He, She, Ve, It (Language and Gender in Science Fiction)

Original illustrations throughout this piece by Alex Kostiw

There's a starman waiting in the sky
He'd like to come and meet us
But he thinks he'd blow our minds
—“Starman,” David Bowie 

“[A] 1960s film of the 'office of the future' made on-par technological predictions (fax machines and the like), but had a glaring omission: The office had no women.”

 —“Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot,” Tom Vanderbilt, Nautilus, issue 28, emphasis added

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While science fiction serves a great many different purposes, one of the most common is as a medium for free speculation about the future. Sci-fi authors have frequently been great at accurately envisioning the future of technology—having foreseen everything from credit cards to space flight well before its time—but the future of human society, its culture, values, and mores, has always been much harder to envision with any accuracy.

In his essay, “Why Futurism has a Cultural Blindspot,” Tom Vanderbilt suggests that this is because we tend to forget that culture changes at all:

[W]hen it comes to culture we tend to believe not that the future will be very different than the present day, but that it will be roughly the same. Try to imagine yourself at some future date. Where do you imagine you will be living? What will you be wearing? What music will you love? Chances are, that person resembles you now. As the psychologist George Lowenstein and colleagues have argued, in a phenomenon they termed “projection bias,” people “tend to exaggerate the degree to which their future tastes will resemble their current tastes.”

As with our difficulty imagining changes in our personal tastes, so too with society, values, and culture: we tend to unconsciously project the present into the future, even as we try our best to imagine how things could be radically different. 

Illustration by Alex Kostiw

Science fiction is, depending on who you ask, somewhere between as young as the twentieth century and as old as written literature. A good conservative estimate of its age might peg its starting point at Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in 1818, but you can make the case that it really only got going with the advent of pulp magazines, arriving in the early 1900s. Even if you start at that latest date, though, science fiction took its sweet time before really hunkering down to examine the intersection of language and gender, which only came to be a topic of speculation within science fiction starting in the 1960s.

Gender, and in particular gendered language, is much older than science fiction; indeed, it is older than written history itself: when writing first comes fully online as a technology in the late 3000s/early 2000s BCE in Egypt, gendered pronouns are already firmly in place.¹ The existence of genders (that is, groupings of people based on a combination of physical appearance, social roles, and personal identities, usually into the two categories “men/boys” and “women/girls”) is universal in human cultures, and many human languages reflect this by assigning each gender a set of pronouns.² English has gendered pronouns only in the third person, “he/him/his" or “she/her/hers,” but there are languages (like Hebrew) with gendered second-person pronouns, “you (man/boy)” or “you (woman/girl),” and there are even a few (like Tocharian and Korana) with gendered first-person pronouns, “I (man/boy)” or “I (woman/girl).”

So linguistic signifiers of gender were certainly around long enough for science fiction to start speculating about when and why they might change—long enough for sci-fi to ask: what happens to language (and society) when people start to cross gender boundaries? what happens when the boundaries no longer apply at all?—but no one thought to project these changes into the future until they were already happening in the present.

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Travel with me now, into the deep, dank depths of time, to 1955. This is the year in which a trio of researchers dealing with what we now call “intersexuality”—the state of having neither typically male nor typically female reproductive organs, but rather something in between³—coined the concept of gender as a social category,⁴ distinct from the notion of biological sex.⁵ (When making this distinction, the adjectives “male/female” are often used for the sexes, that is, the status of one's body, while “masculine/feminine” are often used for the two most common genders.) It will take until 1964 for a researcher to finally separate the notions of gender roles (the external activities, appearances, and expectations of people based on their gender) and gender identity (the internal sense of self, the perception that you have a certain gender).⁶

The first real attempts at exploring the breakdown gender in science fiction take place around this same time.⁷ As John Money et al were proposing that gender was a separate thing from people's bodies, transgender people were starting to emerge into the public eye and organize themselves for the first time.

(Note: the rest of this essay, especially the following four paragraphs, is heavily indebted to Brian Atterby's excellent book, Decoding Gender in Science Fiction, specifically the seventh chapter, “Androgyny as Difference.”)

Responding to this new era, in which gender was a boundary that could be crossed, a social construct that could be reworked or upended, Thomas Sturgeon imagined a future society where gender had been erased in his novel, Venus Plus X (1960).  Less than a decade later, Ursula K. Le Guin pushed the envelope further by imagining an entire planet on which human gender had ceased to exist in her book, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). These novels depict groups of people whose bodies contain functional sets of both kinds reproductive organs (though in The Left Hand of Darkness, each partner expresses one sex or the other other during mating). Since genders tend to be based around bodies, the result is societies of people without genders. 

In both of these works, the language choice used is the least radical one possible: the genderless people are called “he.” On the bright side, though, this language choice reflects the limitations of the main characters, who is in each case a man choosing the language used to describe the gender-free people he is meeting. This works well enough in its way—both main characters (Charlie Johns in Venus Plus X and Genly Ai in The Left Hand of Darkness) reflect on the limitations and downright foolishness of assigning “he” pronouns to their genderless peers, and people in both fictional worlds speak languages where the native pronouns for people are a word that simply means human.⁸ In both cases, the main character, lacking this genderless “human pronoun” and not wanting to call a person “it,” uses “he” as a sort of default pronoun that encompasses all people, in the same way that “man” or “men” was once used with great frequency to describe the whole of humanity. (Genly Ai, narrator of most of The Left Hand of Darkness, says of “he” that it is “less specific than the neuter or the feminine” [pg. 94]. Make of that what you will.)

Le Guin, at least, later came to regret her pronoun choice. Critics pointed out that her use of traditionally male language to describe genderless characters (as well as a lack of any characters presented in traditionally feminine roles) essentially created a safe trip for male readers, into an ungendered world and back, without being presented a real challenge to their own worldview. In other words, whatever their biology or mating habits, the characters in The Left Hand of Darkness are presented as if they live in a world where men have all the power, responsibility, and agency, and where women are literally nowhere to be found. The King of the fictional country of Karhide can be pregnant, but he is still called “he.”⁹

While she never changed the language of The Left Hand of Darkness itself, Le Guin did respond thoughtfully to this strain of criticism, first in the form of an essay defending her work, then later by republishing that same essay with a side-by-side critique of her original defense and admissions that her critics had a point. She also revised a short story set in the world of The Left Hand of Darkness, “Winter's King,” switching all of its characters to “she” pronouns.

