Sweet Dreams (2017) by Tricia Sullivan

This review first appeared in the BSFA Review issue 6 (Spring 2019)

Sweet Dreams by Tricia Sullivan (Gollancz, 2017)

Reviewed by Nick Hubble

Sullivan’s tour-de-force Clarke-Award shortlisted novel of 2016, Occupy Me, was always going to be a tough act for her to follow, even if she hadn’t been simultaneously engaged in gaining a Masters and then starting a PhD in Astrophysics. Wisely, therefore, she doesn’t attempt the same fullscale assault on the patriarchal norms of narrative in Sweet Dreams, but aims instead for something lighter, although not necessarily without an edge, and more entertaining. In her ‘Acknowledgments’, she describes Sweet Dreams as her ‘twisted homage’ to Elizabeth Peter’s Vicky Bliss novels.

Charlie Aaron is a ‘dreamhacker’, which is not as glamorous as it sounds. The first client we encounter her trying to help is a perpetually farting middle-aged woman called Mrs Haugh-Womaur, who is plagued by a recurring dream of having to invigilate a History A-Level exam in the nude while unruly students catapult plastic Angry Birds piggies at her. Charlie’s attempt to resolve the problem, by using her capacity for ‘lucid-dreaming’ her way into other people’s dreams, is thwarted first by her failure to dream in sync with Haugh-Wombaur and then by her need to vacate the bedroom in search of fresh air. This proves her undoing of course because otherwise she would not have read the message from her ex, Antonio, asking her to take on his current girlfriend as a client, which sets off a sequence of events that ends with Charlie being interrogated by the Dream Police after the girlfriend is found to have drowned herself in the bath when sleepwalking while Charlie is in a hotel room with her. In keeping with the breathless, madcap tone of the novel, this interrogation is played for laughs as becomes obvious when the conversation gets sidetracked by the question of the size of Antonio’s dick; a subject that continually arises until the multiple-orgasmic sex scene half way through the novel.

When quizzed by the Dream Police on her credentials as a ‘dreamhacker’, Charlie has only her ‘elevator pitch’ to fall back on: ‘Secret Diary of a Call Girl meets Inception!’. It is tempting to speculate that this might have been the initial pitch to Gollancz and the possibility certainly crossed the mind of this reader that Sullivan is having a joke at someone’s expense here. Whether this is targeted at the commercial demands of publishers or the tendency of critics to detect the heresy of such commercialism in the most unlikely places is open to question. The point is that Sullivan is saying that she pretty much no longer cares about such considerations. As she implied in a post on her blog in 2015, she is fed up with having her work judged as failing to meet prescriptions – by publishers or critics – of what sf is. It was not a question, she insisted, of her periodically abandoning sf, it was sf abandoning her and her commitment to a literature of possibility and imagination. Since then she has been writing sf on her own terms by pulling no punches and taking no prisoners.

So what if her heroine is a narcoleptic who ‘gets lost on the way from the toilet to the fridge’ and manipulated by just about everyone surrounding her, she is also the only person in 2020s London aware of the fact that ‘all of us fleshmuppets are dreaming and the A[ugmented] R[eality] is awake’. We are not using the virtual technology that proliferates in the novel – mostly in the form of anthropomorphised advertising – but nor is it a malevolent form of AI using us; rather, the interface in the brain between fleshmuppets and tech is creating a new ‘we’, defined by its difference from the remnants of hierarchically-constricted corporations and intelligence agencies. Sweet Dreams is a delirious mess of overdetermined narrative strands that will infuriate those obsessed with the clarity of symbolic order, but as Charlie quips to one of the novel’s power-hungry bad guys, ‘zero-sum games are so last century, mate’.

Tricia Sullivan’s Occupy Me (2016)

This review first appeared in Foundation 125 (2016): 112-115 [I’ve added additional links to this blog version]

Tricia Sullivan, Occupy Me (Gollancz, 2016, 266pp, £16.99)

Reviewed by Nick Hubble (Brunel University London)

