4 ms·
To me it looks like the author had an idea, then the title and then was not able to actually find enough data to support the idea. They went with the title anyw
by yoz-y 8y ago
To me it looks like the author had an idea, then the title and then was not able to actually find enough data to support the idea. They went with the title anyways.
I'd pitch two more examples:
In Dune by Frank Herbert the whole Tleilaxu population is male and nobody knows what happened to their women (this is explained later in the book). It seems odd to me that this was not mentioned in the article as I assume that Dune is more known that any of the books the author mentioned. Tleilaxu in the book have a sort of religious hatred for women.
In the The Risen Empire by Scott Westerfeld the initial antagonist is a race human women who have "since disposed of the useless gender" and merged with machines. This is stated as a matter of fact and is not a theme explored by the book.
- jerf 8y agoIt's not quite a true single-gender planet, but Frank Herbert also wrote The White Plague [1], a story about a bioengineered plague that kills only women, set in more or less the present day on a copy of real Earth. One of the scarier books I've read. For most science fiction, there's a clear reason why the events can't really happen, or at the very least, that some sort of massive breakthrough would be required (FTL, fusion, etc.) for the story to happen, or it's just so absurd or disconnected from my real day-to-day experience that it's not a real concern. I've got no such defense for this story, so even though I've read stories about things that are arguably more horrifying in the sense that there are more deaths or the deaths are more horrible or such, this book penetrated my psychological defenses like few others ever have. There's very little stopping it from happening now, and ever less every year. Usually the modern focus of the discussion is race-specific plagues, but (genetic) gender would probably not be that hard to nail either. Even if such a plague wasn't quite 100% accurate, it wouldn't matter much. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Plague https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Plague
- eesmith 8y agoAlong those lines, James Tiptree Jr.'s short story "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwfly_Solution" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwfly_Solution" concerns a plague causing males to kill all females. (Tiptree's "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" was already mentioned in the linked-to article.)