I wrote a short story with something of a transhumanism theme. People can read it here. Actionable feedback welcome; it’s still subject to revision.
Note: The protagonist’s name is “Key”. Key, and one other character, receive Spivak pronouns, which can make either Key’s name or eir pronouns look like some kind of typo or formatting error if you don’t know it’s coming. If this annoys enough people, I may change Key’s name or switch to a different genderless pronoun system. I’m curious if anyone finds that they think of Key and the other Spivak character as having a particular gender in the story; I tried to write them neither, but may have failed (I made errors in the pronouns in the first draft, and they all went in one direction).
I love the new gloss on “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
or switch to a different genderless pronoun system.
Don’t. Spivak is easy to remember because it’s just they/them/their with the ths lopped off. Nonstandard pronouns are difficult enough already without trying to get people to remember sie and hir.
Looks like I’m in the minority for reading Key as slightly male. I didn’t get a gender for Trellis. I also read the librarian as female, which I’m kind of sad about.
I loved the story, found it very touching, and would like to know more about the world it’s in. One thing that confused me: the librarian’s comments to Key suggested that some actual information was withheld from even the highest levels available to “civilians”. So has someone discovered immortality, but some ruling council is keeping it hidden? Or is it just that they’re blocking research into it, but not hiding any actual information? Are they hiding the very idea of it? And what’s the librarian really up to?
Were you inspired by Nick Bostrom’s “Fable of the Dragon”? It also reminded me a little of Lois Lowry’s “The Giver”.
I also read the librarian as female, which I’m kind of sad about.
Lace is female—why are you sad about reading her that way?
I loved the story, found it very touching, and would like to know more about the world it’s in.
Yaaaay! I’ll answer any setting questions you care to pose :)
So has someone discovered immortality, but some ruling council is keeping it hidden? Or is it just that they’re blocking research into it, but not hiding any actual information? Are they hiding the very idea of it? And what’s the librarian really up to?
Nobody has discovered it yet. The communities in which Key’s ilk live suppress the notion of even looking for it; in the rest of the world they’re working on it in a few places but aren’t making much progress. The librarian isn’t up to a whole lot; if she were very dedicated to finding out how to be immortal she’d have ditched the community years ago—she just has a few ideas that aren’t like what the community leaders would like her to have and took enough of a shine to Key that she wanted to share them with em. I have read both “Fable of the Dragon” and “The Giver”—the former I loved, the latter I loved until I re-read it with a more mature understanding of worldbuilding, but I didn’t think of either consciously when writing.
You are most welcome for the sharing of the story. Have a look at my other stuff, if you are so inclined :)
Part of the problem that I had, though, was the believability of the kids: kids don’t really talk like that: “which was kind of not helpful in the not confusing me department, so anyway”… or, in an emotionally painful situation:
Key looked suspiciously at the librarian. “You sound like you’re trying not to say something.”
Improbably astute, followed by not seeming to get the kind of obvious moral of the story. At times it felt like it was trying to be a story for older kids, and at other times like it was for adults.
The gender issue didn’t seem to add anything to the story, but it only bothered me at the beginning of the story. Then I got used to it. (But if it doesn’t add to the story, and takes getting used to… perhaps it shouldn’t be there.)
Anyway, I enjoyed it, and thought it was a solid draft.
I actually have to disagree with this. I didn’t think Key was “improbably astute”. Key is pretty clearly an unusual child (at least, that’s how I read em). Also, the librarian was pretty clearly being elliptical and a little patronizing, and in my experience kids are pretty sensitive to being patronized. So it didn’t strike me as unbelievable that Key would call the librarian out like that.
You’ve hit on one of my writing weaknesses: I have a ton of trouble writing people who are just plain not very bright or not very mature. I have a number of characters through whom I work on this weakness in (unpublished portions of) Elcenia, but I decided to let Key be as smart I’m inclined to write normally for someone of eir age—my top priority here was finishing the darn thing, since this is only the third short story I can actually claim to have completed and I consider that a bigger problem.
Alicorn goes right past it probably because she’s read a fair bit of cyronics literature herself and has seen the many suggestions (hence the librarian’s invitation to think of ‘a dozen solutions’), and it’s not the major issue anyway.
You traded off a lot of readability for the device of making the protagonist’s gender indeterminate. Was this intended to serve some literary purpose that I’m missing? On the whole the story didn’t seem to be about gender.
I also have to second DanArmak’s comment that if there was an overall point, I’m missing that also.
