gryphonsegg

I've started reading Still Forms on Foxfield, a short-by-today's-standards science fiction novel by Joan Slonczewski that published in 1980. I'm posting about it partly because it's just a really interesting book and as a follow-up to my earlier post about how I'd like to see more nerdy feminist discussion about science fiction and fantasy books written by women as opposed to discussions centered around female characters written by men. This post is not a review in the traditional sense, although I might write a review of the book later. For now, I just want to post of list of things about the book that I like and/or find interesting, especially those that stand out in the context of that earlier post and the discussion that ensued in its comments.

1. The set-up is one that I find myself using again and again in my own original writing: A group of humans settle on an extrasolar planet and lose contact with the rest of humankind for period of many Earth-standard years. They adapt to their environment and live in close association with sentient native species. Eventually, representatives of an interstellar human civilization reestablish contact, perceiving themselves as advanced and civilized and the humans who have adapted to the new planet as a technologically primitive and culturally backward "lost colony." The so-called lost colonists are all like, "Oh no, let us explain you a thing. If you think about it in the right way, you will find it is you who are lost."

2. This is a fairly common set-up in SF (although I have the completely unquantitative impression that it isn't as popular among the current crop of writers as it was when I was a kid). Slonczewski's twist on the idea is that the people who fled Earth and settled on the new planet were Quakers. They weren't setting up a colony, they were seeking refuge from a world-wide nuclear war that threatened to destroy Earth and its nearby (in astronomical terms) colonies.

3. One of the popular tropes of "lost colony" stories (which I interrogate in various ways in my own writing) is that, once the humans lose or surrender their spacefaring capabilities and some of the other advanced technology they had access to back on Earth, their society inevitably does a replay of the author's conception of Medieval European civilization or white settler culture on the American "frontier" (I'll save interrogating the mythos of the US frontier for another time), complete with lots of casual two-way violence between men and casual one-way violence of men against women and a set of laws and mores that force women into chattel (actually, women tend to be even more restricted in many of these fictional narratives than they were in those real life historical situations, but that is another post for another time). The settlers on Foxfield don't do that. Because they're Quakers.

4. The women are shown as being equal to the men both in theory and in practice. The only thing that's not great from a 21st century feminist perspective is that there is social pressure on women to bear multiple children because the human population is so small. But there's no attempt to force the issue if a woman really doesn't want to, and being a mother is not treated as incompatible with being an astronomer, a doctor, a community leader, or anything else. I think that's worthy of comment because lots of SF takes it as given that a low human population means fast reproduction is needed which means women must be forced into broodmare duty which means women must also be denied political rights and prevented from doing jobs that the author's RL culture considers unfeminine. Sadly, this assumption is very common even today. Even when it's not baldly stated (as it so often is in settling-a-new-planet SF), the SF and fantasy genres as a whole are really terrible about portraying mothers (again, that could be a whole post on its own). The genres and lots of fandom spaces can be rather hostile to the idea that a human can be both a person and a mother. In this context, it's significant that the main character in Still Forms on Foxfield is a woman who is an astronomer and also the mother of one child (and not looking to have another, which the community doctor, also a woman, mildly disapproves of because population growth and we lost people in last year's flood).

5. In other "lost colony" stories, one of the more popular alternatives to the "traditional patriarchal families" strategy of promoting population growth is enforced heterosexual promiscuity as a means of both getting a high rate of natural increase and maximizing genetic recombination within a limited population. Again, the Foxfield Friends don't go there. Because they're Quakers. They use artificial insemination to minimize genetic drift, which I wish more writers took seriously. Realistically, the technology needed to do artificial insemination is not very advanced. If your fictional society has lost the knowledge of how to do that, they must have lost a lot of other things that usually stick around in these stories. In the settlement on Foxfield, monogamy is the norm or at least the ideal. Heterosexual marriage is standard, and the community is in the process of reaching consensus about homosexual marriage (published in 1980, remember). If there's any adultery going on, it's not mentioned in the first half of the book. Presumably, either it's rare because everybody knows everybody else's business or it's irrelevant because the narrator has bigger fish to fry.

