sci-fi writers | The Second Awakening

So I’ve been reading science fiction again. Not a big surprise–there was a period of time (roughly from age 10 to 16) where I read nothing BUT science fiction, before embarking on a self-designed Great Books survey.

Anyway: I needed a book to read on the flight home from San Francisco, so I picked up a copy of Iain M. Banks‘ Matter, one of his Culture novels. For those of you who aren’t familiar with his work, the Culture is a space opera series set in a human civilization that has evolved beyond such petty concerns as money, economy, gender, government, or living on planets. As that describes the place I want to live in one day, I’m a big fan. I also re-read two of Vernor Vinge’s postmodern space operas, A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. And that got me thinking of one of the grandparents of postmodern space opera, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s Eye. (Warning: there be spoilers below.)

In case you haven’t heard of it, TMiGE sets out to reverse the classic “first contact” story: instead of hideously advanced aliens showing up over a backwards earth, in the novel the humans are the advanced aliens with an interstellar empire who discover an alien race confined to one star system. The Moties, as they are called by the humans, aren’t hicks: a “differentiated” species that has several subspecies that rely heavily on instinctive knowledge, the Moties are the equivalent of an entire race of experts: their Engineer subspecies can barely talk, but can repair advanced machinery after only a cursory inspection of it; the Mediator class can talk the hind legs off a mule; and the Warrior class are born tacticians, generals, and special ops fighters. (Moties also change sex after being pregnant, regularly cycling between male and female, which is kinda cool.)

It’s a fun read, but of course there’s a lot of built-in FAIL. (You were expecting something different from the work of two white sci-fi authors in the ’70s?) The sexism isn’t just cultural, it’s built into the characters: the one human female is consistently airheaded, muddle-minded, and wrong about everything–how she is supposed to be a “doctoral candidate” is beyond me. (She is a noble, so that may be explained.) Besides providing a mouthpiece for liberal strawviewpoints, her primary function is to comfort the crew and be the love interest for the dashing captain. I suppose this could be cultural criticism–after all, the humans not only have revived feudalism in their empire, but the Catholic frakkin’ church as well; that might be giving them too much credit. (Plus they seem not to have read anything ever written by a woman or even encountered a woman in everyday life, based on Sally’s characterization.)

Then there’s the Motie subspecies. This is actually a clever idea…until you take a look at how it’s organized. The primary way to tell Moties apart is by the color of their fur: Warriors are red colored, Doctors rust colored, Engineers brown colored–and the Masters, the subspecies genetically determined to lead all the other subspecies are white.

Yeah. You read that correctly. In the Motie species, white guys literally are genetically superior to the brown guys. Holy frak.

But that’s not the most bizarre aspect of the Motie civilization. The central mystery in the book, the thing that the Moties try hard to hide, is that they are doomed to a constant cycle of the collapse of civilization–millions of years, thousands upon thousands of falls into barbarity. And the reason? I’ll let a Motie explain:

“That’s the whole secret. Don’t you get it yet? Every variant of my species has to be made pregnant after she’s been female for a while. Child, male, female, pregnancy, male, female, pregnancy, ’round and ’round. If she doesn’t get pregnant in time, she dies.”

I suppose this makes a certain very, very strange sense–a sort of evolutionary impetus on steroids, if you will. But what doesn’t make sense is that in Niven and Pournelle’s world, pregnancy always equals childbirth.

Think about that one.

I mean, let’s just go with the idea that somehow becoming pregnant makes a Motie healthy again–that there is some hormonal change that occurs after the Blessed Event that she needs, and somehow can’t be simulated even by the genius Motie doctors (Huh? How? Why? WTF?) Somehow, though, it isn’t getting pregnant or even staying pregnant for a length of time that’s the key–it’s actually giving birth. Which is just a boggle: there’s Something Important about the Motie vagina, I guess.

And of course, abortion is never mentioned. The closest the book comes is to say that the Motie equivalent of birth control would be infanticide. (What? How? The Pill just doesn’t work on Moties? Do these guys know anything about mammalian female physiology? WTF?)

That’s right–in the future, abortion is literally unthinkable. At least, nobody thinks about it. But of course the special Magic Motie Vagina probably explains all this.

Why am I taking all this time to rag on a book from the 1970s, you ask? Because of this:

–Because even then two popular male writers could create a scenario that was grossly ignorant of the female body

–Because I’ve never heard a male fan of the book ever wonder why the hell the Moties don’t have abortions

–Because it’s astonishing that the subject never even comes up given the nightmare parody of female reproduction the book creates.

–Because this book could be written today, and all my objections would remain; because abortion and women’s control over their bodies still remains a taboo subject in much of the world’s literature; because that silence contributes to the oppression of women’s reproductive rights.

