Alternate Realities: A Scifi Book Club discussion

This book does some very interesting things with gender roles. Was this realistor, or did you agree with the author's premise. Was he saying that the setup was rewarding people for going into stereotypical gender roles based on their bodies or was he saying it was easy(easier) for them to slip into those roles because they were in those bodies.

I couldn't finish the only other book of his I started: Saturn's Children. Lots of robot sex.

I don't think he really says anything about gender roles. It starts off like he's trying to make a statement - switches genders on the participants, puts them into opposite gender bodies in the experiment - but then he doesn't really do anything with it once he's there. He sets it up like he goes to do some deep-thinking on gender, and then kind of just wonders away on it. I thought Kim Stanley Robinson had more to say about gender in 2312 than Stross did here. I thought the book was a fun read, but there's a lot less than meets the eye here than Stross would have us believe.

Sure they were urged to comply with the 50s model of a family, but they really slipped into those roles really easily.

Yeah, but we don't know what gender they were beforehand. We know that Kay and Robin were put into opposite genders. Was Jen a woman before the experiment? We don't know. Also, we don't know enough about the society they are coming from. If a person can become a tank, do they really have a strong male/female identification? Would the blonde duelist that Robin fights at the beginning enter into the proscribed role as easily? We don't have enough information to know what Stross is trying to say.

Also, why specify that the time period that they are mimicking is 1990-2010, and then give them very 1950ish roles. It doesn't make any sense.

This was a very sloppy book. There are a lot of red herrings and clues about the society that don't go anywhere. I think it could have used a stronger editor, and an author that had a better idea of just what he was doing.

Stross has been known to get into that, taking the point of view that such things are fluid and dynamic. I haven't read this one yet, but in Accelerando, the issue was woven into the narrative at several points. For instance, the protagonist seemed to casually embrace cross-dressing, despite being heterosexual.

And later, another supporting character felt the urge to experience sex from the point of view of a woman, something that was difficult for him because it brought up how his father would call him "queer" whenever he was doing anything he found odd.