Someone has been cutting ontological corners in Tricia Sullivan’s latest novel, Occupy Me, which traces the attempts of an angel, Pearl, to deal with the fallout of the cosmic credit crunch while saving the threat to the future of humanity posed by Bethany Collins ‘because her boyfriend doesn’t satisfy her sexually’ (172). We first encounter Pearl, working as a flight attendant for a transatlantic airline, in the act of throwing a hijacker off a plane. This circumstance is enlivened by the facts that the plane is cruising at 32,000 feet at the time and that Pearl gets sucked out of the cabin along with the hijacker when she inadvertently tears a hole in the fuselage. Desperate to catch and save the man plummeting beneath her, Pearl leans into higher dimensional space, or HD as it is abbreviated throughout the novel, in order to come out below him, before spreading her wings and soaring back up to him. However, at the point of opening her arms to catch him, she is engulfed by a blast of fire and the man and his mysterious briefcase suddenly turn into a predatory, giant pterodactyl. A burning Pearl escapes by diving under the surface of the sea. Thereafter, radical indeterminacy permeates the novel, which switches location between Long Island, Scotland and HD, as Pearl chases after the briefcase, which we come to realise also somehow contains her, even if, as at one point, it is disappearing down the throat of another dinosaur, which itself is sinking helplessly into a Cretaceous swamp. This sounds madcap and zany as Sullivan freely acknowledges through Pearl:

We were in a briefcase in a spinosaurus on the ocean of prediction. We thought we were small but we were very, very large. We thought we are large but that wasn’t right, either.

   It’s like Horton Hears a Hoo. (204)

Yet the zaniness is not an end in itself; it simultaneously permeates and is contained within a wider metaphysical framework in a manner which one might have said is not dissimilar to the best work of Philip K. Dick if it were not for the fact that Sullivan is on record as categorically rejecting such comparisons.

The problem with linking women writers to better-known male counterparts in this manner is that it suggests that critical legitimacy is only ever awarded on patriarchal terms. But Sullivan explodes that argument in Occupy Me by shifting the terrain of the debate to a completely different order of both magnitude and meaning. It is not just that what she is doing might playfully be described as feminist Dick, it goes beyond that as Pearl notes at one point when seemingly confronted by the impossibility of the briefcase being too heavy to lift: ‘It felt like somebody was pulling my cock and I don’t even have a cock’ (118). This feeling is not the recognition of a female lack but the prelude to Pearl’s characteristic mode of interaction with the matter of the Universe by means of bracing herself against it so that the force she exerts on it equals the force it exerts on her. Earlier in the novel, a character helpfully identifies this approach as ‘Isometrics’ (37), which is a static form of exercise and training for strength-based athletic disciplines. Here, though it becomes a means for Pearl to transcend the detached status of an individual sentient being by connecting materially with the universe:

As always when I lift, the world parts like a pair of lips and I can see its language emerging from the mouth of the cosmos, I glimpse realities that are folded up in dimensions of where I am. It’s a rush better than flying, better than sex. (118)

The recurring imagery of Occupy Me is yonic rather than phallic; concerned with opening oneself to possibility rather than trying to take advantage of it. When doused with crude oil, Pearl does not just drink it: ‘I took it up my snatch. Into my ears. My follicles’ (257). Encountering eggs made of all the lost waveforms in the universe, Pearl weighs them in her hands and embraces their materiality: ‘I put the eggs up inside myself, one at a time. I felt their mass pressing against my pelvic bone and it took some concentration to hold them in’ (227). Not only does Sullivan deconstruct the privileging of presence over absence central to the Western metaphysical tradition but she moves beyond it into a different realm of permeable boundaries. Her relationship to the briefcase and the HD it contains is described as that of lovers whispering in the dark, when either or both might say: ‘I missed you. You fit so nicely in my hole. Thank you’ (167). The traditional (male) critical subject-object relationship with the world has no purchase here.

