Boy Culture in the Nineteenth and a Half Century!

I've been reading H. Bruce Franklin's Future Perfect: American Science Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (revised edition, Oxford University Press, 1978), which turns out to be more of an anthology than a critical study. It's worth reading because of the commentary he supplies; he's written a good many books on various subjects, including Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction (Oxford, 1980), which is out of print but worth tracking down.

Franklin begins by suggesting what I agree is a "good working definition of science fiction": "the literature which, growing with science and technology, evaluates it and relates it meaningfully to the rest of human existence." He returns to that definition in the book's second section, on Poe, who has often been called the father of SF. Franklin treats him respectfully with appropriate skepticism, especially his program (in a "famous passage from his review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales" [ 96]) for the writing of short stories:

The key word in Poe's argument, as his italics indicate, is "effect." The argument that fiction should be evaluated for its effectiveness, its success in achieving the objective correlative which the author desires, slides around the question of what it should effect. To say that the tale of terror is "effective" may not necessarily, in the long run, to praise it [97].

Franklin distinguishes two categories of science fiction in Poe's work,

the tale contrived like an electric coil to induce particular emotions in the reader and the tale contrived as a wheelbarrow to bring to the reader some scientific notion or knickknack. In the first, the science is merely a device; in the other, the fiction is merely a device [97].

Good enough, but Franklin goes still further:

Poe, then, may be the father not of science fiction but rather of what is so often associated with the term science fiction -- fiction which popularizes science for boys and girls of all ages while giving them the creeps [98].

He grants Poe more virtue than that, though, suggesting that Poe is better than his theory. I'm not so sure; I've never liked Poe myself, either as poet or storyteller. But Franklin makes a good point which connects to my own wariness of "extreme" horror movies in our day.

Yet surely those who find "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" of enduring value do not do so merely because they admire Poe for making a story which can horrify them. Would anyone who wants to be as horrified as possible turn to fiction? Or are horror stories merely safe escapes or releases from the terrors of the actual world? In 1854, the same year in which "The Facts in the Case of M. Waldemar" was published, appeared Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself. Douglass, who had been a slave boy in Poe's Baltimore, describes the incident which awakened him into consciousness of Maryland social reality, the whipping of his aunt, stripped naked to the waist and hanging from a hook, by his master, who keeps snarling "'you d____d b___h'" as he tortured her until she was "literally covered with blood":

The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood-clotted cowskin.

The man who invented the horrors of "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" preferred not to look at these other horrors. In fact he supported the slave system which produced them, as well as his own material comforts [98-9].

I'm not as sure as Franklin that Poe's fans don't necessarily admire him primarily for making a tale which can horrify them, though I would expect that his admirers value his tales for more than one reason. The fans of ultraviolent cinema seem to think that "effects" are all that matter, though. The late Thomas M. Disch, a poet, writer of sf and horror fiction, and swaggering leather boy, wrote a history of science fiction in which he attacked writers like Ursula Le Guin whose gore-and-creepy quotient didn't come up to his high standards. (Her feminism, he thundered, "is less overtly phobic of the male sex than that of Andrea Dworkin, but it is no less absolute. ... Ideology breeds nonsense and ... Le Guin's work has undergone a gradual PC ossification" [via]. Girl cooties, yuck!)

But I very much appreciate the questions Franklin raised here. He made me think again of the idea that Lawrence Block put into the mind of one of his characters, that the tears you shed while watching a movie aren't real tears, any more than the fear you feel while watching a horror movie is real fear. I have the same reservation about the genre that Franklin expressed: if you want to be horrified, why look to fiction? Something else is going on, but what? I'm certainly open to the idea that horror stories in any medium can point to some deeper (or at least other) meanings; I just don't know what they might be, because I haven't found any that work for me that way.

Boy Culture in the Nineteenth and a Half Century!

I've been reading H. Bruce Franklin's Future Perfect: American Science Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (revised edition, Oxford University Press, 1978), which turns out to be more of an anthology than a critical study. It's worth reading because of the commentary he supplies; he's written a good many books on various subjects, including Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction (Oxford, 1980), which is out of print but worth tracking down.

Franklin begins by suggesting what I agree is a "good working definition of science fiction": "the literature which, growing with science and technology, evaluates it and relates it meaningfully to the rest of human existence." He returns to that definition in the book's second section, on Poe, who has often been called the father of SF. Franklin treats him respectfully with appropriate skepticism, especially his program (in a "famous passage from his review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales" [ 96]) for the writing of short stories:

The key word in Poe's argument, as his italics indicate, is "effect." The argument that fiction should be evaluated for its effectiveness, its success in achieving the objective correlative which the author desires, slides around the question of what it should effect. To say that the tale of terror is "effective" may not necessarily, in the long run, to praise it [97].

