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Oleksandr Zholud's Reviews > Venus Plus X
Venus Plus X
by
by
This is a SF that questions gender roles, written in 1960. It was nominated for Hugo best novel in 1961 but lost to A Canticle for Leibowitz. I read is as a part of monthly reading for July 2021 at The Evolution of Science Fiction group.
The story starts with the protagonist, Charlie Johns, waking up in some strange place with no memory of how he got there and why, but overwhelmed my remembering women he loved or liked, from his school teacher to his bride. He is approached by an anthropomorphic being, whom he has problem to definitely place as a male of female. His story is interrupted from time to time with short pieces about several couples from Johns’ period Earth or its near future, where gender roles of the 50s are questioned e.g. with a man nursing his baby or discussing where to buy underwear ‘Like a bikini only less. Knit.’
As story goes on, readers discover that anthropomorphic beings are in our future and they are both sexes in one, so conflicts based on e.g. patriarchy are absent here. Moreover, their true love is when ‘a Ledom and his mate mutually conceive, and each bears twins’. There is also some wonderful tech that makes life easier and a new form of religion, which deifies children.
The novel is definitely an important step in discussing gender in SF. While in details our present is sometimes further away than the wildest dreams of 50s SF authors, he seen the destination quite well. And, as the narrator notes, ‘He remembered reading an ad in a magazine listing ten quite common items on a shopping list, aluminum foil, an anti-biotic ointment, milk in cartons, and the like, and pointing out that not a single one of these things could be had twenty years ago. … Maybe he was as funny as the West Indian lady on the escalator, but he shouldn’t overlook the fact that her first escalator, strange as it was to her, wasn’t even a product of her future.’
The downside of the later part of the book is that the author starts to preach his ideas about how gender issues of his times are bad, for this sound quite out of date.
The story starts with the protagonist, Charlie Johns, waking up in some strange place with no memory of how he got there and why, but overwhelmed my remembering women he loved or liked, from his school teacher to his bride. He is approached by an anthropomorphic being, whom he has problem to definitely place as a male of female. His story is interrupted from time to time with short pieces about several couples from Johns’ period Earth or its near future, where gender roles of the 50s are questioned e.g. with a man nursing his baby or discussing where to buy underwear ‘Like a bikini only less. Knit.’
As story goes on, readers discover that anthropomorphic beings are in our future and they are both sexes in one, so conflicts based on e.g. patriarchy are absent here. Moreover, their true love is when ‘a Ledom and his mate mutually conceive, and each bears twins’. There is also some wonderful tech that makes life easier and a new form of religion, which deifies children.
The novel is definitely an important step in discussing gender in SF. While in details our present is sometimes further away than the wildest dreams of 50s SF authors, he seen the destination quite well. And, as the narrator notes, ‘He remembered reading an ad in a magazine listing ten quite common items on a shopping list, aluminum foil, an anti-biotic ointment, milk in cartons, and the like, and pointing out that not a single one of these things could be had twenty years ago. … Maybe he was as funny as the West Indian lady on the escalator, but he shouldn’t overlook the fact that her first escalator, strange as it was to her, wasn’t even a product of her future.’
The downside of the later part of the book is that the author starts to preach his ideas about how gender issues of his times are bad, for this sound quite out of date.
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