Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (531 page)

Rachel drowses in the warm sun and dreams a vision that has the clarity of truth. In the dream, her father comes to her. “Rachel,” he says to her, “it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks of you. You’re my daughter.”

I want to be a real girl, she signs.

“You
are
real,” her father says. “And you don’t need some two-bit drunken janitor to prove it to you.” She knows she is dreaming, but she also knows that her father speaks the truth. She is warm and happy and she doesn’t need Jake at all. The sunlight warms her and a lizard watches her from a rock, scurrying for cover when she moves. She picks up a bit of loose rock that lies on the floor of the cave. Idly, she scratches on the dark red sandstone wall of the cave. A lopsided heart shape. Within it, awkwardly printed: Rachel and Johnson. Between them, a plus sign. She goes over the letters again and again, leaving scores of fine lines on the smooth rock surface. Then, late in the morning, soothed by the warmth of the day, she sleeps.

* * * *

Shortly after dark, an elderly rancher in a pickup truck spots two apes in a remote corner of his ranch. They run away and lose him in the rocks, but not until he has a good look at them. He calls the police, the newspaper, and the Primate Center.

The reporter arrives first thing the next morning, interviews the rancher, and follows the men from the Primate Research Center as they search for evidence of the chimps. They find monkey shit near the cave, confirming that the runaways were indeed nearby. The news reporter, an eager and curious young man, squirms on his belly into the cave and finds the names scratched on the cave wall. He peers at it. He might have dismissed them as the idle scratchings of kids, except that the names match the names of the missing chimps. “Hey,” he called to his photographer, “Take a look at this.”

The next morning’s newspaper displays Rachel’s crudely scratched letters. In a brief interview, the rancher mentioned that the chimps were carrying bags. “Looked like supplies,” he said. “They looked like they were in for the long haul.”

* * * *

On the third day, Rachel’s water runs out. She heads toward a small town, marked on the map. They reach it in the early morning—thirst forces them to travel by day. Beside an isolated ranch house, she find a faucet. She is filling her bottle when Johnson grunts in alarm.

A dark-haired woman watches from the porch of the house. She does not move toward the apes, and Rachel continues filling the bottle. “It’s all right, Rachel,” the woman, who has been following the story in the papers, calls out. “Drink all you want.”

Startled, but still suspicious, Rachel caps the bottle and, keeping her eyes on the woman, drinks from the faucet. The woman steps back into the house. Rachel motions Johnson to do the same, signaling for him to hurry and drink. She turns off the faucet when he is done.

They are turning to go when the woman emerges from the house carrying a plate of tortillas and a bowl of apples. She sets them on the edge of the porch and says, “These are for you.”

The woman watches through the window as Rachel packs the food into her bag. Rachel puts away the last apple and gestures her thanks to the woman. When the woman fails to respond to the sign language, Rachel picks up a stick and writes in the sand of the yard. “THANK YOU,” Rachel scratches, then waves good-bye and sets out across the desert. She is puzzled, but happy.

* * * *

The next morning’s newspaper includes an interview with the dark-haired woman. She describes how Rachel turned on the faucet and turned it off when she was through, how the chimp packed the apples neatly in her bag and wrote in the dirt with a stick.

The reporter also interviews the director of the Primate Research Center. “These are animals,” the director explains angrily. “But people want to treat them like they’re small hairy people.” He describes the Center as “primarily a breeding center with some facilities for medical research.” The reporter asks some pointed questions about their acquisition of Rachel.

But the biggest story is an investigative piece. The reporter reveals that he has tracked down Aaron Jacobs’ lawyer and learned that Jacobs’ left a will. In this will, he bequeathed all his possessions—including his house and surrounding land—to “Rachel, the chimp I acknowledge as my daughter.”

* * * *

The reporter makes friends with one of the young women in the typing pool at the research center, and she tells him the office scuttlebutt: people suspect that the chimps may have been released by a deaf and drunken janitor, who was subsequently fired for negligence. The reporter, accompanied by a friend who can communicate in sign language, finds Jake in his apartment in downtown Flagstaff.

Jake, who has been drinking steadily since he was fired, feels betrayed by Rachel, by the Primate Center, by the world. He complains at length about Rachel: they had been friends, and then she took his baseball cap and ran away. He just didn’t understand why she had run away like that.

“You mean she could talk?” the reporter asks through his interpreter.

—Of course she can talk, Jake signs impatiently. —She is a smart monkey.

