LeGuin has become an enduring influence on writers who follow her in science fiction gendered depictions. As Melissa Scott remarked in an interview, “I remember reading The Left Hand of Darkness for the first time, and realizing that it was possible to imagine a world with changeable gender” (“Melissa and Her Friends”). Scott herself is noted for a host of GLBT characters integrated into novels on a range of subjects. Most notable, perhaps, is Shadow Man (1995), in which Scott imagines a universe of multiple genders. The novel’s protagonist, Warreven, was born a “herm,” possessing the ability to live as either a man or woman (he chooses the former). His struggles with gender identity, as well as his planet’s unwillingness to move beyond traditional definitions propel much of the plot; they also allow Scott to set up an allegory for the GLBT civil rights movement. Warreven’s reluctance to become a spokesperson for alternative gender identities is one of the most compelling aspects of Shadow Man, and Scott’s unwillingness to satisfactorily conclude the novel’s conflicts reveals the continued complications of gender in our society.
Another affirmation of varied sexuality arises as Samuel Delany explores the human yearning for sexuality with a category of humans known as “Spacers” in his short story, “Aye and Gomorrah” (Dangerous Visions, 1967). Here individuals are selected in early puberty for a low level of sexuality, then surgically altered, their sexual capacities removed to allow them to work in the radiation of outer space. Attracted to the Spacers are “Frelks,” whose sexual drive tends to be stirred only by the inaccessible. Here readers must consider how sexuality centers us, and how it will be handled as technological advances offer new, even horrifying, options.
A different exploration of the ways technology may offer physical alterations or transform our understanding of what is human occurs in Anne McCaffrey’s The Ship Who Sang (1970), the story of Helva, whose severe physical disabilities are resolved by her transformation into a “shell person” sealed into a titanium container. Supplied with a ship to operate and a “brawn” (a physically adept partner), these shell people wander the universe on their jobs for Central Worlds. After their huge debts for alteration, therapy, and training are paid off (if ever), shell people may work for themselves. The distinction of this novel is the ways in which Helva and her various male and female brawns interact with each other. As Helva grows up and learns to manage her own emotions, she also falls in love. McCaffrey’s vision of gender enables us to consider the implications of romance between a huge ship and a tiny man. Is it possible to experience the ecstasy of love without the physical capacity to enact it? How do the power plays of gender expectations work themselves out for the physically disabled? In examining these questions, we come to understand once again how the metaphors of science fiction allow us to consider the humane questions of our age. While some critics argue that McCaffrey depicts disability in a negative light and condemns the disabled to a life of separation, other readers note her celebration of the human spirit, her examination of human frailty in other characters, and her delight in creating a wide band of human possibility.
Thus, what science fiction offers many readers are new options for thinking through the concerns of their own age, metaphors which help to provide distance, and opportunities to redefine their own perceptions. So broad a concept as gender, then, opens a host of possibilities to writers. In the Xenogenesis Trilogy (1987–89, republished in 2000 as Lilith’s Brood), Octavia Butler posits a three-gendered race (the Oankali) rescuing planet Earth from the devastation of intercontinental ballistic weapons. Biological merchants, the Oankali exchange genes with aliens through a highly seductive sexual process. The downside of accepting the salvation of the Oankali is its consequences for human reproduction, the intimacy of the sex act, and the resulting hybrid children. For readers, the concept of a third gender interacting with the male and female during copulation is both curious and troubling.
Another complicated exploration of sexuality occurs in Up the Walls of the World (1978), in which James Tiptree Jr. (nee Alice Sheldon) creates a giant gas planet where the inhabitants float on the winds high above. Males become the highly respected “Fathers,” whose tenderness with the children they both give birth to and rear is balanced by their grumbling that women get to be adventurous and have all the fun. The airy process of passing the egg back and forth up in the high winds during copulation is a delightful scene not to be missed. The text also provides a sobering exploration of how the birth parent’s role defines his/her life. Tiptree has been recognized for her contributions to gender images in science fiction, as well as her choice of a pseudonym that produced significant speculation and reflection on the supposed differences in science fiction written by men or by women. The James Tiptree, Jr. Award was founded in 1991 as “an annual literary prize for science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender” (James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award Council).
More disturbing yet are the gendered understandings in Sheri Tepper’s Beauty (1991), which explores the Sleeping Beauty legend, the land of Faery, the source of good and evil, and the horrors Beauty discovers when she is transported to the twenty-first century, escapes to the twentieth, is raped, and discovers pornography, sadism, and the ways in which sex is separated from the tenderness of love she believes occurred in her own century. In a different timeline Tepper creates a war-torn culture, The Gate to Women’s Country (1988), where women have created safe havens within their gates and warriors live in garrisons outside. Having discovered the reality of a gene for violence, the novel’s women have created a system to prevent impregnation by the warrior class, thus gradually removing the source of aggression from the world.
