Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
The big cheat for me I mentioned above, that siblings were allowed to mate to produce one child, but couldn't vow kemmer and had to separate. I felt as if Le Guin bent her social norms to serve her plot, as it made no sense to me. If there's nothing wrong with what we'd call incest or inbreeding, than why limit it (while allowing kemmer vows for unrelated pairs); if there was a reason to prohibit it, because of biology or eugenics or social structure, why allow it at all? Wouldn't society be better served by having such pairings entirely taboo, instead of one and done, which seems calculated to be very difficult emotionally.
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It's only difficult emotionally in a pair-bonding situation. If pair-bonding wasn't the norm then a single child here and a single child there, all raised together in the hearth, wouldn't have the same emotional impact. So I wondered whether this complexity over incest was a hang over from Le Guin wondering into (what seems to me to be) the more natural group environment for this society. She then decided she needed pair-bonding to show the parallels she wanted and we end up with some parts not making sense.
Or it could have happened more organically in the reverse: perhaps Le Guin started by assuming pair-bonding but various premises began to bend the thought experiment into a more naturally group environment, from which the incest variation might have evolved.
Either way, we do seem to be left with some things that don't fit as well as they could.