh, he makes a lot of leaps without any good explanation to back them up. (‘He’ being kind of both Niven and the main character here.) Oh, no metal to mine, so clearly civilization cannot re-emerge. There’s bacteria in your gut! It could mutate! (And there was no other bacteria anywhere? Not.) You’re lucky, therefore you have no free will. Nessus might be male and take a female mate, or he might be female and take a male mate, or he might be male and take a male mate. But never once does it cross his mind that they might both be female.

K: Yes, let’s talk about the aliens for a bit. We have three species represented here, if we don’t count the Ringworlders as a fourth. And apparently Niven gets props from many for coming up with detailed and very different alien societies. I can see that to a certain extent, but once again his big issue is gender relations. Nessus (the puppeteer) implies that reproduction for his species requires three. Okay, fine. Except that one of the three involved is ‘property’ and nonsentient. Er, okay, fine. I don’t like that, but if you want to have a species where that is the case I can see how it might be interesting to explore. Not that it is explored or anyone comments upon it. Because ha ha, silly us, our other alien species, the catlike Kzin, -also- have a second sex which is nonsentient. And in both cases, as far as the reader is concerned, we are told that the aliens we see are analagous to males, implying (or in the case of the Kzin, flat out stating) that the nonsentient sex is the female one.

K: Once is interesting, twice is a trend. And given the fact that Niven made no effort to then contrast the human race with these aliens by making the human females dynamic, intelligent and interesting, it just smacks of a lack of interest in portraying females at all. The only reason the human females weren’t completely nonsentient is because obviously everyone knows that’s not the case. (Though apparently they aren’t quite up to male standards either.)

J: It’s bizarre too. Because Nessus says their only options to not breed are surgery or abstinence. I mean.. couldn’t you have sex with one person and not the both required? Not that we have any clue how any of it is accomplished. Because while he doesn’t shy away from nice human hetero sex scenes, he’s extremely vague about the aliens. And you’re right that we’re supposed to surmise that the nonsentient puppeteer is female, because Louis doesn’t ever imagine otherwise. Like if he had thought Nessus and the Hindmost both female, he would’ve had to imagine the nonsentient one as male and he couldn’t do that. And if both of those races are used to females being nonsentient, they should’ve been treating whatshername (I keep wanting to call her Trillian, for reasons I can get into later.) like crap. And Louis should’ve been all ‘What’re you doing, guys? She’s as sentient as me.’

J: Not that I want Nessus or the Hindmost to actually be female! Because /then/ we get the characterization of kzinti as male and warlike and fierce and strong. And the puppeteers as female and cowards and manipulators.

K: I didn’t entirely get the problem with the puppeteers and breeding. Nessus also says that abstinence causes its own problems and remarks that no race can go without sex for very long without it causing issues. And after he said that, I waited for Louis to contradict him, since humans have long practiced a lifetime of celibacy with no issues at all. Except he didn’t. Instead, Louis decides he may as well agree to bring along a completely unqualified 20 year old, since she’s eager to bed him and then he won’t have to be deprived. He even reflects on how stupid he was in the past for going on his solo ‘sabbaticals’ without taking along a woman in stasis he can wake up whenever he gets the urge.

J: Gah, yea. I’d forgotten he’d thought that. Like the human race wouldn’t have developed a very nice realistic sex doll he could’ve brought instead. The doll could’ve seemed just as sentient as he wanted. Which I’m guessing is not very. Was there also something in here about men only being able to reproduce until they’re in their 40s or 50s? Showing a clear lack of understanding of human reproduction!

K: There was indeed, though I think it was 50s or 60s. In any case, I can’t explain it, since even in 1970 I can hardly believe anyone thought that was true, since there were countless examples of it being untrue.

J: If the boosterspice made you sterile after you used it once or a few times, then sure, but.. that’s not stated.

K: Because that might confuse people into thinking our virile hero is impotent somehow! When of course he’s not. Every woman ever wants to sleep with Louis Wu. Though it’s never exactly explained why.

J: Why was he randomly called by his full name here and there? I can’t take his full name seriously in any case. After the titles of the first two chapters, I couldn’t take anything seriously! Which is when my mind started going down the Hitchhiker’s path. For those playing along at home, the first two chapters are: Chapter 1 – Louis Wu | Chapter 2 – And His Motley Crew

K: Ha! I did not actually notice that at all. Anyhow, I started equating Teela to Trillian fairly early on, but then gave it up. As underused and underdeveloped as Trillian is, she’s an astrophysicist, beautiful -and- smart. At least in the books. Teela is just a scream machine, someone for Louis to shake his head at, who conveniently disappears for the last third of the book so they can solve the problem of how to get out of the Ringworld.

