There is a surreal, science-fictional quality to this photograph. All of the buildings have a similar blue-gray color, streaked with mold and decay. Every window seems to be dark. A single automobile lurks at the bottom margins of the shot, with a lonely pair of pedestrians nearby. Were it not for their presence, this would seem to be a dead city, the victim of some apocalyptic evacuation. And I experienced a delirious shiver of ostranenie when I realized that perhaps the strangest thing about the city was that it bore no scar of advertising.
The Pyongyang of this photograph doesn’t seem like a real place. It seems rather like a pure archetype, an image of the Stalinist wasteland that has populated the Western imagination of the Soviet states since the 1950s. It seems impossible for any real city to be so desolate. This is a city where the worst thing we can imagine has already happened. This is the London of 1984. This is City 17.
And yet.
My in-laws lived their entire lives in Communist Romania, under the dictator Ceausescu until his deposal in 1989. They have fond memories of this time, and will often tell me wistfully of how peaceful and orderly their world was before the turbulence of the revolution. My wife remembers playing with her sisters while they stood in line to buy milk, and pinching the baby so that people would let them move forward in line. They had to wait in line for milk, because it was rarely available and tightly rationed, but this was normal and expected. She has pictures of herself, dressed in a new dress with her hair up in bows, singing the anthem beneath the portrait of Ceausescu on the schoolhouse wall. They lived in what we would consider dire poverty and repression, but these facts did not define their lives. They managed to get married, to have children, to play with their classmates and dress in new clothes, to sing songs and bicker with their sisters.
This is not to say that there were no difficulties, that we should envy the Communist system, or that we should make light of its crimes. It is rather to marvel at the resiliency of those who lived there. Though they lived in a dystopia, they still lived. No one told them that it was a dystopia and that they were obliged to be unhappy. And unburdened by that knowledge, many of them were happy.
Another striking photograph from the set above shows two female soldiers walking hand-in-hand down a crowded street. They aren’t looking at the photographer. They aren’t performing at a state-sponsored event meant to honor the regime. Nor are they characters in a drama meant to impress on us the horror of their situation. They’re living their lives.
This is part of a series of posts on the His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman (henceforth HDM). Spoilers abound.
Having covered the two major flaws in Pullman’s HDM trilogy in the previous two posts, this last post is a disorganized collection of contradictions and loose ends that bothered me after I finished the trilogy.
What is Lord Asriel’s origin? It’s hinted in a few different places that he is something other than an ordinary human, but this is never explained or followed up on.
When did Lord Asriel get the time to build his alliance? He doesn’t get the ability to travel easily between the worlds until the very end of the first book, but in the third book we discover that he is the leader of a vast, trans-dimensional rebellion. When did he find the time to visit all of these dimensions and recruit his allies? This connects with question #1, because we’re led to believe that Asriel’s rebellion has been in the works for centuries or more, which is obviously impossible if Asriel is just a normal human.
How did Asriel discover both that the Authority existed and that he could be killed? This is a counterintuitive combination of beliefs. It would be one thing for the skeptic Asriel to conclude that God/The Authority doesn’t exist; it would be another to discover that he does, and is immortal and indestructible in the way that the Church describes. It’s not at all obvious how Asriel came to believe that the Authority existed but could be destroyed.
Why is the Magisterium afraid of Dust? Why do they oppose research into it? The most that the trilogy offers by way of explanation is the puerile assumption that because Dust is Good, the Church (being Bad) must oppose it. But this doesn’t explain anything at all. In particular, what does the Church think that Dust is? What bad outcome are they trying to avoid? I can’t possibly believe that the Church knew ahead of time that research into Dust could lead to the extinction of the Authority—from the interior perspective of the Magisterium, that would be impossible. We’re left with no motive at all, other than the bad guys being bad because the plot requires them to.
What is the Authority’s motive? How do he and Metatron benefit from their (very weak) control of the world? Furthermore, if the Authority wants to control the world, why does he do it so indirectly through the vehicle of the Church rather than using his legions of angels? This ties into the general lack of a coherent motive for the antagonists in the trilogy. They’re simply evil because the plot requires them to be evil, and because Pullman wants to convince us that their real-world counterparts are evil.
