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Comment by snowwrestler | Hacker News Reader

I love to read old sci fi for the anachronisms.

Interfacing with an advanced computer via teletype is pretty funny. But there are also cultural anachronisms. For example all the people speaking are men except for shrieking kids and a meek wife. And it is a sci fi story that ends in a Bible scene!

“Golden Age” sci fi stories are great mental puzzles, but also great glimpses into the mindset of the era in which they were written. It’s fun to see what authors thought would change quickly, and what wouldn’t change.

In this story, space travel and energy development advances quickly. But in 2061 there’s still only one big computer and it takes symbols and teletype to interact with it. People have everything they need, but the population keeps exploding. In short it is a good view into the U.S. of the 1950s: a time of nuclear physics, the space race, and the baby boom.

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Counterpoint: the classic "The mote in God's eye", by Jerry Pournelle and David Niven. It's a great story, but the details aged so badly as to make it super difficult to read. Spaceships that run exactly like 18th century British sailing ships, with all the class differences between grunts and officers, and everybody smokes (on a spaceship!), the woman are ornaments etc etc.

Yeah, that’s a good example. Niven often would have characters riding through hyperspace with aliens but also smoking and being casually chauvinistic. Like if you took all the male characters in Mad Men and drafted them into interstellar war.

Mote is actually one of the rare instances where the authors got the computer predictions right. All the characters carry hand computers that fit in their pockets, and all the rooms have big screens that can be used to display information. Not too far from how things work today.

Every time I re-read the foundation series, I feel like you could take most of the characters, flip a coin to assign a gender and nothing would change.

This is true. None of Asimov's early male characters have actual gender.

Every time he tried to assign gender it was horrible. Susan Calvin as the distant, unfeeling woman who could only be a mother to a robot was one.

There was:

* the housewife who fell in love with her robot

* the mother who saved a robot instead of her biological child and was killed by her husband

* the woman who poisoned her genius husband after he created a temporary time-travel technology because she didn't believe he'd ever get the credit

* the wife who ruins her husband's chance to hook up with a real bombshell on Mars by showing up a little too early with her mother

* about five shrewish mothers who didn't trust robots around their children and were proven wrong

* "Little Miss", whose only achievement is being open-minded about her "male" robot being sentient

* Several stories about "intuitive robots" who had to be made feminine so that men would bother talking to them. I still remember the cringe-worthy line: “Listen, men respond to voices. At the most intimate moments, are they looking? It’s the voice in your ear.”

And I'm just going off the top of my head here. There's so much more.

Then Asimov took a three-decade break from fiction. When he came back every explicit woman was some kind of super-powered bimbo.

Asimov was at his best when you couldn't sense any gender. His notion of gender was deeply unsettling.

Having read Asimov's autobiographical inserts in anthologies such as Before the Golden Age and The Early Asimov, I get the idea that young (as in prior to the age of 30) Asimov suffered from a problem similar to many male mangakas: their exposure to girls/women is so minimal as to be almost non-existent (in the case of mangakas, of course, this comes primarily from the work schedule), and with such a paucity of experience, they flounder to construct such characters except within the bounds of extreme stereotype.

I've read those inserts too. They're a little convenient.

Pretend he's sincere. He then spent thirty years being a notorious... I struggle for a description. Womanizer? Hound?

He called himself a dirty old man and a lecher, and claimed he had been one from the age of fifteen. He wrote a book called "The Sensuous Dirty Old Man".

If he weren't already dead years ago he'd have been metooed into the Earth's core. He was literally famous for pinching women's butts when they didn't expect or want it.

And he came back from that in the 80s and had learned nothing about women. His female characters are all sex and smugness.

I suppose that's common in the mangakas too. Few of them learn how to deal with women as human beings instead of sexual objects.

One can be lecherous from the age of 15 onward and never actually get to know any women, so the two aren't mutually exclusive (actually, the first might contribute to the problem of the second.)

Oh, I know all too well of his numerous sexual assaults. When it gets to the stage that Harlan Ellison makes it a point to get between him and women as they're going up a set of stairs...yeah not great, not great at all. I don't want to downplay it in the least.

Firstly, why does every story need to include a mix of genders speaking? If I wrote a story about a night out with my mates, would you complain that only men were talking?

Secondly,

> And it is a sci fi story that ends in a Bible scene!

Did you miss the entire premise of the story?

> If I wrote a story about a night out with my mates, would you complain that only men were talking?

I don't think OP is complaining, just remarking on how it's a signal of the time.

You can write a story about your mates all day long, nobody cares, don't draw this false equivalence; however, when all of society is just writing books about "their mates" and somehow women aren't present in any of these stories in any significant capacity, then I think I'd raise an eyebrow: no?

> Firstly, why does every story need to include a mix of genders speaking?

Did every Saturday morning cartoon have to end with explaining the moral of the story, and followed by a joke with the whole cast laughing? They didn't, but they sure used to.

Did the old knightly tales always have to show christian values and knightly valour, through a whole lot of christian symbolism? They didn't, but they sure used to.

Likewise I've started to read all the classic sci fi, and it is very noticeable, that women just want to have sex with the main character for no real reason. Because ya know, it would be nice to admit that women have sexual desires as well, and that it's especially convenient if that would mean them pleasing the protagonist that just shows up.

Read one, and you don't have to complain about it, read several and you start to see it pervasive and an outlook of the times. So I look forward to the hundredth story about going out with your mates, so I can call it out in the same manner

> Likewise I've started to read all the classic sci fi, and it is very noticeable, that women just want to have sex with the main character for no real reason.

Averted in spades by E. E. "Doc" Smith, whose work seems a bit "clunky" by modern standards but was writing really heavy-duty sci-fi ten to twenty years ahead of its time.

I didn’t say that every story needs to include a mix of genders speaking.

This story does have a mix, though. And it’s interesting that the characters conform to U.S. 1950s gender roles despite the plot covering enormous distances and spans of future time.

This is simply because it was written by someone in the 1950s for readers in the 1950s.

Likewise, in the U.S. in the 1950s it was broadly assumed that everyone was familiar with the language of the Christian Bible, especially King James. Whereas today’s society is less religious overall and more overtly diverse. An editor considering this story today would have to think about how many people would simply miss the reference of the last line.

I love the books of Nevil Shute (not exactly sci fi - engineering fi maybe?). But the female characters in “On the Beach” could not have fewer dimensions than if they were massless points on a plane, and in one of his other books, the main character’s nickname is literally the n-word.

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