Franklin distinguishes two categories of science fiction in Poe's work,

the tale contrived like an electric coil to induce particular emotions in the reader and the tale contrived as a wheelbarrow to bring to the reader some scientific notion or knickknack. In the first, the science is merely a device; in the other, the fiction is merely a device [97].

Good enough, but Franklin goes still further:

Poe, then, may be the father not of science fiction but rather of what is so often associated with the term science fiction -- fiction which popularizes science for boys and girls of all ages while giving them the creeps [98].

He grants Poe more virtue than that, though, suggesting that Poe is better than his theory. I'm not so sure; I've never liked Poe myself, either as poet or storyteller. But Franklin makes a good point which connects to my own wariness of "extreme" horror movies in our day.

Yet surely those who find "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" of enduring value do not do so merely because they admire Poe for making a story which can horrify them. Would anyone who wants to be as horrified as possible turn to fiction? Or are horror stories merely safe escapes or releases from the terrors of the actual world? In 1854, the same year in which "The Facts in the Case of M. Waldemar" was published, appeared Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself. Douglass, who had been a slave boy in Poe's Baltimore, describes the incident which awakened him into consciousness of Maryland social reality, the whipping of his aunt, stripped naked to the waist and hanging from a hook, by his master, who keeps snarling "'you d____d b___h'" as he tortured her until she was "literally covered with blood":

The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood-clotted cowskin.

The man who invented the horrors of "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" preferred not to look at these other horrors. In fact he supported the slave system which produced them, as well as his own material comforts [98-9].

I'm not as sure as Franklin that Poe's fans don't necessarily admire him primarily for making a tale which can horrify them, though I would expect that his admirers value his tales for more than one reason. The fans of ultraviolent cinema seem to think that "effects" are all that matter, though. The late Thomas M. Disch, a poet, writer of sf and horror fiction, and swaggering leather boy, wrote a history of science fiction in which he attacked writers like Ursula Le Guin whose gore-and-creepy quotient didn't come up to his high standards. (Her feminism, he thundered, "is less overtly phobic of the male sex than that of Andrea Dworkin, but it is no less absolute. ... Ideology breeds nonsense and ... Le Guin's work has undergone a gradual PC ossification" [via]. Girl cooties, yuck!)

But I very much appreciate the questions Franklin raised here. He made me think again of the idea that Lawrence Block put into the mind of one of his characters, that the tears you shed while watching a movie aren't real tears, any more than the fear you feel while watching a horror movie is real fear. I have the same reservation about the genre that Franklin expressed: if you want to be horrified, why look to fiction? Something else is going on, but what? I'm certainly open to the idea that horror stories in any medium can point to some deeper (or at least other) meanings; I just don't know what they might be, because I haven't found any that work for me that way.

The Present Is a Disputed Area

I've been putting off rereading Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time for the same reason anyone hesitates to return to a much-loved work from the past: for fear it wouldn't be as good as I remember. But if anything, it's better.

I first read it in the fall of 1976, a few months after it was published. A friend had taken me to hear Piercy reading her poems, and then to hear her talking to a class, so she'd already made a big impression on me. Then a few people were passing around a copy of Women on the Edge of Time, and I read it twice within a few days before giving it to the next person. It was a slightly unsettling experience, because I'd never before read a book that felt like it was pandering to my politics. Most science fiction, let alone mundane fiction whether gay or straight, required a lot of filtering as I read it, to compensate for sexism, racism, and homophobia. Reading Woman on the Edge of Time was like stepping on a step that wasn't there; the adjustments had already been made for me. I felt enormously grateful to Piercy for the gift of such a story.

The frame story of Woman on the Edge of Time is set in New York City around 1975. Consuelo ("Connie") Ramos is thirty-seven, a Mexican-American woman living on welfare. She was born in Texas, but gradually migrated north to Chicago, and later moved to New York. When the novel opens she has already been institutionalized once, for abusing her young daughter Angelina while in a long despairing drunk following the death of her lover Claud; previously she'd spent some time in jail as Claud's accomplice as a pickpocket. When her niece Dolly's violent pimp Geraldo follows Dolly to Connie's apartment, Connie attacks Geraldo in Dolly's defense, and is railroaded back into a mental institution. Connie meets and befriends several other patients, and with some of them is drafted into a psychosurgical experiment typical of the period: the doctors hope to control "antisocial" behavior through direct stimulation of the subjects' brains. This is one major stream of the story.

We also learn that Connie has been visited by Luciente, who claims to be a visitor from the future, part of a time-travel project in 2137. Gradually, through telepathic contact, Connie is able to visit Luciente's world. Piercy leaves open the question of whether Luciente is supposed to be real or Connie's hallucination, though within the story it's clear enough. The other major stream is Connie's, and the reader's, introduction to twenty-second century Mouth-of-Mattapoisett in Massachusetts, a community patterned after Wamponaug Indian culture, though with a mixture of high technology -- Piercy had a better sense of where computers would go than most sf writers in the 70s -- and close-to-the-earth poverty.