But while images of gender may be elicited to explore untold visions of otherness and our need to accept the realities of difference in our cultures, they may also offer opportunities to consider our own interactions as gendered human beings. Connie Willis complicates this problem in her brief novel, Uncharted Territory (1994), in which the partners Carson and Findriddy explore the planet Boohte for rich resources needed back on Earth, secretly hiding their finds in an effort to preserve the planet for an indigenous species of indeterminate gender. Through skillful use of language Willis manages to avoid defining the genders of the main characters for much of the text, though this does not prevent us from making our own assumptions. Subplots and lesser characters gradually model a range of typical human gendered behaviors and power struggles. As the novel progresses, the behaviors of animals, particularly the bowerbird, are explored and compared to human activity. By the end of the novel, when we have discovered the gender identities of Carson and Findriddy, we also observe the unfolding of their connections to each other and the power of an unsuspected love.
In all of these texts, the experimental ways in which gender and sexuality are explored offer us opportunities to examine tough questions and rethink our own perceptions. Given its wide array of approaches to gender questions, issues of power, and understandings of human need, science fiction can help us to understand our own ways of being. As science fiction moves into the twenty-first century, gender images continue to evolve, often following the conventions of sub-genres within the field. Two examples of this trend are found in the first novels of Alastair Reynolds and Richard K. Morgan. Reynolds’s Revelation Space (2000) is firmly rooted in the space opera tradition, and to many, Reynolds has redefined it for a new generation of science fiction readers. Morgan’s debut novel Altered Carbon (2002)—winner of the 2003 Philip K. Dick Award—successfully combines elements of the hard-boiled detective novel with science fiction. The commercial success of both novels indicates their characterizations of men and women have met with popular approval, and a more thorough reading of each text might suggest one of the ways in which the genre will approach gender in the future.
Revelation Space’s plot revolves around three women spread across a future universe where humanity has splintered into a number of disparate factions. A surface reading of Revelation Spa
ce reveals these women as occupying fairly traditional roles for their gender: career woman, widow, and wife. And while conventional wisdom suggests that they may have competing or disconnected goals, the space opera requires cooperation from its characters. Reynolds’s three women need to work together and combat an alien presence that threatens the continued existence of the human race. The successful alliance of these characters meets that threat and allows for a temporary reprieve from a larger destructive force.
If Reynolds’s dependence on the space opera requires gendered characters to move beyond their traditional roles and work for the collective good, Morgan’s reliance on generic elements of the hard-boiled detective type forces him to create a strong male protagonist who must resist and defeat a number of femme fatale figures. As befitting this sub-genre, the male lead inhabits a world replete with violence and sex. Morgan takes full advantage of his audience’s generic expectations and provides graphic descriptions of his narrator’s physical confrontations and sexual liaisons. The protagonist’s conquests with the latter are numerous, but women play a much more expansive role in the text. Some use sex as a tool to influence the narrator’s investigation; others use his need to protect women—a staple of the hard-boiled detective—to manipulate his findings. While femme fatales are common in the novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Morgan’s do have more depth and often prove equal to his protagonist, a direct challenge to the gender stereotypes in detective fiction.
If the first decade of this century is any indication, gender continues to play a prominent role, even in those texts that follow the conventions of sub-genres and have less use for it as a form of social commentary. A study of the history of gender images in science fiction, however, does suggest that gender in this genre is unpredictable. In the critically-acclaimed, reimagined television series Battlestar Galactica, for example, the creators’ decision to reconstitute the Starbuck character as a woman was met with considerable uproar from fans loyal to the original series. In hindsight, though, the fans’ accusations of political correctness gave way to an appreciation for the new Starbuck, who treads carefully between expectations of her gender and her profession as a soldier. As it does with so many other contemporary issues, Battlestar Galactica uses Starbuck and other carefully nuanced characters to interrogate constructions of gender in our society. Good science fiction can follow the conventions of its genre and still ask its readers to think seriously about gender. In that respect, gender images will continue to be a place for fruitful and invigorating discussion in science fiction.
* * * *
Works Cited
Asimov, Isaac. The Foundation Trilogy. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1951.
Battlestar Galactica: The Miniseries. Dir. Michael Rymer. 2003. Universal, 2004. DVD.
Butler, Octavia E. The Xenogenesis Trilogy. New York: Warner Books, 2000.
Delany, Samuel. “Aye and Gomorrah,” Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison, New York: Doubleday, 1967.
Heinlein, Robert. Glory Road. New York: The Berkley Publishing Group, 1963.
James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award Council. N.p., 2010. Web. 15 Nov. 2010.
LeGuin, Ursula. The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Ace, 1969.
McCaffrey, Anne. The Ship Who Sang. New York: Ballantine, 1970.
“Melissa and Her Friends: An Interview with Melissa Scott.” Diverse Universe 17 (2003): N. pag. Spaced Out, Inc. Web. 15 Nov. 2010.
Morgan, Richard K. Altered Carbon. New York: Del Rey, 2002.
Reynolds, Alastair. Revelation Space. New York: Ace, 2002.
Scott, Melissa. Shadow Man. New York: Tor, 1995.
Tepper, Sheri. Beauty. New York: Doubleday, 1991.
——. The Gate to Women’s Country. New York: Doubleday, 1988.
