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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27686 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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Kim Stanley Robinson, science fiction, and the limits of what you can imagine

A couple times on this forum Kim Stanley Robinson (KSR, for short) has come up. He's an American science fiction writer who plies mainly in hard(er) science fiction, and especially likes to play with themes that explore the interactions between technology, culture, and economics. He takes some limitation of humans and imagines: what if it were not so? How would we change, what could we do, what new things would we discover about ourselves? He's a bit of a granola-eating utopian socialist so I'm sure some here would have certain ideological objections to his writing. But it's nice sometimes to read work from someone who has a fundamental sort of optimism for humanity, that we might one day be able to put aside our differences and Figure It All Out.

His "Mars trilogy" (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) might be his masterpiece, and extends his inquisitive nature. A depiction of the colonization of Mars over centuries, there is an endless series of problems for the characters to solve; some scientific in nature, but more than that organizational and cultural. The colonization of a virgin world yields all kinds of conflicts where there can be no true compromise between people with differing fundamental values. Alongside the geoengineering of Mars proceeds the genetic engineering of the human race, as scientists begin to unlock the ability to greatly extend the lifespan of humans. This might just have originated as a conceit by KSR to keep most of the characters across the centuries required for the geological drama to play out, but he dives fully into imaging all the upheaval such an advance would yield.

There are Luddites, reactionaries, those who wish to monopolize longevity for themselves, a great and deep anger from the masses at the prospect that immortality might be denied to them. There are myriad complications and problems; certain limits prove tricky to overcome. But technological progress is an unyielding wave, and by the end of the series humans dabble in every kind of imaginable self-customization, from the crucial to the trivial: yes, all sorts of environmental adaptations to Mars' ecosystems are quickly developed, but so are custom mixes of psychoactive drugs. People create physical backups of themselves so they can do dangerous sports. All sorts of modifications can be sought to fill the spiritual and emotional void. People delay their physical decrepitude indefinitely. Women put off having children into their 300s.

But what people don't do is change their sex. The trilogy was published between 1992 and 1996; KSR likely would not have understood the concept of "changing gender". Despite the near-infinite possibilities of changing one's physical form that is offered, no one seeks to transform themselves; no woman decides to father children, no man bears a child. There is no mention of purely cosmetic alterations to simply imitate the opposite sex, or become some even more complex sexual entity now that technology enables them to do so. No character ever feels any deep or emergent desire to push past this one final barrier, when all the others have already been crossed. And it's not like KSR is some prude or philosophically opposed to it; his more recent novels feature trans and non-binary characters, and in those that feature similar types of possibility with respect to genetic engineering people freely experiment with switching sexes even if they do not have some form of dysphoria. The simplest answer is that the notion that people would want to change their sex simply did not occur to him, and this is remarkable in the context of the books trying to imagine all the possible physical and societal limits that humans could push.

Most of the original hundred colonists are either American or Russian; one might speculate that if the books had been started five years earlier, the latter would have been Soviet, and if they had been started five years later, perhaps Chinese. To some extent this is the problem of all science fiction that deals in the near future (the the trilogy begins in the far-off future of 2026); it is far enough away to be unable to predict with certainty but close enough that mistakes seem obvious in hindsight. But I think this is also somewhat of a humbling notion that we just might not be as good at predicting societal changes as we might flatter ourselves to be. I used to feel that they were more strongly tied to material/economic forces; in recent years I've become less sure. When it comes to predicting the grand arc of human civilization it is a lot easier to look a fool than a wise man. I'm glad that there are people who are willing to ignore that and take a stab.

Ian Banks (one of my favorite authors, whereas Aurora makes me despise KSR) had characters switching their phenotypical sex on a whim in the Culture novels written in the late 80s and early 90s.

I don't think he was a trans ideologue, it simply makes sense in a setting where people can trivially become post-biological, and external sex is just as much of a choice as one's hair color.*

Now, if today, we miraculously had a pill that swapped genders quickly and reversibly, I think the majority of people would try it, yet switch back to their original after the novelty wore off. I'm perfectly content being a man, even if I have no particular sense of "gender identity" as some claim to possess, yet I think I'm better off as a man than a woman, all else being equal.

*Changing sex is something most Culture denizens do throughout their lives, as a sort of loose cultural expectation. They often opt to child bear, swapping genders with their partners if necessary. Then again, they can just upload into computers or change their species outright, so they'd look at you askance if you thought that one's choice of gonads was a particularly defining feature. I suspect it would take time for our society to get to a similar point, but it seems inevitable enough to me over long enough timescales.

I find myself in the likely unique situation of writing my own novel in a similar setting, including the near-term colonization of Mars.