"Our technology did not develop in a straight line from yours," Luciente tells Connie. "We have limited resources. We plan cooperatively. We can afford to waste ... nothing" (125). And: "We don't have big cities -- they didn't work" [68]. Sometime in the twenty-first century there was a major revolution, and now the ultrarich elites control only the Moon, the space platforms, and Antarctica; a war of attrition is still being waged. (Page numbers are from the Fawcett mass-market paperback, still in print after all these years.)

We get glimpses of a few other communities: Cranberry, based on "Harlem-Black" culture, and Ned's Point, "the flavor of Eastern European Jewry" (153). We're told that the First Nations have their own territory, and Connie meets a young Latina from Texas who tells her that things are somewhat different there too: "What we've done with adobe over the past forty years -- how it glows. We eat plenty of meat too, not like here, where they think one skinny cow makes a fiesta!" (210). The communities aren't isolated from each other, though: there's a lot of trade and other interaction between them, especially for educational purposes. Young people travel to study with masters in their field, and may settle in the masters' communities, move to others, or return home.

I noticed very forcefully on this reading how radical was Piercy's approach to sex/gender and race. Babies are incubated in a "brooder," because as one woman character tells Connie,

It was part of women's long revolution. When we were breaking all the old hierarchies. Finally there was that one thing we had to give up too, the only power we ever had, in return for no more power for anyone. The original production: the power to give birth. Cause as long as we were biologically enchained, we'd never be equal. And males never would be humanized to be loving and tender. So we all became mothers. Every child has three. To break the nuclear bonding [105].

On race, another character explains,

I have a sweet friend living in Cranberry dark as I am and her tribe is Harlem-Black. I could move there anytime. But if you go over, you won't find everybody black-skinned like her and me, any more than they're all tall or all got big feet. ... At grandcil -- grand council -- decisions were made forty years back to breed a high proportion of dark people and to mix the genes well through the population. At the same time, we decided to hold on to separate cultural identities. But we broke the bond between genes and culture, broke it forever. We want there to be no chance of racism of again. But we don't want the melting pot where everybody ends up with thin gruel. We want diversity, for strangeness breeds richness [103-104].

These are still threatening ideas, not only in mainstream American society but also in multiculturalist circles -- to say nothing of other cultures.

Even more threatening, I think, would be Piercy's handling of gender. Piercy invented neuter pronouns, "person" and "per", for her future, and broke the bond between reproductive organs and gendered expression. (In Mattapoisett, people usually refer to males and females, instead of men and women, except when they're talking about historical conditions and struggles.) This leads to a lot of confusion for Connie, who sometimes can easily discern the sex of the people she meets in Mattapoisett, but more often can't. So we get scenes like this one:

"When I was born, I was named Peony by my mothers --"
"Peony sounds like a girl's name" [says Connie].
"I don't understand. It was the name chosen for me" [77].

And this one:

Finally she heard a high-pitched warning siren and a fast-moving vehicle flashing red lights came shrieking toward them about a foot off the ground. It came to an abrupt halt right outside the tent and settled with a hiss. White Oak [the pilot] hopped out and a person -- the voice [Connie had heard over an audio communicator] had been male, she thought -- about five feet nine, compactly built, slid out of the other side and strode with quick, slithery grace toward the tent. Bolivar, she supposed, had kinky hair worn in braids fully as elaborate as Erzulia's, but his skin was fair and heavily freckled with the sun. He worse a knee-length ... she could not call it anything but a dress, with stripes on the bias [160].

Many readers today, I think, would try to read characters like these as "transgendered," but that's a concept that would have no meaning in a society where gender isn't an important category. I see "transgender" and "genderqueer" as largely conservative if not reactionary trends, attempts to hold on to standard gender patterns -- partly, I suppose, as a result of the influence this book has had on me. (To clarify, however quixotically: this doesn't mean that I think people shouldn't be free to express and label gender, to dress and decorate themselves, and to modify their bodies, as they wish. Of course they should: that's an old Gay Liberation tenet that I still hold to. But I still think that many trans people are very conservative in their view of gender and sex. Someday I'll do a post on that.) A reviewer on Amazon referred to the future Mattapoisett as "a female dominated society," which supports my feeling that many people perceive sexual equality as female domination.

