Gay Hunter by James Leslie Mitchell writing as Louis Grassic Gibbon.

Gay Hunter was published in 1934 and is one of those old books that amazon has, but overpriced, $96 in this case. I found a cheap copy on alibris though it was a version republished in 1989. Copies of the original hardcover ranged from $96 to $1250 on alibris. The prices made me wonder what could possibly be in this book, wondering if it could be about – a gay hunter?

Gay Hunter was a nice read, only taking about a day. It was sweet and most of what happens you want to happen. There’s something nice and indulgent about a book that doesn’t thwart your wishes, making you frustrated and pained by its treatment of characters you like. Gay is very likable. By the way, Gay Hunter, the lead character, is a woman and an archeologist, very free and fit, sort of a mild female version of Indiana Jones.

In the book Gay and a couple of freaky fascists find themselves in a future Britain where advanced civilization has been wiped out by atomic war. I was surprised people knew about the possibility of atomic bombs and that they could wipe out civilization but apparently they did, even in 1934. People in this future have reverted to hunter/gatherer bands. Gay becomes part of one of these bands while the fascists try to set up a society with themselves at the top using their ability to manipulate some of the technology left behind by the lost civilization. The hunters are very much noble savages except more noble and less savage. They all seem very sweet in a kind of “Garden of Eden before the fall” kind of way. It makes them two dimensional.

In addition to atomic bombs the science fiction elements include areas sterilized by radiation, mutated animals, a heat ray, television and voices from the past (Gay’s future). Stableford in Scientific Romance in Britain 1890-1950 calls Gay Hunter “…one of the most impressive post-holocaust stories written between the wars…”-

Gay spends most of the book nude, along with everyone else. Well, everyone except for the freaky fascists, who, like Adam and Eve after the God casts them out of the garden, cover themselves with plant material.

Though I liked it I couldn’t really understand why anyone would think someone else would pay $1250 for even a first edition. But maybe there is something else at work here. It’s a pretty hot book for 1934. Most of the characters spend the book nude. There’s sex, offscreen but without benefit of proper clergy. Gay implies she may, in the future, investigate lesbian sex and polyamory. That is pretty hot for 1934, for an England still in a hangover from the Victorian age. Maybe if someone read Gay Hunter in the 30s when they were young they might have found it very titillating. They might be willing to pay a lot to try to recapture that feeling.

Anyway, I liked it.

© alllie 2009

Distribution: This article is copyrighted by alllie, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, or web media so long as you tell me where and this credit is attached as well as a link back to this page, http://www.alllie.com/alllieblog/.

Tanith Lee – When the Lights Go Out

Tanith Lee has two kinds of books, the ones with lots of plot and little imagery and the ones with lots of imagery and little plot. When The Lights Go Out doesn’t have a lot of plot: Girl runs away, becomes priestess. While some of Lee’s books have just two or three images worth remembering, I left this book full of film flags. It was one of her ice cream books. It went down as easy as ice cream and just as sweet and creamy. Some of her recent books, particularly young adult or book club ones, don’t have the magic of her earlier works but When The Lights Go Out, published in 1996, does. Lee’s imagery is so beautiful, so precise, that I can see the things she describes in my mind. They transport me to the scene. I’ve long claimed that Shakespeare was Christopher Fry in his last life but in this one she’s Tanith Lee.

I think some reviewers, those who prefer the newspaper reporter’s spare prose, have criticized Tanith Lee’s use of the English language. It’s too lush for them. Lee sees the world in all of its colors but for some critics the world is black and white, or no more than 16 shades of gray. They think her descriptions are overdone. So more and more she has deserted the imagery that is her greatest skill, to conform her work to reviewers’ tastes. That is our loss but in When the Lights Go Out, she hasn’t done that. It’s one of her better things. Not her best, but lovely to read.

… the Thames, dirty silver as an ancient spoon…

…waves moved softly in transparent fans.

High up, the seagull called the scream of unvoiced human agony, on her behalf, to the ears of a God too far away to realize she had suffered.

The gull waddled along the sill, and jumped off, as if throwing itself to its doom.

…the knives of sunlight glinting.

Sea grey. Caps of cream like old curtain lace, and filmy greenness extinguishing. Then the cold sky turned a clear hot orange, fading up like smoke into violet. And the sea reflected, a chameleon, lying graciously. The sea was not any such colour, not even when she came in wearing red—

The sail bent like a wing.

…he saw…flame like a dart between their young jewelry eyes, a look.

Christmas stars on the tree of darkness.

Bells ran like knives in icing sugar air intense as vodka.

…under the full white ice of the moon…

The sea below, stilled by freezing. A crochet of ice against the beach…

A spray of water like diamonds.

The sea was loud. It crashed – a thousand goblets shattered – to the stones…

Snow and frost still drew in the shapes of things, the tiles on roofs, the pinkened coils of the stones along the beach.

She wound the serpents of her moon-pale arms about his neck.

The vivid red of the flames and the liquid ribs of the sea reflecting…

…and in their eyes the jewels of the lights.

© alllie 2009

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Tanith Lee quotes property of Tanith Lee.

Why do women buy more fantasy than science fiction?

Well, how is science fiction different from fantasy? In a sense all fiction is fantasy but in literary terms science fiction is set in a world that might be while fantasy is set in a world that never could be. But that’s not the only difference. The real reason that women buy more fantasy is that fantasy is not adverse to emotional content and most science fiction is.

