Still Forms on Foxfield
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.
This entry was originally posted at http://gryphonsegg.dreamwidth.org/82592.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
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.
This entry was originally posted at http://gryphonsegg.dreamwidth.org/82592.html. Please comment there using OpenID.