Back in the mists of time, around a decade ago, there was a plan for an ever-expanding online collection of short critical essays on key works of the fantastic. The plan fizzled and died, but not before I wrote nine pieces for it (which I just found). This is the last of them.
First edition: New York: Pyramid, 1960
Edition used: New York: Pyramid, 1960
Charlie Johns, a contemporary American, mysteriously wakes up in a posthuman future, the apparently utopian society of Ledom (‘model’ backwards). It is home to homo sapiens’ replacements, an androgynous species possessing both male and female genitals. As devoted to the principles of process and change as they are to their children (who symbolise the future and thus change), they live lives of fulfilment and repose. They transported Charlie through time so he can learn about them and offer an ‘objective’ view on their culture and society. Or so he is led to believe…
Interpolated between the chapters charting Charlie’s adventure are shorter ones depicting the life of contemporary suburbanites Herb and Jeanette Raile, and their children, Davy and Karen. These contrapuntal chapters offer sharp satiric insights into gender roles, sexual politics and mores, consumerism, competition, materialistic Protestantism, social hierarchies and child-rearing. Although their tone is very different from that of the Ledom chapters, they offer an essential counterbalance to the more traditionally utopian method of Charlie’s story.
John Clute described Venus Plus X as the novel which
bravely came as close to a traditional utopia as any US genre-sf writer had approached before the efforts of Mack Reynolds.[1]
This tension – between the utopian guided tour and genre sf’s predominantly action-adventure format – is perhaps most evident in the closing pages of the novel in which a cognitive breakthrough (of sorts) piles fresh revelation on fresh revelation, casting much of what has gone before in a fresh light. A similar tension is effectively balanced in the tonal differences between the Ledom and suburban chapters. Because the utopian form requires expository dialogue to interpose between the utopia and the visitor (including the reader), there is always overt commentary in place of the effect of direct perception. Consequently, in depicting suburban America, Sturgeon is faced with the option of an apparently realistic vision or an expository technique which would parallel (without replicating) the technique used to depict Ledom. Sturgeon’s turn to the satiric, which had become increasingly commonplace in 1950s US magazine sf, is in many ways the more satisfactory method of reconciling the traditional utopian with genre sf, not least of all because it keeps them in constant tension and balance. Venus Plus X, like Ledom, is about ‘passage’ (107) and ‘dynamic imbalance’ (108).
What, then, are the qualities of Ledom that make it utopian? Without biological differentiation in terms of sexual characteristics, and without the fetishisation of particular body parts, there is no basis upon which to construct an ideology of gender differentiation. Biological determinism is invalidated as a concept, replaced by a variety of cultural (including technological) determinism. The Ledom thus express themselves, rather than sexual or gender categories, through their modes of dress, labour and creative activity. Competition has been replaced by harmonious coexistence. Community has replaced suburb.
These utopian elements take on greater effect because of their contrast with the harried, frustrated, confused lives of the Raile family. Herb and his neighbour Smitty worry about what they perceive as women taking over in the guise of attaining equality. Where Smitty struggles to maintain masculinist bigotry, Herb struggles to compromise between traditional masculinity and an equal relationship with Jeanette. But Jeanette is not without her own neuroses about sexuality and power relationships. And in a number of comic asides – when Karen touches herself in the bath, when Davy hits her with a pillow for receiving different treatment from their father – it is clear that their children will be caught in similar dilemmas.
The major set of images Sturgeon uses to valorise this distinction between community and suburb is concerned with music. The inspirational, unrehearsed but nonetheless perfect group singing of the Ledom stands in stark contrast to the pop idol Herb and Smitty watch singing ‘Goozle Goozle’ on TV, a polysemic performer targeted at a whole array of market segments:
The words are something about Yee Ooo: I hold Yee Ooo, I kiss Yee Ooo, I love Yee Ooo, Ooo-Ooo. The camera dollies back and the singer is observed in a motion which one might explain by asserting that the singer, with infinite ambition, is attempting to grasp between his buttocks a small doorknob strapped to a metronome. (37)
At the core of the novel lie its least novelistic chapters, when Charlie receives a history lesson via the cerebrostyle. The Ledom – and arguably Sturgeon – locate the failure of Western civilisation in the suppression of pre-Christian ecstatic religion and sex and their distortion into instruments of social control:
So sex and religion, the real meaning of human existence, ceased to be meaning and became means. (130)
In the opening chapter, the dislocated Charlie devotes his energy to trying to remember:
He could not stop remembering; dared not, and did not want to stop. Because as long as he kept remembering, he knew he was Charlie Johns; and although he might be in a new place without knowing what time it was, he wasn’t lost, no one is ever lost, as long as he knows who he is. (8)
Continuity of identity here depends not upon name but upon recollection; and what applies to the individual applies to society as a whole. As long as ecstatic religion and sex are repressed, forgotten, Western so-called civilisation is alienated from its true identity.
Central to this repression is an overemphasis
on differences which [are] in themselves not drastic. (61)
Anticipating Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), the Ledom argue that differentiation is a product of looking for difference – which is then employed to construct ideologically naturalised hierarchies. Without the deconstruction of sexual differentiation – an act literalised in Ledom – sexual equality will continue to be one of Western literature’s ‘hallucinatory images’, along with
pigs with wings, human freedom, fire-breathing dragons, the wisdom of the majority, the basilisk, the golem. (84)
Notes
[1] John Clute and Peter Nicholls, eds, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (London: Orbit, 1993), p.1176.
The other eight entries I wrote were:
Voltaire, Candide
Godwin, Caleb Williams
de Maistre, Voyage Around My Chamber
France, Thais
London, The Iron Heel
Gernsback, Ralph 124C 41+
Smith, The Skylark of Space
Schuyler, Black No More
Mark Bould 