Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy discussion

This is our discussion of the story:


Houston, Houston, Do You Read? by James Tiptree Jr.

This story is part of the group discussion of James Tiptree Jr.'s short story collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. (See the discussion hub topic for more info.)

likely her most famous story...I first ran across it in one of Terry Carr's Best of the Year anthologies...it won the Hugo in 1977 for best Novella

Another terrific feminist story.

Trio of (male) astronauts on a mission to get close to the sun get somehow (wave hands) tossed a couple of centuries into the future, where they find things have changed. Since Earth is no longer at the endpoint of their trajectory, a crew of (mostly female) astronauts rendezvous with their spacecraft and begin the long trip bringing them back to earth.

While they were away, a pandemic drastically reduced Earth's population by interfering with reproduction. The new society is generally peaceful, some would think passive, non-hierarchical, and overall quite pleasant and laid-back.

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What the guys are a little slow glomming onto is that there are no men left. Naturally, everyone on the rescue ship is a clone.

There are three guys, and they have three rather different reactions. Cap'n Dave thinks the problem is the women of forgotten the place God made for them, and citing Bible verses, vows to bring them to proper submission to the Lord.

Bud simply sees a planet full of horny women waiting to be fulfilled by him, and he plans to service each and every one of them, whether they want him or not.

The narrator character, Lorimer, is less aggressive in how he feels about this sense of wrongness. He's content to stand and observe either Dave or Bud do their thing.

Using male PoV again lets Tiptree explore these manifestations of maleness in reaction to her apparently utopian female society.

Aside: this put me in mind of an old Gene Roddenberry pilot (or two): Genesis II or Planet Earth or some such, where John Saxon goes into suspended animation and awakes to find the world run by women. And in my minds eye I can see Capt. Kirk deciding this is just the sort of stagnant society he needs to shake up with a little conflict.
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This is an awesome, biting satire, all the more vicious because so much of the men's thoughts seem to ring so true in other popular literature.

*****

when I first read it as a wee lad of 12, it went right over my head...sort of turned me off to Tiptree's work (oh, "he" writes that artsy stuff)

****
The story follows three male astronauts via flashbacks on their circumsolar mission, when something goes wrong and they are transported into a future, where males are completely extinguised by some epidemic on Earth. Houston doesn't react any more, but they are grabbed up by a spaceship with female crew. As they realize that this is the future, they wonder why it isn't further advanced. They gather clues and figure out that the whole humanity is cloned from some 11,000 genotypes.

The male crew reacts in a bad way to this revelation.

Review

A dark, sarcastic, feminist story - men wake up just to find out that they are unwanted and useless, resorting to violence and rape. It contrasts all of those testosterone-stuffed space captains like Han Solo or Kirk with a sharp bite, a provocation.

I want to emphasize the brilliance of the last sentence - which is the better future for humanity?

It is a must-read and takes the 3rd place in Locus' 20th century novella list.

Andreas wrote: "It contrasts all of those testosterone-stuffed space captains like Han Solo or Kirk with a sharp bite, a provocation...."

I'm glad you mentioned Capt. Kirk, because when Capt. Dave started going on is rant about the new society being all wrong, Kirk was exactly who I was thinking about. One of Capt. Kirk's classic (I know about the prime directive, but this case is different) rants about, "mankind wasn't meant for utopia, for the easy life, to have things given to us. We were meant to scrape and claw and struggle and fight..."