{"id":16955,"date":"2018-02-06T11:39:47","date_gmt":"2018-02-06T19:39:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?p=16955"},"modified":"2018-02-07T09:50:20","modified_gmt":"2018-02-07T17:50:20","slug":"andre-norton-gender-and-the-zero-stone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2018\/02\/06\/andre-norton-gender-and-the-zero-stone\/","title":{"rendered":"Andre Norton, gender, and The Zero Stone"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

I was a big fan of Andre Norton<\/a>\u2019s work when I was a kid.<\/p>\r\n

(Yes, I do feel a little guilty that I\u2019m writing this post when I still haven\u2019t finished the Le Guin post that I meant to write last week. I hope to do that soon. But this post is easier to write.)<\/p>\r\n

Norton wrote a lot of books<\/a>. When I was a kid, I read, I dunno, maybe a dozen of them? And there were lots more on my library\u2019s shelves, with evocative and memorable titles: Quest Crosstime<\/cite>, The Beast Master<\/cite>, Judgment on Janus<\/cite>, The Zero Stone<\/cite>, Moon of Three Rings<\/cite>,\r\nKey out of Time<\/cite>, and plenty more.<\/p>\r\n

I\u2019m not sure why I didn\u2019t read all of them; I liked all the ones I read. (I do know why I never read the Witch World<\/cite> books: because I wanted to read them in order, and in those benighted pre-Internet days, I wasn\u2019t sure what the first one was.) Eventually I bought half a dozen of her books, but I don\u2019t think I read most of those either. So I\u2019ve been reading them as they come up in my read-all-my-unread-books project.<\/p>\r\n

I\u2019m currently a third of the way through The Zero Stone<\/cite>. I\u2019m finding it fairly readable, and I\u2019m learning some things about storytelling from it\u2014for example, it does a good job of starting in media res, with the protagonist, Murdoc, fleeing for his life through the dark streets of an unfamiliar city, and then of pausing to fill in backstory. But I\u2019m also noticing some things about it that I\u2019m less pleased by.<\/p>\r\n

One of those things is plausibility, especially around unlikely coincidences; there\u2019ve been several bits that seemed implausible to me so far, and I\u2019m normally fine with coincidence in sf, especially in action-adventure sf like this.<\/p>\r\n

There\u2019s also occasionally a certain sloppiness of writing and editing. For example, Murdoc explicitly narrates that the Free Traders that he\u2019s traveling with use their own language (that he doesn\u2019t understand) when talking with each other, and that the Traders are immune to most planets\u2019 diseases; but when a little later he comes down with the plague, he finds out super-important plot things by overhearing a conversation among the Traders, and one of the things they indicate in that conversation is that they\u2019re afraid of catching the plague from him.<\/p>\r\n

Anyway, the plot holes aren\u2019t really a big deal. Nor is the other thing that I\u2019m noticing, which has to do with gender.<\/p>\r\n

I should start this section by noting that I knew that Norton was a woman from an early age; in fact, when I later heard about a man named Andre, I was confused because I knew it only as a woman\u2019s name. At which point someone explained to me that Norton published under that name in part to sound more male, because her expected main audience was teenage boys.<\/p>\r\n

Her first novel was published in 1934, and even by the time she wrote this book, in 1968, action-adventure was still mostly focused on male characters. (Alyx<\/cite> et alia notwithstanding.) So it\u2019s no surprise that Murdoc is male, nor that there\u2019s a strong emphasis on his relationships with his father and his male mentor. He has a brother and a sister, but the sister doesn\u2019t get much narrative attention. (The brother inherits their family\u2019s shop; the sister gets married.) Murdoc has a father and a mother; the father has a name and a character and a backstory, while the mother is never named and doesn\u2019t have much character or backstory. It turns out that Murdoc has reason to dislike his mother, which might explain some of his de-emphasis on her; and of course the action-adventure plot is focused on stuff having to do with his father, so of course that leaves less room for his mother in his fairly brief backstory narrative. But even so, it seemed weird to me that she doesn\u2019t even get a name.<\/p>\r\n

But although I was musing about all of that while reading, none of it would\u2019ve led me to write and post this entry. What led to that was a sequence in which Murdoc is interacting with a mysterious telepathic catlike alien named Eet. After a couple of adventurous episodes together, Murdoc refers to Eet as he<\/i> in narration, and then adds:<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

I say \u201che,\u201d for while he never stated his sex, if he had one, I came to think of him as male, and since he did not correct that assumption, I continued in it.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\u2014The Zero Stone<\/cite>, pp. 78\u201379<\/p>\r\n

And I\u2019m thinking that either Murdoc is making unwarranted assumptions, in which case this is a super-subtle undermining of reader assumptions about Eet, or Norton was following the standard path-of-least-resistance convention of making all the important characters male, and didn\u2019t notice the parallel with her own real-life situation.<\/p>\r\n

I initially assumed the latter. This passage makes briefly explicit what\u2019s implicit in the rest of the book and in most sf written before the 1960s (and,\r\nfor that matter, in a great deal of fiction written in English up to today):\r\nmale is what Delany calls the \u201cunmarked state,\u201d so both writers and readers are likely to assume that a given character is male unless explicitly told otherwise. By this point in the book, only four female characters have appeared or even been mentioned: Murdoc\u2019s mother and sister (neither of whom get to say or do much); the woman who Murdoc\u2019s brother hopes to marry (who doesn\u2019t appear on-camera and is only mentioned once in passing); and the ship\u2019s cat, Eet\u2019s mother, who\u2019s just an ordinary nonsentient cat. All the other characters are explicitly or implicitly male. So I figured that Eet was also probably male.<\/p>\r\n

But on further thought, I\u2019m not so sure. Norton didn\u2019t have to include that sentence in the book; she could\u2019ve just referred to Eet as he<\/i> and never explicitly discussed gender, and that would\u2019ve been so standard that few readers would\u2019ve thought twice about it. So now I\u2019m wondering whether this was indeed a subtle undermining. Eet remains silent on plenty of topics; it\u2019s entirely possible that gender just isn\u2019t something they know or care about.<\/p>\r\n

Anyway, I have no conclusions. And this is a tiny throwaway moment in a book that\u2019s about other topics; I don\u2019t want to make too big a fuss about it. But I thought it was interesting.<\/p>\r\n

(I should note that it\u2019s also possible that there will be more on this topic later in the book.)<\/p>\r\n

PS: A while later, p. 99, Murdoc refers to a new alien as \u201chim, her, or it,\u201d but by the end of the page, he\u2019s referring to that alien with male pronouns,\r\nwith no discussion about why.<\/p>\r\n

PPS: Something related is going on with skin color. On pp. 83\u201384, Murdoc examines his own hand, which had been blemished with purple splotches of plague but is now healing:<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

My flesh was pink and new-looking in unseemly splotches against the general brown of my skin. Though I was not as space-tanned as a crewman might be, my roving life had darkened my skin more than was normal for a planet dweller.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

I gather that Norton wrote a fair number of Native American characters in various books, and that she said she had a small amount of Native American ancestry; which makes me even more disappointed at her framing things in terms of any given skin color being \u201cnormal for a planet dweller.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,29,27,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gender","category-life-updates","category-speculative-fiction","category-writers"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16955"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16973,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16955\/revisions\/16973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}