Strange Horizons - jul-2002

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Strange Horizons, July 2002

by Strange Horizons, Inc.

Strange Horizons, Inc.

www.strangehorizons.com

NOTICE: This ebook is licensed to the original purchaser

only. Duplication or distribution to any person via email,

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violation of International copyright law and subjects the

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Distributed by Fictionwise.com

Strange Horizons, July 2002

by Strange Horizons, Inc.

CONTENTS

Article: Defining/Redefining the Masculine “Other” in

Science Fiction, by Neil P. Baird

Article: The Golden Age of Fantasy Is Twelve: SF and the

Young Adult Novel, by Rachel Manija Brown

Article: The Time of the Other, by Fred Bush

Article: Lust, Love, and the Literary Vampire, by Margaret

L. Carter

Article: Interview: Steven Barnes, by Greg Beatty

Fiction: Other Villas, by Erika Peterson, illustration by Jeff

Doten

Fiction: Ignis Fatuus, by Timons Esaias

Fiction: Dream the Moon, by Linda J. Dunn

Fiction: Other Cities #11 of 12: The Cities of Myrkhyr, by

Benjamin Rosenbaum

Fiction: Once Upon a Time in Alphabet City, by Joel Best

Fiction: Lion's Blood, by Steven Barnes (excerpt)

Music: Interview: Heather Alexander

Poetry: The File of a Thousand Places, by Robert Randolph

Medcalf, Jr.

Poetry: Long Voyage, by David C. Kopaska-Merkel

Poetry: To Atlantis, by S. R. Compton

Poetry: Two Poems by John Sweet

Review: Neil Gaiman's Coraline, reviewed by Tim Pratt

Review: Corporate Monsters and Body Thieves: Two

Brilliant Chapbooks of Speculative Poetry from Mark

McLaughlin and Bruce Boston, reviewed by Michael Arnzen

Strange Horizons, July 2002

by Strange Horizons, Inc.

Review: Junji Ito's Uzumaki, reviewed by Laura Blackwell

Review: Robert Sawyer's Hominids: It's Not Your Father's

Cavemen Story, reviewed by John Teehan

Review: Steven Barnes's Lion's Blood and Heather

Alexander's Insh'Allah, reviewed by J. G. Stinson

Strange Horizons, July 2002

by Strange Horizons, Inc.

Defining/Redefining the Masculine “Other” in Science

Fiction

By Neil P. Baird

7/1/02

If you deny any affinity with another person or

kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly

different from yourself as men have done to

women, and class has done to class, and

nation has done to nation you may hate it or

deify it; but in either case you have denied its

spiritual equality and its human reality. You

have made it into a thing, to which the only

possible relationship is a power relationship.

And thus you have fatally impoverished your

own reality. You have, in fact, alienated

yourself.

—Ursula K. Le Guin, “American SF and the

Other"

The extent to which such writers, critics, and editors as

Joanna Russ, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree, Jr., and

Pamela Sargent have explored the feminine “other” within

science fiction is known to many. Indeed, it was Pamela

Sargent who criticized and yet realized the potential of the

genre in her introduction to Women of Wonder by saying,

“One can wonder why a literature that prides itself on

Strange Horizons, July 2002

by Strange Horizons, Inc.

exploring alternatives or assumptions counter to what we

normally believe has not been more concerned with the roles

of women in the future” (xv). While these and other feminist

authors have explored alternatives to the alienated status of

women constructed by patriarchy, the effects of participating

in a patriarchy for men remain relatively unexamined.

Although the social system of patriarchy privileges men, this

privileged status places men in a position of power which

isolates them from women and other men, thus constructing

a masculine “other” alienated from relational existence. What

Sargent and other feminist writers have done is create space

for science fiction and its criticism to deeply explore

alternatives to this masculine “other” constructed by

patriarchy. Using Allan G. Johnson's conception of patriarchy

in The Gender Knot, this essay will offer a new reading of

Harlan Ellison's “I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream” and

explore Candas Jane Dorsey's “(Learning About) Machine

Sex” in order to explore the question being asked by the

mad-scientist narrator in Michael Blumlein's “The Brains of

Rats.”

The mad-scientist narrator of Michael Blumlein's “The

Brains of Rats” is asking a question that could only be asked

in a post-feminist era: What does it mean to be a man? The

short story portrays the discovery of a rhinovirus that, when

transmitted through water or air, has the ability to cross the

placenta into a developing fetus, creating either an all-male

or all-female human species. This single science fictional

element places Blumlein's mad-scientist narrator on a journey

of self-discovery which creates a certain poignancy to the

Strange Horizons, July 2002

by Strange Horizons, Inc.

questions of gender that many of us as readers are already

asking.

Part of the beauty of this short story is not so much in

what it is saying but in what it does to the reader. To put it

frankly, reading “The Brains of Rats” makes some habitual

science fiction readers uncomfortable. Several episodes are

intended to shock readers, such as when the narrator

portrays his homosexual experiment with a black man in as

much explicit detail as possible (Blumlein 641-643). This

same feeling is created when the narrator asks a friend what

is the best thing about being a man and he replies, “Having a

penis.... Having it sucked, putting it in a warm place,”

(Blumlein 640) or by the patient who laments that he is

impotent and, after having a metal rod placed in his penis,

rejoices in his godlike ability to have sex for eight hours

straight, pleasing his women by bending the rod in different

directions (Blumlein 644-645).

