Strangers

What a crappy, crappy book. It's like the author thought, "Hmm, science fiction is all about expanding our ideas of humanity and sentience? Nah, I'll just be really sexist."

(This review contains spoilers, but I promise, you really don't care.)

Two things were so bad I bookmarked the pages so that I could reproduce them here:
--On page four of this book, the only named female character to that point is called a "fucking bitch" and a "cunt." (To be precise, "cunt" is actually referring to all human females, but inspired by her actions.)
--p43: "Farber, who had been used to the aggressive, self-assertive women of Earth, was delighted by Liraun's apparent submissiveness, although like most men of his generation he seriously believed himself to show more be 'liberated.' Nevertheless, he quickly became comfortably accustomed to having her defer to his will, cook his supper, serve him in a hundred little ways."

Here's my recap: human dude is frustrated that his human ladyfriend is manipulating him into sex after they've been dating for a few days. So he wanders off during a festival and meets a lady alien. He takes her home and has sex with her. The next day another dude is making fun of him for it and calls the alien a "nigger." (Note that word choice aside, there's no indication of why the aliens are looked down upon except that apparently that one dude thinks they smell bad and their vaginas are sideways?) Our "hero" decides he wants to marry the alien because she's really submissive and stuff, and his friend adds, "You can fuck niggers if you want but don't you think about marrying them! We don't marry our niggers back home" (p56). So he goes to the alien council and asks to marry her, and they'll agree only if he changes his genes (?!) so that he can reproduce with the alien. Uh, sure. So he does that, and they get married, and his alien wife asks him if he wants to force her to have children, and he says yes ("'My wife,' he said with great seriousness, meeting her gaze, 'I have dicided [sic] that this is the time for you to conceive, and to bear your children.' ... Then he said: 'There's no need for you to be afraid.' And, very gently: 'You're a woman; this would have come to you eventually no matter how long you waited.'"). So she gets pregnant, and then he realizes that alien mothers can't give birth without dying. And then she dies. The end.

And I just. What.



(Coming back to this review later to add that in addition to all the other problems, every human in this book is DUMB AS A BRICK. So women in the alien society are born with their father's last names, take their husband's names when they get married, and then at some mysterious time they take a third name, everyone the same one. There are a couple conversations about how mysterious this all is, and what could possibly be the impetus for the third name??? I'll give you a minute... Yup, it happens when they get pregnant. Also, every woman in the alien society dies when she gives birth, and somehow no one has ever noticed that alien women mysteriously disappear and there are no mothers. There's some claptrap [word of the week!] about how they're all suspicious of strangers and they won't let anyone study them, but seriously, humans have interacted with these aliens long enough to learn their language fluently but they don't notice that they've never seen a mother? It's another example of sexism, because clearly the author can't imagine, and therefore the characters can't imagine, the idea of a mother doing anything other than sitting around in her house raising her kids and being invisible. But it's also just bad science and bad science fiction.) show less

What a crappy, crappy book. It's like the author thought, "Hmm, science fiction is all about expanding our ideas of humanity and sentience? Nah, I'll just be really sexist."

(This review contains spoilers, but I promise, you really don't care.)

Two things were so bad I bookmarked the pages so that I could reproduce them here:
--On page four of this book, the only named female character to that point is called a "fucking bitch" and a "cunt." (To be precise, "cunt" is actually referring to all human females, but inspired by her actions.)
--p43: "Farber, who had been used to the aggressive, self-assertive women of Earth, was delighted by Liraun's apparent submissiveness, although like most men of his generation he seriously believed himself to show more be 'liberated.' Nevertheless, he quickly became comfortably accustomed to having her defer to his will, cook his supper, serve him in a hundred little ways."

Here's my recap: human dude is frustrated that his human ladyfriend is manipulating him into sex after they've been dating for a few days. So he wanders off during a festival and meets a lady alien. He takes her home and has sex with her. The next day another dude is making fun of him for it and calls the alien a "nigger." (Note that word choice aside, there's no indication of why the aliens are looked down upon except that apparently that one dude thinks they smell bad and their vaginas are sideways?) Our "hero" decides he wants to marry the alien because she's really submissive and stuff, and his friend adds, "You can fuck niggers if you want but don't you think about marrying them! We don't marry our niggers back home" (p56). So he goes to the alien council and asks to marry her, and they'll agree only if he changes his genes (?!) so that he can reproduce with the alien. Uh, sure. So he does that, and they get married, and his alien wife asks him if he wants to force her to have children, and he says yes ("'My wife,' he said with great seriousness, meeting her gaze, 'I have dicided [sic] that this is the time for you to conceive, and to bear your children.' ... Then he said: 'There's no need for you to be afraid.' And, very gently: 'You're a woman; this would have come to you eventually no matter how long you waited.'"). So she gets pregnant, and then he realizes that alien mothers can't give birth without dying. And then she dies. The end.

And I just. What.



(Coming back to this review later to add that in addition to all the other problems, every human in this book is DUMB AS A BRICK. So women in the alien society are born with their father's last names, take their husband's names when they get married, and then at some mysterious time they take a third name, everyone the same one. There are a couple conversations about how mysterious this all is, and what could possibly be the impetus for the third name??? I'll give you a minute... Yup, it happens when they get pregnant. Also, every woman in the alien society dies when she gives birth, and somehow no one has ever noticed that alien women mysteriously disappear and there are no mothers. There's some claptrap [word of the week!] about how they're all suspicious of strangers and they won't let anyone study them, but seriously, humans have interacted with these aliens long enough to learn their language fluently but they don't notice that they've never seen a mother? It's another example of sexism, because clearly the author can't imagine, and therefore the characters can't imagine, the idea of a mother doing anything other than sitting around in her house raising her kids and being invisible. But it's also just bad science and bad science fiction.) show less