Module Seven deals with gender and race in SF, although I feel that Kindred provided an ample introduction to these subjects, even though it was categorized as having more to do with time travel. Initially, I was wary of reading Underground Airlines – another book dealing with slavery and all of the emotional turmoil it entails. After finishing the novel, however, I think that the two should be considered as companions to one another, in some way. I think that they each provide unique and valuable perspectives about the institution of slavery and the implications it has had on American culture, although Kindred felt much more entirely immersive, while Underground Airlines gave you a bit more room to step back and look around, to judge the bigger picture. Perhaps this perception is just based on my knowledge of the authors’ identities. I was skeptical of Underground Airlines after our discussion about the ability of writers to convincingly write beyond their experiences – while I believe that this is undeniably possible and a process common in the field of creative writing (how else could we ever make up new worlds? Although these new worlds nearly always build upon elements of what we already know and are influenced by systems we are already familiar with, whether they are critiqued or not…) I always remain a bit dubious of the ability of people with opposing experiences to accurately and humanely portray different groups of people. The authorial responsibility goes beyond just including characters of diverse backgrounds in a story, it involves writing those characters to be three-dimensional, and some people, I suppose, just don’t have enough familiarity or lived experience to do so convincingly, at least not convincingly to people familiar with the real people in question. But I (really) digress, my point was that Underground Airlines did not fall into the hole of two-dimensional characters that I feared it would. Part of the novel’s ability to move me was its creation of characters I really cared about, from Kevin to Brother (?) to Martha and Lionel, even to Maris and Ada. The moments that struck me most occurred right at the very beginning and toward the very end. The first came when Victor recounted the story of the football team owner who used “peeb” labor to fill his team and described the fans who watched in disgust and utter fascination as the men played for their amusement. Though this was a particularly heavy-handed part of Ben H. White’s overall critique of modern American society, it affected me because it gave words to something I was trying to explain very recently but was unable to articulate: after listening to a Code Switch podcast, I was talking about the strangeness of basketball, the incredibly rich white owners trading black men who played physical games for their amusement, the same thing with football, just with an even whiter, more conservative fan base. The next moment was when Victor/Brother (did we ever learn his real name? The one his mother gave him, not his service name?) was on the GGSI train, singing mechanically with the enslaved men, thinking about the fact that these men were going to ride this train for the rest of their lives, and with a small mistake, he could end up riding the train forever along with them. It seemed impossible to fathom, yet entirely real and utterly horrifying, this one detail, which was so emblematic of the institution of slavery itself. Just the simple fact that these men would do this for the rest of their lives, that they were born there and they would die there, that the world could offer them nothing more. It was strange how nothing, really, nothing at all separated them, nothing protected Victor or Cook from being treated just like the PBs, nothing they could possibly do gave them immunity from the way the world really saw them. For all of the black characters, no sort of life seemed positively free, from the cloistered, policed ghettos to the bugged bounty hunters.

Ursula Le Guin’s “Nine Lives” produced a lot of uncomfortable trains of thought, most of them having to do with the strange and mildly unnecessary sex (masturbatory?) scenes. Considering her extensive anthropological background, maybe Le Guin thought this an entirely pertinent aspect of cloning, but it was one I had never before delved into. I thought it was interesting that she described the ten as beautifully Assyrian-looking, yet they all said proudly that they were American. It is strange for someone to cling to a national identity when they don’t even have a real sense of their parentage or a human upbringing, especially coming from a society that dissolved its national borders after food shortages. Maybe the emphasis on national identity was part of their strange nurture, but why? What would be the purpose? I thought that the last remaining clone did not come off as creepy as Le Guin intended him to. It was almost more comfortable for him to fulfill the robotic, mechanical role of repairing things and occasionally making sullen remarks like those of an emo teenager, rather than having to imagine him as a fully fledged person, just with nine identical counterparts, all of whom were also somehow fully human.