Most, though not all, of early science fiction was written by men, particularly in the first half of the 20th century. Men don’t generally like emotional stories. Most male readers hate the Twilight series and generally don’t like authors like Jane Austen, the Brontes or Margaret Mitchell. Women do. When men were most of the writers, editors, and readers of science fiction, emotional content was left out so it would appeal to the readers most likely to buy it. This continues till this day. I’m not saying it’s a hundred percent. In the last thirty years there have been plenty of science fiction authors who were women, women like Lois McMasters Bujold and Olivia Butler, but I wonder if even their works are read by many men.

The gender bias in science fiction is undeniable. Who can forget the words of Robert Silverberg about Alice Sheldon, who published under the name of James Tiptree to avoid the gender prejudice of the genre.

“It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing. I don’t think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Earnest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male.”

So women turned to the literary ghetto of fantasy, a place where women writers were allowed to publish and women readers were not disdained.

Gender bias exists, not just in what writers get science fiction published, but in the work itself. Many science fiction stories and novels are so sexist that they are likely to repel the woman reader. Women are not just demeaned, they are often nonexistent. Many stories set in the science fiction ghetto are like the Smurfs or pictures of the Middle East, all guys with maybe one chick off to the side. When there is a major female character she’s either just a sex object or she’s like Michelangelo’s sculptures of nude women, a man with boobs stuck on.

As women love the love stories, men love the superhero stories and the hero’s journey. Women often consider the whole “hero’s journey”meme as the purest kind of fantasy. When, at least after the hunter gatherer days, has the physical prowess of one man made a difference in the outcome of anything? David and Goliath? Okay, after that. But men have it in their souls, probably from the hunter gather days, that if they can fight and win and save their group, they can be the hero and get the girl, or girls. Well, those days are gone. A man can’t fight a predator drone. Even in the hunter/gatherer days, when a young male made a “journey” it was generally because he had been thrown out of his natal group or was looking for unoccupied territory where he could establish his own group. I think one of the reasons males, subliminally, want to become a hero is so they will gain enough value that they will be allowed to remain in their natal group or even lead it. Very much a hunter/gatherer thing.

So now fantasy is outselling science fiction ten to one because women are still buying real books in much larger numbers than men and women buy fantasy. I would think the solution to that is to hire women editors and for them to buy science fiction stories and novels written by women, with female characters, and to market them to women. Stephenie Meyer’s science fiction novel, The Host, has sold millions so women will buy science fiction. Despite that many men in science fiction publishing think they are above the woman reader and writer and disregard any manuscript with a woman’s name on it. That’s why Alice Sheldon pretended to be a man, why other women published under names that did not reveal their gender. Women notice the contempt and go write and read fantasy. I read fantasy myself, even though much of it makes me feel a little dirty. I really like science fiction better, like I prefer Star Trek to LOTR, despite the cardboard backdrops. And fantasy won’t change the world, the future, while science fiction has, and more than once.

We need to make a deal. We women won’t roll our eyes at your superhero stories and you won’t roll your eyes at our love stories. We won’t snort derisively at Superman or Spiderman and you won’t sneer at Twilight or Wuthering Heights. Then maybe we could share. Men and women could both write and read science fiction and maybe we could save the genre.

© alllie 2009

Distribution: This article is copyrighted by alllie, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, or web media so long as you tell me where and this credit is attached as well as a link back to this page, http://www.alllie.com/alllieblog/.

When was the Golden Age of Science Fiction? The late 1930s to the 1950s, when science fiction became widely popular and many classic science fiction stories were published. The joke answer is that the Golden age of Science Fiction is 14, the age when many science fiction readers become fans. I know I read my first scifi when I was 13 or 14 so maybe they are right.

Lately scifi fandom, in which I include not just the fans but writers, podcasters and publishers, want to catch the next generation of fans and have been pushing Young Adult Science Fiction, scifi for kids in their teens and maybe early twenties. I’m not immune to this campaign so I’ve been reading some of it myself. First, I got Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies trilogy. It was light but okay. Then I got Twilight, the first of Meyer’s books about a clumsy girl and the vampire who loves her.

My first impression of the book was that it was BIG. It was a thick book. Once I opened it I realized it was big inside. Big font. Big line spacing. It reminded me that what publishers are basically selling is a paper product. The more paper they sell, the thicker the book, the more they can charge. The actual arrangement of ink on the page is usually the cheapest part of their product. Twilight is a big book. It might be classified as Young Adult Speculative Fiction but it was great as Old People Going Blind Fiction as well. As an old person going blind I found the font and the line spacing made it a lot easier for me to read than the tiny fonts in real books. I didn’t have to put on my special adjustable glasses and put it down a lot because my eyes were freaking. BIG FONTS. It was easy to read.

The story is pretty simple. Despite that it pulled me right in. A shy girl moves to a small town to live with her father. She figures out that there are vampires going to her high school. She falls for one of them and he falls for her.

