Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  Active or ambitious women are evil—this literature is chockfull of cruel dowager empresses, sadistic matriarchs, evil ladies maddened by jealousy, domineering villainesses, and so on.

  Women are supernaturally beautiful—all of them.

  Women are weak and/or kept off stage—this genre is full of scientists’ beautiful daughters who know just enough to be brought along by Daddy as his research assistant, but not enough to be of any help to anyone.

  Women’s powers are passive and involuntary—an odd idea that turns up again and again, not only in space opera. If female characters are given abilities, these are often innate abilities which cannot be developed or controlled, e.g. clairvoyance, telepathy, hysterical strength, unconscious psi power, eidetic memory, perfect pitch, lightning calculation, or (more baldly) magic. The power is somehow in the woman, but she does not really possess it. Often realistic science fiction employs the same device.11

  The real focus of interest is not on women at all—but on the cosmic rivalries between strong, rugged, virile he-men. It is no accident that space opera and horse opera bear similar names.12 Most of the readers of science fiction are male and most of them are young; people seem to quit reading the stuff in their middle twenties and the hard-core readers who form fan clubs and go to conventions are even younger and even more likely to be male.13 Such readers as I have met (the addicts?) are overwhelmingly likely to be nervous, shy, pleasant boys, sensitive, intelligent, and very awkward with people. They also talk too much. It does not take a clairvoyant to see why such people would be attracted to space opera, with its absence of real women and its tremendous over-rating of the “real he-man.” In the March 1969 issue of Amazing one James Koval wrote to the editor as follows:14

  Your October issue was superb; better than that, it was uniquely original . . . Why do I think it so worthy of such compliments? Because of the short stories Conqueror and Mu Panther, mainly. They were, in every visual and emotional sense, stories about real men whose rugged actions and keen thinking bring back a genuine feeling of masculinity, a thing sorely missed by the long-haired and soft-eyed generation of my time, of which I am a part . . . aiming entertainment at the virile and imaginative male of today is the best kind of business . . . I sincerely hope you keep your man-versus-animal type format going, especially with stories like Mu Panther. That was exceptionally unique.

  The editor’s response was “GROAN!”

  But even if readers are adolescents, the writers are not. I know quite a few grown-up men who should know better, but who nonetheless fall into what I would like to call the he-man ethic. And they do it over and over again. In November 1968, a speaker at the Philadelphia Science Fiction Convention15 described the heroes such writers create:

  The only real He-Man is Master of the Universe . . . The real He-Man is invulnerable. He has no weaknesses. Sexually he is super-potent. He does exactly what he pleases, everywhere and at all times. He is absolutely self-sufficient. He depends on nobody, for this would be a weakness. Toward women he is possessive, protective, and patronizing; to men he gives orders. He is never frightened by anything or for any reason; he is never indecisive and he always wins.

  In short, masculinity equals power and femininity equals powerlessness. This is a cultural stereotype that can be found in much popular literature, but science fiction writers have no business employing stereotypes, let alone swallowing them goggle-eyed.

  Equal is as equal does

  In the last decade or so, science fiction has begun to attempt the serious presentation of men and women as equals, usually by showing them at work together. Even a popular television show like Star Trek shows a spaceship with a mixed crew; fifteen years ago this was unthinkable.16 Forbidden Planet, a witty and charming film made in the 1950s, takes it for granted that the crew of a spaceship will all be red-blooded, crew-cut, woman-hungry men, rather like the cast of South Pacific before the nurses arrive. And within the memory of living adolescent, John W. Campbell, Jr., the editor of Analog, proposed that “nice girls” be sent on spaceships as prostitutes because married women would only clutter everything up with washing and babies. But Campbell is a coelacanth.

