One of my most favorite quotations about writing, from Umberto Eco, in the author notes to The Name of the Rose:
… when I put him in the library, I did not yet know he was the murderer. He acted on his own, so the speak. And it must not be thought that this is an ‘idealistic’ position, as if I were saying that the characters have an autonomous life and the author, in a kind of trance, makes them behave as they themselves direct him. That kind of nonsense belongs in term papers. The fact is that characters are obliged to act according to the laws of the world in which they live. In other words, the narrator is a prisoner of his own premises.
(My italics. My bolding, I mean, since Wordpress renders quotations in italics.)
This thought brought to you by working on Choice of Romance II. I.e., Crap, I didn’t create a variable for that!
Choice of Games is pleased to announce the release of Choice of Romance, by Heather Albano and Adam Strong-Morse! Play it on the web, or download the iPhone version or the Android version.
Play as a young aristocrat who comes to court looking for love… and catches the monarch’s eye. Will you find true love? Gain a crown? Lose your head? Choice of Romance is a text-based multiple choice game of romance, deception and court intrigue.
I’m not over at Tor.com participating in this conversation because I haven’t read enough Heinlein to be qualified to pass judgment on the treatment of women in his body of work.
Lack of qualification doesn’t stop me from airing my opinions on my own blog, though. 
So here we go.
I’ve read only Starship Troopers, Time Enough for Love, and the very beginning of To Sail Beyond the Sunset. (I’ll get to Stranger in a Strange Land someday, I promise.) Starship Troopers has, if I recall correctly, two female characters (the mother and the female pilot) who are onstage for a grand total of something like five pages. So moving right along. Let’s talk about Heinlein’s treatment of women in Time Enough for Love.
Ms. Hoyt postulates the following reasons for why “some women feel required to stone Heinlein in effigy whenever his name is mentioned”:
Oh, yeah, I know, he wrote women who like sex and all penetration is violation (my aching left foot) and all that rot. Which is why vast pickets of marching women have formed outside every theater showing Sex and the City, right? No? Odd.
Wait—it’s because he wrote women who wanted to have babies. And this, as we all know, is a gross lie. Liberated women do NOT want to have babies. This is why there is absolutely NO industry devoted to infertility, in vitro fertilization, and other techniques devoted to helping women who built high power careers first realize their dream of having babies. Also, older women who are educated and have careers do not EVER adopt from abroad, with or without the help/support of a husband. In fact these things were never heard of. Wait—WHAT? What parallel universe is this?
So it must be because his women characters were attracted to men and tried to be attractive to the male gender. Of course, he should never write things that do not portray the life of women in the current world. Women are NEVER attracted to men. As for dressing for men—why, you can’t find a pair of high heels anywhere on display in store windows. Dresses? What are dresses? They’ve long been abolished. The closest to dressing nice a woman goes is the pantsuit…unless one looks outside the Women’s Studies departments in colleges—but who would want to do that?
Okay—if everyone is done screaming, may we now speak as adults discussing adult problems?
You betcha, Ms. Hoyt. Coming right up. Taking the points in turn:
1) My issue with the women in Time Enough for Love is not that they like sex… but that they are all so desperate to have sex with their men that they will do so on any terms the man dictates.
“Lazarus, if Ira refuses me—refuses me utterly; he need not marry me—would you… teach me ‘Eros’?”
– Minerva
I also can’t help noticing that although the man dictating the terms is Ira in the example I just quoted, usually the man who dictates terms to women dying to sleep with him is Lazarus. The POV character. Marty Stu, much?
2) My second issue with the women in Time Enough for Love is not that they want babies… but that they want to have Lazarus Long’s babies so much that they will do so (again) on any terms he dictates.
“Lazarus, I’m certain you’ve married your descendents in the past; is there some reason to discriminate against me? If you’ll tell me, perhaps I can correct it… Or it could be for progeny only, though I would be proud and happy to be permitted to live with you.”