It was a little slow to start. I didn’t really find the girl, Bella, interesting. She seemed rather ordinary. There’s a vagueness to her that reminds me of superhero comic books. They leave the faces of the superheroes sketchy so the reader can imagine themselves in that role. In the same way Bella is vague so the reader can imagine herself as Bella. It’s not even clear if Bella is particularly pretty (except to Edward) but when the vampires appear, going to high school to give themselves a paper trail and a backstory that will allow them to live among humans, there are pages devoted to their beauty. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful vampires. Beautiful and irresistible so their prey cannot resist them. But this family of vampires is vegetarian. They don’t eat people but Bella’s vampire Edward can barely restrain himself from taking her. The descriptions of the teen vampires are very much how girls, how I, viewed many boys when I was that age. They did seem just as beautiful to me as Edward seems to Bella. I used to sit in class and covertly watch them. Edward’s hard flesh was like the hardness of young male flesh as their hormones turned them, almost overnight, into something different, something alien. I hit my teenaged brother a couple of times (he deserved it) and it was like hitting a log. I hurt my hands more than I hurt him. And teenaged boys, beautiful as many are, are often monsters. So the entire metaphor of vampire = teenaged boy = monster = object-of-desire works.

Like Shakespeare has multiple layers and can be read for the plots, for the characterizations, for the sex and violence, for the dirty jokes, for the philosophy, for the language, Twilight, as simple as it is, has several layers. Meyer doesn’t have, say, Tanith Lee’s genius for the English language but the entire Bella/Edward relationship is a metaphor for the relationship between teenaged girls and boys as they fight their instinct to have sex, sex that might destroy them. Maybe it’s not like that today with birth control and abortion but when I grew up the struggle between guys and girls was to not have sex. The girl was supposed to be in charge of that but the better guys shared it, fought against their desire to have sex and maybe ruin the life of the girl who gave in. In the same way Edward fights against giving into this instincts and taking Bella, consuming her. As much as he is driven he fights against his desire. He also fights against her desire to become like him, to become a vampire, to lead her into damnation. He believes that he lost his soul when he was transformed and he doesn’t want to be the weapon that deprives Bella of hers. The whole thing is a metaphor for sex, at least sex in the life of a Mormon housewife, which was what Meyer was 5 years ago.

Meyer has linked various works to each book in the series. Pride and Prejudice to Twilight. Romeo and Juliet to New Moon. Wuthering Heights to Eclipse. A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream to Breaking Dawn. This adds another layer to each of the stories. In Twilight Edward, at first, seems cold and withdrawn, like Mr. Darcy, but that is because, like Mr. Darcy, he is trying to control and conceal his growing desire for an unsuitable girl. I think telling the Romeo and Juliet elements in New Moon would be too spoilery. In Eclipse, there are two guys in love with the same girl, in a relationship very much like Cathy, Heathcliff, and Edgar Linton. And in the final book, Breaking Dawn, first you have two men magically in love with the same girl then two immortal families struggling over a magical child like in A Midsummer’s Night Dream. All of the connections are pretty weak but it adds a nice additional layer to the books and that lets you run the similarities and differences over in your mind.

The Twilight Saga, like Austen’s novels, the Bronte sisters’ works and even Romeo and Juliet, are pretty much girl books, the text version of chick flicks. Meyer is writing about love and romance at its most melodramatic extreme. I don’t know that a male could tolerate them. Well, unless he got off on the idea of being the superhero protecting an accident-prone, trouble-magnet girlfriend from all the dangers of the world or secretly hanging out in her bedroom, watching her as she sleeps. (Edward takes stalking to a whole other level.) Like Austen’s novels, the Twilight novels, especially the first one, have a strong Cinderella element. Most of Austen’s heroines are ordinary girls, usually without much money, who get the best, richest, most good-looking guy in the novel. Like Cinderella they get the prince. Just so Twilight is the story of how Bella, the ordinary girl, gets the superhero vampire.

So there are at least three layers to the Twilight Saga. It makes it all a little better. Gives you something else to read into it no matter how preposterous the story is.

Of course, I loved all four books, though I am kinda disgusted about it. Teenaged love, the vampire and the virgin. God, how ridiculous is that? Yet as soon as I finish one of Meyer’s books I start rereading the parts I like best then reread the whole thing. After six days I’m almost through my third reading of Breaking Dawn. I don’t know why her books ring my bells. They make me feel kinda manipulated but still I find them addictive. A supernormal stimulus? I’m kinda of mollified by the fact that the series has sold over 8 million copies worldwide so I’m not alone. Lots of people find these books addictive.

This summer Meyer also released the scifi book Host which I recommend. It is pretty straight forward scifi about an alien parasite living in the brain of a human and changed by it. The parasite finds herself loving the people that her host loved and driven to be with them. In a sense it’s a rewrite of I Married a Monster From Outer Space but without the sex. No sex before marriage in books by Mormon housewives! I’ve already read it three times too. I try to blame that on the nice big font!

Well, at least it’s over. It will be a while before Meyer can get another book out and until then I can pretend I have better taste than this. Though I’m not embarrassed about liking Host. That one was okay.

© alllie 2008

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I just read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It’s a great book and an emotionally touching one. It really made me cry. What made it more heart-rending was knowing it was real, real in the sense that the things described in the book also happened to real people, millions of real people. That made the book hard to read sometimes.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the story of two Kentucky slave families. Their owner has fallen into debt and is forced to sell two slaves or break up his entire farm and sell all his slaves. He chooses his farm manager, Tom, into whose arms he was put as a baby, and Henry, the handsome young child of his house servant, Eliza. He chooses them because they will bring the most money and satisfy his debt. Eliza, overhearing his plans, takes her child and flees. Tom chooses to stay and sacrifice himself rather than cause any other slaves to be sold. Those slaves would include his wife and children but he also stays because he loves his owner, a love the man does not deserve, and because he sees it as his Christian duty. The novel follows Eliza as she travels North to Canada and freedom and Tom as he is sold South, finally finding his own kind of freedom. It shows us how all, master and slave, are corrupted by this form of labor.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been parodied so often that I thought it would be a silly book, hard to take seriously, but it is a book like Tom Paine’s Common Sense, a book that brought on a revolution and changed the world, a book that showed slavery so clearly that only those with hard hearts or financial interest could continue to accept it.

