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But I know that I'm different and they're not quite me
I was reminded again this afternoon that as far as I can tell, I encountered my first non-binary character in Jean M. Auel's The Valley of Horses (1982), which I read for the first time, partly under my desk in social studies class, in seventh grade.
When they were gone, Jondalar scooped the last dregs of the fermented bilberry juice into two cups and gave one to the enigmatic figure waiting in the quiet dark. The Shamud took it, tacitly understanding they had more to say to each other. The young man scraped the last few coals together near the edge of the blackened circle and added wood until a small fire was glowing. They sat for a while, silently sipping wine, huddled over the flickering warmth.
When Jondalar looked up, the eyes, whose indefinable color was merely dark in the firelight, were scrutinizing him. He felt power in them, and intelligence, but he appraised with equal intensity. The crackling, hissing flames cast moving shadows across the old face, blurring the features, but even in daylight Jondalar had been unable to define any specific characteristics, other than age. Even that was a mystery.
There was strength in the wrinkled face, which lent it youthfulness though the long mane of hair was shocking white. And while the figure beneath the loose clothing was spare and frail, the step had spring. The hands alone spoke unequivocally of great age, but for all their arthritic knobs and blue-veined parchment skin, no palsied flutter shook the cup that was lifted to the mouth.
The movement broke eye contact. Jondalar wondered if the Shamud had done it deliberately to relieve a tension that was growing. He took a sip. "The Shamud good healer, has skill," he said.
"It is a gift of Mudo."
Jondalar strained to hear some quality of timbre or tone that would shade the androgynous healer in one direction or the other, only to satisfy his nagging curiosity. He had not yet discerned whether the Shamud was female or male, but he did have an impression that in spite of the neutrality of gender, the healer had not led a celibate life. The satirical quips were too often accompanied by knowing looks. He wanted to ask, but he didn't know how to phrase his question tactfully.
"Shamud life not easy, must give up much," Jondalar tried. "Did healer ever want mate?"
For an instant the inscrutable eyes widened; then the Shamud broke into sardonic laughter. Jondalar felt a hot flash of embarrassment.
"Whom would you have had me mate, Jondalar? Now, if you had come along in my younger years, I might have been tempted. Ah, but would you have succumbed to my charms? If I had given the Blessing Tree a string of beads, could I have wished you to my bed?" the Shamud said with a slight, demure bend of the head. For a moment, Jondalar was convinced it was a young woman who spoke.
"Or would I have needed to be more circumspect? Your appetites are well developed; could I have aroused your curiosity to a new pleasure?"
Jondalar flushed, sure he had been mistaken, yet strangely drawn to the look of sensuous lechery and the catlike sinuous grace the Shamud projected with a body shift. Of course, the healer was a man, but with a woman's tastes in his pleasures. Many healers drew from both the male and female principle; it gave them stronger powers. Again he heard the sardonic laugh.
"But if the life of a healer is difficult, it's worse for the mate of one. A mate should be a man's first consideration. It would be hard to leave someone like Serenio, for instance, in the middle of the night to take care of someone who was sick, and there are long periods of abstinence required . . ."
The Shamud was leaning forward, talking to him man to man, with a gleam in his eye at the thought of a woman as lovely as Serenio. Jondalar shook his head with puzzlement. Then, with a movement of the shoulders, the masculinity had a different character. One that excluded him.
". . . and I'm not sure I'd want to leave her alone with a lot of rapacious men around."
The Shamud was a woman, but not one that would ever be attracted to him, or he to her, as anything more than a friend. It was true, the healer's power came from the principle of both sexes but was that of a woman with a man's tastes.
The Shamud laughed again, and the voice had no shading of gender. With a level look of person to person that asked human understanding, the old healer continued.
"Tell me, which one am I, Jondalar? Which one would you mate? Some try to find a relationship, one way or another, but it seldom lasts long. Gifts are not an unmixed blessing. A healer has no identity, except in the larger sense. One's personal name is given back, the Shamud effaces self to take on the essence of all. There are benefits, but mating is not usually among them.
"When one is young, being born to a destiny is not necessarily desirable. It is not easy to be different. You may not want to lose your identity. But it doesn't matter—the destiny is yours. There is no other place for one who carries the essence of both man and woman in one body."
In the fire's dying light, the Shamud looked as ancient as the Earth Herself, staring at the coals with unfocused eyes as though seeing another time and place. Jondalar got up to get a few more sticks of wood, then nursed the fire back to life. As the flames took hold, the healer straightened, and the look of irony returned. "That was long ago, and there have been . . . compensations. Not the least is discovering one's talent and gaining knowledge. When the Mother calls one to Her service, it isn't all sacrifice."
