Ironically, SF likes to define itself as a literary genre that boldly goes where no other genre has gone before. Still, it has a few malcontents who absolutely lose their collective shit whenever something new threatens to happen.
A specific tripwire that’s guaranteed to get the Grumpy Old Sci-Fi Fans yelling at those damned kids to get off their spaceship is suggesting that some “classic” novels and short stories haven’t aged too well.
But honestly, a lot of the science fiction of that era hasn’t.
Frank Herbert’s Dune, for example.
Dune is brilliant; it’s a majestic triumph of world building, no argument there. But the poisonous snake in Herbert’s masterpiece is Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, a homophobic and malignant stereotype.
It’s an absurd and offensive stereotype. As a character, the Baron stands out like a severed thumb, and contemporary readers definitely wouldn’t put up with it. (Thankfully, Villaneuve’s adaption avoids this problematic issue)
You wouldn’t use a fun house mirror’s reflection for your driver’s license photo because you’d be uncomfortable with that image of yourself. But that’s exactly what happens when someone is stereotyped as the Other.
If you’re on the wrong side of the Holy Status Quo, the people on the other side can interpret your existence however they like. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Lie and you don’t like it.
Furthermore, looking at the bigger picture, perpetuating these hateful myths got people fired, evicted, jailed, and killed.
You couldn’t get away with a hateful and preposterous boogeyman like Baron Harkonnen nowadays, and that’s a good thing. The trope of using homosexuality as an allegory for a decadent lifestyle is a museum relic.
The evidence of civilized behavior is when you see the Other as People. If empathy isn’t there, it’s sociopathy.
The depressing paradox here is Herbert should have known it was a Lie. But he needed the Lie more than he needed his son.
[Herbert] was unhappy when his son came out as gay, and even more upset when Bruce became a part of queer street theatre in the Bay Area. His father believed Bruce had chosen his sexual orientation, and wanted him to renounce it. Bruce died of AIDS in 1993, cared for at the end by an old college friend in San Rafael, California, with support from the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a charitable group of gay performers, protesters, and caregivers.
Herbert’s decision to cast his son from his life was barbaric.
It brought to mind “New Moon Rising”, a classic Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode where Willow tells Buffy a big secret. It’s a humane counterpoint.
Buffy: I wanna hear about you and Oz. You saw him, right?
Willow: I was with him all night.
Buffy: All night? Oh my god. Wait. Last night was a wolf moon, right?
Willow: Yup.
Buffy: Either you’re about to tell me something incredibly kinky, or —
Willow [grinning] : No kink. He didn’t change, Buffy. He said he was gonna find a cure, and he did. In Tibet.
Buffy: Oh my god. I can’t believe it.
[a pause]
Buffy: Okay, I’m all with the woo-hoo here, and you’re not.
Willow: No, there’s “woo” and, and “hoo.” But there’s “uh-oh,” and… “why now?” And… it’s complicated.
Buffy: Why complicated?
Willow [sighs, takes the leap] : It’s complicated… because of Tara.
Buffy [confused] : You mean Tara has a crush on Oz?
Willow: No.
[Buffy finally understands]
Buffy: Oh.
[Willow smiles nervously]
[After a moment, Buffy abruptly stands up and backs away from Willow]
Buffy: Oh. Um… well… that’s great. You know, I mean, I think Tara’s a, a really great girl, Will.
Willow: She is. And… there’s something between us. It-it wasn’t something I was looking for. It’s just powerful. And it’s totally different from what Oz and I have.
Buffy [babbling] : Well, there you go, I mean, you know, you have to — you have to follow your heart, Will. And that’s what’s important, Will.
Willow [beginning to get scared]: Why do you keep saying my name like that?
Buffy [responding with a frozen smile] : Like what, Will?
Willow [panicking] : Are you freaked?
Buffy [shocked] : What? No, Will, d-
[Buffy stops, suddenly realizes what’s at stake in this moment, makes a decision]
Buffy: No.
[Buffy sits next to Willow]
Buffy [firmly] : No, absolutely “no” to that question.
[Willow stares back at Buffy, skeptical but hopeful]
Buffy: I’m glad you told me.
This was the conversation Frank and Bruce Calvin Herbert needed to have but, didn’t because it was easier for Frank Herbert to envision giant sandworms on a desert planet in a make-believe universe than to see his son as a human being.
In spite of the stubborn denialists that don’t believe in the aliens who exist outside their White Heterosexual Christofascist Utopia, multiple variations of Buffy and Willow’s painful but necessary conversation have happened before, are happening right now, and will happen in the future.
Somewhere in the United States, someone is coming out to their parents and someone else is changing their name from “Danny” to “Danielle” and another someone is confessing to their priest they don’t believe in God.
How these conversations go depends if love is strong enough to open up closed minds and overcome old, deep-rooted societal biases.
It’s helpful to think of these perilous conversations as Herbert’s Gom Jabbar; not everyone can pass the test because they can’t think outside the box.
Buffy didn’t reject Willow because she didn’t see her friend as a stereotype. Buffy valued their friendship so much that she was able to leave those preconceptions in the trash where they belonged and move on.