In what sense does Lyra “disobey” in the third volume? Her disobedience was predicted as being a world-altering event from the very first book in the series, but it’s not clear who or what Lyra is actually rebelling against. The “forbidden fruit” that she tastes is presumably her sexual discovery with Will (and I’ve already talked about the stupidity of that particular plot point), but who is there to forbid her from doing that? The Authority and Metatron are already dead. Everyone else in the book is supportive of her. This appears to be another instance of Pullman trying to force Lyra into the mold of a Second Eve against the logic of the story.
The big one: the book’s treatment of God/The Authority is incoherent and self-contradictory. For most of the trilogy, we are told that God exists but is evil, and we need to kill him. After God is killed, Mary has a very long monologue explaining why she doesn’t believe that God exists… which contradicts the fact that we just spent the entire trilogy working against him. But never mind that. Even if we accept that the Authority is not who Mary means by “God”, this ignores that the trilogy is premised on the existence and goodness of Dust. And what is Dust? An omnipresent, all-knowing “substance” of some kind, which is responsible for the existence of conscious life, which has an awareness and motive of its own, which selects, speaks to, and guides the protagonists throughout the story. That sounds vaguely familiar. If only I could remember what people called that BENEVOLENT OMNIPRESENT FORCE WHOSE WILL THE HEROES HAVE TO ENACT. Maybe one of my readers can help me.
All of which comes down to a single recommendation: don’t bother reading the whole trilogy. Read the first book if you must, but know that if you skip the rest you won’t be missing much.
This is part of a series of posts on the His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman (henceforth HDM). Spoilers abound.
Pullman’s trilogy is intended as an anti-Narnia, a polemical work meant to critique and satirize Christianity and the Church. He’s stated this openly in several interviews, and he followed HDM with The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, a fictionalized version of the story of Jesus which makes his critique even more explicit. It’s interesting, then, to note that Pullman’s critique is in fact focussed on an incredibly narrow part of religious life, to the exclusion of the better part of what believers actually experience.
To wit, Pullman treats religion as if it’s entirely about power and authority.
The Church in the world of HDM is a political entity, entirely concerned with maintaining its own worldly status and position. The Church’s moral teachings exist solely to increase the Church’s power. God is renamed “the Authority,” and both him and his archangel Metatron are in the diety business just because they want to boss other people around. The plot of the trilogy concerns the efforts of the protagonists to undermine this authority and get out from underneath the shadow of God’s or the Church’s control.
Let me concede up front that this is not an entirely baseless critique. The Church is political entity, even in our own time, and it has often acted in ways meant to increase its own power rather than forward its supposed spiritual purpose. Furthermore, Christian activism in the US largely contributes to the notion that Christianity is a political platform rather than a spiritual discipline.
But Pullman doesn’t seem to think that there is anything to religion other than power and control, which means that he misses the largest part of what most believers actually experience. (It also means that he writes a book which purports to be an attack on Christianity in which no character ever says a single word about Christ, not even the timeworn cliches of Jesus as a great teacher misrepresented by the Church, etc. In fact, given the differences between Lyra’s world and ours, it’s not actually clear that there ever was a Christ in their timeline.) To put it mildly, my experience of religion is not one that much resembles Pullman’s critique. My knowledge of God begins in beauty, passes through sorrow, transcendence, sublimity, struggle, and (yes) obedience, and ends in silence. My God is the voice that answers Job out of the whirlwind, the fire burning in the unconsumed bush, he who is clothed in darkness, but who will not break a bruised reed. The Authority of Pullman’s books only ever says, “Do as I tell you.” Christ says “Come to me you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
My experience is not unique. I do not know anyone whose primary understanding of God is that of a distant lawgiver, a powerful being who coerces obedience with the threat of eternal punishment. And to be clear, most of my Christian acquaintances are of the evangelical Protestant or conservative Catholic stripe, precisely the sort of people that Pullman most has in his sights. Perhaps somewhere out there exist Christians who conceive of God this way. But I have never met them.
To critique the Church in the way that Pullman does is to focus only on its most impersonal, institutional, and authoritarian aspects, and to ignore everything else. The Church contains more than bureaucrats and lawyers. It contains saints and mystics, poets and painters, architects and astronauts. HDM does not acknowledge the existence of this mass of people at all. In HDM, there is no one in the Church who is there for any reason other than acquiring power, and no one who bows a knee for any reason other than fear. Pullman is free to present the Church this way if he wants to. But this is so different from reality as to be useless as a critique.