And let’s not get into the book’s other nightmare (super-fertile brown aliens are going to invade our country and breed all over the place, destroying civilization!) I’ll leave that one for Lou Dobbs to take care of.

I have too many books. In fact, I have too many unread books. In fact, I have so many unread books that I can’t find several unread books that I know I bought recently (including two Atwood novels and an Olivia Butler novel.)

Like a lot of Metropolitans of a literary bent, my apartment is not so much Where I Live, but Where I Keep My Books. I have, at present, two full-length (height?) Ikea bookshelves, and two columns of built-in bookshelves of roughly the same capacity. And I still have books overflowing off the shelves! And this was after I got rid of at least a third of my books when my ex and I moved in together!

I have a theory as to why people keep books, that breaks them down into three classes:

I. Useful Books

These are books you keep for reference purposes or utility. This would be, in my case, my collection of computer reference books (I like “cookbooks” which don’t purport to teach you how to program all over again, just tell you how to handle individual problems); my history books, language books (I collect languages and am generally in the process of trying to learn one; right now I’m teaching myself Hindi), and dictionaries/thesauruses (thesaurusi?), my rhyming dictionary, and even that big book of literary criticism that I keep around just in case I need to deconstruct something in a hurry. Also included in this category is my vast collection of genre books that I re-read whenever I’m too tired to engage more challenging stuff.

II. Books of Sentimental Value

We all have those: the book of poems that you don’t even like anymore, but they reminded you of what you felt like when you were young and in love. (Or not in love, as the case may be–woe is me!) The novels that used to be in Category I but have dropped into here because you won’t reread them, but they remind you of who you were when you were just learning how to read. The inspirational book that led you into a religious fad for several years. They have only limited utility, but you keep them anyway because of their associations.

III. Books That Make You Look Smart

Maybe it’s a Metropolitan thing, but a lot of people have books on their shelves for the sole reason of letting people know that they are the Kind of Person who would read that Kind of Book. For example, I have a copy of Ulysses on my shelf. I read it on my own while in my junior year at college, without notes, and comprehended maybe 10% of it–which I thought was a decent batting average, all things considered. (I chased it with Paradise Lost to clear out the Joycean syntax–my god, the things I could do when I was young!) Now, I’m never going to read Ulysses again (heck, I may never read Gravity’s Rainbow again, and that was a book I enjoyed infinitely more than Ulysses.) Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t with the copy on my shelf–it’s missing several pages in the “catechism” section towards the end of the book. But–and this is the key–I want people to know that I’ve read Ulysses, that I’m that kind of grand master reader of capital-L Literature. And so I keep Ulysses and Don Quixote and my Faulkner novels on my shelf.

The thing is, you’re justified in keeping everything from Category I; most of the stuff from Category II (it shouldn’t be all that big, anyway); but why in the hell should you keep anything from Category III? Sure, you’ll end up with a bookshelf of detective and sci-fi novels, plus a few computer books, but that shouldn’t matter, right?

Of course, there are problems with this schema. For example: my three-volume copy of Shelby Foote’s The Civil War. Category I? I have re-read it at least three times. Or maybe Category II–I read it during the heyday of my bout of Civil War, an affliction that remains in remission but still plagues me with periodic outbreaks. And what about the rest of my military history collection? And am I even interested in this stuff anymore, when I could be reading Judith Butler or Julia Serrano?

Philip K. Dick, in his remarkable Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep (much weirder and more visionary than Blade Runner), talks about “kipple”:

Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday’s homeopape. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you to go bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up there is twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.

No one can win against kipple, except temporarily and maybe in one spot.

Now, this is actually an observation about entropy, and how the universe will eventually end up in a state of thermodynamic equilibrium called the heat-death of the universe. It also shows that Tom Pynchon wasn’t the only smart-ass virtuosic writer in the 70s to make a career out of writing about entropy–just the one reviewed in the New York Times.

In any case, it’s clear that books are my kipple. I occasionally find a book I had forgotten purchasing, lying clean, pristine, and unread: in a perfect state of literary thermal equilibrium.

In other words, I need to stop buying books until I’ve reduced the kipple in the apartment.

But, you say, O gentle reader, what on earth does this have to do with your blog? We thought this was going to be a place to hear about feminism, and specifically trans feminism, and so far your last two posts have been about what shows you like to watch, and how messy your apartment is? What gives?

Fear not: for part of my process tonight was to cull out several books that I haven’t read (or need to re-read), all of a feminist bent. Which I am going to read over the next X weeks and report back to you on. Which should be interesting; I was, after all Professionally Trained in interpreting literature. Which is why I design databases today. Life is rarely neat.