It’s tragic that Frank Herbert was unable to extend grace to his dying son because of his inability to practice what he preached. Unfortunately, it was a bridge too far. As a reflection of our current political situation, Herbert chose to be JD Vance instead of Tim Walz. Herbert boxed himself in.
“How tempting it is to raise high walls and keep our change. Rot here in our own self-satisfied comfort. Enclosures of any kind are a fertile breeding ground for hatred of outsiders, that produces a bitter harvest.”
— Reverend Mother Superior Darwi Odrade
Hunter Gathers
The last two Dune novels are boderline pornographic in some parts.
Herbert had issues with his sexuality.
AnnM
karen marie
@AnnM: It’s too annoying to try to read far to figure out its relevance.
japa21
Great post. Brought up some memories that I won’t go into at this time, maybe in the future.
Chet Murthy
@japa21: seconded.
Sister Golden Bear
THANK YOU! Extremely well said.
Anoniminous
I have a fund of stories from the Plague Years. Not too interested in relating ’em.
ETA: seems I’m not the only one.
Baud
I’ve never read Dune and this makes me want to stick to the movies.
AJ of the Mustard Search and Rescue Team
Great post and well said.
I also liked the highlighting, just in case anyone gets cranky about it. Worked for me.
Josie
@Baud:
I have not read the books or seen the movies, and I am not upset by my choices. But then I don’t grok science fiction. It’s all I can manage just to deal with current reality.
The Thin Black Duke
@Baud: Adam-Troy Castro once said that people have a reluctance to revisit books, movies and TV shows that they loved years ago because there’s always a chance that they were visited by “the suck fairy”.
Raoul Paste
It’s odd that he could write that last sentence for the Reverend mother and not see how it applied to his own life. Who knows what was going on in his head.
That’s a very sad story about his son.
Chet Murthy
@The Thin Black Duke: Woody Allen’s and J.K. Rowling’s works come to mind. Completely ruined for me. Ditto (to a lesser extent) Van Morrison and Eric Clapton’s music. sigh.
The Thin Black Duke
@Chet Murthy: Purple Rain. I attempted to revisit it some time ago, but when Prince slaps Apollonia, I had to turn it off. Damn it.
O. Felix Culpa
I “discovered” Dune in 7th grade. Loved it and read it multiple times. It truly is a masterpiece of world-building, although the later books deteriorated quickly. It’s sad that Frank Herbert could not love his son Bruce just the way he was. There were so many tragedies in the AIDS era like that.
Lyrebird
Thanks so much for your post and for this quote!
That happened to me with Anne McCaffrey’s early Pern books, which kept me alive through my early teen years, but now, aaack.
Frankensteinbeck
No, it’s not. The story line is incoherent garbage that ends with “Oh, well, I guess that was all a waste, nevermind.” The world building is good, but eleven year olds can do good world building. The books are packed tight with mystical sounding gibberish that doesn’t really mean much, and as near as I can tell people love that. It’s fingernails on a blackboard for me. Unless your philosophy actually is profound rather than just sounding cool, I give no points.
EDIT – The first movie distills down all the crazy-ass world building, and the recent movies beautifully render the aesthetic. Skip the books themselves.
KatKapCC
@Chet Murthy: Add Neil Gaiman to that list for me, which makes me want to scream.
strange visitor (from another planet)
@Frankensteinbeck: i mean, besides all of that worldbuilding (and the ecology of dune is some cool shit), it’s a pretty tight hero’s journey, basically star wars inverted, with the protagonist journeying TO the desert planet instead of departing FROM it.
gotta wonder if lucas was aware of arrakis and lifted anything from it to go along with his declared influences, flash gordon, the hidden fortress and WWII films like the dam busters
i’ll totally agree he lost the thread in the later books and the whole schtick with the honored matres, the infinite duncan idahos, the no ship and the abrupt american gothic cosmic being ending was so much shark jumping.
Downpuppy
I read the entire series as a teenager. Forgot 98%, and apparently misunderstood almost all of it.
Never even figured out the difference between Gurney Halleck & Duncan Idaho.
Of the last 2 movies, the first ended suddenly just as things were starting to happen.
The second was such a dreary mass of gray & brown & repetitive scenes it wasn’t worth seeing.
So it goes.
The Thin Black Duke
Reprehensible as Herbert was as a father, I think it’s important to acknowledge Dune as the entry point for getting the people who most likely wouldn’t read Silent Spring to understand that using Earth as a garbage dump wasn’t sustainable.
strange visitor (from another planet)
@Downpuppy: the difference between gurney halleck and duncan idaho is like the difference between achilles and odysseus or oedi and skeevo from vanth dreadstar’s crew.
one is a super-badass death-dealer, dedicated to the hero and the hero’s cause. the other is a versatile, devious, dangerous man who is never at a loss
@The Thin Black Duke: facts.
Tim in SF
I didn’t think there was anything more homophobic than the Baron character in the 84 Dune movie. Much worse than the book. Here’s the one gay guy in all of Sci Fi and he’s absolutely covered with disgusting, oozing sores, and obvious allegory to AIDS. There were a lot of reasons to hate that movie, but for me, that topped the list.
I’m sad to hear that Herbert was like this with his gay son. I never knew that. It’s very disappointing.