This is part of a series of posts on the His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman. Spoilers abound.
All of the biggest problems with the His Dark Materials trilogy are in the third volume. As I mentioned before, the first volume was excellent, and the second plenty good. The third one stank to the heavens, and lo, great was the odor thereof. And yet, I could even have forgiven the third volume its many absurdities, if it had not been for the ending.
The climax of the third book, or what should have been the climax, was the death of the Authority. That was handled fine. There was a bit of authorial convenience, what with the protags just happening to stumble across the old bloke in time to open the lid and have him disappear in a puff of air, but that was no worse than many of the other stupid things that happened in that book. No, the part that made me throw the book across the room was what happened after that. You know what I’m talking about. When Lyra and Will get together and…
Let’s give Pullman a little credit here. Let’s assume that he didn’t mean to imply that his thirteen-year-old protagonists actually had sex, even though the scene easily lends itself to that interpretation. (If they only kissed, why put it off-screen?) But still, let’s stop to appreciate the utter idiocy of what Pullman tried to pull off in the ending: the leakage of Dust, which threatens the entire multiverse, is stopped because two kids kiss.
I died of stupid when I read this.
The biggest problem of the third book is that Pullman’s polemical purpose got ahead of his narrative purpose, and this problem is basically what kills the ending. He wants to make some kind of point about sex being awesome and good (and you should totally do it, even if you’re only thirteen), and he has to make good on the prophecies hinted at back in the first book that Lyra would be a Second Eve[1]. So he contrives to have preteen smooching somehow be the solution to the universe’s problems, even though this makes no sense at all given what the rest of the trilogy has told us about Dust. There is no logical reason for Lyra’s and Will’s actions to close up the leakage of Dust. It occurs purely to support Pullman’s polemics, and it violates the logic of the story to do so.
Pullman may have been trying to have the ending operate on fairy-logic or dream-logic, and this might have worked had the rest of the story not been so science-fictional. This is a story in which the “magic” operates on clear principles, and there’s a rational (though fantastic) explanation for everything. The dream-logic by which love can heal the universe clashes with the tone that carries through the rest of the book, and the glaring incongruity instead foregrounds Pullman’s authorial fiat. Plus, what a saccharine, cliched form of fairy-logic this is? Love is what saves the universe? A kiss will heal the tear in the world? This is a plot for a second-rate Disney film, not a significant children’s trilogy with aspirations to something better.
Pullman should have known better.
[1] I should point out that there already was a Second Eve, and she’s known for something kind of different.
So I was going through some of my abandoned drafts, and I discovered that two years ago I had half-written a series of posts about Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. I wrote a first post about the trilogy but never followed up on it, but I figure late is better than never. Look for the next three installments over the next two weeks.
Occasionally you’ll be with a group of people and they’ll get to talking about their favorite historical epochs, nostalgic for lives they never led. One person will talk up their childhood love of the Wild West, another reveal a penchant for Victorian England. This last one just has a thing for corsets, but it’s better not to call them on it.
When my turn rolls round I take a sip of whatever we’re drinking and look at my shoes. “The mid 90’s were pretty good,” I say lamely. “Slower internet and everything, but at least we had penicillin.”
Perhaps it’s my being a history buff, but the past sucked. For about a millennium and a half after the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe just seems like a real shit place to reside. Lots of rooting in filth until you die at thirty a half mile from where you born. Nominally the nobles had it better, but still, your fever would have been treated with the application of leaches and your pretty young bride had like a one in two chance of surviving child birth.
There’s lots of words I could use to describe this, but I’m going to be generous and just say “bullocks”. The past didn’t suck for most of the people who lived there. I know this because I’ve been there, and I know people who lived most of their lives in the past.
Yes, of course, all of us have lived most of our lives in the past. The past is never really that far away. You can travel back in time up to a few decades just by visiting rural areas here in the US. (Conversely, Westerners visiting Japan often get a sense of visiting the future.) But I know time travelers from times more distant than that. My in-laws grew up and lived a significant portion of their lives in rural Romania in the mid 20th century, which was technologically and culturally at least a century behind the modern world, even the modern world of the 1950’s. My wife’s grandmother still lives on the farm where she raised her many children, and her lifestyle and attitudes are, at best, from the 19th century. Good portions of it are quite a bit older than that. Of course the past that one finds in these places is never pure, as modernity reaches its tendrils even to rural Romania in some respects. Still, it is enough to gain a sense of what our poor, pitiful, filthy, ignorant ancestors were like.
