Finished it a couple of weeks ago. Liked it over all, especially after filtering out the more offensive values of the author (women are great as sex toys, especially intelligent, determined ones being the one that gets the most air time.)
But, as I’ve commented a few times, there was a passage (or two) in it such that when I first ran across I put the book down and didn’t look at it again for years. Basically, they’re condescending, “oh those poor muddled faggots, aren’t they pitiful” parentheticals. Two of em to be precise. (I know, the feminists _should_ be saying ‘cry me a river’ here, and the feminist inside me is. But it still bit.)
Reproduced for those who claimed they were not there, here you go, bold-ing my own:
The third morning after the system was installed, Jill brought a letter, category “G” to Jubal. [Category ‘G’ being “Propositions of marriage and propositions less formal”] The ladies and other females (plus misguided males) who supplied this category usually included pictures alleged to be of themselves; some left little to the imagination.
It’s harmless enough. A parenthetical reference that gave me long pause when first I read it in my early teens. But it’s unnecessary. It’s thrown in there for no other purpose than to say a) I admit this exists and b) I condemn it. Probably counted as cosmopolitan for the time.
She discussed it with Mike–but Mike could not understand why Jill had ever minded being looked at. He understood not wishing to be touched; Mike avoided shaking hands, he wanted to be touched only by water brothers. (Jill wasn’t sure how far this went; she had explained homosexuality, after Mike had read about it and failed to grok–and had given him rules for avoiding passes; she knew that Mike, pretty as he was, would attract such. He had followed her advice and made his face more masculine, instead of the androgynous beauty he had had. But Jill was not sure he would refuse a pass, say, from Duke–fortunately, Mike’s water brothers were decidedly masculine, just as his others were very female women. Jill suspected that Mike would grok a “wrongness” in the poor inbetweeners anyhow. They would never be offered water.)
Ignoring the fact that the parenthetical is larger than the rest of the paragraph… I’m pretty sure this is where I just stopped reading my first time through. The stereotyping grated on me from the get go. Throw on top of it the “wrongness” and “inbetweeners”, and I was thoroughly distressed by reading this passage. And it still grates.
A few years before I read stranger in a strange land for the first time, I read lord foul’s bane. I asked my older sister what she thought of the latter, and she was resoundingly not interested in the book. Very early on there is a rape scene in it. Knowing as little as I did about sex at the time, all I got out of the scene was that the main character was on a power trip, and did something violent the innocent young female character which gave him great satisfaction, oh, and that there was blood involved. I didn’t really even get the concept of rape, and wondered why my sister had let this stop her from reading a book that was otherwise interesting. Dark, depressing, repetitive, but somehow, to me, at the time, interesting. Never really connected that with my own reaction to SiaSL until now. Hmmm.
As I said, I write this in part because I have had two people, both of whom I admire greatly, inform me that stranger in a strange land was totally gay neutral (one actually said it was gay positive). These are the only moments when anything explicitly homosexual is discussed. (There is a later scene where one man is suddenly divested of clothing in the presence of another nude male, but I choose to interpret that scene in light of the parentheticals, and see nothing supportive of homosexuality in it)
They are, however, two parentheticals out of an entire book (and a rather lengthy one at that), so it’s trivial compared to the offense against the independent female population. And the book has literary significance.
The themes, plot structure, and some of the ideas are seminal and classic. It’s not hard to connect this book to so many other pieces of sci-fi and fantasy, the matrix, piers anthony, the xenogenesis series, and ET, just to name a few. It tells an engaging story, and has likeable characters, all 4 of them (Heinlein’s self-idealization, Heinlein’s idealization of youth, Heinlein’s idealization of woman, and Heinlein’s idea of everyone else).
Stranger and Stranger…
I’ve been meaning to read Stranger… for years. I’d heard it was anti-female, but hadn’t heard about the anti-homo bias. The only other Heinlein I’ve read was Job, which I enjoyed very much.
Have you read “The World Well Lost” by Theodore Sturgeon?
Re: Stranger and Stranger…
I have not. Do you recommend it?
Re: Stranger and Stranger…
Yes, I do. “The World Well Lost” was the first published sci-fi story that featured a homosexual character in a major role (to say any more about it would give stuff away). I actually recommend all of Sturgeon’s books, but “The World Well Lost” is brilliant.
