Thread: Hey!! Let's get some action going! What are we reading?
View Single Post
Old 03-24-2021, 02:29 PM   #29859
Uncle Robin
Diligent dilettante
Uncle Robin ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Uncle Robin ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Uncle Robin ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Uncle Robin ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Uncle Robin ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Uncle Robin ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Uncle Robin ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Uncle Robin ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Uncle Robin ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Uncle Robin ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Uncle Robin ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Uncle Robin's Avatar
 
Posts: 3,662
Karma: 52758936
Join Date: Sep 2019
Location: in my mind
Device: Kobo Sage; Kobo Libra Colour
From Inherit the Stars

Quote:
The smooth, tanned curve of her leg and the proud thrust of her behind under her thin skirt drew an exchange of approving glances from the two English scientists.

UGH! I had hoped for at least one Golden Age-ish Hard SF writer who wasn't a lech, but yet again it seems to be a vision of the future written by a man whose attitude toward women was rooted in the pre-Neanderthal past. I'm only a third of the way, so I'll keep going for now, but this kind of crass objectification really takes me out of the story, reminding me as it does of all the IRL misogyny, chauvinism and exploitation of women by leading figures in SF of the time.

For a Hard SF book (and it is HARD SF, almost textbookish at times) written 15 years after the Nobel was awarded for research on DNA, there's a puzzling omission too: When trying to determine if the body found was human, why didn't they test its DNA? That capability wasn't even science fiction when Hogan wrote the book, it was well within the capability of the science of his time to test DNA to see if it was human, yet a society almost a hundred years more advanced didn't have that technology?
Uncle Robin is offline   Reply With Quote