Key’s gender is not indeterminate. Ey is actually genderless. I’m sorry if I didn’t make that clear—there’s a bit about it in eir second conversation with Trellis.
I’m sorry if I didn’t make that clear—there’s a bit about it in eir second conversation with Trellis.
I thought it was pretty clear. The paragraph about ‘boy or girl’ make it screamingly obvious to me, even if the Spivak or general gender-indeterminacy of the kids hadn’t suggested it.
Finally got around reading the story. I liked it, and finishing it gave me a wild version of that “whoa” reaction you get when you’ve doing something emotionally immersive and then switch to some entirely different activity.
I read Key as mostly genderless, possibly a bit female because the name sounded feminine to me. Trellis, maybe slightly male, though that may also have been from me afterwards reading the comments about Trellis feeling slightly male and those contaminating the memory.
I do have to admit that the genderless pronouns were a bit distracting. I think it was the very fact that they were shortened version of “real” pronouns that felt so distracting—my mind kept assuming that it had misread them and tried to reread. In contrast, I never had an issue with Egan’s use of ve / ver / vis / vis / verself.
I got used to the Spivak after a while, and while it’d be optimal for an audience used to it, it did detract a little at first. On the whole I’d say it’s necessary though (if you were going to use a gender’d pronoun, I’d use female ones)
I read Key as mainly female, and Trellis as more male- it would be interesting to know how readers’ perceptions correlated with their own gender.
The children seemed a little mature, but I thought they’d had a lot better education, or genetic enhancement or something. I think spending a few more sentences on the important events would be good though- otherwise one can simply miss them.
I think you were right to just hint at the backstory- guessing is always fun, and my impression of the world was very similar to that which you gave in one of the comments.
I enjoyed the story—it was an interesting world. By the end of the story, you were preaching to a choir I’m in.
None of the characters seemed strongly gendered to me.
I was expecting opposition to anesthesia to include religiously based opposition to anesthesia for childbirth, and for the whole idea of religion to come as a shock. On the other hand, this might be cliched thinking on my part. Do they have religion?
The neuro couldn’t be limited to considered reactions—what about the very useful fast reflexive reaction to pain?
Religion hasn’t died out in this setting, although it’s uncommon in Key’s society specifically. Religion was a factor in historical opposition to anesthesia (I’m not sure of the role it plays in modern leeriness about painkillers during childbirth) but bringing it up in more detail would have added a dimension to the story I didn’t think it needed.
Reflexes are intact. The neuro just translates the qualium into a bare awareness that damage has occurred. (I don’t know about everyone, but if I accidentally poke a hot burner on the stove, my hand is a foot away before I consciously register any pain. The neuro doesn’t interfere with that.)
I will check the links and see about fixing them; if necessary, I’ll HTMLify those stories too. ETA: Fixed; they should be downloadable now.
Cool. I also couldn’t help reading Key as female. My hypothesis would be that people generally have a hard time writing characters of the opposite sex. Your gender may have leaked in. The Spivak pronouns were initially very distracting but were okay after a couple paragraphs. If you decide to change it Le Guin pretty successfully wrote a whole planet of androgyns using masculine pronouns. But that might not work in a short story without exposition.
Le Guin pretty successfully wrote a whole planet of androgyns using masculine pronouns.
In Left Hand of Darkness, the narrator is an offplanet visitor and the only real male in the setting. He starts his tale by explicitly admitting he can’t understand or accept the locals’ sexual selves (they become male or female for short periods of time, a bit like estrus). He has to psychologically assign them sexes, but he can’t handle a female-only society, so he treats them all as males. There are plot points where he fails to respond appropriately to the explicit feminine side of locals.
This is all very interesting and I liked the novel, but it’s the opposite of passing androgyns as normal in writing a tale. Pronouns are the least of your troubles :-)
I think Key’s apparent femininity might come from a lack of arrogance. Compare Key to, say, Calvin from “Calvin and Hobbes”. Key is extremely polite, willing to admit to ignorance, and seems to project a bit of submissiveness. Also, Key doesn’t demonstrate very much anger over Trellis’s death.
I probably wouldn’t have given the subject a second thought, though, if it wasn’t brought up for discussion here.
If I had to put a gender on Trellis, I’d say that Trellis was more masculine than feminine. (More like Calvin than like Suzie.) Overall, though, it’s fairly gender-neutral writing.
