Geek Girls Rule! #131 – When the Misogyny Gets Me

Hopefully there won’t be too many typos, tonight is my first experiment in blogging (here anyway) while drinking.  I decided my first several days of actually accomplishing things at work deserved a reward, and for that reward I chose a bottle of my new (and only) favorite wine, Cetamura Chianti.  I’m not a wine drinker normally, but this stuff is niiiiccccccce…

Anyway, the reason I decided to post about this, not the wine but when I can’t ignore the misogyny, is because I love classic SF.  I really do.  I like Asimov, Heinlein, Wellman, Lovecraft and many others.  The one thing all of these authors have in common is kind of a lot of misogyny, Asimov far less than the others, but still women tend not to factor much in his stories.  The theorizing about Lovecraft’s tentacular, vaginal nightmare creations is legendary, and Heinlein may as well have his own chapter in the Big Book o’Freud.  Wellman, well, he’s pretty straightforward, too, his character  John Thunstone is downright dismissive of the abilities of women in general, and thwarts several female villains who get in over their heads, “just like a woman.”  So, I’m no stranger to over-looking misogyny-o-rama while reading for pleasure, but I have to tell you: Murray  Leinster is sorely trying my patience.

I honestly don’t know if I can finish this book.

I picked up the e-book anthology of his called A Logic Named Joe* which is a short story I had read in several different anthologies.  Eric Flint put this anthology together for Baen, so I went in prepared to L-O-V-E it.  I really enjoyed A Plague of Demons*, the anthology of Keith Laumer’s stuff Flint also edited.  But god damn it, if two stories in to the Leinster anthology I didn’t start to doubt my commitment to Sparkle-Motion.

You know, it would be ok if he just didn’t HAVE women in the stories, like many of his contemporaries.  I could cope with that.  I mean, Wellman rarely inserts them in the Thunstone or John the Balladeer stories, and when he does it is problematic, but survivable.  But there is something about the way Leinster describes women in general, and his named female characters in specific, that just chaps my hide.  Maybe it’s the constant references to gold-digging (“marriage is a girl’s career”), or the fact that all of his ideal heroines are, if not outright stupid, barely literate and often so naive it’s unbelievable.  In one story, the hero has to go to a nigh-feudal abondoned colony to find a girl who isn’t, ahem, economically motivated, and who (rightfully) worships the hero’s burning intellect and sense of derring do.

I’m sorry, I can’t even type that with a straight face, and I’m sure the wine’s not helping.

I’m used to unfavorable depictions of women in SF/F media.  Half the time, believe it or not, I don’t even notice them.  I happily read Wellman, Lovecraft, and countless others who avoid, discount, or actively despise women.  But something about Leinster just pisses me off.  And I’m not sure exactly what it is.  Maybe it’s the insistence that women are “gold-diggers.”  Maybe it’s the fact that many of his heroes seem to get led/put in the path of trouble by a woman, or at the very least, a woman is somehow the root cause.

“Some people claim that there’s a woman to blame
But I know it’s my own damn fault.”

Thank you, Mr. Jimmy Buffet (from Wasted Away in Margaritaville)

If a middle-aged stoner songwriter can figure this out, why the hell can’t middle-aged male SF/F writers?  Or rather couldn’t.  And yes, I know, man of his times and all that, but it just seems so much worse in his stuff than in the others.  And I’m not entirely sure why?  Maybe because the ideas of “Logics” in A Logic Named Joe (1946) is so like the idea of home computers and the internet, that it’s hard for me to place him where he really belongs in the spectrum of SF/F.  But I don’t think so.

I’ll keep thinking on it, and maybe in a couple of days I’ll be able to keep reading his incredibly ham-handed takedown of Communism, and read how he either saves feudalism or brings them into the womb-like embrace of capitalism.

*it’s available in the Baen Free Library

Geek Girls Rule! #112.9 – Golden Dreams by Ardath Mayhar

I really don’t have a whole lot to say about Golden Dreams.  I enjoy it.  It makes me tear up in the right places, and laugh out loud where it should.  Ardath Mayhar captures the essence of Fuzzies very well, although there are a few inconsistencies.   For one, she has all Fuzzies aware of the story of rescue coming from the stars.  In Piper’s books no Fuzzies mention this, and in Tuning’s he has Little Fuzzy and the other southern Fuzzies completely ignorant of the idea.  Stargazer is the one who shares that story with the Hagga (big ones) in the Tuning book.  She also has the names of the guys who capture the bunch of Fuzzies who become Ruth Ortheris’s Fuzzy family wrong, but that just feels like me nitpicking.