I read the first four books of Earth's Children (1980–2011) in middle school and do not regret not returning decades later for the final two; it became much more obvious to me as an adult that the id-engine of the series was problematic on top of problematic with a side order of herbal medicine, heroic engineering, and deep time, which is of course what I noticed and cared about at the time. There's some of that here, with the idea of the character who belongs nowhere except where the magic of their marginalization places them. I still love them and their shape-shifting, truthful trolling of the co-protagonist, especially when Auel's matriarchal Paleolithic is otherwise so heavily cishet. I love that the question of their physical sex is never answered even for the reader. I remembered them when most of the rest of my memories of that book had reduced to a cave lion cub, river travel, and lots of porny euphemisms for the tab-a-slot-b of m/f sex. And now the book at the top of the stack at my bedside has a non-binary protagonist, so.
When they were gone, Jondalar scooped the last dregs of the fermented bilberry juice into two cups and gave one to the enigmatic figure waiting in the quiet dark. The Shamud took it, tacitly understanding they had more to say to each other. The young man scraped the last few coals together near the edge of the blackened circle and added wood until a small fire was glowing. They sat for a while, silently sipping wine, huddled over the flickering warmth.
When Jondalar looked up, the eyes, whose indefinable color was merely dark in the firelight, were scrutinizing him. He felt power in them, and intelligence, but he appraised with equal intensity. The crackling, hissing flames cast moving shadows across the old face, blurring the features, but even in daylight Jondalar had been unable to define any specific characteristics, other than age. Even that was a mystery.
There was strength in the wrinkled face, which lent it youthfulness though the long mane of hair was shocking white. And while the figure beneath the loose clothing was spare and frail, the step had spring. The hands alone spoke unequivocally of great age, but for all their arthritic knobs and blue-veined parchment skin, no palsied flutter shook the cup that was lifted to the mouth.
The movement broke eye contact. Jondalar wondered if the Shamud had done it deliberately to relieve a tension that was growing. He took a sip. "The Shamud good healer, has skill," he said.
"It is a gift of Mudo."
Jondalar strained to hear some quality of timbre or tone that would shade the androgynous healer in one direction or the other, only to satisfy his nagging curiosity. He had not yet discerned whether the Shamud was female or male, but he did have an impression that in spite of the neutrality of gender, the healer had not led a celibate life. The satirical quips were too often accompanied by knowing looks. He wanted to ask, but he didn't know how to phrase his question tactfully.
"Shamud life not easy, must give up much," Jondalar tried. "Did healer ever want mate?"
For an instant the inscrutable eyes widened; then the Shamud broke into sardonic laughter. Jondalar felt a hot flash of embarrassment.
"Whom would you have had me mate, Jondalar? Now, if you had come along in my younger years, I might have been tempted. Ah, but would you have succumbed to my charms? If I had given the Blessing Tree a string of beads, could I have wished you to my bed?" the Shamud said with a slight, demure bend of the head. For a moment, Jondalar was convinced it was a young woman who spoke.
"Or would I have needed to be more circumspect? Your appetites are well developed; could I have aroused your curiosity to a new pleasure?"
Jondalar flushed, sure he had been mistaken, yet strangely drawn to the look of sensuous lechery and the catlike sinuous grace the Shamud projected with a body shift. Of course, the healer was a man, but with a woman's tastes in his pleasures. Many healers drew from both the male and female principle; it gave them stronger powers. Again he heard the sardonic laugh.
"But if the life of a healer is difficult, it's worse for the mate of one. A mate should be a man's first consideration. It would be hard to leave someone like Serenio, for instance, in the middle of the night to take care of someone who was sick, and there are long periods of abstinence required . . ."
The Shamud was leaning forward, talking to him man to man, with a gleam in his eye at the thought of a woman as lovely as Serenio. Jondalar shook his head with puzzlement. Then, with a movement of the shoulders, the masculinity had a different character. One that excluded him.
". . . and I'm not sure I'd want to leave her alone with a lot of rapacious men around."
The Shamud was a woman, but not one that would ever be attracted to him, or he to her, as anything more than a friend. It was true, the healer's power came from the principle of both sexes but was that of a woman with a man's tastes.
The Shamud laughed again, and the voice had no shading of gender. With a level look of person to person that asked human understanding, the old healer continued.
"Tell me, which one am I, Jondalar? Which one would you mate? Some try to find a relationship, one way or another, but it seldom lasts long. Gifts are not an unmixed blessing. A healer has no identity, except in the larger sense. One's personal name is given back, the Shamud effaces self to take on the essence of all. There are benefits, but mating is not usually among them.
"When one is young, being born to a destiny is not necessarily desirable. It is not easy to be different. You may not want to lose your identity. But it doesn't matter—the destiny is yours. There is no other place for one who carries the essence of both man and woman in one body."