Le Guin pretty successfully wrote a whole planet of androgyns using masculine pronouns
I had read a very fine SF novel, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, in which all the characters are humanoid hermaphrodites, and was wondering at the obduracy of the English language, in which everybody is “he” or “she” and “it” is reserved for typewriters. But how can one call a hermaphrodite “he,” as Miss Le Guin does? I tried (in my head) changing all the masculine pronouns to feminine ones, and marveled at the difference. And then I wondered why Miss Le Guin’s native “hero” is male in every important sexual encounter of his life except that with the human man in the book. ----Joanna Russ, afterword to “When It Changed”
I do typically have an easier time writing female characters than male ones. I probably wouldn’t have tried to write a story with genderless (human) adults, but in children I figured I could probably manage it. (I’ve done some genderless nonhuman adults before and I think I pulled them off.)
The main feeling I came away with is… so what? It didn’t convey any ideas or viewpoints that were new to me; it didn’t have any surprising twists or revelations that informed earlier happenings. What is the target audience?
The Spivak pronouns are nice; even though I don’t remember encountering them before I feel I could get used to them easily in writing, so (I hope) a transition to general use isn’t impossible.
I’m curious if anyone finds that they think of Key and the other Spivak character as having a particular gender in the story
The general feeling I got from Key is female. I honestly don’t know why that is. Possibly because the only other use of Key as a personal name that comes to mind is a female child? Objectively, the society depicted is different enough from any contemporary human society to make male vs. female differences (among children) seem small in comparison.
Target audience—beats me, really. It’s kind of set up to preach to the choir, in terms of the “moral”. I wrote it because I was pretty sure I could finish it (and I did), and I sorely need to learn to finish stories; I shared it because I compulsively share anything I think is remotely decent.
The general feeling I got from Key is female. I honestly don’t know why that is.
Hypotheses: I myself am female. Lace, the only gendered character with a speaking role, is female. Key bakes cupcakes at one point in the story and a stereotype is at work. (I had never heard of Key the Metal Idol.)
Could be. I honestly don’t know. I didn’t even consciously remember Key baking cupcakes by the time the story ended and I asked myself what might have influenced me.
I also had the feeling that the story wasn’t really about Key; ey just serves as an expository device. Ey has no unpredictable or even unusual reactions to anything that would establish individuality. The setting should then draw the most interest, and it didn’t do enough that, because it was too vague. What is the government? How does it decide and enforce allowed research, and allowed self-modification? How does sex-choosing work? What is the society like? Is Key forced at a certain age to be in some regime, like our schools? If not, are there any limits on what Key or her parents do with her life?
As it is, the story presented a very few loosely connected facts about Key’s world, and that lack of detail is one reason why these facts weren’t interesting: I can easily imagine some world with those properties.
Small communities, mostly physically isolated from each other, but informationally connected and centrally administered. Basically meritocratic in structure—pass enough of the tests and you can work for the gubmint.
How does it decide and enforce allowed research, and allowed self-modification?
Virtually all sophisticated equipment is communally owned and equipped with government-designed protocols. Key goes to the library for eir computer time because ey doesn’t have anything more sophisticated than a toaster in eir house. This severely limits how much someone could autonomously self-modify, especially when the information about how to try it is also severely limited. The inconveniences are somewhat trivial, but you know what they say about trivial inconveniences. If someone got far enough to be breaking rules regularly, they’d make people uncomfortable and be asked to leave.
How does sex-choosing work?
One passes some tests, which most people manage between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, and then goes to the doctor and gets some hormones and some surgical intervention to be male or female (or some brand of “both”, and some people go on as “neither” indefinitely, but those are rarer).
What is the society like?
Too broad for me to answer—can you be more specific?
Is Key forced at a certain age to be in some regime, like our schools? If not, are there any limits on what Key or her parents do with her life?
Education is usually some combination of self-directed and parent-encouraged. Key’s particularly autonomous and eir mother doesn’t intervene much. If Key did not want to learn anything, eir mother could try to make em, but the government would not help. If Key’s mother did not want em to learn anything and Key did, it would be unlawful for her to try to stop em. There are limits in the sense that Key may not grow up to be a serial killer, but assuming all the necessary tests get passed, ey can do anything legal ey wants.
Thank you for the questions—it’s very useful to know what questions people have left after I present a setting! My natural inclination is massive data-dump. This is an experiment in leaving more unsaid, and I appreciate your input on what should have been dolloped back in.
Small communities, mostly physically isolated from each other, but informationally connected and centrally administered. Basically meritocratic in structure—pass enough of the tests and you can work for the gubmint.
Reminds me of old China...