Beyond these matters, Woman on the Edge of Time is a very rich book. Piercy put a great deal of work into her future societies (there's also a chilling dystopian chapter that gives a glimpse into the culture of the "richies," which seems even less distant now than it did thirty-five years ago), but she also describes contemporary American society with a careful and critical eye. Piercy has been a political activist for many years, first in the New Left and then in Second Wave feminism, and in environmental and international solidarity movements since then. She gives a little of this background to Connie, who recalls,

Years ago I was living in Chicago. I got involved that way. Meetings, meetings, meetings! My life was so busy, my head was boiling! I felt such hope. It was after my husband Martín ... He got killed. I was young and naive and it was supposed to be a War on Poverty. ... But it was just the same political machine and us stupid poor people, us ... idiots who thought we were running things for a change. We ended up back where we were. They gave some paying jobs to so-called neighborhood leaders. All those meetings. I ended up with nothing but feeling sore and ripped off [154].

"Paying jobs to neighborhood leaders" ... that rings a bell somehow. Later, I think they came to call themselves "community organizers."

Piercy's depiction of the brain salad surgeons and their self-justifying prattle helped my harden my own distrust of psychiatry. Another reviewer of this novel on Amazon wrote, "I'm certain that back in the 70s, and even today, there are places like this, although I doubt that implanting devices into mental patients' heads (surely a plot device) has ever taken place." His doubt is seriously misplaced; psychosurgery and attempts to control "deviant" behavior by stimulating the brain electrically had a brief vogue in the Sixties and Seventies. It went somewhat undercover, partly because its most distinguished exponent left the US for Spain, but recently he came back, and he's tanned, rested and ready. The writer Arthur Koestler wrote a novel in 1972, The Call Girls, using the same procedure as a plot device, which I think far inferior to Piercy's; but then it's written from the perspective of the doctors, not the patients. The general mentality has always been with us, of course.

I should add, and stress, that the politics of the book didn't get in the way -- at least for me. If you disagree with them, they probably will. Science fiction and especially utopian fiction are literature of ideas more than action, and tend to be didactic. But Piercy is also good at depicting characters in difficult situations. Her characters are unusual for science fiction: women, people of color, poor people, mental patients. (If you find Woman on the Edge of Time excessively preachy, compare it to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which is at least as driven by sexual politics -- male-supremacist sexual politics -- and is every bit as preachy about the conditions of [male] mental patients. Their plight is, among other things, a metaphor for the suffering of men in a "matriarchal" society, a popular theme in masculist literature of the period.)

Granted, Mattapoisett has the same weakness that most utopian societies do: it has no subconscious. The guide figure can explain everything to the visitor, and there's no underside; everything is as the guide describes it. For a comparison, imagine a normal, politically sound American of our day explaining the wonders of our society -- our racial and sexual equality, our wonderful economic system, our first-rate health care system, our peaceful coexistence with our neighbors -- to a visitor from a century past. (Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed, published in 1974, is as close as I can think of to an exception, but then it's subtitled "An Ambiguous Utopia.") This is a normal problem in the Utopian genre, though.

What impressed me most on this rereading of Woman on the Edge of Time was how little it had dated, both in its future and in its present; to me Piercy's politics seem more relevant than ever. And above all, it's a great read.

The Present Is a Disputed Area

I've been putting off rereading Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time for the same reason anyone hesitates to return to a much-loved work from the past: for fear it wouldn't be as good as I remember. But if anything, it's better.

I first read it in the fall of 1976, a few months after it was published. A friend had taken me to hear Piercy reading her poems, and then to hear her talking to a class, so she'd already made a big impression on me. Then a few people were passing around a copy of Women on the Edge of Time, and I read it twice within a few days before giving it to the next person. It was a slightly unsettling experience, because I'd never before read a book that felt like it was pandering to my politics. Most science fiction, let alone mundane fiction whether gay or straight, required a lot of filtering as I read it, to compensate for sexism, racism, and homophobia. Reading Woman on the Edge of Time was like stepping on a step that wasn't there; the adjustments had already been made for me. I felt enormously grateful to Piercy for the gift of such a story.

The frame story of Woman on the Edge of Time is set in New York City around 1975. Consuelo ("Connie") Ramos is thirty-seven, a Mexican-American woman living on welfare. She was born in Texas, but gradually migrated north to Chicago, and later moved to New York. When the novel opens she has already been institutionalized once, for abusing her young daughter Angelina while in a long despairing drunk following the death of her lover Claud; previously she'd spent some time in jail as Claud's accomplice as a pickpocket. When her niece Dolly's violent pimp Geraldo follows Dolly to Connie's apartment, Connie attacks Geraldo in Dolly's defense, and is railroaded back into a mental institution. Connie meets and befriends several other patients, and with some of them is drafted into a psychosurgical experiment typical of the period: the doctors hope to control "antisocial" behavior through direct stimulation of the subjects' brains. This is one major stream of the story.

