How the Other Bland Lives: Halfway Human by Carolyn Ives Gilman

 

"Slow, but engrossing" is how I would describe my experience reading Halfway Human. There's a lot to think about here, as with Gilman's other work (like Dark Orbit).

The premise is intriguing, but I admit I was a bit thrown off initially by the use of the pronoun "it" for the character Tedla. Granted, this was written in the 1990's, so I decided to dive in. It turns out that "it" actually makes sense in the context of the novel as it turns out the "blands" like Tedla aren't even thought of as human on its home planet. The novel ends up being as much about social and economic hierarchies in general as it is about gender in particular, as the blands are more-or-less enslaved. It's as much Marxism and social science as Beauvoir and feminist theory.

But does it have a plot? Yes! Like I said, it's engrossing, if a bit slow at times. The basic set up is relatively straightforward: Tedla is found after a suicide attempt and meets Val, an expert in the cultures of various planets (in a somewhat Hainish-type galaxy where humans have spread out and evolved a bit differently on different planets, incidentally the same universe as Dark Orbit). What slows down, but greatly enhances, the plot are Tedla's lengthy flashbacks detailing basically its whole life story on a planet where children are raised in common and only develop sex/gender at puberty (the society reminds me a bit of Plato's Republic as well). All of this happens against the backdrop of Val's relatively nice planet that feels a bit like Star Trek, if there was a show only about the academic side of Starlet Academy (as an academic myself, I found the exploration of the power dynamics and bureaucracy somewhat familiar...).

All of this gives the reader a lot to think about! How does gender drive societal power relations and vice versa? Does a society need a permanent underclass to function, or could we do better? How should societies with really different ideas about social relations interact with each other? Who do we listen to to really learn about other societies? How do biology and environment influence the development of a culture?

In many ways this is definitely a 90's sci-fi book (albeit a good one!), but in its attempt to think deeply about gender--what it is, what it has been, and what it could be--it feels like it could maybe speak to conversations happening today and in the future.

See also my Goodreads review.