{"id":8618,"date":"2014-01-04T16:49:09","date_gmt":"2014-01-04T21:49:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.starshipnivan.com\/blog\/?p=8618"},"modified":"2014-01-04T17:18:03","modified_gmt":"2014-01-04T22:18:03","slug":"paired-particles-space-operas-and-gendered-pronouns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/?p=8618","title":{"rendered":"Paired Particles: Space Operas and Gender Shoals"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"2012<\/a><\/p>\n

In 2011\/2012, two SF works formed a conceptual pair: Morgan Locke\u2019s Up Against It<\/em> and Joan Slonczewski\u2019s The Highest Frontier<\/em>.\u00a0 Both are ambitious space operas that take place on belaguered space habitats.\u00a0 Both brim with originality and bravura, field a host of complex issues, portray fluid\/non-binary genders, use non-Anglo settings and are as hard SF as can be (provided you don\u2019t count orbital mechanics as the sole hard science, as genre fundies do; Locke is a chemist, Slonczewski a biologist and their first-hand expertise shows).\u00a0 Both obey marketing directives: they are parts of projected trilogies and have adolescent protagonists.\u00a0 In Up Against It<\/em>, a sharply etched adult woman thankfully shares center stage.\u00a0 The Highest Frontier<\/em> is more Harry-Potter-in-space but the quirks and gender of its protagonist mostly redeem the YA concession.\u00a0 The Highest Frontier<\/em> got a lot of recognition, including the Campbell award.\u00a0 Up Against It<\/em> went by almost unnoticed.<\/p>\n

I gamma-read these two, so I already reviewed them extensively, if privately.\u00a0 This was not the case for the paired set of 2013: Deborah Wheeler\u2019s Collaborators<\/em> (a standalone) and Ann Leckie\u2019s Ancillary Justice<\/em> (first volume of the now-obligatory trilogy).\u00a0 Like their 2012 counterparts, these are ambitious space operas that tackle many issues.\u00a0 Whereas the 2012 two focus on can-do survival and are relatively small-scale (no galactic empires), the 2013 ones focus on colonialism and gender in Le Guin and Cherryh\u2019s wake, but their scientific concepts are more SF-traditional.\u00a0 Both use multiple narrative viewpoints \u2013 condemned as \u201cromance cooties\u201d in SF circles, though the technique is routine in literary fiction \u2013 and have made conscious decisions about pronoun use, of which more anon.\u00a0 Like the divergent fates of the 2012 pair, Ancillary Justice<\/em> got a rousing reception whereas I count formal reviews of Collaborators<\/em> on the fingers of one hand.<\/p>\n

Collaborators<\/em> is obviously descended from Le Guin kernels but carves its own unique path.\u00a0 Following The Left Hand of Darkness<\/em> it posits the Bandari, single-gendered humanoid aliens who polarize slightly when in estrus and a bit more during gestation.\u00a0 Like Le Guin (who defended her choice until she retrenched in short stories that featured Gethenians), Wheeler uses exclusively male pronouns for the species.\u00a0 And similar to the settings of Le Guin\u2019s The Word for World is Forest<\/em> and Cherryh\u2019s Downbelow Station<\/em>, Collaborators<\/em> shows how a non-terrestrial culture interacts with a stranded human starship whose crew, bolstered by its formidable technology, forgets that they are not gods and interfere heavily in the politics of two adversarial nations.\u00a0 The major conflict is nuanced by ambiguities and dilemmas on all sides and at many levels.<\/p>\n

Wheeler\u2019s Quaker beliefs are visible (including the refusal to indulge in charismatic saviors) and the parallels to the havoc wrought by imperial-nation interventions on earth are clear.\u00a0 The alien biology and first-contact dynamics are handled unusually deftly; the narrative polyphony weaves complex melodies and harmonies.\u00a0 Wheeler\u2019s world is effortlessly immersive and teems with fully realized characters.\u00a0 At the same time, the human side is conveyed almost exclusively by male characters and the Bandari occasionally leave behind them a Wraeththu-like whiff.<\/p>\n

Ancillary Justice<\/em> posits the Radchaai, a galaxy-wide dominant polity that is rather obviously modeled on imperial Rome futurized by the customary space opera panoply (nanotech, up\/downloading, FTL) and replete with cultural-specific quirks to quickly individualize the groups within it \u2013 including the author\u2019s own unabashed love of tea.\u00a0 The Radchaai, the obverse side of Banks\u2019 Culture (with ship Minds to match), share the Romans\u2019 casual, pragmatic cruelty including the citizen privilege boundary.\u00a0 Their resources permit them to animate corpses from uprisings against the Radchaai with AI \u201cconsciousness\u201d.\u00a0 The resulting constructs are used as starship crews and planetary enforcers.\u00a0 These ancillaries are descendants of Cherryh\u2019s Union\/Alliance azi and of the Star Wars stormtrooper clones: essentially cheap disposable zombi.<\/p>\n

