A Patriarchalness in the Sky

by Liz Henry

As I started off into Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky I don’t even know what I expected. Surely I’d read something by him before, or had an impression that here was a book worth keeping from my friend’s giant box of giveaway books? Early on, several Super Space Babe characters were set up. They were young, geniusly smart, sexy, perky, useful, Asimovian Future Women who were described in terms of how deeply they were adored by powerful, geniusly smart men. Note the “powerful” bit. There was a lone plucky young girl of about 12 who was the genius baby darling of the spaceship. It smelled like a setup, and somewhat crestfallen, I figured all the plucky women would have 18 babies and spontaneously decide to abandon their careers soon enough as the plot moved along. Oh, what an innocent I was!

Because by page 200 they’d all been raped, and braindamaged, or raped and braindamaged, or raped and braindamaged and tortured and killed. It’s almost like the science fiction old-guy universe had never heard of “Women in Refrigerators” and never thought about it. So, not for the first time, I find myself reading a science fiction book where supposedly everything is all equality la la land and half of all the top scientists and military and political leaders are women. But those “successful” women are created only to be tortured and destroyed. And so quickly. And the ones that stick around are wrong, or just not quite good enough, or are revealed to be traitors, or blind, or not at all as much geniuses as the Great Men Who Matter. Yes… it’s got that too, the one-in-a-million Great Men of History who invent everything and establish empires!

So right about the time the brain-damaging rape and mindwipe scenes started hitting, I had a sort of feminist rage nostril-flareout and started going back and marking up the book.

One main thing that pissed me off hugely was the ways that the child character, Qiwi, starts off a child and then because of the rest of the crew being in coldsleep, grows up, but is constantly described to emphasize her child nature. She’s juvenilized in nearly every scene. I suppose this is done to make her an appealing character and to be all symbolic of the Nation (or as I came to think of it, the not-quite nation or sorta-empire trading entity of free market libertarianly wankeriness) abused and born anew. Ask me how much I love when women characters are just metaphors for nation-states… Anyway, spunky, rebellious little Qiwi grows up, sleeps with the boss man of the enemy because she’s fooled by a giant lie that the two guy-heroes aren’t fooled by and don’t bother to inform her about, continues being so childish it’s freaky, is described as a child, or remembers her childhood, or relates to other people while thinking of how she felt about them when she was a child, and her pathological need to please various people is because of her childhood, etc. – So where is the creepy part? Well, as I mentioned, the repeated rapes and mindwipes and brain damages and raping and torturing and the way her boyfriend is a monster who thinks of her as his fuckdoll, oh and not to mention he raped and tortured and murdered her mom, but she never realizes it even though she’s a PERKY GENIUS ™ both because she doesn’t want to realize it because of her childlike girlish enthusiasm, and then (later) because every time she realizes it, they know, and they mind-wipe her again. Meanwhile, I also smelled with disgust from the very beginning that the Hero-Dude’s girlfriend was doomed in some way and that he was Destined to be with the perky Qiwi who had a childhood crush on him and who really he loved all along. He was so blind! Yes – of course this came true. Gross!

And yeah, I like flying kittens, but they just made it worse.

Child Qiwi is always grinning. She babbles charmingly about Mama and Papa. She’s uncannily full of insight. She teases. She cocks her head. “She looked at him sideways, a chil pretending to conspiracy” (p. 34). Then by p. 194 Qiwi is… well, around college age or older, but she’s still described (through the eyes of Tomas Nau, her boyfriend and head of the enemies) in terms of her youth, vulnerability, sexual usefulness, and exploitability:

Nau let his hands roam her flanks; he felt the worry slowly subside in her. Lots had gone wrong with this mission, but Qiwi Lin Lisolet coudl be counted a small triumph. She had been fourteen – precocious, naive, willful – when Nau took down the Qeng Ho fleet. The girl was properly infected with mindrot. She could have been Focusd; for a while he had considered making her his body toy. Thank the Plague I didn’t.

Then, within a couple of pages we can lift some phrases and actions and speech patterns of Qiwi, a good example of how she’s presented throughout the book, even when she’s much older woman:

“Tomas — ” she turned to face him directly. “Do you you think I’ll ever get the rockpile stabilized?”
….
Qiwi’s laughter made her sound even younger than she looked….
…
“Yeah, maybe you’re right… I do need to step back, think about things… Maybe… Besides, Papa is awake on this Watch. I’d like to be with him a little more.” She looked at him questioningly, implicitly asking for release from duty.
…
She sighed, smiled with a hint of mischievousness. … She reached down, and neither of them spoke for some time. Qiwi Lisolet was still a clumsy teenager, but she was learning. And Tomas Nau had years to teach her. Kira Pen Lisolet had not had nearly so much time, and had been a resisting adult. Nau smiled, remembering. Oh yes. In different ways, both mother and daughter had served him well.
(184-85)

Did you get that? Qiwi doubts herself. She’s a teenager. She does more smiley head-cocking childlike behaviors. Then she gives him a clumsy hand job (Gross!) while he smugly thinks about how he raped her mom and how long he’ll have to train her to be a better fucktoy.