Bill K
Another chapter of “Why aren’t our heroes perfect?” Two things can be true at once – Herbert wrote an epic novel that highlighted ecology, religious zealotry and the corruption of power. Herbert was also a bad homophobic father which was reflected to some extent in his writing. I will continue to enjoy Dune whenever I re-read it while saying a small prayer for Frank and his son.
Chet Murthy
@Tim in SF: i have a memory of watching that movie: it was cheesy and the music was even cheesier. A week ago I tried to watch it again: it was so terrible, so so terrible I didn’t even make it to the point where Paul arrives on Arrakis. I mean that was one terrible movie.
lollipopguild
In light of this very good post it’s funny to think that one of the biggest “world building” efforts here lately is project 2025. The creators want to take the whole country back to the 1950’s, really the 1850’s. Why they would believe that 50% or so of our country would allow themselves to be forced to live a 170 year old way of doing things is beyond me.
lowtechcyclist
@Frankensteinbeck:
Yes, THIS. That’s exactly how Dune ends. It’s been nearly half a century since I first read it, but it makes no sense, especially given that the galactic jihad that Paul spends the second half of the book trying to find a way to avoid would involve the deaths of hundreds of millions. Nevermind, indeed.
And on the way there, there’s the whole business with Terrible Purpose and every little gesture being potentially fraught with meaning – ably parodied by the National Lampoon’s Doon, by the way. When I tried to read it a second time, a couple decades back, it was all just too too much.
S Cerevisiae
@strange visitor (from another planet): I read the prequels mostly to learn the backstory of those two.
Chris
What I found utterly bizarre about the Harkonnen was when I found out that Herbert, supposedly, based them on the Nazis. And like. I don’t see that at all, to a point that verges on Godwin’s law. They’re not nationalists. They’re not eugenicists. They’re not social reactionaries. They’re not conspiracy theorists. They’re racists, but in the same way as pretty much any colonial power. They’re authoritarian, but so is everybody else in that society. And then there’s the whole homosexuality stuff.
Ironically, almost every other faction in the novel has something more ideologically in line with the Nazis than the Harkonnen. The Atreides and Corrinos both have their “superior soldiers selected by survival of the fittest” thing, and of course the Bene Gesserit are running a centuries-old selective breeding program to create an ubermensch.
I had no idea about Herbert’s personal life, but let’s just say I’m utterly unsurprised that a guy like that would write villains “inspired by the Nazis” that missed pretty much everything that made them Nazis.
strange visitor (from another planet)
@Chet Murthy: first “alan smithee” film i’d ever seen in the wild. lynch took his name off of it.
West of the Rockies
@strange visitor (from another planet):
The last two books in the original series of eight were written by another Herbert son and a collaborator. They were dreck.
I loved Dune. Old Frank sounds like a relic (and unknowing victim) of his era.
I loved Ferris Bueler’s Day Off. Watched it again a year ago and kind of hated much of it. Ditto 16 Candles.
Weird how we see now from our mature perspectives how foolish, juvenile, entitled, and bigoted we were in youth. But so often we don’t question the values draped over us as kids, the homophobia of the 60’s, a Catholic upbringing (in my case), the misogyny and bigotry of the TV shows, films, and music of our youth and the dominant culture.
Jess
@Bill K: Yes. I think people can have elements of greatness without being ethically great as well. Most of us are pretty lopsided. I have a close friend who is beautifully balanced, and it’s such a rare thing; people are always falling in love with her because she is so integrated and sane. Enjoy the products of genius without idolizing their creators. And remember that geniuses are often misfits who don’t relate well to others.
The Thin Black Duke
@strange visitor (from another planet): Thing is, this is what happens when auteurs step outside their sandbox. Some Artists understand how to use the tools in SF’s tool cabinet. Others don’t. Look at Robert Wise’s Star Trek. Conversely, John Carpenter’s Dark Star still holds up.
brantl
@Frankensteinbeck: Dune was a brilliant commentary on the idea of someone being able to see the possiblilities of the future, and being backed into a corner by their moral values. Paul Atriedes was basically an analog to Jesus, in a non-religous context
I’m sad to hear that he had more imaginations in his mind, than in his heart.
S Cerevisiae
@Jess: Agreed. I have always said there’s a fine line between genius and madness.
kindness
Herbert obviously wasn’t the best dad. He should have accepted his son. In Dune though, my impression was Herbert wanted Baron Harkonnen to come across as completely vile. It wasn’t the gay part that made the Baron a monster. It was the pedo drugging children and murdering them afterwards that left the impression. So for me, it wasn’t so much an anti-gay statement, but then I wasn’t really thinking about the sexuality of it
Confession – I read all the Dune books, even the insipid ones written by his son.
Chris
@Hunter Gathers:
A dude who built an entire ecosystem around giant worms had some issues with sexuality?
Dan B
Thanks for a very emotionally impactful post, at least for me. I had some wrenching experiences with families discovering their son was gay as he was dying horribly. It was bad enough for me that they were suffering and dying but to see how the families suffered from the homophobia they clutched tightly was yet more unnecessary pain. There are groups who burn through millions of dollars amplifying the hatred. Why? For what, false purity?
