Gender Genocide by Edmund Cooper

Rura spent her days learning to forget that she had ever been an exterminator, learning to become a woman....  She began to feel proud of her swollen breasts and swollen belly. These were the outward and visible signs of the true nature of womanhood.

In our last installment I invoked the name of Edmund Cooper, so it seemed appropriate to follow up Bob Shaw's well-received Orbitsville with fellow Briton (or "Britisher" as Ace puts it) Cooper's 1972 Who Needs Men?   I own a copy of the sole American edition, which doesn't even include any cover blurbs.  This paperback, published by Ace in 1973, bears the title Gender Genocide and has a sort of folk art/art deco cover by an artist nobody can identify.  I recently goofed on the cover of Robert Bloch's Lori because the illustrated woman had over-sized man-hands, and I find the diminutive right hand of the woman depicted on Gender Genocide to be equally disturbing.  The Portuguese and German editions of the novel also have unsettling covers.

Via twitter, internet SF blogger extraordinaire Joachim Boaz suggested to me that the critical consensus on Gender Genocide is a big thumbs down, but let's see for ourselves if this ain't rock 'n' roll, diamond dogs!

Who Needs Men?/Gender Genocide takes place in the 23rd century in the British Isles.  London is the capital of the Republic of Anglia, the successor state to Great Britain; the Republic's population consists of three million cloned women.  The small number of British men left alive, thirty thousand or so, hide in the wilds of Wales and Scotland, where they and their families are subject to being hunted by the helicopters and hover cars of the Republic's Execution Squads.

How did we arrive at this world turned upside down?  Back in the 21st century biological warfare spawned a plague to which men were more susceptible than women, which set the stage for a worldwide feminist revolution that saw women take over and men driven into hiding.  The policy of the current prime minister, Curie Milford, is to pursue the male until he is completely annihilated.

The first 70 or so pages of the novel are amusing thanks to all the wacky ways Cooper depicts a post-feminist revolution world.  The government, which relies heavily on propaganda and censorship (like the Papacy from 1559 to 1966, it maintains an Index of forbidden books) has its citizens convinced that Shakespeare and Leonardo were in fact women in disguise.  Words and concepts like "pregnancy" and "wife" are so disgusting that young women get sick to their stomachs when they hear them.  Buckingham Palace is now called "Liberation House" and Queens College is now "The College of Insemination."  The characters say things like, "Goddess damn you!" and "Ovaries alive!"  When one woman says she wants to go by the book, another snaps, "Stick the book in your vagina!"  The people hiding in the hills are called "regressives," the men "pigs" and their wives "sows."  A character who is credited with valor in the fight against regressives up in Scotland is "awarded the silver nipple for gallantry."

Our lead character is Rura Alexandra, who at the start of the novel has just graduated from the College of Exterminators and, along with other recent graduates, is on her first mission to the Celtic fringe, whipping over the lochs and heather in a hover car, looking for "pigs" to shoot down with laser rifles or blow up with grenades.  A major theme of Cooper's book is that no amount of government propaganda can change human nature, and it is clear that Rura and some of the other newly minted Exterminators in her squad are none to eager to exterminate.  Some even find that the customary lesbian orgies leave them feeling empty.  To distract themselves from their unhappiness they turn to booze, which, as you can imagine, hampers their combat abilities when it comes time to go toe to toe, crossbow and dirk versus laser rifle and grenade, with the regressives.

Rura's comrades are killed and she is captured and gang raped, then made the wife of Diarmid MacDiarmid, leader of one of the most tenacious bands of regressives.  Away from England and all that propaganda, Rura's true heterosexual nature blossoms and she falls in love with Diarmid in short order.  They enjoy a tragic love affair in the beautiful Scottish Highlands, amidst the death and destruction of the Republic of Anglia's war of extermination, and Cooper really lays on the romantic and melodramatic slosh:

Knives and forks and plates would have been incongruous.  The fish were laid on leaves and delicately dissected by fingers.  They tasted as fish had never tasted before.  They tasted of stolen time.

"Make us a fire, then we can hold each other and go to sleep as you wished.  If there are nightmares, we will drown them in orgasm.  I doubt that we could drown them in whiskey.  There is not enough whiskey in the whole of Scotland to wash away this day's work."  

The air was sharp, the nights cool.  Sere leaves fell from beech, oak, ash.  The evergreens preserved their illusion of immortality.  