Occupy Me is the twelfth novel of a writing career lasting over twenty years and including such successes as winning the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Dreaming in Smoke (1999) as well as being shortlisted for both Maul (2003) – which was also voted second in a list of SF by women voted on by readers of the Vector (journal of the British Science Fiction Association) editorial blog – and Lightborn (2010) – subject of a 2010 roundtable discussion involving myself, Nic Clarke, Niall Harrison and David Hebblethwaite. However, such a brief summary of Sullivan’s career conceals the reality of an ongoing struggle for recognition and periods out of contract and having to write on spec. This is partly a question of the relative lack of recognition for women sf writers. Indeed, it was an interview with Sullivan which initially catalysed the 2010 focus of the Vector editorial blog on ‘SF by Women’ in response to an extended sequence of male writers winning the Clarke from shortlists with typically only one woman writer on them. But, as Sullivan wrote frankly and illuminatingly about in a post on her blog last year [2015], her own struggles reflect a wider problem of sf, itself, and the publishing industry surrounding it. While she ‘wanted science fiction to be a literature of possibilities, of imagination, of human progress, not just a collection of tropes’, publishers wanted an ‘exciting, streamlined, grabby kind of thing’ that was easy to get in to. Regardless of what Sullivan wrote, though, and however garlanded it might be, it did not sell and thus, in order to gain those sales, she wrote (as Valerie Leith) a fantasy trilogy at the turn of the millennium and, more recently, the YA novel, Shadowboxer (2014). Each time this was seen as an ‘abandonment’ of sf, while the subsequent novel – Maul after the fantasy books and now Occupy Me – is always the ‘return’ to sf. Against this imposed narrative, Sullivan argues, ‘It is not a return because I never left SF. Science fiction abandoned me. Science fiction pushed me out the door. Science fiction left me begging for scraps’. This highlights a structural problem with the genre in that its tightly-policed definitional boundaries have acted as a constraint on exactly that openness to the universe which Sullivan is trying to articulate and which one might have thought should have been at the heart of what sf is.

Of course, the nature of sf has shifted significantly in the last 10-15 years, most obviously with respect to the way it has become permeated with fantasy. A useful illustration of this can be seen by relating Occupy Me to two other recent novels deploying the trope of angels – Aliette de Bodard’s The House of Shattered Wings (2015) and Justina Robson’s Glorious Angels (2015). These novels share a feminist rejection of patriarchal orders in favour of a more receptive stance to the materiality of the world and taken collectively they demonstrate the full spectrum of the conjoined genre of sf and fantasy (sff). While The House of Shattered Wings revolves around the use of magic, this did not stop it winning the BSFA Best Novel Award. In Glorious Angels, the magic turns out to be largely the product of scientific technology. In Occupy Me everything that happens has a science-inspired rationale but it often functions in practice like magic. These three novels map out some of the parameters of an sff genre in which women writers are resolutely not asking for anyone’s approval or even their acceptance. As Sullivan says, ‘I don’t beg. I don’t want your scraps. I go and hunt down my own food’ and she describes Occupy Me as ‘SF on my own terms’ (Sullivan 2015).

Unsurprisingly, therefore, the novel makes few concessions to easy reading but fuses literary and sf devices with an unyielding pace of narration. As readers, we do not always know what is going on or even which character is narrating. The justification provided in the text for this is that ‘[e]ntropy loves order because more order burns everything down faster’ (74). So order, with its hierarchies and binary classifications, is rejected in favour of continuous everyday intervention ‘against the grain of time’ (74). This is not the abstract theoretical formulation that it might seem but a reference to a constant and necessary component of human society, the ‘care-givers’ to whom Sullivan dedicates the novel. For what is care other a constant war of attrition against sickness, hunger, loneliness and despair? It is this caring behaviour that unites the positive characters in the novel from Pearl, herself, to Alison, ‘Schrödinger’s veterinarian’, and Akele, the night watchman at Dubowski’s Environmental Reclamation. The defining feature of this caring is strength: the isometric strength to resist when ‘the ineffable is bearing down on you as if to crush you beneath its casual, steel-shod heel’ (143). Ultimately this is a novel about the giving and receiving of care in all its forms. Occupy Me invites us to enter it, but the only way we can fully do that is by simultaneously opening ourselves up to it.

 

 

The Left Hand of Darkness

This review appeared in the BSFA Review issue 6 (Spring 2019)

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (Gollancz SF Masterworks, 2017)

Reviewed by Nick Hubble

The Left Hand of Darkness is set on the planet Gethin, also known as Winter where there is no sexual difference between people apart from a monthly period of kemmer. When the androgynous Gethenians meet in kemmer, hormonal secretions increase so that either male or female dominance is established in one and the partner takes on the other sexual role:

Normal individuals have no predisposition to either sexual role in kemmer; they do not know whether they will be the male or the female, and have no choice in the matter. (Otie Nim wrote that in the Orgoreyn region the use of hormone derivatives to establish a preferred sexuality is quite common; I haven’t seen this done in rural Karhide.). Once the sex is determined it cannot change … If the individual was in the female role and was impregnated, hormonal activity of course continues, and for the 8.4 month gestation period and the 6- to 8- month lactation period this individual remains female. … With the cessation of lactation the female … becomes once more a perfect androgyne. No physiological habit is established, and the mother of several children may be the father of several more. (91)

Thus read the field notes of Ong Tot Oppong of the Hainish Ekumen on her initial observations concerning the sexual life of the Gethenians. These notes are in the possession of Genly Ai, who has openly come to Gethen as an ambassador from the Ekumen with the purpose of inviting the Gethenians to join the wider interstellar community. ‘The Question of Sex’ – as the chapter in which Ong’s notes appear is titled – is the aspect of The Left Hand of Darkness which has attracted most attention over the near half century since its original publication.