Virtually all sophisticated equipment is communally owned and equipped with government-designed protocols.
That naturally makes me curious about how they got there. How does a government, even though unelected, go about impounding or destroying all privately owned modern technology? What enforcement powers have they got?
Of course there could be any number of uninteresting answers, like ‘they’ve got a singleton’ or ‘they’re ruled by an AI that moved all of humanity into a simulation world it built from scratch’.
And once there, with absolute control over all communications and technology, it’s conceivable to run a long-term society with all change (incl. scientific or technological progress) being centrally controlled and vetoed. Still, humans have got a strong economical competition drive, and science & technology translate into competitive power. Historically, eliminating private economic enterprise takes enormous effort—the big Communist regimes in USSR, and I expect in China as well, never got anywhere near success on that front. What do these contended pain-free people actually do with their time?
How does a government, even though unelected, go about impounding or destroying all privately owned modern technology? What enforcement powers have they got?
It was never there in the first place. The first inhabitants of these communities (which don’t include the whole planet; I imagine there are a double handful of them on most continents—the neuros and the genderless kids are more or less universal, though) were volunteers who, prior to joining under the auspices of a rich eccentric individual, were very poor and didn’t have their own personal electronics. There was nothing to take, and joining was an improvement because it came with access to the communal resources.
Of course there could be any number of uninteresting answers, like ‘they’ve got a singleton’ or ‘they’re ruled by an AI that moved all of humanity into a simulation world it built from scratch’.
Nope. No AI.
What do these contended pain-free people actually do with their time?
What they like. They go places, look at things, read stuff, listen to music, hang out with their friends. Most of them have jobs. I find it a little puzzling that you have trouble thinking of how one could fill one’s time without significant economic competition.
Oh. So these communities, and Key’s life, are extremely atypical of that world’s humanity as a whole. That’s something worth stating because the story doesn’t even hint at it.
I’d be interested in hearing about how they handle telling young people about the wider world. How do they handle people who want to go out and live there and who come back one day? How do they stop the governments of the nations where they actually live from enforcing laws locally? Do these higher-level governments not have any such laws?
I find it a little puzzling that you have trouble thinking of how one could fill one’s time without significant economic competition.
Many people can. I just don’t find it convincing that everyone could without there being quite a few unsatisfied people around.
Oh. So these communities, and Key’s life, are extremely atypical of that world’s humanity as a whole. That’s something worth stating because the story doesn’t even hint at it.
I disagree: it doesn’t matter for the story whether the communities are typical or atypical for humanity as a whole, so mentioning it is unnecessary.
I’d be interested in hearing about how they handle telling young people about the wider world.
The relatively innocuous information about the wider world is there to read about on the earliest guidelists; less pleasant stuff gets added over time.
How do they handle people who want to go out and live there and who come back one day?
You can leave. That’s fine. You can’t come back without passing more tests. (They are very big on tests.)
How do they stop the governments of the nations where they actually live from enforcing laws locally?
They aren’t politically components of other nations. The communities are all collectively one nation in lots of geographical parts.
Many people can. I just don’t find it convincing that everyone could without there being quite a few unsatisfied people around.
They can leave. The communities are great for people whose priorities are being content and secure. Risk-takers and malcontents can strike off on their own.
They aren’t politically components of other nations. The communities are all collectively one nation in lots of geographical parts.
I wish our own world was nice enough for that kind of lifestyle to exist (e.g., purchasing sovereignity over pieces of settle-able land; or existing towns seceding from their nation)… It’s a good dream :-)
I enjoyed it. I made an effort to read Key genderlessly. This didn’t work at first, probably because I found the Spivak pronouns quite hard to get used to, and “ey” came out as quite male to me, then fairly suddenly flipped to female somewhere around the point where ey was playing on the swing with Trellis. I think this may have been because Trellis came out a little more strongly male to me by comparison (although I was also making a conscious effort to read ey genderlessly). But as the story wore on, I improved at getting rid of the gender and by the end I no longer felt sure of either Key or Trellis.
Point of criticism: I didn’t find the shift between what was (to me) rather obviously the two halves of the story very smooth. The narrative form appeared to take a big step backwards from Key after the words “haze of flour” and never quite get back into eir shoes. Perhaps that was intentional, because there’s obviously a huge mood shift, but it left me somewhat dissatisfied about the resolution of the story. I felt as though I still didn’t know what had actually happened to the original Key character.
I wrote a short story with something of a transhumanism theme. People can read it here. Actionable feedback welcome; it’s still subject to revision.