Illustration by Alex Kostiw

Both of these early explorations of language and gender are focused on androgyny, a combination of maleness and femaleness and/or of masculinity and femininity. Androgyny is one important way of complicating or even erasing the gender binary: creating ambiguous gray space in between the two categories, blending together two designations which we are taught to see as not only separate, but opposite.  Specifically, both of these novels describe a kind of biological androgyny, in which the physical reproductive systems of both sexes are combined. These authors ask: what would happen to our social lives if the sexes were fused? 

There's another option when creating androgyny, though, that science fiction authors began to explore later, which I'll call;social androgyny. Instead of imagining a world in which someone has decided to erase any opportunity for gender distinctions by physically merging the sexes, some authors have imagined worlds in which gender has simply disappeared. Bodies with different sets of reproductive organs still exist in these worlds, but the language used to talk about people does not reflect this, nor do the social roles that people take on, nor the ways people perceive one another. In other words, these authors ask us: what would the world look like if people simply forgot that genders were a thing? 

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Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy (Ancillary Justice [2013], Ancillary Sword [2014], and Ancillary Mercy [2015]) imagines a vast interplanetary empire in which genders are unmarked in speech (“Radchaai” is the name of the language, the empire, and its people) and not distinguished in social life. The result is a world where reproduction has been completely uncoupled from gender, as we see here in the first book, Ancillary Justice: 

She blinked, hesitated a moment as though what I’d said made no sense to her. “I used to wonder how Radchaai reproduced, if they were all the same gender.” 

“They’re not. And they reproduce like anyone else.” Strigan raised one skeptical eyebrow. “They go to the medic,” I continued, “and have their contraceptive implants deactivated. Or they use a tank. Or they have surgery so they can carry a pregnancy. Or they hire someone to carry it.” (Chapter 1)

In part because of this social background, the main character of the books finds it difficult to distinguish and mark gender when she comes into contact with other languages and cultures:

I turned to look at her, to study her face. She was taller than most Nilters, but fat and pale as any of them. She out-bulked me, but I was taller, and I was also considerably stronger than I looked. She didn’t realize what she was playing with. She was probably male, to judge from the angular mazelike patterns quilting her shirt. I wasn’t entirely certain. It wouldn’t have mattered, if I had been in Radch space. Radchaai don’t care much about gender, and the language they speak—my own first language—doesn’t mark gender in any way. This language we were speaking now did, and I could make trouble for myself if I used the wrong forms. It didn’t help that cues meant to distinguish gender changed from place to place, sometimes radically, and rarely made much sense to me. (Chapter 1)

The English pronoun Leckie chooses to represent all humans in Radchaai is “she,” a choice that reflects less about Radchaai society than it does our own. Think about it: The Left Hand of Darkness and Venus Plus X are, linguistically speaking, populated entirely by men—by “he”s. Even though the whole idea of these books is to subvert our expectations about gender, both novels actually subtly reinforce them. Books and other media populated exclusively by “he”s and “him”s are abundant and, for most of history, have scarcely been critiqued for having no “she”s.¹⁰ By employing the masculine-gender pronoun, these books present us with a safe androgyny, one that allows us to think about it without being particularly challenged by the language that surrounds it.

The Imperial Radch trilogy 

The Imperial Radch trilogy turns this on its head. The books are populated entirely by “she”s, including male “she”s like the one in the second block quote above. We are presented with characters who are referred to as though they are women, but whose genders are actually unknown or nonexistent. The fact that every character is a “she” instead of a “he" brings this constantly to the reader's attention: while “he”-dominated and “he”-exclusive literature abounds in science fiction and elsewhere, “she”-exclusive literature is practically unheard of outside of literature targeted specifically at women. “She” makes us sit up and take notice.

Leckie's answer to the question “what does a genderless world look like?” is basically that power and individuals' biological sex is no longer intertwined, but that power and having sex are still very much related. In Radchaai space, power is defined through wealth and patronage relationships. Patronage relations and personal power can in turn be enhanced through having sex with one's patron, at the expense of one's personal dignity. Like Le Guin, who imagines a genderless world whose primary countries are feudal, bureaucratic, and oligarchic, Leckie does not see erasing gender and, thereby, patriarchy, as a means to create an egalitarian society.¹¹ In her world as in ours, a more equal society is the result of organizing against and resisting oppression.

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Samuel R. Delany's masterpiece, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984), though written a generation earlier than Leckie's books, actually takes her approach to language and gender a step further. While both worlds imagine what I'm calling social androgyny (in which the concept of gender has been removed from a society, even as distinct kinds of bodies have been preserved), Delany's book imagines what further changes might happen to gendered language after it ceases to represent a rigid, uncrossable, binary division between seemingly opposite groups of people. His answer is that it could be used instead to represent the fleeting, fluid object of one's erotic desire:

“She” is the pronoun for all sentient individuals of whatever species who have achieved the legal status of “woman.” The ancient, dimorphic form “he,” once used exclusively for the genderal indication of males (cf. the archaic term man, pl. men), for more than a hundred-twenty years now, has been reserved for the general sexual object of “she,” during the period of excitation.  (78)

In Stars in My Pocket, most of the characters come from worlds on which the gender binary has disappeared, and everyone refers to each other as “she.” The exception is when speaking about someone you're really into, which ends up meaning that people are sometimes...uncomfortably open about who they're really into—it just crops up right there, in the pronouns you use to talk about them.