It may be hard to find- it’s in Sturgeon’s book “E Pluribus Unicorn”, and I also have it in an anthology of Gay fiction. Sturgeon’s been undergoing a bit of a revival in the past couple years, so it may be easier to find than I expect.
I tried reading “Lord Foul’s Bane” many years ago. Stopped just after the rape scene, as well. Couldn’t understand why people thought it was such a good series. I have a hard time reading books or watching movies when I dislike the characters, and I really didn’t like the main character of that book.
Read Stranger in a Strange Land too. Don’t think I disliked it, but I have a hard time remembering too much about it. It didn’t leave too much of an impact on me.
Thomas covenant is very easy to dislike. The emotion that dominates his life is self-pity. Yet he perseveres and does good stuff. It’s not hard for me to understand what about it appealed to me at that point in time, but I recognize that he won’t be winning any popularity contests any time soon. At many points, the series was like watching a train wreck. But there are parts of it that I would say were worthwhile. Perhaps not worth reading 8 long books, but I had an excess of spare time as a child. =)
hrmp. i read most of H’s juvie fiction when it was age-appropriate, and remember it being fine. i still haven’t gotten around to reading any of his adult fiction, although i should. partly it’s because people warned me about the things you discuss above, and partly because i think i’m letting my Asimov aversion spill over onto a writer i see as somehow associated.
have you read this?? or this? (hrmp. the reviewers get McHugh, but are off on Arnason…)
ps. have you ever read any Varley? it’d be fun to talk about his issues with gender and orientation…
Never read any Varley. I like asimov, despite his incredibly shallow and poorly differentiated characters. He has very, very neat ideas. If he had very, very neat characters too, his novels would be masterpieces. As it is, for me, they’re like interesting thought experiments with persons A, B, and C. =)
Never read any of the above. I really ought to compile a reading list (I wonder if I could even stick to it…. =).
i’m all for the list idea, but i’m a big hypocrite since mine is about a mile long and i’m making no progress on it.
China Mountain Zhang and Ring of Swords are both excellent books, singled out for their treatment of homosexuality, although it’s much more central to RoS than CMZ. i like the more recent spate of female SF authors better than anything else (i grew up reading lots of Tiptree; go figure).
i’ll agree with you on Asimov; the plot-summaries will draw me in, but the characters put me to sleep by page three. Varley is also very much an idea-man, but can write decent characters (though his leads tend to blur into one another). i can never quite decide if his strong female characters are just that, or also a bit of objectification and fantasy. he has also done a lot of gender-switching (it’s a major component of his “8 Worlds” work) which is interestingly realised, but squeamish about homosexuality (especially male homosexuality).
See, I find it very difficult to determine a lot of Heinlein’s own politics or beliefs from his work. Some things are very consistent — the sexy-smart-fertile-uberfemale was clearly a turn-on for him in some way, because she’s everywhere. (Unlike many women, I don’t actually end up having a problem with this. I like Friday and Wyoh and Maureen; to a lesser extent, I like Gillian and some of the others. They prefigure, for me, characters like Cordelia Naismith. Yes, they’re filtered through Heinlein’s biases, but I find it hard to fault him for writing women as though they had brains and gonads, and not just innards full of hysteria.
Now, the homosexuality thing — in Stranger, I find it hard to say how much of it is Heinlein, and how much is the culture he’s set up to work with. Especially since both parentheticals are in sections that are Jill’s POV–it could be her, rather than anything else.
In the originally-published version, not the uncut, Ben gets smacked around by Jubal for freaking out when Mike made what looks like a “have a three-way with me and Jill!” move.
(This takes place after Mike has made Ben fairly uncomfortable by sitting next to him, putting an arm around his waist, and cuddling him close.)
Jill got up suddenly and sat down on Ben’s other side, put her arms around him. “Ben, kiss me and stop worrying.”
She did not wait but kissed him. Ben did stop worrying, was lulled into a sensuous glow that left no room for misgivings. Then Mike tightened the arm he still had around Ben’s waist and said softly, “We grok closer. Now, Jill?”
