Men...you can’t live with them and you can’t live without them. Or so the old saying goes. The women in World Without Men by Charles Eric Maine, found a way to live without them, well, at least they almost did. This science-fiction novel from the late 1950s depicts a utopian society of the future where men are no longer needed and the planet is run entirely by Lesbians (that word is always capitalized in this book). Like any good work of this genre, it grows out of and reflects social ideas of its time. In this case these reflections come from a darkened mirror.
True to the styles of its time, this book is a series of short stories, revolving around a central theme, and strung together to form a novel. Most of the characters do not carry over from one story to the next. As it opens, the body of a dead male is discovered in a rocket ship. Aubretia, a woman who works for the media, tells her lover, Gallardia, about this incident. Gallardia goes on to explain the history of the present they live in. Seven centuries previous to their time, in the 1950s, a birth control pill was invented. Through its use over time, the male half of the human species eventually disappeared. The Lesbians learned how to reproduce through parthenogenesis and single-cell cytosis; eventually they created a perfect cybernetic technocracy with no war, no poverty, and scientific work for everyone. The world was controlled by a computerized brain that everyone was attached to. (Sounds like the internet?) But when Aubretia speaks out about the discovered male body, she gets taken away for brainwashing so she forgets about it. This perfect society functions smoothly because it hides truth from its citizens. A male on the planet would disrupt everything and those in power would never want that. By the end of the first chapter, it becomes clear that both 1984 and Brave New World are sources from which Maine derived his attitudes and ideas.
The two stories that follow go back in time to the 1950s and 2020s to show the stages of progression from the invention of the birth control pill to the utopia the novel starts out with. In one story, the scientist who leads the research team for the corporation that is developing the pill. He decides to quit because he fears being a part of an invention that will lead to widespread amorality but he has an internal dilemma because he is, himself, completely amoral about his own sexuality. In the other story, an American journalist travels to London for a tryst with a government employee but he has the ulterior motive of getting her to talk about the inner workings of the increasingly totalitarian government. Neither of these stories has a happy ending, leaving the reader in the darker areas of Rod Serling-type story telling.
The fourth, and best, story of the bunch is about Gorste, an old man imprisoned by the Lesbians so they can extract what they need from him to artificially induce mandatory asexual births. After attacking and raping the woman who takes care of him, he escapes from his apartment only to discover there is no way out of the building in which he is trapped. After the woman recovers, she opens the outside door to set him free, knowing that doing so will ultimately result in his death. If he had not raped her, she would never have let him go. What is clever about this story is that it acts as an inversion of the housewife syndrome. Feminists in the 1950s claimed that being a housewife, while the husband went out to work, was the same as living in a prison. So in this case, the roles are reversed and Gorste is a man trapped by a Lesbian whose job it is to keep him from getting away. In this inverted world, the man is put into the housewife’s place. But the weapon he uses to escape from her grasp is rape so any intelligent reader will lose respect and sympathy for him. Again, this is an inverted world and in it rape can be used as a means for Gorste’s liberation but by un-inverting this world we are faced with the dilemma that the housewife does not have rape as an option for her own liberation. So the imbalance of power is exposed but possibly only to the carefully discerning reader.
The last story is a return to the future utopia where scientists have created a male baby in a laboratory. They are ordered to destroy it but one woman, instead, kidnaps the infant and escapes with it to renew the human race from its perfect but dull and meaningless society.
World Without Men deals with a lot of issues that were prevalent in its time. In one sense it deals with fears of totalitarianism; this is in relation to the post World War II generation when the threats of fascism and the realities of communism were looming large over the free world. But the threat of totalitarian domination was not limited to those types of governments. The legitimate fear of large corporations becoming more powerful than the government was beginning to take hole while Western bureaucrats were insisting that the free people of America and Europe all look and behave in a uniform fashion. This tension can be felt in the rise of the corporation that invents birth control pills for women. The author also successfully predicts the sexual revolution and the women’s liberation movement that began in the 1960s after the invention of female birth control. He addresses the fears of a blossoming amorality and a sexually promiscuous society that leads to the breakdown of the nuclear family and eventually the breakdown of society on a macro level too. This opens up the possibility of a domineering government stepping in to maintain order. Maine also brings the Frankenstein syndrome into this novel by showing how a technological innovation can lead to having unwanted, and possibly destructive, consequences that its creators were unable to predict as they did their research and development. While this book lacks originality in its themes, it is uniqueness comes out in its details.
Like in Huxley’s Brave New World, there is a fine line between utopia and dystopia. The Lesbians have created a society free of war, crime, and poverty but they do so by eliminating individuality and freedom of choice. You either conform or get put to death. People deemed to be unworthy of the state are humanely executed and those who seek truth about the system are arrested and hypnotized so they forget anything they have learned. Their society functions because it is stagnant and free from entropy or any other kind of noise in the system. This novel not only argues for sexual diversity but also the right to choose, to explore, and to learn in ways that are beneficial to each individual. If the price we pay for that freedom is shifting levels of randomness and chaos, then that is a worthy price to pay. That is what makes life interesting.
This is a minor novel. The themes it addresses are derivative and somewhat typical of the science-fiction genre of its day. All the stories are molded from the same template: one person tries to liberate themselves from the domination of the authoritarian society they live in. Large portions of the story are told through internal monologue or dialogue in which the characters don’t speak naturally but sound as though they are reading an essay out loud, violating the dictum of “show don’t tell” that is believed to be a standard for good fictional writing. The issues of gender and sexuality, as they are portrayed, are dated and too limited to the mindset of its time so that younger readers may not pick up the social and ideological cues it is meant to convey.
World Without Men may not be a profound work of literature but it is worth reading once. The fact that it is dated may even make it more interesting, especially for those with a taste for retro-futurism. The themes of moral uncertainty, claustrophobia, and paranoia are chilling at times and the mild nightmare this book portrays is the type of thing that could only have come out of the 1950s. Besides all that, both heterosexual men and lesbians can get a mutual thrill by imagining a world populated by bare breasted women in mini-skirts who get tipsy and make out on the couch for fun. At the very least, it can be an interesting experiment to try imagining the time when this book was written and how such imagery could be titillating, shocking, or even offensive depending on who you ask.
Maine, Charles Eric. World Without Men. Ace Books Inc., New York: 1958.
No comments:
Post a Comment