In the fire's dying light, the Shamud looked as ancient as the Earth Herself, staring at the coals with unfocused eyes as though seeing another time and place. Jondalar got up to get a few more sticks of wood, then nursed the fire back to life. As the flames took hold, the healer straightened, and the look of irony returned. "That was long ago, and there have been . . . compensations. Not the least is discovering one's talent and gaining knowledge. When the Mother calls one to Her service, it isn't all sacrifice."
I read the first four books of Earth's Children (1980–2011) in middle school and do not regret not returning decades later for the final two; it became much more obvious to me as an adult that the id-engine of the series was problematic on top of problematic with a side order of herbal medicine, heroic engineering, and deep time, which is of course what I noticed and cared about at the time. There's some of that here, with the idea of the character who belongs nowhere except where the magic of their marginalization places them. I still love them and their shape-shifting, truthful trolling of the co-protagonist, especially when Auel's matriarchal Paleolithic is otherwise so heavily cishet. I love that the question of their physical sex is never answered even for the reader. I remembered them when most of the rest of my memories of that book had reduced to a cave lion cub, river travel, and lots of porny euphemisms for the tab-a-slot-b of m/f sex. And now the book at the top of the stack at my bedside has a non-binary protagonist, so.
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It's too bad that we can't have that, just without the rape and porn.
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I second your suspicion. I still own three out of the first four novels (although one was a gag gift in grad school accompanied by a filk of "The Internet Is for Porn") and periodically think about re-reading them just to see if I can still discern what I loved in them despite the terrible levels of everything else and then I'm just not sure I want to do that to myself. I am quite confident I never want to re-read The Mammoth Hunters, actually, because its love triangle annoyed me so much: even in eighth grade I understood it could have been solved with poly. I can remember almost nothing about The Plains of Passage except I believe we met some further half-Clan, half-Other characters and Ayla got pregnant.
How often do you get to read about a teenage girl inventing a bunch of important things and living alone in the wilderness with a pet wolf and wild horse?
Right! That's what I glossed as heroic engineering: it turns out I love the trope no matter the tech level. It didn't register to me as at all unusual that the engineer was an adolescent girl. I loved the cold landscape. I loved learning how things were made.
I think it also helped kick-start my interest in archaeology, because of the way that she incorporated real Paleolithic artifacts into the book and showed in the little inset map where they had been found.
I used to visit the exhibit on Shanidar Cave at the Boston Museum of Science because of The Clan of the Cave Bear. I bought myself a dictionary of medicinal plants. I still have a lump of red ochre somewhere. This is why the objectively assessed quality of art is totally orthagonal to its effect on people's lives!
It's too bad that we can't have that, just without the rape and porn.
Auel's may have been the first explicit sex scenes I read in fiction and they were substantially less interesting to me than flint knapping or developing a two-stone sling technique. In hindsight I can appreciate that her concept of "sharing Pleasures" was enthusiastically sex-positive, but she still loses so many points for descriptors like "throbbing manhood" and "moist well."
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...now that you mention it, so did I. I wonder whether those books were part of why.
I appreciated Ayla being such an inventor, but somewhere around when she invented soap and needles and sunglasses, my disbelief unsuspended itself.
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I had forgotten the sunglasses. I am afraid to check whether I am remembering correctly that she invented the bra.
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This is the specific reason why Ayla inventing a ton of different things never struck me as weird or unrealistic. They're all things that someone might plausibly think about while doing the things she does. It doesn't parse so much as "Ayla invents everything from the menstrual cup to the computer" as "Ayla is a clever and inventive person who keeps coming up with ways to make her daily tasks easier."
... with the caveat that I last read most of these at 15 and obviously wasn't thinking about any of it in too much depth then. But, while I totally relate to and sympathize with being knocked out of suspension of disbelief in the story for any reason (I mean, the reasons why I have stopped reading books are many and varied), I do think that the Superinventor Mary Sue Ayla characterization has been way overblown in the way people talk about these books, vs. the way her characterization comes across when embedded in its context.
(Caveats apply, etc.)
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YES, SERIOUSLY
Like "she invents the travois LOL!" Well yeah, because (again, IIRC, I haven't read these in decades) she's trying to move Jondalar and he's going to die if she can't figure out how. And it's not "inventing" in the modern sense of Edison or whoever submitting patents and getting credit in society -- most of the time she's by herself, and it's "come up with stuff or die." With the giant caveat that I reread the first and second books as a kid and teenager, was seriously WTF at the third, and I know I must have read the fourth and fifth but just don't remember them at all. So maybe she is more Mary Sue in those! But what I loved about the first couple of books was the sort of Robinson Crusoe quality.
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(It's kind of funny to me how, in some ways, my tastes for certain things had already become established by that point.)
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I feel occasionally that it is possible to read me like a book that doesn't even close from my childhood taste in narratives and characters and then I try not to feel that it makes me really dull.