And they were neither pitiful, filthy, nor ignorant. That’s just modern condescension speaking. (It is hard to argue with poor, however.)
This is the most striking thing about visiting the past. The people who live there certainly lack many of our modern luxuries, and their lives are less pleasant than ours in some ways. But they don’t think that their lives suck. They are happy at roughly the same levels that we are happy. Many of them are distinctly uncomfortable with the modern world when it inevitably forces itself on them. Sometimes they look down on us for our laziness, loss of virtue, and alienation. To say “the past sucked” is to ignore the happiness of those who lived there, and in many cases continue to live there.
I’m also reminded of another famous group of time-travelers, the Hmong, who were caught up in a war from centuries in the future and then had to be relocated from their traditional homes into the heart of the modern world. You should not be surprised to hear that most of them found this transition to be painful, and that many of them wished to return to the filthy, disease-ridden, hard-laboring past that we had “rescued” them from. But you may be surprised that Western medicine—one of the few things that I would have mentioned as an unambiguous benefit of the modern world—was a source of special distress to many of them. Time-travelers don’t necessarily see our best points as good points at all.
One of the more interesting ideas of critical theory is the concept of abjection, which is the attitude by which the mainstream rejects and symbolically casts out its antithesis, defining itself by what it excludes. Racial whiteness is defined by the abjection of blackness. Literary fiction is defined by the abjection of genre. And modernity is defined by the abjection of the past.
This abjection is absolutely necessary for modernity to function. We have to be ashamed and disgusted by our ancestors, for how else would we justify the vandalism of our inheritance and our pollution of the natural and social environments? By making the past abject, we reassure ourselves that we have lost nothing in the transition to modernity, that our forefathers have nothing to teach us, that we were right to leave all of that behind. Daniel “The Past Sucked” Polansky is merely participating in this ongoing project of abjection.
Ladies and gentlemen, let me present to you the most awful piece of extruded fantasy product that I’ve ever had the misfortune to read in its entirety:
Man, this thing was awful
A March into Darkness by Robert Newcomb. If you’ve read this book, then you know what’s coming. It was just… I mean… words fail me. This was bad in nearly every way that it is possible for a book to be bad. I would never have read the entire thing, except that at the time I was under unusual circumstances: I was stuck in a room with nothing else to read for an entire weekend, and one of my fellow room-sitters had this book with him. It was either read this book, or stare at the wall. I chose to read the book.
In retrospect, staring at the wall may have been less painful.
Let me quickly run down the book’s faults, before we move on to the one thing that the book did well.
The protagonist was a complete idiot, and a grating, indulgent whiner at that. Main character stupidity was the main driver of the plot for the first quarter of the book.
The worldbuilding was a fourth-generation Xeroxed copy of a Dungeons and Dragons cliche guide. There was nothing inventive or surprising about any of it. (Well, except for the invisible flying magical manta ray army. That was kind of cool.)
The dialog was awful. It was so banal and so predictable that I learned to just skim the pages of dialog looking for the longer-than-average paragraphs, because that was where the exposition nuggets were buried. Everything else was the most juvenile, cringe-inducing conversation that you’ve ever read.
The characters were factory-built from plastic parts. I can’t remember a single one of them aside from their most generic specifiers: “the protagonist”, “the girl” (there’s only one of significance), “the wizard”, etc.
The plot problems were all solved by a combination of coincidence and application of magical technobabble. The main antagonist is supposedly invincible because he has a kind of magical martial arts training that takes centuries to complete. A major plot point is the protag trying to find the ancient monastery where this technique is taught and begin training, so that he has at least a chance of standing up to the baddie. And then, about 100 pages before the end, they discover a magic spell they can cast that will allow them to skip straight to being a grand-master. And why did we spend all of this time reading about the %!#$&^ training?
But there was one saving grace. One thing, one thing that kept me turning pages instead of going back to the comforting tedium of wall-watching.
The plot moved like a crack money on rocket skates.
