(no subject)

[forestofglory]

I've been reading a lot of Cherryh's Union/Alliance books lately (just finished Rimrunners) but I'm still not sure if I like them. I defiantly like the complex world building that she is doing. However one thing that bothers me is the sexism -- not the author's sexism exactly but the societies she writes about are fairly sexist -- pretty much in line with sexism at the time of writing. Cherryh makes it feel really creepy and unjust(eg the treatment of the male and female researchers in Forty Thousand in Gehenna) while kind of just expecting that's what life will be like for women in the future.

Comments

[cleverthylacine]

It doesn't particularly bother me because she doesn't seem to think that it is okay, nor is her fiction utopian or prescriptive. In fact when you consider how dystopian it actually is--they are, after all, using genetic engineering to justify human slavery, both of intentionally intellectually disabled people as well as the intentionally very gifted--I don't even find it surprising, because I expect to find intersecting oppressions rather than one and only one oppression that is an obvious stand-in for the author's pet issue in good worldbuilding.

I don't think that sexual oppression and gender-based oppression can ever be completely eradicated in societies that allow people to own each other, because of the temptation to sexually abuse people we don't think of as really human and over whom we have absolute power, and that was the origin of everyone in 40000 in Gehenna. Also in the person of Ari Emory I in Cyteen, she allows female as well as male characters to be creepily sexually oppressive.

Cherryh is not the author to read if you want visions of a better world or reassurance that things will get better in the future. Her premise seems to be that history tends to repeat itself as people come up with old solutions to new problems. She never does the sparkly hammer of justice thing where the social problem is solved by the end of the book with all malefactors punished or educated--but those aren't things I personally look for. If you want that you won't get it from her.

What I personally can't take is when an author creates a world that they obviously think is So Much Better And Less Oppressive than our own and their own internalised garbage is lying all over the place writ large. I like Lois Bujold but I get a lot of cringe-inducing moments from her stuff because the Betans think they're so much more socially advanced than everyone else but the gender stuff is WHACK and offensive and gross because the author herself seems impervious to actually getting it.

I don't mind if the author has created a world where some things are better, some things are worse and some things are broken in different ways, but I really hate it when one of the societies in a series is obviously the author's personal paradise and it's fucked up as hell but the author can't see that.

That said you might like the Foreigner series and Chanur series better. They are in the same universe but the cultures are a bit different and the gender dynamics of the atevi and the hani are interesting.

[forestofglory]

It bothers me in that I feel gross a icky reading about it. I don't Cherryh has a problem (well maybe excessive pessimism) but I'm also not sure if she aware of how she is incorporating real world sexism into her books.

[cleverthylacine]

I guess what I want to say is that this is an emotional reaction, and there's no way I'm going to argue with that. You feel the way you feel and there's no right or wrong way TO feel.

But I don't feel that way.

I don't believe that authors have an obligation to fix the problems of the real world if they want to write about the future, or that not doing so means they believe the world will always be the way it is now. :/

[forestofglory]

This totally an emotionality reaction. The way Cherryh writes about sexism in the books I've read gave me an icky crawling feeling. Because sexism is icky, and the sexism she writes about seems very insidious. I don't think she is a bad person for writing about sexism in her future world. I don't think she has any obligation to write books that don't have creepy sexism in them. And I don't think you are ought to have the same emotional reactions I do. (In fact it would be creepy if you did.)

[cleverthylacine]

Hmmm okay. I was getting a different impression at first, I thought maybe you were wanting to discuss the books as politically problematic, which I don't think they are because they're about a creepy society generally, the creepiness of which they totally acknowledge. The whole azi slavery thing is beyond creeptastic.

So I don't extrapolate from this that she's unaware of sexism or that she necessarily believes sexism will always be with us (which is where I initially thought you might be going here); I think she created a creepy society totally on purpose.

I happen to like a certain kind of creepy book quite a bit, though my favourite series of hers is the Foreigner series, which I don't find creepy at all. I'm not sure if you would like them, because the interpersonal male-female relations among humans seem very much like they are in our own world. (We see little societal/institutional gender stuff because there are very few human characters, but one of the human characters is the main male character's ex and involved with his brother.) Most of the time we're dealing with only one or two human characters living among aliens, and the alien male-female relations seem to be far more equitable.