Note: The protagonist’s name is “Key”. Key, and one other character, receive Spivak pronouns, which can make either Key’s name or eir pronouns look like some kind of typo or formatting error if you don’t know it’s coming. If this annoys enough people, I may change Key’s name or switch to a different genderless pronoun system. I’m curious if anyone finds that they think of Key and the other Spivak character as having a particular gender in the story; I tried to write them neither, but may have failed (I made errors in the pronouns in the first draft, and they all went in one direction).
I love the new gloss on “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Don’t. Spivak is easy to remember because it’s just they/them/their with the ths lopped off. Nonstandard pronouns are difficult enough already without trying to get people to remember sie and hir.
Totally agreed. Spivak pronouns are the only ones I’ve seen that took almost no effort to get used to, for exactly the reason you mention.
Looks like I’m in the minority for reading Key as slightly male. I didn’t get a gender for Trellis. I also read the librarian as female, which I’m kind of sad about.
I loved the story, found it very touching, and would like to know more about the world it’s in. One thing that confused me: the librarian’s comments to Key suggested that some actual information was withheld from even the highest levels available to “civilians”. So has someone discovered immortality, but some ruling council is keeping it hidden? Or is it just that they’re blocking research into it, but not hiding any actual information? Are they hiding the very idea of it? And what’s the librarian really up to?
Were you inspired by Nick Bostrom’s “Fable of the Dragon”? It also reminded me a little of Lois Lowry’s “The Giver”.
Thanks so much for sharing it with us!
Lace is female—why are you sad about reading her that way?
Yaaaay! I’ll answer any setting questions you care to pose :)
Nobody has discovered it yet. The communities in which Key’s ilk live suppress the notion of even looking for it; in the rest of the world they’re working on it in a few places but aren’t making much progress. The librarian isn’t up to a whole lot; if she were very dedicated to finding out how to be immortal she’d have ditched the community years ago—she just has a few ideas that aren’t like what the community leaders would like her to have and took enough of a shine to Key that she wanted to share them with em. I have read both “Fable of the Dragon” and “The Giver”—the former I loved, the latter I loved until I re-read it with a more mature understanding of worldbuilding, but I didn’t think of either consciously when writing.
You are most welcome for the sharing of the story. Have a look at my other stuff, if you are so inclined :)
For me, both of the characters appeared female.
Sbe zr gur fgbel fbeg bs oebxr qbja whfg nf Xrl’f sevraq jnf xvyyrq. Vg frrzrq gbb fbba vagb gur aneengvir gb znxr fhpu n znwbe punatr. Nyfb, jvgu erfcrpg gb gur zbeny, vg frrzrq vafhssvpvragyl fubja gung lbh ernyyl ertneq cnva nf haqrfvenoyr—vg frrzrq nf gubhtu lbh pbhyq or fnlvat fbzrguvat nybat gur yvarf bs “gurl whfg qba’g haqrefgnaq.” Orpnhfr bs gung nf jryy nf gur ehfurq srry bs gur raqvat, vg fbeg bs pnzr bss nf yrff rzbgvbanyyl rssrpgvir guna vg pbhyq.
I liked it. :)
Part of the problem that I had, though, was the believability of the kids: kids don’t really talk like that: “which was kind of not helpful in the not confusing me department, so anyway”… or, in an emotionally painful situation:
Key looked suspiciously at the librarian. “You sound like you’re trying not to say something.”
Improbably astute, followed by not seeming to get the kind of obvious moral of the story. At times it felt like it was trying to be a story for older kids, and at other times like it was for adults.
The gender issue didn’t seem to add anything to the story, but it only bothered me at the beginning of the story. Then I got used to it. (But if it doesn’t add to the story, and takes getting used to… perhaps it shouldn’t be there.)
Anyway, I enjoyed it, and thought it was a solid draft.
I actually have to disagree with this. I didn’t think Key was “improbably astute”. Key is pretty clearly an unusual child (at least, that’s how I read em). Also, the librarian was pretty clearly being elliptical and a little patronizing, and in my experience kids are pretty sensitive to being patronized. So it didn’t strike me as unbelievable that Key would call the librarian out like that.
You’ve hit on one of my writing weaknesses: I have a ton of trouble writing people who are just plain not very bright or not very mature. I have a number of characters through whom I work on this weakness in (unpublished portions of) Elcenia, but I decided to let Key be as smart I’m inclined to write normally for someone of eir age—my top priority here was finishing the darn thing, since this is only the third short story I can actually claim to have completed and I consider that a bigger problem.