Honestly, while not as gripping as the original Piper books, it is well written and a lot of fun.  She emphasizes the lack of gender divided tasks among Fuzzies, and the importance of fun to Fuzzies as a whole.  She begins her story a generation past when a landslide cut the Fuzzies off from the technology and tools they’d salvaged from their downed ship, and follows the deterioration of their culture as they are forced to spend more and more time hunting and gathering, as well as trying to survive on a planet with many large predators who think Fuzzies, or Gashta, taste great.  I think she successfully conveys the gradual loss of knowledge as the stories are passed on orally, although if the original Fuzzies had a system of writing, as they must have being an interstellar travelling race, I am a little dubious that would have disappeared entirely by the time she says it does.

But again, the bulk of my criticisms sound like nitpicking.  I find this book superior to Fuzzy Bones in most ways, lacking only a focus on the current Upland Fuzzies.   Hearing the coming of the Marines and the ensuing archeaological dig described from the point of view of the Fuzzies would have made me happier.

Apart from the story of the ship and stars being credited to more than just Stargazer, there’s really nothing in this book to contradict either the 3rd Piper book, nor Tuning’s book.  In the second and third Piper book they are aware of the group of Fuzzies up north who haven’t migrated, but he doesn’t explore them.  Having read all of the books in rapid succession this last week, if you want no sizeable or jarring contradictions, read the three Piper books and this one.  If you don’t care, or are a completeness nut, then pick up Tuning’s as well.

Geek Girls Rule! #112.75 – Fuzzy Bones by William Tuning

I just finished Fuzzy Bones, and started Golden Dreams, so you’ll get my analysis of that one, too, as soon as I finish it.

Ace contracted William Tuning to write Fuzzy Bones to either coincide with, or ride the success of, the re-release of the first two Piper books.   I find it sort of  odd that the book written in the 80s is FAR more sexist than the books written in the 60s.  All of the established female characters are there, since Tuning wrote it  as a continuation of the storyline begun in Fuzzy Sapiens.  But Tuning diminishes their importance and involvement as professionals, and emphasizes their domestic roles, choosing to play up stereotyped and cliched male/female interaction.   It’s kind of painfully like watching an episode of Donna Reed.

That said, I do like this book, just not as much as the Piper or Mayhar books.  It’s much longer, the villains are stock, cliched and two-dimensional.  And his depiction of Little Fuzzy is way off the mark.  That said, I love his  Upland Fuzzies, especially Stargazer.  “What make do, Cobra Eyes?” is still my favorite quote.  Sorry, but if you want context you’ll have to read the book. Which is not quite as painful as I make it sound.  Just skim over the Victor Grego/Christianna Stone storyline parts, and the Hugo Ingerman parts, and focus on the mystery of the Upland Fuzzies and you’ll be fine.

I think Tuning felt that “more is better” in the drama/antagonist department, as there are several plotlines occurring concurrently.  The Victor Grego falling in love with Christianna Stone who had gone to Zarathustra to be a prostitute and failed, and her trying to hide that from him, making her blackmailable by the villains.  The crooked attorney Hugo Ingerman and his crazed (completely out of character as established in Fuzzy Sapiens) hunger for sunstones and attempts to rile up the populace while the priest, Rev, tries to hold things together.  And the discovery of the Upland Fuzzies and their secret.  Honestly, he really should have just picked one plot, preferably the Upland Fuzzies, and stuck with it.

I read it out of a sense of completeness, but like I said above, if you skim the Ingerman and Victor/Christianna stuff, the Upland Fuzzy storyline is excellent.  Although the fact that he felt the need to provide Jack Holloway a love interest at the end of the book as a happy ending tack-on is more than a little annoying, and again, sexist as this Sociologist (female character, so of course a “soft science”) who came out to study Fuzzy society suddenly decides to drop everything to take care of him after he’s shot in one of the climaxes of the book.  Barf.

My friend Chris and I discussed the parts of this book I found problematic tonight, and he said that he wasn’t at all surprised that Tuning’s book was the more sexist of the two.  For starters, Piper imagined a world where we would have moved away from the sexism of his era, and Tuning probably decided that he’d have to play up the sexism to realistically mimic the writing of someone from the late 50s early 60s.  Citing more recent works in the Conan world, he explained that when more recent authors try to write in the style of an author from an earlier period, they often wind up creating more of a charicature than a true reproduction because they try too hard.  Also, the 80s really weren’t all that less sexist and horrible than the 60s.  They were sexist in a  different way with the backlash against Feminism really coming into it’s own with the election of Ronald Reagan and his criminal gang, to paraphrase George Carlin.

So, yeah, there it is.  Not a bad read, a little bloated by the extraneous plotlines, more sexist.  I really would have liked him to have focused more on the Upland Fuzzies and their “mystery” as well as the legal repercussions, but I don’t know that he could have convincingly pulled off the legal stuff.  But the Upland Fuzzy stuff is great.