We also learn that Connie has been visited by Luciente, who claims to be a visitor from the future, part of a time-travel project in 2137. Gradually, through telepathic contact, Connie is able to visit Luciente's world. Piercy leaves open the question of whether Luciente is supposed to be real or Connie's hallucination, though within the story it's clear enough. The other major stream is Connie's, and the reader's, introduction to twenty-second century Mouth-of-Mattapoisett in Massachusetts, a community patterned after Wamponaug Indian culture, though with a mixture of high technology -- Piercy had a better sense of where computers would go than most sf writers in the 70s -- and close-to-the-earth poverty.

"Our technology did not develop in a straight line from yours," Luciente tells Connie. "We have limited resources. We plan cooperatively. We can afford to waste ... nothing" (125). And: "We don't have big cities -- they didn't work" [68]. Sometime in the twenty-first century there was a major revolution, and now the ultrarich elites control only the Moon, the space platforms, and Antarctica; a war of attrition is still being waged. (Page numbers are from the Fawcett mass-market paperback, still in print after all these years.)

We get glimpses of a few other communities: Cranberry, based on "Harlem-Black" culture, and Ned's Point, "the flavor of Eastern European Jewry" (153). We're told that the First Nations have their own territory, and Connie meets a young Latina from Texas who tells her that things are somewhat different there too: "What we've done with adobe over the past forty years -- how it glows. We eat plenty of meat too, not like here, where they think one skinny cow makes a fiesta!" (210). The communities aren't isolated from each other, though: there's a lot of trade and other interaction between them, especially for educational purposes. Young people travel to study with masters in their field, and may settle in the masters' communities, move to others, or return home.

I noticed very forcefully on this reading how radical was Piercy's approach to sex/gender and race. Babies are incubated in a "brooder," because as one woman character tells Connie,

It was part of women's long revolution. When we were breaking all the old hierarchies. Finally there was that one thing we had to give up too, the only power we ever had, in return for no more power for anyone. The original production: the power to give birth. Cause as long as we were biologically enchained, we'd never be equal. And males never would be humanized to be loving and tender. So we all became mothers. Every child has three. To break the nuclear bonding [105].

On race, another character explains,

I have a sweet friend living in Cranberry dark as I am and her tribe is Harlem-Black. I could move there anytime. But if you go over, you won't find everybody black-skinned like her and me, any more than they're all tall or all got big feet. ... At grandcil -- grand council -- decisions were made forty years back to breed a high proportion of dark people and to mix the genes well through the population. At the same time, we decided to hold on to separate cultural identities. But we broke the bond between genes and culture, broke it forever. We want there to be no chance of racism of again. But we don't want the melting pot where everybody ends up with thin gruel. We want diversity, for strangeness breeds richness [103-104].

These are still threatening ideas, not only in mainstream American society but also in multiculturalist circles -- to say nothing of other cultures.

Even more threatening, I think, would be Piercy's handling of gender. Piercy invented neuter pronouns, "person" and "per", for her future, and broke the bond between reproductive organs and gendered expression. (In Mattapoisett, people usually refer to males and females, instead of men and women, except when they're talking about historical conditions and struggles.) This leads to a lot of confusion for Connie, who sometimes can easily discern the sex of the people she meets in Mattapoisett, but more often can't. So we get scenes like this one:

"When I was born, I was named Peony by my mothers --"
"Peony sounds like a girl's name" [says Connie].
"I don't understand. It was the name chosen for me" [77].

And this one:

Finally she heard a high-pitched warning siren and a fast-moving vehicle flashing red lights came shrieking toward them about a foot off the ground. It came to an abrupt halt right outside the tent and settled with a hiss. White Oak [the pilot] hopped out and a person -- the voice [Connie had heard over an audio communicator] had been male, she thought -- about five feet nine, compactly built, slid out of the other side and strode with quick, slithery grace toward the tent. Bolivar, she supposed, had kinky hair worn in braids fully as elaborate as Erzulia's, but his skin was fair and heavily freckled with the sun. He worse a knee-length ... she could not call it anything but a dress, with stripes on the bias [160].

Many readers today, I think, would try to read characters like these as "transgendered," but that's a concept that would have no meaning in a society where gender isn't an important category. I see "transgender" and "genderqueer" as largely conservative if not reactionary trends, attempts to hold on to standard gender patterns -- partly, I suppose, as a result of the influence this book has had on me. (To clarify, however quixotically: this doesn't mean that I think people shouldn't be free to express and label gender, to dress and decorate themselves, and to modify their bodies, as they wish. Of course they should: that's an old Gay Liberation tenet that I still hold to. But I still think that many trans people are very conservative in their view of gender and sex. Someday I'll do a post on that.) A reviewer on Amazon referred to the future Mattapoisett as "a female dominated society," which supports my feeling that many people perceive sexual equality as female domination.

