SF in 1969 vs. 2018

Way back in the days of LJ, my husband was EccentricOrbit.  I don't know if he'll ever return to using social media, let alone get an account here, but I'm going to use that name for him for lack of anything better.  

Recently EccentricOrbit and I were discussing the recent SF series Murderbot Diaries, by Martha Wells.  Actually we were having a fairly heated disagreement – heated for us, which is not all that warm – about the sentience or lack thereof of one of the side characters.  Since a goodly number of the characters are robots, including the main POV character, it’s not a simple question. 

But what struck me was how both of us used specific pronouns to refer to the POV character.  Murderbot is the narrator and never indicates any gender for itself.  When other characters refer to Murderbot, the author adroitly avoids he/him/she/her by using “cyborg” or “SecUnit” or whatever.  So when I heard myself saying things like “…she does this…”  and EccentricOrbit said things like “… but he never does that…,” it took me awhile to realize we were using different pronouns to refer to the same character.  We both saw Murderbot in our own image.  There’s nothing in the text to indicate any gender at all, so this was entirely our own doing.  If I hadn’t had this argument with EO I wouldn’t have realized this unspoken assumption we both made. 

It made me appreciate how skillfully Martha Wells had eliminated all trace of the POV character’s gender in her own writing, and also made me realize what a dilemma Ursula Le Guin had with The Left Hand of Darkness.  Much has been said (by Le Guin and others) about why she opted to use masculine pronouns referring to her genderless Gethenians.  Due to the novel’s structure and themes, she couldn’t use the first person trick with that book.  It makes me wonder how different my reading experience would have been if Le Guin had used they/them.  Maybe if she was writing it today she would have.  Oh well, it was still an absolutely remarkable book and ground-breaking for its time.

By the way, I found the Murderbot Diaries very reminiscent of a lot of fic about Bucky Barnes – many of the same themes about the struggle to form an identity of one’s own after being used as an impersonal tool.  Great books.