Rura finds she enjoys cooking and cleaning and housework and being a mother.  But the Exterminators are relentless, and Rura and Diarmid don't live long enough to see the birth of their child.

At 200 pages, Gender Genocide is too long, and the second half seriously drags.  We could probably do without at least one of the numerous and tepid action scenes.  We also spend way too much time admiring the scenery and contemplating the history and literature of Scotland--did Cooper get a grant from the Scottish Tourism Board to finish this novel?  (Maybe, in an alternate universe, VisitScotland.com, instead of telling you to visit Scotland because it inspired Diana Gabaldon's Outlander, is advertising its connection with Gender Genocide.)

I liked the parts set in England, among the cloned women, when Cooper is satirizing feminism and revolutionism; they are strange and original.  Unfortunately this material only constitutes about a third of the book.  The "love and survival in post-apocalyptic Scotland" part of the book, like 130 pages, is totally uninspired and basically pointless--we get all this repetitive detail about how Rura and Diarmid live off the land and avoid the Exterminators, and then in the last chapter they just get lasered down. What I consider the climax of the book, when Rura expresses her love for Diarmid despite all her misandry training, is on page 92!

Gender Genocide would have worked much better as a long short story or a novella, like 100 or 120 pages, maintaining its focus on the totalitarian women's state, jettisoning the Highland camping travelogue, and keeping the love story to a bare minimum.  All of Cooper's themes, like how most women want to have love relationships with men and bear a man's child, are right there in the first half of the book.  

Obviously, this book's cavalier attitude towards rape, unflattering portrayal of lesbians, endorsement of traditional gender roles, and assertion of the primacy of nature over nurture are going to offend many people.  The greater crimes, in my eyes, are that the book feels padded, the characters are uninteresting, and the love story and adventure elements are boring.  I'm giving Gender Genocide a marginal/moderate thumbs down; the concept behind the book has potential, but it is poorly executed in a way that is unforgivable.

Orbitsville by Bob Shaw

"As far as I can tell, the object out there...the thing we have discovered is a space ship over three hundred million kilometres in diameter!"

Bob Shaw's Orbitsville, which first appeared as a serial in Galaxy in 1974, has received enthusiastic acclaim.  In 1975 it won the British Science Fiction Award for Best Novel. The book's cover is awash in high praise from such institutions as The Times Literary Supplement and from such luminaries as our buddy Edmund Cooper.  I recently acquired a copy of the 1985 Panther paperback of the novel, and this week I read it.

From its first page I was convinced that Orbistville was worthy of its renown; Shaw has a good writing style, and quickly seizes the reader's attention with compelling characters, brilliant images and a tense, suspenseful scenario.

The pollution-ravaged Earth of the future is ruled (apparently informally) by a cruel and capricious female, Elizabeth Lindstrom, President of Starflight, the firm which has a monopoly on interstellar travel.  In a time when most women take advantage of technology that can render them perfect physical specimens, Lindstrom is content to be hideously ugly and exude a disturbing odor. One of her space ship captains, Vance Garamond, is told to babysit Lindstrom's nine-year-old son for a few hours, but he botches the task--the brat falls and cracks his skull.  Knowing he faces summary execution by the erratic and autocratic President, Garamond bolts from her palace, collects his wife and son, and they flee the Earth in his exploration ship.  Unfortunately, there is only one other habitable planet known to exist in the universe, and Lindstrom basically runs that one as well.

The early part of the novel is plotted like some kind of high seas adventure story set in the 16th century-- the star ships even have to deal with interstellar weather in the form of ionic winds, and Garamond uses an ancient map to find a third habitable "planet." This is when we shift into Larry Niven territory; the heavenly body Garamond discovers is a Dyson sphere over one AU across which someone dubs "Orbitsville." The inner surface of the thing has an Earth-like atmosphere, artificial gravity, and is covered in supernutritious and easy to cultivate grass.  There is enough room on the bucolic inner suface of Orbitsville to accommodate the population of the overcrowded Earth a billion times over--Garamond has discovered a paradise, and suggests the entire human race move into it and that money and private property be abolished.

