And yet another poor student falls victim to the evil of decontructionism… 
Seriously though, most male-written SF is NOT misognystic. Some of the stuff from the 40s-50s is, but that’s just a reflection of the times.
Gosh, and here I thought I’d made it clear that I wasn’t using deconstruction to criticize this novel. I thought, in my oft-quoted op, that the “last discipline” i.e. FEMINISM, caused me to dislike male-written science fiction. And I also said not all of it is misogynistic.
This Year’s Model, I was actually very optimistic when I picked this latest book up. I love apocalyptic works. I thought this would be fantastic. And then I couldn’t find a single female character that was sympathetic or likeable. I thought at the end maybe Jeanne would turn out to be someone I could like, but she turned out to be troubled, unhappy, frigid, and emotionally unstable. I’m going to check out authors that have been recommended in this thread. I don’t want to not read any male sci-fi at all.
Nemo, despite your abusive tone, I will respond to you. I’m glad I had the education I did, because it was valuable, but now I am sensitized to how women and women’s issues are treated in literature. I see it constantly, everywhere. I agree that, if you are looking for it, you can find it in any literature. If I had studied Communism, no doubt this thread would be about the greedy capitalists. If I could turn it off and enjoy male-written sci-fi, I would.
Cliffy, I’m not surprised at all. Just disappointed. I’ve known it was a problem in this field for a long time.
I can’t really say too much about Silverberg, as I haven’t really read much of his stuff.
But I do want to express the hope that when you feel better you will want to talk about The Integral Trees. I thought it was fairly balanced in its treatment of women, as they serve in most of the same capacities in society as men do (caregivers, warriors, scientists) and are generally seen working side-by-side with men. There was certainly a good bit of brutality and unpleasantly-pragmatic pairbonding in the story, but I think that’s a resonable expectation of a society that has been forced back to primitivism.
And as far as a rape victim becoming promiscuous, that isn’t at all ‘most improbable.’ I know it to be fairly common, and it was in fact the reaction of a friend of mine when she was assaulted in college. I don’t think using this fact of psychology in an honest way makes Niven’s fiction mysogynist.
Not for those specific reasons, but I’ve never understood the appeal of Silverberg as a writer. While he has interesting visions, he doesn’t express them well, nor does he treat most characters well, but I agree, that females get an unfair amount of humiliation in his hands – in his books, I don’t know from personally.
I do take issue with your broad brush approach to most SF writers, even if it is deserved, it is too broad a statement that, I would guess in your unwellness and unhappines with Silverberg, was not as well-formed as you would normally make it.
I have a similar argument with the “Starbuck” character on the new BSG – wherein a female character is given a load of traits that are considered poor traits in a male character – but in spite of the fact that she offers little to no new ground, is considered some great advancement in SF to have such a strong woman portrayed. (let’s not get into the repeated phallic imagry of not only the cigars, but the hoses in Cylon ship (she literally sucks on a Cylon’s hose – it’s just, you know, wrong).
But those of us who decry it as just a really bad idea are immediately branded neanderthals who can’t accept a strong woman. It seems to me however that, you could really use a male with these problems to make a really strong feminist statement, but to use a woman in this way is somewhere on the level of Silverberg’s apparent recent work.
Interesting discussion, even though I’ve coat-tailed here.
Well, certainly, Saltire, I would be interested in what you have to say about the Integral Trees. I am, frankly, surprised that so many people like it so much. The book had promise. The setting was unique and gorgeous. And then there was the rape stuff. I just couldn’t give that book any credit after that. That wasn’t necessary to the plot; it was gratuitous; it was just like reading some sick, twisted porn.
ddgryphon, you are certainly giving me a lot of credit. I am using a broad brush for male science fiction writers, and it’s not just because I’m ill. Problem is I can’t figure out whether a book is going to turn horribly wrong until after I read it, so I generally avoid anything written by a man unless a friend recommends it to me. I actually was brave and picked up a copy of The Stainless Steel Rat a while ago and enjoyed it immensely, so I’m not all that intolerant. And I’ll read Mark E Rogers whenever I can find him. There are probably more male writers that I read. I’ll think of more later.
Maybe I was too harsh in my posts, Elysian, but you did manage to push a number of buttons.
First off, deconstruction. Once you say you take deconstruction seriously, you’re going to be judged as the kind of person who takes deconstruction seriously. It’s like someone posting that they decided who to vote on based on astrology. You may make some excellent points otherwise, but people are going to focus on that.
Second, overgeneralization. You judge an entire characterization by the use of a word you don’t like. You judge an entire book by what a few characters do. You judge an author’s entire body of work by a single book. You judge an entire genre by two examples. You judge a person’s personal beliefs by a piece of fiction they wrote. You judge an entire gender by a handful of examples. In every case, you’re taking way too little evidence and running away with it. Try sticking with “Based on reading one of his novels, I think it’s possible that this author may have difficulty in writing believable female characters” instead of “Based on the fact that one author describes a female character as a cow in one novel, I know that most male authors are sexist”.