J: Oh, Teela gets to be part Trillian and part Heart of Gold.. speaking of women with a heart of gold. :> And then we had a two-headed alien. So I really started to wonder how much Douglas Adams was using Ringworld to riff off of.

K: That is actually a good question. One which I’m not qualified to answer, but I can’t imagine it wasn’t something he had read and was aware of when writing Hitchhiker’s.

J: Didn’t Arthur Dent also meet Trillian at a party? But anyway.. the other reason I couldn’t take Louis Wu seriously as a name is that he was trying too hard to be Chinese without being Chinese. It was.. well, weird, but also racist. We first meet him he’s altered his true appearance and wearing clothes to make him nothing but a caricature of what a Chinese man is supposed to look like. Dressed up for his party? Or does he always present himself that way except when he’s off exploring ringworlds?

K: From the very brief introduction we have to current Earth society before we leave the planet, it sounds to me like extensive costuming and colorizing is typical of the present society. Teela, for instance, looks not at all like her presented appearance at the party. I do wonder why this seems to be a relatively common future trope (we last encountered it to this extent in Babel-17) — but maybe I’m just out of touch, since I do not like jewelry, perfumes make me ill, and I have way better ways to spend my money and time than worrying about cosmetics. I guess if modification was easy and cheap I might well use it to remove some weight.

J: The book that comes to mind is Westerfeld’s Uglies series. I think when a society is decadent and bored, they supposedly start playing with cosmetics, clothing, accessories, etc. If it was cheap and relatively safe and painless, I might do a few things. But why look like a boring old stereotype of a Chinese man? At least try to look like someone in particular, or be, y’know, different. Horns, wings, fur. Or if you felt that ideally reflected the you inside, then.. why remove it all to make a space trip?

K: I wasn’t entirely sure about that either, except that they weren’t going to be able to bring their cosmetics with them on the trip, and I’m sure real astronauts aren’t allowed to wear such things(?), so perhaps it’s something he included without even thinking about it.

J: Hrm. Maybe.

K: Now, the technology was interesting. Aside from the various poorly explained youth serums (the boosterspice, and then the Ringworld equivalent which somehow gave you ’50 years of youth’ per dose.) We have the transporter booths, the puppeteer equivalent, moving sidewalks — and then Louis mentions using a typewriter. What?

J: Did he? I don’t remember that. What kind of threw me was ‘intercom’ also including video. Since to me ‘intercom’ is very specific. Unlike ‘comm’, which I take more generally, to cover a wide range of possibilities.

K: Video intercom isn’t unheard of, so that didn’t really pop out at me. And I had to laugh at the moving sidewalks (slidewalks!) because really, that idea is so impractical. They can’t even keep the elevators working in subway stations. They can’t even properly plow the sidewalks we have. Can you imagine municipalities trying to keep miles of conveyor belts working? Outside? And yet… it’s such a popular idea. Like flying cars.

J: Bunch of lazy people. :) That reminds me though.. that he thinks teleporters will homogenize the planet. Moreso than television or other communications technologies. Like there wouldn’t be a backlash against, say, the Louvre being turned into a Walmart.

K: Yeah, it’s pretty clear now that increased communication and consumerism is what’s going to homogenize the planet. Transportation may come later but it’s not going to be at all essential.

J: If anything, it may have the opposite effect. If I can teleport anywhere I want, am I going to go to Dunkin Donuts? No. I’ll go to whoever I think is the best donut place on the planet. The number of Dunkin Donuts then won’t be based on ‘well, the closest one is a mile from here’, but on how many are needed to keep up with demand.

K: That’s an interesting point. I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s very true. We put up with a lot of mediocre stuff because of convenience, but this would really change the nature of convenience in a fundamental way.

J: There is just so much in here I wish Niven had been concerned with exploring instead of the stupid Ringworld. What’s Earth like? What are the colonies like? What are the alien societies like? Not that I want to read the other books to find out. I think they’d just tick me off.

K: And there’s no real guarantee that they focus on the information you want. I think here again, he got interested in the idea of a Dyson sphere and wanted to figure out how to improve it. I can’t fault him for the thought experiment. It’s just the execution which is so unfortunate, because it completely takes away from the fact that the idea of a ‘ringworld’ is actually interesting. But he didn’t really explore that either, because as soon as we get there our characters are mostly trying to escape!

