Easter and Parthenogenesis

I was thinking yesterday as I wandered in to work that Easter is the perfect length. It's like two magic week-ends at once so you get more than twice as much done as you would in two ordinary week-ends. I had time to socialise, sleep, play Trivial Pursuit, do ordinary chores AND a whole pile of things that had been postponed for months, read two books, see a band and shop. It was great! And there was chocolate too.

Why then did I feel so ripped off when my diary said that Tasmania has something called "Easter Tuesday"? How good would that be? Lucky Tasmanians.

One of the books I read before Easter was Glory Season by David Brin. He's a complicated American SF writer with strangely right ring politics. So far so dodgy. Trouble is he writes like a dream and creates these internally consistent worlds so you find yourself admiring his detailed description of the effects of a double sunset or moonrise on the alien plant life without noticing the utter repugnance of what he's on about. For a while anyway. I've been trying to work out exactly why this book makes me feel so very uneasy.

Glory Season is about a planet run by women. Society is dominated by clans of clones who've found entrepreneurial niches for themselves and their descendants. Men are needed to do things women can't such as sailing and "sparking" the production of clones at one time of the year (apparently parthenogenesis doesn't work and sperm is still needed to make women grow placentas. I know, I know. It's SCIENCE FICTION.) For the sake of diversity, some people are produced sexually at a different time of the year. Unique individual women produced this way are second class citizens and their only hope of reproducing clones of themselves is by developing a profitable talent. Men and women have been altered so they each want to breed at the times that have the best genetic outcomes for them. There's a lot of dwelling on the detail of breeding rituals and the women seem preoccupied with continuing their line, even at the age of 15 or so.

For some reason though Brin's world still assigns talents based on current (and increasingly discredited) assumptions about gender so that women still can't navigate and don't like playing computer games. Over thousands of years, this society has decided to turn its back on technology and adopt a low tech pastoral model which while not unique in the universe is still ascribed, at least in part, to the feminist preoccupations of the planet's founder.

His framework for describing this world is through the points of view of two marginalised people: a disadvantaged "unique" young woman with unusual mathematical abilities and a (normally functioning) male visior from another planet who arrives with news that other people are on their way. In the end we know society's going to change both techonologically and gender-wise and that this is a GOOD THING.

I guess I'm bothered by the fact that it's a bloke who's setting up this Amazonian world - and it is Amazonian - the women fight an awful lot and the male visitor comments several times how distractingly beautiful they all are. It's a bit of a teenage boy wet dream place. That's probably a sci-fi genre issue. I'm also bothered that the dramatic tension is about trying to redress the balance towards more gender equity. But then, you know, what else could it be about? And for all that, it was a really good read. Much better than some of his later "Uplift" books where humans joined intergalactic civilisation and made chimps and dolphins speak.