[ SECRET POST #5516 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5516 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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08. [SPOILERS for Book of Boba Fett or maybe Attack of the Clones]




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09. [SPOILERS for Space Brothers/Uchuu Kyoudai]




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10. [SPOILERS for Eternals Mid-Credits Scene]



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11. [SPOILERS for Book of Boba Fett]




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12. [OP warned for graphic description of medical content/gore]





















Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #789.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

06. https://i.imgur.com/4zuE4Fv.png

[feotakahari]

I’ve seen it written that James White could more easily get into the mindset of an alien caterpillar than a human woman.

[(Anonymous)]

Only until an alien caterpillar speaks out about how he got them all wrong.

[(Anonymous)]

Of course, what you say is absolutely true.

At the same time, a lot of them were very strange people in general, and I think Cordwainer Smith definitely falls in that category. It's sometimes hard to tell where the line is for Smith between having weird ideas about women, and just having weird ideas about everything. Just a weird, weird, weird writer. Definitely also sexist to some extent, but very weird.

[tabaqui]

So...wtf is going on in this cover art, OP?

And yes - a lot of the first sci-fi writers men *and* women, really did not write women characters well at all.

[(Anonymous)]

So...wtf is going on in this cover art, OP?

You say that like you've never seen someone stride purposefully down the Hallway of Butts before

[(Anonymous)]

Is that a routine part of your day?

[tabaqui]

Obviously, I am sorely lacking in the 'Hall of Butts' experience.

[(Anonymous)]

DA

Hall of Butts.

The first secret goes extremely well with this comment.

( help me...I will die of internal giggling...)

[(Anonymous)]

OP here. I haven't seen this particular cover before, but it looks like an astronaut from the past got cryogenically frozen and woke up during the Instrumentality of Man. The Underpeople are genetically engineered entities made from various types of animals like cats, dogs, cattle, snakes, etc. They're designed to look human and are sentient, but are not legally considered people by humanity and are treated as servants. It's Smith's treatise on exploitation and slavery, basically.

[(Anonymous)]

He did some weird and wonderful stuff, it's true.

[tabaqui]

That sounds very funky.

[meadowphoenix]

That's a very annoying way many many authors decide to write on exploitation and slavery.

[(Anonymous)]

How so?

in this essay i will...

[meadowphoenix]

I should start by saying that I'm talking about authors who are saying some form of "exploitation and slavery is bad" I'm not talking about Randian authors.

First, human slavery irl is usually justified either by conquest and/or by post-hoc dehumanization. The dehumanization of labor is something that has to be worked at with sustained othering, so it begins after people have decided on conquest and/or subjugation. The dehumanization is NOT for the purpose of conquest or subjugation, those impulses can be justified by "threats" and "defense" or "safety" and often are. The dehumanization is for the the enslaver or exploiter to feel that they have retained their humanity even by being inhumane. If you start with a state of actual lack of humanity, you have missed something very fundamental about exploitation and slavery in the first place, to the point where I think any explication of those ills fails both with a lack of thoughtfulness and in conveyance to the audience. As a side note, as a person who is part of a people who were included with animals for a significant amount of recent history, no matter the intention it always reads as though the book philosophy is saying "yes they are animals, but that doesn't mean you should treat them like that" which is a shitty feeling.

Second it is rare for these authors to write on animal husbandry or domestication as also bad and that creates an incoherent premise, imo. If the idea is that these genetically engineered semi-animal, semi-human beings shouldn't be exploited or enslaved, but that it's fine for animals to be, you have introduced that there is a line of sentience that matters, rather than like...species, but won't say where it is. What is human enough? Something similar occurs with robots and cyborgs. There may be also some ableist implications, but that depends on the story.

Third, there is the creation aspect of this (also in robot/cyborg explications of slavery and exploitation). This is much less of an annoyance, but I do think the creator-creation dynamic means that exploitation is a different concept entirely than exploitation in domination of an already existing culture, so while this is fine for class, it's weirder for slavery and I would not conflate the two. But I do think there's a use in exploring secondary class dynamics, which occurs within cultures anyway.

Re: in this essay i will...

[(Anonymous)]

NAYRT

But these are great points!

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, I would have said something in response to the actual secret but I am distracted by all the butts.

[tabaqui]

*gigglesnort*

[(Anonymous)]

Oooooh, good lordy. I was on a golden age of sci-fi kick a while back, and while I do not regret the least the study I did on the foundations of contemporary science fiction, I also saw the more troubling views of all of them.

Heinlein being obsessed with polyamory and considering women as fit only for particular positions in his worse books, Larry Niven being alright with a 200-year old guy hooking up and having sex with a 20-year old naive woman, Dyson being a climate change denialist, Asimov himself being a serial harasser...

Mind you, I absolutely needed to read their works so I can write stuff of my own, and the study gave me a lot of ideas for stuff of my own. But I'm definitely grateful for the fact their uglier sides can be ignored in contemporary science fiction.

[feotakahari]

And if you look at pre-Golden Age, it’s actually worse. Lovecraft was a standout in racism, but he was by no means unique.

[(Anonymous)]

So was Edgar Rice Burroughs, as much as I love his work.

[(Anonymous)]

That's definitely true, but it's interesting because I think there was a pretty specific group of SF writers and fans, the whole John Campbell, Astounding/Analog, hard space opera, engineer circle of writers, where the stuff you're talking about was much more talking about. That whole line of science fiction really just had a marked conservative libertarian right-wing political ethos down the line and it's reflected in their views of women (and often of minorities).