Third, “judge not lest you be judged”. If a male reader said “I don’t read female authors because I know they usually write bad books. Once in a while, I might take a chance on reading one if a friend tells me this particular book is an exception to this rule.” would you think they were prejudiced?
Finally, a sense of proportion. There are plenty of worse offenses to women out there. If you get this worked up over a couple of out-of-print SF novels, what do you have left for female circumcision or debt slavery or female infanticide or forced prostitution or stoning or rape or serial killings?
Actually, Nemo, I didn’t ever, ever say I took deconstrutionism seriously. I’ve stated very clearly (see post #21, since it didn’t seem to be coming through in my original post) that I wasn’t evaluating Silverberg in that fashion. I think you are focusing on that because you want to.
I think you are guilty of this as well. You’ve fastened on the word deconstructionism and haven’t gone much past that.
It wasn’t just one word, either, Nemo. Here is what I wrote: “Jolanda – a cow. Stupid AND deluded (twofor!). A slut, and happy about it. Also with a magic vagina.” That is far more than just the word cow. She was called stupid repeatedly, and spacy, and weak, and crazy and vacillating and a heavy drug user, and a talentless hack, a puppy, and fat. She blows her friend’s cover to her lover just because she has loose lips. That is how the main female character was portrayed.
Now, if she was the only female character portrayed in a negative light, I might not have thrown the book from me in disgust. But she wasn’t. I hope you won’t require that I go more in depth on every single female character in the book to prove to you that YES the women were treated very badly.
As for judging all of Silverberg’s works on this single novel, well, this is all that I have to judge him with. Why in the world would I want to read more crap like this, when I have a hundred other better books to bury my nose in?
As for judging all male science fiction authors from the word “cow” in Hot Sky at Midnight, well, I haven’t, I didn’t, and I won’t. I have, in fact, read other books in the genre. My opinion isn’t entirely baseless.
Actually this happens. I’m not too concerned about it, no. Let them read what they want. If female authors treat men as stupid, weak, and cows, then I would think readers would be entirely justified in avoiding those books. Why read something that treats your sex badly?
Gee, I think these are entirely different issues. Are you seriously saying that if I get upset at an author that calls his main female character a cow, stupid, talentless and deluded, that I can’t get upset over forced prostitution? Huh?
Or are you saying that if I get upset over forced prostitution I shouldn’t get upset at a prized work of science fiction, widely disseminated, read, and enjoyed, that has distinctly misogynistic elements?
I think I would be crazy NOT to be upset about the mistreatment of women wherever and whenever it occurs.
It’s pretty sad that you would say this based on just one book. He treats his female characters pretty well, IMO.
For example:
Gioia in Sailing to Byzantium: This is a woman in a society where almost no one grows old. She’s one out of ten thousand (or something like that) who still are subject to the aging process. She doesn’t want to drag down the man she’s in a relationship with, so she leaves him. He cares about her so much he spends years trying to find her.
Thissa (I think that’s her name) in Kingdoms of the Wall: She’s a witch. But not just any witch! This woman is also a rarity.
Carabella in the Majipoor: A traveling juggler who becomes the wife of the man in charge.
The ‘twins’ in Starborne: These beings’ minds are linked–and one of them is a star.
Thank you very much! If you say that he does treat women well in some of his books, I will check them out.
What could possibly go wrong in a book detailing the adventures of “slippery” Jim diGriz? The man sounds like a saint. 
Heh. What you really want to do is go through Silverberg’s older works and count the number of times his females had a “boyish behind.” I met his wife of the time. She had, well, three guesses.
Science fiction has a long and horrible history of portraying women. And as a rule of thumb, the bigger the name and the harder the science, the worse the portrayal of women. Even in the 60s and 70s, when Silverberg came of age as a writer, the era in which writing standards rose markedly, few even of the best writers could do - or bothered to do - good female characters. You can explore the works of Silverberg, or Zelazny, or Delany, or Disch, or Brunner, excellent writers all, without remembering more than a handful of female names. Even Ursula LeGuin wrote all her early books about males. It was just what was expected.
And you can only imagine the brouhaha that resulted when Joanna Russ came out with The Female Man. Look it up. I don’t know how well this has aged, but it was dynamite in its day.
I didn’t respond to this thread earlier because I haven’t read Hot Sky at Midnight or more than a couple of other recent Silverberg novels. He literally gave up writing around 1978 when his fantastic streak of brilliant novels gave him great in-group prestige and no money or outside fame. When he started up again, he stopped writing interesting little novels and wrote fat, bloated fantasies about nothing at all that sold huge amounts.