The societies in the vast universe of Stars in My Pocket take this and run with it: people are frank about who they want to have sex with, and sex happens when all parties are amenable. Worlds without this linguistic feature, though, can be more sexually repressed, if not in the way we're used to. Rhyonon, the planet where the book opens, has traditional gendered pronouns, and strict rules about who has sex with who: a tall person getting it on with a short person is completely forbidden! To an extent, then, Delany imagines that, no matter what strange inverted forms they may develop into, society and language will still manage to reflect one another in refreshingly weird ways.

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There's an entire other direction that science fiction authors have pushed this concept, however: instead of wondering about erasing gender and creating androgynous societies, some have asked: what happens when you add another gender on top of the other two?

The simplest answer an author can give is: not much! Maybe there's a future where a third gender is a broadly accepted norm, and that's that. This is the world of Alastair Reynolds' On the Steel Breeze (2013), which features a supporting character called Travertine, whose pronouns are “ve,” (subject) “vis” (possessive), and “vir” (object). Nothing much is made of Travertine's gender: vis pronouns are part of people's normal interaction with vir, and ve gets along very well, thanks very much. The one thing that sticks out is that Travertine is the only character who uses these pronouns, which seems to indicate a world in which people of vis third gender are less common than men and women.

It's hard to draw conclusions from the gender of a single character,¹² but Travertine comes across as a sort of neutral figure, one whose gender lies in between (or simply outside of) masculine and feminine and doesn't have a clear characteristic of its own. Octavia E. Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy¹³ imagines the opposite: a third gender so unique that it makes the other two seem the same by comparison. The books feature an alien race called the Oankali, who have males, females, and a third sex/third gender called ooloi. Brian Atterby describes the ooloi this way in Decoding Gender in Science Fiction:

[T]he ooloi are over-endowed. They have two hearts, four arms, seven fingers on each hand, an internal reproductive organ called the “yashi,” and wriggling sensory tentacles in various places. They do not have genitals but their sexual equipment includes both the womb-like yashi and the phallic sensory arms. They are attractive to members of both sexes and can temporarily develop breasts and other secondary sex characteristics of either human sex...  

One effect of adding ooloi to the human sexual equation is to make females and males appear more alike than different, because both are treated the same way by the ooloi. The ooloi uses its sensory arms to enter both the male and female bodies. It receives from each the gametes out of which it constructs a new individual. It differs from men and women in being immensely powerful, able to kill with a touch but also to heal, and capable of stimulating (and receiving) unearthly pleasure. (144)

The ooloi are biologically and socially distinct from males/men and females/women, but they are also aliens (or, later, alien-human hybrids). This makes them uniquely suited to their pronoun, which is “it”—the only time I have seen this pronoun used for third-gender characters. Using “it” emphasizes the ooloi's difference, both as creatures not (or not fully) human, and as a gender so over-endowed and unique that they render the other two hardly worth distinguishing by comparison.

The Xenogenesis series, also known as Lilith's Brood

I've been writing as though third genders were the end all and be all of additions to the gender spectrum, but when you come right down to it, there's not necessarily any numerical limit on genders. Raphael Carter (a science fiction author who does not identify as male or female) imagines the addition of many more than merely two or three gender categories. In “'Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation' by K.N. Sirsi and Sandra Botkin,” a science fiction story disguised as an academic paper, a fictional medical condition is described, which causes a person to perceive too many factors about people to sort them consistently into just two gender groups. Instead, people with the condition either become confused about people's gender and have trouble keeping their pronouns straight, or (more interestingly) they begin sorting people into more specific categories than the traditional gender binary allows:

Not only did the twins correctly sort these photographs...they distinguished accurately between such different intersexual conditions as true hermaphroditism, gonadal agenesis, and male and female pseudohermaphroditism...After some hesitation...they picked up the pile of control photographs and sorted them into a total of 22 categories, each one corresponding to a word in their private language...Categories 9 and 21 proved to identify women born with clitoromegaly and men born with hypospadias, respectively, even though these are minor cosmetic conditions of the genitals with no known effect on clothed appearance. Category 6 comprised people with high scores on the Bem test of psychological androgyny. Again, it is not clear how this could be distinguished from a photograph, but the twins' identifications have proved to be repeatable. Number 18, whose exact biological meaning is unclear, includes a disproportionate number of people with a family history of osteoporosis...Perhaps most strikingly, categories 4 and 9 identified men and women who took artificial sex hormones rather than producing them naturally, even when this was the result of hysterectomy or accidental castration rather than of genetic difference. (25-26)

Gender is really a grab-bag of various ideas (bodies! social norms! sexuality! language!), and Carter's story points out that we could, in theory, be splitting the hairs of gender a lot more finely than we do. Without being any more arbitrary than we already are, we could create enough genders such that it might be easiest, for linguistic purposes, to just assign everyone's group a number and be done with it.¹⁴ Or maybe Carter's point is that, with this many potential categories out there, gender is best left aside altogether.

Illustration by Alex Kostiw

As I hinted in the introduction, these explorations of gender are less attempts at predicting the future, and more in-depth reflections on the current state of things—having only recently discovered that gender is more imagined than real, authors begin exploring what is happening as it changes, and speculating about its disappearance. These explorations could just as easily be done in longform essays, but science fiction allows authors to make them more palatable and more exciting by talking about them as if they occurred in a distant time and/or place (Carter's story excepted—though perhaps the story's framing as medical literature serves the same purpose).

However, even though these stories are probably not attempting to predict the cultural future (perhaps it is simply beyond human ability to do so), they do present us with possible futures. These futures prompt two significant questions: what can be gained from disrupting the gender binary? And: how do we get there? I leave these questions to the reader.