6. This really stands out to me: In the seventies and the eighties, it must have seemed plausible, even probable, that nuclear annihilation would become reality before same sex marriage became reality.

7. This is one of the few "old" SF works I've read that portrays technological changes in everyday life that stand up to today's reality. Besides space travel being trivial, the main technological development that makes life in the interstellar we're-not-an-empire-we-swear very different from the author's RL culture is communication equipment. Most other SF I've read from around the same time has people on other planets storing all their information on cassette tapes and calling each other on wall-mounted communication units. Slonczewski has people who accept the benefits (which are free until they aren't) of the System keeping in constant contact with each other (and the duly appointed/elected authorities, naturally) via wristbands that serve the functions of iphones, debit cards, medical monitors, and more. This is one old future that still seems actually futuristic.

8. That's not only because of the communication tech; it's also because Slonczewski put some work into making the System not look too much like the US or the USSR circa 1979. She envisioned greater changes in social values and daily life practices than many other SF writers of the same era.

9. Tying in with #8 and also with the earlier points about the status of women on Foxfield, she also avoided the popular trope of having a cataclysmic event on Earth (nuclear war, plague, environmental collapse, zombies, or whatever) turn the remnants of human civilization into an anti-feminist nightmare where the men are badass warriors and leaders and women (barring the occasional Special Girl) are limited to being broodmares, prostitutes, and/or rape victims (Gosh, I'm sensing a theme here). The System is full of women in government, in science, and in a host of middling-status jobs; women are both illustrious VIPs and ordinary citizens (so the appearance of a woman isn't a signal to Watch This Space in order to see either Sexiness or a Statement About Womankind). There's a casual mention that in the aftermath of the war which came close to destroying life on Earth, reproducing parthenogenetically was fashionable for a time because many of the survivors attributed the war to the inherent aggressiveness of male political leaders and decided that a female-skewed population had better chances of avoiding future wars. That passed, so men still exist . . . no big deal.

10. OMG THE ALIENS!!!! The native sapient lifeforms of Foxfield are EXCELLENTLY IMAGINED! They are loosely based on fungi. Their reproductive biology is like nothing animals do, physiologically or psychologically, so they don't have dimorphic sexes. The Foxfield Friends speak English, so they default to feminine pronouns for their fungi-like neighbors, whom they refer to collectively as the Commensals or 'mensals. The Commensals seem very alien, which I strongly approve of on general principle. It's fascinating how the Friends and the Commensals live side-by-side, learn from each other, and communicate with each other during the period in which the action takes place.

11. It's also important to note that their first contact would have gone extremely badly with any other group of human settlers I've ever read about. Neither group realized the other was sapient at first, some of the native Foxfielders killed some of the human newcomers and then realized their mistake and tried to communicate with the still-living humans. And this set of humans, alone of all the space settlers I've ever encountered in my life of reading science fiction, responded by trying to communicate back instead of trying to wipe them out. Because they're Quakers.

I am becoming increasingly dismayed by the amount of cultural space taken up by A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones, especially in what I'll call, for lack of a better term, nerd feminist discourse. This isn't just another "I'm tired of popular thing I don't like" complaint. Wherever I go to read women's thoughts about the fantasy genre or fandom or female characters in popular fiction or feminism from a nerdy, bookwormish perspective, a big part of the conversation is dominated by ASOIAF. So many women spend so much energy dissecting this series, analyzing its gender dynamics, defending its female characters . . . and yet the author is a man, and a man who makes creepy, fetishizing comments about abused adolescent girl characters and who has never even pretended to be even slightly feminist-friendly at that. The longer it goes on and the farther it spreads, the more desperately I want to know Who the hell put George RR Martin, of all people, in charge of setting the terms of conversation about women in fantasy fiction, and why are so many intelligent women who have some awareness of feminist issues so ready to accept that state of affairs?

