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annathepiperRobert J. Sawyer's Hominids came to me quite well recommended by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.