Fine, Nau’s a psycho and a jerk, a rapist and mass murderer, and now is manipulating, undermining, and exploiting loveable Qiwi. Got it. Still reading the book. Getting more pissed off and suspicious though.

[More, way more, behind the cut]

Technorati Tags: books, ranting, reading, sciencefiction

Then from p. 186 we see from her point of view but 3rd person; her own narration about herself is incredibly childlike and not at all ringing true to me as how an intelligent geek girl raised to be ruler of a powerful dynasty would think. She’s with her brain-controlled Papa, placating, smiling, trying to please him, thinking how her Mama was right, she had “come a long way toward growing up.” Then the psychotic torturer enemy guy, Brueghel, threatens her; she stands up to him, insolent, laughing, teases and enrages him, but then “strange feelings” overcome her and she realizes how her Papa won’t protect her anymore, and begins trembling in fear. Okay… getting more warning signs. Qiwi is being established in our minds as more and more rapable.

At this point I stopped dogearing the pages and started marking them with sticky post-it flags. Really soon, I ran out of post-its.

In following pages it becomes clear that Brughel sees Qiwi as a nasty little slut, completely expendable, an enemy bitch who’s breaking rules and is getting away with it because she’s a “good lay”. Nau realizes that Brughel has “certain frustrated needs” that are his birthright as part of the Emergent uppper class, the Podmasters.

How about Qiwi’s own people? They also think of her as the enemy’s whore. Pham Nuwen, the ancient empire builder dude in disguise, at least is old enough to be excused for looking at her and seeing a “child”. As he constantly does. Then we get it that one of Pham’s “peculiarities” is sexism. (Which presumably isn’t a problem anywhere else in Qeng Ho culture?!) And he remembers an incident from his childhood where a 13 year old female cousin, Cindi, stood up to defend him and was probably killed for it. Throughout the book he harks back to that moment and his love for her and her heroism, which though it was heroic, was also a “silly, stupid, hopeless gesture” (218).

God, I marked a lot of places… too many… Basically, whenever Qiwi is mentioned, she is tied to being a child. On p. 283 she talks with Ezr Vinh and ponders her 13 year old crush on him. “On such occasions she wondered if the Diem massacre had somehow stunted her soul, trapped her affections as they were in the last innocent days before all the death…” Meanwhile her friends Luan and Floria are being raped and mindwiped or disappeared or something. Qiwi investigates, follows a trail, sneaks into Brughel’s private quarters, has weird nervous thoughts and then finds a creepy video of her boyfriend raping and cutting up her mom years ago and then she suddenly remembers all the other times she discovered this and was mindwiped. Ugh, and double ugh!

Qiwi got a glimpse of the corridor, of hands dragging her along. How many times has this happened before? No matter how hard she strained, she couldn’t move a muscle. Inside she was screaming. This time I will remember. I will remember.

Le sigh. So much for spunky, madcap, laughing, engineer-genius Qiwi, if we ever believed in her or liked her in the first place, which I didn’t.

Okay so far, our plucky girl engineer genius is NOT very enjoyable to read. Instead of feeling like we’re exploring something profound and interesting about women, rape, trauma, childhood abuse, domestic abuse, the suppression and recovery of memory, or whatever, I just am wildly annoyed. And now I venture into difficult territory, where I dip into authorial intent and reader response. As I mentioned, to me it feels like a setup for the female reader. Let’s make a smart woman character, then have her prattle and cling to her boyfriend! It comes off to me like a playing out of really sick anxieties and fantasies for the male writer or reader; anxious about feminism and women’s equal opportunity? Well then, let’s make some smart women characters and *destroy them*. I *don’t* have any reason as a reader to trust that the (male) writer has some “purpose” for writing this character, a purpose that’s at all relevant to me as a female reader.

However, in a book like L. Timmel Duchamp’s Renegade, the whole book is about Kay Zeldin, a strong female character, a very well developed one, being imprisoned, tortured psychologically and physically, mindfucked in every way, etc. It’s a very difficult book to read because of this intensity, but as a reader I trust that there’s a point to it! That that’s the point of the book! That it’s *about that* and it’s about human beings, human nature, real relationships, politics, and it’s exploring it for a reason! Same with something like Walk to the End of the World; full of brutality and violence towards women, but when I read it, I get that there’s a point and it’s done with feminist consciousness and – this might be the crucial part – done with female readers in mind. While in Vinge’s book, it’s just sort of “innocence/youth/femininity/female competence punished” created in order to flesh out male villainy (the only real, conscious, free-will villainy of the book; Nau and Brughel) and male heroism (Pham Nuwen and Ezr Vinh). (And a side note that could be developed out much further, they are corporate villains, they’re evil and heroic in some kind of weird capitalist/neoliberal/libertarian economic view where what’s important is what multinational corporations want to do, in such a way that I often was just holding the book at arm’s length staring at it with my mouth open and laughing my ass off in disbelief.)