Had I been reading under normal circumstances, I probably would not have kept reading long enough for the book to get its plot hooks into me. And even after I had sunk a few hours into the book, I looked up about once a chapter and said, “Why am I still reading this dreck?” But I kept going. Not just because I had nothing else to do, but because I actually wanted to know what happened next. When I had to put the book away for an hour, I kept thinking about it. The girl was in danger! The wizard was going to discover something magical! The protagonist was angsting about something! Would the girl be saved? What did the wizard discover? Will the protag stop being such a putz? I was aware—painfully, eye-gougingly aware—of the fact that every one of these plot points was a cliche. But nonetheless, I cared. Not about the characters, and certainly not about the setting, but about what happened next.
In part, the relentless nature of the plot is what made the later betrayals so galling. When I wondered How would the protag overcome the baddie?, the answer turned out to be By using a magic spell to make the previous 200 pages of martial arts training irrelevant. This made me mad, because I was actually invested in the answer. Not very invested, mind you, but invested enough to be upset that the resolution was so stupid. In fact, it was only as I reached the end of the book that the novel’s full stupidity began to weigh on me, because I realized that the one good thing in this trainwreck was itself going to be derailed, as all of the dilemmas of the plot were resolved in the cheesiest and most obnoxious way possible. And so I resigned myself to skimming over page after page of banal, repetitive dialog and burning through hordes of doomed redshirts on my way to the climax, knowing that it, too, was bound to be a disappointment. And it was a disappointment.
But I did learn some things along the way.
First, plot matters. Many readers get their fix from character, ideas, or prose more than plot. I would normally count myself as one of those. But even a convicted setting-and-style junkie like me couldn’t help but be taken in by the sweet plot crack that Newcomb put into his book, and I kept coming back for another hit. Even after it was clear that the plot had been cut with some nasty stuff, and even after I was sure I was going to regret it. I still wanted more. After a while I started to hate myself, wishing I could kick the habit, but the book would not let me go until I had burned through to the very last page.
The second point is don’t disappoint your reader. If the conclusion of the book had actually satisfied me rather than dissolving into a mushy pile of cliche and frustration, I might have tentatively recommended it. I mean, for a certain kind of reader, the kind who doesn’t care about characterization or prose style or anything else, this could actually be a good book. The opening is kind of interesting. At first it seems like it’s going to go somewhere compelling. If there had been any follow-through, if the author had actually tried to solve his plot problems rather than just hand-wave them away, it might have been kind of okay. Not great literature, mind you, but a pulpy little fantasy romp. Instead it was a disaster.
It turns out that Newcomb’s publishing contract was cancelled after the sequel to this book. I can’t imagine why.
And it is often so that popular culture, guided only by its intuitive and communal wisdom, sees what can’t be seen, but is nevertheless real. But having gained some trust in that, I was still confused by the rather odd phenomenon of the zombies. Why did this rather obscure Caribbean cult of people in a drug-induced catatonic state get so easily transformed into such an elaborate metaphor of the post-apocalyptic world? And why did they think that the world after the collapse would be filled with people stripped of their souls, stripped of all feelings, whether of pain or pleasure, anger or joy, who spent their time relentlessly pursuing one product?
And then it struck me: they aren’t looking into the future, they are looking at the present moment; and they aren’t looking at what will be done to others; they are looking at what has already been done to themselves. The image, so silly on its face, resonates with the young because they know, at some intuitive level, that we are already in the midst of the apocalypse, that the world wishes to strip them of their minds and their hearts and make them pure consumers, and relentless consumers of one product, the advertiser’s dream. They know, in their heart of hearts, that the world is out to get them, and means them no good. They have seen a deeper truth than anyone cares to admit.
The author is both more pessimistic and more optimistic than me. He thinks that we’re in imminent danger of social collapse (I don’t), but that some good things will appear in its immediate aftermath (I think it’ll take a lot longer than that). And the essay is adapted from an address given to a Catholic audience, but since I’m not a Catholic there are a few parts of it that I won’t wholly endorse. Nonetheless, it was a cracking good read.
We cannot have a world without structures of power, though we might wish for it. But if we must have power, what sort of power should we have? How should power present itself?
We go looking for one kind of powerful man, and we find a king wearing sumptuous robes and carrying a glittering staff. He blasts trumpets and pounds drums at his approach and wafts incense in his wake. When we come to supplicate him, he demands our prostration and does not forget for a moment that he is powerful, and we are not.