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I will work on adopting your take.
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That does sound like useful work. Thanks.
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It never occurred to me at the time I first read the books, either: it all made sense in context. She needed, something she made it happen. I never wondered why no one else did. As as an adult reader, in the aggregate, I agree it's a lot of firsts.
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Now I'm scarred at second hand.
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(I got about three chapters into The Mammoth Hunters, realized that this was going to be one of those books where the author was going to make everyone have implausibly bad communication skills and common sense so as to make the romantic plot go, and gave up.)
The plot of Plains of Passage isn't memorable because it basically doesn't HAVE a plot. It's more like a vehicle for a series of short stories [STOP READING HERE IF YOU DON'T WANT TO BE REMINDED]: The Inevitable Mammoth Porn Scene, They Visit the Sharamudoi And Drama Ensues, Ayla&Jondalar vs. the Feminazis, Ayla&Jondalar vs. the Rapist Bros, Ayla&Jondalar vs. the Glacier, Jondalar's Sister Settles and Everyone Cries, and so on and so on.
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That's good to know.
(I got about three chapters into The Mammoth Hunters, realized that this was going to be one of those books where the author was going to make everyone have implausibly bad communication skills and common sense so as to make the romantic plot go, and gave up.)
It was. I can't even remember that much about the technology because my annoyance at the love triangle wiped it out.
The Inevitable Mammoth Porn Scene
I HAD MANAGED TO FORGET UNTIL THIS MOMENT THE INEVITABLE MAMMOTH PORN SCENE. NOW I CANNOT GET THE PHRASE "DOUBLE-CURVED, MARVELOUSLY MOBILE ORGAN" OUT OF MY HEAD. THANK YOU. THANKS SO MUCH FOR THAT.
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(Seriously, though, I’m sorry for reminding you. Why don’t comments have a ‘cut’ feature?)
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I didn't even have to re-read. My copy of The Plains of Passage is in storage. It was just there in my head and God knows what else is, too.
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I love how much this book seems to have functioned as a gateway drug to herbalism.
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The self-sufficiency especially made an impression on me.
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I had remembered the horse and the cave lion, but until
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Two something horses, a cave lion too, and a fluffy baby wolf...
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It's a legitimate value!
(I remain amazed this entire series was just hanging out on the shelves of a middle school library, except that it was clearly the sort of thing that adolescents, for one reason or another, want to read.)
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Mary Renault is very much history RPF. I recall her sex scenes as oblique except for Nikeratos/Axiothea in The Mask of Apollo, adrenaline-fueled situational bisexuality for the win.
(Falcon Crest was very detailed about the winemaking history of California!)
Dick Francis novels are not so much with the sex scenes, but they are wonderful about the neepery of various professions. (I learned a lot about wine from Proof (1984).)
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Same. It gave me very high standards for productions of the Bacchae.
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Honestly, I think that's wonderful.
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So then, having read these out of context sex scenes, I went home and discovered we actually had Clan of the Cave Bear in the room of less favored books that haven't been banished to the basement or given away yet. So I read it & then acquired the next couple for myself.
I think, when looking back on books one read as an adult, there are several perspective changes going on at the same time.
Adult eyes see differently than child eyes, and that's partly maturing, and partly having a lot more context about the world that changes how you understand stuff in the book, but there's also a piece where the first time you come across X, it's novel, and the 200th time, it's an example of how there's too much X in the world, or at least you can see how it's like other examples of X and maybe someone else did it better.
And then, not only did one grow up, but the times changed and the norms of society evolved (even assuming one stayed in the same society for all that time, and of course one might have moved elsewhere). And things that were ahead of their time at the time now seem backward and problematic and geez, how did we ever put up with that? (And it's not like no one at the time understood that those things were problematic. But they were also often a step forward from previous problems. Or mixed up in the attempt to move forward from previous problems. I hope the adults at the time were raising a fuss about the blondness/whiteness of Ayla and Jondolar and how that was used in the books, for example. I don't remember how aware I was of that as problematic at the time, or if not, when that awareness permeated my memory of the books.)
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She did a pretty good job with a very plausible (basically) alien culture in Clan, I have to say.
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I described that book once (to
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They more than comprehend polycules and lots of complex gender interactions; I guess it was the throbbing spears.
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That's The Valley of Horses!
They more than comprehend polycules and lots of complex gender interactions; I guess it was the throbbing spears.
To be fair to your child, it may not have been their puritanical streak so much as their prose standards.
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I read The Valley of Horses before The Left Hand of Darkness!
(Genderfluid Ice Age, legit.)
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I read all of the ones that existed at the time (when I was also twelve or thirteen), but I agree on the diminishing returns. The worldbuilding was the best in The Clan of the Cave Bear.