Mars is a backwater, an insignificant ball of rusty dirt colonized more for the cred (and countries simply aping Elon rather than any true economic incentive), rather than any concrete benefit. Terraforming is stupidly wasteful, the same time and effort could let you make exponentially larger volumes of permanent space habitats, and cater to far larger numbers of people. Thus, there's no effort to do so there, at most people build massive biodomes that cordon off chunks of the surface, and combined with an artifical magnetosphere from a fusion plant hooked up to an asteroid at a Lagrange point, means you can walk around on the surface in some places with only mild physiological or pharmacological augmentation. Add in VR, and the sheer inconvenience of options like smashing water rich comets into an inhabited planet, and barring a few kooks, nobody takes it seriously.

It's also set close enough to our time that people don't regularly swap sexes, at least outside of say, VR, in a more involved manner than modern equivalents like a weeb using an anime girl avatar in VR Chat. Transgenderism as we know it is still mostly dead, because anyone who feels that strongly about it has availed of opportunities to get far better treatment than we have today.

Your post about Aurora was the inciting incident for this post. Is all you've read of KSR Aurora? Because I'm sure the context would be rather lost on someone new to him given it's essentially KSR meta-critiquing himself by reversing all his usual tendencies. It's not really his best work, especially given that it is so inward-focused.

I've read about half the Culture books (whenever I come across one in the library), and I really should start hunting down the rest.

Indeed, Aurora is all I've read, and it was bad enough to put me off him, albeit I am considering reading the Mars trilogy since it seems less odious.

I think describing it as "meta-critique" is being overly generous to the man, from what I've heard about his politics he's an environmentalist wingnut, and that shows in spades in Aurora.

The only gripe I have about the Culture books is that Banks had the temerity to die instead of spending the next few centuries writing more of them haha, let's see if GPT-5 is good enough to write pastiche. I've read every one, and most of his other works, barring The Wasp Factory, which isn't particularly scifi, and which I didn't enjoy.

The trilogy was published between 1992 and 1996; KSR likely would not have understood the concept of "changing gender". Despite the near-infinite possibilities of changing one's physical form that is offered, no one seeks to transform themselves; no woman decides to father children, no man bears a child... The simplest answer is that the notion that people would want to change their sex simply did not occur to him, and this is remarkable in the context of the books trying to imagine all the possible physical and societal limits that humans could push.

That's possible -- I learned about trans-* stuff pretty early, chronologically, due to the overlap in some fandom spaces, and I still didn't learn a lot of the more practical details for trans men until ~2003-05ish -- but I'm not sure it's obviously true. People have already brought up Heinlein, but scifi and general literary fiction already had some heavy genderfuckery already; while not all of it would fit the modern-day understanding of transgender (Woolf's 1928 Orlando: butch woman or nonbinary, greatest thread ever, locked by moderators after 10000 pages), or be particularly palatable to the modern-day trans movement (When Gravity Falls postulates a Muslim-dominant future where the protagonist's girlfriend is a trans woman prostitute, 1987).

More broadly, Ranma 1/2 had its American debut in 1993. In comics, Alan Moore's Promethea (with a very explicit contrast between gender-stuff and homosexuality) wasn't at that part of the plot until 2001 or so, but Camelot 3000 had a person reincarnated into the opposite gender in 1982. Neil Gaiman had Wanda Mann, who outside of the unfortunate name, was otherwise handled pretty well in 1991 (and probably a response to an earlier Sandman series only mentioning trans women as a serial killer's victims. Grant Morrison wrote Lord Fanny in 1994, who... was about as poorly written as you'd expect given the name or Morrison being involved. There were a handful, and of course outsider pieces tended to be even more esoteric.

Transmale characters were much less common, but they did exist.

This isn't to say Robinson had to know of any of these, but neither was it that far off from the opportunity. (Including physically; Davis California isn't San Francisco, but it was only an hour or hour-and-a-half drive, and the DSA circles there in the 1990s had a lot weird people of all kinds.)

((And, on the other direction, I'm pretty sure your point would apply to Woolf; the mechanics and philosophy for gender stuff in that era existed, up to and including Hirschfeld giving out 'gender passes', but was different enough from modern understandings that even had the notorious recluse learned of them they wouldn't have been very predictive for the future.))

An alternative explanation is that regardless of what Robinson could have imagined, he was writing for his audience, and while trans stuff wasn't well-known in that era, The Silence of the Lambs was 1991. I (and the film) would argue Buffalo Bill is not trans so much as just hates himself, but the film had to argue that in part because trans_vestitism_ at least was well-enough known for at least part of the audience to react to that. A careful author can avoid issues, but a careful author can also avoid problems by not stepping on landmines.

People seeking sexual reassignment surgery goes back to the 1950's. Probably the first normie-famous case was Renee Richards who transitioned in the 1970's and played women's tennis as a transwoman. I'm not sure about the legal history in the US, but in the UK the classical legal case was Corbett vs Corbett in 1970 which held that a marriage between a man and an MtF transsexual was invalid on the grounds that she was legally male. So trans people existed at the time KSR was writing, and someone who was familiar with the weirder fringes of progressive politics (as I think KSR was) would have known about them. But even among people who were all-in on the 1990's PC wave, they were not an important left-wing cause. In UK student unions, the "T" got added to "LGBT" around 2000.

