Halfway Human

Rhetorically speaking, Carolyn Ives Gilman's science fiction novel Halfway Human is the most interesting thing I've read since I first moved to the north and found Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin in the public library. It's not until page 313 of this 325-page novel that you'll realize how thoroughly she has trapped you, how she's using your emotions about a fictional alien character to show you something important about what you notice and how you act towards others on your own planet.

I really want to gush about this novel; I went to bed with it one night and had to force myself to put it down, two hours after I would usually have been asleep. And the next morning I got up and started reading it again. At that point I felt I had to see how it came out, even though I had guessed all the important parts already. I had to know what happened to the main character, Tedla, and everyone it affects on two worlds.

Yes, "it." Tedla is a neuter from Gammadis, a planet where neuters are used as slaves and not considered human. The story of its early years on Gammadis and its time on Capella, a planet more like our own, is horrifying and compelling, especially because of the "human" lens through which the portrait has to be viewed. Before the age of 14, when all Gammadians are neuter, the children (proto-humans, or "protos") passed around rumors like that "eating beans will produce male genes, the bite of a needletail will make you female. There were diagnostic tests: If you looked at your fingernails palm up rather than palm down, you were sure to be a man. Looking over your shoulder to see the sole of your foot was a sure sign of a woman."

On Capella, the planet I think is most like our own (although a character points out that all people call their planet some variation of "earth"), "knowledge was its principle export, and its only major industry." Like the country of Gilead in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, the planet of Capella has things in common with our own planet, but they're obviously far in the future and much more exaggerated--showing where we could be headed. The problem with the knowledge culture is that "the companies need us all to be alienated from each other, because it cuts off routes of communication they can't control. If everyone shared information openly, it wouldn't be a controllable commodity, and no one could profit from it."

Tedla's story is masterfully told, moving backwards from the point at which she attempts to kill herself, alone on Capella. As she tells stories that reveal the horrors of slavery on Gammadis, we react along with the xenologist to whom she is telling her story, Val. It's clear that what happens to the neuters, "blands," as they are called on their own planet, is wrong. Even though Tedla denies that it was a slave-- "we weren't slaves. Neuters are never traded for money"-- it's clear that blands are treated as such, and the details (including torture scenes) are right out of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Told from birth that "blands" are less than human, Tedla believes it, despite growing evidence, as her story continues, that its intelligence is greater than that of the gendered humans whose every whim it must anticipate and gratify.

I keep typing "she" when referring to Tedla, and I think it's because the reader identifies with this character; I assume that a male reader might stumble over calling Tedla a "he." There's another reason I think of "it" as a "she," though, and that's the way the humans (both Gammadians and Capellans) want to use it sexually because it is extraordinarily attractive; that makes me think of stories about the lot of beautiful slave women in the American south before the civil war. Tedla is frustrated by the degree to which "we have to think about your sexuality all the time." She says:
"Some humans--maybe all--are actually attracted by asexuals. Even your standards of beauty tend to be androgynous. I don't know why it is--the ambiguity of identity, perhaps, or the novelty of a transgender experience. Then there are people who are attracted to anything dangerous."
"What is dangerous about it?" Val asked.
"On Gammadis, sexual encounters with neuters are absolutely forbidden," Tedla said. "The idea is horrible, shameful, disgusting. Anyone found molesting a neuter would be ostracized, and penalized by the harshest laws we have."
"But it's done?"
"All the time," Tedla said bitterly. "Everyone condemns it, then they do it anyway. It's the central hypocrisy of my planet. They all learn not to see it. The only thing more forbidden than doing it, is talking about it."

About halfway through the novel, Tedla meets its first alien, and the events that lead to it escaping to Capella commence. The reader is increasingly implicated in the view that what the "alien" Gammadians do is bad, and what the more "human" Capellans do is good. Val asks her husband Max, after hearing most of Tedla's story:
"Do you think we deserve to be human?"
"God knows what the test is, if Tedla couldn't pass it," Max murmured. "I'm glad we didn't have to take it."

What drives Tedla to suicide on Capella is partly what she learns about the "blands" on that planet:
"It is not just a matter of poverty, as you seem to think. Here, where people can inherit money, or get it from partners or royalties without earning it, you have many well-t0-do blands. But most of them are poor. They live shabby, circumscribed lives--aware of, but never aspiring to, the humanity around them, though they will live off it parasitically if they can. They are the eyes behind all those windows in the housing tower you saw. They take whatever chances others give them. They complain, but not so that you hear them."

Hearing this is enough to cut an emotional reader like me to the quick. And as if that isn't enough, the satire becomes even more pointed. It points to me more clearly than the parents of my kids' friends who group me with "those college liberals":
"...I began to understand something about you Capellans. I had always thought--in fact, you always claim--that you are a perfectly secular society. But that's not true. The feeling you have for knowledge is very close to the awe others feel for the sacred. Faith in knowledge is the principle you will never back away from, the thing you protect when everything else is gone. Creating is your highest calling. Destroying it, or polluting it, is the unforgiveable sin. Learning is your righteousness, research is your sacrament, discovery is your revelation. You believe not in a trancendent God but in a transcendent truth that we all can strive toward through learning."

The genius of Gilman's satire lies partly in its indeterminacy--she doesn't even point her finger at Earth, and she doesn't suggest that the way we keep our "blands" quiet is evil. It's you who will suggest this to yourself, as you read Tedla's story. The story is rhetorically magnificent; it traps you like a slave who will inevitably be recaptured every time it tries to run away.

You must read this book! Because the only thing worse than mistreating slaves is shutting yourself off from the feelings of the humans who share your planet.