Gur qrngu qvqa’g srry irel qrngu-yvxr. Vg frrzrq yvxr gur rzbgvba fheebhaqvat vg jnf xvaq bs pbzcerffrq vagb bar yvggyr ahttrg gung V cerggl zhpu fxvzzrq bire. V jnf nyfb rkcrpgvat n jbeyq jvgubhg qrngu, juvpu yrsg zr fhecevfrq. Va gur erny jbeyq, qrngu vf bsgra n fhecevfr, ohg yvxr va gur erny jbeyq, fhqqra qrngu va svpgvba yrnirf hf jvgu n srryvat bs qvforyvrs. Lbh pbhyq unir orra uvagvat ng gung qrngu sebz gur svefg yvar.
Nyfb, lbh xvaq bs qevir evtug cnfg gur cneg nobhg birecbchyngvba. V guvax birecbchyngvba vf zl zbgure’f znva bowrpgvba gb pelbavpf.
Alicorn goes right past it probably because she’s read a fair bit of cyronics literature herself and has seen the many suggestions (hence the librarian’s invitation to think of ‘a dozen solutions’), and it’s not the major issue anyway.
You traded off a lot of readability for the device of making the protagonist’s gender indeterminate. Was this intended to serve some literary purpose that I’m missing? On the whole the story didn’t seem to be about gender.
I also have to second DanArmak’s comment that if there was an overall point, I’m missing that also.
Key’s gender is not indeterminate. Ey is actually genderless. I’m sorry if I didn’t make that clear—there’s a bit about it in eir second conversation with Trellis.
Your gender pronouns just sapped 1% of my daily focusing ability.
I thought it was pretty clear. The paragraph about ‘boy or girl’ make it screamingly obvious to me, even if the Spivak or general gender-indeterminacy of the kids hadn’t suggested it.
Finally got around reading the story. I liked it, and finishing it gave me a wild version of that “whoa” reaction you get when you’ve doing something emotionally immersive and then switch to some entirely different activity.
I read Key as mostly genderless, possibly a bit female because the name sounded feminine to me. Trellis, maybe slightly male, though that may also have been from me afterwards reading the comments about Trellis feeling slightly male and those contaminating the memory.
I do have to admit that the genderless pronouns were a bit distracting. I think it was the very fact that they were shortened version of “real” pronouns that felt so distracting—my mind kept assuming that it had misread them and tried to reread. In contrast, I never had an issue with Egan’s use of ve / ver / vis / vis / verself.
I got used to the Spivak after a while, and while it’d be optimal for an audience used to it, it did detract a little at first. On the whole I’d say it’s necessary though (if you were going to use a gender’d pronoun, I’d use female ones)
I read Key as mainly female, and Trellis as more male- it would be interesting to know how readers’ perceptions correlated with their own gender.
The children seemed a little mature, but I thought they’d had a lot better education, or genetic enhancement or something. I think spending a few more sentences on the important events would be good though- otherwise one can simply miss them.
I think you were right to just hint at the backstory- guessing is always fun, and my impression of the world was very similar to that which you gave in one of the comments.
Great story!
I kept thinking of Key as female. This may be because I saw some comments here that saw em as female, or because I know that you’re female.
The other character I didn’t assign a sex to.
I enjoyed the story—it was an interesting world. By the end of the story, you were preaching to a choir I’m in.
None of the characters seemed strongly gendered to me.
I was expecting opposition to anesthesia to include religiously based opposition to anesthesia for childbirth, and for the whole idea of religion to come as a shock. On the other hand, this might be cliched thinking on my part. Do they have religion?
The neuro couldn’t be limited to considered reactions—what about the very useful fast reflexive reaction to pain?
Your other two story links didn’t open.
Religion hasn’t died out in this setting, although it’s uncommon in Key’s society specifically. Religion was a factor in historical opposition to anesthesia (I’m not sure of the role it plays in modern leeriness about painkillers during childbirth) but bringing it up in more detail would have added a dimension to the story I didn’t think it needed.
Reflexes are intact. The neuro just translates the qualium into a bare awareness that damage has occurred. (I don’t know about everyone, but if I accidentally poke a hot burner on the stove, my hand is a foot away before I consciously register any pain. The neuro doesn’t interfere with that.)
I will check the links and see about fixing them; if necessary, I’ll HTMLify those stories too. ETA: Fixed; they should be downloadable now.
At 3800 words, it’s too long for the back page of Nature, but a shorter version might do very well there.