As I read it I found myself holding my breath as Eliza escaped, crying when Tom and others were wrenched from their families, horrified when young girls were sold to rapists. It is also a very well written adventure story. You get involved with the people and knowing that these things really happened to real people, that Stowe isn’t exaggerating, made it something else, made it news, made it history.

When the escaping slave George declares that he will kill or die for his freedom you admire him. When he shoots a slave catcher to save his wife and child, you applaud. When Tom is taken from his family and then later sold to a cruel master who works his slaves to death and Tom still holds on to his religion, you don’t fee contemptuous of him, you admire his strength and steadfastness. He is not a fool but a good man caught in bad circumstances and still trying to live a good life.

Even the events that seem most unlikely, like Eliza’s flight across the moving ice flows in the Ohio River, were based on real incidences. In February, 1838, a young slave woman holding her child in her arms escaped in just such a way.

If anything Stowe minimized the misery many individuals suffered. Her villains seem very true to life, so true to life that if you think back on people you have known, you will recall some who, if slavery were legal, would act just as Stowe’s villains do.

While I didn’t find Stowe’s villains implausible I did find her heroes a bit unbelievable. Truth be told I have known very few people who would act so nobly, but there must be people who would or the civil war would never have been fought. The Beecher family probably would. All of Harriet’s siblings were reformers in addition to being writers, preachers, educators and all fervent abolitionists. They didn’t just talk the talk, they walked the walk.

The novel is soaked with Christianity and, despite that, my pagan soul did not rebel. If anything I embraced the version of Christianity that Stowe shows us, a Christianity based in action, not just blind superstition, a Christianity that works to better the lives of those who are unfortunate instead of just accepting things as they are, a Christianity that could fight against slavery rather than just teach slaves blind faith.

If Eva’s death lays it on a bit thick you must remember that Stowe had lost a child of her own and when the book was published in 1852 the mortality rate for children was much higher than today. There were no antibiotics and even the germ theory was unknown so many families, even most, experienced the loss of a child. Stowe had seven children herself but was survived by only three. Life was much more tenuous then and people found Christianity a solace. Given that Stowe was from a family of famous preachers and reformers and believed deeply herself it is only natural that her work would show Christianity as a positive force in life. Despite this I think anyone would enjoy this book regardless of their religion or lack of it.

Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind is another great book. It shows how the pre-civil war south was remembered by those who lived affluent lives. It is also a very women’s lib book. Scarlet is a strong, capable person who survives and helps her family survive despite living a time when women were supposed to be weak and helpless. Scarlett is a rock. A vain, selfish, not too smart rock, but a rock nonetheless. The blacks in Gone with the Wind are all shown as strong people with independence and dignity. Well, except for Prissy, who was an idiot. On the white side Aunt Pittypat was an idiot as well but Aunt Pittypat had a defacto guardian, the negro butler/driver Uncle Peter. When the parents of Melanie and Charles died and they were sent to live with their Aunt Pittypat, it was Uncle Peter who practically raised them and who made most of the decisions in the family. Peter is the one who went to get the housekeeping money from Pitty’s brother. He was the one who decided when Melanie could put up her hair and start attending parties, when Charles should have a larger allowance and what college he would attend. It was Uncle Peter who decided when it was too cold or wet for Miss Pittypat to go visiting or when she needed a shawl. Indeed, Miss Pittypat would get upset and “swoon” if Peter was gone for long. At one point he is referred to as “the grizzled old despot of Aunt Pittypat’s house.” When Peter goes through the dangerous area where Sherman marched to the sea, burning almost everything in the army’s path, goes through it on a horse he “acquired” in order to deliver a letter to Melanie, his main concern is that the girls return with him to live with Miss Pittypat so his Miss will look more respectable.

Despite this, Uncle Peter’s position was no more secure than Tom’s in Stowe’s work. The death or bankruptcy of his owner could have put him on the auction block just as easily as it did Tom.

The thing about Margaret Mitchell’s work and even Stowe’s is that to white people the lives of slaves were like icebergs, 90% was hidden.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Gone with the Wind are both great books. Add in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, mix all three together and you get a picture of life in the slavery South. But Stowe’s book is the most important. It sparked a revolution that freed four million people. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was also translated into every major language and became the second best selling book in the world after the Bible. You don’t sell that many books just on morality. You also have to have a good read and Uncle Tom’s Cabin is that.

By the end if the book Tom seemed to me to be, not just a poor slave, tortured and exploited, but a veritable Spartacus. Except that the character Tom didn’t really exist. He was created by Harriet Stowe. She was the Spartacus, leading people to freedom but better than Spartacus. In the end Spartacus and his followers ended up nailed to crosses along the Appian Way. Those that followed Tom and Harriet Beecher Stowe ended slavery in the United States. That is how you change things. Not with some superhero, and Spartacus was a superhero, one of the greatest men who ever lived, a slave that led a slave revolt that almost brought down Rome, but superheroes don’t change the world and Spartacus didn’t. To change the world you have to change the human heart, one heart at a time. It was what Tom Paine and Harriet Beecher Stowe were able to do. When Abraham Lincoln met Stowe he said “”So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!”, the war the ended American slavery.

