Space Princesses on Slower-than-Light Starships
Because it is strictly forbidden for authors to respond to reviewers who do them the kindness of reviewing their books, I thought this would be a good opportunity to write a short essay on a topic utterly unconnected to any previous discussion which may or may not have arisen, uh, earlier this morning, in this space.
So the topic I have chosen entirely at random to discuss is why, in my most recent novel COUNT TO A TRILLION the expedition of the Nigh-to-Lightspeed vessel Hermetic across one hundred lightyears roundtrip and one hundred years earth-relative time has a crew of 210 men but no women.
It is because when Rania (or, to give her full style, Her Serene Highness Rania Ayesha Anne Galatea Grace Angelina Frankenstein Grimaldi of Iberia, Sovereign Princess of Monaco, Duchess of Valentinois and of Mazarin, Marchioness of Baux, Countess of Carladès and of Polignac) returns aboard the Hermetic as a sixteen year old youth, but her father Prince Ranier Grimaldi the Captain does not return, there is a mystery.
The explanation given out was that certain ‘comfort women’ had been, unbeknownst to the public, smuggled aboard to service the otherwise lonely crewmen, and one of them was her mother, and that disputes over the women led to jealousy, hatred, murder, and mutiny.
Those of you who recognize the name Galatea will need no further clues as to her true origin.
That’s the reason. There was no sinister political message or metaphysical misogynistic overtones to it. I wrote it that way for the same reason a mystery writer writing a locked room mystery has his murder take place in a locked room; not because he is pro-lock or anti-lock, but because if the door was open, that mystery is absent.
A second question is why did your humble author, yours truly, think that the idea of an all-male expedition was within the bounds of the fantastic and unbelievable absurdities that are routinely put forward in space operas and geewhizwow wonder tales with a straight face.
I mean, isn’t the idea odd?
Unheard of?
And since seven of the crew are the world’s foremost mathematicians and xenolinguists, surely it requires some explanation as to why no women were included among them? Doesn’t the author (who cannot do math) think that girls can do math?
And since the death rate of the Expedition when it returns to Earth a century later turns out to be two to one (66% of the crew were killed off during tragedies both natural and manmade) surely it shows respect for women to depict them in stories dying from starvation, radiation poisoning, cannibalism, and explosive decompression with blood oozing from their pores and eyesockets? Isn’t that was suffragettes yearned for when they demanded equality from their menfolk?
These are all good, if rhetorical, questions! Except for the one about girls doing math, which is a stupid question. Even if the author had some antigynorithmetical objection to female math, in this story the greatest human mathematician of all history is Rania
Rania is also the Captain of the ship, and who takes over the planet more or less singlehandedly, and creates worldwide peace, and … good grief! If you want to argue that you’ve discovered an the author’s subconscious biases, you could make a much better argument pretending I suffer from rampant gynophilia than misogyny.
I even make her a Princess of Monaco. Not even Kara Zor-el of Krypton (or Argo, take your pick) on whom Rania may have been based was a sovereign princess.
Not a Space Princess, Despite her Bare Midriff
So my answer to all of the above is a big shrug. I just write the darn story, I don’t have to tell you what it means.
If the story is unclear (except where I deliberately want it to be unclear) I have failed at my craft.
If I fail not at my craft, a geek of ordinary intelligence should be able to figure out what the tale is about. We lawyers call this the ‘reasonable Geek standard’. Muggles may or may not be able to puzzle out my meaning: they are not of our shared background of Fanboy cultural assumptions (but see FOOTNOTE below.)
Perhaps that answer makes no sense. Let’s try again:
In my book, one of the predictions I make is that a Northern Hemisphere torn by world wars, plagues and poisoning, the center of power would shift south, first to China, Australia and Africa (in the 23rd century) and later to India and South America (in the 24th).
If the cultural center shifts, the Westerners would imitate (or be forced to conform to) Eastern cultural traits, dress and philosophy and so on, in much the same way that the Japanese in the 19th Century imitated the West.