Replied in PM, in case you didn’t notice (click your envelope).
PS: My mind didn’t assign a sex to Key. Worked with me, anyway.
Cool. I also couldn’t help reading Key as female. My hypothesis would be that people generally have a hard time writing characters of the opposite sex. Your gender may have leaked in. The Spivak pronouns were initially very distracting but were okay after a couple paragraphs. If you decide to change it Le Guin pretty successfully wrote a whole planet of androgyns using masculine pronouns. But that might not work in a short story without exposition.
In Left Hand of Darkness, the narrator is an offplanet visitor and the only real male in the setting. He starts his tale by explicitly admitting he can’t understand or accept the locals’ sexual selves (they become male or female for short periods of time, a bit like estrus). He has to psychologically assign them sexes, but he can’t handle a female-only society, so he treats them all as males. There are plot points where he fails to respond appropriately to the explicit feminine side of locals.
This is all very interesting and I liked the novel, but it’s the opposite of passing androgyns as normal in writing a tale. Pronouns are the least of your troubles :-)
Later, LeGuin said that she was no longer satisfied with the male pronouns for the Gethenians.
Very good points. It has been a while since I read it.
I think Key’s apparent femininity might come from a lack of arrogance. Compare Key to, say, Calvin from “Calvin and Hobbes”. Key is extremely polite, willing to admit to ignorance, and seems to project a bit of submissiveness. Also, Key doesn’t demonstrate very much anger over Trellis’s death.
I probably wouldn’t have given the subject a second thought, though, if it wasn’t brought up for discussion here.
Everyone’s talking about Key—did anyone get an impression from Trellis?
If I had to put a gender on Trellis, I’d say that Trellis was more masculine than feminine. (More like Calvin than like Suzie.) Overall, though, it’s fairly gender-neutral writing.
I too got the ‘dull sidekick’ vibe, and since dull sidekicks are almost always male these days...
I do typically have an easier time writing female characters than male ones. I probably wouldn’t have tried to write a story with genderless (human) adults, but in children I figured I could probably manage it. (I’ve done some genderless nonhuman adults before and I think I pulled them off.)
The main feeling I came away with is… so what? It didn’t convey any ideas or viewpoints that were new to me; it didn’t have any surprising twists or revelations that informed earlier happenings. What is the target audience?
The Spivak pronouns are nice; even though I don’t remember encountering them before I feel I could get used to them easily in writing, so (I hope) a transition to general use isn’t impossible.
The general feeling I got from Key is female. I honestly don’t know why that is. Possibly because the only other use of Key as a personal name that comes to mind is a female child? Objectively, the society depicted is different enough from any contemporary human society to make male vs. female differences (among children) seem small in comparison.
Target audience—beats me, really. It’s kind of set up to preach to the choir, in terms of the “moral”. I wrote it because I was pretty sure I could finish it (and I did), and I sorely need to learn to finish stories; I shared it because I compulsively share anything I think is remotely decent.
Hypotheses: I myself am female. Lace, the only gendered character with a speaking role, is female. Key bakes cupcakes at one point in the story and a stereotype is at work. (I had never heard of Key the Metal Idol.)
Could be. I honestly don’t know. I didn’t even consciously remember Key baking cupcakes by the time the story ended and I asked myself what might have influenced me.
I also had the feeling that the story wasn’t really about Key; ey just serves as an expository device. Ey has no unpredictable or even unusual reactions to anything that would establish individuality. The setting should then draw the most interest, and it didn’t do enough that, because it was too vague. What is the government? How does it decide and enforce allowed research, and allowed self-modification? How does sex-choosing work? What is the society like? Is Key forced at a certain age to be in some regime, like our schools? If not, are there any limits on what Key or her parents do with her life?
As it is, the story presented a very few loosely connected facts about Key’s world, and that lack of detail is one reason why these facts weren’t interesting: I can easily imagine some world with those properties.
Small communities, mostly physically isolated from each other, but informationally connected and centrally administered. Basically meritocratic in structure—pass enough of the tests and you can work for the gubmint.
Virtually all sophisticated equipment is communally owned and equipped with government-designed protocols. Key goes to the library for eir computer time because ey doesn’t have anything more sophisticated than a toaster in eir house. This severely limits how much someone could autonomously self-modify, especially when the information about how to try it is also severely limited. The inconveniences are somewhat trivial, but you know what they say about trivial inconveniences. If someone got far enough to be breaking rules regularly, they’d make people uncomfortable and be asked to leave.