I got my copy of Halfway Human from Arc Manor publishers. Their free ebook for this month is L. Neil Smith's 'Tom Paine Maru--Special Author's Edition.' The Coupon Code for November is 9992224. Instructions and download link (as usual) at: www.PPickings.com. Tom Paine Maru will be available from November 2nd through November 30th.

Being Humane

I am not a big fan of Ann Mccaffrey's dragon series, or Eragon. My favorite story about dragons is E. Nesbit's The Dragon Tamers. You can find this story in two places I know of: The Book of Dragons by E. Nesbit, which is a collection of her dragon stories, and The Book of Dragons selected and illustrated by Michael Hague, which is a gorgeous book and a good introduction to the tradition of stories about dragons.

There are many things to like about Naomi Novik's dragon novels, the Temeraire series (His Majesty's Dragon, Throne of Jade, Black Powder War, Empire of Ivory). Her next Temeraire book, Victory of Eagles, is scheduled to come out on July 8, 2008, my birthday (hint, hint). One of these days, Peter Jackson may make a movie based on the first book. Novik's premise is that in the days of the Napoleonic wars, the British are using dragons much as they used horses, except that the dragons have more mobility and, well, firepower.

In the second book, Throne of Jade, Temeraire finds out that dragons in China are treated much better than dragons in England. Rather than sleeping outside on the ground, being given raw cows and sheep to eat, and only allowed to breed at special grounds set aside for the purpose, Chinese dragons get cooked food, have special houses with heated floors, and are revered and encouraged to breed, although the Chinese are interested in which dragon breeds with which other dragon to produce the best offspring. Temeraire himself is an "Imperial," the best kind of dragon, and it was a mistake that his egg landed in British hands. The hands it landed in are those of a former navy captain, Laurence. Temeraire, like all dragons in these novels, can talk, and he and Laurence discuss the cooked Chinese food after the first time Temeraire has eaten it:
"Well, I only hope you will not find it indigestible, from so much spice," Laurence said, and was sorry at once, recognizing in himself a species of jealousy that did not like to see Temeraire enjoying any Chinese customs. He was unhappily conscious that it had never occurred to him to offer Temeraire prepared dishes, or any greater variety than the difference between fish and mutton, even for a special occasion.
But Temeraire only said, "No, I like it very well," unconcerned and yawning; he stretched himself very long and flexed his claws.

At the end of Throne of Jade, Laurence offers to stay in China if Temeraire would be happier there, and they discuss it:
"You would rather go home, though, would you not?"
"I would be lying if I said otherwise," Laurence said heavily. "But I would rather see you happy; and I cannot think how I could make you so in England, now you have seen how dragons are treated here." The disloyalty nearly choked him; he could go no further.
"The dragons here are not all smarter than British dragons," Temeraire said. "There is no reason Maximus or Lily could not learn to read and write, or carry on some other kind of profession. It is not right that we are kept penned up like animals, and never taught anything but how to fight."
"No," Laurence said. "No, it is not."

Laurence, who has from his first introduction to the dragon corps, spoken out against the abuse and neglect of dragons, continues to learn about the similarities between "owning" such a sentient creature and slavery, which in good-guy 19th-century British fashion, he opposes. In the fourth book, Empire of Ivory, he is forced to "understand the accusations which had been made" against him and his fellow British dragon officers:
That they had stolen medicines, cultivated for the use of the King's own subjects, was only the least offense; the foremost, that they had offered a territorial challenge, by invading in the company of their own ancestors, as Kefentse considered the dragons of the formation to be; and in league with enemy tribes had been stealing their children, for which he offered as one portion of evidence that they had been travelling with a man of the Lunda, notorious kidnappers."
Of course, even as Laurence is forced to understand his behavior, the reader is forced to see it in light of something we now acknowledge to have been wrong, the enslavement of Africans.

I like the way Novik weaves this thread in and out of her story--that it's not humane to treat anyone the way the rigid hierarchy of the British Empire proscribed. And by extension, of course, the fiction asks us to examine how far we have come. Do we still breed horses for our own purposes? Yes, and their legs break. Do we still have puppy mills? Yes, because they're profitable (and we have plenty of them right here in my home state of Ohio: http://columbusdogconnection.com/PupMillsInOH.htm).

Do we have a right to buy and sell animals? This may sound like kind of a wacky question, but I don't think it goes too far. If we didn't regard animals as "ours" and think that we can do with them whatever we like, the worst kinds of abuse couldn't happen. By extension, the less we regard children as "ours," the less we feel a right to educate them in whatever narrow way we believe, and the less chance there is that the person who has "custody" of a child feels so alone that she has to leave the napping child in the car just so she can run in to the store and buy food for supper, or that he feels overwhelmed in the way that can lead to physical or verbal abuse.

I do think we have a right to buy and sell animals for food; I do it myself. But I buy beef and chicken, not to mention eggs, from local farmers, because they see a point in letting the animals use their legs and see the sun, while big food companies tend to treat animals in any way that will maximize their profits, both because they can and because few people are interested in finding out what happens to those animals. If you don't like to read books like The Jungle or the more recent Fast Food Nation, you're not alone, but ignoring a problem allows it to persist. I might even go further--the rhetorical effect of Uncle Tom's Cabin was to demonstrate that if you don't speak out against evil, you are part of it.

Less of the feeling of "ownership" and more of the feeling of "custodianship" would benefit the dragons of Britain in Novik's fictional world, and certainly the animals we still feel the right to breed in this world.

If you're interested in this issue, you might take a look at the Humane Society website:
http://www.hsus.org/