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1. Interestingly, however, one of the other very early written languages, Sumerian, did not have feminine/masculine gendered pronouns. Instead, its pronouns were divided into two grammatical categories—human beings and gods in one category, and non-humans in the other. Notably, however, the language of the nearby Akkadians, which was also among the first written languages, did have gendered pronouns.↩

2. A majority of the world's languages do not have gendered pronouns, a surprising fact that I discovered by accident when researching this essay. I have seen numbers ranging from 57% to 70% of languages having no gender system, but can't find anything definitive. Any attempt to give a percentage of all languages is usually complicated by the facts that (1) the exact number of languages on earth is wide open for debate, since the line between language and dialect is often blurry, and (2) many languages are spoken by very small populations, are understudied, and/or are undergoing language death, and are therefore subject to rapid and extreme changes. Indo-European languages, a language family that is among the most widely spoken on Earth and that includes English, do typically have gender systems for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives (English is the weird outlier within this family, since it only has gendered pronouns, and other nouns and adjectives are usually not marked for gender).↩

3. The old word for intersexuality or being an intersex person is “hermaphroditism” or being a “hermaphrodite.” This older word comes from a character in Greek mythology, Hermaphroditus, who is the intersex child of two Greek gods, Aphrodite and Hermes—hence the name. “Intersex” is considered more polite these days, but “hermaphrodite” was what the researchers used back in the 50s; here's the paper citation if you need it—I had no luck tracking down a copy online, which I guess is unsurprising considering how old it is:

Money, John; Joan G. Hampson, John L. Hampson, 1955, “Hermaphroditism: Recommendations concerning assignment of sex, change of sex, and psychologic management”, Bulletin of the John Hopkins Hospital, 97: 284.

Intersex conditions have a wide variety of expressions, from having the sex chromosomes of one sex but the reproductive organs of the other, all the way up to having partial genital tissues for both sexes, with a range of possibilities in between. (Apparently there are no documented cases of individuals having fully functioning, fertile reproductive systems of both sexes. This shines an unfortunate light on —All You Zombies—, a favorite story of which I once made a recording for my old podcast.) Estimates of how many people have intersex conditions range from less than .1% all the way up to 1% of the human population, depending on how strictly you define your terms.↩

4. Until this point in history, the English word “gender” was pretty much just a grammatical category, rather than a sociological one, and the word could refer to any system of division of nouns in a language into different categories. See note 1 above for one example of grammatical “genders” that don't line up with our social genders; another famous example comes from Dyirbal, an Australian aboriginal language with four grammatical genders, which are reserved for the following kinds of nouns: (I) men and most animate objects; (II) women, water, fire, violence, and exceptional animals; (III) edible fruit and vegetables; and (IV) miscellaneous. Category II is the inspiration for the title of a book I read in college as part of my linguistics degree, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.↩

5. “Biological sex” is a tricky concept that, like gender, also turns out to be more of a social construct than an objective reality. The standard story is that in biology there are two sexes, males and females, but this is complicated by a variety of factors, not least of which are the broad array of possible intersex conditions that occur in humans and many other animals. While most animals reproduce by the mating of two distinct subtypes of animal, many species also have important “third sexes” (like the sterile workers in social insects like ants and bees, which are usually designated as “female,” though this is an awkward designation for an animal which does not and cannot reproduce). What's more, the actual biology of the different sexes often has little correspondence across species; for example, while human sex characteristics come from genes called X and Y, with females having XX chromosomes and males having XY, birds have a completely different set of sex chromosomes called Z and W, with the males having two of the same (ZZ) and the females having two different ones (ZW). Because biological sex may be just as subjective and blurry a category as gender, some have taken to wondering whether, in humans at least, there is just gender, which by itself makes us pay attention to certain body differences as a means of dividing ourselves into categories.↩
6. Some people report experiencing an internal sense of having no gender (agender) or having different genders at different times (genderfluid). These gender identities and others are sometimes grouped together as non-binary gender identities.↩

7. One might point to Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) as a precursor to this, though it is not generally considered a work of science fiction. It's about an extraordinarily long-lived person who changes genders throughout their life, which extends throughout several major historical epochs.↩

8. Here's where that pronoun is mentioned in each book:

The personal pronoun—and there was only one! in Ledom was like that: personal and without gender. That Charlie had told himself it was he was Charlie's own mistake, and now he knew it. (Venus Plus X, 73)

Yet you cannot think of a Gethenian as “it.” They are not neuters. They are potentials, or integrals. Lacking the Karhidish “human pronoun” used for persons in somer, I must say “he,” for the same reasons as we used the masculine pronoun in referring to a transcendent god: it is less defined, less specific, than the neuter or the feminine. But the very use of the pronoun in my thoughts leads me continually to forget that the Karhider I am with is not a man, but a manwoman. (The Left Hand of Darkness, 94)

↩

9. I note in passing that Le Guin did not live in a world where men could be pregnant, but that we do, in the form of transgender men who keep their reproductive organs. While this is a vastly different situation from what Le Guin or, for that matter, Thomas Sturgeon described, it has the ring of a correct cultural prediction, the kind I described as unusual in science fiction at the beginning of this essay. The counterpoint is: why weren't pregnant men predicted any earlier in science fiction? (Maybe they were—help me, readers?) I'll conclude by pointing out that the best (and simultaneously worst-because-most-visceral) pregnant man story in science fiction is Octavia E. Butler's “Bloodchild,” which is about a human man pregnant with alien offspring. Don't read it if you like sleep or the feeling of physical comfort in your own body.↩

10. Legendary internet timesuck TVTropes.org has a name for media featuring only one gender: Chromosome Casting; the site's list of examples is worth reading. In literature alone, you will find The Hobbit (1937), Heart of Darkness (1899), and the complete works of H.P. Lovecraft. While the TV Tropes listing uses “chromosome casting” to refer to single-gender casts of any gender, the list is, unsurprisingly, heavily weighted toward men. One of my favorite books doesn't show up on the TV Tropes list but probalby should: Moby-Dick (1851), which has exactly two women with any lines of dialogue, Mrs. Hussey and Aunt Charity, who disappear after chapter 20 (note: Moby-Dick has 135 chapters).↩
11. One can see how this idea—erasing gender will end oppression—might be tempting. It's not that far from the idea that electing or appointing women to positions of power will lead to greater gender equality and better lives for women. This latter idea is fairly common (viz. much of Hillary Clinton's current support, despite her historically bad record on actually doing things for women), but also fairly easy to debunk: women in power face the same limited choices and the same, or greater, pressures as men in positions of power, and the results for women are typically not much different from those of men. Nicole Aschoff makes this plain in her excellent book, The New Prophets of Capital:

Putting women in charge will not change the power of the profit motive and the compulsion of companies to give workers as little as economic, social, and cultural norms will allow. The goal of feminism is justice and equality for all women, not simply equal opportunity for women or equal participation by women. By aligning the goals of feminism with the goals of capitalism, [Sheryl] Sandberg’s model of emancipation functions as ideology, accepting and undergirding the dominant structures of power in society. Her critique of gender inequality in elite jobs, while accurate and thoughtful, glorifies the capitalist work ethic by pushing women to seek self-actualization through self-exploitation. Women who follow her action plan may achieve more success in their careers, and perhaps even reach the heights that Sandberg herself has gained. But her plan will help only a small number of women—the women who can find a place within the limited number of power positions in the corporate hierarchy. Everyone else—the domestic workers, retail staff, caregivers—will remain excluded, their efforts undermined by the strengthening of capital and the women who burnish its meritocratic facade. (39)

The shorter way to debunk this idea: just bring up Margaret Thatcher.↩
12. Wikipedia claims these pronouns were the invention of a New Zealand author called Keri Hulme in the 1980s, but I haven't found any independent corroboration of this. They were apparently first used extensively by Australian sci-fi author Greg Egan to refer to ungendered characters, both human and machine.↩
13. A favorite series of mine, in which I've actually found numerous parallels with the excellent videogame Half-Life 2, which I discuss here. The Xenogenesis trilogy was later republished under the name Lilith's Brood; the individual books are Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989).↩

14. The creation of this quantity of genders is already underway, in fact: last year, Facebook upped the number of gender choices for users' profiles to 58. ↩

Bibliography:

Aschoff, Nicole. The New Prophets of Capital. New York: Verso, 2015.

Attebery, Brian. “Androgyny as Difference,” in Decoding Gender in Science Fiction, 129-150. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Bettcher, Talia, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2014 ed. “Feminist Perspectives on Trans Issues.” Stanford: The Metaphysics Research Lab, Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), Stanford University http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/feminism-trans/ (accessed December 5, 2015).

Butler, Octavia E. Lilith's Brood. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2000.

Butler, Octavia E. “Bloodchild,” in Bloodchild and Other Stories, 2nd ed. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005.

Carter, Raphael. “Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation' by K.N. Sirsi and Sandra Botkin,” in The James Tiptree Award Anthology 2, edited by Karen Joy Fowler, 15-29. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2006. 

Craig, Maggie. “They’re here, get used to them: why gender-neutral pronouns are not 'radical.'” Hopes and Fears, September 21, 2015. http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/city/life/216515-gender-neutral-pronouns-radical

Delany, Samuel R. Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. 1984. Reprint, New York: Bantam, 1990.

Leckie, Ann. Ancillary Justice. New York: Orbit, 2013. Ebook, .epub edition. 

Leckie, Ann. Ancillary Sword. New York: Orbit, 2014. Ebook, .epub edition.

Leckie, Ann. Ancillary Mercy. New York: Orbit, 2015. Ebook, .epub edition.

Le Guin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness. 1969. Reprint, New York: Ace Books, 2000.

Saul, Jennifer. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2012 ed. “Feminist Philosophy of Language.” Stanford: The Metaphysics Research Lab, Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), Stanford University http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2012/entries/feminism-language/ (accessed December 5, 2015).

Sturgeon, Theodore, Venus Plus X. 1960. Reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1999.

Vanderbilt, Thomas. “Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot.” Nautilus. September 10, 2015. http://nautil.us/issue/28/2050/why-futurism-has-a-cultural-blindspot.

Wikipedia contributors. “Gender-specific and gender-neutral pronouns.” Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neutral_pronouns (accessed December 5, 2015)

Collaboration and Resistance: Half-Life 2 and the Xenogensis Trilogy

Please come in peace, we beseech you,
Only a landing will teach them.
Our earth may never survive,
So do come, we beg you.
Please interstellar policemen,
Won't you give us a sign?
Give us a sign that we've reached you.
—"Calling Occupants of Interstellar Craft," Klaatu

Before I go anywhere here, know this post will assume that videogames are art. I don't have strong opinions about what, exactly, art is, or what it is for, but I believe that videogames require the same level of skill, patience, and creativity to make that other art forms do, and that videogames can reward close scrutiny and intellectual engagement in the same way that art does. So for my purposes today, they are art. If you think I'm wrong, maybe go read some Tom Bissel.

~   ~   ~

Octavia Butler at a book signing.

Octavia E. Butler was a science fiction writer, working from the 70s to the 00s; she was the first black female sci-fi author to rise to any kind of prominence, and I've recently found I can't get enough of her work. I just finished reading what one of my sources calls her "masterpiece," the Xenogenesis trilogy,* which begins with the main character's introduction to an alien race:  

The Oankali, a nomadic alien species, have engineered themselves into genetic dead ends. They have refreshed themselves many times in the past through cross-planetary interbreeding. Now they are looking to take the best traits from humans by combining our genetic material with theirs, using an advanced race of tentacled breeder-beings called "ooloi."...From the Oankali point of view, humans, taken alone, are disastrously hierarchical and domineering; the new blend will be less fierce and less individualistic. When they arrive on Earth, humans have barely survived mutual destruction. (From Octavia Butler, the outsider who changed science fiction)

The central problem of the trilogy is this: the Oankali have come to Earth to trade. Their trade is not in goods but in genes, and they intend to create a new species by mixing their genes with humans', as the summary above mentions. No one is forced to breed with the aliens; however, given that the Oankali view humans as  a danger to themselves, they will not allow any humans to breed on their own. Humanity as we know it, then, is doomed to extinction, while an alien/human hybrid will succeed us. Understandably, much of humanity is pretty furious about this. The "resisters," as the angered reactionaries come to be called, see anyone who collaborates or breeds with the Oankali as an enemy, which includes the main character of the first book, Lilith Iyapo:

The Oankali manipulate her into training the first group of humans to re-colonize Earth. Lilith is a natural leader, but leading 40 angry, confused, and captive humans is no easy task. Her loyalties are divided: On one hand she wants human freedom; on the other, she comes to respect and perhaps even love some of the Oankali...Certainly the humans react to the Oankali with xenophobia and violence...The humans are none too keen on having a leader who appears to have allied herself with the enemy. The men are particularly threatened by Lilith’s strength and confidence. They beat her and call her a whore...They respond to Lilith’s Chinese-American boyfriend Joe with bigotry and homophobia. (From Sleeping With the Enemy: Octavia Butler's Dawn)

The humans' negative reaction to their situation and to the collaborator Lilith is the dark side of the resistance mentality, a mentality that is presented quite positively in the videogame I just finished, Half-Life 2.

In Half-Life 2, the main character is Dr. Gordon Freeman, a physicist who re-eappears on Earth mysteriously a number of years after an apocalypse event and alien invasion, and who joins the resistance against the aliens. In the opening sequence, he (and the player controlling him) is introduced to Earth as it is now, with humans living under an alien occupation and police state:

As he steps off the train and enters City 17, Dr. Freeman is confronted by the white-bearded face of Dr. Wallace Breen, Earth's Administrator. He welcomes visitors in a recorded message: "You have chosen, or been chosen, to relocate to one of our finest remaining urban centers. I thought so much of City 17 that I elected to establish my Administration here, in the citadel so thoughtfully provided by our Benefactors." The player at once begins to identify Dr. Breen as the smiling face pasted over the ugly situation that is the world of Half-Life 2, and his message is immediately followed by scenes of that ugliness: police brutality, separation of loved ones, intimidation, and hopelessness.

As the game unfolds, the player finds out more about Dr. Breen: he is the person who arranged the surrender of Earth to the Combine—the alien force that has come to the planet with some largely unspoken, yet undeniably sinister purpose—after a short and one-sided conflict. But he has high hopes for the future: humanity can profit from its association (however involuntary) with the Combine, if only we can collaborate:

It has come to my attention that some have lately called me a "collaborator," as if such a term were shameful. I ask you, what greater endeavor is there than collaboration? In our current, unparalleled enterprise, refusal to collaborate is simply a refusal to grow—an insistence on suicide, if you will. Did the lungfish refuse to breathe air? It did not. It crept forth boldly while its brethren remained in the blackest ocean abyss, with lidless eyes forever staring at the dark, ignorant and doomed despite their eternal vigilance. Would we model ourselves on the trilobite? Are all the accomplishments of humanity fated to be nothing more than a layer of faded, broken, plastic shards, thinly strewn across a fossil bed, sandwiched between the Burgess Shale and an eon's worth of mud?

In order to be true to our nature, and our destiny, we must aspire to greater things. We have outgrown our cradle! It is futile to cry for mother's milk, when our true sustenance awaits us among the stars. And only the Universal Union, that small minds call the "Combine," can carry us there! Therefore I say, yes, I am a collaborator! We must all collaborate, willingly, eagerly, if we expect to reap the benefits of unification. And reap we shall! (Source)

However valid Breen's hope of a brighter future may be, the player is given very little chance to see his point of view. The game's narrative quickly thrusts the player-as-Gordon-Freeman into cahoots with the resistance movement against the Combine and its human collaborators; the resistance befriends him, shelters him, and asks for his help in rescuing imprisoned members and ultimately in bringing down their oppressors. And the Combine respond by trying to kill or capture him. All the while, in the background of the game, Dr. Breen issues public messages upbraiding the resistors and admonishing humanity to come to its senses and cooperate peacefully with their "Benefactors," the occupying alien force. Breen seems, in essence, another Lilith Iyapo, seen from the perspective of one of her human enemies in Xenogenesis.

Just how apt this comparison is not quite clear; it takes a fair deal of reading between the lines to generate a sympathetic portrait of Dr. Breen, whom Half-Life 2 sets up as the final enemy to be defeated at the close of the game's narrative.** And even if the player is able to come to terms with Breen's worldview, and accept that he's only doing what he thinks is right, the player can never know for sure that the Combine's promise for humanity's glorious future is not simply a lie. At best, Breen comes off as a well-meaning man forced by circumstance to go along with and even occasionally instigate oppression; but this is a pretty strained reading, given that Breen is also certainly also a bully and kind of a jerk.

Lilith, on the other hand, is a more complex figure, dealing with more morally complex circumstances. In the Xenogenesis universe, neither humanity nor aliens are completely in the right, and she manages to choose one side over the other without sacrificing her moral authority:

The humans start a war with their alien captors. The Oankali are peaceful, environmentally responsible and relatively egalitarian. They’re just trying to save humanity, right? And look at the thanks they get. Yet Butler isn’t interested in simple characterizations: Oankali good, humans bad. The Oankali don’t have a utopian society. They berate the humans for their deadly combination of intelligence and hierarchical thinking. Yet they constantly violate the rights of their captives...

Lilith is coerced and manipulated, and her choices are extremely limited (interbreed, death, or a solitary life aboard the ship). But she’s an intelligent, creative, and strong-willed woman, and she does what Butler’s heroines do well: She negotiates between poor options. She reluctantly acts as the mediator between the humans and the Oankali. She isn’t willing to be an Oankali pet or a guinea pig, but she isn’t willing to revert to caveman society with the humans either. Throughout the novel she demands respect from the Oankali, and works to forge a more equal partnership between the two groups. (From Sleeping With the Enemy: Octavia Butler's Dawn again)

Videogames are a young art form, and one thing videogame creators are still grappling with is how best to deliver narratives to the player. Half-Life 2 has an incredible narrative delivery mechanism: all narrative elements are delivered within the gameplay itself; there are no cutscenes (in which the player must put down the controller and watch a short movie) and no dialog boxes (where the action stops and the player goes through a list of possible questions and answers with a non-player character), only seamless gameplay. Creating this kind of narrative is incredibly demanding, as it requires timing events correctly and placing them in the right space so the player will not miss them and thus a crucial part of the story.

