SF anthologies and wacky times in Antwerp

[sunnyskywalker]

Wackiness of the Day: hundreds of people in an Antwerp train station dance along to "Doe, a Deer" from The Sound of Music. I assume that they choreographed this beforehand, because I don't think half of Antwerp is part of the Classic Musical Borg.

I've re-aggravated my shoulder somehow and had a mild stomach flu in the past week. 2009: Still Not My Year.

On the bright side, I got ahold of Seeds of Change, an anthology of sf stories about the near-future. It inspired me to post more of my old Golden Age SF anthologies on PaperbackSwap.com so I could get more anthologies like this instead of... well, boring and/or misogynistic stuff. (Not that all Golden Age stuff is, but...)

The anthology has stories about Nigerian oil pipeline-defending robots and a woman with an abusive husband, voluntary prosopagnosia, beer bottles AIs with counseling programs (and advice on how to win barfights), technology and democracy, and cancer and eukaryotic cells and morality and uploaded consciousnesses. Lots of neat stuff. They aren't all perfect stories, but they do all make you think. Like this bit from the first story, "N-Words":

The magazine showed a pale, red-haired Neanderthal boy with his adoptive parents, staring thoughtfully up at an outdated anthropology display at a museum. The wax Neanderthal man in the display carried a club. He had a nose from the tropics, dark hair, olive-brown skin and dark brown eyes. Before Harding's child, the museum display designers had supposed they knew what primitive looked like, and they had supposed it was decidedly swarthy.

Never mind that Neanderthals had spent ten times longer in light-starved Europe than a typical Swede's ancestors.

OH.

Speaking of short sf stories... somewhere at The Hathor Legacy ages ago they were talking about Neil Gaiman's story How to Talk to Girls at Parties" and agreed that the "women are aliens" trope is getting a little old. This made me wonder: are there any stories where men are the aliens? I mean literally, as in, "Gosh, we just don't get men, they're so weird... hey wait, they really are from another planet!" I can't remember any myself, but surely there must be one?

Unless you replace "men" with "dominant aliens of multiple sexes who treat all humans, men and women, as the subordinate partners in their reproductive cycle," in which case Octavia Butler has it covered.

Comments

[baleanoptera.livejournal.com]

*...a female deer, Ray - a drop of golden sun, Me- a song..* Oh drat! I blame the people of Antwerp, but must admit that the song is damn catchy.

[sunnyskywalker]

There must be something in the water there.

I can usually only get catchy songs out of my head with other catchy songs, but there are some places you can't sing "The Internet Is For Porn" out loud to do so...

[plasticinecupid.livejournal.com]

LOL. That's a lot of people dancing. I wonder... why?

Interesting point about "How to Talk to Girls at Parties," which I agree isn't Gaiman's finest. I think it got attention b/c it's the kind of thing that can be anthologized with a million other mildly sf for boys things.

As for boy aliens, there's always Starman and The Man Who Fell to Earth (aka David Bowie: the Alien Who Makes Women Pee Their Pants). Those don't quite capture the alien feeling I get from real men, though (unlike how the Gaiman story is designed to relate how teenage boys feel about real girls).

That made me remember (pardon the rambly anecdote) a moment when my former roommate and I were a little not-sober and I said to her, "This is horrible, but sometimes I have a hard time believing that men are really human." It seemed like such a strange impression to have, considering all the books I've read written by men, and about men - all the "men" I've identified with on a vicarious level. Yet, when thinking of myself in relation to men, and how most of them have treated me, that's the truth. It relieved me quite a lot when she echoed the thought, though she's very different than I am. I think the feeling's pretty well universal, and it's more than some kind of existential "otherness." And now it's a troubling thought that the female perspective of that alien/otherness hasn't been explored more.

[sunnyskywalker]

It must be a massive sociological experiment. "How would people in a train station react if suddenly a bunch of seemingly-ordinary people started singing and dancing as if life actually worked like musicals? To a classic musical number? Can we get a grant for this?"

Hm, yes, I thought those Bowie roles came across more as "men who happen to be aliens" than "men ARE aliens," but I haven't seen them recently enough to be sure.

I also have a point where my understanding of men breaks down, despite knowing several of them that I really "get" in most ways and reading tons of male-authored, male-POV stuff. I wonder if it has to do with the things they experience so much differently - like, not getting catcalled by random cars full of teenage boys, for instance, and getting treated differently by doctors (do they ever call 20-year-old men "sweetpea"? I doubt it), and that sort of thing. It's like... living in parallel universes or something. You just wouldn't quite get the person who grew up in a world where Mexico won the Mexican-American war, maybe, even if you otherwise had a lot in common?

One of my favorite lines in Octavia Butler's Dawn is when some of the men complain that the aliens are treating them like women. Of all the indignities! Her short story "Bloodchild" is probably the piece that comes closest to reading as "men are aliens," if "female aliens with a certain social standing and reproductive patterns act somewhat similarly to human men at times" counts. But I can't think of a straight-up "(at least some) men are literally aliens" story.

I've read two sf versions of Heart of Darkness in the past month, though. I'm not sure what that's about.