  At any rate, many recent stories do show a two-sexed world in which women as well as men work competently and well. But this is a reflection of present reality, not genuine speculation. And what is most striking about these stories is what they leave out: the characters’ personal and erotic relations are not described; child-rearing arrangements (to my knowledge) are never described; and the women who appear in these stories are either young and childless or middle-aged, with their children safely grown up. That is, the real problems of a society without gender-role differentiation are not faced. It is my impression that most of these stories are colorless and schematic; the authors want to be progressive, God bless them, but they don’t know how. Exceptions:

  Mack Reynolds, who also presents a version of future socialism called “the Ultra-Welfare State.” (Is there a connection?) He has written novels about two-sexed societies of which one is a kind of mild gynocracy. He does not describe child-rearing arrangements, though.

  Samuel Delany, who often depicts group marriages and communal child-rearing, “triplet” marriages (not polygamy or polyandry, for each person is understood to have sexual relations with the other two) und so weiter, all with no differentiation of gender roles, all with an affectionate, East Village, Berkeley-Bohemian air to them, and all with the advanced technology that would make such things work. His people have the rare virtue of fitting the institutions under which they live. Robert Heinlein, who also goes in for odd arrangements (e.g the “line marriage” in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress in which everybody is married to everybody, but there are seniority rights in sex), peoples his different societies with individualistic, possessive, competitive, pre-World War II Americans—just the people who could not live under the cooperative or communal arrangements he describes. Heinlein, for all his virtues, seems to me to exemplify science fiction’s failure of imagination in the human sphere. He is superb at work but out of his element elsewhere. Stranger in a Strange Land seems to me a particular failure. I have heard Heinlein’s women called “boy scouts with breasts”—but the subject takes more discussion than I can give it here. Alexei Panshin’s critical study, Heinlein in Dimension, undertakes a thorough investigation of Heinlein vs. Sex. Heinlein loses.17

  Matriarchy

  The strangest and most fascinating oddities in science fiction occur not in the stories that try to abolish differences in gender roles but in those which attempt to reverse the roles themselves. Unfortunately, only a handful of writers have treated this theme seriously. Space opera abounds, but in space opera the reversal is always cut to the same pattern.

  Into a world of cold, cruel, domineering women who are openly contemptuous of their cringing, servile men (“gutless” is a favorite word here) arrive(s) men (a man) from our present world. With a minimum of trouble, these normal men succeed in overthrowing the matriarchy, which although strong and warlike, is also completely inefficient. At this point the now dominant men experience a joyful return of victorious manhood and the women (after initial reluctance) declare that they too are much happier. Everything is (to quote S. J. Perelman) leeches and cream.18 Two interesting themes occur:

  1.the women are far more vicious, sadistic, and openly contemptuous of men than comparable dominant men are of comparable subordinate women in the usual space opera.

  2.the women are dominant because they are taller and stronger than the men (1).

  Sometimes the story is played out among the members of an alien species modeled on insects or microscopic sea-creatures, so that tiny males are eaten or engulfed by huge females. I remember one in which a tiny male was eaten by a female who was not only forty feet tall but maddened to boot.19 There are times when science fiction leaves the domain of literature altogether. Least said, soonest mended.

  I remember three British accounts of future matriarchies th
at could be called serious studies. In one the matriarchy is incidental. The society is presented as good because it embodies the traditionally feminine virtues of serenity, tolerance, love, and pacifism.20 In John Wyndham’s “Consider Her Ways” there are no men at all; the society is a static, hierarchical one which (like the first) is good because of its traditionally feminine virtues, which are taken as innate in the female character. There is something about matriarchy that makes science fiction writers think of two things: biological engineering and social insects; whether women are considered naturally chitinous or the softness of the female body is equated with the softness of the “soft” sciences I don’t know, but the point is often made that “women are conservative by nature” and from there it seems an easy jump to bees or ants. Science fiction stories often make the point that a matriarchy will be static and hierarchical, like Byzantium or Egypt. (It should be remembered here that the absolute value of progress is one of the commonest shibboleths of science fiction.) The third story I remember—technically it’s a “post-Bomb” story—was written by an author whose version of matriarchy sounds like Robert Graves’s.21 The story makes the explicit point that while what is needed is static endurance, the Mother rules; when exploration and initiative again become necessary, the Father will return. The Great Mother is a real, supernatural character in this tale and the people in it are very real people. The matriarchy—again, the women rule by supernatural knowledge—is vividly realized and there is genuine exploration of what personal relations would be like in such a society. There is a kind of uncompromising horror (the hero is hunted by “the hounds of the Mother”—women whose minds have been taken over by the Magna Mater) which expresses a man’s fear of such a world much more effectively than all the maddened, forty-foot-tall male-gulpers ever invented.