An overly delicate concern for avoiding the appearance of inequality between the sexes is not a cultural product of the dominant powers, in my invented history, of the Indosphere of the 23rd Century. The question here is not why there is not a coed starship, but, rather, why would there be?
Even in the West, certain cultural traits arise and pass away.
Captain Robert Scott died on the ice in a famous and doomed Antarctic expedition no more dangerous than the imaginary expedition to V 886 Centauri described in my tall tale. Rightly or wrongly, neither he nor anyone of his time would have expected him to take a women into such danger. That was AD 1912, a mere one hundred years ago. The imaginary expedition in my tale takes place in AD 2235, more than twice that gap of time.
I think readers would justly mock me if I did what writers in the 1940’s did, and portrayed the future exactly like the writer’s present day except for one SF invention.
Will even the things we take for granted never change nor pass away?
If they are not to pass away, perhaps we should not take them for granted.
The cultural change needed to not invite women along for a desperate expedition to another star could be prompted by something as minor as future generations deciding, based on experiences of coed crews aboard submarines during wartime getting pregnant, not to allow a mutligeneration starship to launch. One way to confine the ship to a single generation is to remove one of the sexes needed to reproduce.
And, unlike a starship launched by Gene Roddenberry, where all the leggy crewwomen wear miniskirts and are addicted to contraceptives, there may be cultural objections to marriage, fornication or even fraternization between the sexes issuing from the Catholic Spaniards or the genetically caste-differentiated Hindus of the Twenty Third Century who fund the expedition, no matter what the lusty young Texan may have preferred.
Now, if I had established that there was no smoking of cigarettes or no drinking of alcohol aboard the ship, would any commentator think that odd enough to need an elaborate explanation be put on stage?
* * *
I hope I am also allowed to mention two things about my personal writing method.
First, like an engineer who prefers to use off-the-shelf technology, I prefer to use real things to invented things, because reality is more imaginative than am I. For example, as at least one reader has noted, I copied a famous anecdote from a famous mathematician (Galois) and attributed it to my protagonist in his youth. In order to invent similar details for the backgrounds of my other characters, I looked up a list of the most famous mathematicians of history. Below is the list I found.
I do not defend this list — I think it frankly unfair to list Euclid beneath Newton, and Leibniz not at least equal and I would not put Archimedes above Apollonius.
But look it over. What do you notice about it?
1. Isaac Newton
2. Archimedes
3. Carl F. Gauss
4. Leonhard Euler
5. Bernhard Riemann
6. Euclid
7. Henri Poincaré
8. Joseph-Louis Lagrange
9. David Hilbert
10. Gottfried W. Leibniz
11. Alexandre Grothendieck
12. Pierre de Fermat
13. Niels Abel
14. Évariste Galois
15. John von Neumann
16. Karl W. T. Weierstrass
17. René Descartes
18. Brahmagupta
19. Carl G. J. Jacobi
20. Srinivasa Ramanujan
21. Augustin Cauchy
22. Peter G. L. Dirichlet
23. Hermann K. H. Weyl
24. Eudoxus of Cnidus
25. Georg Cantor
26. Muhammed al-Khowârizmi
27. Arthur Cayley
28. Emma Noether
29. Pythagoras of Samos
30. Leonardo `Fibonacci’
31. Kurt Gödel
32. Charles Hermite
33. Aryabhatta
34. Apollonius of Perga
35. Richard Dedekind
36. Diophantus of Alexandria
37. William R. Hamilton
38. Pierre-Simon Laplace
39. Blaise Pascal
40. Bháscara Áchárya
41. Gaspard Monge
42. Felix Christian Klein
43. Jean le Rond d’Alembert
44. Jacques Hadamard
45. George Boole
46. Élie Cartan
47. Archytas of Tarentum
48. Stefan Banach
49. Ferdinand Eisenstein
