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But I lost my heart and the future's gone with it
Last night's eight hours of sleep were more disrupted and fragmentary than the previous, but my brain wasn't wrong that in life Kenneth Colley was only a little taller than me and a year or so younger when he first sparked a fandom for Admiral Piett.
I read later into the night than planned because I had just discovered Irene Clyde's Beatrice the Sixteenth (1909), which would fall unobjectionably toward the easterly end of the Ruritanian romance were it not that the proud and ancient society into which Dr. Mary Hatherley awakens after a kick in the head from her camel while crossing the Arabian Desert has zero distinction of gender in either language or social roles to the point that the longer the narrator spends among the elegantly civilized yet decidedly un-English environment of Armeria, the more she adopts the female pronoun as the default for all of its inhabitants regardless of how she read them to begin with. Plotwise, the novel is concerned primarily with the court intrigue building eventually to war between the the preferentially peaceful Armeria and the most patriarchally aggressive of its neighbors, but the narrator's acculturation to an agendered life whose equivalent of marriage is contracted regardless of biological sex and whose children are all adopted rather than reproduced puts it more in the lineage of Theodore Sturgeon's Venus Plus X (1960) or Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) even without the sfnal reveal that Mêrê, as she comes to accept the local translation of her name, has not merely stumbled upon some Haggard-esque lost world but actually been jolted onto an alternate plane of history, explaining the classical substrate of Armerian that allows her to communicate even if it bewilders her to hear that the words kyné and anra are used as interchangeably as persona and the universal term for a spouse is the equally gender-free conjux. If it is a utopia, it is an ambiguous one: it may shock the reader as much as Mêrê that the otherwise egalitarian Armeria has never abolished the institution of slavery as practiced since their classical antiquity. Then again, her Victorian sensibilities may be even more offended by the Armerian indifference to heredity, especially when it forces her to accept that her dashing, principled, irresistibly attractive Ilex is genetically what her colonial instincts would disdain as a barbarian. Children are not even named after their parents, but after the week of their adoption—Star, Eagle, Fuchsia, Stag. For the record, despite Mêrê's observation that the Armerian language contains no grammatical indications of the masculine, it is far from textually clear that its citizens should therefore all be assumed to be AFAB. "Sex is an accident" was one of the mottoes of Urania (1916–40), the privately circulated, assertively non-binary, super-queer journal of gender studies co-founded and co-edited by the author of Beatrice the Sixteenth, who was born and conducted an entire career in international law under the name of Thomas Baty. I knew nothing about this rabbit hole of queer literature and history and am delighted to see it will get a boost from MIT Press' Radium Age. In the meantime, it makes another useful reminder that everything is older than I think.
As a person with a demonstrable inclination toward movies featuring science, aviation, and Michael Redgrave, while finally watching The Dam Busters (1955) I kept exclaiming things like "If you want the most beautiful black-and-white clouds, call Erwin Hillier!" We appreciated the content warning for historically accurate language. I was right that the real-life footage had been obscured for official secrets reasons. The skies did look phenomenal.
I read later into the night than planned because I had just discovered Irene Clyde's Beatrice the Sixteenth (1909), which would fall unobjectionably toward the easterly end of the Ruritanian romance were it not that the proud and ancient society into which Dr. Mary Hatherley awakens after a kick in the head from her camel while crossing the Arabian Desert has zero distinction of gender in either language or social roles to the point that the longer the narrator spends among the elegantly civilized yet decidedly un-English environment of Armeria, the more she adopts the female pronoun as the default for all of its inhabitants regardless of how she read them to begin with. Plotwise, the novel is concerned primarily with the court intrigue building eventually to war between the the preferentially peaceful Armeria and the most patriarchally aggressive of its neighbors, but the narrator's acculturation to an agendered life whose equivalent of marriage is contracted regardless of biological sex and whose children are all adopted rather than reproduced puts it more in the lineage of Theodore Sturgeon's Venus Plus X (1960) or Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) even without the sfnal reveal that Mêrê, as she comes to accept the local translation of her name, has not merely stumbled upon some Haggard-esque lost world but actually been jolted onto an alternate plane of history, explaining the classical substrate of Armerian that allows her to communicate even if it bewilders her to hear that the words kyné and anra are used as interchangeably as persona and the universal term for a spouse is the equally gender-free conjux. If it is a utopia, it is an ambiguous one: it may shock the reader as much as Mêrê that the otherwise egalitarian Armeria has never abolished the institution of slavery as practiced since their classical antiquity. Then again, her Victorian sensibilities may be even more offended by the Armerian indifference to heredity, especially when it forces her to accept that her dashing, principled, irresistibly attractive Ilex is genetically what her colonial instincts would disdain as a barbarian. Children are not even named after their parents, but after the week of their adoption—Star, Eagle, Fuchsia, Stag. For the record, despite Mêrê's observation that the Armerian language contains no grammatical indications of the masculine, it is far from textually clear that its citizens should therefore all be assumed to be AFAB. "Sex is an accident" was one of the mottoes of Urania (1916–40), the privately circulated, assertively non-binary, super-queer journal of gender studies co-founded and co-edited by the author of Beatrice the Sixteenth, who was born and conducted an entire career in international law under the name of Thomas Baty. I knew nothing about this rabbit hole of queer literature and history and am delighted to see it will get a boost from MIT Press' Radium Age. In the meantime, it makes another useful reminder that everything is older than I think.
As a person with a demonstrable inclination toward movies featuring science, aviation, and Michael Redgrave, while finally watching The Dam Busters (1955) I kept exclaiming things like "If you want the most beautiful black-and-white clouds, call Erwin Hillier!" We appreciated the content warning for historically accurate language. I was right that the real-life footage had been obscured for official secrets reasons. The skies did look phenomenal.
