2007 Book Log #53: Hominids, by Robert J. Sawyer

[annathepiper]

Robert J. Sawyer's Hominids came to me quite well recommended by framlingem, and only today, after I resolved to finally read it, did I realize that it actually won the Hugo in 2003. So yeah, book with a high pedigree, this. I myself am somewhat ambivalent to it; while I think it's got a really fun premise (i.e., parallel world where the Neanderthals became the dominant species rather than Homo Sapiens, world intersects with ours, cue the WTFery on both sides), there are also aspects of it that irritate me immensely. I can't get into that without spoilers, so let me cover the more general reactions first.

There are side-by-side plot threads, one in our world, one in the Neanderthal world, and the latter is infinitely more interesting. I have very limited exposure to current understanding and theories about how the Neanderthals may have lived, but it seems like Sawyer has taken a lot of those details and rolled them into an interesting society. He also puts little touches on it that helped make it feel real to me, such as red being their indicator color for things being good, since red is the color of blood and health. Plus, honestly, the Neanderthal characters felt more fleshed out to me than the ones in our world did. However, I have to balance this against how, especially when the main Neanderthal character Ponter is interacting with people in our world, Sawyer hammers the reader over the head again and again and again and again with how Neanderthal culture is so much better than our own: they have almost no violent crime, no war, no religion, no prohibitions on gender in sexual pairings, no pollution of the environment, no mass extinction of species, etc., etc. Sure, as any reader of my journal knows, I lean pretty hard to the left--and even so, I got really tired really fast of the blatant social commentary.

But really, what irritated me about the book the most is this.

The main female character, Mary Vaughan, is introduced in a scene where she is raped. And okay, sure, I can buy her flipping out and not struggling for fear that this masked guy with a knife is going to mutilate her or even kill her. I can even maybe believe her being scared of telling anyone for fear that she will not be believed, and worse, that she will be blamed--gods know we have enough "blame the victim" crap going on in rape trials every single day.

But I totally lost sympathy for her the instant she actively decided against calling 911, despite the fact that she would be turning her back on other women going through the same thing--that she would even be letting other women be at risk from this asshole by her silence. She actively thinks about this, and then decides not to call 911 anyway. Now, if I think about it, I can see scenarios in which even a intelligent, dedicated, and driven woman (which I'm assuming Mary is, on the grounds that she's not only a Ph.D., she's a renowned expert in her field) would be so hardcore flipping out by being raped that she'd feel this way. But were I this woman's friend, I would be doing everything in my power to respect her feelings while at the same time urging her to call the fucking police.

Now, this part was irritating enough. What made it worse is that for the rest of the book, she continues to not report her assault to the police, so this asshole continues to go free. She makes exactly one attempt to seek out help, and that amounts to only going into a rape crisis center where there's no chance that she'll be known, and having a very short conversation with the young counselor there.

And for most of the rest of the book, her primary plot function is to ogle Ponter the Neanderthal, decide what a perfect society he comes from, be ashamed of herself and her entire species, and fall in love with him. In less than twenty days. After she has been raped, and during which time she has the obligatory frightened reactions to every man in the plot, only Ponter doesn't count because he isn't actually Homo Sapiens. And he is of course the first significant character she actually tells about her being raped, of course shortly before he returns to his own world.

I come out of all of this thinking that the moral of this story is apparently that "it's okay if you get raped, because a big hairy gentle guy from another world will show up and you'll fall in love with him anyway".

And, um, no. Sorry, Mr. Sawyer, but on behalf of the women I know who have suffered rapes, no.


All in all I'm not sorry I read this, since it did have some nice ideas, but I really wish the execution had been better. Two stars.

Comments

[poetry-lady.livejournal.com]

From reading your description behind the cut (I haven't read the book, and am not likely to, as I tend to not like male-written dystopia/utopia fiction), I don't so much have problems with the "she didn't call the cops" scenario, as that whole area is such a grey one, with so many freakin' nuances and sticky wickets. (From my own life--how do you tell a middle-aged rape survivor to kindly BUTT THE HELL OUT of how you're working on/with a minor possible/probable rape victim who is still in denial to themselves, and you're working on establishing trust, caring, and respect, so that when they do come out of denial (because likely will, eventually), they're likely to trust you? When middle-aged survivor's only response is 'fuck their trust, fuck their privacy, you MUST take them to the hospital, the cops, the crisis counselor.' The alleged incident is not recent, the possible victim in denial/is compartmentalizing-dissassociating about it to most people. I have enough respect for others' autonomy with their bodies, their selves to not want to force the issue and drive them further into denial--and I also have a part of me that wants to, yes, take them to the cops immediately. But that's not going to be helpful right now, as that's not where this kid is. It's 90,000 shades of grey, and I'm floundering.

No, to get back to the book, what I do have problems with is this raped-woman-goes-all-stockholme-syndromesque on a male who is an honorary female--that there's something so special about THEM that it cancels out anything that a woman has experience. (The worst cases of this are the "fall in love with your rapist" shit like on General Hospital with Luke & Laura in the 80s.) Honestly, I have a hard time when male writers decide to use rape as a plot device. Since most of them will never know the fear of being raped, of having your ultimate boundaries violated, they feel free to speculate the most bizarre reactions. Most of which seem to involved women being so crushed that they are beyond hope of ever relating to another man again, until their uber-sensitive alter-ego comes along and proceeds to ignore all her boundaries until she is forced to fall madly in love with him or commit suicide. At which point, they fall madly in love and boink like bunnies, and she wants to have his baby.