One passes some tests, which most people manage between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, and then goes to the doctor and gets some hormones and some surgical intervention to be male or female (or some brand of “both”, and some people go on as “neither” indefinitely, but those are rarer).
Too broad for me to answer—can you be more specific?
Education is usually some combination of self-directed and parent-encouraged. Key’s particularly autonomous and eir mother doesn’t intervene much. If Key did not want to learn anything, eir mother could try to make em, but the government would not help. If Key’s mother did not want em to learn anything and Key did, it would be unlawful for her to try to stop em. There are limits in the sense that Key may not grow up to be a serial killer, but assuming all the necessary tests get passed, ey can do anything legal ey wants.
Thank you for the questions—it’s very useful to know what questions people have left after I present a setting! My natural inclination is massive data-dump. This is an experiment in leaving more unsaid, and I appreciate your input on what should have been dolloped back in.
Reminds me of old China...
That naturally makes me curious about how they got there. How does a government, even though unelected, go about impounding or destroying all privately owned modern technology? What enforcement powers have they got?
Of course there could be any number of uninteresting answers, like ‘they’ve got a singleton’ or ‘they’re ruled by an AI that moved all of humanity into a simulation world it built from scratch’.
And once there, with absolute control over all communications and technology, it’s conceivable to run a long-term society with all change (incl. scientific or technological progress) being centrally controlled and vetoed. Still, humans have got a strong economical competition drive, and science & technology translate into competitive power. Historically, eliminating private economic enterprise takes enormous effort—the big Communist regimes in USSR, and I expect in China as well, never got anywhere near success on that front. What do these contended pain-free people actually do with their time?
It was never there in the first place. The first inhabitants of these communities (which don’t include the whole planet; I imagine there are a double handful of them on most continents—the neuros and the genderless kids are more or less universal, though) were volunteers who, prior to joining under the auspices of a rich eccentric individual, were very poor and didn’t have their own personal electronics. There was nothing to take, and joining was an improvement because it came with access to the communal resources.
Nope. No AI.
What they like. They go places, look at things, read stuff, listen to music, hang out with their friends. Most of them have jobs. I find it a little puzzling that you have trouble thinking of how one could fill one’s time without significant economic competition.
Oh. So these communities, and Key’s life, are extremely atypical of that world’s humanity as a whole. That’s something worth stating because the story doesn’t even hint at it.
I’d be interested in hearing about how they handle telling young people about the wider world. How do they handle people who want to go out and live there and who come back one day? How do they stop the governments of the nations where they actually live from enforcing laws locally? Do these higher-level governments not have any such laws?
Many people can. I just don’t find it convincing that everyone could without there being quite a few unsatisfied people around.
The exchange above reminds me of Robin Hanson’s criticism of the social science in Greg Egan’s works.
I disagree: it doesn’t matter for the story whether the communities are typical or atypical for humanity as a whole, so mentioning it is unnecessary.
The relatively innocuous information about the wider world is there to read about on the earliest guidelists; less pleasant stuff gets added over time.
You can leave. That’s fine. You can’t come back without passing more tests. (They are very big on tests.)
They aren’t politically components of other nations. The communities are all collectively one nation in lots of geographical parts.
They can leave. The communities are great for people whose priorities are being content and secure. Risk-takers and malcontents can strike off on their own.
I wish our own world was nice enough for that kind of lifestyle to exist (e.g., purchasing sovereignity over pieces of settle-able land; or existing towns seceding from their nation)… It’s a good dream :-)
It was the first thing.
The exchange above reminds me of Robin Hanson’s criticism of the social science in Greg Egan’s works.
I enjoyed it. I made an effort to read Key genderlessly. This didn’t work at first, probably because I found the Spivak pronouns quite hard to get used to, and “ey” came out as quite male to me, then fairly suddenly flipped to female somewhere around the point where ey was playing on the swing with Trellis. I think this may have been because Trellis came out a little more strongly male to me by comparison (although I was also making a conscious effort to read ey genderlessly). But as the story wore on, I improved at getting rid of the gender and by the end I no longer felt sure of either Key or Trellis.
Point of criticism: I didn’t find the shift between what was (to me) rather obviously the two halves of the story very smooth. The narrative form appeared to take a big step backwards from Key after the words “haze of flour” and never quite get back into eir shoes. Perhaps that was intentional, because there’s obviously a huge mood shift, but it left me somewhat dissatisfied about the resolution of the story. I felt as though I still didn’t know what had actually happened to the original Key character.