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L. E. Modesitt is a... 'guilty pleasure' is really not the right term, because that implies a level of active joy I don't get from his books. Semi-inexplicable fascination, perhaps? Yeah, let's go with that. Like, his protagonists are all slight shading variations on the same cardboard cutout, he is not a deep philosophical mind regardless of what he'd like you to think, he has what might as well be a fetish for including the letter Y in proper names, and he literally writes out sound-effects. But I do genuinely enjoy the parts of his books when he plays the show-my-research game about practical things like woodworking or road-building, and about half the time he does manage to hook me into vicariously enjoying the power-fantasy aspects of his work.
But man, he is so weird about such a lot of stuff. Like, he has a veneer of feminism? His books are very clear, on an explicit textual level, that toxic patriarchy and misogyny are bad. He also manages to extend the thought and say that any culture where one sex dominates and restricts the other is bad, because women are people rather than plaster saints. But he has a strong tendency to turn his male protagonists into living avatars of 'Not All Men' -- people are constantly telling them that most men are terrible but they're decent people, and obviously they keep getting in trouble because they're not acting like violent brutes. Which, uh. Undermines the explicit message. A lot.
I'm thinking of this mostly because I randomly reread Fall of Angels last week and was struck by the utter weirdness of telling a story about a majority female spaceship crew stranded in a patriarchal fantasy world and struggling to survive both the physical and social environmental hazards through the POV of the single surviving male crewmember. I didn't notice that the first time around because A) I was young, and B) all of the Recluce Saga novels are from male POVs (some interstitial chapters follow female characters, but always from third-person omniscient rather than third-person limited) so this seemed like an obvious extension of that pattern. But in retrospect, that's screwy, and the way all the female characters keep reassuring Nylan that he's Good and Special and Not Sexist comes off skeevier and skeevier the more it happens.
Anyway, I was at the library a few days ago and figured I'd see what Modesitt had been writing over the past decade or so, and I discovered that he'd finally written one Recluce book with a female protagonist! (That was in 2009. Then he promptly went back to the relentless male-centrism.) But Arms-Commander seemed like it might be worth reading to see how he handled female protagonists in this particular setting -- especially since it picks up the thread of that stranded spaceship crew about fifteen years down the road.
( cut for length )
But man, he is so weird about such a lot of stuff. Like, he has a veneer of feminism? His books are very clear, on an explicit textual level, that toxic patriarchy and misogyny are bad. He also manages to extend the thought and say that any culture where one sex dominates and restricts the other is bad, because women are people rather than plaster saints. But he has a strong tendency to turn his male protagonists into living avatars of 'Not All Men' -- people are constantly telling them that most men are terrible but they're decent people, and obviously they keep getting in trouble because they're not acting like violent brutes. Which, uh. Undermines the explicit message. A lot.
I'm thinking of this mostly because I randomly reread Fall of Angels last week and was struck by the utter weirdness of telling a story about a majority female spaceship crew stranded in a patriarchal fantasy world and struggling to survive both the physical and social environmental hazards through the POV of the single surviving male crewmember. I didn't notice that the first time around because A) I was young, and B) all of the Recluce Saga novels are from male POVs (some interstitial chapters follow female characters, but always from third-person omniscient rather than third-person limited) so this seemed like an obvious extension of that pattern. But in retrospect, that's screwy, and the way all the female characters keep reassuring Nylan that he's Good and Special and Not Sexist comes off skeevier and skeevier the more it happens.
Anyway, I was at the library a few days ago and figured I'd see what Modesitt had been writing over the past decade or so, and I discovered that he'd finally written one Recluce book with a female protagonist! (That was in 2009. Then he promptly went back to the relentless male-centrism.) But Arms-Commander seemed like it might be worth reading to see how he handled female protagonists in this particular setting -- especially since it picks up the thread of that stranded spaceship crew about fifteen years down the road.
( cut for length )