Yes, I know the standard answer is "That's a lot of female characters!" But I'm not satisfied with that. First of all, ASOIAF is a long series that has a lot of characters, period. Soap operas have a lot of female characters too, and at least their sensationalized rape storylines aren't handled in a way that has "MALE GAZE" stamped all over them. Secondly, those characters in the books are a little too obviously written by a man for an audience of men. I understand that the HBO series is supposed to be somewhat better in terms of letting the more negatively portrayed women have some human qualities, but it's also worse about gratuitously inserting explicit sex with gross power imbalances, so yeah. Finally and most importantly, there are plenty of real life women who have written stories about multiple female characters, and very few of those have gotten the level of attention and wide-ranging discussion that ASOIAF and some other male-authored texts I can think of have recently received even from women who are all about the feminist analysis.

The only women authors I can think of right off the top of my head who take up a comparable amount of cultural space are Jane Austen (who didn't write fantasy) and J.K. Rowling (whose children's books do feature more prominent male than female characters and whose non-fantasy adult novel is still pretty well overshadowed by the earlier children's fantasy series). Stephenie Meyer has name recognition, but her work is treated as a (very, very stale) joke in the circles I run in, and her reputation as a bad writer who became popular with teenage girls is often wielded as a weapon against other women who want to write novels, participate in fandom, or just have their opinions respected. The closest thing I can think of to a woman-authored ASOIAF equivalent is The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, which is somehow mysteriously just not considered as fitting a topic for ongoing serious discussion and is often dismissed out of hand with highly inaccurate comparisons to Meyer's Twilight. All the others just kind of fall through the cracks. Somehow. Just like Joanna Russ said. Speaking of Joanna Russ, she and the other feminist SF authors of the seventies and eighties wrote about a lot of female characters, and some of them wrote more "grim and gritty" fiction than Martin or Richard K. Morgan or the rest of the "grim and gritty" fantasy dudes could ever envision. Sure, it's dated in some ways, but I've been surprised more than once by how many "second wave" concern are still relevant today.

So, to sum up, I am: a) SO sick of discussions about female characters being driven by a man, b) fully intending to come up with a list of science fiction and fantasy by women that includes many female characters and perhaps does other things that ASOIAF gets credit for and does them better, and c) especially sick of seeing it implied or stated outright that women who find Cersei Lannister a poorly written aggregation of misogynist stereotypes instead of a sympathetic portrayal of a woman coping with patriarchy only feel that way because of our own internalized misogyny.

I need to make cards for Wanky "Hard" SF Writer Bingo. These are the spaces I have so far:

Turing Test that Alan Turing wouldn't have passed- Proving an entity's sapience and personhood involves demonstrating that the entity has a prurient interest in young, female humans. In many cases of this, the entity in question does not even have an organic body.

Hide the white women- Young, thin, human women or teenage girls with extremely pale skin (and usually with blond hair too) are super-attractive to all beings.

Obsessed with their own breasts- Any being with breasts is constantly aware of their shape, size, movement, nipple size, color and size of areolae, how the breasts are squished or held in place or not by completely standard everyday clothing, etc.

You keep using that word- Rape used as a metaphor for a thing that has absolutely nothing to do with non-consensual sex.

There's a word for that- Non-consensual sex occurs, but the narrative voice or a sympathetic character takes pains to point out that it was NOT RAPE.

Naked for the greater good- A contrived situation emerges in which the only logical course of action for a character is to remove every stitch of clothing and perform some series of athletic feats that give a watching mixed crowd a great view of everything. While she's doing this, she thinks about how some women would refuse to do this or think badly of her for doing this because it's immodest, but it doesn't bother her at all because modesty is a frivolous luxury that a woman who has her priorities in order simply cannot afford.

Adult writer audibly drooling over teenage character- Self-explanatory. The older I get, the more disgusting I find this.

Species of rational misogyny- Alien species in which males are sapient and females are not.

Species of dirty old men- Alien species whose biology requires extremely young females to bear the children of much older males.

Species of hot space babes- Alien species whose members look like female humanoids who are super-attractive by the standards of the writer's culture; males are either non-existent or super-ugly.