  So far I’ve been discussing fiction written by men and largely for men.22 What about fiction written by women?

  Women’s fiction: Potpourri

  Most science fiction writers are men, but some are women, and there are more women writing the stuff than there used to be. The women’s work falls into four rough categories:

  1.Ladies’ magazine fiction—in which the sweet, gentle, intuitive little heroine solves an interstellar crisis by mending her slip or doing something equally domestic after her big, heroic husband has failed. Zenna Henderson sometimes writes like this. Fantasy and Science Fiction, which carries more of this kind of writing than any of the other magazines, once earned a deserved slap over the knuckles from reviewer James Blish.23

  2.Galactic suburbia—very often written by women. Sometimes the characters are all male, especially if the story is set at work. Most women writing in the field (like so many of the men) write this kind of fiction.

  3.Space opera—strange but true. Leigh Brackett is one example. Very rarely the protagonist turns out to be a sword-wielding, muscular, aggressive woman—but the he-man ethos of the world does not change, nor do the stereotyped personalities assigned to the secondary characters, particularly the female ones.

  4.Avant-garde fiction—part of the recent rapprochement between the most experimental of the science fiction community and the most avant-garde of what is called “the mainstream.” This takes us out of the field of science fiction altogether.24

  In general, stories by women tend to contain more active and lively female characters than do stories by men, and more often than men writers, women writers try to invent worlds in which men and women will be equals. But the usual faults show up just as often. The conventional idea that women are second-class people is a hard idea to shake; and while it is easy enough to show women doing men’s work, or active in society, it is in the family scenes and the love scenes that one must look for the author’s real freedom from our most destructive prejudices.

  An odd equality

  I would like to close with a few words about The Left Hand of Darkness, a fine book that won the Science Fiction Writers of American Nebula Award for 1969 as the best novel of that year.25 The book was written by a woman and it is about sex—I don’t mean copulation; I mean what sexual identity means to people and what human identity means to them, and what kind of love can cross the barriers of culture and custom. It’s a beautifully written book. Ursula K. Le Guin, the author, has imagined a world of human hermaphrodites—an experimental colony abandoned by its creators long ago and rediscovered by other human beings. The adults of this glacial world of Winter go through an oestrus cycle modeled on the human menstrual cycle: every four weeks the individual experiences a few days of sexual potency and obsessive interest in sex during which “he” becomes either male or female. The rest of the time “he” has no sex at all, or rather, only the potential of either. The cycle is involuntary, though it can be affected by drugs, and there is no choice of sex—except that the presence of someone already into the cycle and therefore of one sex will stimulate others in oestrus to become of the opposite sex. You would imagine that such a people’s culture and institutions would be very different from ours and so they are; everything is finely realized, from their household implements to their customs to their creation myths. Again, however (and I’m very sorry to see it), family structure is not fully explained. Worse than that, child-rearing is left completely in the dark, although the human author herself is married and the mother of three children. Moreover, there is a human observer on Winter and he is male; and there is a native hero and he is male—at least “he” is masculine in gender, if not in sex. The native hero has a former spouse who is long-suffering, mild and gentle, while he himself is fiery, tough, self-sufficient, and proud. There is the Byronesque memory of a past incestuous affair; his lover and sibling is dead. There is an attempted seduction by a kind of Mata Hari who is female (so that the hero, of course, becomes male). It is, I must admit, a deficiency in the English language that these people must be called “he” throughout, but put that together with the native hero’s personal encounters in the book, the absolute lack of interest in child-raising, the concentration on work, and what you have is a world of men. Thus the great love scene in the book is between two men: the human observer (who is a real man) and the native hero (who is a female man). The scene is nominally homosexual, but I think what lies at the bottom of it (and what has moved men and women readers alike) is that it is a love scene between a man and a woman, with the label “male: high status” pasted on the woman’s forehead. Perhaps, with the straitjacket of our gender roles, with women automatically regarded as second-class, intelligent and active women feel as if they were female men or hermaphrodites. Or perhaps the only way a woman (even in a love scene) can be made a man’s equal and the love scene therefore deeply moving, is to make her nominally male. That is, female in sex but male in gender. Here is the human narrator describing the alien hero:

  to ignore the abstraction, to hold fast to the thing. There was in this attitude something feminine, a refusal of the abstract ideal, a submissiveness to the given . . .26

  Very conventional, although the story is set far, far in the future and the narrator is supposed to be a trained observer, a kind of anthropologist. Here is the narrator again, describing human women (he has been asked if they are “like a different species”):

  No. Yes. No, of course not, not really. But the difference is very important, I suppose the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one’s life, is whether one’s born male or female . . . Even where women participate equally with men in the society, they still after all do all the child-bearing and so most of the child-rearing . . .

  And when asked “Are they mentally inferior?”:

  I don’t know. They don’t often seem to turn up mathematicians, or composers of music, or inventors, or abstract thinkers. But it isn’t that they’re stupid . . .27

  Let me remind you that this is centuries in the future. And again:

  The boy . . . had a girl’s quick delicacy in his looks and movements, but no girl could keep so grim a silence as he did . . .28
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br />   It’s the whole difficulty of science fiction, of genuine speculation: how to get away from traditional assumptions which are nothing more than traditional straitjackets.29 Miss Le Guin seems to be aiming at some kind of equality between the sexes, but she certainly goes the long way around to get it; a whole new biology has to be invented, a whole society, a whole imagined world, so that finally she may bring together two persons of different sexes who will nonetheless be equals.30

  The title I chose for this essay was “The Image of Women in Science Fiction.” I hesitated between that and “Women in Science Fiction” but if I had chosen the latter, there would have been very little to say.

  There are plenty of images of women in science fiction.

  There are hardly any women.

  Notes

  1. In conversation and in his discussion of “Speculative Fiction” given at the MLA Seminar on Science Fiction in New York City, December 27, 1968.

  2. Basil Davenport, Inquiry Into Science Fiction, Longmans, Green and Co., New York, London, Toronto, 1955, pp. 39ff.

  3. A recent novel by James Blish, Black Easter, published by Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y. in 1968, does exactly this. See in particular the Introduction, pp. 7–8.

  4. Samuel Delany, “About Five Thousand One Hundred and Seventy Five Words,” in Extrapolation: the Newsletter of the Conference on Science Fiction of the MLA, ed. Thomas D. Clareson, College of Wooster, Wooster, Ohio, Vol. X, No. 2, May 1969, pp. 61–63.

  5. There have been exceptions, e.g. Olaf Stapledon, George Bernard Shaw. And of course Philip Wylie’s The Disappearance. Wylie’s novel really ranks as a near-future story, though.

  6. Frederik Pohl, The Age of the Pussyfoot, Trident Press, New York, 1968.

  7. I don’t want to adduce further examples, but most well-known science fiction is of this kind. It suffices to read Childhood’s End for example (Arthur C. Clarke), and ask about the Utopian society of the middle: What do the men do? What do the women do? Who raises the children? And so on.