– Hamadrayad
“Time is short, you are leaving. Can you truly forgive me? Will you put your child into me before you go?” Her eyes were welling tears, but she stared at him steadily. “I want your child, Lazarus. I will not ask twice… but I could not let you leave without asking.”
– Minerva
“It’s time for you to impregnate us.”
“Both of us.”
- Lorelai Lee and Lapis Lazuili
She looked him steadily in the eye. “I want your child, Lazarus.”
Lazarus Long took a deep breath, tried to steady his heartbeat. “Dora, Dora, you are hardly more than a child yourself; it is too soon for you to be talking about having one. You don’t want to marry me—”
“I did not ask you to marry me.”
And when he says that he would not father a child without marrying the mother:
“What is your purpose in insisting on a marriage ceremony, Woodrow? So that our child will bear your name? I don’t want to be a sky widow… but if that is what it takes, let us ride back into town and find a Moderator…”
“Dora, I won’t settle for only one child. You’re going to have half a dozen children by me, or more. Probably more. Maybe a dozen. Any objection?”
“Yes, Woodrow—I mean No, I do not object. Yes, I will have a dozen children by you. Or more.”
“Having a dozen children takes time, Dora. How often should I show up? Every two years, maybe?”
“Whatever you say, Woodrow. Whenever you come back—each time you come back—I’ll have a child by you. But I do ask that we start the first one at once.”
“You crazy little idiot, I believe you would do it that way.”
“Not ‘would’—shall. If you will.”
– Dora and Lazarus Long (aka Woodrow Wilson Smith)
3) And my third issue with the women in Time Enough for Love is not that they are attracted to men and try to be attractive to the male gender… but that major life decisions are made on the basis of their attraction to a particular specimen of the male gender. Show me a woman in Time Enough for Love who prioritizes anything else in her life (career, artistic aspirations, whatever) over having as many babies as possible. Not just having sex, having babies.
With those points responded to, I might add that I am also disturbed by the large number of relationships in that book that are between father-figures and daughter-figures. Lazarus’s paramount love story is entitled “The Tale of the Adopted Daughter,” for God’s sake. He describes his love for Dora at the time of their marriage as that of “a doting father for a favorite child”—his words. Later he sleeps with Minerva-the-former-computer, whom he cared for while she was learning to be flesh-and-blood—how is that not raising a child?—and with Laz and Lori, whom he raised from birth. When telling the story of turning down Llita, he explains that his rule of thumb is to never sleep with a dependent woman unless he plans to marry her. Not, say, to never sleep with a dependent woman at all because of the enormous power differential.
Said power differential is pretty much a pre-requisite for a relationship with Lazarus Long, actually. If there were nothing else squicky about his marriage to Dora, their wedding vows would seal it for me:
“Dora, will you go where I go, do what I do, live where I live?”
She looked startled but answered steadily, “Yes, Woodrow. If that is truly what you want.”
“Don’t put any conditions on it. Will you, or won’t you?”
“I will.”
“If it comes to a showdown, will you do what I tell you to? Not give me any more stubborn arguments?”
“Yes, Woodrow.”
“Will you bear my children and be my wife till death do us part?”
“I will.”
“I take thee, Dora, to be my wife, to love and protect and cherish—and never to leave you… so long as we both shall live. Don’t sniffle! Lean over here and kiss me instead. We’re married.”
“I was not either sniffling! Are we really married?”
“We are. Oh, you can have any wedding ceremony you want. Later.”
- Lazarus and Dora
In case you missed it as it went by, he makes her promise to do what he tells her to, first, and then he takes her as his wife and promises to protect her. And in fact, all of Lazarus’ wives end up doing what he tells them, his patronizing “bless their hearts” nattering about compromise notwithstanding.
And finally, there is the fascinating fetishization of gynecological exams—specifically, the numerous scenes involving a biological father or father-figure performing a gynecological examination on a daughter or daughter-figure. Brought to its inevitable conclusion in To Sail Beyond the Sunset (I didn’t get this far, but I am going by a summary I read) where Maureen feels sexually attracted to her father while he is examining her.