J: And I’m still confused why the place is full of humans. The explanation is supposed to be that the people who made the ringworld also wandered by Earth and half-heartedly terraformed it, brought some chimps and Neanderthals with them and.. what? We evolved from those Neanderthals or we descended from the ringworld engineers? And where do the dinosaurs come into it?

K: I suspect the history may be better fleshed out in future books, but yes, the impression I got was that Niven was saying we were somehow evolved from the pets of the Ringworld humans. So we were distantly related to them, but not -them-. I don’t know where the dinosaurs come in.

J: And none of these other alien races had run into humans on any other planet other than the ones who wandered there from Earth? Only Earth humans managed to make a go of it.

K: Well, I think the Earth thing was somewhat meant to be speculation. Because really it doesn’t make a -whole- lot of sense. Earth is supposedly 200 light years away from Ringworld, and no one ever encountered these Ringworld humans before, so presumably most of their empire was away from ‘Known Space’ which is the area local to Earth, roughly 70 light years across according to the book. So the odds that Earth, so very distant, was really part of it? Dunno. It seemed like an awfully silly coincidence, but as it was never properly followed through with in this book I can’t say either way.

J: Also the arrogance. Oh, these people can’t fly the cities anymore. They think we’re gods. So they’re uncivilized and backwards and barbarians and such a shame their civilization fell.

K: Shoddy reasoning was all over the place. There are lots of leaps of logic that are only barely supported by the available facts (ex: the whole Earth terraforming business). Like, they all happily conclude that people invented the floating cities before the development of the life extending serum, because people who don’t live long lives are more likely to be reckless with the life that they have. Um, what?

J: Yea, bizarre. And how is living in a floating city any less safe than flying around on cycles or in spaceships? When it comes to the luck thing, I could buy that a very lucky person would be reckless and careless. I couldn’t buy that she couldn’t empathize with people. That ‘I’m blind’, ‘But can you /see/?’ thing was just weird. And why would her luck have to drag her all the way to the ringworld to teach her how to uh.. be in pain? She couldn’t burn her feet on Earth? And I refuse, I refuse to believe this guy who now /owns/ her is the best possible person in the world for her and isn’t she so ‘lucky’ to have been united with him.

K: Niven (through Louis) flat out questions her humanity at several points in the book. I found it fairly hard to believe she was -that- distanced from the normal human experience. And yes, I strongly object to the manner in which she was disposed of by finding that random dude and then… randomly sleeping with him. And even more randomly being sold to him. The whole subplot of Teela’s luck was just weird and confusing.

J: And he’s really old. So she hasn’t even traded in for a man closer to her own age. :P

K: After reading this, I have to wonder why this universe became such a favorite that it spawned so many sequels, prequels and spinoffs. There is so little to recommend it. The basic idea– I’m just not sure how you can rescue it from all of the fail.

J: I don’t know.. the only redeeming quality I can see is that the two aliens were interesting. Although not entirely well-rounded.

K: They aliens were interesting, sort of. The puppeteer moreso than the Kzin. I have a prejudice against cat aliens.

J: I didn’t really read him as a cat. Even though he did say kittens at one point, I think. I guess I pictured more that big Looney Tunes monster. Whose name Google now informs me is Gossamer.

K: I can’t say whether or not I would have immediately read him as a cat, though I’m sure that his felinity was mentioned. But really I spent the better part of the 90s seeing those Man-Kzin War books being promoted at the bookstore when I went in to buy something else, so I have the cover images burned into my brain.

J: Ah. Well, I don’t have trouble with cat aliens per se. They do seem to be all over the place though.

J: Maybe you can explain something to me. It’s probably physics. So at the end, they pull the ship up the mountain and it’ll go down the hole in the middle and out into space, yea? It that because centripetal force is going to erm.. propel them that way? And then what’re they doing? Hanging out in space? I just.. why couldn’t they just take off again? Why did they have to go ‘down’ and through the hull?
s/It/Is

K: The problem was, to put this in the terms of technobabble from other series, all their impulse engines were burned up by the sun, but their hyperdrive was contained within the hull rather than fastened outside of it. So the only way they could move was by turning on the hyperdrive, which would have caused massive destruction if they tried to do it inside the ring instead of out of it. Now, I don’t recall an explanation for how the hyperdrive worked, but presumably it works on the same basic principle as most FTL drives and warps local space allowing the ship to escape Einsteinian space and enter a dimension where the speed limit isn’t the speed of light. Doing this on top of a planet or planet-like structure is probably a very bad idea.

J: I was just trying to picture a bunch of different alternative escape plans. But I couldn’t think of one that’d work. So I guess I get it now. And they must’ve landed near the one spot they could escape through because Teela was lucky and it was in her best interests to get Louis as far away from her as possible.

