Reading Niven

The other day, I had a sudden bee in my bonnet to listen to the Violent Femmes, which reminded me of high school and this nice but horribly stoned boy I used to know; before I knew it, I was on a full-blown nostalgia kick. In honour of this, I decided to re-read The Mote in God's Eye, a science fiction novel dealing with first contact, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. I'd loved it when I first read it as a kid. Much of my early exposure to science fiction came from my father's books. The house was littered with them. Many of them had a militaristic bent: Jerry Pournelle, David Drake, later David Weber. Lots of military books in general, not just science fiction. Techno-thrillers. Various Jane's tomes. Books on naval battles, and on military hardware, and missiles. I knew what a Trident missile was in second grade. To this day I have dreams involving nuclear weapons. Never real Bomb Dreams, with one almighty flash and then the end; the bombs are just there. Part of the dreamscape. Morally neutral. (I'm not sure if that bothers me.)

Lots of the books I read back then were what you'd call 'hard' science fiction. In particular, they were distinctly mannish. Engineery books, books about problem-solving, books which shied away from investigating too deeply their characters or their emotional lives, except in the butchest of ways; books written for plot rather than for prose. Although not all of them were of that character. There was Asimov, who was much cuddlier; and there was Ray Bradbury...

To make a long story short--

CHORUS: Too late!

--I decided to re-read The Mote in God's Eye to see what I thought of it years later, now that I've become a gay pacifist socialist aesthetic Seattle type, left the rotting town in Iowa where I'd grown up, and met people who aren't white.

My reaction involved a lot of giggling. The future society, the Second Empire, Niven and Pournelle used is just silly, a Puritanical misogynistic classist bunch of prudes. And Anglo? You had better believe it's Anglo. Their future is white as a sheet. There is exactly one black person, mentioned in passing. The only significant non-Caucasian characters are an Arab trading magnate and his manservant, shifty and unprincipled and moneygrubbing, not portrayed as actively villainous but most definitely Outsiders. Where the heck, I asked myself, are all the Asians?

Women really take a beating. So to speak. There's exactly one female character, who fits into the deeply unfortunate mold of the spunky independent young woman who deep down just wants to knit little booties for her brood of hellspawned young, and make her man a sandwich. Maybe pie. I know the book was written thirty years ago, but come on! The feminine is equated with the domestic to a degree that'd make Donna Reed moist as a snack cake. There was one passage that really leapt out at me; Sally, you see, an anthropologist, is busy studying the first intelligent alien species humanity has encountered, and realises in the middle of all that that what she really misses is 'girl talk. Marriage and babies and housekeeping and scandals'. Now, I'm no woman, but even I can tell you that there's more to women than sitting around crocheting and talking about bleach. She's desperate to swap recipes with someone. There's nothing wrong with recipes as such. I even swapped one myself, once. But that is the uttermost limit of her identity as a woman. Recipes. And swooning over that big strong Captain Blaine, with his duty and his square shoulders and his passive sodomy. (Well, come on. He commands a ship crewed entirely by men, off in space for ages at a time in high-stress conditions. You know they do it.)

And they're all such total prudes! All the menfolk go all red and blushy and incoherent with great big sticks up their asses when Sally takes her clothes off so the aliens can inspect her, on another ship, where not a single human can see her. The very thought of an exposed bosom sends them reeling with maidenly vapours. (Just like Republicans, really: SHRIEK! Titties! *swoon*) Really, what kind of a science-fictional society do you call that? Even E. E. Smith's whiz-bang Boy's Own adventure yarns were filled with people getting their kit off left and right. And Isaac Asimov, in contrast, with his sexbots...? He was a dirty, dirty man, and I respect that. Dirtiness is much truer to the human spirit.

Now, this is not to cast aspersions on the personal politics of the good masters Niven and Pournelle, about which I know nothing whatsoever. I don't know if they genuinely have 'Two White Dudes' written across their foreheads in letter of fire thirty feet high. It is only a fictional society, after all. And it's a possible one. It's not unlike societies of the past. But it's a thoroughly disagreeable one. I found myself very disappointed that the authors didn't take a more critical tone. To my surprise, they don't seem to take the piss at all. They write with straight faces, unless I've missed something. And I am surprised that they could've written a book thirty years ago, when the politics of race and gender were going through such transformative uproar, and David Bowie was still wearing dresses and fellating Mic Jagger, and then filled it with such regressive and archaic politics, never once commenting upon this in the text. The injustice is quite blatant, but the authors don't critique their own creation; the protagonists are all stamped as Heroes, and their values are all very Noble. It feels naive, and absurd.

And none of this ever occurred to me when I was a kid. This is why it's good to grow up.

What would Samuel Delaney say about a book like this, I wondered...

Then I laughed until tea almost came out of my nose.

(Answer: shoe orgy.)

Posted by aloysius at March 15, 2004 08:58 PM | TrackBack |