Does anybody out there have more? I just started (and quit) a book that had Adult writer audibly drooling over teenage character, You keep using that word, Obsessed with their own breasts, Turing Test that Alan Turing wouldn't have passed, Hide the white women and some ultra-creepy emotional incest that I'm not sure how to describe all in the first 32 pages.

I am just about fed up with books in which the main character is female but all the important supporting characters are male, especially when the setting is one which appears to have equality on the surface (no expressions of surprise to find a woman doing the heroine's job or holding certain titles, no evidence that family law favors husbands/fathers over wives/mothers, girls going to school with boys presented as completely normal and unworthy of comment, some high-ranking women referred to in passing or given walk-on roles) and yet all the people who really matter in Our Heroine's life and career and adventures just happen to be men. This is bothering me so much more than it used to. Maybe it's because I've begun to notice it more, or maybe it's just because I've recently started two different books which I picked up in part because they featured female main characters, and in both cases, after I got into the story, it occurred to me that they were completely surrounded by male characters. One of them looked very promising at first, with women other than the main holding positions of authority and/or jobs that are heavily male-dominated in the real world, but as the plot progressed, they turned out to be very minor characters, whereas there are multiple male characters who are moving the plot as much as or more than the heroine and who have much more character development than any of the other female characters. I don't just want fantasy about a world where one woman is special enough to have a story told from her point of view; I want fantasy about a world where women are half the population and the story reflects that.

Yesterday I did something that I had previously told myself I'd never do: I reread The Great Gatsby. I first encountered this book as required reading in high school and predictably hated it. Recently, someone who loves it convinced me to give it another try, having argued convincingly that one needs life experience to appreciate all its merits. So, I've read it again. I do not love this book like my acquaintance does, but I also do not hate it. I now understand for the first time how someone could love it, and my reasons for not loving it are rather different from the reasons I hated it before.

I'm not the sort of reader who normally notices or cares very much about the stylistic quality of the language with which a story is told. I'm more a fan of storytelling than of literature. But even I have to admit that Fitzgerald's use of language is here a great thing in its own right, painting vivid scenes and keeping them zipping along one right after the other. The book dragged for me in high school, but as an adult, I devoured it at a pace I normally reserve for action-packed stories that make me eager to find out what happens next. I still don't like any of the characters, but I now understand, in a way I didn't when I was younger, that I'm not necessarily supposed to. And even though I don't like any of them, I do recognize them now, whereas I didn't have enough real world experience to recognize them before. The problems that I have with the story now are all the same ones I have with all the other well-regarded stories by Famous Dead White Guys and many of the Not-As-Famous Living White Guys.

The main lesson I have taken away from the experience is that The Great Gatsby should not be required reading for high school students because they won't understand it and they'll end up hating it for all the wrong reasons. It makes me wonder why this is ever assigned to high school students in the first place. Its themes are not ones that make sense to most high school students. I mean, yeah, they know what adultery is, but they don't grasp the full social significance of it and probably won't even notice how much it recurs in the books. It's obvious that Tom is having an affair with Mrs. Wilson and that Gatsby wants to have an affair with Daisy, but as a teenager I honestly did not notice that adultery is all over the background. Teenagers might have a rudimentary grasp of the distinction between old money and nouveau riche, but very, very few of them have ever seen that kind of snobbery in action, and the ones who have seen it surely didn't understand all the implications. The themes of the work that really stood out for me on my second reading are disillusionment and the futility of trying to recover lost chances-- not themes that seventeen-year-olds are likely to pick up on! They still have too many of their illusions. They have not had enough time to make much of an attempt to recover their lost chances. No themes stood out to me on my long-ago first reading, and there's a reason for that.

I had another feminist click moment this morning, and it helped me articulate one of the things I find immensely frustrating about the recurring debates over female characters in fandom, especially the ones that center on labeling certain female characters as "feminine" or "girly-girls" and labeling others as "unfeminine," "rejecting or hiding their femininity," or "men with breasts." One of the baseline assumptions that both of the two most vocal sides of the debate start from is that a fixation on fashion and make-up is inherently feminine, girly, and womanly and that a female character who doesn't care about or take pleasure in playing with fashionable clothes, accessories, and cosmetics is more like a guy and more distanced from typical women and their concerns than a female character who does. And I just realized that I fundamentally disagree with that assumption.

