<p>Review copy provided by Erewhon Books.</p>
<p>This is the first book I've gotten to review from Erewhon, I
believe the first book they're putting out at all. It's an interesting choice
to set the tone for their new imprint--very much a book both of the current
moment and of science fiction's past.</p>
<p>Jonathon Bridge is a man at odds with himself. He's not even
sure he understands everything that has upset his wife--the details unfold over
the course of the book--but one of the conditions for staying in their marriage
and co-parenting their child is that he spend a year in The Fortress. The
Fortress is a woman-run city-state which men only enter under certain extremely
narrow conditions--basically a gender serfdom.</p>
<p>This feels like a book from the '70s. It has all the
"and then it's a fortress OF WOMEN" and "let's learn about
gender in a very encounter-y sort of way" elements that...there were LOADS
of those, some of you read fourteen of them the year you were fourteen, I know
I did. And I feel like S.A. Jones was maybe one of us and wanted to read one of
them and realized how INCREDIBLY PROBLEMATIC all of those '70s gender encounter
books are in retrospect and said, huh, let's do one in the present moment that
people can read right now without screaming. There is a lot more emphasis on
consent, on structural problems, on being part of structural problems even if
you are not the worst of them. On empathy and understanding other people's
viewpoints. So if you grew up with those '70s gender encounter books and feel
like you'd like another that's more up-to-date, this is definitely for you--and
if you have no idea what I'm talking about, this might also be for you.</p>
<p>I do wonder whether this will age any better than the
previous iterations did. I wonder whether the things that it is saying about
learning what it feels like to be helpless, to consent and then feel uncertain
about the free value of that consent, the context of that consent, all of those
things...will feel retrograde and gross. But that's how we get there. We don't
get there by never talking about it, by never going off and thinking about what
someone else said. We get there by doing another round of them and then saying,
okay, but, but this thing, it doesn't take into account this other thing, and
then this, and also that. That's how conversation works, that's how discourse
works.</p>
<p>There's a lot about sex and gender and consent in here, and
I feel like Erewhon's opening statement was: we know what this field is, and we
want to move the discourse forward, even if it's sometimes uncomfortable.</p>
<p>Well, okay. Thanks. I'll look forward to that.</p>
 <br /><center><hr/><em>Posted from my blog with <a href='https://wordpress.org/plugins/steempress/'>SteemPress</a> : http://www.marissalingen.com/blog/?p=2722 </em><hr/></center>