CD Characters in Books etc.

[Kimberly Kael]

John Varley has several short stories (which I read in the collection Persistence Of Vision) set in a time when growing a full clone and transferring consciousness into a new body is done fairly routinely. People "back themselves up" and in the event of untimely death they simply get a new body. Murder is no longer a common crime because your victim doesn't stay dead.

It doesn't take much of a leap to think about growing a clone with tweaked genes and several of the stories do explore characters who choose to inhabit a new body of a different sex. I've often wondered if Varley is transgender, or is close to someone who is, because the notion spoke to me very clearly but I understand for many it's a disconcerting read.

[Paula G]

I remember a book we read at grammar school, in, I think, the year before "O" levels (there that dates me) I can't remember the title or the author, but it told the tale of a couple of children a boy and a girl who ran away from home and joined a troop of players. As the story was set in Elizabethan times the girl had to pretend to be a boy, and of course the band of payers had to include one William Shakespeare.

The real fun I remember was when the girl disguised as a boy, had to act the part of a girl in one of the plays, and being taught how to act like a girl by a boy.......

If anyone else knows of or remembers this book I would quite like to revisit it and see if I would still enjoy it.

[Paulette]

Not a gender-disguised or trans novel, but the novels of Steve (s.m.) Sterling have very lively and believable heroines. The heroes are pretty good too, but he writes women exceptionally well. I find it very easy to fall into the worlds he creates and inhabit both the male and female characters he populates them with. (Actually, the women are a bit easier for me.)

His recent vampire novels, starting with A Taint in the Blood, feature a woman who discovers she's a power bottom, as well as bi-inclined. An earlier series, which begins with Island in the Sea of Time, features two women, one the captain of a US merchant marine sailing ship, and the other the daughter and heir of a pre-stonehenge European nation.

Steve also writes some of the most convincing war novels and battle scenes I've ever read, for both men and women. And I love his alternate history stories, which are what first attracted my attention.

Paulette

[Paulette]

Almost forgot one of my favorite mind-benders: Ursula LeGuin's "The Left Hand of Darkness." Here the race of beings are quite humanoid, but are genderless until the annual estrus comes upon them, and they then become the sex opposite to the person they are closest to at the moment. This presents complications when one of them is isolated with a human Earth-male for a time.

I first read this as a novelette, and later as a full novel, but didn't recognize that they were the same book because in the first one the alien was referred to throughout as "she," and in the second one the alien was referred as "he." I can be somewhat excused for this because there was a difference of some twenty years between the first and the second reading. Even so, the recognition that a pronoun change made the plot unrecognizable was shocking to me, and made me really question my feminist credentials.

In either form it's a good read, and both versions make one examine one's biases.

Paulette

[Robyn Katie]

Hi all,

Lydia is exactly right about the Oz book. It'sL. Frank Baum's The Land of Oz, in which the boy Tip breaks his enchantment by an evil witch, and becomes Ozma, rightful Queen of Oz. And if my picture hasn't gone away (it's been a while), you'll see Ozma at upper left. She is my inspiration and encouragement, and my avatar here.

Love, Robyn Katie

[Robyn Katie]

Hi again,

For great CDing you can hardly beat the classics. In olden days when troopers rode the land snatching likely young men for soldiers, it was common for mothers to hide their stripling boys by dressing them as girls. That sets the stage for, ta-daa ...

Achilles! That great hero, macho to the Nth, in fact a cold-blooded genocidal killer, nevertheless was said in post-Homeric myth to have "lived among the women." I was fuzzy on the details so I've condensed this from the Wikipedia article:

The story is that there was a prophecy that he would do great deeds in war. So Thetis hid him at the court of King Lycomedes in Skyros. Dressed as a girl, he lived among the King's daughters (possibly as "Pyrrha" = the red haired girl). (And got busy, and fathered a son ... cool wish-fulfilment situation no doubt.) He was found out by Odysseus, though, who disguised as a peddler selling women's clothes and jewelry, finds out the disguised boy by "just happening" to leave a spear and shield lying around among the duds. Achilles seized the spear at once, and so ... goodbye to his life as a girl.

Personally I would have seized the women's clothes and jewelry first. But then I'm not a Greek war hero.

Love, Robyn Katie

[Anthony Simon]

Nice to have you back Robyn K. I wondered about your avatar and now I know...

I have a different take on the Achilles myth. It just always made me feel very uncertain. Like I agree with you about his violence, but somehow I suspected it was the deep underside of his girlishness (He could get away with being dressed as a girl and not get found out). My problem was I felt the myth having resonances in me that I really didn't want it to have - Like my violence and girlishness were somehow parts of the same thing.

And it also mixes up with the transgressive thing. I would have loved to be a female in the company of females (still would love it). But at the same time, there's a part of me that's aware that I'm not - I mean that's really what the myth says to me. It's about a guy finding out that he's really a guy and can't get away from his destiny.

[Robyn Katie]

I agree with you, Anthony: Achilles is fearful to think about. I too wonder about the mix of girlishness with manic violence his adolescent life implies—doesn't it resonate with so many things, from America and the way it behaves in the world, through things like Arnold Schwarzenegger's self-exposing jeer about "girly men" (and what a cultural can of worms that opens up), right down to the brutal and scary impulses we as individuals seem unable to quell in ourselves.

Same for the destiny aspect. Even though of course all us GMs are stuck with being GM (even The Operation wouldn't change those genetics), I guess I avoid thinking about that, so much do I desire to feel myself a woman. "A female in the company of females"—I bridge that goal imaginatively in my mind every day. And yet how distant it is, and how impossible.

Yes, the Achilles myth is daunting, and the more you explore it, the more daunting it gets. It has so much resonance, some of it unpleasant, for anyone straddling the gender barrier.

[Anthony Simon]

I don't know if this really fits here, but you often read about how authors find their characters taking over and directing the way the story is going to go. Like, in some sense, their characters are taking over the author - which, if the author is male and the character is female, might be thought of as akin to CDing.

In a recent interview, the author Will Self went further:

One of the great achievements of Umbrella is Self's ability to write a convincing female protagonist. Unlike many of the great male novelists of his generation who have been accused of ignoring the female experience in their work, Self seems entirely at ease with the female psyche.

"Yeah, well, I'm quite girly," he says. "I like women, my friends are women. I don't have many male friends – never have.

"I always start with physicality when I'm writing as a woman. So I always have a vagina and think about having periods. I always start with an embodiment. And I think when I read men writing about women, they never seem to have thought about that. They've never thought: actually, you've got a cycle, you're different. So if I do succeed at all, that's what it's down to."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/au ... -interview

[Anthony Simon]

Found this in Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (she's often said to be a cute observer of her society):

Dear me! we had such a good piece of fun the other day at Colonel Forster's. Kitty and me were to spend the day there, and Mrs Forster promised to have a little dance in the evening; (by the bye, Mrs Forster and me are such friends!) and so asked the two Harringtons to come, but Harriet was ill, and so Pen was forced to come by himself; and then, what do you think we did? We dressed Chamberlayne in women's clothes, on purpose to pass for a lady, - only think what fun! Not a soul knew of it, but Col. and Mrs Forster, and Kitty and me, except my aunt, for we were forced to borrow one of her gowns; and you cannot imagine how well he looked! Well Denny, and Wickham, and Pratt, and two or three more of the men came in, they didn't know him in the least. Lord! how I laughed! and so did Mrs Forster. I thought I should have died. And that made the men suspect something, and then they soon found out what was the matter.