Jess
@kindness: I was thinking the same. The point was that it was non-consensual, not homosexual. I already knew I was bi when I read Dune as a teen, and it didn’t feel like an attack on my sexuality. He was so clearly a predator, and that’s what made his sexuality grotesque
Edit: I have a problem with people who turn themselves into a stereotype. They can present themselves however they like, but I find it unattractive, like they’re dehumanizing and Othering themselves.
tommyspoon
This is a distressing thing to learn about FH, but knowing his oeuvre as I do, it isn’t surprising.
I had an acquaintance in HS die alone in a Catholic hospital because his family refused to see him after learning he was gay and dying of AIDS.
A group of his friends, me included, went to the hospital to try and visit, but the nuns and nurses wouldn’t allow it because we weren’t his family.
“His family has abandoned him, Sister!” one of us screamed at a stern-faced nun who refused our entry. “Why are you doing this? Why are you denying him the love of his chosen family?”
She said nothing; we left defeated. He passed away a few days later.
I think about him every time the subject of “the other” is brought up.
I believe that there is no “other”.
Because, if you believe in “the other”, it is only a matter of time before you become it yourself.
azlib
I read the entire Dune series recently. I had read the original novel in early 1970. Parts of it have not aged well which is understandable. I never saw the Baron as homophobic, but he was a rather over the top villain. What always amazes me is the way a fair amount of SciFi includes some arm wavy science, but all seem to be set in a time of authoritarian regimes. Dune is no exception.
I do think we make a mistake in assuming great writers are also nice people. Frank Herbert’s personal life was pretty bad, but Dune in my mind is a pretty amazing piece of writing.
And if you want to read some really excellent pieces of SciFi, try reading Adrian Tchaikovsky’s trilogies. His “Children of Time” or his “Shards of Earth” are excellent.
strange visitor (from another planet)
@S Cerevisiae: those books weren’t written by herbert. i really wonder if he would’ve been pleased with how things were depicted in those stories.
Dan B
@kindness: Pedophilia is the most consistently weaponized accusation against gay men and against trans women. Harkonnen was likely what Herbert thought about gay people, including his son.
Jess
I recently reread Ngaio Marsh’s books. I remembered that she was sympathetic to non-whites, but had forgotten, or had overlooked, how bigoted she was towards gay men. Talk about stereotyping and Othering! She was a better writer than I had remembered, but a worse person. Too bad.
Chris
@The Thin Black Duke:
The Suck Fairy that I notice the most when going back to entertainment is sexism. Which is odd, because I was generally pretty good at spotting racism in movies even when I was a kid (Gone With The Wind was just as gross for me when I first saw it at sixteen as it is as a politically educated adult). The sexism far less so. It’s one of the things that makes me think the people who say sexism is even more ingrained in society are onto something.
strange visitor (from another planet)
@kindness: agreed. that’s what i took from the baron’s characterization as well.
Jacqueline Squid Onassis
“Dune” is also blatantly pro-eugenics which was not standard for its time. Herbert was an okay writer but he certainly had some weird phrasing. The misogyny and homophobia in that book aren’t nearly as out of place to me as the eugenics.
Jess
@Chris: It is. I hated Woody Allen before it was cool to do so because I thought he was so clearly a misogynist. No one else seemed to see it until after the step-daughter scandal. It can be really subtle. Like, who gets to be funny, and whose job it is to laugh and applaud. Or how every women has to look hot and wear high heels, while the men can be as old and gnarly as they want.
The Thin Black Duke
@Chris: This.
Off the top of my head, there’s an I Love Lucy episode where Lucy has a golden. once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get signed to a Hollywood contract, but Ricky, Fred, and Ethel guilty trip Lucy I to turning it down. This was framed as a Happy Ending.
Chris
@strange visitor (from another planet):
Something Abigail Nussbaum’s review of Dune a couple years ago pointed out is that it can never decide whether it wants to be a deconstruction of the hero’s journey or a straight telling of it, and the book suffers as a result.
For all that, I do still enjoy the book.
The Thin Black Duke
@Jess: In Manhattan, everyone in Woody’s circle of friends thought it was cool that he was dating a girl who just got out of high school .
strange visitor (from another planet)
@Chris: holy sixteen candles, batman, that take is on fire.
soooo much sexism in eighties and nineties movies
@Chris: yeah, that sounds about right. in trying to avoid the hero-journey conclusion, paul gets his hero-journey conclusion when he kills feyd, claims the empire and is betrothed to irulan.
S Cerevisiae
@strange visitor (from another planet): yeah, true. I thought the books he wrote after Messiah kind of lost me anyway although I did have to find out what happened to Leto II. I wanted to learn more about the history previous to Dune so I had to check out the prequels his son wrote. I am a terrible judge of writing anyway, I just wanted to know the story and figured Frank had outlined a framework for all the historical references he put in his books and his kid went from that. I have no idea if that’s true, however.
kindness
@Dan B: Pedophilia is frequently weaponized against gay people. The thing thats so crazy about that is most pedo actions are adult men and underage girls.
tommyspoon
@Jacqueline Squid Onassis: Helps to remember that the eugenics movements of the early twentieth century were largely supported by LIBERALS.
“Hey, we believe that science can solve any problem much better than religion can. Need help with your Aunt who is always acting out? Get her a lobotomy!”