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I haven't read Beatrice the Sixteenth yet, but I did find a non-PDF copy online earlier this year, for those who share my hatred of non-reflowable text but are too impatient to wait for the MIT Press version. I had to roll my own EPUB out of the Web pages (it is out of copyright and I feel no guilt).
It sounds like there's some overlap with Seven Days in New Crete as well as the Sturgeon and Le Guin.
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I found it on HiLoBrow! I noped out on the format and the AI-assisted illustrations and fortunately have no difficulty reading off HathiTrust. I am glad you were able to construct a version comfortable for you to read.
It sounds like there's some overlap with Seven Days in New Crete as well as the Sturgeon and Le Guin.
Not very much for me—Seven Days in New Crete is so much a part of Graves' mythos that its semi-utopia is ritually gendered in a way that seems orthagonal to Armeria, which should not even be described as a matriarchy because of the binariness of the term. In that respect it feels oriented very differently even from close contemporaries like Gilman's Herland (1915), however unwieldy or intermittent its worldbuilding. It is trying to get outside of itself.
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I discovered them last year after reading Rose Macaulay's What Not (1918) and really approve.
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I hadn't! This book was a complete windfall!
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If it is a utopia, it is an ambiguous one...
I assume you're referencing the subtitle of The Dispossessed, although as you point out, thematically it sounds like there's more kinship with The Left Hand of Darkness. And of course there's the subtitle to Delany's (Trouble on) Triton, "An Ambiguous Heterotopia." I haven't gotten around to reading Triton yet, but from what I know of it, it sounds like a direct descendent of Urania. I need to read both, and thanks for posting about the latter.
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The Japanese imperialism took me by surprise. People, news at eleven: complex.
I assume you're referencing the subtitle of The Dispossessed, although as you point out, thematically it sounds like there's more kinship with The Left Hand of Darkness.
I did have Le Guin generally in mind. I am also stunned that this novel never seems to have been put up for some kind of retrospective Tiptree/Otherwise. I have read earlier and contemporary works classed as feminist utopias, but nothing that actually tries to frame a society beyond gender.
And of course there's the subtitle to Delany's (Trouble on) Triton, "An Ambiguous Heterotopia." I haven't gotten around to reading Triton yet, but from what I know of it, it sounds like a direct descendent of Urania. I need to read both, and thanks for posting about the latter.
You're welcome! Everything about this novel, its author, their activism blew my mind. People are so interesting and the effort to flatten them out maddens me.
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Heeee.
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Along those lines, when you consider that actual US-style slavery had only been abolished 46 years earlier, and Brazil had only abolished it 21 years earlier, maybe it seemed very plausible indeed that a form of slavery would just ... continue.
... Going further down that rabbit hole, a number of Arab countries didn't end slavery until the second half of the 20th century, so were actually practicing it in the this-world equivalent of where the story was set (I say this judging from the camels)
Very cool also that the author had a career in a non-assigned-at-birth gender!
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Yes! It would still be remarkable if it had been written in 1919 or 1929, but 1909 is just nuts! There's a whole lot of weirdness flying around in the decades before science fiction as we know it generically coalesced—the point of the Radium Age series is to highlight the breadth of its diversity—and I still can't think of anything else in its decade that feels comparable. Some of it is recognizably exotic adventure and then there's all the other stuff. I personally have not seen the default female pronoun used for a society not expressly composed all of women until Le Guin's 1975 revision of her own "Winter's King" (1969), where even the defamiliarization does not mean exactly the same thing because of the differences in Gethenian biology, where as far as I can tell the Armerians are textually Earth-human: their society is not one which requires a change in anything other than habits of mind. It's getting at gender as social construct, gender as performance, decades before Judith Butler. And then there are battles also.
... Going further down that rabbit hole, a number of Arab countries didn't end slavery until the second half of the 20th century, so were actually practicing it in the this-world equivalent of where the story was set (I say this judging from the camels)
Oh, fascinating! I had not caught that point of history. So it's still fair for Mêrê to be shocked when thinking of the timeline of the British abolition of slavery, but it need not have been out of the norm for Armeria's neighbors in our world. (It does seem to be located on the Arabian Peninsula. Mêrê seems to have been traveling eastward: she asks at one point about the road to Aleppo and wonders if she could have strayed as far as the Persian Gulf, which she hasn't.)
Very cool also that the author had a career in a non-assigned-at-birth gender!
And seems to be a headache for modern scholars to categorize in terms of gender, which feels fitting.
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I understand where that minute came from!
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An adjacent culture, which requires travel into the mountains, with whom they trade for surplus children. Very little is known about the other culture except that they seem to be a confederation of tribes—Mêrê is confused that the Armerians have never tried to subdue and civilize them and the Armerians on whom she tries out this proposal are confused by the concept of colonialism—and even the government agent who deals with them the most admits that she has very little idea of their own society, because outside of business arrangements it's all closed practices; she doesn't even know what social norm or ritual taboo she transgressed all those years ago that almost got her killed [edit: the most plausible explanation is something related to gender which an Armerian would not even have thought about looking out for, but it is not definite in the text]. The Armerians are ethnically indistinguishable from this group, but ethnicity is effectively meaningless to the Armerians, which is one of the contributors to the building conflict with Uras: the first sovereign of Armeria was Uras-born, which the other city-state in its expansion now claims gives them rights to Armeria as a branch of their own royal family, and the Armerians whose families have no biological links between generations fail to see the force of this argument. Whether or not this societal structure would actually be sustainable at the scale of a state, I am fascinated that Clyde thought of it. [edit] It is never made clear how Armerian society evolved so differently from its neighbors; there are a lot of points in this novel where more modern speculative conventions would have encouraged the author to fill the worldbuilding in. I still find it really impressive because it's so different.