Look at world history. There have been many, many times and places-- even within modern European history!-- in which men were just as fashion-conscious as women. There have been--and in some places still are--cultures in which both men and women use make-up and other cultures in which neither men nor women do that. There have even been times in the not-so-distant past when white Americans and Europeans considered wearing make-up improper for "good" women. There have been and still are some non-Western cultures in which it's the men who use cosmetics and elaborate clothes and accessories to attract attention to their appearance, while the women's traditional dress and grooming styles are more practical and low-key. The emergence of the current Western popular gender schema, in which women are highly ornamental and men are much less so or not at all, emerged along with certain shifts in economic structure and cultural values, including women's work being disappeared from public view so that married women were increasingly regarded as ornaments and economic drains to their husbands rather than household managers and economic assets, and fashion being considered less a luxury that upper class people enjoyed and more a waste of time that frivolous people enjoyed.

So the conversations I'm seeing now about whether certain characters don't get enough respect because they're feminine, where feminine is defined as highly focused on and invested in fashion and make-up, are really bugging me. I mean, I used to be uncomfortable with those kinds of conversations because I could see that both sides had some good points. But now it has become really clear to me that the very terms of debate are more full of problems than I had consciously recognized. In addition to the issues that are entirely about gender in and of itself, it also bothers me that these conversations completely erase the matters of class and poverty. All of this really settled for me while I was thinking about recent commentary on The Hunger Games, in which people asserted that the series is anti-femininity because it's about people who are too poor to pursue fashion as an end in itself rebelling against an oppressor class that revels in ever-changing fashions because they have the time and material resources to do so thanks to a sociopolitical structure that takes away resources produced by the former group. Supposedly, this valorizes the main character's so-called rejection of femininity (she was too busy keeping her little sister from starving to death to care about clothes and make-up) and disparages "girly things" (literally defined as "fashion and make-up") and the people who like them. Way to completely ignore all the themes, especially the entire issue of poverty and exploitation on which the whole story hangs.

People, I think I'm finally cured of Valdemar. I bought the newest collection of Valdemar short stories (various authors, Mercedes Lackey advertized as sole editor), but once I started reading it, I found that multiple stories made me want to throw it. The Shin'a'in Herald story was the absolute last straw for me-- not only the last straw in the book, but the last straw in the series. I can put up with many things for the sake of returning to a world I've loved for years. But this story's blatant disregard for continuity shattered any remaining hope I had of any effort being made to keep Velgarth a mostly internally consistent world.

In this story, a young man raised by the Tale'sedrin clan, which was wiped out by bandits and refounded by Tarma over the course of several previous books and short stories, goes to Valdemar. He trains with the Heralds and has trouble learning how to use a sword because his people have no tradition of sword-fighting!!!! That's right, all the people Tarma adopted have been raising the new Tale'sedrin with no knowledge of how to use a sword or how to fight on foot because, in direct contradiction of all previous portrayals, Shin'a'in don't use swords, don't use melee weapons generally, and don't fight on foot. Ever. And they never did in the past, so they have no traditions related to those skills. All Shin'a'in warriors were only ever archers, and only from horseback.

As for the priests of their most honored and beloved deity being called the SWORD-sworn because they were supernaturally good SWORD fighters, and that being a huge part of the identity of Tarma, the Shin'a'in SWORD-sword character through whom we first me the Shin'a'in, and that being a fundamental plot-point of many of the stories in which Tarma was featured . . . THAT'S ALL RETCONNED! Sure, Lackey didn't write that story herself, but she gets sole credit for editing the anthology in which it appears. She approved this gross mangling of continuity. Shin'a'in sword fighters, specifically Tale'sedrin sword-fighters are not an obscure part of her previous worldbuilding.