“Imagine if we could do a ‘genetic lobotomy’! Then that pesky Aunt would never have been born at all!”
O. Felix Culpa
@The Thin Black Duke:
Manhattan was my last Woody Allen movie. It was so darn creepie and weird, him dating a young girl like that. Especially since teenagers are still unformed and not all that interesting yet, if what you’re looking for is a true companion. However, I gather that Woody was looking for something else, which is a sad commentary on his stunted development.
Rathskeller
@Chet Murthy: I’m simply waiting for Woody to die. I won’t revisit his “oh I’m trapped into having sex with this underage girl” movies.
but he’s a great artist despite being a shitstain as a father, husband, and human being. I just won’t ever willingly give him my time or money while he’s alive.
Stibbert
An unremarked lesson from Dune: the “never forget, never forgive” Fremen are clearly modeled on Bedouin Arabs, while buried in the Appendix we find that the Imperial Sardaukar study the Tawreh.
gene108
@azlib:
I didn’t either, until I learned there was a belief that homosexuals were prone to being child molesters back in the 1950’s and 1960’s and probably well after that.
Looking at Baron Harkonnen from that perspective, the homophobia becomes more obvious.
One other common 1960’s belief that crept into the first novel was that caffeine sobers someone up. Duncan Idaho comes back drunk from doing something important. Lady Jessica wants to know what. Orders people to bring Duncan coffee to sober him up.
A lot of older writings are full of bits that we no longer hold true that can be mildly amusing, like coffee sobers people up, to very disturbing upon rereading.
Jess
@The Thin Black Duke: And from a woman’s perspective, why on earth would an attractive girl want to date an aging geek like W.A.? Funny how you never see the genders reversed… I was really struck by this when Sea of Love came out in 1989, when an aging Al Pacino gets it on with a very hot Ellen Barkin; I remember sitting in the theater with my BF and some other friends, and all the women were like, really? The guys were oblivious to the weirdness of it all.
Chet Murthy
@Rathskeller: The last Allen film I watched was _Purple Rose of Cairo_, and I thought it was just the best. Maybe I was just young. Anyway, sometime after I learned about his
pedo-actually-its-ephebophilia, and that was that.SFBayAreaGal
@The Thin Black Duke: Buffy as aged well. I love the show.
Chris
@tommyspoon:
Well, sort of, depending on the definition of “liberal.”
A lot of the people who embraced eugenics were progressive in the Gilded Age sense of “look at all this modernity! Railroads! Factories! Industry!” In other words, a lot of the same people who thought the robber-barons and their trusts were just great. On the flip side of that were people like William Jennings Bryan who are remembered as reactionaries for things like the anti-Darwinism, but were also the kind of economic populists that New Deal type liberals would look back fondly on all through the twentieth century. It’s hard to pigeonhole in terms of modern political identities.
Gloria DryGarden
@azlib: I was a big Marion zimmer Bradley fan. Her writing, her stories were great. Lots of women centered positive stories. It turns out she was abusive as heck in her personal life, horrible stuff. It’s hard to put the great results next to the terribleness.
woody marrying his step daughter (one friend says she was smart, to marry a rich man and set herself up to have a good privileged life for her kids that she had w him. My friend knew someone whose kids went to the fancy school in nyc w woody and yoon’s kids. I’m probably spelling her name wrong)
abraham maslow’s daughter lived in boulder, Colo, and was pals w my therapist there. I love his hierarchy of needs. I refer to it all the time. The insider information on him is pretty bad. I really don’t like it when men fuck their daughters.
the stories of successful effective people doing hair-raising stuff, that they coerce their victims into keeping secret… it’s enough to leave one’s innocence and trust in tatters.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
Nobody mentioning Heinlein? Maybe because it was obvious he was sexually messed up and that permeated so much of his work, so it wouldn’t be a surprise for it to come out now.
I read Stranger in a Strange Land as a teenager at a time when everybody was reading it, and I enjoyed it though I did roll my eyes a lot. That was also the era where I read all the way through Atlas Shrugged, with a similar amount of eye rolling. I think I have a lot less tolerance for idiocy in my novels now.
Heinlein’s juvenile novels were my introduction to a lifetime of sci-fi, and I still have fond memories of them. But I’m certain if I tried rereading any of them, I’d find that the “suck fairy” (see Comment #11) had hit them with a heavy hand.
strange visitor (from another planet)
@Stibbert: uh, is that some hayseed, half-assed attempt to say, “torah“?!?
FFS. there are jews in the dune series, a rabbi features predominantly towards the absurd ending who was, iirc, kind of a waking stereotype in himself, but no. the prisoner-soldiers of the padisha emperor are not emphatically NOT based on red-sea pedestrians.
oldster
Teresa Nielsen Hayden used to talk about the “suck fairy” and her sisters, the “racism fairy,” “misogyny fairy,” “homophobia fairy,” and others. I don’t know whether she originated it, but that’s where I found it.
Older literature is even more awash in this stuff. Dickens’ “Pickwick Papers” is genuinely hilarious, but several members of the club routinely sexually harass women and girls. This is always presented with indulgent whimsy in asides like, “and Tupper stole a kiss from the pretty serving maid,” but it’s still sexual harassment, it still sucks, and it isn’t funny at all.
