Feminism has ruined Ben Bova for me

[asterroc]

I'm reading Ben Bova's "The Alien Within", Book 2 in the Voyagers series, and it's been years since I read the first one. Bova writes interesting complex characters^*, with layers upon layers of deception, sometimes including self-deception as well. His women however are always described in terms of their sexuality - their appearances are described in sexual terms, they react to the other characters^* in the story in sexual ways, the other characters (both male and female) react to them sexually (men analyzing their sexual attractiveness, women treating other women as rivals for sexual favors), and every woman with a name slept her way into her current position. It's absolutely disgusting.

^*Where for Bova "character" means "white male", and everything else is an exception.

Bova also exoticizes the "orientals" in the story, using the exoticism as another sexual attribute in the "oriental" women, and as a sign of strength/power/fighting skill in the "oriental" men.

This book is really the product of a maladjusted mind. I'm willing to finish it (there's very few non-fiction books I won't finish after I've voluntarily started them^%, and fewer yet in SF/fantasy), but I don't think I'm ever going to read another Bova novel. Shame, he's written so much.

^%A couple corrections are noted in this sentence - strike throughs indicate removed, italics indicate added.

Comments

[gemini6ice.livejournal.com]

The only book in the last decade I haven't finished after starting was At Swim, Two Boys, and that's because it was written in such a heavy irish dialect that I couldn't understand it.

I feel compelled to finish a book regardless of how little I enjoy it. Only then do I feel I have the right to completely criticize it. :)

[calzephyr77.livejournal.com]

I found an SF anthology called More Women of Wonder and if I didn't hold my copy so dearly, I would send it to you. It was published in 1976 and I'm sure a side by side comparison with other SF of the day would be quite fun. It's always a little sad when the future is not so futuristic :S

[seekingferret.livejournal.com]

The thing about reading Bova is that there's one key fact you ought to always keep in mind when reading Bova: From the early '70s through to the mid '80s, he was one of the most influential editors in SF, at Analog and then at OMNI. So his failure to represent women, what you term the evidence of a 'maladjusted mind'- that mind was responsible for acting as gatekeeper to several of SF's most important magazines in that era. It explains a lot, doesn't it?

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

Holy crap.

(I was reading Analog as recently as 2005, and it still seemed stuck in the 1950s.)

[seekingferret.livejournal.com]

Analog has had the same editor since Ben Bova left in 1978, Stanley Schmidt. If you wish to read SF that isn't trapped in the '50s, you need to steer a wider path than Analog and Asimov's. There are a number of small circulation, well-edited SF magazines that showcase SF with a more modern feel. The big guys stay big by appealing to the conservatism of their audience.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

How sad. Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I also find it intriguing that I was entirely unaware of the problems in these sorts of works when I was younger. I find myself wanting to reread the first Voyagers book to see if it is horribly sexist as well - I expect that it is, and I just never realized.

[sildra.livejournal.com]

My upbringing--especially from my mother, but really from both parents--made me hyper-sensitive when I was young (I could barely get through The Once and Future King, of all things, because the sexism really bothered me at age 11). And then my mom would always give me trashy sci-fi/fantasy to read, and my dad would give me classic sci-fi, which is even worse. I remember being pretty confused about that contradiction when I was a teenager. When I confronted my mom about it, she gave me a book that she remembered as being progressive when she was in college. It... had the female crew engaging in lesbian sex in the middle of exploring a hostile planet. I think I pretty much just gave up on caring at that point (unless it's really egregious), and decided I could read sci-fi and put up with this, particularly in anything written before I was born, or just not read sci-fi (I chose the former).

[allandaros.livejournal.com]

I hadn't read much Bova - the only book of his that I recall reading was Orion, which I classified as "eminently forgettable." Now I know to stay far, faaar away from his stuff. Thanks for the heads-up!

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

The first two books of the Voyagers series were written during the Cold War, and hence deal with a lot of international politics that you might find interesting if you can ignore the sexism. While I don't recall the first Voyagers book at all, summaries I've read of it to remind me before reading this book tell me that it focuses heavily on the politics between the USA and USSR in the "near future" (that is, the near future compared to the book being written around 1981) and how they would react to each other when an alien spaceship is discovered entering the Solar System.

This book (The Alien Within, written 1986) is set 18 years after the first, with the USSR on the brink of collapse and massive genocide taking place in Africa as a result of over population and selective sex determination of children focusing nearly exclusively on male children. The middle section of the book focuses on the main character attempting to single-handedly solve the wars in Africa.

So you might actually like the politics of the book, though you might find it naive since you actually know about that stuff unlike me. :-P