The Ship Who Sang 5: The Wider Context

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The individual short stories in the series were written during the Apollo program, before the moon landing, during an era when minority rights and the traditional roles of women were becoming increasingly vocally challenged. Did this show in the content or preoccupations? How might a modern author treat the same subjects?

Comments

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    edited October 2024

    As is typical, the author's own cultural assumptions are very visible because they are different from those currently accepted, so yes it showed, A modern author would have totally different blind spots that would be far less visible to us. Not that it bothered me at all!

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    Yeah, I suspect a modern author would have worked a lot more outrage into the story.

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    On the one part, this was a story told nearer the start of the women's liberation movement, and so the story addresses those themes. That movement has moved on, so any similar story would address the issues in a different way.

    One other thing that stuck me, that I hasn't seen mentioned yet, is the role of money, debt, and servitude in Helva's life. She's a debt-bonded labourer, only one step above a slave. She had no choice about this debt-bond, as she was placed in the programme before she was mature enough to make the decision herself. Yet everyone accepts this as natural. The debt is there to "repay the cost of her education", but we don't see able-bodied people in debt-bondage because of their education, or other services provided to them by the state.

    Any thoughts on that?

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    An American writer is against slavery, but not the slavery that shaped their country, another slavery that has never happened. People aspiring to become elite have all kinds of ways of neutralising community to justify themselves. What matters about the start going nova? Helva lost her boyfriend. What else is new?
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    @NeilNjae said:
    On the one part, this was a story told nearer the start of the women's liberation movement, and so the story addresses those themes. That movement has moved on, so any similar story would address the issues in a different way.

    One other thing that stuck me, that I hasn't seen mentioned yet, is the role of money, debt, and servitude in Helva's life. She's a debt-bonded labourer, only one step above a slave. She had no choice about this debt-bond, as she was placed in the programme before she was mature enough to make the decision herself. Yet everyone accepts this as natural. The debt is there to "repay the cost of her education", but we don't see able-bodied people in debt-bondage because of their education, or other services provided to them by the state.

    Any thoughts on that?

    I felt it was a theme based heavily on a US-style self-funded approach to medicine. McCaffrey moved to Ireland later in her life but was brought up in the US. It seemed to me as I was reading it that a European author might have approached this differently - maybe more emphasis on moral obligation to society as a whole, and less on trying to balance books.

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