Then again, Dickens is pretty dodgy about all matters related to women, him and his “child-bride.”
Chet Murthy
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: I read a ton of Heinlein in high school. Stranger in a Strange Land was pretty weird, but I shrugged. The I read Glory Road and I was, like, -nopes-. I didn’t read Friday, nor anything else after. Somebody in this commentariat said they thought he’d been constrained by writing YA fiction for so long, and with _Stranger_ he kinda broke free. And …. heh, in _Glory Road_ he sure AF did break free, let his freak flag loose and never looked back.
So yeah, I think he had a few …. sexual issues.
Gloria DryGarden
@Lyrebird: oh no! Anne mcCaffrey? What? I read everything of hers. Was she diabolical?
Gloria DryGarden
@oldster: re older fiction full of misogyny:
and yet, it’s a glimpse into how things were, what was socially acceptable. Like art that depicts atrocities and hidden secrets in peoples lives, history hidden in plain sight, in art pieces, that might show what is taken for granted, assumed, or is a cultural norm.
that misogyny stuff was normal. It’s still kind of more normal than I’d like, in some circles. It’s gotten challenged, it’s changed, and, it might be going on more subtly.
even as a cis female , stories like gone with the wind have gotten right last me, without me noticing. Because of how ingrained the attitudes have been. Like, this is how it is, this is what to expect. The only way I get around my blind spot filters is to reverse the gender in a situation, a story, a joke. It makes it so clear, when I notice something is just so wrong, when you switch the gender on it.
randy khan
First, that scene in Buffy is so strong, and critical to the series. That moment of realization of what she’s doing and consciously stopping doing it right then captured me then, and even re-reading it gave me some of the same tingle down my spine.
I’ll be honest, though – I read Baron Harkonnen as a pedophile, not as gay. Finding out more about Herbert and his son obviously affects that perspective, but now I feel like I have to go back to the book to see why I thought that.
Timill
@Gloria DryGarden: Never heard anything bad about Annie, though some of her fiction may have suffered by being written for JWCJr – frex, she included the prologue to Dragonflight at his insistence.
VFX Lurker
I don’t know anything diabolical about McCaffrey, but the early books have issues for modern readers.
Essay here: DragonRiders of Pern Issues: Sexual Politics
Tim in SF
@tommyspoon: “Helps to remember that the eugenics movements of the early twentieth century were largely supported by LIBERALS.”
How does it “help to remember” that?
No liberals I know believe it now. In fact, I think one of the defining characteristics of liberals is that they change their mind when new information becomes available.
VFX Lurker
Sometimes a reader can impose their own viewpoint on a story and miss an author’s intent. Mark Twain lampooned this human foible in his short story, “A Fable.” I did it with Dune.
When I first read God-Emperor of Dune in 2019, I did not know anything about Herbert’s homophobia or his personal life. I also knew a lot of openly gay people. So, when the Duncan Idaho golem objected to a same-sex relationship, I thought Frank Herbert used Idaho to depict an example of somebody with backwards views. After all, Idaho represented somebody with centuries-old views. I misread the scene as a condemnation of homophobia.
I learned about Herbert’s homophobia and gay son only this past year. In the future, I will re-read that passage with some sadness. I honestly thought Herbert was a more open and forward thinker when I first read that part of the book.
Gloria DryGarden
@gene108: I want to connect some dots here. Sort of a triad of links. I argue w my evangelical friend about gay rights. She says they are wrong, it’s a sin, in gods eyes. She got all kinda stereotypes.
I tell her, look, the word in the Bible that gets mis translated or interpreted as homosexual, is often understood to be a word for 9 young boys as sexual workers for male overnight guests. A word for those boys, that role they are forced into. I guess that was historically a thing, and the Bible was saying it’s wrong. I posit that the thing that’s wrong isn’t the same- sex relations, but actually the using of children for sex, ie pedophilia, and trafficking. Also, in some cultures, it’s not quite seen as being homosexual, for the guy who “tops”, it’s just the one who receives, who is considered gay. See “ the kiss of spider woman” w bill hurt, and I forget, was it Raul Julia?
so to accuse people w a same sex orientation of being the pedophiles is absurd. It’s straight guys, using kids, usually boys, for sex. Pedophiles, all the way.
it sounds like blaming the people you’ve harmed, for having some “vile” characteristics, but it’s you.
(it’s probably not wrong to traffick girls, however. I don’t hear anything about that in terms of biblical blaming. But girls, you know, non sentient, not much value. Fine to sell them into slavery or prostitution, too. But this is a separate topic. Besides, there’s nothing girls can do w each other, it boggles the imagination. I know, I tried to explain it to my dad, about my sister. He understood, for just 10 seconds. Anyway girls, it’s a separate topic)
anyway, my interpretation of all this, is same sex relations are fine, but don’t have sex w minors or people who are not your equal in power and say so. Consent is the thing.
These politicians who are busy, they should stick to fucking their couches, or people they accede equal rights to.
yes lots of sarcasm seasoning sprinkled in here
and yes, I understand sexual abuses if children comes in all kinds of gender combinations.
Gin & Tonic
@The Thin Black Duke:
As does the Grateful Dead’s Dark Star.
I’ll see myself out.