50. Johannes Kepler
51. Jean-Victor Poncelet
52. Jacob Bernoulli
53. Hipparchus of Nicaea
54. Godfrey H. Hardy
55. Andrey N. Kolmogorov
56. François Viète
57. Julius Plücker
58. Joseph Fourier
59. Alhazen ibn al-Haytham
60. Carl Ludwig Siegel
61. Hermann G. Grassmann
62. Christiaan Huygens
63. André Weil
64. F.E.J. Émile Borel
65. Liu Hui
66. L.E.J. Brouwer
67. John Wallis
68. Pafnuti Chebyshev
69. Siméon-Denis Poisson
70. Henri Léon Lebesgue
71. Michael F. Atiyah
72. Jakob Steiner
73. Pappus of Alexandria
74. Giuseppe Peano
75. M. E. Camille Jordan
76. John E. Littlewood
77. Jean-Pierre Serre
78. Francesco B. Cavalieri
79. Johann Bernoulli
80. Panini (of Shalatula)
81. Atle Selberg
82. Shiing-Shen Chern
83. James J. Sylvester
84. Adrien M. Legendre
85. Ernst E. Kummer
86. Hermann Minkowski
87. George Pólya
88. Hippocrates of Chios
89. Alan M. Turing
90. Omar al-Khayyám
91. Emil Artin
92. Felix Hausdorff
93. Girolamo Cardano
94. Joseph Liouville
95. Johann H. Lambert
96. Paul Erdös
97. Alexis C. Clairaut
98. Marius Sophus Lie
99. Nicolai Lobachevsky
100. Thales of Miletus
Myself, I notice that the distribution of mathematical genius is politically incorrect. There is one woman on the list.
For reasons I know not, the Bell Curve of female intelligence has fewer outliers than male: the fairer sex produces fewer idiots at the low end of the curve, but also fewer geniuses at the high end.
You are free to blame the unfairness of history for that Bell Curve distribution if you wish. In times past a woman with a natural talent for mathematics was unlikely to get an education, especially if she were an Ethiopian taken by Arabs in their slave trade and sold to the Turks as a scullery drudge. I don’t claim the distribution is for a genetic causes rather than cultural or dietary or even Karmic. (For that matter, I don’t even claim intelligence can be scientifically defined, much less that a single simple cause be found to account for it.)
But I do claim that if history is unfair, it is not likely to get less unfair in the future.
Indeed, as increasingly clever technology puts increasingly dangerous instrumentalities for the conquest and oppression and of our fellow-man into our hands, it may get very much more unfair.
I also claim that if you cannot sympathize with the men of the past, who did not live as we live, you probably cannot sympathize with the men of the future, who (if science fiction is to be believed) will not live as we live.
The second thing I should mention about my writing method is this: I prefer in my writing that the events cohere, at least a bit, to my theme. The theme of my work is stated in the first sentence.
If the future is not going to be the rosy-colored Gene Roddenberry future of unisex secular socialist utopia, it ill behooves me to portray the future people as taking the question of relations between the sexes as frivolously as does the fat and happy generation who live off the luxury of their hardworking fathers and grandfathers and borrow from the predicted production of the as-yet unborn and unaborted sons and grandsons.
In other words, call me cynical if you like, but for this book at least, I do not predict future generations will live as we live because I do not foresee that they will be able to afford to.
* * *
(FOOTNOTE: next superhero rpg I play, I am so definitively playing a sidekick to Captain Air Conditioner named Fanboy.)
((FOOTNOTE to the Footnote: for you non-Geeks out there, rpg is geekspeak for ‘rocket propelled grenade.’))
(((FOOTNOTE to the Footnote to the Footnote: that was a joke. RPG is actually an abbreviation for Retrograde Pyelogram, a medical imaging procedure to visualize the urinary tract. It is something we science fiction writers often talk about, ever since the days when E.E. “Doc” Smith introduced the concept of the Visualization of the Cosmic Urinary Tract into his Lensman series.)))
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