A lot of transgressive art comes with an awesome catch-22 attached to it—if someone reacts by saying, “hey man, WTF, ick,” the artist can claim that the critic is too closed-minded to appreciate the genius inherent in the art and is therefore unqualified to critique it. Mr. Heinlein explicitly builds this into his fiction with expressions like “tell Mrs. Grundy to go fly a kite.” Should you object to some aspect of his futuristic advanced-human society (parent-figures having sex with child-figures, for instance), you’re Mrs. Grundy and your criticism is automatically rendered invalid.
There have been plenty of occasions when something presented by an SF novelist initially squicked me, then got me to question my own prejudices, then led me to the conclusion, “Well, that bothers me, but it probably shouldn’t. Hm, I’ll have to think more about that.” Heinlein’s presentation of group marriage among the quasi-immortal Howard Family (a new and shocking idea to someone of my background when I encountered it at age nineteen) was something that made me question the Mrs. Grundy rules in my brain and be glad I had done so.
As far as father-daughter romantic relationships go, however—no. Ick. I’m comfortable being uncomfortable with that, thanks.
So, yeah. I don’t have a problem with female characters who like sex; I actually think Maureen of Time Enough for Love is an awesome character, she being the one who is attracted to Lazarus and just wants to have some fun, rather than wanting to fawn over him, follow him everywhere, and bear lots and lots of his babies. I don’t have a problem with female characters who want children; I have a problem with the enormous percentage of female characters in Time Enough for Love who proposition Lazarus not by saying, “Hey, you’re pretty cute, want to get together sometime?” but “I want to have your child.” I don’t have a problem with group marriages; I do have a huge problem with marriages between fathers and daughters.
Assuming Time Enough for Love is representative of Heinlein’s portrayal of women… which may or may not be true; I really need to read more Heinlein before making that assessment… then yeah, I have a problem with Heinlein’s portrayal of women.
(His worldbuilding is pretty awesome, though. I have really got to read Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.)
Was that an adult enough discussion for you, Ms. Hoyt?
Twenty-one years ago, when I was twelve, my childhood sweetheart tried to get me into Dr. Who. It didn’t take. (Possibly because we began at the beginning, with William Hartnell. It’s sure as hell taken now; I waited two hours in the sun on the concrete last year to hear David Tennant speak at Comic-Con.) In the process of it not taking, I read some tie-in novels he loaned me. I liked them better than the TV show.
The Curse of Fenric novelization by Ian Briggs was my first encounter with anything approaching a non-linear plot structure, and I remember being astounded and delighted by the concept. Really, it only barely qualifies: the main story is told linearly, one chapter at a time. But the chapters are interspersed with “documents” (a fairytale, a letter, a school essay, etc.) that provide backstory—a backstory never explicitly given to the characters, only t0 the reader; and moreover a backstory that isn’t dissected and neatly-arranged for the reader, but merely handed over with the implicit direction to figure out the connections yourself. I was twelve. I had never encountered anything like it. It was a lot different than the middle-grade and YA fiction I was usually handed. Come to think of it, my predilection for reading mysteries in my spare time was another reason I’d never before encountered such a thing: a typical mystery novel connects all the dots for you in the final chapter.
The Curse of Fenric (acquired recently second-hand, out of sentiment) has not, um, worn all that well. The linear story impresses me a lot less now than it did when I was a kid. I still like the interspersed documents, though. And the prologue still makes me smile. To be honest, I got the book in part because bits of the prologue had surfaced to the top of my memory in the last month or so.
(Yes, I have a somewhat bizarre facility for remembering things I have read, and being able to quote them long after normal people have emptied those memory cells and filled them with something more useful. I did in fact remember the last two paragraphs of the prologue almost word-for-word, twenty years later. What can I say—I was born with this quirk instead of with the ability to read maps. The following is not from memory, however. I have the book in front of me. You need to put up with the overwrought philosophy to get to the punchline.)