Geek Girls Rule! #112 – Forgotten Fiction 1 – H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy

Ok, I don’t know how forgotten the Little Fuzzy (Little Fuzzy, Fuzzy Sapiens, Fuzzies and Other People) books actually are.  But I’m one of the few people I know who has read them.  H. Beam Piper wrote them in the early 60s shortly before committing suicide.  The first two books, Little Fuzzy and Fuzzy Sapiens saw the light of day during the 1960s, and were republished in the early 1980s by Ace.  At that time, Ace contracted two additional Fuzzy books to finish the story arc begun in the first two books:  Fuzzy Bones by William Tuning and Golden Dreams: A Fuzzy odyssey by Ardath Mayhar.   In 1984, the partially completed Fuzzies and Other People emerged, contradicting some of the events in both of the new books contracted by Ace, but I don’t feel it makes either of the new books any less enjoyable.  Fuzzies and Other People definitely feels less finished, less polished, than the other two, and it is possible to see where Piper may have intended to go back and fill in dialog or make smoother transitions.

When one takes into consideration the time period in which Piper wrote and lived, the Fuzzy books are surprisingly not hideously sexist.  Women have jobs and professions, many of them are scientists or doctors.  Ok, so all the male characters, and the women themselves, refer to collective groups of women as girls, and most of the female doctors and scientists are in fact involved in either the soft sciences, like psychology, or pediatrics.  However, there is at least one female chemist.

I also realize that the attitudes toward and descriptions of Fuzzy mental capacity and the Fuzzies themselves will probably set off several racism buttons in people, but again, remember the time period in which these were written.  The fact that Piper has a character threaten a hotel with a discrimination suit if it kicks out the Fuzzies staying there for a trial when the majority of hotels in America at the time were still legally segregated was pretty damn progressive.

Character drives the stories, with the technology being mostly background noise.  They have air (hover) cars, video phones (no way, not first thing in the morning anyway), anti-gravity lifters, stenomemophones which transcribe from the spoken word*, but mostly the technology stays safely out of the way of the story.  Just the way I like it.   But it’s also notable for what’s lacking.  No cell phones, no mp3 player type things, and film is still film even if the images can be electronically transferred in the blink of an eye to the other side of the planet (with a noise, one imagines, very like the high speed dub on old reel to reel tape recorders).

Piper does not linger over his descriptions of violence, and I feel fairly comfortable allowing younger readers access to the Fuzzy books.  I can see much in these books to use as teachable moments for younger readers about the way things were.  The problematic symptoms of the time period in which they were written could be awesome discussion points for the parent wanting to explore themes of sexism, racism or paternalism.

I, however, prefer to take them as they are.  I read them for fun, not for education, and my musings about the charming anachronisms within are more the product of an undergrad Comparative Lit course than any serious effort on my part.  The fact that EVERYONE in the books smokes and cocktail hour is de rigeur even in the bush, cracks me up.  I enjoy them because the characters are relatable, the Fuzzies are awesome (I dare you to come away from these books not thinking having a Fuzzy around would be a blast), and the world is believable, with genetic anomalies and everything.  If you can, pick these up for a quick, light, fun read.  There are a few tearjerker moments, and some kind of scary ones, but the endings are always happy and the bad guys all get punished.

While Piper’s Fuzzy books are currently in print, you’ll want to scan used bookstores for both Tuning’s and Mayhar’s.  Neither are currently in print.

*If only voice recognition software were that good yet.

Geek Girls Rule – Flash Update

I’ve been blogging over at the California Chapter of NOW’s blog for a while, which explains some of the slowdown over here.  And today I did something for them that is equally germane to this blog, but I’m not going to repost it in its entirety, so go there and read it.  

Essentially, enough people sent me the link to Limpdick McDouchepants… I mean, “Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Tech”‘s screed about how girls are getting estrogen all over his SF/F, and gay men are getting their gay-ey gayness… or whatever, all over his SF/F and he’s had enough! 

I think we can all picture Captain Sadpants McDateless, at least his demeanor if not his looks.  He’s the kind of guy who’ll spend half an hour telling a girl why she can’t possibly understand SF/F like him and his giant, genius man-brain, and how all women are gold diggers and whores, then ask her out and wonder why she doesn’t leap at the chance.  I’ve met him, you’ve met him, we all wish we hadn’t. 

Thankfully, these jerks are a minority in SF/F and gaming circles.

Geek Girls Rule! – Podcast #13 Verb Noire and Race Fail 09

Lucky 13!  Finally got the damn thing up, edited and posted.  Boy, it has lived up to it’s number, too.  Editing issues, had to attempt the upload three times because our internet’s been all wonky.  But it’s here.

Podcast #13

Mikki Kendall and I talk about Race Fail 09 and how it inspired her and Jamie Nesbitt Golden to start up Verb Noire.  It gets a bit quiet in places, so you’ll want headphones for this.  I need better tech.

Also, just so you know, the glitch they talk about in reference to the Verb Noire store is fixed, and their first book River’s Daughter by Tasha Campbell is ready for sale!

Addendum:  I’ve not read the Sookie Stackhouse books, so I am going off of what other people have told me about the way the characters of Tara and Lafayette were depicted therein.  I suppose I should get off my ass and read those, huh?