I was going to begin this review by arguing that ‘if Heinlein’s line “the door dilated” is often presented as an example of the cognitive estrangement of 1940s Golden Age SF, then Le Guin’s “The king was pregnant” is representative of a more profound late 1960s countercultural and feminist defamiliarisation’. But then I read China Miéville’s introduction to this new edition of Le Guin’s 1969 classic and discovered to my horror that not only does he make the exact same comparison, he also sums up its significance more effectively: ‘Heinlein renders one corridor strange: Le Guin reconfigures society’. For Miéville, the novel’s defamiliarisation of gender makes it unquestionably a precursor of the genderqueerness and sexual fluidity of our twenty-first-century present.

However, as he acknowledges, it was not always seen in such a radical light. Le Guin’s use of universal male pronouns to denote a society without a permanent sexual divide and therefore without a gender division, led to Joanna Russ, among others, criticising The Left Hand of Darkness for only containing men in practice. In In the Chinks of the World Machine (1988), Sarah Lefanu argues that the lack of sexual difference means that there is no historical dialectic and that the novel’s popularity is due to it simultaneously offering women a retreat from conflict back to the pre-Oedipal imaginary order while offering men the opportunity to roam freely unconstrained by the difficulties that arise from sexual difference. Adam Roberts went as far as to say, in Science Fiction (2000), that The Left Hand of Darkness is remarkably non-binary as a novel, with an appealing spirituality but an unengaging storyline, and mainly dependent on the quality of its world-building to attract readers’ imaginative and emotional investment.

In fact, The Left Hand of Darkness has long had all the hallmarks of one of those novels which one feels guiltily ashamed of uninhibitedly enjoying in private while publicly pretending indifference in order to fit in with the apparent critical consensus. There is something about all that apparently non-existent narrative tension concerning the fate of Genly’s mission and his relationship with the mysterious and enigmatic King’s Ear, Estraven, that makes one need to keep turning the pages even on the umpteenth rereading. The plot is not negligible by any means. The central irony that the rather backward kingdom of Karhide does eventually turn out to be more important to Genly than the apparently more modern and democratic Orgoreyn, is the inspiration for Iain Banks’s Culture-related planetary romance, Inversions (1998). And, of course, the Culture is also a society in which it is possible for the mother of several children to become the father of several more.

Maybe the fantasies of motherhood which male readers might indulge while reading such novels are merely examples of how men might roam freely in their imagination while unconstrained by the difficulties that arise from sexual difference? Interestingly, when Le Guin wrote about The Left Hand of Darkness in her 1976 essay, ‘Is Gender Necessary?’, she noted that it seemed to be men who engaged most clearly with her conception of Estraven as both ‘man and woman, familiar and different, alien and utterly human’ by identifying with Genly and therefore participating ‘in his painful and gradual discovery of love’. Eleven years later, however, in ‘Is Gender Necessary? Redux’ (1987), following more criticism of the novel, she appeared to change her mind on this matter: ‘Men were inclined to be satisfied with the book, which allowed them a safe trip into androgyny and back, from a conventionally male viewpoint. But many woman wanted it to go further …’ Yet, rather than simply replace the earlier passage with the new judgement, she allowed both versions to sit beside each other by including the new observations in square brackets within the original essay. In this way the ambivalence and ambiguity of the novel became replicated in her commentary upon it. Men might read the novel in either way. Or indeed, they might read it one way and then experience it differently when reading it again. And women were also invited ‘to explore androgyny from a women’s point of view’ as if, irony of ironies, ‘it was written by a woman’. Le Guin’s self-criticism may appear to be an internalisation of her critics’ arguments but on closer reading it is often apparent that she is angry with herself for not managing to make them see the points she was trying to make.

