Just finished reading the above book by one of my favourite new sci-fi authors, John Scalzi. His books aren’t high art but they are fast-paced, tightly plotted and most of all fun.
Anyway, one aspect of the above mentioned story had me raising my eyebrow. One of the characters, a male computer technician is described as being in a relationship with another technician and church member called ‘Sam’. For some reason the author is very careful to never reveal 'Sam’s gender, and Sam is a unisex name.
Am I missing something? What was the point of that aspect of the story?
Short answer: they don’t know Sam’s gender either.
If anyone, like me, hadn’t heard of this author before, there appears to be a heap of samples of their work on the site as well - I’ll include the URL for anyone either interested or bored with nothing to do - The Scalzi Creative Sampler | Whatever
Thanks for digging that up! Hmmmm, he says his intent wasn’t to have his readers notice or consider Sam’s gender, for me everytime the use of pronouns was carefully avoided it was rather jarring, for the simple reason that it is extremely uncommon to write like that.
I actually thought there was going to be a ‘big reveal’ that Sam was male and that was what the author was working towards thoughout the book but it never happened.
His last line is kind of interesting, “What color is its hero, Harry Creek?” (the main character of the book). I kind of thought of him as generically white and a sort of an everyman in appearance probably because:
(a) I don’t really have a particularly clear visual image of characters anyway unless the author describes them in detail
(b) I’m white and from a predominately white country so white is the default for me anyway.