Reading Wednesday 26/8

[liv]

Recently read

• Cyteen, by CJ Cherryh. (c) CJ Cherryh 1988, Pub 1995 Warner Books, ISBN 978-0-446-67167-9
  
• He, she and it, by Marge Piercy. (c) Marge Piercy 1991, Pub Del Rey 2016, ISBN 9781473529724

Back to back rereads of two feminist SF classics from 35 years ago. I didn't quite intend to put them together but there might be something in the juxtaposition. I picked Cyteen as my homework book, because I'd been meaning to reread it and I reckoned it was dense and thinky enough to have something to say about it. And then the same prof picked He, she and it as the intro book for a new theological SF reading group she's starting.

Cyteen is absolutely gripping. Even though it's long, even though it has too much infodump, even though I was reading it for the second time. There were a couple of early chapters where Cherryh tried to fill the reader in on all the politics and history of the Union and Alliance for readers like me who haven't avidly devoured the whole complex meta-series, and I was a bit bored and considering that I might no longer be the right reader for this. But once it started telling stories about individual characters I couldn't put it down.

On a crude level Cyteen is kind of about the nature versus nurture debate, and it has some really interesting exploration of that, especially considering that it was published over 10 years before the sequencing of the human genome. It's head and shoulders above most 20^th century SF in its handling of genetics; it portrays genetics, including gene editing, as a science, including experiments which sometimes go wrong, and factors that can't be fully modelled leading to unpredictable outcomes. It isn't assuming that once we understand the biology of inheritance we'll have quasi-magical powers over creating humans exactly to spec, and it's not a horror story about how genetic engineering is playing God and will lead to inevitable doom. Similarly with computers. Cherryh does a reasonable job of projecting forward from 1988 to the space-faring future; computers have become far more powerful, and are networked, but they're not magic and they're not gods.

I really like the conceit that cloning someone requires not just an identical DNA sequence, but identical upbringing and circumstances. Which is obviously impossible, but the exploration of what happens if you try is fascinating. However, I no longer have the patience to entertain the concept that slavery isn't bad if you treat the slaves well and indeed put effort into psychologically programming them so that they love their enslaved circumstances. I am not sure that this is the view that Cherryh is promoting, but it's presented as morally ambivalent and different characters have different views about it. When I previously read Cyteen I had mixed feelings about the way the book uses rape as a plot point. Rereading nearly 20 years later (!) I'm much more negative towards this element of the book. I think in many ways Ari Senior is a great example of a horrible and yet compelling character; jack is reading Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota books, where I bounced off the first of the quartet because I just couldn't deal with Mycroft. Ari is morally extremely awful, not least because she rapes her grad student, but I really want to keep reading about her. When I was younger I was much more sympathetic towards Ari II, but this time round I see her as only relatively less bad than her progenitor. She is a child, she is being massively manipulated by powerful adults, but she's a terrible person.

I read He, she and it (under its UK title Body of Glass) so long ago that it was pre-LJ days, maybe within a few years of its publication. I remember hating it, hating what it did with Jewish material and feminism and sexuality. So I really didn't approach the reread with positive expectations. I like it better this time round, I still have problems with it but it didn't annoy me as much. I think this may be partly a factor of being enough older than the main character, Shira, to feel sorry for her instead of being annoyed with her.

The other thing is that much of the historic background of the book is set roughly now whereas when it was published in 1988 it was all future history. It's not productive to compare Piercy's predictions of the next 50 years with what actually happened! Basically we have a post-climate disaster dystopian future, which projects forward things that feminists were afraid of the 1980s, corporate takeover of the few scarce resources left to humanity, retrenchment of oppressive gender roles. I'm not quibbling about the exact imagined history of the early 21^st century, but I feel like Piercy sets up a doom scenario and then doesn't take it seriously enough. Like she mentions billions of deaths, widespread crop failure, and a world where the majority of the survivors live in toxic, violence-ridden wasteland. But she doesn't seem to care about them, because her characters live in the feminist Jewish free town of Tikva and have skills that are valuable to the rich elites. On the one hand Piercy is pessimistic about the world becoming all but uninhabitable by, um, the 2020s, but on the other she's optimistic about people continuing to have much the same lifestyle as we do now despite not being able to breathe the air or grow food across most of the planet.