I already knew that she's been phoning it in for a few years now, but there's something about her acceptance of such a complete defiance of previous canon that gets under my skin in a way that nothing else, not even her own relatively easy-to-miss retcons, ever did. I've stuck with Valdemar for a long time despite annoyances and misgivings about a variety of things that pale in comparison to letting this level of continuity-smashing slide. But I think I'm done now. If she cares that little about her own worldbuilding, I'm out. I'm giving up before we get stories in which Talia is a former race car driver and Vanyel has cat ears.

Finished Zoo City today! I am really, really into this book. It's making me think about scores of possible crossovers, and it's making me wish for sequels and a fandom. That last bit is troublesome because the book doesn't contain the a lot of elements that most of the fandoms I've observed fixate on. For me, however, it's been a long time since I've found a world that piqued my interest this much. I checked the book out from a library, but I am seriously considering buying my own copy so I'll have it as a reference whenever I want it.

So . . . My names is Gryphon's Egg, and I have magic guilt animal problem. The first step is admitting the problem. If anyone has a character they'd like me to write about dealing with magic guilt animals, please prompt me in comments.

I found a good pair of antennae today! These are really nice antennae, not just something I could have bought the component parts of any of a hundred stores within driving distance and convinced a second-grader to put together in exchange for cookies. *looks askance at a certain other costume shop* Now I have everything I need for my alien costume. <3 I expect to post later this weekend with my character's personal backstory. I should have done that already, but I've been holding back because I've been thinking carefully about how to present it. I am dealing, after all, with a character who has no internal gender identity and who might never have developed a physical sex in the natural course of thing, who was forced to become what humans in general view as definitely and rather emphatically female. This is a character rejects gender outright and wears zir/her sex characteristics like war wounds.

I also finished The Truth of Valor this afternoon. I need to post about that too sometime. For now I'll just say that, while I am very aware of several issues on which major criticisms could be based, and while I know full well that I might end up discussing those at length myself, I really, really appreciate that this series exists. It's not a deep series by any means, but it's something that is (sadly) pretty special: an all-out, no-holds-barred power fantasy featuring a hero who is female. It is not a female power fantasy. It's not about a character having and learning to use and love feminine types of power. Nor is it about a character who gets to be the One Exceptional Woman and Better Than Other Girls. It's just a power fantasy, much like the thousands of other power fantasy stories in the genre, and its hero is female, and that's not an issue in the setting of the story.

My broadband connection has been sporadic these last few days and will remain so for the near future, so I’m posting quickly while I still have access. I might cross-post later, but LJ hasn't been working for me at all today.

Lately I’ve been reading a mostly good book, but it, like many other books before it, threw me out by casually dropping an aside about one of the characters having been Jack the Ripper in one of his previous incarnations. And then the matter was dropped out of discussion as quickly and casually as it had been dropped in. The character is rather villainous in most of his incarnations, at least a bit skeevy in all of them, but part of the plot is that another character is determined to redeem his multiverse-crossing soul. It’s complicated. Anyway, various versions of him have done some quite nasty things, but the ripper murders kind of stand out. Well, they stand out to me, but apparently not to anyone else who knows about it. Other real-life murders have been touched on in the story, but none so casually as the ripper murders, which were treated as merely a minor side effect of other events. That’s especially puzzling since one of the few female characters is supposed to be an avatar of a goddess who was, among other things, a protector of prostitutes. (I have some qualms about the way other RL murders are fictionalized, but at least they seem to be taken more seriously.)

This is far from being the first time I’ve noticed such light, dismissive treatment of Jack the Ripper and his crimes and his victims in a work of fantasy (although at least this time the murderer is something that started out as human and still manifests as mostly human in most place-times, not an alien motivated by its natural biological drives or a being completely removed from humanity). I am seriously disturbed by the popularity of treating Jack the Ripper as just another character from Victorian fiction whom we’re all perfectly well entitled to cross over with any long-lived, time-traveling, or Victorian character, just like Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Moreau. It’s as if there is widespread confusion about the fact that the ripper murders were real life murders that actually happened to real people. When you use Jack the Ripper in your fantasy story, you’re not borrowing from an influential early horror novel; you’re basing someone in your story on the earliest publically recognized and documented serial killer. I can’t help but wonder if that might be because many of us still don’t think of the women he murdered as having been entirely real people.