I really enjoyed The Fifth Sacred Thing, and I wonder sometimes just how
much our own preconceptions blinker us to particular aspects of what we
read - it is a cliche in certain circles that the reader constructs the
text, but obviously we are trying here to create some common ground for
discussion:
SC said:
> > I'm currently half way through this on the grounds that I've paid for
it
> > and am damn' well gonna read it.
I'm sure there's some exaggeration for effect going on here, but is this
really the spirit in which to approach a novel? If you're already feeling
so negative towards it, is there really any hope that you will get anything
positive from your reading, or are you just searching for ammunition to
back up your original bad impression?
> > A few questions spring to mind. Why is it always sunny in utopia-land?
This did not particularly strike me - although in the context of a future
where water is the most precious commodity - always sunny - does not seem
like such a huge privilege.
> > Why are all good-guys so sweeeeeet and lacking in individuality?
I did not get this impression at all. Many of the most central characters
are presented as flawed eg Madrone's pride about healing causes her to
overreach herself, Madrone and Bird have terrible difficulties readjusting
to each other on his return eg the fight over moving Sandy's plant,
Madrone's lack of understanding about how sleeping with Hijohn would affect
Katy and so on...
I thought that the City Councils demonstrated how principled negotiation
was an attempt to take account of individuality.
How did
> > they transform a major city into a garden paradise in only a few years
> > without sewers collapsing, derelict buildings becoming unsafe, rats
> > overrunning the place, etc?
It's twenty years, not a few years. There is no sense of a paradise - they
eat a very limited diet of food they grow themselves except on feast days
and as water is such a big issue I would guess that sewers would be an item
of the infrastructure on which they focused a great deal of attention.
Perhaps this amount of "progress" would not be feasible, but this is a
fiction, and its an interesting vision that Starhawk has created.
How do they manage to have all the useful
> > bits of technology they want without the manufacturing side - inventing
> > wonderful crystals that do all the difficult bits just wont cut it.
I agree that this is problematical, but I thought it was an interesting
conceit - this is a novel by an ecofeminist after all, so we might expect a
different take on science/sustainability etc.
In
> > other words, is it a feminist utopia because its only about
> > spirituality?
I don't actually understand this question. For me, the interweaving of
spirituality was intriguing as for most of my adult years (lapsed
Catholic!) I have been very anti-spirituality - "religion is the opium of
the people" - and so on, but now I am prepared to think about what
spirituality offers to people who believe in/hope for/work for a better
world. As a socialist and a feminist, until very recently I took an
extremely condescending attitude to people who were "still blinded by
religion", but now consider that to be a position that I really had not
thought through fully. (as an aside, you might like to look at the various
websites associated with Starhawk and see how pagan eco-feminists are
committed to activism)
Are there any feminst utopias that actually "like"
> > technology and make an effort to incorporate it sensibly into the
story?
Have you read _Body of Glass_ - not strictly a Utopia, but technology is a
central issue? Piercy's earlier _Woman on the Edge of Time_ is frequently
critiqued in such a way as to imply it is purely pastoral but technology is
integrated into that utopia. I guess it depends on what you mean by liking
technology and your definition of sensible. Feminists have done a great
deal of ground-breaking work on critiquing science and technology which
have tended to be at the service of and under the control of male, white,
middle class scientists with all the potential abuses that that suggests.
For that reason, I believe that feminist science fiction is probably more
ambivalent about "liking" science or technology.
> > Are there any characters in a utopia who drink beer, play pool, and are
> > rude to the neighbours now-and-again?
Finish the book - I don't promise pool-playing but there are plenty of
arguments and also celebrations.
Kate said:
> Now I add my complaints. Why is it that the gay men have their
> own little space (their "fairy section") but there isn't any separate
> women's space?
Sorry, this didn't jump up and hit me. I was more intrigued by the ideal
of communal living in Maya/Madrone's house. Perhaps my heterosexuality
blinding me here. Altho' from my recollection the "fairies" were only one
particular group of gay men - not the entire SF population of gay men.
Why do these people praise the Goddess in all her
> incarnations, but get queasy when it comes to violence? After all, the
> Goddess does have her violent, blood-sacrifice side.
This is not a homogeneous population - some worship the Goddess, some like
Madrone seem to think of her more metaphorically, some are atheists, some
are Catholics... The dark side of the Goddess is referred to very early on
in the novel when Madrone loses a patient in childbirth. I think the novel
is an extremely interesting experiment with the idea of non-violent
resistance and if Starhawk or her characters are "queasy about violence" I
am on their side. I would have serious ethical problems with using
violence in the pursuit or protection of any point of view/way of life and
I am glad that some people are willing to experiment with another way (see
Starhawk's non-fiction for testimony on non-violent direct action)
And why do all the
> white people down in Southern California seem to be perfectly okay when
it
> comes to skin cancer, but every white person in the North is dying of it?
I'll need to re-read to check this out. Does it have anything to do with
the wide-spread pharmaceutical abuse in SC? Or to do with the eco-system
being differently affected? Can you point me to the relevant chapters
where skin cancer is discussed?
> And why does Southern California have to be the bad guys? (Okay....no
> La-La Land jokes now...)
I don't live in the US, but I thought it was perhaps an extrapolation for a
tendency amongst some Southern Californians to exhibit extreme paranoia
about the threat to their lifestyles posed by illegal immigrants from
Mexico.
> I should have just stuck to Octavia Butler. She may be
> optimistic, but she's also practical.
Do you mean optimistic? I find her work pessimistic. And what do you mean
by practical? To which of her works are you referring?
I'm going to have to read the novel again now. I certainly did not think
it was perfect although the casual sharing of sexual partners without
consequent jealousy was one of the things which I found less believable.
And the apparent success of the non-violent direct action was undermined by
the use of violence by the SC troops who changed sides. Overall, however,
I found it inspiring, in the sense that it made me think about activism,
about sustainable living, about collective responsibility and so on.
Perhaps it needs to be read with a suspension of technophilia and
spirituality-phobia.
Joan
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