"She'd done well to make commander so soon even with the Fleet's steady growth in the face of the Havenite threat, for the life-extending prolong process made for long careers....She'd known and accepted from the start that those with less competence but more exalted bloodlines would race past her. Well, they had, but she'd made it at last. A cruiser command, the dream of every officer worth her salt!"
I'm trying not to hate this book. With all due respect for my husband, who eats up these kinds of novels like little leftover Halloween candy bars--Honor Harrington: On Basilisk Station seems like the kind of book that will give me enough of a rash to sit and write a ten-page critique on it, and then inflict it on my few readers in the form of a blog post. Since I'm short on time and long on sympathy, I'll try and compress my main beef with this genre in a quick rant.
My problem with science fiction that attempts to place women on par with men in a tech-oriented far-flung future is that these characters aren't really women--they're men with boobs and vaginas (and guns). The author stumbles all over himself (or herself, as was the case with Cordelia's Honor) to appear forward-thinking by extrapolating current social and technological trends into the future. The problem with this approach in writing an imagined future history is that trends are just that--flashes in the pan that don't last and are mostly written off to the dustbin of history.
The things about men and women and society that last--for example, the fact that societies not based on the family as basic social unit ultimately fail--seem to be lost on these writers.
This kind of future is far from a feminist one; in fact, it is masculinist in the extreme. There is no place for the feminine in this future. No one nurtures (except the Nanny State). No one is soft. No one makes curtains and cans tomatoes. No one cleans the smudges from a child's face and puts band-aids on boo-boos. What's left is a simply horrifying vision of what happens when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics meets Brave New World run amok. No wonder the people in these books are always fighting wars and struggling under totalitarian governments. No wonder that whiz-bang technology serves as the replacement for the soft tissues that formerly supported new life. No wonder everyone sees a military career as the apogee of female achievement. Barrenness reigns supreme: and a queen is the overseer of all!
Adding to the absurdity of this form of long-rage extrapolation from what is essentially history's latest fad (feminism), is the fact that you can see from the quote above that the author includes a classist and ageist bias to his future society. Also, no one believes in God (apparently), but everyone uses blasphemies in their everyday speech. These are supposed to add a gritty, realistic tone that today's reader can relate to. On the other hand, gender bias--which has been with us as long as the earth revolves around the sun and is one of the things that EVERYONE can relate to--has been magically resolved.
Ugh. I can't go any further with this. And don't bother to argue about equal rights for women in the combox, because I'm not against that (look to Ladies Against Feminism for a thoroughgoing critique of the failed platform of feminism). I was just starting to think that I was some kind of cave-dwelling fuddy-duddy for preferring Jane Austen movies and homemaking blogs. Dwelling in the past, I thought--and not even a realistic one. But compared with the futures of Honor Harrington, and Cordelia, et al., I far prefer my lavender-scented cave.
This is what I want: stories that don't have an agenda to throw at me about politics, religion, or social issues. I want stories with a fully-fleshed woman character who is strong AND feminine (or at least, doesn't treat her femininity as a weakness or a weapon). I want a future that is positive for women and children. I want a world that offers options for all. True, such a world offers danger and conflict. Our characters must find their way through it. But it has to be more tasty than just a literary can of SPAM.
"It's pulp!" yells my husband in exasperation. "Just live with it!"
*sigh* I know. I'm so hard to please.
(John C. Wright has more meaty discussions of this nature on his LiveJournal.)
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8 comments:
At one point in sci-fi history, the lack of nurturing, hard society was the POINT of the novel. They were satires or cautionary tales of what could happen if we didn't shape up.
I stopped reading McMaster-Bujold long before she made it to Cordelia's Honor. I can't stand a lot of "great authors" for this very reason.
You might like David Brin though. Although I can't recall any of the women canning. :)
Honey,
LASERS! Space battles, good guys (girls) blowing things up! Empathic 6 legged cat thingies.
Its like Jane Austin on steroids without most of the emotional clutter.
You know, COOL!
The Housewife's Husband
BTW,
David Brin is great.
Dean (again)
Thank you for your reflection. I was never able to articulate way I was put off by science fiction.
"Jane Austen on steroids without most of the emotional clutter"
MOST is the key word there...I watched Star Trek with David for awhile, and it didn't take too long to realize that it was just a SOAP OPERA for geeks! I've watched enough Young and the Restless to see the parallels.
Anyway, Dawn, maybe we should write a sci-fi book about some women gardening on Mars with huge families while their husbands fought in the intergalatic battles, and they end up saving humanity with their resourcefulness and all the kids turn out to be the remnant of the human race that keeps the species from completely dying out.
But on the other hand...I've never considered anti-feminist sci-fi a genre I'd delve into. I can't really put myself in a position to figure out how I'd diaper a child with the limited water and resources on Mars. :)
Yech. I think it would involve a lot of wipees and some seriously deep landfills.