The headlines read: “Intelligent chimp inherits fortune!” Of course, Aaron’s bequest isn’t really a fortune and she isn’t just a chimp, but close enough. Animal rights activists rise up in Rachel’s defense. The case is discussed on the national news. Ann Landers reports receiving a letter from a chimp named Rachel; she had thought it was a hoax perpetrated by the boys at Yale. The American Civil Liberties Union assigns a lawyer to the case.

* * * *

By day, Rachel and Johnson sleep in whatever hiding places they can find: a cave; a shelter built for range cattle; the shell of an abandoned car, rusted from long years in a desert gully. Sometimes Rachel dreams of jungle darkness, and the coyotes in the distance become a part of her dreams, their howling becomes the cries of fellow apes.

The desert and the journey have changed her. She is wiser, having passed through the white-hot love of adolescence and emerged on the other side. She dreams, one day, of the ranch house. In the dream, she has long blonde hair and pale white skin. Her eyes are red from crying and she wanders the house restlessly, searching for something that she has lost. When she hears coyotes howling, she looks through a window at the darkness outside. The face that looks in at her has jug-handle ears and shaggy hair. When she sees the face, she cries out in recognition and opens the window to let herself in.

By night, they travel. The rocks and sands are cool beneath Rachel’s feet as she walks toward her ranch. On television, scientists and politicians discuss the ramifications of her case, describe the technology uncovered by investigation of Aaron Jacobs’ files. Their debates do not affect her steady progress toward her ranch or the stars that sprinkle the sky above her.

It is night when Rachel and Johnson approach the ranchhouse. Rachel sniffs the wind and smells automobile exhaust and strange humans. From the hills, she can see a small camp beside a white van marked with the name of a local television station. She hesitates, considering returning to the safety of the desert. Then she takes Johnson by the hand and starts down the hill. Rachel is going home.

* * * *

Copyright © 1987 by Davis Publications, Inc.

In 1980, Eric Garber and Lyn Paleo published
Uranian Worlds: A Guide to Alternative Sexuality in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
, followed by a second edition in 1990
.
This ground-breaking work provided an annotated bibliography of texts in these three genres which dealt with alternative sexualities, particularly homosexuality. The length of this work and the extent to which it traced a history of representation of alternative sexualities in science fiction, in particular, flew in the face of two extant discourses about the relationship between sexuality and science fiction: first, that homosexuality was completely absent from SF; and, second, that SF was, in general, an adolescent boys’ genre from which sex itself was, naturally, absent. The peculiarity of the assumption that teenage boys are interested only in technology and not at all in sex deserves at least a brief mention, but the primary point is that Hall and Garber’s work was the first step in creating a kind of genealogy of LGBT representation in the genre, one which recognized the extent to which such work already existed and the breadth of the ground which it covered, both in thematic and in generic terms. And, as Samuel Delany notes in his “Introduction,” “Without the energy and purpose of its compilers, this book might simply have been a dreary listing of stereotypes.…But the compilers…have put most of their energy into detailing the positive and/or astereotypical portrayals of gay men and women throughout the range of science fiction and fantasy. …They would seem to have the sense that we cannot change the way we write without changing the way we read” (xxi). It is unusual, as Joanna Russ also notes in her own “Introduction” (the book has two), for a bibliography to be received with excitement—but, as Russ also points out, “When I was sixteen I would have given a great deal for it” (xxiii). The reason for this is that Uranian Worlds made visible in an organized and comprehensive way something we had been told did not exist: science fiction that transcended stereotypes and that was even written by LGBT people.

Garber and Paleo point out a number of things that should probably have been common knowledge, but that were largely ignored in discussions of the genre. Insofar as issues around sexuality were mentioned at all in criticism prior to the publication of
Uranian Worlds
, it was almost entirely within the field of feminist SF. Feminist SF criticism, paying attention to works such as Joanna Russ’s
The Female Man
, Suzy McKee Charnas’s
Walk to the End of the World
(and its sequels), Marge Piercy’s
Woman on the Edge of Time
, and Ursula Le Guin’s extraordinarily generative
The Left Hand of Darkness
, was able to take note of the presence of lesbians in Russ’s and Charnas’s work, of bisexuality in Piercy’s, and of the deconstruction of the sex/gender binary through the figure of the hermaphroditic alien in Le Guin’s. These observations, however, did not—and still do not—equate to a study of homosexuality in SF, much less a study of LGBT issues more broadly within the genre. This is one of the reasons why Garber and Paleo’s work is such an important foundational document for anyone who wants to study the ways in which science fiction has handled queer sexualities in the past and also how these issues are being represented today. While Garber’s death in 1995 forestalled the possibility of a third edition of Uranian Worlds, the advent of the internet has to some extent addressed that lacuna. For example, Mary Anne Mohanraj has long maintained a list of SF and fantasy works dealing with homosexuality or including LGBT characters (A Guide to Alternative Sexuality in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror); it is up-to-date until June 2006. A similar, but more current, list with links to a wide variety of non-scholarly resources is maintained by Dusk Peterson as a web directory of GLBT Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature. There are also a number of LGBT SF-specific awards, notably the Spectrum Awards given by the Gaylactic Network in the categories of best SF novel, best SF short fiction and best other work (which includes anthologies, comics, tv shows and films), the James Tiptree Jr. Award, whose focus is primarily on explorations of gender but which is often won by queer-themed fiction, and the Lambda Literary Award for the best book-length publication in LGBT SF/Fantasy/Horror (this is, curiously, the only genre where lesbian and gay are not separate categories).