I recently watched a program on propaganda on C-Span. Propaganda is about fooling people, about governments, organized religion, or political groups getting people to blindly support one thing or another by using symbols and myths rather than by using the truth. That is not what Tom Paine and Harriet Stowe did. They got people to believe something by telling them the truth and by reaching their hearts.

© alllie 2007

Distribution: This article is copyrighted by alllie, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, or web media so long as you tell me where and this credit is attached as well as a link back to this page, http://www.alllie.com/alllieblog/.

On the local library channel I have been listening to a reading of James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips. Born in 1915, Alice Bradley Sheldon was the daughter of wealth, privilege and intellectual accomplishment. Her father was a lawyer and naturalist and her mother a prolific writer. She was a graphic artist, an art critic, worked in air intelligence for the US Army in WWII and was later recruited into the CIA which she left in 1955 to get a doctorate in Experimental Psychology at George Washington University. She was an attractive, bisexual tomboy. She also had an open marriage despite being deeply in love with her husband.

Alice Sheldon wrote mostly science fiction and did most of her writing under the name James Tiptree, Jr. Many women writers have written under male pseudonyms. Mary Anne Evans wrote under the name of George Elliot, Charolette Bronte wrote as Currer Bell, Emily Bronte as Ellis Bell, and feminist Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin as George Sand. But all that was long ago. Despite the bias of the science fiction community against female scifi writers there seems limited reason for Sheldon to have assumed a male persona and to have clung to it for so long. It wasn’t just that she used a male pen name for her published work, it was that she corresponded volumously with many other science fiction writers and fans and even in these personal letters maintained the Tiptree persona and repeatedly denied she was a woman.
Of course eventually she was discovered.

But that is not what struck me as I listened to her book. It was this:

In February 1975 he[Tiptree/Alice Sheldon] wrote Russ that women were “a little–a little–like a beautiful deer in a game park where they have temporarily suspended hunting season. There are few such parks and god knows how long this will last.” In a subsequent letter he said he meant that women should consolidate their power base, watch their backs, and try to make their freedom last.

That is the gist of it for me. Freedom for women is such a new thing in the world. Women have been enslaved everywhere, never free, never in history. We have always been property. Always slaves, first to men, then to our bodies popping out babies that we are genetically programmed to love and care for. Our freedom seems fragile, fragile and very precious, fragile and easily snatched away. In much of the world, especially the Moslem world, that freedom still does not exist and as long as women are enslaved anywhere, my freedom is not secure. As long as some women are not free, I cannot be free. At any moment my freedom might be snatched from me. I and the women around me might be put back into chains. Just as in Nazi Germany qualified women were fired from their jobs because “motherhood” was the only permitted role for women. Just as in the US after World War II women were forced from their jobs and back into the role of maids, sex slaves, brood males and parasites, aka wives. Just as in Russia and the Soviet Republics after the end of communism women were the first to lose the jobs and rights till, for many of them, the only choice was starvation or prostitution. http://www.unesco.org/courier/2000_02/uk/ethique/txt1.htm

On every side there are attacks on women’s freedom. The Supreme Court only recently ruled that women can be prevented from certain forms of abortion without considering any health consequences to the woman. After all, once a male’s DNA carrier is present in a woman’s body that body is no longer hers. Her health no longer matters. That is the implication. Russell Shaw in the Catholic Herald proclaimed that this was “only the first step” as the 5 Catholic men on the Supreme Court worked to overturn the right of women to determine what happens to their own bodies. This, the religious right declared, is only the beginning!

In Germany a Moroccan woman who was frequently beaten by her husband was told she could not get a quick divorce because the Koran gives a husband the right to beat his wife. A Lebanese-German man strangled and beat his daughter for refusing to marry the man he had chosen for her and was given mere probation because his cultural conditioning was a mitigating factor. A Turkish-German who killed his wife for violating his “honor” was given the least possible sentence because she had offended his moral precepts. A Lebanese-German who raped his wife while beating her was given only probation. Across Europe Moslem Imans give their flocks advise on how to beat their wives (so the infidels will not see the bruises).
http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnists_a_l/johann_hari/article2496657.ece

In Canada Sharia courts are set up to deal with “family” matters. All this is nothing compared to how women are treated in Moslem countries. When women in countries such as Iran or Saudi Arabia try to protest for rights they are beaten by mobs of men. Or arrested. Or killed.

As capitalists lure more Moslem men to western countries for cheap labor they explicitly promise them they will still be able to keep women subjugated. Then the capitalists claim this subjugation must be tolerated in the name of “multiculturism.”