The actual plot of the book revolves around a pair of brilliant computer scientists creating a cyborg, who is explicitly compared to the golem legend. It's trying to address questions like, is a cyborg a person? Is it ok to create a conscious being? Computer science and robotics are not quite a completely imaginary discipline by 1990 but Piercy was free to invent what she wanted. As high tech computer futures go, I've seen worse, I've seen better. It uses the trope of direct brain to computer interface, and partly explores the ways that cyberspace is different from meatspace, such as being able to create a persona or avatar.

However, the whole thing gets completely derailed into a very basic sexual fantasy: what if it was possible to have sex with a man who's much stronger than you but is programmed (literally programmed) to never harm you? To be fair to Piercy, not only did she not know what directions computer and internet tech would take, she also couldn't have read the vast flourishing of female-authored fanfic and erotica from recent decades. I'm not one to kink-shame, I have no problem with Shira getting her perfect cyborg mate, though I wish it wasn't portrayed as what all women want sexually. Also, the moral exploration of this situation centres very much on the question of what does it say about her if she's more attracted to a cyborg than to fully biological men, rather than the much more important question of whether it's in any way ethical to have sex with someone who is sentient but programmed to be a perfect lover and do whatever pleases his female partner without any selfish desire. I basically don't care about sex robots, and I don't find the idea of a female-designed sex robot that novel.

That said, as a more mature reader I did care more about the plot and the efforts to save Tikva and the eventual fate of the cyborg-golem. There are places where Piercy, who is possibly better known as a poet than a novelist, makes inexplicably bad language choices, such as describing failed cyborgs as "autistic" or using the term "The Troubles" for an imagined nuclear war that annihilates most of the Middle East. But I am actually looking forward to discussing this with experts and enthusiasts!

Anyway, this reminds me that you should read mrissa's excellent piece on rereading!

Currently reading

• A little history of mathematics by Snezana Lawrence. Snezana is a member of my community and I asked for this as a Chanukah present. I've been kind of dipping into it rather than reading it cover to cover, but it's so much better than all the popular maths books I was devouring as a teenager. Firstly it doesn't assume that maths was invented in Classical Greece and then nothing happened until Newton and Leibniz (except maybe there were some exotic oriental types who invented the word 'algebra'). It looks at maths from a definitely European perspective, but is still interested in what was going on elsewhere in the world whether or not Europeans were aware of the advances at the time. It has women in it other than Hypatia. I mean she was cool, but she was not the only female mathematician in history.
  
  There probably isn't a perfectly goldilocks amount of maths in a popular maths book, but I think aLHoM strikes a good balance of explaining mathematical insights and advances without making the reader go through all the equations or geometric diagrams step by step to be able to understand things. It also has the most gorgeous chapter headings, woodcuts drawn by Kat Flint, and a really lively narrative style that makes historical figures seem real.
  
  
• Breaking Binaries by R Elli Tikvah Sarah. I have a kind of complicated history with R Elli but we had a really profound conversation earlier in the summer, and also their latest book has a chapter about people who are neither fully Jewish nor fully outside the community, which is probably what I want to work on for my final thesis. I think of R Elli as primarily an activist; they were a key figure in the fight for same-sex marriage in the early 1990s. I'd sort of forgotten that they're an incredibly lucid interpreter of the Bible, and I'm getting a lot out of the book even before I get to the Beyond the Jew / Non-Jew Binary chapter.

Comments

[wychwood]

I should probably reread Cyteen. I find Cherryh hard work to read, because it's nearly always very dense and emotionally fraught, but also her best stuff is so good. And I feel very sorry for Ari II though certainly not as much as I do for e.g. Grant!

[liv]

I definitely enjoyed the experience of rereading. It is emotionally hard work but it's also a cracking great story! And yeah, the narrative really wants you to feel sorry for the poor little rich girl Ari who has everything she can even imagine asking for (but a whole lot of fucked up politics and interpersonal awfulness), and not for the various azi who have to sacrifice themselves providing it for her. The chapters from Grant's and child Florian's points of view are heartbreaking, and then the book throws you straight back to Ari's viewpoint where they're pretty much just human machines.