This brings us to the question, however, of what we mean when we say LGBT SF. Are we referring to work written by LGBT people? Are we referring to work which represents LGBT people in ways that are completely congruent with how we understand both sexuality and gender identity issues today? What do we do with the body of work that Garber and Paleo delineate which uses the homosexual character as a figure of evil (the obvious example being the sadistic pederastic Baron Harkonnen in Frank Herbert’s Dune)? How should we think about fiction that extrapolates new and different forms of sexuality, such as Samuel Delany’s “Aye and Gomorrah…,” where sexual desire for castrated spacers produces the new and perverse category of the ‘frelk’? Should we divide the terms (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) into separate categories? What about the many works which do not fit into these decidedly contemporary ways of thinking about sexuality, but are more generally ‘queer’? And how do we think about ‘queer,’ which is often used as an umbrella term to avoid saying LGBTTTQQIIAA1 or some such, but which, certainly in academic circles, more accurately refers to an approach that questions the naturalness and illuminates the historical specificity of categories such as heterosexual and homosexual, as well as embracing a binary-breaking fluidity that critiques and, at least in fiction, often circumvents Western cultural beliefs in the clear separation of male and female and the wilful ignorance of the existence of intersex people (people who are biologically between female and male)?

Certainly the issue of sexual identity is a theme of LGBT science fiction, although often in the form of somehow transcending or getting beyond identity categories and arriving in a world where one’s sexual orientation is an unimportant and even trivial aspect of one’s character. One of the staples if one talks about the history of homosexuality in science fiction, particularly in the fan community, is the idea that the representation of homosexuality as an acceptable identity began with the 1953 publication of Theodore Sturgeon’s short story “The World Well Lost.” Sturgeon’s story features both an alien pair, the Loverbirds, who turn out to be gay lovers and a human pairing which consists of a closeted gay male crewman in love with his oblivious straight superior. The story takes for granted the homophobia of human society (indeed, it is the discovery that the refugee Loverbirds are the same sex that leads Earth to return them to their own planet, where they will be executed), but also calls that homophobia into question both through the sympathetic characterization of Grunty and through the irony that the reason the Dirbanu refuse to trade with Earth is that all humans, since female and male humans look very similar, appear queer to them. The Dirbanu
know
that we are not a wholly homosexual society, but we
look
it to them and they are unable to overcome their prejudices. In numerous short stories from this period and in the novel
Venus Plus X
, Sturgeon makes a point of criticizing the bigotry that arises from fear of difference. In
Venus Plus X
, that bigotry is not homophobia so much as what has come to be known as transphobia: the more or less contemporary protagonist, Charlie Johns, is extremely accepting of the Ledom’s hermaphroditic society until he discovers that the Ledom surgically alter infants to produce hermaphroditism. Johns can accept hermaphroditism as a result of evolutionary processes, but not as a deliberate choice.