Beyond these matters, Woman on the Edge of Time is a very rich book. Piercy put a great deal of work into her future societies (there's also a chilling dystopian chapter that gives a glimpse into the culture of the "richies," which seems even less distant now than it did thirty-five years ago), but she also describes contemporary American society with a careful and critical eye. Piercy has been a political activist for many years, first in the New Left and then in Second Wave feminism, and in environmental and international solidarity movements since then. She gives a little of this background to Connie, who recalls,

Years ago I was living in Chicago. I got involved that way. Meetings, meetings, meetings! My life was so busy, my head was boiling! I felt such hope. It was after my husband Martín ... He got killed. I was young and naive and it was supposed to be a War on Poverty. ... But it was just the same political machine and us stupid poor people, us ... idiots who thought we were running things for a change. We ended up back where we were. They gave some paying jobs to so-called neighborhood leaders. All those meetings. I ended up with nothing but feeling sore and ripped off [154].

"Paying jobs to neighborhood leaders" ... that rings a bell somehow. Later, I think they came to call themselves "community organizers."

Piercy's depiction of the brain salad surgeons and their self-justifying prattle helped my harden my own distrust of psychiatry. Another reviewer of this novel on Amazon wrote, "I'm certain that back in the 70s, and even today, there are places like this, although I doubt that implanting devices into mental patients' heads (surely a plot device) has ever taken place." His doubt is seriously misplaced; psychosurgery and attempts to control "deviant" behavior by stimulating the brain electrically had a brief vogue in the Sixties and Seventies. It went somewhat undercover, partly because its most distinguished exponent left the US for Spain, but recently he came back, and he's tanned, rested and ready. The writer Arthur Koestler wrote a novel in 1972, The Call Girls, using the same procedure as a plot device, which I think far inferior to Piercy's; but then it's written from the perspective of the doctors, not the patients. The general mentality has always been with us, of course.

I should add, and stress, that the politics of the book didn't get in the way -- at least for me. If you disagree with them, they probably will. Science fiction and especially utopian fiction are literature of ideas more than action, and tend to be didactic. But Piercy is also good at depicting characters in difficult situations. Her characters are unusual for science fiction: women, people of color, poor people, mental patients. (If you find Woman on the Edge of Time excessively preachy, compare it to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which is at least as driven by sexual politics -- male-supremacist sexual politics -- and is every bit as preachy about the conditions of [male] mental patients. Their plight is, among other things, a metaphor for the suffering of men in a "matriarchal" society, a popular theme in masculist literature of the period.)

Granted, Mattapoisett has the same weakness that most utopian societies do: it has no subconscious. The guide figure can explain everything to the visitor, and there's no underside; everything is as the guide describes it. For a comparison, imagine a normal, politically sound American of our day explaining the wonders of our society -- our racial and sexual equality, our wonderful economic system, our first-rate health care system, our peaceful coexistence with our neighbors -- to a visitor from a century past. (Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed, published in 1974, is as close as I can think of to an exception, but then it's subtitled "An Ambiguous Utopia.") This is a normal problem in the Utopian genre, though.

What impressed me most on this rereading of Woman on the Edge of Time was how little it had dated, both in its future and in its present; to me Piercy's politics seem more relevant than ever. And above all, it's a great read.

Have You Ever Seen a Grown Extraterrestrial Naked, Bobby?

Last night I saw Robert Wise's 1951 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still on a big screen for the first time. I first saw it on TV at the age of twelve or so, and one time on video as an adult. It made a big impression on me as a kid, of course, with its message of benign interplanetary missionaries bringing the good news of peace and brotherhood to the savage Earthlings. As an adult I mainly noticed its campiness, though just about every movie from the 195os looks campy now. For years I nursed a major schoolboy crush on Michael Rennie, the Brit dreamboat who played Klaatu, and even in my dotage I can still see why: those Hepburn cheekbones, the willowy build, the accent, the reserve combined with warmth. (It also seemed to me as I watched the movie last night that Rennie resembled David Bowie, or vice versa. Was Ziggy Stardust a younger brother of Klaatu?)

I think I'm going to look at some critical writing on The Day the Earth Stood Still later on, but for now I just want to write about how it looked to me this time around.

