Gwyneth Jones has talked before about the limitations involved in being labelled as a feminist writer, particularly for women writers; her comments have attracted discussion (to which she has responded in turn). Life, as far as Jones herself is concerned, is her last engagement – to date – with feminist sf, which she understands to mean sf that deals explicitly with, as she puts it, the Battle of the Sexes. While I join with L. Timmel Duchamp in disagreeing that the Battle is all that feminist sf is (or should be) about, there can be no doubt that Life places feminism front and centre. Not just feminist issues, but feminism as an explicit, understood and debated body of thought. (As I was writing this, Niall wondered aloud: what other – if any – feminist sf stories feature characters who identify or are identified as feminists? I’d be interested to know if anyone reading this has an answer.)

Put another way, Life is concerned with feminisms, because the novel presents multiple faces of feminist thought and activism – chiefly the wary, accommodationist approach of Anna, and Ramone’s more aggressive desire to clear the decks entirely and start again.

Anna thinks about feminist issues mostly in the breach – on occasions when she has been reminded, beyond the possibility of denial, that the world is not equal, and that she is not, always, judged on her merit ahead of or instead of her gender. Most of time, feminism does not form a part of her life. As Daz Avriti, Anna’s Malaysian contemporary at university, points out to her, the capacity to assume that there is no longer any need for feminism – or that the sum total of feminism is the fight for women to be taken seriously – is a measure of Anna’s (white, western, [struggling] middle-class) privilege. In fact, feminist issues are a continuum; and elsewhere in the world, the issues are about women’s survival:

“Anna, where you and I live, women’s rights is old news. Intelligent women want to be judged on their own merits and find the whole feminism thing embarrassing and whiney. But here, where I live… it’s a can of worms. If you start applying the concept of ‘human rights’ to women, in Asia and Africa, you uncover a holocaust.” (235)

This privilege brings its own layers of complication and difficulty when things do go wrong; it insulates Anna from knowledge of the problem, not from the problem itself. The way Anna reacts to her rape is telling in this regard. Initially she feels only confusion, and a measure of denial: how could this happen to her; she’d always been so careful; how could her control of the situation and of her body be so comprehensively destroyed? “You’re having an awkward conversation with a fellow undergraduate,” she reflects, “and suddenly he comes at you with an axe, I wasn’t prepared. […] I could’t believe it. I’m the one who failed to read the damned body language” (78). Then, thinking about how and why she stopped fighting him off (“he’d never have left if I didn’t capitulate, didn’t withdraw my objection, let him score the point, agree to his version” (78)), she feels for the first time a kinship with others who have gone through the same, shattering experience. She is able to recognise the broader, systemic reasons rape and other abuses keep happening, because she, now, has become a part of that culture:

This is what happens, she thought. Women lie, they keep silent, because no one likes a whistleblower. This is how it all carries on. Now I am doing it. I am part of the machine that destroys women’s chances. (81)

I mentioned the obstacles she faces at work, and her resistance to efforts to change things (for fear, again, that she was be seen as Difficult), in the previous post. But it does not go away, as she hopes it will, when she is older and more established in her career. It takes a few bottles of wine and a comfortable evening with a trusted old friend, but eventually she is driven to vent about the other pressures – subtler, but in their steady, relentless way almost as damaging – that she is subject to as a woman, and supposed to laugh off as just a joke:

“It gets so wearing. They come on to me relentlessly, these male colleagues of mine. I take it lightly, I flirt and act sassy, what else can you do? But of course I know what it means, and it’s not friendly. I’m supposed to have forgotten what ‘fucking someone up’ usually implies, in a professional context? I’m supposed to have not been listening, when a few moments before they were all crowing over the way they shafted some poor loser?” (281)

Still she cannot bring herself to act against these attitudes; she will never be secure enough to stop playing the game.