In point of fact, “The World Well Lost” was simply the story that attracted the most attention after its publication, in part because of stories that circulated about attempts by a highly influential magazine editor to suppress its publication. The 1960s was a period when a number of writers were attempting to make SF as a genre more accepting of ‘adult’ depictions of human relationships, as well as of works of the imagination which used variously gendered (or non-gendered) aliens to think about different ways of understanding desire and its potentials. The was a period that produced sexually explicit work by Philip Jose Farmer, Robert Silverberg, Norman Sprinrad, and others that was predominantly heterosexual, yet often imagined wildly diverse forms of sexuality. Many of these stories were controversial when they were published although their supposed explicitness about sex is generally tame by contemporary standards. Nevertheless, they represented SF’s need to reflect the mood of the sixties, including the civil rights and second wave feminist movements, counter-cultural expressions of “free love,” experiments with drugs, and the willingness to at least consider the possibility that homosexuality or bisexuality might be viable human options (it is notable that the 1960s was when most English-speaking countries reversed the late nineteenth-century criminalization of male homosexuality, with the primary exception of the USA2). While only a few of these works dealt with LGBT issues, their emphasis on the need for SF to recognize sex and sexuality as important factors in the development of characters, the description of cultures, and the portrayal of human (or human/alien) relationships helped to open up the genre to new approaches and ideas. Nevertheless, much SF writing in this period either strictly ignored the existence of alternative sexualities or included homosexual characters only as stock figures of effeminacy (if male), comedy, and/or of evil.

The LGBT SF that arose in the 1960s and 70s included early works by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Suzy McKee Charnas, Samuel R. Delany, Thomas Disch, Ursula K. Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre, Marge Piercy, Joanna Russ, and James Tiptree Jr. Although heterosexual women, both Le Guin and Tiptree (the story of Tiptree’s “outing” as female is well-known
³
) produced work that was important in terms of considering the operations of gender and sexuality and of potentials for re-thinking the heteronormativity
⁴
of contemporary Western societies. Le Guin’s
The Left Hand of Darkness
is one of the most influential (and certainly the most-studied) SF novels of all time; in its depiction of an alien but humanoid species made up entirely of hermaphrodites, The Left Hand of Darkness pushed readers to imagine gender differently and to think about alternative possibilities for culturally gender-bound activities. Amongst the Gethenians, there is no rationale for limiting activities to a particular category of human: anyone can do anything. Everyone is human and no one is ‘male’ or ‘female.’

This notion of freeing humanity from the constraints of gender also underlies both Samuel Delany’s
Triton
and Joanna Russ’s
The Female Man.
In
The Female Man
and in her short story “When It Changed,” Russ presents readers with an all-female world. Without men, women are free to become human: they experience the full range of human emotions and have, of necessity, to take on all roles in their society. Women raise children, repair farm equipment, hunt—women also fight duels and kill each other. Women in Russ’s Whileaway reproduce through a technology of merging ova, rather than parthenogenetically (as in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic early feminist, but asexual, utopian novel,
Herland
). One question that Whileaway implicitly raises, however, is whether these women who have sex and form families with each other are lesbians, as we understand the term. This is a reflection of the extent to which the categories of ‘homosexuality’ and ‘heterosexuality’ are only made meaningful by their existence as opposites within a system of binary classifications. Since there is no heterosexual option to make the Whileawayans all-female sexual relations ‘lesbian’ by contrast, it is possible to think of the novel as describing a world in which women are simply sexual.

Often the point of these alternative societies is to use futuristic or alien worlds to make the reader think differently about their own society. This is an approach that SF critic Darko Suvin has referred to as “cognitive estrangement,” a process of alienating us from what we think we know. Much LGBT SF proceeds by introducing cognitive estrangement to the ways in which we understand gender and sexuality to function in the world. This can include the ways in which desire circulates between individuals, the ways in which relationships are formed, and possibilities for reproduction and child-rearing. In Delany’s
Triton
, for example, a similar pattern of cognitive estrangement around gender and sexuality occurs as in the works of Le Guin and Russ. Nevertheless, Delany produces this effect by a diametrically opposed strategy: Rather than limiting his world to a single type of sexed body (whether hermaphrodite or female), he proliferates genders and sexualities. Triton is a society which recognizes 40 or 50 genders and nine basic sexualities. It is also a society in which, if you are bored with or frustrated by your current life, you can have every aspect of it changed, including your biological sex and your sexual orientation. For Delany, a gay African American SF writer, Triton provides a space in which he can investigate the current workings of gender, sexuality, and race and where he can also imagine different possibilities for the ways in which those very contemporary categories might change, both in themselves and in the ways in which they intersect. A similar sense of fluid identities and bodily plasticity can be found in the short stories of John Varley, a straight author whose Nine Worlds stories take for granted the practice of easy, cheap, and reversible sex changes. While Varley never really explores the bisexual potential that his stories create, nevertheless his vision of gender fluidity and of a world in which sexuality is decoupled from biological sex and reproduction (everyone in the Nine Worlds has the right to bear one and only one child) opens up interesting spaces for imagining a world of different bodily potentials.