“Now! Right here, at once–oh, Share Water, my darlings!”
Ben turned his head–and was snatched out of euphoria by utter surprise. Somehow, the Man from Mars had rid himself of every stitch of clothing.
La la la, scene change. During the next scene, it becomes clear that Ben was freaked out more by Mike’s mysterious clothing-vanishing ability than by anything else, but he has “no stomach” for “group orgies”, at which point Jubal smacks him about for being a disrespectful rude fellow. Then they have a whole argument about the ethics of sex (and whether men kissing men is necessarily “a pansy gesture”).
I’m inclined to think that at the time Heinlein wrote the book, he mostly didn’t care about homosexuality; it was definitely on his radar, but Stranger is markedly (for its time) non-negative. A bit pitying, which stands out now because the culture has changed so much.
His later work is even less negative, actually. There’s a bit in Time Enough for Love where one guard propositions another for “Seven Hours of Pleasure”. The guards are in uniforms which disguise their gender, and they hold a brief conversation that goes something like this:
“What gender are you?”
“Does it matter?”
“No, I guess not.”
They turn out to be male and female, but they’re clearly from a culture where it doesn’t matter so much to them what the physical sex of their partner is. So the question arises: Did Heinlein change his mind? Did he never really care to begin with? Is it him in Stranger, or Jill?
It’s really hard to know what he was thinking.
One of the things he wrote in the last decade before his death was the preface to Ted Sturgeon’s last book, Godbody. Godbody contains a Christ-figure having sex with both men and women.
Heinlein called it “pornography”. He also called it “reverent”.
heinlein & homos
So, I think I kept the commentary mostly to the writing and not the author. It’s a valid point, and my sardonic comment, “This was probably considered cosmopolitan for the time”, is well worthy of consideration without sardonicism.
I will point out that the first offhand “misguided males” comment is immediately adjacent to stuff written in Jill’s voice, but is embedded within expository text. That’s why I took it as authorial voice, but I could see it being at least heavily guided by Jill’s perspective.
What’s cool about heinlein’s (good guy) women is that they are smart and capable. Sexy too, but that’s not a big one for me. The problem with them is that they’re subordinate to guys. The only time you see any of them really interacting with non-good-guy males is with Gillian, before Gillian meets Jubal. At all other times, the women step aside and let the men handle things. When they good guys are all alone, the gals will tease, but the biggest threat that is ever made is mass resignation (over a threat of docked pay for Dorcas for freaking out, at a time when it was not unreasonable to freak out). That and the deliberate interchangeability of the female characters, which reaches its highlighted apotheosis in the similarity between Jill and Dawn. So, better than Asimov and Tolkien, nowhere near as good as Butler, George RR Martin, or Gaiman. (all big surprises, I’m sure. Also worthy of note is that the progression of authors I listed corresponds to the progression of their birthdates, at least as far as the three lumps go, if I’m not mistaken)
Re: heinlein & homos
True, you did confine the comments mostly to the writing. I think I partially had a knee-jerk reaction because Heinlein often gets accused of homophobia on the basis of things like Stranger, which makes no sense to me.
I said “Jill’s POV”, not “Jill’s voice”; there is a technical difference, and Heinlein tends to use fairly tight POV.
As for the women: Yes. That’s pretty much what bugs me about them, but as a much younger reader, I didn’t notice that. I noticed that Heinlein’s women had brains and were still attractive and desirable–not only that, but that they were attractive in large part because they had brains.
And yes–Butler’s Lilith Iyapo, or Lauren Olamina, or any number of others are fabulous female characters, informed and influenced by so many things that have happened in feminism and civil rights and sf.
And Bujold’s Cordelia Naismith would have given Heinlein wet dreams, except for her lack of submission. 😀
Gaiman’s women, except for Hunter and Door, I’ve never noticed much, and I don’t read George R.R. Martin.
Asimov–I can’t stand any of his women, except for Marlene (Nemesis). Susan Calvin was smart, yes–but that’s all she was. Smart and ugly and desperate. “Liar” pretty much made that clear, which is one of the reasons I’ve avoided re-reading it for about 10 years. And Jessie and whats-her-face (Gladia?) from the Baley novels were cardboard at best.