For Ramone, by contrast, feminism – even if she periodically rejects the concept, or the baggage that goes with it (“Here she was, a fucking professional feminist, basically a sex-worker, a pornographer, making her living out of being female” (222) – is an awareness, a way of seeing the world, that she lives with all the time. It is an itch she can never quite scratch, but can certainly never ignore. Unlike Anna, Ramone – “the rabid one”, as Spence, tellingly, dubs her – can never bring herself to make nice and play the game, because the game destroys women, bit by bit:

As far as Ramone could see, what these women had in common was the same as any woman struggling to have power in a man’s world. The eating disorders, the mysterious illnesses, the hysteria. If you were Albert Einstein and born female in the fifteenth century, you’d end up in some convent fasting yourself crazy, writing liturgical music, and reforming the Carmelites. (73)

She ridicules the notion of feminist history, of finding the women who have been written out of the generally accepted narrative of human progress: “It’s playing into the hands of the enemy to say, see, we were up to your standards all along.” (224) (I am reminded of the stance taken by Caitlin Moran in her new book, although somehow I doubt she put nearly as much thought into her own statement on women’s history.) Where Anna can be optimistic, most of the time, that things are improving for women and will continue to do so, Ramone has no such hopes. The playing field is not and never will be level; the only answer is to abandon it and find something new, “a whole different paradigm” (224).

Ramone’s commentary is disquieting, and it certainly doesn’t win her any friends; even the people who vaguely like her, or at least continue to meet up with her every so often after they all leave university, wonder “why did she have to be so violent, contentious, and unreasonable?” (217). While at times it is hard to avoid the feeling that Ramone takes her feminism to its logical conclusion quite so mercilessly in part because she relishes playing the villain – it beats trying to be liked and failing, or not being seen at all – her fidelity to a truly independent self leads her into such extremes of suffering that it is impossible to believe she’s faking it. Although she relishes the suffering, too, of course; even Ramone herself entertains the uncomfortable idea that her persona is essentially an elaborate method of self-harm.

I don’t think this invalidates what Ramone says, however; her message is liberating and necessary, even if you don’t follow her all the way and despite her cluelessness when it comes to her involvement in the Malaysian human rights protest movement. Both of the times I’ve read the book, I’ve found myself frustrated with her excesses and self-destructiveness, but also with myself, with my own Anna-ishness. Ramone tears off the veil, and there is more than a hint of The Female Man – capital letters and all – to the militant defiance of her thought and expression when she says:

I want to exterminate women, wipe them from the face of the earth. I don’t want to be liberated, I want to be a monster. He didn’t get it. No one ever got it, and Ramone could have straightened them out by saying nobody is born a woman and that what she hated was the way she COULD NOT ESCAPE from the role of second-class person. No woman could, the only escape was to become SOMETHING NEW that had never existed before. And fuck them all; she’d rather be misunderstood than acceptable… But he was impressed by her anger. She saw the alarm coming up in his eyes. It never ceased to amaze her, that fear. For fuck’s sake, she thought, I weigh fifty kilos, that’s about seven stone twelve, o dweller in the shades of departed empire: what do you think I’m going to do? (153)

In her recent column ‘On Science, Emotions, and Culture (Part 1)’ at Strange Horizons, Vandana Singh offers the following quotation from Albert Einstein:

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

This seems to me as good a place as any to begin our discussion of Life (2004) by Gwyneth Jones, the Future Classics book of the month for August (I know, I know). Because whatever else happens – and it really does all happen – to the novel’s protagonist, Anna Senoz, one of her touchstones remains her passion for science:

[W]hy do I work so hard? Why do I dream of doing something important, even if it’s something only another nerd would understand? It was inexplicable.

[…] They call me Mr Spock and think I’m unemotional: but I like marvels. I have a taste for extraordinary things. That’s why I’m here at the Forest University of Bournemouth, instead of in Manchester: why I’m doing Biology Foundation instead of specializing. I wanted to do something different, to see another world. And to know. I want to know my subject, not just get a job. She returned to her reading, thrilled by a romance and a magic that was invisible to Ramone. (33-34)

It’s a presentation of science – of the why of science, of the compulsion and fascination that keeps someone in the lab until anti-social-o’clock every evening – that perhaps isn’t communicated to the non-scientist world enough. For perfectly understandable reasons – on which I’d be very interested to get the input of Torque Control readers – science is so often thought of as the cold fish, the antidote to wonder. One of the things Life does so well, I think, is reminding us that this is not so: that there is an awe to be found in explanation, in understanding. (And also, of course, that such understanding may not always be comforting, or welcome.)