Tiptree, James Jr. Up the Walls of the World. New York: Ace, 1978.
Willis, Connie. Uncharted Territory. New York: Bantam, 1994.
* * * *
Featured as a “master teacher” in Ken Macrorie’s Twenty Teachers, Twila Yates Papay has published and spoken on topics as diverse as science fiction, travel writing, autobiography, composition pedagogy, collaboration, service learning, and future writing. An avid traveler, she spent her first sabbatical journaling her way around the world, her second journeying widely in Africa, assisting in university writing centers, and photographing more animals up close than she had envisioned in her wildest safari dreams. Her most recent adventure entailed interviewing women writers across Australia, volunteering at an experimental school in Sydney, exploring aboriginal sites, and visiting remote locations in The Kimberley. In addition to creative nonfiction and traditional literature, she has taught classes in Tolkien, Rowling, science fiction, and magical realism.
* * * *
Paul D. Reich is Assistant Professor of English at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. His areas of teaching and research include late nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, African American literature, the American West, and popular culture. His work has appeared in Teaching American Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, and Sycamore Review.
STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT
(1898–1943)
Up until about the 1970s, it was possible to be a best-selling writer as a poet, and before World War II it was fairly common. (In recent years there’s been the occasional best-selling work of poetry like Seamus Heaney’s 2000 translation of Beowulf, but poets are mostly expected to be academics or poverty-stricken, or both.) It’s sort of a literary fluke that Robert Frost and T. S. Eliot are still well-remembered and widely read, while the equally celebrated Stephen Vincent Benét is now all but forgotten. While his work ranged widely, he often touched on science fictional themes, and his influence can be seen in many writers who grew up reading him. (Andre Norton’s Star Man’s Son, for instance, is very much an homage to “By the Waters of Babylon.”)
Benét was born into a military family in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and was sent to a military academy (which he hated) as a ten-year-old. Rejected for military service in World War I because of his poor vision, Benét was free to complete his education at Yale. His first two books of poetry, Five Men and Pompey (1915) and The Drug Shop (1917) were published while he was still in his teens. When he graduated from Yale in 1919 with an MA in English, he submitted his third volume of poetry instead of a thesis.
After college, Benét spent many years living off-and-on in France, where he met his wife, Rosemary Carr. Benét’s first novel, The Beginning of Wisdom, came out in 1921. He wrote prolifically in genres ranging from poetry and historical fiction (the two areas he was best known for) to screenplays, radio broadcasts, and even a libretto based on one of his stories. His book-length 1928 poem John Brown’s Body, about the Civil War, won Benét his first Pulitzer in 1929.
In 1943, Benét died of a heart attack at the age of forty-four. His unfinished poem about the settling of America, Western Star, won a posthumous Pulitzer the next year.
BY THE WATERS OF BABYLON, by Stephen Vincent Benét
First published in The Saturday Evening Post, July 1937. Originally Titled “The Place of the Gods”
The north and the west and the south are good hunting ground, but it is forbidden to go east. It is forbidden to go to any of the Dead Places except to search for metal and then he who touches the metal must be a priest or the son of a priest. Afterwards, both the man and the metal must be purified. These are the rules and the laws; they are well made. It is forbidden to cross the great river and look upon the place that was the Place of the Gods—this is most strictly forbidden. We do not even say its name though we know its name. It is there that spirits live, and demons—it is there that there are the ashes of the Great Burning. These things are forbidden—they have been forbidden since the beginning of time.
My father is a priest; I am the son of a priest. I have been in the Dead Places near us, with my father—at first, I was afraid. When my father went into the house to search for the metal, I stood by the door and my hear
t felt small and weak. It was a dead man’s house, a spirit house. It did not have the smell of man, though there were old bones in a corner. But it is not fitting that a priest’s son should show fear. I looked at the bones in the shadow and kept my voice still.
Then my father came out with the metal—good, strong piece. He looked at me with both eyes but I had not run away. He gave me the metal to hold—I took it and did not die. So he knew that I was truly his son and would be a priest in my time. That was when I was very young—nevertheless, my brothers would not have done it, though they are good hunters. After that, they gave me the good piece of meat and the warm corner of the fire. My father watched over me—he was glad that I should be a priest. But when I boasted or wept without a reason, he punished me more strictly than my brothers. That was right.
After a time, I myself was allowed to go into the dead houses and search for metal. So I learned the ways of those houses—and if I saw bones, I was no longer afraid. The bones are light and old—sometimes they will fall into dust if you touch them. But that is a great sin.
I was taught the chants and the spells—l was taught how to stop the running of blood from a wound and many secrets. A priest must know many secrets—that was what my father said.
If the hunters think we do all things by chants and spells, they may believe so—it does not hurt them. I was taught how to read in the old books and how to make the old writings—that was hard and took a long time. My knowledge made me happy—it was like a fire in my heart. Most of all, I liked to hear of the Old Days and the stories of the gods. I asked myself many questions that I could not answer, but it was good to ask them. At night, I would lie awake and listen to the wind—it seemed to me that it was the voice of the gods as they flew through the air.
Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction Page 126