Lindstrom's space fleet catches up to Garamond's ship, but she has to put her lust for revenge on the Garamond family on hold, because Garamond is a world-famous celebrity.  (Shaw doesn't make it very clear, but even though sometimes Lindstrom acts like Queen of the galaxy and murders people with impunity, apparently there is some kind of Earth government and she has to take it, and public opinion, into consideration.) Lindstrom, who fills the role of evil businessperson we so often see in fiction, decides she will continue to charge people for transporting them across the galaxy, and immediately begins shipping in colonists to Orbitsville (or as she calls it, "Lindstromworld.")  Unlike the many college professors I've met in real life who are feverishly hunting for grant money when they aren't railing against capitalism from their gorgeous Manhattan apartments and Hamptons summer homes, Garamond practices what he preaches and refuses the monetary rewards Lindstrom offers him for finding this paradise.

Am I crazy, or is that Pete Townshend
in that space suit?

The third and final act of the 187-page book has Garamond off exploring a different part of Orbitsville's star system.  One of Lindstrom's minions sabotages his ship (oh naughty sneaky), dooming it to a fatal collision.  We get some solid traditional hard SF scenes as the scientists and engineers in Garamond's crew take up their computers and welding torches and rebuild the ship in eight hours so they can survive the crash.  They crash inside the Dyson sphere fifteen million miles from the settlement, and from the wreckage build a squadron of propeller planes so Garamond can make his way back to Lindstrom and get his revenge on her!  He expects the trip to take over two years!

Orbitsville is quite good.  The adventure stuff, the science stuff, and the character stuff all work.  Garamond is obviously the hero and Lindstrom obviously the villain, but both are interesting and nuanced, with Garamond causing many of his own problems and putting other people at risk with his negligence and selfishness, and Lindstrom idiosyncratic and even a little sympathetic in her broken-heartedness over the death of her son.  (She reminded me of Medea, a woman both evil and wronged.  This is another of those SF books which would be an interesting subject for feminist analysis; Garamond's wife is also an interesting character.)  Shaw cleverly sets up parallels between Garamond and Lindstrom: both seek revenge, and even as Garamond resists Lindstrom's authority, Garamond's own crew resists his.

The actual meat of the story, the space travel and alien artifacts, reminds me of something Poul Anderson or Larry Niven might write, but Shaw's writing style and characters are better, making for a really enjoyable piece of work.  And people who think "government is the only thing we all belong to" and find Anderson-style libertarianism tiresome will be thrilled with the last chapter, in which the formerly out-to-lunch government suddenly reasserts itself with the aid of that iconic hero of the center left, the investigative journalist, and throws Lindstrom in prison.  In an italicized epilogue we are told colonization of Orbitsville leads to absolute equality and a homogenization of mankind; Orbitsville is a trap set by ancients designed to domesticate adventurous and aggressive societies like our own.

Recommended.

How many of these "great" science fiction stories have you read?

This is what the last page of my copy of Edmund Cooper's The Last Continent, Dell 4655, printed in 1969, looks like.  I love these kinds of ads, with just the title and author; your mind is filled with wonder at the possibilities of what each book could be about.  Like young Marcel in Proust, looking at the train schedule and fantasizing what a town is like based only on its name, you can construct characters and a plot in your mind for each book that, who knows?, may be more exciting than what the book truly contains.

I also like to wonder why the titles are presented in the order they are, and why one book is more expensive than another.  Did A. Bertram Chandler piss somebody off?  Were his books poorer sellers than Emil Pataja's?  I've never even heard of Emil Pataja!

<UPDATE JAN 30 2014: I read a book by Emil Petaja, who doesn't necessarily spell his name the way Dell does in its advertising.>

I have read five of the listed books, but I'm not willing to say any of them are great; I'm counting three OK/averages and two lame/Idon'tgetits.  Opinions do differ, though, as we shall see.

Deathworld 3 by Harry Harrison
I've read this twice and enjoyed it both times, but damned if I can remember anything about it.  It's an adventure story in which guys on horses kill astronauts that land on a planet, then an agent goes to the planet to make peace with the horse riders, or something like that.

The Cosmic Rape by Theodore Sturgeon
Earth people are cursed with individualism, but luckily an alien entity, the Medusa, comes to Earth and connects all our minds together.  There are lots of these collective consciousness stories out there, like Clarke's Childhood's End, Holly's The Green Planet, the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, and so on.  The Cosmic Rape was later published under the title To Marry Medusa.  Joachim Boaz liked this a little more than me, and gave it 4 stars out of 5; I think it deserves an "acceptable/average" score of 3.   