This is the best kind of power. First, because it is easy to find. We only have to follow the sound of drums and the smell of incense, and when we arrive in the gold-littered court there is little question that we’ve come to the right place. More importantly, the king himself knows that he is powerful. If we come to complain about his rule, he will admit that he is responsible even if he ignores our pleas. And because he knows he is responsible, he may even remember to do justice, may be persuaded to be good. And if not, because his power is a visible, sharp-edged thing, we can at least get out of his way.
We go looking for another kind of power, and we find a quiet woman sitting behind a plain wooden desk covered with papers. She looks up from her writing and offers us a cup of tea. We’re confused, because this does not look like a seat of power. The woman is confused as well. There is no power here, she tells us, clearly hoping that we will leave. She says she is a writer, a businesswoman, a minor bureaucrat. Why would we come to her looking for a seat of power?
This is a good question. We do notice there is a subversive book, or a foreclosure notice, or maybe just form 27b-6 lying on her desk. Is not this a kind of power? She shakes her head. This is just social justice, the free market, the will of the people, she assures us. There is no power here. Yes, some people will always go to extremes, get into too much debt, or vote for foolish policies. But this is not her fault. She is certainly not responsible.
Too bad about that. We had some questions about the exercise of this power, but we can’t find anyone who will answer for it.
Why in the world would The Sparrow have gotten a Tiptree award?
My confusion has nothing to do with the quality of the novel. The Sparrow is a wonderful book, one of my favorites, and it would deserve almost any award you could give it. But the Tiptree is for “works of science fiction or fantasy that expand or explore one’s understanding of gender,” which was not one of the things that stood out to me as something The Sparrow really did. And looking through the remarks by the judges, I feel my suspicion confirmed:
I was initially concerned that the sexual content was slight, but my enthusiasm finally swept these doubts away. Although never quite defined as such, the transformation of the protagonist takes place largely through sexual experience, from his initial celibacy, to the middle of the book with his longings, to his final climactic and terrifying journey offworld.
I have to agree with this judge that the sexual content is “slight”. The book has a realistic portrayal of Sandoz’s celibacy, including the fact that he’s not always happy about it, but that’s about it.
The story centers on the spiritual crisis of Emilio Sandoz, a Jesuit priest who has had his view of God (and, not incidentally, his masculinity and his sexuality) challenged by his experiences on the planet Rakhat…. On a different level, in her portrayal of the inhabitants of Rakhat, Russell makes fascinating connections among the binary oppositions of male/female, person/animal, ruling class/laboring class, pushing these connections in new directions.
Again, the first sentence of this quote is correct, but the second makes me wonder if we read the same book. Actually, let me correct that: the relationship between the two alien species on Rakhat can be read as an interesting embodiment of social relations on our world, but these considerations strike me as being far from the core of the story. (They are, however, much more important to the second book.)
Central to The Sparrow is the examination of the importance of sexuality to gender identity, specifically masculinity. Can you be celibate and still be a man?
The answer to that question is pretty clearly “yes”, and I don’t see where this is ever centrally important. That Sandoz is both a man and celibate is taken for granted throughout most of the story.
There is an alien race whose genders are ambiguous to humans, mostly because the females are larger than the males and the males raise the children. The center of the book is the hero’s struggle to reconcile the fact that the aliens he had moved heaven and earth to study have abused him terribly, with God’s Plan, celibacy, and his own macho upbringing.
Again, it’s true that the alien sexes are dissimilar from our own, but this is a commonplace in modern science fiction. A book in which biologically different aliens are also sexually different is hardly groundbreaking at this point. The second sentence of this quote is the only one that actually mentions what I regard as the real center of the book, but notably this has only a tenous attachment to gender.
Perhaps the place where I differ from the judges is more in emphasis than in content. The gender-related themes that they identify are certainly present in the novel, but they play second fiddle to the spiritual themes. If you ask me what The Sparrow is about, I’ll say faith and faithfulness, providence, grace, and forgiveness. I probably wouldn’t mention anything gender-related at all. And insofar as gender does impinge upon the story, it seems to me that it does so in a completely conventional way for a contemporary story, i.e., it doesn’t reiterate the gender norms of fifty years ago, but it reflects straightforwardly the gender norms and quasi-feminist cliches of today. The Sparrow is a great book, but it’s not the sort of book that I would nominate for the Tiptree.
The other nominee for that year was Ursula K. LeGuin’s novella Mountain Ways, which is much more the sort of thing that I would expect. It’s about people from the planet O who have a custom of four-person marriage, and it’s wonderful.
J.S. Bangs 