K: Hahaha. Yeah, that must be it.

The Strange Case of Origami Yoda (Tom Angleberger)

The Plot
Tommy isn’t exactly the coolest boy in the sixth grade, but he knows he’s cooler than Dwight. Which is why it’s so very confusing when Dwight, who has committed many crimes against coolness, produces an origami Yoda. And not just any origami Yoda, but a Yoda who gives great advice (if in a poor imitation of the actual Yoda’s voice). If Dwight is so incredibly out of the loop, how does Yoda do it? Is the Force really at work here or is it something else?

My Thoughts
The title of this book alone made it required reading, and then the cover (with its picture of an origami Yoda made by the author) just clinches the deal. But other than those things and the cover blurb, I didn’t have much more information about it going in.

The setting is a U.S. middle school, a fairly liberal one, as the kids seem to have plenty of time to congregate out of class (not a feature of the junior high I went to – though at least we still got a long enough lunch to have some recess time after eating). Tommy is a kind of middle of the road kid, perhaps on the less popular side of average, and his friends mostly occupy the same social stratum. Dwight is a boy on the fringe of their group — he’s considered borderline acceptable even by them, due to his behaviors and habits which are considered odd by the other kids.

Dwight, however, doesn’t seem to care or notice that he’s looked down upon by the others. He seems oblivious for the most part to the horror he creates when he wears a weird outfit or eats his food in an odd fashion, or talks to a girl without agonizing over it. It’s not clear to me as a reader if Dwight is meant to be socially awkward and unaware of the views of others or if he’s completely aware of their shock, but is just above petty social games and confident enough in himself to behave the way he wants. In the end it may not matter (we spend the book in Tommy’s head, not Dwight’s) but it’s an interesting question which I don’t entirely feel was resolved.

One day, Dwight shows up having made a Yoda out of origami. He puts it on his finger and does a Yoda imitation and thus proceeds to give advice to the others. Most of the time, this advice seems to be very wise, and most of the other kids find this completely incompatible with their view of Dwight as clueless. (Though it fits better with the possible second view of Dwight which none of them have entertained.) Tommy is one of the most concerned by this seeming divergence from expectations (perhaps because it forces him to think he may have mislabeled and underestimated Dwight?) and so he attempts to compile a dossier of the advice Yoda has given and the results which ensued.

The various scenarios presented are all reasonable, realistic and all that (well, maybe — do they really still have middle school dances? they were lame 20 years ago and not many people went), and the premise is a fine one. The only place where the story falls down a bit is in the fact that all the kids (except for Tommy’s cynical “friend” Harvey, who as far as this story actually has an antagonist, is it) sound exactly the same, even though we’re supposed to be getting stories from a variety of perspectives. Perhaps the stories are meant to have been filtered through Tommy before being written down. I’m not sure. But I would have liked to have seen a bit more variety in voice.

The other issue I had was with the girls. And in the context of the story, it’s not really a fault, it’s just a POV that’s so common I’d really like to see some effort to make it new again. And that is the view of girls as alien beings impossible to comprehend, a view which most of the boys seem to share. I’m not sure how one would make this new, but I do know it wasn’t exactly ‘new’ here.

Overall, this was a pleasant little story. By the end, Tommy seems to have learned a lesson, everyone is happy (except Harvey) and it ends on a feel good note. There is a sequel coming, which I find I’m actually interested to read, because it seems like it’s going to focus on Harvey and his reaction to all of these events.

In Short
Though The Strange Case of Origami Yoda doesn’t exactly break new ground in tween books, it’s still a decent story with some interesting characters. I really like the idea of the origami Yoda, and really it was that which attracted me to the book in the first place. (And shows what you can do with a kickass title.) Though most of the characters felt pretty generic, Dwight and Harvey (and to a certain extent Caroline, a hearing impaired student just slipped in there for no moral value at all — nice work!!) stood out as being unique constructs. I’ll be picking up the sequel to see what happens next.

Origami Yoda
Edited to add my not so great attempt at making this version of Origami Yoda. The only origami paper I could find in the house was small and rainbow colored, neither of which helped.

[Yoda uses the force to prevent his picture being taken]

[Yoda’s force powers are overcome by sunlight]

Skyfall (Catherine Asaro)

The Plot
The Skolian Empire stands on the brink of war, with only an important vote in the ruling Assembly to decide which way the decision will turn. Roca Skolia, the Foreign Affairs Minister and daughter of the current rulers of the Empire, is desperate to get back and cast her votes against the war. But she knows her son Kurj, head of one of the military branches, is just as determined to keep her from arriving in time so he can cast her votes for her. She attempts to avoid his agents by taking a roundabout method back and accidentally finds herself stranded upon the world called Skyfall. What happens next may end up having an even more profound effect upon the Empire than the war ever could.