My ex had a story involving a rape that he wrote, and I really didn't have the heart to tell him that he was deluding himself that he could really KNOW how it felt, how someone would react. Didn't have the heart to tell him I'd seen a guy brought low by a sexual assault from another male, who didn't want anyone, male or female, coming near him, trying to help him/console him/support him. That he distrusted EVERYONE, male or female, for a while. That pretty much the only things I could say were "I *do* believe you" and "because I'm an RA, I can't leave you alone until I can be certain you're not a danger to yourself or others; but you don't have to talk to me, I'll just sit here if you want, but I have to do my job."

I do find it interesting that he posits almost the exact opposite of Jean M. Auel's Neanderthals in the Clan of the Cave Bear series. Neither one seems really believable--the truth lies somewhere in between, I suspect.

[annathepiper]

To answer the first part of your post first... I totally agree that there are a zillion shades of gray in how one would deal with trying to help out a middle-aged rape survivor, yeah. But I stand by my overall assertion. I'd be doing everything in my power to try to respect her feelings and urge her to go to the police, especially if so far as she knows the attacker was a random masked stranger at large on the campus where she works. I'd be absolutely urging her to consider the safety of her colleagues and the students. If it came to it, I'd be offering to go to the authorities on her behalf if she couldn't bear the thought of doing it herself. I do acknowledge it'd be an extremely difficult thing to do, because yeah, on the one hand I'd have the urgent need to be sensitive to this person's experiences, and on the other, the fact that if somebody came to me and said they'd just experienced a violent sexual assault on the campus where she worked, that if I didn't report it to the authorities then it might happen to others as well.

Also... in this plot, the event is recent. And she does, I grant, at least seek help at a rape crisis center, although she winds up going to one in a place where there's no chance that she'd be known. But that's part of why the whole thing didn't play realistically for me as I was reading. There was a reviewer on Amazon who did a good job of capturing my overall reaction to it--that it was as of Mr. Sawyer were just going by the Lifetime-Channel, simplified-and-sanitized-for-TV pointers for how he thinks a woman ought to react when she's raped.

I dunno. I think that rape in general, whether a woman or a man is the victim, is so hugely complex a thing that it really does not deserve the superficial attention he gives the issue in this plot. That it's there at all, for me, is entirely gratuitous; it reads like an excuse to have Mary the geneticist be scared of all men in general until she meets Ponter the Neanderthal. And all I can think is, "Was it really necessary to have her raped on camera at the beginning of the book to advance this as a plot point?"

I get the idea, glancing at the Amazon pages for books 2 and 3, that she does eventually confront her rapist. But given how this whole thing is handled in Book 1, I'm just not interested in going to see how it all gets resolved.

[lickingtoad.livejournal.com]

I'd heard of this book before in the exact same context: 'Aren't Neanderthals great?!' Heh. Worry ye not, other people seem to have picked up on that as well.

[annathepiper]

So I had gleaned from the Amazon reviews for it!

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

I read some of this, serialized in _Analog_ a few years ago. Wasn't particularly impressed, but it sounds like those portions were better than the novel.

I have an unsold novel, completed over a decade ago, in which the interaction between Neanderthals and future humans plays an important part. This not a time travel story; a surviving population is found on a huge, interstellar colony ship. (Long story. Novel, actually. ;-)

Based on what was then known about Neanderthal physiology - especially the insides of their skulls - I postulated that they were more intelligent than modern humans, and extremely socially adept, but also more bound to their instincts. To use a somewhat obsolete term, they were less neotenous (hope that's right; LJ's spell checker doesn't have it) than modern humans. From that I developed culture and personalities. And, yes, they can interbreed with modern humans, but the results are usually not viable.

They did not domesticate individual species, but - as some West Coast Indians sorta did - their entire ecosystem. The were like migratory workers, moving with the seasons to take advantage of local resources, but they also deliberately planned out the use of those resources, and took actions to renew them.

They were _very_ good at long term planning.

[annathepiper]

Sawyer's extrapolations of what Neanderthal culture would be like are easily the best part of the novel and are why I didn't just bail on the book right after the rape scene. He does postulate that they had higher base intelligence, and they do domesticate wolves, but not herd animals since they remain a hunter-gatherer society; he's also got them using living trees as homes, so the aspect of working with the ecosystem is in there. And since they're still a hunter-gatherer society, he's got 'em working harder to control their own population.

There are other aspects that are more thought-provoking, such as how he's got 'em sterilizing not only persons who commit crimes but also any relatives that share at least fifty percent of their genetic material--offspring and siblings. And, all persons in their society have computerized implants that record their actions constantly, so it's a lot harder to commit a crime in general in their society... but then again, nobody has any privacy whatsoever, either. There are interesting gray areas here, lots of potential ramifications, and that's another disappointment for me in this book... that rather than dealing with all of these interesting ramifications, mostly, the story just hammers on the idea that because of these things, The Neanderthals Have No Crime So Aren't They Great? The only time the possible downside of this is explored is that there's a character who's pissed off that her mate got sterilized only because he was the brother of someone who had committed a crime--he hadn't done a damn thing himself--and at that point I was thinking, "OKAY! Now that's interesting!"

Mostly, though, the potential of this stuff was not explored at all. :(

[avram]

I read Sawyer's Calculating God when it was nominated for the Hugo a few years back and I was trying to read as many nominees as I could before voting, and it seemed to me that Sawyer was writing at about the level of a Star Trek: TNG episode. (That's not a compliment.) I decided to avoid his work in the future.

I was mildly surprised that something so mediocre had gotten nominated. Turns out that Sawyer actively campaigns to his fans for nominations.

[annathepiper]

Given what I remember about the majority of TNG episodes, yeah, I can actually buy that comparison.

I can't necessarily fault him for the campaigning thing... but knowing that, I find his Hugo less surprising now. ;)