Sci-Fi or Science Fiction
is a genre of speculative fiction, which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel universes, and extraterrestrial life.
Wikipedia
Indeed, sci-fi is by far my favorite fiction genre. The “imaginative and futurist” facet is what makes this ilk so immersive and engaging. Yet, when I read some of these books, there are a few discords that do not sit well with me. Recently, I was reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, the first book in the Foundation series, and ended up contemplating two aspects that left me disconcerted.
Foundation is a composite novel of five interrelated plots occurring over a span of 200 years. It chronicles the gradual decline of a once all powerful Galactic Empire that ruled the entire Milky Way. The book highlights several “imaginative and futurist” technologies, including hyper-video, 3D newscasts, hyper-space intergalactic travel, and the widespread use of atomic energy to power everything from trinkets to gigantic factories. Most fascinating, perhaps, is “psychohistory,” a study of the reaction of human conglomerates when exposed to economic and social stimuli — using statistics, history, and sociology to predict how future human societies would evolve — a thread that binds all the story arcs in the book.
Yet two elements stand out due to their anachronic nature – an empire having dominion over the entire galaxy, and a conspicuous dearth of strong women characters.
In an era where technology is so advanced that people live under artificially controlled environments and travel across stars at speeds faster than light, it is perplexing, to say the least, to imagine empires, feudalism, vassals, rulers, and regents existing concomitantly. I would have envisioned a society that had advanced alongside the technology, perhaps into a modern, autonomous, fragmented, and commercial nation corporation, similar to Mr Lee’s Hong Kong or Narcolombia from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. This dichotomy between medieval society and futuristic technology left me baffled at times. For instance, whenever there was a mention of ship in the book, I would unwittingly think of naval vessels of the foregone British or the Spanish empires plying between their respective colonies for trade, only to realize after an instant that these are intergalactic spaceships!!
Yet, the aspect that troubled me the most was the apparent lack of any vital female characters in the story. The absence of any woman, lead character or otherwise, can be felt throughout the book until the end, where there are two minor characters — the wife of a ruler of one of those planets at the edge of the galaxy who seem to be the stereotypical housewife of the ’50s, nagging and belittling her husband and a young girl whose only act in the book is to be awed when offered a shiny, atomic powered necklace that glows. There is also a fleeting mention of “housewives rebellion,” which one of the male antagonists sarcastically quips would occur when “atomic knives and stoves” would go out of commission.
And it got me thinking.
From what I have read about Asimov so far, I don’t get any proof as to his being misogynistic. On the contrary, Asimov acknowledged his oversight and regretted his early portrayal of female characters. He eventually developed some capable woman characters — Susan Calvin, the chief robot psychologist from I, Robot, and a slew of robotics based short stories, being my favorite.
Both his societal depiction and female characterization appear to be rooted in the societal norms and expectations of the time when the book was written. The book was conceptualized and published in the 1940s and ’50s. These were the times when the British Empire, which a decade back was reigning over a quarter of the planet as an “empire on which the sun never sets,” was slowly disintegrating. Furthermore, Edward Gibbon’s “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” written in the eighteenth century, is believed to be the inspiration for the narrative behind the collapsing Galatic empire.
Similarly, his stunted knowledge about women stems from the prevalent norms of that era. With limited career choices and the societal expectation that a woman is better served if she were a “good wife and homemaker,” women were often relegated to household duties and being dutiful spouses. At best, career women of the ’50s would be synonymous with secretaries, nannies, or matrons. Asimov or any other writers of that time didn’t see women in the same light as how we have come to view them today — an empowered lot who by every means are equal, if not better than men.
In the end, the society that you grew up watching and interacting with every day consciously or unconsciously shapes your views, even the futurist ones. Asimov simply “wrote what he knew.”
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