My Thoughts
I was first introduced to Catherine Asaro’s Saga of the Skolian Empire sort of by accident. I was with friends in Boston, and we stopped by Pandemonium, a science fiction and fantasy bookstore. I was not feeling very flush with cash at the time, so I lingered near the door while they shopped, trying to avoid temptation. At a table near the entrance were some books and also their author, who I ended up talking to, because I felt awkward just standing there and ignoring someone. It was Catherine Asaro, and she gave me a pen. And then I felt guilty for taking the pen, so I also bought one of her books, The Last Hawk, which she told me was probably the easiest to read as a standalone. I took it home and read it and enjoyed it, and even went so far as to figure out which book I ought to read next, so I read that one and liked it too. And that’s kind of where things stood, because I knew even though the two I had read were enjoyable, I still felt like there was a multitude of backstory I had missed and which I needed to properly enjoy the later books in the series. I am a freak for timelines.

So when we decided to read one of Asaro’s books for Tripletake, I seized upon the chance to finally have an excuse to (1) figure out the internal chronology of the series and (2) buy all the rest of the books. Skyfall comes chronologically first (for now, at least) in the series, though it was not published first.

In Skyfall, we’re introduced to Roca Skolia, the second daughter of the current rulers of the Skolian Empire and the Empire’s Foreign Affairs Councillor. As the story opens, she’s realizing she was tricked by her son Kurj into leaving the seat of government just before an important vote will be called — a vote which will determine whether or not the Empire enters into a war with their rival empire, the Eubian Concord. With Roca out of touch, Kurj will be able to cast her votes as proxy and thus swing the result in the direction he desires. In order to thwart his plans, Roca devises an extremely roundabout method of returning to the Assembly. She lands on the world of Skyfall a few days before her next connection and promptly finds herself swept off by a group of the planet’s inhabitants. Though her kidnappers don’t mean her harm, an unexpected blizzard keeps her from getting back to the spaceport in time to make her flight, and she is stranded. Then, to make matters worse, she finds herself in the middle of a siege when the stronghold where she is staying is attacked by a group seeking to overthrow Eldrinson Valdoria, the current man in charge.

That Roca and Eldrinson find themselves mutually attracted is probably not a surprise. But what was a nice surprise was the effort made to make the residents of Skyfall (aka Lyshriol) actually different, even though they were of human stock. Instead of five-fingered and toed appendages, they have four fingers which bend in the middle to oppose one another. They think and count in base 8, and their vocal abilities have been enhanced so that they can make more sounds than a normal human. But somehow they can’t grasp the idea of a written record. Though they’re human, they’re still very alien — it’s hard to imagine them or get in their heads. And that was interesting to me, much more than your typical degenerate colony. It also seemed fairly self-consistent to me, more logical than say, the ancient colony/experiment which we visit in The Left Hand of Darkness.

Now, meanwhile, Roca’s son Kurj, though pleased with the voting results he’s achieved with his machinations, is increasingly agitated over his mother’s disappearance and consumed with the guilt of knowing it would not have happened but for his schemes. He devotes fantastic amounts of time and resources into trying to figure out where she’s gone, hoping to rescue her and also to punish anyone who might have been involved in keeping her away from him.

Along the way of this, we get a good amount of information about the history of the Skolian Empire, the leaders, the current political situation, the distribution of humans in this particular future, and various technologies which are unique to Asaro’s universe. As an introduction to the series, I came away from Skyfall feeling far less confused by the cast of characters and the setting than I recall feeling after the other books I read. There was plenty of information provided, but the number of main characters was not excessive and I was able to keep track of them and their relationships to one another without any trouble.

I’m looking forward to going through the series now in chronological order, and I expect that when I do hit the two books which I’ve already read, they’ll make a lot more sense and have more meaning once I can place them within a bigger context.

In Short
Though I had read a couple of books from the Skolian Empire series several years ago and found then enjoyable, I had been a bit confused by all of the names and places flying around because they took place quite far along in the series’ internal chronology. Skyfall is currently chronologically first and thus serves as a very good introduction to the characters and the setting, laying the groundwork for the rest of the books. Though it wasn’t published first, Asaro did a very good job of not expecting people to have read any of the other books before this one. I’m looking forward to continuing with the series from here.c

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.