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American
and British science fiction reflects American and British
culture. At any given moment, if we want to know which particular
group of people is disturbing the rest of society, all we
have to do is take a look at the kind of alien with which
the genre is currently preoccupied.
Science
fiction has always been concerned with exploring the Alien,
the Not Self, the Other. Let me take you on a tour of the
history of that alien, show you the broad trends, and then
come back to what SF considers The Alien today.
The
first aliens of pulp SF were slimy bug-eyed monsters from
the nether regions of the solar system. Nothing like us, supposedly,
except they were always recognizably and rather adolescently
male: they were war leaders, they had no kids hanging around
to spoil the fun, and (if the cover illustrations of the pulps
are to be believed) they often abducted good looking and scantily
clad human women for nefarious purposes.
In
the thirties and forties, during the grim years of the depression
and just before the second world war, the green slime monsters
turned into androids and robots. These metal men (some of
these robots had female names, but we weren't fooled) were
smooth, emotionless and rather, well, Teutonic. Then came
the McCarthy era. In keeping with the paranoia of the time,
aliens became those who looked like us, who pretended to be
us in order to take over the world. Aliens were vegetable
beings grown in pods in the back garden who took the place
of Mom and Dad; or amoeboid extra-terrestrials who rode invisibly
on the backs of their unsuspecting hosts.
And
then came the sixties. During this era of pot and peace we
felt a bit more kindly disposed towards the alien. In John
Wyndham's The Chrysalids, post-holocaust radiation led to
minor mutations such as six toes, or telepathy. Those who
deviated from the norm, even those who looked normal--perhaps
especially those who looked normal--were hunted down and killed.
The interesting thing about The Chrysalids, of course, is
that the story is told from the viewpoint of a mutant. As
far as the reader's sympathies were concerned, there was no
longer that clear dividing line between Us, humanity, and
Them, the monstrous enemy. For the first time, we were being
asked to imagine ourselves as and to identify with The Other.
During the civil rights marches, while our ears rang with
Martin Luther King's dream, science fiction was telling us
that The Other was human, too. The idea of alieness had suddenly
become one of degree.
The
next tentative step down that road was the portrayal of aliens
who were normal humans, biologically speaking, but who were
raised by aliens and therefore not quite Establishment. If
you're raised by weirdos and foreigners, where do your sympathies
lie? A prime example comes from Heinlein: Valentine Smith,
the Stranger in a Strange Land. (In Hollywood, a similar process
was occurring in another genre, Westerns. Take for example
all those films where a pregnant white woman is abducted by
Apache. Mother dies in childbirth. White boychild grows up
behaving and believing in himself as Apache...at least until
the cavalry come along and tell him, hell no, he's a real
man, not a savage.)
So.
By the sixties our aliens had progressed from green slimy
Non-Mankind, to robotic Fake-Mankind, to the muties and pod-people
of Twisted-Mankind. They were now hovering on the fulcrum
between maybe-maybe-not Mankind.
Where
were the women?
In
early SF, female characters served as the scientist's ignorant
girlfriend, or the hero's reward for a job well done. By the
fifties and sixties, women were allowed to be heroic as long
as they did it in their own sphere--courageous mothers defending
their children, or human housewives who set up coffeeklatches
with alien housewives thereby achieving world peace. Most
of these women (not all, of course--remember, I'm discussing
broad trends only) were shining fictional examples of socialization.
But in the 1960s, in the real world, women began to protest
this socialization. We stood up and said: "That's not who
we are!" And so male SF writers, a bit puzzled, but game for
the challenge, turned to an examination of who women might
be.
This
examination manifested itself largely through writings about
women-only societies: the "sex-battle texts," to use Russ's
term. The women in these books were not fully human. We were
portrayed as being bereft of sexual feeling; or we had plenty
of sexual feeling but were frustrated and embittered by having
no men to express those feelings with; we did not understand
Art; we did not understand science and so were invariably
technologically backward. Women-only societies were often
portrayed as static, hierarchical and insect-like (see, for
example, Wyndham's Consider Her Ways). This kind of fiction
operated very much out of traditional cultural assumptions--often
nothing more than a reversal of male/female roles. The female
characters were only alien because they weren't "proper" women.