Have we women in the west been living in a sanctuary where the males did not prey on us, like a deer park with a suspended hunting season, a sanctuary that is ending. We have been living in a dream if we think our rights are secure. All women MUST “consolidate their power base, watch their backs, and try to make their freedom last.” We must fight for the freedom of all women and against the loss of our own freedom with all we have.

~~~~~~~~~

© alllie 2007

Distribution: This article is copyrighted by alllie, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, or web media so long as you tell me where and this credit is attached as well as a link back to this page, http://www.alllie.com/alllieblog/.

Jane Austen (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817)

I recently reread Jane Austen’s novels (Jane Austen: Her Complete Novels ). Austen’s novels are classics, justifiably so. One of the things that makes a work of literature a classic is that each time you reread it you notice new things. You can read Austen for the love stories, for her wit, for descriptions of the upper class world in which she lived. This time I found my self reading her for the economic situation of her characters and for their relationships to those who were not of their class.

Rich and poor are relative terms. Austen writes only about the comparatively rich, them and nothing else. The lower classes do not seem to exist in Austen’s world. They are seldom mentioned and rarely named. They have no dialogue and are never important to the story. Only in Mansfield Park are they even described and that only so the two servants of Fanny’s poor family can be disparaged. Despite that these vulgar and slatternly women seem to have their own lives, unlike the other servants in Austen’s novels. The servants Austen mentions most often are coachmen, drivers for the rich families she writes about, and they are only mentioned humorously. Austen’s characters (and probably Austen herself) thought it humorous that the drivers cared so for the health and well-being of the horses in their charge that they were loath to use them.

Despite the genteel poverty of some of Austen’s characters they all seem to have servants. Pride and Prejudice mentions Bennett servants including a cook, a housekeeper and two housemaids. They also have a carriage which means they had a driver and probably a stable boy or two as well.

In Sense and Sensibility when the Dashwoods move to their new cottage in reduced conditions, they take three servants, a man and two women.

In Emma, a novel where the heroine is a local heiress, the Bates, Miss Bates and her mother Mrs. Bates and their niece Jane Fairfax, are poor, at least for their social set. They have fallen far and might expect to fall farther. They are so poor they are often given gifts of food and invited to supper. Despite this they have a cook and their door is always answered by a girl named Sally.

In Mansfield Park Franny Price visits her poor family, her father unable to work, too many brothers and sisters, yet her family has two servants. Not good servants. They are frequently complained of, but that is two more servants than most of us will ever have. Mansfield Park, of course, has servants past counting, most of them nameless and invisible. At least the Price family servants have names and personalities.

In Mansfield Park the kitchen workers are referred to as “inferiors”. In Persuasion Sir Walter finds the navy offensive “as being the means of bringing persons of obscure birth into undue distinction”. Mr. Elliot’s late wife is referred to as a “very low woman” because her father was a grazier and her grandfather had been a butcher. This despite her having been an heiress. A person must have money and high birth to be acceptable.

No one else counts

Jane Austen was born the year before the American Declaration of Independence and died two years after the death of Napoleon but in all her books there is no mention of the American or French revolutions or how an increase in social and economic justice might affect the upper class British world that Austen writes about.

War is barely mentioned and never dwelt on despite several minor characters having relatives who died in battle and despite at least one major character having made his fortune in battle (apparently officers on a ship that captures an enemy ship got part of the pillage, as though they were privateers instead of soldiers. ) In Austen’s novels a soldier’s purpose seems to be to wear a red coat and flirt with young women. She does not mention how these soldiers were used to grow the British Empire and to exploit people all over the world.

In some ways the world Austen describes is like the pre-civil war world of Gone with the Wind except in Gone With the Wind even women had some awareness of larger issues. It can be argued that a lack of a wider awareness in Austen’s characters adds a timeless quality to her work but it also makes it trivial and limits it to the world of women.

Austen’s novels include no mention of history, rarely of politics or literature. The women of Austen’s novels are shown as ignorant of everything outside of their family and social circle. Ignorant to the bone. The Bennett girls of Pride and Prejudice never went to school, never even have a governess though the family always has a cook and other servants. The girls do nothing but amuse themselves. No wonder, as their father describes them, they are “ignorant silly girls.”

Austen’s novels, at their base, are about love and money. I think one reason Austen’s work remains popular is that most of her novels are Cinderella stories. The comparatively poor girl captures a man who is rich, nice and good-looking, generally the prince of the novel, the best man in it. Love is important but money comes first. Without money no man is a prince.

Money magically appears. People either have it or they don’t. There is never any good explanation of where money comes from. None of it seems earned. Maybe Jane Austen herself wasn’t clear about how money was made. Indeed, the only way an upper class woman could get money was to marry it, inherit it or to draw interest on money that she inherited. Women in Austen’s novels seem raised and trained to be a cross between parasite, a geisha and a brood mare. Even if they could earn an honest living the very idea was considered horrible, as it was to Jane Fairfax in Emma who expected to have to make her living as a governess. She was saved from this terrible fate by marrying a rich man.

