Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
I think I am jealous of anyone who was reading science fiction before 1976. [1]
I'm jealous because I wish I could have read the stories in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever without a legend leaning over my shoulder. It would have meant I could have read most of them twice: once before knowing that James Tiptree Jnr was Alice Sheldon, and once after. As ( Read more... )
I'm jealous because I wish I could have read the stories in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever without a legend leaning over my shoulder. It would have meant I could have read most of them twice: once before knowing that James Tiptree Jnr was Alice Sheldon, and once after. As ( Read more... )
Of course they're not actually like that - the question is based on a deliberately false premise, as you rightly point out is made plain by the story. But you're being too kind to the women - the men don't accidentally start acting like crazed nutters, but are fed drugs which strip away their better (civilised) selves. There's that point here about civilisation being paper-thin, but that's hardly restricted purely to men. We don't see the women on those drugs and so have no way to tell if they'd be just as bad, but by observing their ruthless will to power, their cool refusal not to counter any deviation from their precepts, we see that they probably are.
The women have defined what is and is not bad and desirable because the society is theirs. In our own time, men have more or less done the same thing and feminists have rightly condemned them for it. I don't see how you can't condemn the women in Houston Houston for creating a society in which only the female works. And I think Tiptree does.
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Absolutely. This is the big point for me - that the women deliberately set out to prove their own point, by whatever means necessary. Which makes me wonder why they (the women on Gloria specifically) were so intent on rescuing the men in the first place? They insist they can't just let them die, but then go out of their way to provoke behaviour that "justifies" murder.
There's that point here about civilisation being paper-thin, but that's hardly restricted purely to men. We don't see the women on those drugs and so have no way to tell if they'd be just as bad
A telling moment is Andy/Kay's reaction to the fight with Bud; "I felt it! I felt physical anger, I wanted to hit him. Woo-ee!". Clearly, the ability to feel aggression isn't lacking here; its absence is cultural, not biological. Given the right trigger, these people too can be aggressive. I wonder at the fate of Andy/Kay in the longer term, when the ramifications of that fact are contemplated.
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