Which was not all that different from how it looked to me as a kid. The film studies professor who introduced the film talked about its Cold War context, which is obvious enough, and its similarity to other Cold-War alien-as-Other movies that followed. But Day actually rejects the Cold War. Klaatu is dismissive of both the American and the Soviet governments' excuses for not convening the international meeting he demands for the delivery of his ultimatum. The film makes it clear that both sides, the US and the Soviet Union, are to blame for the dangerous international situation, and what the Cold War regarded as world-historical political conflict is brushed aside as petty, childish squabbling. Characters who voice conventional political sentiments are shown as foolish, like Aunt Bee, I mean Mrs. Barley who says "If you want my opinion, he came from right here on Earth. And you know where I mean." The reporter who cut short the incognito Klaatu's remarks about the dangers of reacting out of fear rather than reason got laughs from last night's college audience; he's a reminder that the broadcast media have always preferred soundbytes to discourse. The sympathetic Helen Benson immediately dumps her oafish boyfriend Tom when he makes it clear that he cares only about notoriety, not saving the earth.

The movie's politics take a dive into sentimentality when Klaatu and Bobby visit the Lincoln Memorial and admire the conclusion of the Gettysburg Address. That Lincoln presided over one of the bloodiest and most destructive wars in history up to his time is tactfully left out of the story.

The biggest laugh of the night went to the doctor who tells a colleague that the life expectancy on Klaatu's planet is 130, confesses that "He was very nice about it, but he made me feel like a third-class witch doctor" -- and then offers the other doctor a cigarette, which is accepted. I was especially amused by the newscaster Drew Pearson's wearing his hat as he read the news on his television program, though he was the only media figure shown doing so.

Klaatu's initial announcement, "We have come to visit you in peace and with goodwill," is disingenuous -- he comes bearing a threat of planetary destruction if we don't clean up our act -- and Gort the robot is the forerunner of the Terminator. (Does "Klaatu barada nikto" translate as "I'll be back"?)* Or at least of Skynet, and of the Machines from the Matrix. Klaatu explains that his people created a "race of robots" to police them, stamping out any "aggression" as soon as it appears. And really, wasn't it foolish of Klaatu in his first encounter with human beings to hold out an unexplained object as he marched silently down the spaceship's ramp toward the crowd? Leaving aside his people's study of human behavior via radio before he was sent here, which should have given him some idea it's important to remember that Klaatu's people aren't naturally pacific either -- that's why they built their robots.

The film studies professor's attempt to draw a connection to other sf movies in which the alien monster symbolizes the Red (or Yellow) menace seemed to me off the mark. The movie mocks the hoi polloi's readiness to imagine the Man from Space (whom they have seen only in his shiny spacesuit and mask) as a creature with tentacles, a Bug-Eyed Monster. Michael Rennie isn't the Blob, the Thing, or the Creature from the Black Lagoon: the trope of a slow-moving monster carrying a frightened human woman its arms is played out here by the robot Gort. (It's the brunette Patricial Neal whom Gort carries, though, not this bare-shouldered blonde -- who doesn't appear in the movie.) Day belongs to another strand in science fiction, which was already well-established in the genre: the story about a Kindly But Stern intergalactic dog-trainer who comes to rub our noses in our poop -- but will we allow ourselves to be housebroken, or will we have to be put down? Damon Knight had already mocked the theme in his 1950 story "To Serve Man." Other examples that come to mind include Edgar Pangborn's story "Angel's Egg," published in the same year that Day was released, a milder version of the fable in which the author laments our human immaturity and allows his cute extraterrestrial visitor to drain away his memories. (If only all lesser breeds were willing to sacrifice their lives to their superiors in the name of scientific research!) In 1958 Robert Heinlein published Have Space Suit Will Travel, in which an American teenager finds himself as one of several human samples before an intergalactic tribunal, and responds to criticism of Homo sapiens with a "You and what army?" defiance. But hey, you don't look to Hollywood for innovative science fiction.

I also guess I'll finally grit my teeth and take a look at the 2008 remake starring Keanu Reeves, if only to see how they updated it. And really, who better than Teh Keanu to reprise Rennie as a beautiful, human-but-not-quite visitor from outer space who dies and is raised from the dead? (Other candidates for the original role, according to IMDB's trivia page, included Spencer Tracy and Claude Rains.) The Christ-figure symbolism in the 1951 version was deliberate, and Reeves had already played a dying-and-rising character who brings Good News to Modern Man a decade earlier.

*I know it doesn't, but an Ahnuld joke had to go in there somewhere.

Have You Ever Seen a Grown Extraterrestrial Naked, Bobby?

Last night I saw Robert Wise's 1951 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still on a big screen for the first time. I first saw it on TV at the age of twelve or so, and one time on video as an adult. It made a big impression on me as a kid, of course, with its message of benign interplanetary missionaries bringing the good news of peace and brotherhood to the savage Earthlings. As an adult I mainly noticed its campiness, though just about every movie from the 195os looks campy now. For years I nursed a major schoolboy crush on Michael Rennie, the Brit dreamboat who played Klaatu, and even in my dotage I can still see why: those Hepburn cheekbones, the willowy build, the accent, the reserve combined with warmth. (It also seemed to me as I watched the movie last night that Rennie resembled David Bowie, or vice versa. Was Ziggy Stardust a younger brother of Klaatu?)

