To see how this works, let’s look at Jones’s discussion of feminist SF. One of the dilemmas Jones, a self-proclaimed feminist, sees in certain schools of feminist SF is the recourse to essentialism (women are women and what is most quintessential in all women is their femaleness) as a strategy for validating the lives of women in the face of a hostile patriarchal world. With devastating accuracy and wit, Jones refers to this style of biologically determinate fiction as “the rise of the dark-female-womb-good vs. light-male-phallus-bad story.” Jones makes the apt but somewhat dismal point that “this is the only version of feminism that has broken through to permeate the genre-as-we-know-it.” Jones concludes that she sees two types of SF writers: the Dinosaurs, which includes most writers regardless of gender, race, and popularity, and the Birds. The Dinosaurs know that you “can break the laws of physics any time, but human nature can never change.” The Birds “claim that they do not know what ‘bird nature’ is, or ever was…” It’s a neat allegorical distinction for a very real problem that has plagued SF, including feminist SF, for several decades now: even the most radical end-of-patriarchy novels end up reproducing the same old gender divides that have bedevilled us since Western society invented the idea of binarism and applied it to every aspect of human life.
If Deconstructing the Starships comes back again and again to issues of feminist SF and the problems of gender—and by extension sexuality—in science fiction, it merely reaffirms Jones’s point that the genre reflects contemporary preoccupations. In a world divided by the twin preoccupations of obsessively examining issues of sex and gender or of obsessively denying that sex and gender are or could be issues at all, it is scarcely surprising to find these particular fixations of the late 20th century played out in contemporary SF writing. It is a question that Jones returns to consistently throughout the course of the book, in both essays and book reviews.
Perhaps the most fascinating of all of the essays in the collection, “Aliens in the Fourth Dimension” describes the process by which Jones went about constructing her aliens in the Aleutian trilogy in order to conduct a thought experiment about the nature of the ‘other’ and the problem of communication. In White Queen, the first novel of the trilogy, a mildly disreputable band of aliens, whose notion of sexual dimorphism is purely arbitrary, arrive on earth only to discover that they have accidentally fulfilled our own fears and myths of alien invasion. Sexless, but not gender-less, the Aleutians are some of SF’s more notably alien aliens, which makes it that much more of a shock to the reader of “Aliens in the Fourth Dimension” who discovers for the first time that the aliens are modelled not only on the colonized others of Europe’s imperial past, but also on women. As Jones says, there are “obvious parallels between my culture’s colonial adventure and the battle of the sexes.” Additionally, as Jones herself, points out, it is an SF cliché that all aliens speak English. The Aleutians do not. They are telepaths—or they may be telepaths. It’s not clear to humans. And while some of them learn English and other Earth languages, many refuse to use speech at all.
What does the speechlessness of the Aleutians have to do with gender or with the relations between coloniser and colonised? One of the basic insights of both post-colonial and feminist criticism is that those who are neither white nor male tend to be silenced by the dominant culture, while at the same time being seen by their masters as essentially speechless. Moreover, colonised races are treated by the colonisers as if they were—or were equivalent to—female. In bringing these insights into her SF, Jones is proposing not an exact correspondence between the Aleutians and the subjugated colonial races nor between the Aleutians and women, but rather an “an alternative” representation. Jones says that:
I planned to give my alien conquerors the characteristics, all the supposed deficiencies, that Europeans came to see in their subject races in darkest Africa and the mystic East—’animal’ nature, irrationality, intuition; mechanical incompetence, indifference to time, helpless aversion to theory and measurement: and I planned to have them win the territorial battle this time.
There is a nice irony in the turnabout of colonial stereotype that the Aleutians come to represent in the novel, a point that disappears seamlessly into the science fictional scenario of the books. The lovely, yet rather gently satirical quality of the Aleutians as aliens is only underscored for the reader when Jones quotes one US critic as hailing the Aleutians “as ‘the most convincingly alien beings to grace science fiction in years.’” Jones’s humanoid sexless telepathic aliens make for a particularly satisfying science fictional thought experiment, one with as much importance to the consideration of gender in feminist SF as Le Guin’s Gethenians, yet without the many critical problems of language and representation that have been engendered by The Left Hand of Darkness. “Aliens in the Fourth Dimension” is just as satisfying, not only for its consideration of the problems of colonialism and gender politics, but also for its insight into the writer’s process of creation.