Contrast Banks’s Culture.

As I recall it, sex changes are casual and fully functional. People transition over an extended period of time when they feel like it, and they can and do switch back and forth. It can be a fashion, idle curiosity, or a sense of obligation. Not that the Culture would admit to something so primitive as obligations, but apparently, one of its deep-seated norms is that each citizen fathers one child and mothers another. I can only assume this is part of its casual dismissal of Malthusian growth.

As an aside, omnisexuality is normalized in the Culture. Naturally, none of the male protagonists seem to go in for it. Whether this is author oversight or an intentional surrogate for his male audience, it’s almost conspicuous. For that matter, I can’t think of any characters, male or female, who are exclusively homosexual. The classic Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism isn’t actually all that gay.

I don’t remember any mentions of gender identity, dysphoria, or affirmation. (Caveat: I’ve read about half the series, with a bias towards earlier books.) Perhaps this is to be expected given their publication dates. I’d go further, though, and argue that gender essentialism is incompatible with Culture metaphysics. This is an aggressively materialist setting. The godlike machines which can swirl around your constituent atoms at will have found no evidence of a soul. Gender, as it might be formulated today, is relegated to a preference.

Good to see someone else rep the Culture, I just wrote a comment suggesting the same before I saw you had first.

I think this is more a limit of KSR's imagination than commentary on the time period. Le Guin wrote The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969. It features a population that ordinarily have an asexual appearance (no secondary sex characteristics) but go into a kind of heat during which they can develop either set of secondary sex characteristics. What set of characteristics they develop isn't even consistent across heats! It's a setting where one's biological sex is very literally contextual, though not necessarily chosen.

Heinlein’s “All You Zombies” was 1958. I’m sure there are examples of earlier stories featuring gender reassignment as well. To the extent KSR chose not to have gender modification in a transhuman milieu, I doubt it was for lack of exposure to the idea.

I read The Left Hand of Darkness earlier this year and was sort of surprised to see the amount of reading into it of exploration of trans topics. To me the novel did not really address what I could recognize as transgender/sexual themes. Rather Le Guin seemed much more interested in exploring masculinity/femininity as social constructs, and how a culture might be affected without "true" masculinity/femininity. Besides the toying with the reader of seeing the characters as male by default, the introspection seemed mostly to focus on what the cultures lacked in their essence by not being sexually dimorphic. E.g., Karhide is a society that simultaneously lacks female affection and childrearing, but also male obsession and capacity for war.

Maybe I have a sort of inherent bias against reading things as trans metaphors, but some of the reflections I read afterwards trying to tie the novel to contemporary trans politics seemed like rather clear misreads of the novel to me. Just my impression

Le Guin has this problem, in general , as also shown in A Wizard of Earthsea. Where, in every badly made adaptation the protagonist is made white instead of the intended black. I also imagined the protagonist white when I read them as a child.

Her problem is she is to good of a writer to make truly progressive works. "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto."

instead of the intended black

Wasn't his skin bronze or red-brown or something like that? I've always pattern-matched him to some sort of a Mediterranean dude in my childhood, darker than what we are accustomed to seeing today due to a more outdoors-oriented life of an islander.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/feb/09/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.ursulakleguin

UKL: I see Ged as dark brownish-red, and all the other people in the book (except the Kargs and Serret) as brown or brown-red, to very dark or black (Vetch). In other words, in the Archipelago "people of color" are the norm, white people are an anomaly. Vice versa on the Kargish islands. That much is pretty clear in the books. How dark you want Ged to be is pretty much up to you! Why not? Readers rule, OK?

I read this as more Polynesian than Mediterranean, but unsurprisingly, it sounds like it’s not supposed to map straight onto real demographics.

I broadly agree that it's not, like, very specifically a trans metaphor. I think it is getting at something a little more fundamental, the idea of sex being social and contextual. This has obvious implications for trans people so I can see how people read a trans metaphor into it.

What's in some ways even weirder about this is that you don't have to look very hard to find examples of science fiction, from the same time as Kim Stanley Robinson or earlier, in which people in the future make radical changes to their gender. Around the same time as the Mars trilogy, Greg Egan published Distress which features a future in which there are seven different genders (including asexual) which people switch between based on their self-identification and in which such gender changes are accompanied by medical interventions and changed pronouns. Much earlier than Kim Stanley Robinson's work, there's Venus Plus X by Theodore Sturgeon which features a society of people who have intentionally modified themselves to be gender neutral.

Egan’s Oceanic, from 1998, has sex change as part of casual sex. Pretty sure all the characters are engineered organisms, so it felt like a commentary on what a LeGuin analogue would choose were she intelligently designing a species.

I am always amused by the fact that the scene in which the protagonist gets his penis back is simultaneously so emasculating.

Egan’s “Closer” (1992) story also focuses on sex change. Strongly recommended, goes in pretty hard.

I think about that story a lot. That and Baxter's Mayflower II.

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