On Sat, 19 Apr 1997, farah mendlesohn wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Apr 1997 12:48:43 -0500 Michael Marc Levy wrote:
>
> > Based on class evaluations and comments during discussion, it
> [Door into Ocean] was too
> > complex and too slow, nothing much happened, passive resistance
> doesn't work
> > Mike
>
> Did you point out its connection to Quaker philosophy? It is
> interesting to compare it to her Still Falls on Foxfield, to LeGuin's The
> Eye of the Heron (or is it the Compass Rose, I am not sure) and to
> Judith Moffat's Penterra. There seems to be a tradition of non-violent
> resisatance lurking around sf. One of the most sucesful portrayals I
> know of is Harry Harrison's The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted.
>
> I realise that this is sort of off the feminist topic, but *why* is violence
> both necessary and the cause of squeamishness? And do we as
> feminists have to discuss only "feminism" (whatever that is).
>
> Farah
>
Between them, Slonczewski and Moffett are sort of a two woman Quaker SF
sub-genre all by themselves, aren't they. Yes, we talked aobut
Slonczewski's Quakerism, and I brought in a colleague of mine who is a
Quaker (also a Zen Buddhist and a Jew simultaneously, but that's another
story) to discuss Quakerism and its rather successful history of passive
resistance.
My favorite scene in Slonczewski's books, by the way, occurs in The Wall
Around Eden. In it a biker gang bent on trouble breaks into a church where a
group of Quakers are holding a meeting. By chance a severely retarded
young woman is standing near the back door holding a baby and, when the
bikers break in, she hands the baby to the head bad guy who's so totally
freaked out by the baby and not knowing what to do with it that it
totally defuses the dangerus situation. I don't know how believable the
scene is, but it works just great in the book.
Farah, I wish I'd been able to take your history courses as history minor.
All we got to read were G.R. Elton, C.V. Wedgewood, Trevor-Roper and the like.
Mike Levy
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