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Tripoint Q3 - Rape
Rape is central to this book. Marie is suffering PTSD from the rape which resulted in Thomas , who is damaged severely as a result of Marie's monomanial revenge-seeking. Tomas repeatedly suffers from nightmares that someone is having sex with him while he is drugged out in Jump, and it seems to be Capella who is doing it to him, though there is no proof. Since Jump is a strange sanity abusing mental state in which most people render themselves unconscious with drugsto bear, he may be consenting or he may not be as he remembers little about it. But he is very disturbed by it.
Did this make you feel uncomfortable? Did the treatment of Rape seem exploitative? Does addressing things like this belong in fiction? Do the repercussions of this act seem realistic?
Comments
The main thing that seemed weird was that (so far as I could tell) there were no structures or mechanisms for dealing with the event or helping any of the victims process it. Was there no process on Sprite (described as a family ship) for anyone to recognise what was happening with Tom and intervene? On the other hand, pretty much everyone seemed weird and screwed up so maybe there was just an expectation that you just got on with things?
It didn't feel like an environment that was survivable in an emotional sense.
I liked that it was deliberately unclear whether the incident with Marie and Austin was a rape or not. Marie was certainly in over her head, and reacted badly to the initial sexual encounter. We don't know how much control either of them had over how the incident escalated into a confrontation between two ships.
As for Tom, he was removed from Marie's care when young, but went back to her later. But you're right, no-one seems to have attempted to straighten out Marie. Yes, she may have refused it initially, but I'd have thought she'd have been worn down over the twenty-ish years since Tom was born.
Capella? A predator, exploiting her ability to move in jump, and her position as seconded-from-Fleet navigator, to hurt others. Cherryh could have written that Capella didn't have much control over her actions during her lucid intervals in jump, hence couldn't have stopped her sexual need for Tom. But she didn't.
No.
No.
Everything in the real world belongs in fiction, and a lot of things that aren't in the real world, too.
I mean, I guess in the absence of a meaningful system of law and order, then I think yes.
Capella is a strange character indeed.
I got the impression (rightly or wrongly) that Capella is one of (a very few?) individuals who can learn to remain conscious and comparatively sane during the jump. A corollary is that she can "visit" others though I was never sure if this visitation was real in the sense of trotting along to a cabin, or instead a kind of hallucination of mental conversation. Either way she gets to have more control over and memory of the event than whoever she "sees".
The later parts of the book suggested to me that Tom also has this ability (in latent form?) and that Capella wants to cultivate it so she has someone else to talk to. So maybe Tom is being set up to become a navigator?
(More question marks than confidences there)
I believe you are correct on all counts