[davidgillon]

I think Justin's rape is made even worse by part of why AE1 does it to him being that she thinks it will be good for him. *Shudder*

Between her and Jordan, it's a miracle Justin and Grant survived to adulthood.

For deeply disturbing exploitation of the Azi, I do think 40,000 in Gehenna is potentially worse, but mostly on a matter of scale.

[liv]

Yeah, I'm in a way more tempted by 40,000 than Regenesis, partly based on the allusions to it in Cyteen and partly because Cherryh wrote it in the same headspace and not decades later.

I am not convinced Ari thinks her sexual torture of Justin is good for him exactly, I think she thinks being able to manipulate him through inducing intense trauma is good for the overall Reseune project. And she doesn't have any ability to discriminate between good for Reseune, good for humanity, and getting Ariane Emory more power. The scene, disturbing though it is, is a very good portrayal of a rapist in a position of power, where there's some element of quasi-consent, so she can almost convince herself that the victim being turned on means they're actually into it.

[davidgillon]

And she doesn't have any ability to discriminate between good for Reseune, good for humanity, and getting Ariane Emory more power.

Oh, good point. I'm fairly certain she sees power for AE1 as essential for humanity, and good for Reseune as simply shoring up her own powerbase. But, as best I recall, Cyteen isn't as clear in bringing out the political element of AE1's power, as Councillor for Science, as Regenesis is when AE2's position is threatened by Defence.

I am not convinced Ari thinks her sexual torture of Justin is good for him exactly

My impression was she thought it made the difference between Justin being just Jordan's clone, and Justin being a Special (even if he then keeps his light under a bushel and isn't actually considered a Special by most people). But it's a good five years since I last re-read Cyteen and I don't have a copy to hand to check that.

[mrissa]

So glad you liked the rereading piece, thank you!

[liv]

Thank you for thinking deeply and clearly about these things.

[ambyr]

Since you say that you haven't read the rest of Alliance-Union, I will mention that Cyteen (and 40k in Gehenna and Regenesis) are the only books from Union's perspective, and everything Alliance side portrays Union as straight-up evil. I don't think Cherryh thinks you're supposed to take away from this "that slavery isn't bad if you treat the slaves well"! Certainly the protagonists believe this, but Cyteen is her attempt to write villain-perspective after many previous books establishing that they're the bad guys and their moral code is utterly fucked up.

[liv]

Ah, so it's not meant to be morally ambiguous, it's meant to be villain POV? That makes sense. I'm not sure I would have read it in the first place knowing that, and then I would have missed out. 20-something Liv was willing to entertain SF thought experiments about, what if morality doesn't work the way we think it does, and almost 50 Liv has much less patience for that sort of thing.

I think I've read one Alliance book, Pride of Chanur, but I didn't get into much. From memory of a long time ago I think it was too much of an establishing book where not enough actually happened.

Would you recommend Regenesis? Despite her awfulness I got to the end of Cyteen and really wanted to spend more time with Ari, and of course the advantage of coming from a future perspective is that I can lay hands on the long-delayed sequel if I want to.

[ambyr]

I mean...do you like curtainfic? Because Regensis is basically curtainfic. I've read it twice, I don't hate it, it will certainly let you spend more time with Ari II, but it is very low down the list of my Cherryh recommendations.

[liv]

Thank you, that's a helpful description. On the one hand I read about half a dozen novels a year these days and I don't see that changing, so I'm a bit nervous to plunge in to this set of 27 books, but it's also possible that the best of them are better than anything else I might spend my limited reading time on.

[davidgillon]

I think I've read one Alliance book, Pride of Chanur,

The Chanur books really don't interplay strongly with Alliance/Union. Yes, the Alliance is somewhere off-screen to the side, but that's really just there to say Tully came from Somewhere, and Compact Space might want to put up a united front when dealing with them.

