nebula project – Page 2

Nebula Project: The Gods Themselves

What follows is a spoiler laden discussion of the book The Gods Themselves. Beware if youâ€™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.

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 youâ€™re worried about such things.

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.

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.

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.

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.