The protagonist Breq (a now-isolate ancillary who harbors a portion of the AI consciousness of a once-mighty starship) sets out to assassinate a powerful Lucifer\/Palpatine figure for reasons of personal loyalty.\u00a0 So the scaffolding is a traditional revenge quest, garnished with Breq\u2019s fraught dealings with an ambiguous ally of once high status \u2013 very similar to the currents between Ai and Estraven in The Left Hand of Darkness<\/em>.\u00a0 Like Collaborators<\/em>, Ancillary Justice<\/em> shows several worlds and the complex interactions between them.\u00a0 However, the characters in Ancillary Justice<\/em> are far less sharply drawn than those in Collaborators<\/em> to the point of blurriness and the novel contains many lumpy passages.\u00a0 Also like Collaborators<\/em>, Ancillary Justice<\/em> switches between viewpoints, finessed by the conceit that the ship\u2019s AI is tallying ancillary inputs in situ \u2013 a clever dodge though its execution is not entirely smooth, augmenting the murkiness (it would do better in film).<\/p>\n

Last but decidedly not least, and a point highlighted in all the reviews of Ancillary Justice<\/em>, Breq designates everyone with female pronouns.\u00a0 The rationale is that Radchaai make no gender distinctions: their technology allows them biological fluidity, so that familial\/client status has now become the primary hierarchy marker.\u00a0 Hence Breq either cannot comprehend or chooses not to master such distinctions in non-Radch cultures that have them.<\/p>\n

The 3.5 people who have read my writings know my views on colonialism, gender and their intersection.\u00a0 It\u2019s good to see the ubiquitous pseudo-inclusive \u201che\u201d subsumed for once and it\u2019s fun to hazard guesses at the genderings that are left truly ambiguous.\u00a0 However, I think that the conflation of grammatical, cultural and biological gender blunts the story.\u00a0 The former is arbitrary and would be unavoidable in many languages (it\u2019s an acid test for true fluency).\u00a0 The middle is a battleground frought with both promise and peril \u2013 but it\u2019s unlikely that the status-conscious Radchaai would not have other distinctions.\u00a0 The latter, whether one chooses traditional or novel terms, whether one adheres to gender binaries or not, is one that an advanced AI would sense, even when diminished.<\/p>\n

One could argue that we\u2019re seeing a carryover of Radch arrogance by a multiply unreliable narrator.\u00a0 However, the fact that Breq\u2019s inability\/unwillingness to distinguish gender (which type?) is constantly mentioned, explained and defended puts it in the \u201cprotesting too much\u201d category: it punctures the immersive membrane of the narrative, turning the device into a\u00a0 self-conscious flag rather than a fully integrated (and hence submerged) core context.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t help that the primary antagonist is given many trappings of a male\/masculine terrestrial, which shows how hard it is to write truly gender-blind narratives.<\/p>\n

Caveats aside, both the 2012 and 2013 space opera tangled pairs are intriguing; it will be interesting to see where their sequels go.\u00a0 The pronoun issue is vexed, though Anglophone SF is lucky to only have to worry about third-person singular pronouns.\u00a0 Melissa Scott, always a forerunner, put down five sets of pronouns in The Shadow Man<\/em> way before this became the burning issue in SF that it has become.\u00a0 Other writers did without pronouns or expanded their vocabulary: neologisms aside, why not press the neutral option or the third-person plural into service?\u00a0 Female- or male-only are clumsy instruments to designate either mono\/multi\/fluidly-gendered species or cultural gender blindness.\u00a0 We need different mindsets, and different words, for such horizons.<\/p>\n

\"2013<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2011\/2012, two SF works formed a conceptual pair: Morgan Locke\u2019s Up Against It and Joan Slonczewski\u2019s The Highest Frontier.\u00a0 Both are ambitious space operas that take place on belaguered space habitats.\u00a0 Both brim with originality and bravura, field a host of complex issues, portray fluid\/non-binary genders, use non-Anglo settings and are as hard SF […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,10,13,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biology-and-culture","category-science","category-science-fiction","category-writing-and-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8618"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8618\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}