With few exceptions men do not seem to earn money either. True, in Emma Mr. Knightley has a large farm but that was inherited. In Persuasion Captain Wentworth had gotten rich capturing enemy ships and in Pride and Prejudice Mrs. Bennett’s brother was a lawyer. A few clergymen are mentioned, mostly in terms of how much of a living they have. Apparently ministering to the poor and keeping them docile could be relatively well rewarded. Most of the wealthy men in Austen’s novels inherited or married their money and property. None of them earned it except perhaps for Captain Wentworth, if being a privateer can be considered as “earning” money. Interestingly, a man’s wealth is measured in his yearly income while a girl’s wealth is measured as a lump sum. In Pride and Prejudice Darcey had an income of 10,000 pounds a year. Bingley had three or four thousand a year. Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park had 20,000 pounds. In Pride and Prejudice Jane and Elizabeth each have a thousand pounds.

Austen’s class prejudice can be clearly seen in Emma. Most of the troubles in the novel are a result of Emma making friends with the poorer Harriet, something she comes to rue when Harriet comes to love Mr. Knightley, Emma’s neighbor, her brother-in-law’s brother and the man Emma decides she want to marry once she finds Harriet has fixed her heart on him. Emma’s interference in Harriet’s life and encouraging her to fix on men above her station causes even Harriet much heartache. This is Emma’s moral, that classes do not mix.

Class prejudice seems to be a given in all Austen’s work. As it probably was in her life.

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© alllie 2007

Distribution: This article is copyrighted by alllie, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, or web media so long as you tell me where and this credit is attached as well as a link back to this page, http://www.alllie.com/alllieblog/.

Spoiler Warning: I discuss many of the important plot points so stop now if you want to be surprised.

In his third Takeshi Kovacs novel, Woken Furies, Richard K. Morgan brings Kovacs back to his home planet, Harlan’s world, a world ruled by an hereditary plutocracy. Centuries before this plutocracy was almost deposed in a revolution led by a woman calling herself Quellcrist Fallconer. After Quell’s death they granted many concessions in order to quell that revolution. Our own plutocracy did something similar with the New Deal and Great Society programs, programs used to placate the American public and forestall a communist revolution. No longer afraid of such a revolution the plutocracy sees no reason they should allow those programs to continue. So too the first families of Harlan’s world are taking it all back, driving the population into greater and greater poverty, just as Quell warned. (This enemy you cannot kill. You can only drive it back damaged to the depths and teach your children to watch the waves for its return.)

Kovacs lives in a universe where an individual’s personality and experiences are continually downloaded into a "stack" which is sort of a hard drive implanted at birth . When a person in this universe dies his stack can be removed, implanted into a new sleeve (body) and then he/she will live again.

Kovacs is a former "envoy" turned criminal, criminal being one of the few careers open to an ex-envoy. While making an illegal living Kovacs is also on a quest for personal vengeance against the religious sect that tortured his ex-girlfriend to death and dropped her and her daughter’s stacks into the ocean so that neither could be resurrected.

In all the Takeshi Kovacs novels the subtext is revolution, at least for me, and the principal character is writer/poet/revolutionary Quellcrist Falconer. Her words are peppered through each book even though she never appears, not until Woken Furies.

Escaping from a sticky situation embeds Kovacs with a group of mercenary soldiers cleaning up self-evolving machines left over from Quell’s revolution centuries before. The command hardware implanted in the brain of one of these soldiers seems to have been contaminated with a different personality and this personality seems to be Quell’s. At least maybe.

When I finished Woken Furies I found myself dissatisfied. Like all of Morgan’s books it’s a good read. The universe and characters he describes are well developed and interesting. His portraits of the physical environment are amazing but in the end it was like expecting a meal of heart-killing fried chicken and then getting some low-fat gourmet chicken breast. Good but not what I had a taste for.

I wanted Quellcrist Falconer. That was what I had a taste for. From the previous Kovacs books, I had developed certain ideas about Quell. I thought she would be like the whirlwind, sweeping everything from her path. I expected her to be like Lady Dewinter in The Three Musketeers, except political. Remember when they changed De Winter’s guards merely because she’d spoken to them and thus might have persuaded them to help her. I expected Quell to be like that. A force of nature. Castro a la Rospierre. But this Quell could not even convince Kovacs of the rightness of her cause and Kovacs wanted to be convinced, wanted to believe.

In the end I decided this resurrected Quell was only a sketch of Quell, not the real thing, not the full personality.

I did like Morgan’s idea of a revolutionary force that blends back into the population to live their lives, then, when the conditions are right, ripe, when revolution is possible, like the plant Quellcrist, they emerge and grow within weeks.

I was also disappointed at the ending. We were given a Quell who could win a revolution not because the people supported it but because she had gotten control of the lethal orbital defense systems left by a previous alien race. Sort of Deus ex machine. Not a revolution. A coup. Revolutions grow from the people. Coups are forced on them. This revolution, if it succeeded, would have been a technological success, not a human one.

That is what I thought the first time I read Woken Furies.

Then I thought about it off and on for a year. Then I read it again. This time I decided the book wasn’t about Quellcrist Fallconer even though I wanted it to be. I wanted it to be about Quellcrist telling us how to wage a successful revolution against a hereditary plutocracy. But just because I wanted it to be about that didn’t mean it was. Woken Furies doesn’t tell us that secret except in the sense of the Quellcrist weed, that a revolutionary must blend into the population but, when conditions are right, emerge and fight again.

Perhaps Quell wasn’t the whirlwind. Maybe no successful revolutionary is. In Peter A. DeCaro’s Rhetoric of Revolt: Ho Chi Minh’s Discourse for Revolution, Ho seems a gentle man who worked for his country’s freedom for decades, for his whole life. Like Tom Paine, the person who made the American Revolution, Ho was primarily a poet and writer trying to inspire his countrymen to support the struggle for freedom. He also seemed to be a man who impressed everyone with his goodness, sort of like Nelson Mandela. So the Vietnamese revolution, when it came in 1945, was successful with barely a shot fired. Then, like the American Revolution, there was a fight for independence, but the revolution part, that was all but nonviolent. Maybe Quell was supposed to be like that. Maybe her iconic status was due not to the force of her personality but the result of a lifetime of work. That aside, Woken Furies is not about Quell. Not even about Revolution.