Jeffg166
The first three Dune book are the movies. I reread them then tried the fourth book. It was so bad I gave up.
Same with Isaac Asimov Foundation. When I read those books for the first time 50 years ago I loved them. Reread them recently and they were awful. Even Asimov didn’t think they aged well.
oldster
@Chet Murthy:
I remember “Have Spacesuite, Will Travel” with some fondness, but I should probably avoid re-reading it if I want to maintain that fondness.
In any case, it fits squarely into his “juvenalia” category, both in that it was written when he was (relatively) young, and that it was meant for young readers.
bbleh
@Hunter Gathers: lol ya think? Giant penises roaming the planet? An Emperor who becomes one?
@Raoul Paste: I assume he DID see that to some degree. He obviously wasn’t dumb. Conflicted, yes.
Tenar Arha
@The Thin Black Duke: OMG yes. “The Suck Fairy” going around killing so much! Particularly bad when it’s books that deeply affected you as a kid or teenager, and then you read them and your tastes have changed, partly from the lessons in those books. Oof.
S Cerevisiae
@Jeffg166: Asimov did write some Foundation sequels in the 80’s that were much better. The spaceship I’d most like to have out of any book, movie, or tv series is the Far Star from Foundation’s Edge. Small and incredibly fast and you operate it by thought, just too cool. I would often ask fellow SF fans that question, you get some interesting answers.
Liminal Owl
@Gloria DryGarden: Oh, my. MZB. I adored the Darkover books, and my one attempt at writing fanfic was in that world. My husband thinks I should make another attempt, though I’ve never succeded with any fiction, so I’ve been considering rereading the stories. More than a little afraid to.
Her husband seems to have been even worse, and died in jail for it.
hells littlest angel
My favorite scene from that prophetic, futuristic masterpiece, Foundation involves a character debarking from an intergalactic voyage, buying a newspaper and lighting up a cigarette.
Chet Murthy
@Liminal Owl: I read the Dark over books in high school. Then again a few years ago, but this second time, I felt like ….. well, Bradley writes to and for young boys. At least, that’s how it felt.
Liminal Owl
@oldster:
From Justine Larbalestier’s “How To Ditch Your Fairy,” I think.
Liminal Owl
@S Cerevisiae: I would probably choose one of the sentient ships with absurd names and sarcastic senses of humor, from Ian M. Banks’ Culture series.
Liminal Owl
@Chet Murthy: Which ones did you read? I was never a young boy, and the ones I especially loved seem very female-centered in my memory.
Pappenheimer
@Chet Murthy: And yet, in Glory Road the main character is black. In Starship Troopers the main character is at least part Filipino. In the Star Beast two of the main viewpoint characters are a Cambridge-educated Kenyan and a lawyer named Greenburg, and none of them feel stereotyped.
And then there was Farnham’s Freehold, which went a long way to erasing anything positive in any other work of his.
I’ll still read Heinlein, if only because he introduced me to the word (and ship) Sisu.
Chet Murthy
@Liminal Owl: it’s been a few years, and I don’t remember which I read the second time around. But I remember there was this moment when I thought to myself ” she’s writing this for boys to read”.
Pappenheimer
@hells littlest angel:”My favorite scene from that prophetic, futuristic masterpiece, Foundation involves a character debarking from an intergalactic voyage, buying a newspaper and lighting up a cigarette.”
I’m sure Asimov would point out that it was an intragalactic voyage, but yeah, fair cop.
lowtechcyclist
@Chet Murthy:
Lazarus Long fucks his mother and his however-many-great granddaughters, IIRC.
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: One of my absolute favorite authors is the Polish science-fiction genius Stanisław Lem, but his sexism was so extreme that it often manifests as stories taking place in a universe that simply has no women unless there’s some kind of romance plot going on (and he only rarely wrote those). He could write them as interesting characters in that context, but when interviewers asked him why so many of his stories had no women at all, he simply stated that he didn’t see why he should introduce a romantic or sexual element all the time, as if that were the same question. And he’d occasionally make some comment about how scientific geniuses were rarely women anyway. I don’t think he ever really got what he was being asked.
Chris
@Tenar Arha:
What helps me with the Suck Fairy is to just keep an eye out for differences period and not just good and bad. Oftentimes, the past is both better and worse. The old seventies and eighties action shows I like to watch have a lot of warts in terms of gender, LGBTQ issues, and representation, which is not great. On the other hand, they’re vastly better when it comes to a healthy suspicion of the police and military than almost anything that could get made today, with copaganda and “backed by the Pentagon” suffocating everything. The same is true in a purely technical sense – the old stuff is a lot worse than today’s when it comes to continuity and character development and the like, but it’s also a lot better at giving me something that I can turn on and then turn off an hour later feeling that I’ve watched an actual full story, and not just a 45-minute trailer for the next story.
So, yeah. Pros and cons. They all have them. All eras of pop culture have stuff that makes me want to pull my hair out, and oftentimes I can look to another era and see how it’s doing the thing better.
lowtechcyclist
@S Cerevisiae:
When I read the I, Robot books and re-read the Foundation trilogy as an adult, the characters all seemed one-dimensional.