The Killer Thing by Kate Wilhelm
Earth people are cursed with a lust to exploit the environment and primitive natives, but luckily some aliens with a powerful space navy come along and force us to behave.  There are lots of these "we are a bunch of jerks and would be better off if there were nice aliens to tell us what to do" stories out there, like Robert Crane's Hero's Walk and the film "The Day the Earth Stood Still."  Back in 2008 I wrote a hostile review of Killer Thing on Amazon.

The Status Civilization by Robert Sheckley
I read this many years ago and remember thinking it was a boring bunch of cliches: the tyrannical Earth government sends a guy to a prison planet where he fights a robot in the arena and then leads the resistance, or something.  Joachim Boaz at sfruminations read it years after I did and thought it a brilliant satire.  What can I say?  Maybe I'm dense.

Spartan Planet by A. Bertram Chandler
This is one of the many books chronicling the career of space navy officer John Grimes.  I've read a bunch of these, totally out of order, and liked most of them.  As I recall, this is the one in which Grimes comes upon a planet where all the women are hidden in a secret lab, and an entire civilization has developed consisting solely of men who, not even knowing women exist, turn to homosexual behavior for love and sexual satisfaction.  Grimes's ship includes female crew members, and the whole society undergoes a revolution when they show up.  This would be a good book to read if you were writing a dissertation about attitudes towards gays in SF.   

*******

Five out of 19 doesn't sound like a lot, but the page says if you ordered five or more of the listed books from Dell then shipping was free, so I am considering five to be a passing grade.  And until I hear differently, I am considering myself king of the science fiction mountain for having read five of the books from this list - feel free to report how many of these books you have read in the comments, especially if you have read six or more and are in a position to dethrone me, or think I'm out of my mind and some of these books really are great. 

Three Novels by Edmund Cooper

Tarbandu at The PorPor Books blog recently purchased Edmund Cooper’s All Fools’ Day, which brought Cooper to the forefront of my mind. I read a Cooper novel in late 2011 and another in early 2013, and had a third on my shelf, unread, so this week I gathered up my notes about Cooper and read that third novel, The Last Continent. 

A Far Sunset

I read this in late 2011, and thought it a solidly average piece of work, as I related in my December 6, 2011, review on Amazon, pasted here:

This 1967 novel is about Paul Marlowe, a British psychiatrist who is on the crew of one of Earth's first interstellar space ships. When his ship lands on an alien planet and is disabled he is captured by the intelligent natives, people who look much like humans and have agriculture and cities but no wheel. Marlowe becomes a member of the alien society, and the novel follows his efforts to alter that society and uncover its secrets.

I like the plot, and it is not a bad novel, but nothing exceptional or special; there is something bland about the whole thing, frankly. Cooper's style is somehow detached, putting distance between the reader and the characters, so that the emotional impact of big moments is diminished. Cooper also makes it a practice to announce ahead of time when something exciting is about to happen (one chapter begins, "It was on the second night that disaster struck,") limiting the amount of surprise, tension or suspense the story can generate.

This was the first Edmund Cooper book I have read, and I am likely to read more, should I encounter them.

I have the Berkley Medallion edition, with the red Richard Powers cover.

Five to Twelve

In January or February of 2013 I read Cooper’s 1968 novel, Five to Twelve. I have the Berkely Medallion paperback with the sexy Jeff Jones cover, which I like quite a bit. Unfortunately the novel was mediocre, a little below average. I didn’t post a review on Amazon, but in my archives I find these notes:

I did not like this as much as Cooper’s A Far Sunset. As a side effect of widespread use of birth control pills, women begin to outnumber men, and women’s physical strength and IQs increase dramatically. By the time the novel depicts, women have all the good jobs, run the government, and have made men second-class citizens, courtesans and such. The main character is a man who, like in a lot of SF books, is contacted by a ruthless underground group of rebels and spends the book deciding whether to side with the ruthless and violent rebels or the ruthless and corrupt status quo. The book was full of weak jokes that the author considered satire, and so any tension the adventure/suspense portions might have had were undermined.

The Last Continent

This week I read 1969's The Last Continent.   My copy is a tattered Dell, #4655, with the somewhat embarrassing Ron Walotsky cover.  I guess Richard Powers and Jeff Jones were busy that day.  And it is not all Ron's fault; the typeface and its placement are also inferior to those on my Berkeley Medallion Cooper books.