"How would you feel about committing genocide on behalf of a corporation?"
"What's in it for me?" (Knights of the Old Republic)

The only narrative that can readily be constructed with such delicate requirements of timing and placement is a rigidly linear one. On the other hand, the main tools that have been developed so far for creating moral complexity in videogame narratives require nonlinearity: games like Fable and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic allow the player to make choices that affect their own moral standing in the narrative, and which can even affect the actions and development of the non-player characters around them, creating branching narratives, the different limbs of which can only be seen by going back and playing the game again and making different choices. For now, such complex character development seems to require suspending any opportunity for the kind of seamless narrative experience offered by Half-Life 2, as the only videogame tools currently available for delivering it are the cutscenes and dialog boxes that Half-Life 2 deliberately avoids.

So the player cannot choose what will happen in the story, only how soon it will happen. There is no opportunity to explore other characters' motivations and internal worlds in greater depth; instead, the options are things like which tunnel to explore first, and whether to shoot the enemy or fling an exploding barrel at him.

You can also choose to shoot a chair at a gunship, though, so that's something

While the player of Half-Life 2 may try to look closely and find different readings of the character of Dr. Breen, ultimately the game is at pains to make him into an enemy for the player to overcome, and what moral complexity he might have accumulated in a more developed art form, like a novel, is here sacrificed for the needs of satisfying gameplay.

---

*Also known by the much less appealing name Lilith's Brood, for what it's worth. Seriously, Xenogenesis wasn't cool enough?
**The player is allowed to sit and listen patiently to Dr. Breen's broadcasts, but can often just as easily walk out of earshot or even pull the TV or other broadcasting device out of the wall, cutting off Breen's message with a satisfying electric pop before he's had the chance to make his case.

Photo sources:
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Half-Life_2_cover.jpg & http://www.apocalypsebooks.com/img/cover/xenogenesis-dawn.jpg (Used here under what I believe to be fair use circumstances; the images are serving in the context of critical commentary on their respective works of art, and they contribute to readers' understanding of the material in a way that could not be practically achieved by words alone)
2. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Butler_signing.jpg
3. My gameplay
4. http://www.gamershell.com/screenpop.php?id=40918

In Defense of Boring Movies

Part of a series of essays In Defense of Boring Movies.

It’s just a life story, so there’s no climax,
No more new territory, so pull away the IMAX.
—"Our Life Is Not a Movie, or Maybe," Okkervil River

One of my favorite films of all time is Stalker, directed in 1979 by Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. It is, in a word, boring.

Oh, there are more eloquent, poetic words an expert reviewer could use to describe this film—and I use those words, often with great relish. But "boring" is my personal description of choice for Stalker and its ilk; in fact, there are a whole class of movies that I love dearly that I group together as "boring movies."

Before I get into what makes a "boring movie" in the sense that I mean, let's back up and talk about Stalker. It's a science fiction film: it takes place in a world where, somewhere in rural Russia, an unknown, but clearly very strange, event occurred, creating a "Zone," said to drive people mad or kill them and cause mutations in their children. At the center of the Zone, supposedly, there is a room that, if you enter it, will make your dearest wish come true. It's illegal to go to the Zone, but in the film two men do, guided by a "Stalker," who knows the Zone's many (invisible) traps and pitfalls.

If that premise sounds intriguing, good, because it is. It is not, however, exciting, and, in its execution at least, is never entertaining. Instead, the movie ... takes ... its ... time. Through long stretches of dialogue-free scene- and mood-setting, it bores you into either turning it off and doing something else more fun, or to settling down, relaxing, and beginning to think. Take this scene as an example: the long, wordless ride to the Zone (filmed in beautiful color) from the world outside it (in sepia tone):

Sequences like that let you know that the director's goal is not to entertain, but to induce a meditative state and provoke thought. To quote Tarkovsky, "If the regular length of a shot is increased, one becomes bored, but if you keep on making it longer, it piques your interest, and if you make it even longer a new quality emerges, a special intensity of attention." In this film, you can focus this attention on a variety of subjects; I tend to pay attention to certain details and use them to debate with myself whether the Zone is real or made up (there is almost never any direct, visible evidence that anything is amiss: for most of the film, we have only the Stalker's word that the Zone is not wholly illusory), but a viewer can spend her time pondering many other questions, including another personal favorite: what does it mean to truly desire something—are our "dearest wishes" made consciously or unconsciously?

A boring movie, in this sense, is a movie with a subversive purpose. Many of my favorite movies in this category advertise themselves as genre fare—the science fiction film, the western, the frontier epic—almost as if they are hoping to draw in the unexpecting viewer, not prepared or wanting thought but an escape. Instead of offering the usual transport to another world, though, where you can forget your own life and its attendant troubles in a sea of fun, tensions quickly followed by resolutions, and the promise of a happy ending, they confront you with questions to ponder and problems to ruminate on. Such confrontations are necessary, and it is good to have pieces of art that will approach us, offer us the opportunity to think deeply, and provide some directions in which answers may lie. I am happy that films like this are out there. And I think you should be, too.

If what I've said on this subject interests you, here is a short list of my favorites, with articles linked to explain what each is about more thoroughly and with more expertise than I can here.

Stalker: I've explained this one to you, but see also Solaris by the same director.
Dead Man: an "acid western" wherein Johnny Depp confronts his own mortality.
The New World: the story of Pocahontas and John Smith as meditation on humanity's relationship to nature.

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Photo source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/danielsphotography/3513199260/

Ex Machina: Superhero Comics and Government

Part of a series of Lists of Cool Things.

The Great Machine/Mitchell Hundred,
Mayor of New York City

And the voice said: 
Neither snow nor rain 
nor gloom of night 
shall stay these couriers 
from the swift completion 
of their appointed rounds.
 