As far as HH is concerned, I reached the end of the first book and am moderately impressed. It was a page-turner, and though at some points I was irritated by some of the PC-isms (characters named Dominica Santos, Hiro Yammata, and Nikos Papadopolous are too anxious to prove their ethnic pedigrees), I can't say I don't admire authors who can write like this.
However, the sheer abundance of tough females in uniform shouting orders like "Move your ass!" to their hapless (but obedient) male counterparts invites the reader's disbelief. If I didn't know the author was a man (David Weber), I'd find myself speculating so hard about the author's agenda that I'd lose my concentration during the battle scenes (and those are good).
FWIW, I'm starting on the second book. Stay tuned...
Hi. This is the first time I've visited your blog, and I'm impressed with this post--it's a different angle of a complaint I've had for years. While I've not done a *huge* amount of sci-fi reading, I am a fairly avid reader--as is my mother. Anyway, she passes on to me contemporary fiction that she's read... and I finally had to ask her to stop. There seemed to be only two ends of some awful continuum represented in the books she was sharing: either they were written by men and were almost entirely the stories of white, disaffected mid-life-crisis-reaching academics who fantasized about their own brilliance and/or their female students to distraction OR they were written by women and were almost entirely about crazy/absentee mothers/fathers and the coming of age (usually with some warped notions or experiences of sexuality) of the main (female) character. Ick. So I spent a year or so reading almost entirely "young adult" fiction--because what I wanted was a STORY.
Then, recently, my mother passed along a few first-novels by women writers--and lo and behold, they're STORIES! Not self-absorbed depressing memoirs, but real STORIES with interesting characters and plot and everything else. I won't argue that they're morally edifying, but they're certainly more pleasant to read than the dreck I've been plodding through since... well, for a long, long time. I enjoyed "Water for Elephants" and "The Thirteenth Tale" (this one has some aberrant sexual behavior, but it isn't dwelt on).
So I'm very sympathetic to your "I want to read for relaxation"... we actually don't have a TV, so I read for "zoning out" as much as I do for real knowledge acquisition. (Different stuff, obviously.)
Anyway, nice post about literature.
I also read your birth-story post--another timely one for me. I'm due in 5 weeks with my third child (I've got 17-month-old twin girls) and am having to convince my doctor at every visit that *yes* I really do want to have a VBAC (my girls were breech and transverse and looked as though they might be beginning to suffer twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome, so I had a c-section at 37.5 weeks with them... happily, everything was fine, and they're awesome).
Anyway, my doctor is a fan of the "once a c-section, always a c-section" mentality, and while he's open to the idea of me having a vaginal birth (I have mentioned, but not made a big deal out of, the fact that I'd actually like to have a natural childbirth). I have (so far) easy pregnancies, no early labor, no early dilation (at 37.5 weeks with my twins, I hadn't started to dilate at all)... and I can't get over the fact that it seems weird to me that, while I have two children, I've *never* gone into labor!
So thank you for a detailed post... it makes me think I'm not ready for a natural childbirth, though, because I've never taken Lamaze classes or anything... I tend toward the "women have been doing this for millenia; it CAN'T be rocket science!" opinion... which, I guess, is naive. Also, I've got twin 17-month-olds who just stopped nursing last month... I've not had much time for things like evening Lamaze classes!
So. Thanks for your words--both literary and laboring. I've got some stuff to think about now.
Wow--thank you Jenny. I really love hearing from you guys and your lives. It's why I write.
...but haven't been much, lately. I wrote a complete outline for my banking article in the hospital (not much to do, y'know) and the bad banking news is flying thick and fast in the media, so I know it's timely.
It's just that in the middle of the dishes, diapers, meal-preparing and breast-feeding (not to mention preschool!), I've had to effect a complete paradigm change in how I manage my older kids.
And to top this hairball off, we're selling our house. "How DO you manage it all?" ask well-meaning people. I can only say (to myself) "An addiction to busy-ness is easy to feed when you have absolutely no leisure time." To them I say, "The grace of God."
There's another theme in the questioning, one which I wish I had time to write a whole post on. It comes out of the mouths of perfect strangers, even. "So...do you think you're going to have any more?" they say.
We don't need a two-child per family policy in this country. It's already in place--in the form of family and friends eyeing your third child and asking this question. I feel like clutching my baby to my chest and saying "None of your business!" What I do say depends on the situation. The best comback I came up with to this line of questioning was, "God gave us the ability to do this, so there must be a way. My job is to find it."
Thanks for reading and hang in there. I know God has an answer for your lives and the issues ya'll are dealing with. Pray for it. The answer will come. And the timing will be so perfect you will not wish it had happened any other way.
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