July 16th, 2006
by
Yonmei
The short story on which “Millennium” is based is one I read in my school library, I think – or if not, in Newington Library about the same time, in the anthology In the Hall of the Martian Kings, which I discover was published by Futura in 1978. In that anthology, the story that struck me most was “The Persistence of Vision”, not the story about the time-traveller Louise.
(Given that it was first published in 1983, a spoiler cut may be redundant, but just in case…)
It works well (I think) as an extension into a long story/short novel: the interweaving viewpoints of the “present day” (1980s) air crash investigator, Bill (who doesn’t exist in the short story), and the “distant future” operative, Louise, who rescues people from planes about to crash where there will be no survivors, is done well.
But there’s one thing in the novel, not in the short story, that truly bugs me. In the short story consistently, and through most of the novel, the inhabitants of this distant future, Eloi or Morlocks, wear “skinsuits” – whole-body masks that can be worn permanently. They can be set to appear however you like: the members of the snatch teams use their skinsuits to disguise themselves as flight attendants. There’s a brief scene where we see one operative taking her skin suit off: Louise mentions the skinsuit that she and that others wear casually and consistently. It’s an odd gadget, sure, but it’s just there: this is the 500th century (or thereabouts), and they have skinsuits. You cannot tell who has leprosy or organrot, who has limbs missing (the narrator has a missing leg) replaced by artificial limbs.
Until right at the end, when the narration switches to her robot “personal therapist”, Sherman, who says that the skinsuit was just a fantasy that the narrator believed in, that the face and body she mentions through the novel as a beautiful lie – borrowed from a 30th-century movie star – were her real face and body.
And every time – even the first time I read it – I thought, oh, what?
What is achieved by this change? Well, if we believe Sherman, this means that Louise was even crazier than we thought, and we already knew she was insane in some quite important ways. But if the skinsuit was a fantasy Louise used for her own mental protection, because she had to believe she was protected by it, then she also imposed this fantasy on others; she hallucinated the scene where Pinky strips out of her skinsuit and hands it to her snatch team manager. She’s set up this entire, consistent, fantasy world for herself where she believes there are skinsuits – and, if we believe Sherman (and while he’s an unreliable narrator, we are given no reason to believe that he’s lying to us in this moment) she believes this so strongly that she can see other people wearing skinsuits and taking them off. We were given no reason to believe that Louise was this detached from reality before: this casts a new light on her actions and sayings throughout the previous narrative.
Or, Sherman was lying. Except that isn’t signalled.
Or, which I think is most likely: Varley glitched. He did a great job with Louise as a hero. But at the end of the novel, Louise takes a heroine’s ending – going off to marry Bill and bear them both a daughter and die on their new world. He could deal with his hero being an ugly woman inside a skinsuit when she was a hero. But then he thought – without thinking about the consequences of his decision – that she really ought to be a beautiful woman for real. Not an ugly para-leper, where what she can do is more important than what she looks like: she’s got to be really gorgeous. So he took back the skinsuit, told us Louise was a fantasist who made all that up, and gave her to Bill as a woman who really is gorgeous.
And I wish he hadn’t done that. Every time I get to the end of Millennium, I wish it.
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Yonmei at
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Filed under Books & Literature, female characters | Comments (5)
Okay, that’s really weird. Because I’ve read Millennium half a dozen times and I have no memory of the last minute skinsuit fix. Somewhere along the line I think my unconscious must have edited it out because it’s so stupid and unnecessary. I’ll have to go reread it now.
I like a lot of Varley’s work, but he has some serious issues about sexual identity that he never seems to quite resolve.
This is such a persistant trope! I notice it all over and it bugs me. In “In the Country of Last Things” by Paul Auster (not, of course, a noted feminist) he goes out of his way to reassure us that his heroine (and she’s very sexy, we’ve been told that MANY times) is able to continue shaving her legs even in a very difficult and deprived situation….because we of course could not BEAR to read about a woman, no matter how sexy, if we suspected for a MINUTE that she had stubbly legs.
It’s just so patronizing and condescending…it makes me feel absolutely disincluded from the world, because I am not a flawless barbie doll and I am, by this authorial logic, utterly peripheral and unworthy.
(Although I do like middle-period John Varley stories–the unfortunately named collection “The Barbie Murders”–a lot.)
Hello! I always thought it was all about Louise’s chances of having a perfectly healthy baby – “the kid” was her greatest sorrow and it was really tragic when she finally told about it and the guy did not really get it. I thought Bill was a bit shallow and did not really understand Louise. I did not think her body image or whatever was so important; all the future people seemed to be a bit crazy but in the end Louise got a chance to be whole, if just for a short time… just my 2 cents.
Johanna from Finland
And every time – even the first time I read it – I thought, oh, what?
Ah – I’m not the only person to run across that scene – it’s like a speed bump.
I would have to re-read the novel to know for sure – but I would guess that skin-suits are a for real kinda thing in Louis Baltimore’s world, but Louise does not need to wear one.
Of course the woman is crazy nuts but maybe not quite that crazy. Or maybe not crazy – I’m not a pshrink but I’ve got it stuck in my head that adaptation to odd circumstance is not ‘crazy’ but rational. Louise adapted to her world well enough to function so .. she’s not crazy.
Now .. crazy would be posting on a blog entry a year after it was posted ..
I’m fairly sure that Varley has Sherman mock the very existence of the skinsuit, not just specify that Louise Baltimore isn’t wearing one. But I’d need to check the text to be sure, since it’s been over a year now since I last read it. I’ll check back when I do.