In
the late sixties and early seventies, women writers took over
the job of talking about the alien. Writers like James Tiptree,
Jr., Joanna Russ, Vonda N. McIntyre, and Suzy McKee Charnas
examined the alienation felt by women in western society.
Starting in the sixties and continuing throughout the seventies
and early eighties, a few writers turned away from the sex-battle
text, the idea of "men" versus "women," and more towards an
examination of the entire notion of gender. The best of these
include the work of Russ, Tiptree, Theodore Sturgeon, Octavia
Butler, and--perhaps the most well-known--Le Guin's The Left
Hand of Darkness. But even the Le Guin book posits a "genderless"
society in which all characters are referred to as "he" unless
they become specifically female for the purposes of sex with
another character, who has become specifically male. It could
be argued that The Left Hand of Darkness is really about men
and gender, and that it is the potential (and, more to the
point, the willingness) to assume "non-male" gender that makes
the characters so alien.
At
this point, a lot of male writers began pumping out dreadful,
reactionary stuff: Edmund Cooper was guilty of this, as was
Heinlein. (There are always exceptions. Among those who at
least tried hard were John Varley and Samuel R. Delany.)
Then,
it seems to me, SF writers looked up, saw the inevitable nature
of the next aliens on the horizon--the aliens of sexuality
as well as gender--and panicked. In the eighties, then, there
was a sudden renewed interest in high-concept SF: hard science,
action-adventure, the re-emergence of famous Golden Age work
(and the attendant phenomenon of "sharecropping"). There was
also, of course, cyberpunk.
Cyberpunk,
at its most cliched and derivative, seems to be merely a revisiting
of film noire ideas and a regression to the Nerd Triumphant
school of literature. In this guise, it is often nothing more
than a hybrid of nihilism (all those grey, raining mean streets
where no one cares and nothing makes a difference) and the
shop-and-fuck novel (brand names, the lust for consumer durables,
descriptions of women's clothes...usually tight, black, spike-heeled
and shiny). At its best, cyberpunk does discuss ideas of alienation,
particularly in the relationship between people and machines,
but generally (Pat Cadigan is a shining exception to this
rule) this occurs within the context of those same old traditional
cultural tropes about men and women.
As
this eighties backlash eased off, sex, sexuality and gender
again became hot topics. Many women writers--mainstream as
well as SF--emerged for the first time, or re-emerged. Writers
like Margaret Atwood and Marge Piercy, Gwyneth Jones and Joan
Slonczewski, Suzette Haden Elgin and Eleanor Arnason were
all writing novels looking at how women have become or remain
Other. Many of their fictional characters were lesbian or
bisexual. Men were reading these books, too, of course, and
then--rather startlingly--began to write them. See, for example,
Geoff Ryman's The Child Garden.
There
is a group of twenty- and thirty-something straight white
boys--particularly in England, I'm not sure why--who have
started writing novels and short stories with lesbian or bisexual
women protagonists: I can think of Simon Ings, Colin Greenland
and Eric Brown off the top of my head, but I'm sure there
are many more. And now, in the nineties, American men seem
to have got in on the act: Allen Steele's latest novel has
a dyke protagonist; one of Mark Tiedemann's short stories,
"Rust Castles," mentions two lesbians. In fantasy, too, men
are happily writing about women who love women: Charles de
Lint's Memories and Dream is one example, Cole and Bunch's
The Warrior's Tale is another. There are many more, in both
genres.
So.
Why are straight men writing about dykes? I think some are
doing what Wyndham did with The Chrysalids: genuinely trying
to explore the alien, trying hard to understand--and to make
understood--women who love women in a male-centered world.
It's difficult not to applaud these attempts, even when the
authors make the occasional appalling blunder about the nature
of Lesbian Woman. But some, whom I do not applaud, are simply
exploiting what they perceive of as being the political climate.
