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

[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