All in all this is an invaluable collection of essays, some of which are masquerading as book reviews—”masquerading” because, in every case, Jones’s approach goes beyond the mere basics of a review to a contemplation of the nature and purpose of SF. Deconstructing the Starships does, however, appear to be rather arbitrarily divided into three parts: a set of essays combined under the heading “All Science is Description,” followed by a second set entitled “Science, Fiction and Reality,” and finished up with a collection of Jones’s book reviews that runs the gamut from Sarah Lefanu’s In the Chinks of the World Machine to Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash to an extended meditation on Le Guin’s utopian fictions. According to the acknowledgments, all of the essays were written between 1987 and 1997. Although they are thematically linked, they are not arranged in chronological order, which might perhaps have given more coherence to what is already a very strong piece of work.
Of course, Deconstructing the Starships is roughly modelled on collections of essays by other SF writers, most notably Ursula Le Guin’s Language of the Night and Dancing at the Edge of the World and Samuel Delany’s earlier critical works. In some ways, however, the casualness with which the essays and reviews have been arranged does the work a disservice, since it is clear that there is a consistent and remarkable vision informing a work that is, in its own right, every bit as important to the genre as Lefanu’s groundbreaking study of feminist SF. In fact, Liverpool University Press seem to have had no idea of the value of Jones’ book, which is rather shabbily treated both in the matter of proofreading and in the cover art, which is a thoroughly uninspired and entirely too obvious beige diagram of an exploded starship model, à la Revell, over a starfield.
Anyone who is interested in SF, in what it is and how it works and in how sf writers think and write about their own field, will find Deconstructing the Starships an invaluable addition to their collection. It is a book which combines the best traditions of informed critical thought and engagement with the ideas of academic criticism, especially post-modernism, with a readable, trenchant and witty style. Indeed, Jones writes with a kind of British understatement that depends on her ability to say what she means with precision, while at the same time exhibiting a nice sense of humour, a penchant for irony and, occasionally, a touch of outrage. This is the work of a writer who is passionate about her genre, and that passion informs and enhances all of the essays in the collection. There is much to think about here—no reader is going to come away from this collection without finding some new insight into the genre or some particular provocation to thought. In the end, whether one agrees or disagrees with what Jones has to say about SF and about gender in SF, in particular, is irrelevant in comparison to the work’s ability to stimulate the reader to deconstruct the ideas and ideologies of the genre. And ideas are what it’s all about.
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Wendy Pearson is a Ph.D. student with a particular interest in SF. Her article “Alien Cryptographies: The View from Queer” won the SFRA’s Pioneer Award for the best critical article in 2000. She has published a number of articles on sexuality and gender issues in science fiction. Her most recent article deals with the figure of the hermaphrodite in SF novels by Melissa Scott, Stephen Leigh, and Ursula Le Guin.
A Mythological Fantasy of Compulsion and Freedom: Roberta Gellis’s Thrice Bound
Reviewed by Heidi Elizabeth Smith
9/17/01
How many of us read Greek myths as children: stories of the Trojan War, the gods, and their mischievous adventures? I know those were some of my favorites, and, to this day, I love retellings of ancient Greek tales. Roberta Gellis’s Thrice Bound is an excellent retelling of this kind. She borrows her characters from the myths, incorporating the gods, like Artemis or Apollo, as highly Gifted mortals who are called gods by the un-Gifted. Thrice Bound, sequel to Bull God, is a retelling of the story of Hekate (sometimes spelled Hecate), who, in the Greek pantheon, is the goddess of magic and was worshipped at crossroads , which she traveled in the companionship of a pack of black dogs, a motif adapted by Gellis in a highly original way. Thrice Bound is a sequel to Bull God in that their stories take place about the same time in the same world and feature some of the same characters, but the plot of Thrice Bound is independent from the previous novel, which told the story of Ariadne and her brother the Minotaur.