Today's young male writers think of themselves as hip, cool,
feminist kind of guys. They know that it's not cool to have
Big John the manly man save the world all on his own and,
along the way, pilot anything that flies, drink anything that
pours and hump anything in a skirt. They change Big John to
Big Joan. But that's all they change: we end up with a Dyke
Heroine who saves the world and, along the way, pilots anything
that flies, drinks anything that pours, and humps anything
in a skirt.... This, the writers tell themselves (and everyone
else), is not an adventure skiffy yarn but cutting-edge, slipstream
SF. "Look," they say, "we're exploring all these, like, alienated
groups: women and (ooh, kinky shudder) lesbians."
Men,
of course, are not the only culprits. Women who lack imagination
are making the same mistakes of cliche with their gay male
characters. For some reason, this seems to be happening more
in fantasy than science fiction. Before anyone leaps to any
conclusions, I am not saying that men should not write about
women or vice versa, or that straights should not write about
gays. I just want people to avoid cliches, to think a little
before they commit their well-intentioned atrocities to paper.
And
most of the writers in our genre are well-intentioned. There
are others who are not.
1994
marked the publication of a nasty little book entitled Colorado
1998. It was written by a man called Mark Olsen, the communications
director for Colorado for Family Values--those nice people
who tried to enshrine into law discrimination against lesbians
and gay men. This book purports to describe how America would
really look if queers ruled the world. (I have to admit that
I find it mildly embarrassing that it took a small-minded
fundamentalist to get around to imagining in print what the
world would be like if dykes and gay men were in charge. Why
haven't any of us imagined this? I really hope someone reading
this will go off and write a queers-rule-the-universe story.
I'd love to read it.)
Colorado
1998, with its bestial portrayal of lesbians (we grunt all
the time, walk strangely, like badgers, and have terrible
table manners), is a classic role-reversal tale where the
writer gives away his prejudices. In attempting to show how
awful lesbians are, Olsen simply holds up a mirror to the
kind of persecution and hatred happening today against queers.
There is no essential difference between this book and the
sex-battle texts of the fifties, sixties and seventies. Like
most tourists in the genre (P.D. James is another), Olsen
is about thirty years behind the rest of us.
1994
saw the emergence of something called Lesbian Chic. (Cindy
and k.d. making out on the cover of Vanity Fair, etc. etc.)
Not coincidentally, last year there was also a resurgence
of women writing about women. Melissa Scott, in Trouble and
Her Friends, is explicit about the alieness of being queer,
and female, in the future. Carrie Richerson's short fiction
is chilling, and exciting, and different: her women are not
only dykes, but they're dead, too--a double whammy. Suzy McKee
Charnas's The Furies takes a brave and unflinching look at
how women and men can be utterly alien to each other; at the
difference in their violence; and at the ways in which women
and men might try (or not, as the case may be) find common
ground.
We
know that these issues--sex, sexuality, gender--are here to
stay in SF because there is a prize, the Tiptree. We know
the award is here to stay because not only has the SF community
rallied magnificently to fund the award, but the award has
sparked controversy--mainly from those who did not win, and
were a bit disgruntled about it. Any number of writers, from
old SF hands like David Brin to recent tourists such as the
aforementioned P.D. James, have postulated futures in which
women are the dominant sex. While such fiction may be role-reversing,
it is not necessarily role-expanding.
So.
Here we are in the mid-nineties. SF writers have this vast
history of the examination of the alien on which to draw:
slimy bug-eyed monsters, robots, muties and pod people, women,
lesbians and gays. 1996 is an election year. I think the rights
of lesbians and gay men will be one of the most intensely
fought over and intently watched battlegrounds. As the war
hots up, I suspect that much, much more SF with queer protagonists
will roll off the presses. But lesbians and gay men are not
the only political hot potato. Look at what's happening in
California and Florida--the growing the fear and resentment
of immigrants. I think we might soon see some science fiction
about immigrating aliens and how they upset the fabric of
society by coming to our world and using up our resources
and why don't they just go back to where they came from? Another
hot spot is affirmative action--discussions about whether
or not to take away set-asides and other help for racial minorities
and those with disabilities. I wouldn't be surprised to see
the new aliens of SF being sick and disabled, and demanding
that humanity pay attention to them and treat them with dignity
and respect.
Whatever
happens, I'm certain that as science fiction matures it will
continue to play more with the Us end of the Us-Them spectrum.
It will continue to examine the alien, and to make the alien
understood. Or it will continue to try.
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