This novel takes place some two thousand years in the future. The Earth is mostly a barren waste, due to the use of nuclear weapons in a war between the white and black races back in the late 20th or early 21st century. In this war the moon was broken apart and pieces of it rained down on the Earth. The southern polar region still bears life, and is the site of a dense jungle with a rich ecosystem of mutant plants, birds and reptiles; there has been an increase in the amount of solar and cosmic radiation that reaches the planet surface, speeding up evolution.

In a small city in the middle of this Antarctic rain forest dwell the last human beings on Earth, people of European ethnicity who have a mixture of primitive (they hunt with spears) and modern (they have electric lights and the telegraph) technology. Only an elite class of eunuchs is permitted to study the modern technology.

On Mars has developed a modern civilization of people descended from Earthlings of African ethnicity. This civilization is going through a period of totalitarian government; their ruling ideology is Vaneyism, a series of myths based loosely on the life of Thomas Mulvaney, a black activist who lived on Earth during the period leading up to the cataclysmic race war. Vaneyism holds that the white man went extinct as punishment for his sins and the Earth is a dead world. As the book begins a Martian exploration ship, hoping to find mineral resources that are scarce on Mars, has just taken up orbit around Earth. Its crew includes a ruthless and paranoid “political officer,” and the crew members are all careful not to say anything that could be interpreted as “anti-Vaneyism.”

The lead black character of the book is Mirlena Stroza, ship’s psychologist (Cooper seems to like to write about psychologists and psychiatrists.) Stroza isn’t quite sold on Vaneyism, and is very excited to explore the Earth. She uses her sexual wiles and a little skullduggery (she drugs the political officer) to make sure she is on the space boat that leaves the ship and goes down to Earth. She is the first of the party to set foot on Earth, and almost immediately meets the lead white character, Kymri son of Kymriso. Kymri has never seen a black person before, and Stroza has never seen a white person before. Reversing the nature of such encounters in earlier history, it is the science-trained black explorer who is backed up by advanced technology (space suit, space ship, firearms) and the savage white native who carries a spear and wears a cape made of feathers. Kymri is captured and finds himself at the mercy of the Martian astronauts.

The encounter of these two civilizations will inevitably lead to radical changes in each, but will those changes be catastrophic or beneficial? The discovery of a living white race explodes Vaneyism and could cause trouble for the ruling Vaney party back on Mars. The political officer wants to exterminate or enslave all the white people. For their part, the rulers of the white city fear the Martians will use their superior weapons and superior numbers to conquer them, and weigh the wisdom of buying time by murdering the small landing party before they can send much information back to Mars. Fortunately for everyone concerned, Mirlena Stroza turns out to be a good diplomat, the white rulers act responsibly, and a revolution breaks out on Mars that overthrows the hardcore members of the Vaney party.  We get a happy ending in which whites and blacks are going to work together to build a just multicultural civilization.

This is a moderately entertaining and interesting book. I am always inclined to like stories about explorers making contact with aliens, and Cooper’s using this scenario to talk about race relations adds a layer of interest. The various characters and the two civilizations, though not extensively drawn (the novel is only 156 pages) are fleshed out enough to maintain the reader’s interest and sympathy. I hoped that Mirlena Stroza’s love affair with Kymri son of Kymriso worked out, and that the Martians didn’t just nuke Antarctica into oblivion. Cooper uses short chapters and the pace is quick, which I appreciated.

There are problems with the book, though. The metaphors in the big sex scene are embarrassing, and the recorded speech the characters find, left by the last black man on Earth twenty centuries ago, is too histrionic and melodramatic. The revolution on Mars, though necessary for the happy ending, feels tacked on; there is only one chapter set on Mars, and the revolution isn’t really closely linked to the Earth expedition.  If I had been Cooper's editor I would have advised him to have the discoveries on Earth more clearly inspire the Martian revolution; that way Mirlena Stroza and Kymri are masters of their own fates.  As written, the change of government on Mars feels like deus ex machina.  

Also, though the book is anti-racist, The Last Continent is vulnerable to charges of racism. Some might find the final fate of the political officer to be offensive on this score. Cooper also suggests that the blacks on Mars, over two thousand years, have failed to produce any significant art or develop any new technologies.   

Despite its shortcomings, The Last Continent is a worthwhile read, especially for those interested in the depiction of race issues in science fiction and connoisseurs of sex scenes in which someone’s tongue is described as an impudent snake.