Cherryh…you know, I don’t think I’ve read much Cherryh with human women in it. Her alien women are great, though.
Re: heinlein & homos
I said “Jill’s POV”, not “Jill’s voice”; there is a technical difference, and Heinlein tends to use fairly tight POV.
Point taken =)
Gaiman’s women, except for Hunter and Door, I’ve never noticed much
And I’ve caught neither of those references. I’ve read all of the sandman and death series. Then there’s Stardust and Smoke and Mirrors. He has a gift for portraying all his characters as memorably unique, while drawing several from the same archetype. For instance, from the witch category, we have Mad Hettie (middle ages to modern day english witch from sandman/books of magic/death) is meaningfully distinguishable from the Lilim (ancient, powerful witch, in Faerie from stardust), though arguably not as much from Dishwater Sal (modest Witch and glass-flower saleswoman in Faerie from Stardust).
And they are all terribly human, with wants, ambitions, strengths and weaknesses. But, then
again, I think gaiman rules, so you’ll have that. =)
Cherryh…you know, I don’t think I’ve read much Cherryh with human women in it. Her alien women are great, though.
I’ve read some of her stuff. Including
A Dirge for Sabis
which I have on my shelf. She had some female characters in positions of power and responsibility. They were as rational and thoughtful as the males, which is to say they varied greatly. I can’t remember the depth and quality of characterization, but I don’t remember her stuff being nearly as character oriented, so maybe that’s why nothing is really sprining to mind =)
Re: heinlein & homos
Hunter and Door are both from Neverwhere. Door isn’t even really human, come down to it, although Hunter is.
Mad Hettie’s really not, either–I guess I have a thing where even if the characters are female and kinda-human, I don’t see them as women unless they actually are women. Door’s sorta-kinda an exception, but she’s definitely mortal, and Neverwhere revolves around the murder of her family. So she’s…powerful, and not quite human, but more human than most of the characters in the Sandman-verse or in Stardust.
Re: heinlein & homos
Gladia was in three of Asimov’s books, Naked Sun, Robots of Dawn, and Robots and Empire.
She starts out as a pretty vapid trophy wife who doesn’t have much depth, I agree. In the second book, she starts to take the initiative more but is still kind of one sided. But, by the last book, she emerges as a strong character who overcomes her inbred shyness to speak for humanity. She turns into a pretty fascinating character, I believe.
I can’t say I disagree with you about his early stuff. Women were not a big part of his writing. But, I think his later stuff does a better job, i.e. Nemesis.
On a totally different note–for sheer classic-sf homophobia, you gotta go with Dune. The bad guy is a homosexual who also happens to be a pedophile; he spends a lot of time raping slave boys and lusting after his nephew and Paul Atreides.
All the good guys are not only straight, they’re also parents, and being parents is a major motivator for them.
Touche
And I read that one straight through, no problem. Granted, it was also about a decade later, so I probably had a thicker skin about the whole thing. But there, it could be simply ‘coincidence’ in that the bad characters happen to be homo’s or viceversa. There’s no ‘expositional’ “Cocksucking is bad” nonsense.
An interesting one to try to figure out as a puzzle is Dave Duncan. I’ve read damn near every book the man has written, (on the order of 20ish, I think). In one trilogy, and a novel in a different universe, the closest male friend of the staunchly heterosexual male protagonist swings both ways. And it’s not difficult to argue that the central emotional theme of almost all his books is platonic love between friends, particularly in the trenches.
In the trilogy, the bi boy repents, though its never clear whether of his sexuality or his prior career as kept boy, but in the end he has devoted himself totally, though platonicly to the protagonist. Throughout the series, in WWII era England, and in the alternate universe, a generalized homo-contempt is taken as a given, expressed expositionally in the treatment of biboy, and by a brief bit of text about the “love that dare not speak its name” in the initial murder-investigation bit in the first book.
In the standalone book, there is no repentence whatsoever (also one of his earliest novels). There is some mouthing about the individual in question having grown up in ancient Greece, but it’s generally a non-issue.
<shrug> What I want is a full length novel, with a gay couple, where it’s not the central issue. Also, a love story about love instead of inches would be nice =)