Allan G. Johnson is a sociologist who has written prolifically

about problems in gender, and his conception of patriarchy

offers an explanation for why readers might feel

uncomfortable with these scenes. In The Gender Knot,

Johnson explores several cultures different from our own to

make an argument about how patriarchy defines sexuality

and our participation in this particular social system (17).

Johnson notes that two to three percent of human children

are androgynous at birth, and that those born with this sexual

ambiguity are accepted in some Native American cultures

because the system in which they live provides a space for

androgyny to exist. For example, those born androgynous in

Strange Horizons, July 2002

by Strange Horizons, Inc.

the Navajo culture occupy a third sex category—"nadle"—

which exists legitimately among the common cultural

categories of “male” and “female.”

To move back to Blumlein's short story, his mad-scientist

narrator crosses boundaries which the specific social system

in which we live does not recognize, or is only slowly

recognizing. As the narrator crosses these boundaries, by

dressing as a woman and experiencing sexuality as a woman,

he begins to offend certain deep structures generated by the

system in which we live. Our system only recognizes the

categories of “male” and “female,” but Blumlein's narrator

violates this system by living a hybrid existence in order to

accumulate knowledge and decide the fate of human gender.

To use Donna Haraway's term, he becomes a cyborg, an

unnatural monster both male and female, which calls into

question these acknowledged categories, thus disturbing

some readers.

I would like to further explore Johnson's idea of “deep

structures” (which is unrelated to the linguistic theories of

Noam Chomsky) with reference to Raphael Carter's

“Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation.” In the form of a

scientific paper coauthored by K. N. Sirsi and Sandra Botkin,

this short story recounts the discovery of a disorder which

impairs gender perception. People with this disorder cannot

readily perceive the sex of a person from appearance alone.

In the course of exploring this disorder, Sirsi and Botkin begin

to realize that “Sometimes an experiment reveals more about

the experimenters than the subjects” (Carter 99).

Strange Horizons, July 2002

by Strange Horizons, Inc.

It is their experience with twins from Minnesota which

causes Sirsi and Botkin to view their own perception of

gender as the disorder. These twins cannot identify gender in

terms of the acknowledged categories of “male” or “female";

however, drawing on their own language developed during

childhood, they can identify gender in terms of twenty-two

categories, from those with clitoromegaly to different forms of

hermaphrodism (Carter 101-103). It is at this point that Sirsi

and Botkin begin to perceive the identification of gender using

only the two terms “male” and “female” as the cognitive

defect, not the other way around.

Sirsi and Botkin conclude that certain innate

predispositions control our perceptions of reality. These

“innate predispositions” are what Johnson means by “deep

structures.” “Our knowledge of the world,” Sirsi and Botkin

explain, “is filtered through an unreliable narrator whose

biases deny us direct access to the truth” (Carter 106).

Similarly, by dressing as a woman and using his homosexual

experiment to experience sexuality as a woman, Blumlein's

narrator disturbs those who approach the short story with the

innate predispositions generated by the patriarchal system in

which we participate because he moves within, without, and

through acknowledged definitions of male and female.

Johnson argues that these innate predispositions construct

gender and our perceptions of gender by creating paths of

least resistance or acceptable ways of acting. To define this

concept, Johnson turns to the paths of least resistance

created by the board game Monopoly (79). Let me illustrate

his argument by telling my own experience with this game.

Strange Horizons, July 2002

by Strange Horizons, Inc.

Monopoly, essentially, creates a social system that rewards

greed. The rules are built in such a way that a player

attempts to create as much wealth as he or she can while

pushing the others out of the game. Because of its length, it

is a game that easily gets boring. When I get bored, I often

miss the opportunity to gain more wealth when I don't notice

players landing on my property. I am laughed at because of

this, and you could imagine the reaction if I just went around

the board not purchasing any property or allowing all to stay

at my hotel for free instead of collecting $1500. In contrast,

there is my friend who follows the paths of least resistance,

and plays by the rules of the game so well that he throws the

board at my wife when he loses and then isolates himself in

his room. He is not like this outside of the game; the innate

predispositions or rules of the game create paths of least

resistance or acceptable ways of behaving which construct

who the players are and how they interact.

Damon Knight's short story “The Handler” illustrates the

nature of innate predispositions and the paths of least

resistance they create. “The Handler” tells the story of Pete

and Harry, the big man and little man (as they are so often

referred to in the story): the mechanism and the handler who

operates it from within. A group of people are celebrating the

success of the show they have just put on, and Pete is the

center of attention, capturing the glances of women and the

envy of men. The tone of the party changes as soon as Harry

steps out of Pete and reveals his true self as the handler. He

is shunned by the people at the party, and only when he is

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StrangeHorizons,July2002byStrangeHorizons,Inc.2StrangeHorizons,Inc.www.strangehorizons.comCopyright©2002byStrangeHorizons,Inc.NOTICE:Thisebookislicensedtotheoriginalpurchaseronly.Duplicationordistributiontoanypersonviaemail,floppydisk,network,printout,oranyothermeansisaviolationofInternationalcopyri...

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