As an academic, albeit within a non-science field, I also found Jones’ exploration of how intellectual passions come into conflict with egos and institutions both telling and familiar. I’m not just talking about smug Charles Craft, Anna’s contemporary and rival at undergraduate level, whose insecure, destructive posturing Jones manages to draw with some sympathy and nuance even while making me want to kick him for every word that comes out of his mouth. It’s also there in the dynamics of every single one of the labs Anna works in later in her life: the hierarchies that must be maintained, the obstructive nonsense that must be obeyed; the supportive camaraderie and the petty backstabbing that both come with trying to pursue the objective among the hopelessly subjective. And let’s just say that the comment on the woeful inability of her doctoral supervisor, KM Nirmal, to provide anything approaching actual, well, supervision, rung far too many bells (“The better you are what you do, the more time you’re doomed to spend doing things you’re no good at” (98)). Not about my own (entirely splendid) supervisor, though, thankfully…

Being a woman in this environment carries its own set of challenges. Most obviously, during her doctorate Anna is sidelined for her pregnancy, which is taken – by Nirmal and others in the lab – to indicate a lack of dedication to Science on her part, a signal that she is on the “Mommy track” and will thus not put in the hours and never become a serious intellectual force. But the impact upon Anna of, as Ramone puts it, “being born female” (109) is felt in all manner of subtler ways. Charles Craft’s overwhelming and frankly undeserving sense of entitlement may make him deeply unpleasant – and unable to deal with competition from lesser beings without belittling mockery or brittle aggression, to boot – but it is hard to imagine him deciding not to defend his corner, and demand respect, when faced with someone else plagiarising his work (as he does to Anna), or the reflection of low status that is Anna’s below-minimum-wage stipend during her doctorate. Yet Anna has been trained not to call attention to herself; she knows, from everything she sees around her, that unlike men, women who rock the boat get remembered not as go-getters but as trouble-makers.

“No one likes a whistleblower, Simon. Not in any business. I’ve been thinking about it, while I walked. The cheating’s trivial, not worth worrying about. If I make a fuss the story might stick with me. I might never live it down; I’d be an awkward bugger.” (79)

It probably doesn’t help that on the occasions she tries to assert herself, and take control of and credit for her own work, she is slapped down; what is Charles’ rape of her, after all, but a reminder of her status – as an attractive object, so beautiful when she’s angry, not an intellectual equal (or superior) whose objections are to be taken seriously. I’ll discuss this, and how Anna’s reaction to such episodes contrast with Ramone’s, in the next post.

This setting of the science fictional – Anna’s personal mission to understand the phenomenon that she comes to call Transferred Y – within its social, human context, is of course central to the book’s purpose. Science does not stand alone, either in the way it is conceptualised and investigated, or in how it is understood and how its effects are felt; not just because there are limits to human rationality but no limits to the human capacity for denial (as the reaction to Transferred Y shows), but also because society is itself a complex organism. I’ll discuss the sfnal specifics of Anna’s discoveries, and the book’s examination of gender, in the last of these posts on Life. But I think there is room to start that discussion rolling now, in outline: how well do these twin aspects of the novel’s concerns mesh? In what ways do the ups and downs of the lives of Anna, Spence, Ramone and the rest reflect and comment upon the Big Ideas that the book sets out to broach?

Above all, does Life offer some answers to the questions that Singh poses at the end of her column?

Are only some emotions permissible in the culture of science[?] […] What is the connection, if any, between the paucity of female scientists and the culture of science? Is the content of science ever affected by the culture of scientific practice?