I'm not certain Cyteen/Regenesis and 40,0000 in Gehenna are entirely Villain POV, as arguably the real ongoing villains in the Alliance/Union books are the Mazianni Fleet, and they're initially on the Alliance side. Downbelow Station is the story where that Alliance-Mazianni pairing is flipped on its head and Alliance, Union and Signy Mallory/Norway turn on them. Union was the faceless other in the war, it was the Mazianni the merchanters really feared.

There is one more book that arguably is Union-facing at least in part, and that's Merchanter's Luck as the protagonist, Sandor, is a Union merchanter, but its a starcrossed lovers romance set Alliance-side which doesn't really get into Union politics, which I don't think Cherryh had really explored for herself before Cyteen.

[princessofgeeks]

Thanks for the review of Cyteen. I was glued to all those books in real time but you are right; they are morally very questionable for several reasons. When I reread them in my 30s I was appalled at the rape stuff and the azi's as devoted love slaves stuff.

[liv]

Was too young for it when it was actually published, but I know it's formative for a lot of my slightly older friends. (I was a very precocious 10-year-old but Cyteen would have been a terrible idea!) There's lots of feminist SF/F from that era which has terrible consent politics, a lot of id-fic about, what if women had power over men, wouldn't that be hot?

I think my biggest problem on re-read is not Ari Senior's rape of Justin, because that's clearly portrayed as an evil act within the book. But Ari II's near-rape of Florian, which is portrayed as a somewhat positive thing because she sort of asks, but you have to ignore the fact that Florian has literally been bred and trained his whole life to be motivated to please Ari. Also they are 12, ew.

[kass]

Oh, man, I remember reading He, She, and It when it came out. Good God but 1991 was a long time ago now.

[liv]

Yeah, this whole experience has given me a lot of feelings about the passage of time. The ozone depletion and nuclear war fear of the 1980s which to my amazement humanity actually dealt with. (Not that there is no danger from these things, but they're a long way down the list of things to worry about compared to Piercy writing before the collapse of the USSR.) The increasing impossibility of loving Israel since the 80s; Piercy would have been aware of Sabra and Shatila but the direction of the country since the Rabin assassination she couldn't have predicted. The American right not being Reaganist, pro-corporate, subtle and polite about their racism, only caring about making money; but MAGA Trumpist, destroying economic prosperity while also being overtly Fascist.

The immense progress in gender equality and LGBTQ+ acceptance in our, and Piercy's, lifetime, even though there is also backlash. Malka was ground-breaking as a theoretically bisexual character (one who has a male online persona who flirts with women, so daring!). Piercy was right that women rabbis have become normal, I think that was already visible from 15 years after R Priesand's ordination. But women more generally at the top of their careers or in positions of political power, including right wing and far right women, seems much more precarious and surprising in He, She and It than it does now.

My partners' 14yo is watching Buffy and I'm having many of the same feels about that. He just can't imagine a world where everybody is straight except maybe Willow, where teenagers and young adults hang out in pretty much all white social circles, where a female action hero is considered surprising.

[goljerp]

I think it's also important to remember (or to know) that He, She, and It was also influenced by / in conversation with Cyberpunk. When I read it (in 1991), I think it was obvious. So it's interesting that you were citing, e.g., corporate takeover of resources as a feminist concern; while I think it's fair to say that Piercy is (and was) a feminist, I don't think that cyberpunk in general was particularly feminist.

I love Cyteen; I liked Regenesis, except I didn't particularly care for the revelation of who Ari 1's murderer was. I mean, maybe Cherryh was intending it all along, but it felt to me like in Cyteen she specifically left it open. And, of course, there's now the knowledge that Cherryh is probably never going to write a sequal to Regenesis, although she definitely left a door wide open for one. (It has an ending, but there are clear hooks for another book...)

[liv]

Thank you, that's a really useful insight. Clearly He, She and It is cyberpunk, but I wasn't really thinking about genre when I read it.

I thought I knew who the murderer was by the end of Cyteen, but perhaps it's not stated explicitly that it's the same person who attempted to assassinate Ari II.

[goljerp]

Also the problem (and it is a problem) with Azi is that in many of them are more tools than independent actors. Would an Azi act on their own to kill Ari I? If not, who pulled their trigger?