I've had Daughter of Elysium on my Kindle for ages and heard about this book first from the Feminist Science Fiction, Fantasy and Utopian Book Club that I was a member of back around the turn of the century. Probably because my eyes are bigger than my stomach and I am chronically over-booked. I have no idea why it took me so long to read this book. I do recommend this book if, perhaps, you enjoy oceanic euphemisms for sex and own more than one adult item shaped like a dolphin. I don't recommend this book if you believe that character traits cannot be divided neatly along moral lines. It's an endless, clumsy rape allegory, and I find that a little nauseating. It's too bad that these really interesting points get overshadowed by the oversimplified gender roles upon which the entire plot hinges. Also, the linguistic description of the Sharers is as good a fictional exploration of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as we are ever likely to see. The author is a professor of biology, and her vast knowledge of the subject shines through in the descriptions of parthenogenic reproduction and marine life.
The book does have positive features, making my dislike of it all the more frustrating. I don't think that this lazy broad-brush ecofeminism does women any favors, as it continues to relegate femininity to the realms of body/emotion/instinct rather than allowing for logic or intellectual choice. Slonczewski equates femininity with every positive attribute possessed by any of the characters: the all-female Sharers are nurturing, generous, telepathic, gentle, and in all respects aligned with nature masculinity is essentialized as purely brutish, destructive, and selfish. The plot is offensively gender-reductive.
I wanted to, and instead ended up throwing it across the room at several points in my reading. I am well-versed in the canon of women SF/fantasy writers.
In fact, feminist science fiction is my most beloved literary subgenre. I want to preface the rest of my review by saying I am deeply feminist. I loathe this book with an ungodly passion.
0 kommentar(er)