Every story must have a beginning, a middle and an end.
But it’s never that simple. Think of the planet Earth, spinning gently round its sun. Someone standing on one side of the planet sees the sun rise on a new day—like the beginning of a new story. But on the other side of the planet, the sun is disappearing into the horizon. For someone standing there, it’s the end of a story. Sunset in one place is sunrise somewhere else. And for someone who is standing between them, it’s the middle of the day (or the middle of the night). It all depends where you’re looking from.
All the time, the Earth slowly turns, joining all the stories together—day after day, year upon year. They are joined into one long story with no beginning and no end.
However far back you go, you can never find a first beginning. There’s always something earlier.
Does this really matter?
Of course it matters. How do you expect me to tell this story if I don’t know where it begins or ends? I could start with a woman standing alone on a beach, but is that really the beginning? Who is she? What brought her here? We might reach the middle of the story and then find that something important took place ten years earlier—or even a thousand years earlier. We’d be in a fine mess then, I can tell you.
Yes, I know, I’m just a grumpy old man, and you want me to shut up and get on with the story. You don’t mind where it begins, just as long as it begins somewhere, and I stop talking all this nonsense. All right, then—we’ll begin with a woman standing alone on a beach.
But don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Which has been going through my mind a lot, as I struggle to write my time-travel novel.
Readercon was a load of fun: saw some old friends, made some new friends, and didn’t make a fool of myself during my first-ever reading at a con! There’s lots more to say about it, but I don’t have the time for a really in-depth write-up of the experience at the moment. So I will confine myself to just one observation out of many.
One of the panels I attended was entitled “Fanfic as Criticism (Only More Fun),” featuring my friend and fellow Clarionite Ken Schneyer, as well as Victoria Janssen, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Eric Kissane, and Cecilia Tan. In general, I agreed with what they had to say. I’m pretty pro-fanfic, myself–or at least, I have the same love-hate relationship with fanfic adaptations as I do with any other type of adaptation (said love-hate relationship documented elsewhere in this blog). One might summarize it as “I like them when they’re good.” (Me and everyone else, of course. Even one of the panelists admitted that fanfic, like everything else, is 90% crap… but the 10% is worth looking for. I entirely agree.)
Only one thread of the panel dicussion gave me pause, and since I find I’m still thinking about it a week later, I figured I’d toss it out here and see what you all thought.
The description of the panel provided in the Readercon program included the line, “Fanfiction can… even attempt to ‘fix’ things the author is felt to have done ‘wrong’…” The panelists elaborated on this point, all making reference to the idea that any creative work is a discussion between author and reader. And one of the panelists said something to the effect of, “Star Trek and other classic SF didn’t have any gay characters, so we had to write them in ourselves.”¹
And I understand the impulse. It’s a pretty basic human need to be able to see yourself somewhere in the things you read. I have it myself.
But I can’t help wondering if fanfic is the best way to exercise that impulse. To the extent that this is all a conversation, isn’t a better contribution to the conversation to create one’s own space opera story, and include within that universe the gay characters who are missing from Star Trek? If you have some sharp criticisms to make of Narnia and Harry Potter, isn’t the most effective procedure to write The Magicians and make that a part of the same genre? If you wish the Sherlock Holmes mysteries dealt with more realistic people and messier human problems, you could try rewriting Sherlock Holmes, but surely you could make the point more clearly by writing Lord Peter Wimsey?
“What the author did ‘wrong’” is part of “what the author did,” and I think there’s value in honestly acknowledging the limitations and unconscious prejudices inherent in a beloved work of fiction, and then moving on to create something similar but better.
¹ I wish I had an exact quote here, and I wish I could attribute it; unfortunately, I only have my quick scribbled notes. If I have mischaracterized your meaning, I sincerely apologize, and invite you to come on in and correct me.