'Cause when love is gone, 
there's always justice.
And when justice is gone, 
there's always force.
—"O Superman," Laurie Anderson

This week, I want to talk about some reading I've been doing, about government, and about comics.*

I just read finished reading through a favorite series of comic books called Ex Machina, about a man named Mitchell Hundred who, as people in comics often do, has an accident, gains special powers, and becomes a superhero. Hundred's powers are the ability to talk to and command machines to do what he tells them to.

Unfortunately for Hundred, his alter ego, the Great Machine, is not very popular...with anyone. Hundred grew up reading comic books with superheroes and supervillains, but as the Great Machine, he finds out that fighting crime as a costumed vigilante in New York in reality is (1) really hard for a variety of reasons—mostly, no one wants him around and he's not very good at it (e.g., he tries to stop people from joyriding on top of the subway and ends up shutting down the whole train system for six hours; he tells two delinquents to go to school and they beat him up) and (2) illegal—the police are after him for causing disturbance and being a public nuisance. He realizes that what he is doing is at best morally questionable, and he decides to try to help others in a different way. He unmasks himself and uses his notoriety as the Great Machine to run for Mayor of New York. 

But since no one wanted him around in the first place, he doesn't get very far. Not far, that is, until September 11th, when the Great Machine uses his powers to order the second plane to land instead of hitting the World Trade Center. As a result of this, Mitchell Hundred is elected mayor. This comic book series, then, is all about his term in office as Mayor of New York: a superhero mayor trying to save the city with politics.

***

In rereading the series and in thinking about it, I noticed an important idea at work throughout—it's present already in the introduction above. It's this idea of the danger of relying on a greater force outside of ourselves to solve all of our problems, in particular, the danger of relying on the government to save us. It is my opinion that a government can and should provide help to its citizens and support them as they pursue life, liberty, and happiness. I know that I have benefited enormously from the workings of the great machine of society (Thomas Jefferson's term), and in particular, from the support of the government (public schools, libraries, roads--even food stamps for a while!), yet I have very little idea of how the system that supports me so really works, or how to involve myself in making sure it works fairly and properly for the benefit of all. Sometimes, like the Great Machine, I just want to get out and go somewhere and do something for somebody—or at least show that I'm trying to be a good person—and sometimes I just end up feeling kind of stupid and maybe slightly racist after the fact. And sometimes, as Mayor Hundred experiences in his time in office, we expect more of our government than is reasonable without more extensive participation and action on our part.

For this week's Illinois primary election, I did a bunch of internet research at the last minute, trying to decide who to vote for in my local elections (i.e., figuring out which Chicago and Illinois State politicians are the least corrupt and morally bankrupt, typically a losing proposition). It was frustrating to realize that, even after serving two years in AmeriCorps, dedicating myself to the improvement of my country through national service and the education of others, I knew so little about how to effect meaningful political or social change through voting. I also know little about public protest, though it's all around me at my work downtown (Occupy Chicago, whether you agree with them or not, are at least surely laudable for keeping the spirit of protest and free speech alive in an increasingly tough city for that sort of thing). Unfortunately, I ended up making a stupid decision that made all my research moot (...ask me about it sometime; no, it wasn't forgetting to vote). It made me consider how far our society would have to go for everyone to know enough to vote responsibly and participate effectively in the system that rules them.

***

Let me come back to my original topic, the comic book Ex Machina. It may surprise you that a heavy theme like "the dangers of the public relying on government to save society" could come out of a comic book. I would have been surprised just a few years ago, when a good friend in college started sharing his comics collection with me. It turned out that comics are more than just superhero stories: in the last several decades, comics have exploded into many genres and worlds of ideas.

The fact is, comics are a medium, a way of telling stories. They can be beautiful or ugly or wondrous or disturbing; the best ones use the blend of visual art and written word to tell a story in a way that no other method of storytelling can. To me, saying that you won't read comics is like saying that you really just don't like, say, books or movies or music: you could say that, and it might be true, but it seems strange to simply discard an entire category of story so candidly. Comics are a method, and they're a unique method that ought not to be dismissed as childish or silly simply because they are often associated in the public mind with children and silliness. I hope you find one sometime soon that will convince you of their power and beauty. Some suggestions are listed below by genre.

History:
T-Minus, a history of the Space Race.
Louis Riel, a biography of a historical figure involved in an important conflict in Canadian history.^†
Maus, the story of a man's imprisonment and escape from a concentration camp and his relationship with his son.^†
Safe Area Gorazde and Palestine, two comics about a man's experiences during conflicts in the Balkans and in Palestine.^†

Realistic Fiction:
Paul Goes Fishing and Paul Moves Out, part of a series of slice-of-life comics about a Quebecois family.
The Big Kahn, the story of a Jewish family that finds out their Rabbi father was not Jewish after his death.^†
Incognegro, story of a black reporter passing as white in the South in the early 20th century.^†

Fantasy/Adventure:
Hellboy, the story of a demon monster-hunter.^†
American Born Chinese, a series of interlinked stories about Chinese heritage/culture and growing up Chinese in the US.
Surrogates, a sci-fi future where everyone has robot bodies that perform all their actions in the real world, operated safely from home.^†
Concrete, in which a man gets put into a giant alien stone body and uses it to travel the world, accomplish great feats or endurance, advocate for good causes, and generally do things not typical of superheroes.^†

---

*Note: I'm not a scholar, at least not in the field of comics, so let me point you to two books with a world more to say and better ways to say it than I have: Understanding Comics, the Invisible Art (or, if you're interested in a more recent and more creation-oriented book, Making Comics) is a wonderful book that describes what comics are, why they're good, and what they can do (and it does it all through comics, i.e., it is a comic book in itself) and Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work is a book which not only discusses what comics are and what they can do, but which also goes on to investigate and analyze numerous comic artists and their work in detail. Both are great, I assure you.
†These books are probably best suited to adults, as they have adult language and themes.