I am rereading a sci-fi book I first read in my teens some thirty years ago. The book is "The Mote in God's Eye" by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
I find I am re-experiencing the book on at least two expected levels: I am enjoying the novel for the terrific fiction that it is and also am mindful of what about the book appealed to a 16-year-old me. Back when I first read the novel and had 80% of my life ahead of me, I am sure I was excited by the visions for an optimistic future. According to the chronology of mankind that begins the book, the Soviet Union and U.S. would find peace and sign treaties creating a unified "CoDominium" in 1990.
And, in 2008 (according to this 1974 novel), we will test the first interstellar drive to move between the stars. Perhaps the authors, writing in the years following the Apollo lunar landing, expected this event would throw open the door to man's curiosity of the cosmos and result in a flood of funding and research for space exploration. The 16-year-old inside me still feels sad that mankind's attention has--practically--been focused on more earthly issues.
I also am finding that my rereading of "The Mote in God's Eye" is focusing my attention on something unexpected (but perhaps it shouldn't have been): The authors seemed to feel that by 3017, the year in which the novel is set, science would advance but apparently human beings would not. Of course, mere decades after of the book was written, their ideas of human progress a millennia hence are downright quaint.
It is a little distracting, somewhat humorous, and quite a bit eye opening to read passages like this, which is a discussion about sex and childbearing between human Sally and an alien:
Alien: Do you have children aboard the MacArthur?
Sally: Me? No! I'm not even married.
Alien: Married?
Sally explains.
Alien: Who raises the children born without marriage?
Sally: There are charities.
Alien: So that if you aren't married you just don't--get together?
Sally: That's right. Of course, there are pills a woman can take if she likes men but doesn't want to take the consequences.
Alien: But a proper woman doesn't use them?
Sally: No.
A few pages later on the humans see pregnant aliens at work and are astounded. Sally tries "carefully to explain just how useless pregnant human females were." Sally plays a prominent part in the novel since she is the only woman--by coincidence explained in the story--on a shipful of military and scientific personnel. In this version of 3017, women stay at home and leave the excitement of exploring space, scientific discovery, and war to the menfolk. Have we really come so far in 33 years that these passages sound so terribly antiquated?
While the two men who wrote the book may be guilty of sexism in their view of the future, they certainly were products of their time. Check out the U.S. Government stats on
the gender of the employed back in 1974: 33.8 million women were employed compared to 53 million men. According to the same report, in 2006 66.9 million women were employed compared to 77.5 million men--the size of the female workforce almost doubled in the time the male workforce increased less than 50%.
The BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics),
also tells us that in 1974, women employed "usually full time" earned $24,714 and men with the same status earned $48,378. By 2006, those annual earnings had risen to $50,380 for women and $69,307 for men. We can argue about the rightness and wrongness of the figures for 2006, but this much is clear: in the last three decades or so, women went from earning 51 cents on the dollar compared to men up to 73 cents on the dollar. My guess is that this increase has less to do with women making more within traditional female career paths (nursing, teaching, etc.) and more to do with larger number of women moving into higher-paid careers that traditionally had been male dominant. In other words, at the time this book was written, it probably was a timely (if soon doomed) idea that women left war and science to men.
So, why were Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle--two men who were able to create a visionary, rich, and textured future--not able to see gender roles changing one iota in a millennia? What does this say about them or about our society? Were they short-sighted? If women had written this book, would it have been vastly different? Or were they making a point (since the alien civilization is filled with gender-changing creatures where women do much of the work--for mysterious reasons I will undoubtedly find out when I complete the book)?
There are times I wish I could simply read a book for what it is, but I often find myself learning as much or more about the author and his or her times as I do about the story. Do you do the same?