We could further explore Anne Reynolt, Trixia Bonsol, Sura Vinh, and other female characters and that would be quite fruitful, in similar ways. Look at Anne and her competence, lack of being sexualized, and powerfulness; all destroyed completely quite early on since she’s revealed to be a mind-controlled slave and as she begins to be sexualized and objectified more and more. (Then, she gets to be a hero – another childlike hero like Cindi, a freedom fighter who was enslaved for centuries… She came out kind of cool at the end, though having to be rescued several times despite being a genius, but why the fuck pair her up sexually with Pham Nuwen… that screwed it up for me as well.) Trixia never gets raped, but her mind-control and brain damaged is described a couple of times as “a kind of rape” though the mind-controlled men are *not* described as raped. Look at Sura and how her aging is described, and how she just happens to choose to have a bunch of kids and stay home with them and watch over the empire and stuff, and then is made to seem a traitor, less visionary, the old scheming bitch who keeps the Great Man back and ruins his plans by subverting his children (and his “children” in terms of all his troops and plans for empire.)

Basically, even extra special genius women mess up and get exploited and raped and their plans fail and then they are forced to forget and they repeat their failures over and over; Men watch them, know about it, or cause it, and have a learning experience. Men mess up and *learn from the experience* and still manage to make their plan work suddenly at the last minute, because they’re extra special geniuses. They’re monitored every minute, but still keep a core of private rebellion. Their plans get discovered, but they still escape.

Any book that does that consistently through 800 pages is sexist crap. I think part of what pisses me off is the feeling that the author intended, and many people must have read, this to be somehow feminist or at least “not sexist” because it had women characters at all, women who were scientists and generals and had careers. However… I disagree strongly.

The gendering of the Spiders has still got it going on, though no one gets raped, which is nice, and super-sexy-spider Victory Smith’s “staying home” is framed in terms of her general telling her that now she can’t fight “in the field” anymore because she’s too valuable and her rank is too high. The result is the same, though; the strong competent female character is basically taken out of the story. She comes back at the end to give an important speech, but then there’s a nuke coming and her tough grizzled old male sergeant hustles her off to a possible safe place and that’s that. Bye, “Victory”, you’re old … no longer the hot young spider you used to be, remeber, back on page 68:

The speaker moved into view. She was… beautiful. Her legs were slender, hard, curving, and every motion had an understated grace. Her uniform was a black that Sherkaner didn’t recognize. … She looked impossibly young.”

Then, that annoying old-guy-book thing that happens all the time in like, movies from the 60s… you know what I mean… where there’s an important old guy who has political or financial power, and they meet a really hot young woman who is competent and useful and flirting with him, and that powerful old guy just happen to have incredible fond memories of the young woman’s mom and how hot she used to be and how damned lucky he is to have Hot Chick 2.0 at his disposal now; (where Hot Chick 1.0 is now isn’t really part of the picture, because women are replaceable and one can easily substitute for another, and rather than becoming more powerful authorities and their “hotness” continuing, it’s clear that juvenileness, exploitability, and hotness is the important bit; anyway that whole thing is damned annoying and if you’re a guy, just be on the lookout for doing that and ask yourself WTF when you start writing it into your stories.)

But like I said, the female spiders never get raped, so, score one for Vinge.

Guess what happens to Qiwi? I think she marries Vinh and founds a dynasty, ie has a gazillion babies. Right… er… ew. I dunno, if you were Qiwi, the first thing you want to do after surviving all that shit is marry someone and have a million babies? What? In what universe? Not mine.

Did I mention the book was also didactic and boring? And I *like* politics and blathery bits about fake biochemistry, nanobot computer networks, and weird astronomy; and didactic novels in general.

The complexity of the politics and morality was about on the level of that book about the matriarchal squid planet… what was it called… I realize the actual writing in Vinge’s book is more skillfully done, the technique is fine, the world built up interestingly enough, there were some nifty ideas, (true also of Nien, which is why I liked him in high school) but my god, the lack of vision as far as women being *people*! How can it be that a human being can imagine other worlds and other intelligent species, but not the sentience and agency of human women? This lack of vision and imagination is astonishing!

How can it be that other intelligent readers don’t even appear to notice the poison and the thorn?

Can I bear to waste the time to read the other one, which apparently this is the prequel to? I’ve heard people say that Vinge’s early work might be kinda annoying or sexist but that his later work is less so. I can’t tell if this book is earlier, or later.

Oh and by the way it doesn’t pass the Bechdel test, a rather astonishing feat for an 800-page book that *appears* to have so many female characters.

I felt unnerved to write this response to a book by a person successful in the field, apparently well respected by people I respect, a wildly successful book, but, whatever. Then I ran it by a friend, who said “OMG I wrote a post like that, and then felt unsure if I should post it, and googled to see if anyone else felt that way about the book, and didn’t see anything. But now I’ll post it.” So, I will too.

- More blogging by Liz Henry at http://liz-henry.blogspot.com

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