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WoGF Review: Halfway Human by Carolyn Ives Gilman
Michael Rosenberg (tintmylf) is a professor of evolutionary biology at Arizona State University and has been reading genre fiction for about 30 years, ever since his mother gave him a copy of The Hobbit (seeing Star Wars at a drive-in theater when it was first released didn’t hurt). He came to Worlds Without End for the Women of Genre Reading Challenge but ended up staying for the cake (which was a lie).
Halfway Human is a story about a society which has done away with sexism, racism, caste and class structure, by creating a new group of asexual androgynous individuals who are the new focus of sexism, racism, caste, and class discrimination. The story is mostly focused on a particular neutered individual (colloquial known as a bland) named Tedla who has escaped her home planet and culture into a different “enlightened” society without her homeland’s biases. Most of the story is told in flashbacks about Tedla growing up and how she came to be in the predicament with which the book begins. To be certain, nothing is as rosy as it is made out.
The story is quite interesting, if moderately predictable at times. The clash of cultures and the descent from the seemingly perfect society to the dark underbelly of the reality is paced fairly well.
One of the complicating factors is that I found it almost impossible to view Tedla as an asexual androgyne and instead mentally viewed it as a “her” for the most part. Some of this is undoubtedly to my own lack of a proper mental reference frame to have an otherwise human character without gender, but part of it may be a failure (or perhaps, less harshly, acknowledge the great difficulty) of the author to be able to write truly genderless characters.