But by Foundation’s Edge, he seemed to have gotten the hang of creating characters that felt like real people. It was a big improvement.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
As much crap as he gets today, I give credit to Joss Whedon for being one of the few who was actually good at writing strong male-female relationships without any hint of a “romantic or sexual element.” Mal and Zoe. Angel and Faith. Black Widow and Hawkeye.
Stibbert
@strange visitor (from another planet): Allowing for however many fictional centuries of language drift, that’s how he spelled it. It’s the only reference to Judaism I recall from the book.
Lyrebird
@Gloria DryGarden: Hey, glad that @VFX Lurker: put in a better resource than I could.
About AM as a person I have only heard high praise, but some of the plot items at the link are hard for me to look past anymore as something of a consent diehard. After she sold her first million books, I thought she could have changed that one lousy sentence in Dragonflight and issued a new edition or something.
SomeRandomGuy
You know, awkward moments like coming out are a real test of friendship. I love that the Buffy bit was done exactly like that – “I’m freaking out – I can choose (to do my best) not to.”
bcwbcw
As a gay person, I found Dune’s Baron Harkonnen less problematic than Herbert’s treatment of men and women as almost different species with very strict roles and characteristics.
Feyd Harkonnen is just as cruel and dispositive of female slave sex workers as his father, the Baron, is of male slaves; to me they seemed equally evil. I agree the David Lynch movie in 1984 was really antigay.
Herbert sets up some supposed “giver/taker” distinction between men and women as fundamental to humans and the crux explanation why we can have a Messiah-like male hero in Paul but generations of Gesserit woman would never be unable to cross this barrier to full psychic awareness. Because they were women, they couldn’t reach this special “taker” part of inner awareness. It reeked of male entitlement when I first read Dune fifty years ago and it still does.
I thought the later books were just rehashed mumbo-jumbo.
randy khan
@SomeRandomGuy:
The first person who came out to me did it to shock me. (Seriously. It was really obvious.) Thanks to my parents who had the unusual attitude for the 1970s that there wasn’t anything wrong with gay people, I wasn’t freaked out. (Really, I have so much to thank my parents for.) So I kind of nodded and said something along the lines of “thanks for telling me.”
JustRuss
A friend of mine was a Sister, they are amazing people. He died too young, but they gave him a hell of a send-off. Only memorial I’ve been to where many of the guests dressed in drag. He would have whole-heartedly approved.
Sister Inspired Revolver of Freedom
TBH I don’t find anything about the “discovery” , for me anyway, of Frank Herbert’s homophobia in the least surprising. Tragic most def, given the high personal cost. Surprising, no. Never mind the Baron; what about the Face Dancers?
Then again, both science fiction & fantasy have been dealing with fallen idols for a long time. How long you ask? Does the name Mary Shelley ring any bells? The union of her & Percy Bysshe Shelley is still celebrated as one of the great literary romances of all time. There is, however, a huge problem with this view. Shelley was married at the time he met Mary Godwin to a very young woman named Harriet. Someone no one approved of him marrying. But they did, & she had 2 children with him. From all accounts, she & Shelley were already emotionally estranged by the time of Mary & Percy meeting. But in that time & place there was a great deal of difference between being privately estranged from one’s spouse & being publicly abandoned by them. As Harriet very much was. Later, she took an unknown lover & was pregnant when, at the age of 21, she drowned herself. Literary reactions toward Harriet were so bad that an infuriated Mark Twain wrote an entire essay called In Defense of Harriet Shelley after reading a biography of Percy that shat all over her to a point that inflamed him. So, yeah, right at the very beginning, our science fiction idols had clay feet.
The fall of Marion Zimmer Bradley has already been covered. That one is horrific. Anne McCaffery had some ideas about relationships between women & men that were, let’s say, problematic. And the role of reproduction in society. Oy! But, she also gave us the first disabled main character in science fiction that I know of, & as a disabled person myself, I respect that.
The problems presented by H P Lovecraft are almost as vast as his Cosmic Horror. Never mind his writing, Isaac Asimov never seemed to have met a young woman he didn’t want to grope. Andrew Offut was a dedicated professional pornographer. Yes, really. His son wrote a book about it, one you should definitely read or at least consider reading. Heinlein? *Face Palm*
I mean, it’s so bad that when, after her death, it was revealed that Alice Munro had basically ignored her daughter being regularly sexually molested by her second husband, while so many of her fans were absolutely heart broken, I basically kind of shrugged. It was a terrible thing, obviously, that she traded her own comfort over the safety of her own child, but, TBH, I really wasn’t all that shocked. She was a literary icon, a Nobel prize winner. Of course, everyone kept their mouths shut.
The one that really hurts, the one that threatens my heart & possibly more, are the recent accusations against Neil Gaiman. There are too many to be ignored or denied. They are terrible. The fact that Amanda Palmer has not defended him in any way is so very telling. I am going to have to deal with his Fall as best I may, along with the falls of all the other Goddesses & Monsters art of any kind seems to produce. Paul Gauguin & Picasso anyone?
Thank the Gods I was never a Woody Allen fan.
Paul in KY
@Chet Murthy: I enjoyed Sleeper.
Paul in KY
@Sister Inspired Revolver of Freedom: I hope Ursula K. LeGuin has still aged well. She was just about my favourite Sci Fi author.