I think I'm going to look at some critical writing on The Day the Earth Stood Still later on, but for now I just want to write about how it looked to me this time around.

Which was not all that different from how it looked to me as a kid. The film studies professor who introduced the film talked about its Cold War context, which is obvious enough, and its similarity to other Cold-War alien-as-Other movies that followed. But Day actually rejects the Cold War. Klaatu is dismissive of both the American and the Soviet governments' excuses for not convening the international meeting he demands for the delivery of his ultimatum. The film makes it clear that both sides, the US and the Soviet Union, are to blame for the dangerous international situation, and what the Cold War regarded as world-historical political conflict is brushed aside as petty, childish squabbling. Characters who voice conventional political sentiments are shown as foolish, like Aunt Bee, I mean Mrs. Barley who says "If you want my opinion, he came from right here on Earth. And you know where I mean." The reporter who cut short the incognito Klaatu's remarks about the dangers of reacting out of fear rather than reason got laughs from last night's college audience; he's a reminder that the broadcast media have always preferred soundbytes to discourse. The sympathetic Helen Benson immediately dumps her oafish boyfriend Tom when he makes it clear that he cares only about notoriety, not saving the earth.

The movie's politics take a dive into sentimentality when Klaatu and Bobby visit the Lincoln Memorial and admire the conclusion of the Gettysburg Address. That Lincoln presided over one of the bloodiest and most destructive wars in history up to his time is tactfully left out of the story.

The biggest laugh of the night went to the doctor who tells a colleague that the life expectancy on Klaatu's planet is 130, confesses that "He was very nice about it, but he made me feel like a third-class witch doctor" -- and then offers the other doctor a cigarette, which is accepted. I was especially amused by the newscaster Drew Pearson's wearing his hat as he read the news on his television program, though he was the only media figure shown doing so.

Klaatu's initial announcement, "We have come to visit you in peace and with goodwill," is disingenuous -- he comes bearing a threat of planetary destruction if we don't clean up our act -- and Gort the robot is the forerunner of the Terminator. (Does "Klaatu barada nikto" translate as "I'll be back"?)* Or at least of Skynet, and of the Machines from the Matrix. Klaatu explains that his people created a "race of robots" to police them, stamping out any "aggression" as soon as it appears. And really, wasn't it foolish of Klaatu in his first encounter with human beings to hold out an unexplained object as he marched silently down the spaceship's ramp toward the crowd? Leaving aside his people's study of human behavior via radio before he was sent here, which should have given him some idea it's important to remember that Klaatu's people aren't naturally pacific either -- that's why they built their robots.

The film studies professor's attempt to draw a connection to other sf movies in which the alien monster symbolizes the Red (or Yellow) menace seemed to me off the mark. The movie mocks the hoi polloi's readiness to imagine the Man from Space (whom they have seen only in his shiny spacesuit and mask) as a creature with tentacles, a Bug-Eyed Monster. Michael Rennie isn't the Blob, the Thing, or the Creature from the Black Lagoon: the trope of a slow-moving monster carrying a frightened human woman its arms is played out here by the robot Gort. (It's the brunette Patricial Neal whom Gort carries, though, not this bare-shouldered blonde -- who doesn't appear in the movie.) Day belongs to another strand in science fiction, which was already well-established in the genre: the story about a Kindly But Stern intergalactic dog-trainer who comes to rub our noses in our poop -- but will we allow ourselves to be housebroken, or will we have to be put down? Damon Knight had already mocked the theme in his 1950 story "To Serve Man." Other examples that come to mind include Edgar Pangborn's story "Angel's Egg," published in the same year that Day was released, a milder version of the fable in which the author laments our human immaturity and allows his cute extraterrestrial visitor to drain away his memories. (If only all lesser breeds were willing to sacrifice their lives to their superiors in the name of scientific research!) In 1958 Robert Heinlein published Have Space Suit Will Travel, in which an American teenager finds himself as one of several human samples before an intergalactic tribunal, and responds to criticism of Homo sapiens with a "You and what army?" defiance. But hey, you don't look to Hollywood for innovative science fiction.

I also guess I'll finally grit my teeth and take a look at the 2008 remake starring Keanu Reeves, if only to see how they updated it. And really, who better than Teh Keanu to reprise Rennie as a beautiful, human-but-not-quite visitor from outer space who dies and is raised from the dead? (Other candidates for the original role, according to IMDB's trivia page, included Spencer Tracy and Claude Rains.) The Christ-figure symbolism in the 1951 version was deliberate, and Reeves had already played a dying-and-rising character who brings Good News to Modern Man a decade earlier.

*I know it doesn't, but an Ahnuld joke had to go in there somewhere.