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Janean Nusz is a freelance writer residing in the Midwest. Her nonfiction work has been seen in numerous publications, both online and in print. Look for her new fiction books online, coming soon to DiskUs Publishing, Pixel Press, and Writer’s Exchange E-publishing. Or just stop by her Author’s Art site to read an excerpt or two.
R Michael Harman is a reviews editor for Strange Horizons.
Taking Apart SF: Gwyneth Jones’s Deconstructing the Starships: Science, Fiction and Reality
Reviewed by Wendy Pearson
9/10/01
“When I was a child … I remember once I found an old book, full of old pictures. Of couples. In the pictures, the women were all shorter than the men. It looked very funny, to have all the women in all the pictures midgets. I said something about it to the tutor for my study-group aide. He told me that hundreds of years ago, on Earth, everybody used to think that women were shorter than men, because all the men would only go around with women who were shorter than they were and all the women would only go around with men who were taller than they were.”
—Samuel R. Delany, Trouble on Triton
I’ve always been fascinated by this particular passage in Triton, a passage which often passes unremarked amongst the novel’s more obviously spectacular efflorescences of speculation about human gender and sexuality. Most readers notice that Triton recognizes 40 or 50 different genders and nine sexualities, but how many of us fully and consistently imagine a world in which the women are as big as the men? It’s an interesting question, not least for the further conjecture that Bron, the dysfunctional protagonist of the novel, suggests to his counsellor, Brian, following the sex change intended to make him into his own ideal woman. Bron muses, “I’ve always wondered if perhaps, back then, women really weren’t smaller; perhaps there’s been some sort of evolutionary change in humanity that’s increased women’s size.”
Why the digression into Triton at the beginning of a review of Gwyneth Jones’s Deconstructing the Starships, a first collection of critical writings by a highly acclaimed British SF writer? One of the essays in Jones’ splendid collection, the rather eccentrically, if aptly, titled “Sex: The Brains of Female Hyena Twins,” just happens to provide a brilliantly off-handed suggestion for why gender is associated with size differentiation in primates and thus why Bron’s speculation about evolution is so beautifully ironic.
Contemplating the scientific study of sex, a topic remarkably rarely addressed by science fiction writers, Jones turns to a collection of scientific essays from the Eleventh International Conference on Comparative Physiology. In this somewhat dry sounding volume, The Differences Between the Sexes, Jones finds a great deal of information, including an article on primates which reveals that skeletal analysis indicates that at one time “female proto-gorillas, humans, chimps may have been as hunky as the males” and that size differentiation by sex may thus not be ‘natural,’ but the evolutionary effect of sexual selection. This information brings what may have seemed to some readers of Triton a tendentiously ideological speculation about gender politics firmly back into the realm of hard science. While Jones doesnt make the connection to Triton herself, she does demonstrate how an SF writer might extrapolate from the scientific analysis of sex; in fact, she finishes this chapter by noting that “we dont have two complementary sexes any more, each safe in its own niche. All there is left is gender: an us and them situation.” It is the “us and them” of gender roles disconnected from biological sex that provides the basis for the aliens in Jones’s White Queen and its sequels.
This leads me, of course, to the comment that the essays collected in Deconstructing the Starships prove Jones to be not only a pre-eminent feminist SF writer, a novelist of considerable grace, style and intellect, but also a quite remarkable feminist critic of her chosen genre. Jones is the author of eight SF novels, including the just released Bold as Love. Two of her novels, Divine Endurance and Flower Dust, form a series set in a far future Malaysia and Indonesia. The Aleutian trilogy, which consists of White Queen, North Wind, and Phoenix Café, are First Contact novels situated on a near future Earth whose misadventures with the alien invaders highlight the fact that issues of language, communications and gender can be just as seriously science fictional as problems of physics or feats of engineering.
Jones also writes horror novels for juveniles under the pseudonym Ann Halam. Her SF work has netted her the British Science Fiction Award, the Tiptree Award, and two World Fantasy Awards, as well as numerous nominations for the Hugo, the Nebula and the Arthur C. Clarke Awards. The Tiptree nominations and the actual award (for White Queen, in 1991) are hardly surprising for a writer of intelligent, sophisticated, complex tales which find remarkably novel ways to address precisely those questions of gender that are the Tiptree’s particular purview. Yet the other award nominations indicate that Jones’ work has a broader appeal to sf readers who would not necessarily identify their own reading interests as feminist.
Gender naturally plays a significant role in these essays, but it does so in the context of a coherent feminist analysis of science fiction as a genre, an analysis which inevitably also touches on such issues as the definition of the SF genre, the rise of cyberpunk, the relationship of SF and postmodernism, the problems of feminist writing that reifies and essentializes the female, and the nature of science itself. Even when a chapter focuses on a specific issue, such as the discussion of cyberpunk in “Trouble (Living in the Machine),” Jones’s context remains the prevailing themes of genre, gender and science. Jones thus provides the reader throughout the book with a remarkably clear and succinct discussion of the generic characteristics of SF, a discussion which, particularly in the introduction, shows a lucid familiarity with the major literary and critical theorists of the twentieth century and yet does so almost entirely without recourse to academic prose and vocabulary. The “deconstruction” of the title is virtually the only exception … and one that is neatly explained by Jones’s comment that SF writers and readers habitually practice deconstruction, whether they know it or not:
The fictional text, radically reinterpreted, becomes a collection of signs, the study—or deconstruction—of which will produce an anatomy of the process of its production; the limits imposed by the ideological matrix which defines this process, and the transgressions by which these secret rules are revealed. The text thus becomes what science fiction always was—a means, not an end: an experiment that can be examined, taken apart, even cannibalised by ruthless commentators, rather than a seamless work of art.
This is a rather neat trick, explaining the apparently frightening terminology of postmodernism by pointing out that “every writer and reader [of SF] has to practice this modern art habitually, technically, intuitively” in the process of unravelling and comprehending the thought experiment that underlies the creation of any truly science fictional world. In the second essay, “Gettting Rid of Brand Names,”Jones ties her own insight into the deconstructive nature of the thought experiments that are the real science of science fiction (that is, scientific method, rather than the exploration of any specific scientific discipline) to two other fundamental observations about SF. The first is Delany’s dictum that the language of SF must never admit to knowledge of any world other than the one constructed for the story. This practice, if writers do not abandon it in favor of chunks of exposition, explicitly requires the reader to “deconstruct” the unstated premises of difference from our own world. The second is the observation, made by such disparate writers as William Gibson and Ursula Le Guin, that SF is not about the future, but the present. “Science fiction is a confusing phenomenon. As even an acute mainstream critic may observe, it pretends to describe the future, yet more than any other literary genre it reflects the exact preoccupations of the present.” Again, it is the reader’s habitual deconstruction of the thought-experiment that reveals the present-disguised-as-future.
“Deconstructing the Starships,” then, is a process of examining the genre, represented in the title of the book by one of its most lasting and iconic clichés, the starship. We pull it apart, cannibalize it, in order to understand how both its generic conventions and its ability to transgress generic limits and expectations most clearly reveal the unspoken ideologies of SF. In so doing, it becomes apparent that certain conventions of SF—e.g. that it is about specific sciences, that it is about the future—bear little relation to the reality of the genre today. Jones carries this process through in several of the novel’s essays and some of the book reviews to a consideration of specific areas of SF writing, most notably cyberpunk and feminist SF. Applying the same critical intelligence with which she addresses the genre as a whole, Jones points to some of the more egregious problems of both types of SF writing.