Miéville begins his introduction by noting that ‘The unluckiest books are those ignored or forgotten. But spare a thought too for those fated to become classics. A classic is too often a volume that everyone thinks they know.’ He goes on to suggest that The Left Hand of Darkness transcends this status by remaining alive. However, as I’m sure Miéville is perfectly aware, the defining characteristic of genuine classics is not that they are ‘known’ and, therefore, neutered entities, but that they remain alive precisely by feeding on the life in their new readers. A classic is a classic because after it has drawn out one response from a reader, it remains hungry not just for new readers but for new responses from its existing readers. So while on the first reading, men might enjoy a trip into androgyny and then back to safety and women might want more, on the second reading, they all might identify differently.

For example, as an adolescent I read this novel indiscriminately as an exotic adventure. Later, having learned somewhere that it is a novel about gender, or the absence thereof, I dutifully read it as a novel about gender, or the absence thereof, and felt rather puzzled by it all. Becoming more aware of the history of the feminist SF of the 1970s, and having undergone the visceral experience of reading Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, I returned to The Left Hand of Darkness for reassurance and found it had become much weirder than I remembered. Some years later, the weirdness had transformed into a pleasurable campness (‘My landlady, a voluble man’ etc) and I read both Genly and Estraven as queer men. But when I read it again, while they remained queer, neither of them were any longer men. The male pronouns may have originally led to critics saying there are only men in the novel but actually their universality is ultimately so unstable that it radically calls into question their capacity to signify the male gender in the novel and, indeed, outside of it. Language is destabilised and with it meaning. In this respect, The Left Hand of Darkness should be considered an example of literary experimentation as radical as any in the genre.

The novel is also, of course, an old-fashioned love story, as Le Guin implied in her 1976 comment that her male readers understood this through their identification with Genly. For all Genly’s tiresome misogyny and heterosexual disgust, his attraction to Estraven is clear from the outset:

Estraven’s performance had been womanly, all charm and tact and lack of substance, specious and adroit. Was it in fact this soft supple femininity that I disliked and distrusted in him? For it was impossible to think of him as a woman, that dark, ironic, powerful presence near me in the firelit darkness, and yet whenever I thought of him as a man I felt a sense of falseness: in him, or in my own attitude towards him? His voice was soft and rather resonant but not deep, scarcely a man’s voice, but scarcely a woman’s voice either … (12)

Estraven’s presence dominates this novel, fascinating both narrator and reader from the outset in the manner of a classic adventure romance. In which respect, it should be noted that the tense climactic crossing off the ice cap is one of the best pieces of sustained action writing in fiction. However, unlike many classic adventure stories, the sexual attraction between the two protagonists during these heightened experiences is made explicit to the reader, even if not consummated. It is not simply the case that there is no conventional female ‘love interest’ to disguise male same-sex desire; it is rather that Estraven fulfils both of these roles and in so doing he appears more complete than the awkward, diffident Genly. Roberts suggests that the Gethenians are not strictly speaking androgynous in that they are not both sexually male and female but neither except when in kemmer. However, Estraven, as described above, is clearly androgynous in the strict sense of the term even though not in kemmer. The reader identifying with Genly comes to share this sense of their own inadequacy, which is made manifest in his revulsion with his own people when they come down to Gethen in a starship. Genly is only happy again when alone with a Gethenian: ‘his face, a young, serious face, not a man’s face and not a woman’s face, a human face’ (296).

By the end of the novel, Genly has learned to see in the Gethenians not an absence of gender but a different kind of non-binary gender and so can the reader. Famously, ‘there is no myth of Oedipus on Winter’; no father to kill and no mother to sleep with because there is no separation of humans between binary gendered roles. In consequence there is no division into the dualisms of dominant/submissive, owner/chattel, or active/passive, but this is not simply a ‘retreat’ – as Lefanu terms it – from the symbolic order of the Oedipal complex back to the pre-Oedipal imaginary order. Rather than signalling a lack of narrative tension, this return allows imaginary identification with all subject positions simultaneously and thus underwrites the re-readability of the novel. The Left Hand of Darkness is a classic because however many times we read it, we can’t exhaust its infinitude of possible meanings. Even though you think you know it, read it again!

Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre (Jo Fletcher Books, 2016)

Originally published in Vector #285 (Spring 2017)

During the 1970s, four novels managed a clean sweep of the Hugo, Nebula and Locus Awards for Best Novel:  Larry Niven’s Ringworld (1970), Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War (1974), and Vonda McIntyre’s Dreamsnake (1978). On the basis of this company, Dreamsnake should be considered one of the unquestioned classics of the genre. However, while not unknown, it is clear that the novel does not have the same name recognition as these peers, nor has it been republished like the others as part of a series of classics, such as Gollancz’s SF Masterworks [in fact, as pointed out by a Vector reader, it was republished in Gollancz’s Classic SF series]. Indeed, this reissue from Jo Fletcher Books appears to be the first mass market paperback edition in the UK since Pan published it in 1979.

Similarly, despite being at the centre of American feminist sf in the 1970s, McIntyre does not have the same renown as Le Guin or Joanna Russ or James Tiptree Jnr. She tends to feature in critical accounts of that period as a bit-player: one of the other participants in the ‘Women and Science Fiction’ symposium organised by Jeffrey Smith and published as Khatru 3 & 4 (1975); one of the co-editors of the 1976 anthology Aurora: Beyond Equality in which Tiptree’s story ‘Houston, Houston, Do you Read?’ and Le Guin’s essay ‘Is Gender Necessary?’ were both first published. Sarah Lefanu denies trying to construct a hierarchy of feminism in her book, In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction (1988), but that is nonetheless what she does by describing Dreamsnake as essentialist. On Lefanu’s reading, McIntyre’s fiction is feminised rather than feminist because, in attempting to rebalance the relationship between men and women, it implicitly accepts the naturalness of sexual difference rather than challenging the social construction of gender.

However, even if the stance of McIntyre’s fiction was considered unfashionable in the 1980s and 1990s, values do eventually change. Constructivist approaches to gender are no longer automatically considered to be the most progressive or radical. While it is useful to know the reception history of a book there is no reason why that should be allowed to outweigh new readings in changed times. In this respect, the relative neglect of Dreamsnake is perhaps an advantage because it allows us to read it afresh as a contemporary text in a way that is simply no longer possible in the case of something as well known as, say, Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969).

In fact, Dreamsnake, with its post-apocalyptic setting and young female protagonist, would have fitted comfortably beside Emily Mandel’s Station Eleven and Emmi Itäranta’s Memory of Water on the 2015 Clarke Award shortlist. The novel begins with Snake, a healer, tending to a small sick boy as his parents hover anxiously in the background. The desert surroundings and other factors indicate a nomadic society but crucial indicators of difference complicate our reading of this situation. For a start, in a pattern that will gain significance over the duration of the novel, there are three parents but more immediately striking is the fact that Snake actually uses snakes to heal people. Specifically, she is able to use the rattlesnake and the cobra, which she carries around with her in a special case, to synthesise and inject – through their bites – complex drugs into her patients. She also has a third snake, the rare and mysterious dreamsnake of the title, which she uses as part of the healing process. However, when she leaves her dreamsnake with the small boy to comfort him while she prepares the drugs he needs, his parents become anxious and kill the snake. This action sets up the plot of the novel for Snake either has to return to the healers’ settlement and risk being stripped of her status for losing such a valuable snake or she has to find another one somewhere.

Eventually, she decides she needs to go to Center, a sealed city which still has connections with the offworld colonies from where the dreamsnakes originate. Her arrival there, around about two-thirds of the way through the novel, sets up an interesting contrast in technology. By now we have seen that the nomadic societies and scattered townships through which Snake has travelling are not as primitive as they first appeared. It turns out that Snake herself made her dreamsnake and four others by painstakingly transplanting DNA through a micropipette in the healers’ laboratories; a process that she can no longer repeat due to the arthritis that is a side product of the healers’ own gene fixes. By linking such techniques to non-hierarchical ways of living, McIntyre is claiming science as the ally of progressive politics; a position that was presumably supported by her own background as a geneticist. Significantly, Center turns hostile towards her at exactly the moment she talks approvingly of cloning.

If this belief in science suggests 1970s optimism rather than twenty-first century pessimism, then it should also be considered that the science McIntyre privileges is definitely not instrumental. The world she depicts is one where all humans can learn to exercise control over their own bodily processes: ‘biocontrol’. Crucially to the generally egalitarian nature of the societies McIntyre depicts, it is considered to be men’s responsibility to ensure contraception through biocontrol of the temperature in their testes. This key social norm is supported by an even more fundamental one: the necessity for consent in all human interactions. Snake wouldn’t even heal someone who didn’t consent to it, let alone have sex with them. It is this relevant and timely principle, rather than its historical status, that makes Dreamsnake demand to be read today.