But from 1967 to 1976 he had the following novels make the final ballot for the Nebula Award: Thorns, The Masks of Time, Up the Line, Tower of Glass, A Time of Changes, The Book of Skulls, Dying Inside, The Stochastic Man, Shadrach in the Furnace. Nine novels in ten years, a string nobody will ever match. And then not another novel on the ballot ever.
Honestly, those are the only ones that matter for Silverberg. And his short story collections from those years are even better. He had eight short works make the ballot over those same ten years.
It’s still true as a general rule that if you want good female characters in science fiction, you need to read female authors. Men still tend to write better men than they do women. Fortunately, the field is much, much better overall in terms of equality and gets better each year, although too many “strong” females, as noted earlier, are men in drag. Even Hot Sky at Midnight is over a decade old, a long time in sf.
But while I wish it weren’t true that male science fiction writers are better at writing aliens than human females, it’s a fact of life. You just have to read around that, either by reading books about well-thought-out male characters, finding the few exceptional male writers who can achieve the feat, or reading the better female writers.
Of course, that’s true in every other genre as well, and in mainstream literature to boot.
I would like to know more about these so-called “magic vaginas”. 
(No, really. Are they actually called that in the book? And, though I think I can infer how their magic is accessed, what effects do they have? Or is it just a creepy old man way of saying “she was really good at f**king”? )
I tried a google search for some variations on this, but predictably got either porn or nothing helpful. I figured that it was something similar to the “magic weapon motif” but applied to women and either a) their worth being that of a vagina and the pleasure/trouble it brings men or b) the standard, “mystery that we have to live with” thing.
You are like the third request for this, but aside from “putrid prose,” I don’t think we’re going to get much of an answer.
There is some puerile fascination with the magic vaginas, huh. Well, I didn’t want to crack the book open again, but the magic vagina is first mentioned on page 131:
Paul is trying to convince Nick to leave Isabelle, mainly because Paul can’t stand her, because of the aforesaid bitchiness and delusion.
Now are you all satisfied?
Oh, and thanks, Exapno, for all that great information. I was born in 1977, so I’m not up on all that history. I tend to read newer sci-fi, and I guess now that I think of it the farther back my reading goes the more disgusted I tend to get by the books.
I want to be diGriz when I grow up
Stay away from Silverberg’s Book of Skulls or whatever it’s called, then: it was my introduction to him, and while the male characters in it are fairly interesting, the female characters are literally sex objects. As in, aren’t allowed to speak, don’t wear clothes, are on-scene only long enough for the male characters to learn sexual lessons from them, these sexual lessons taught by other men. Yeesh. (There are, in flashbacks, other female characters, who also exist primarily for sex, although not in such extreme circumstances). He’s a peeg.
That said, I think it’s pretty ridiculous to avoid a book because the author’s got outdoor plumbing. As a service from another Silverberg-hater, here’s a small list of male SF authors that aren’t peegs:
-Sean Stewart
-Ray Bradbury
-China Mieville
-Greg Bear
-Orson Scott Card (he’s kind of a peeg in his author’s notes, though–just don’t read those)
-Spider Robinson (although he’s got kind of a hippy happy everybody let’s get laid attitude, he doesn’t insult women or subject them to obsessive, constant abuse in his books)
-Phillip Pullman
-Arthur C. Clarke (although I’ve not read anything by him since i was about fourteen, so I can’t vouch for him strongly, I don’t recall any sex at all in his books).
Daniel
I’m sure Ms. LeGuin wil be pleased to find out that The Left Hand of Darkness was all about males. But in general, you’re correct.
I honestly don’t understand why people feel that a character in fiction needs to reflect their own view of what people should be like. Characters reflect what the author felt was needed for that story, nothing else.
But authors have control of what the story was about and, by your statement, what the characters will be and how they will act.
Surely the story will reflect in some way on what the world “should be like” (even if they are just portraying a world that is and offering subtextual hints at what should be changed).
No, no, no. This is obviously a big difference in the way you and I see fiction. (And I already know that Exapno and I have a very different perspective on what is good science fiction.) I view fiction as a good story first; second as an interesting perspective on the way people think and act; third as a technically interesting way of putting the story (literature, if you will); and never as a promulgation of the way the world should be. I may or may not think that the author is describing a world I’d like to live in; that is completely irrelevant to whether I enjoy the story or not. If I only read novels and stories that only reflected the world as I wanted it to be, I’d be horribly deprived of some damn good stories.
This Year’s Model, I’m not sure whether you’re trying to be funny or not, but you do realize that Left Hand of Darkness was LeGuin’s fifth novel, don’t you?
However, I most certainly agree with you in your opposition to Chairman Pow’s comment. This is probably the biggest misconception about science fiction. Writers will set up a future just because, and then totally contradict in their next book. Only a few of the nuttiest libertarians believe their futures should occur. It’s true that many books are warnings about what shouldn’t occur, but I don’t think that’s the same thing.