What Woken Furies is really about is Kovacs and about his having been an Envoy. Envoys are what John Perkins called "jackals" in his book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman. When progressive movements arise, when leaders try to work for their people, when they won’t be bribed or blackmailed, when they will not allow the global plutocracy to rape their country, the jackals are sent in. Jackals are covert ops/CIA/intelligence operatives, sent in to assassinate, to organize riots, coups, civil wars, to stop progressive movements, progressive revolutions, to stop anything that would take power and wealth from the local and global plutocracy. The plutocracy uses envoys to pummel the population into submission so the greedy can take their resource wealth and exploit their labor. That was what Kovacs did when he was an "envoy."

Now I understand why I was dissatisfied the first time I read Woken Furies. I wanted something from it, something Richard Morgan didn’t or couldn’t provide: The secret of how to make a successful revolution against a cruel, exploitive, entrenched plutocracy. That is what Quell did. Or nearly did. How did she motivate people to support a struggle to end their own subjugation? Apparently Morgan doesn’t know the answer to that question. Or doesn’t say.

But that was my fault because in the end Woken Furies isn’t about Quell or revolution. It’s about Takeshi Kovacs, the ex-Envoy/covert-ops/jackal trying to get justice even if he has to make it himself, make it personally.

This brings me to a hope, a fantasy, that some of America’s jackals, the people who really know what is going on, what orders the plutocracy gives, that one or more of these people might become disgusted with what they have done, been ordered to do, and begin to fight against their masters, might testify before Congress or work more covertly against the plutocracy. Is that possible?

We live in hope. Or make it ourselves.

Quotes from Woken Furies:

"Everything the Quellists squeezed out of the original Harlan regime, those guys have been chipping away at ever since it happened." [like the GOP is chipping away at the New Deal and Great Society programs.]

This enemy you cannot kill. You can only drive it back damaged to the depths and teach your children to watch the waves for its return. [Quell's warning about the return of the predatory plutocracy]

The Occasional Revolution, in which she argues that modern revolutionaries must when deprived of nourishment by oppressive forces blow away across the land like Quellcrist dust, ubiquitous and traceless but bearing within them the power of revolutionary regeneration where and whenever fresh nourishment may arise. Quellcrist Falconer

Quellcrist, also Qualgrist, native Harlan’s World amphibious weed…remarkable only for its unusual lifecycle. If and when stranded in waterless conditions for long periods of time, the plant’s pods dry out to a black powder which can be carried by the wind over hundreds of kilometres. The remainder of the plant dies and decays, but the Quellcrist powder, upon coming into contact with water once more, reconstitutes into microfronds from which a whole plant may grow in a matter of weeks.

…the Quellcrist powder that Konrad Harlan’s self-described harrowing storm of justice had blown far and wide in the aftermath of the Quellist defeat now spouted new resistance in a dozen different places.

The Quellist meanwhile slipped away, disappeared, abandoned the struggle and got on with living their lives as Nadia Makita [Quellcrist's original name] had always argued they should be prepared to do…And twenty-five years later, back they came, careers built, families formed, children raised, back to fight again, not so much aged but seasoned, wiser, tougher, stronger and fed at the core by the whisper that persisted at the heart of each individual uprising that Quellcrist Falconer herself was back.

Kovacs to a female believer in New Revelation: "..I’m calling you a gutless betrayer of your sex. I can see your husband’s angle, he’s a man, he’s got everything to gain from this crapshit. But you? You’ve thrown away centuries of political struggle and scientific advance so you can sit in the dark and mutter your superstitions of unworth to yourself. You’ll let your life, the most precious thing you have, be stolen from you hour by hour and day by day as long as you can eke out the existence your males will let you have. And then, when you finally die, and I hope it’s soon, sister, I really do, then at the last you’ll spite your own potential and shirk the final power we’ve won for ourselves to come back and try again. You’ll do all of this because of your fucking faith, and if that child in your belly is female, then you’ll condemn her to the same fucking thing" [This is how I feel about any woman who adopts Islam or even Christian fundamentalism.]

There is thought and there is action. Do not confuse the two. When the time comes to act, your thought must already be complete. There will be no room for it when the action begins. Quellcrist.

…he’d seen them all prove their ability to adopt Quell’s maxim and get on with living a full life when armed struggle was inappropriate.

Rage at injustice is a forest fire – it jumps all divides, even those between generations.

Classic poverty dynamic, people clutch at anything. And if the choice is religion or revolution, the government’s quite happy to stand back and let the priests get on with it….Kovacs

"You think this war ever stopped? You think just because we clawed some concessions from them three hundred years ago, these people ever stopped looking for ways to fuck us back into … poverty again. This isn’t an enemy that goes away."

"The oligarchs aren’t an outside factor… A cancer, if you want to switch analogies. They are programmed to feed off the rest of the body at no matter what cost to the system in general, and to kill off anything that competes. That’s why you have to take them down first."
"Yeah, I think I’ve head this speech. Smash the ruling class and then everything’ll be fine, right."
"No, but it’s a necessary first step."

"It’ll be so good," said Andrea, "To have someone again who knows what to do." [this is why I don't think this is Quell. This sketch of Quell doesn't know what to do.]

An Envoy to Kovacs: "You remember the drill: minimize local disruption, maintain a seamless authority front with the protectorate, hang onto data for future leverage."

"And that’s what we’re supposed to accept as a model of governance, is it? Corrupt oligarchic overlordship backed up with overwhelming military force?"

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© alllie 2006

Distribution: This article is copyrighted by alllie, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, or web media so long as you tell me where and this credit is attached as well as a link back to this page, http://www.alllie.com/alllieblog/.