RS, Author, Novelist on Nostr: A liberal education†. In college, forced to take breadth requirements (thank you ...
A liberal education†.
In college, forced to take breadth requirements (thank you UCLA for the wisdom in that), I took a class that covered the anthropology and archeology of the Middle East. One of my textbooks was When God was a Woman by Merlin Stone. It's still in my bookshelf and I recommend it. It opened my mind to a different time before men got the idea that if you control women's sexuality that you can guarantee her child was his—allowing sons to inherit property. Our Indo-European heritage. Yes, the slaughters hinted at in the bible were all about materialism and gender slavery.
That's what I took from it, anyway No wonder I soon became agnostic.
The year before, I'd written my first novella. I'd known I wanted to write feminist literature because of my mother's experience fighting against a man's world. Over time, after studying ethnographies of many non-western and primitive societies as well as primate behavior, I began to wonder what the world would be like if the meme of patriarchy hadn't infected the minds of human beings.
How could I write that as SF? (It's what I write.)
Off and on, from the late 1970s to the 2020s, I struggled with how to get from our society to the precursor one as a future society. I wanted to write stories about modern people, not a Jean M. Auel The Mammoth Hunters book (also highly recommended). It hit me somewhere in 2022: To some extent it's what you don't say or show. We drive our cars, we don't discuss the physics of combustion or how to machine the parts. The other enabler was finding characters that could carry the requisite burden of an antiestablishment story while intriguing, not putting off, readership.
What brought it al ltogether (the reluctance series, actually) was the realization that I could take certain cartoon ideas far too literally, then then out the concept beyond absurd until it made sense. Discussing the exact details would be spoilers. I hope you'll be able to read the stories (beyond the samples I've posted here on Mastodon) in the coming year or so.
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† I credit my liberal education with teaching me skepticism and critical thinking. I think this is why many ultra-conservatives want to kneecap education in my country of origin. The end game is to force children to attend parochial schools that teach subservience to authority, or to attend underfunded schools that can teach little more than working hard and not thinking for yourself.
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
#BoostingIsSharing and #CommentingIsCool
#gender #fiction #writer #author
#mystery #thriller #romance #sf #sff #sciencefiction
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion
#RSstory #RSReluctanceStory #PennedPossibilities
In college, forced to take breadth requirements (thank you UCLA for the wisdom in that), I took a class that covered the anthropology and archeology of the Middle East. One of my textbooks was When God was a Woman by Merlin Stone. It's still in my bookshelf and I recommend it. It opened my mind to a different time before men got the idea that if you control women's sexuality that you can guarantee her child was his—allowing sons to inherit property. Our Indo-European heritage. Yes, the slaughters hinted at in the bible were all about materialism and gender slavery.
That's what I took from it, anyway No wonder I soon became agnostic.
The year before, I'd written my first novella. I'd known I wanted to write feminist literature because of my mother's experience fighting against a man's world. Over time, after studying ethnographies of many non-western and primitive societies as well as primate behavior, I began to wonder what the world would be like if the meme of patriarchy hadn't infected the minds of human beings.
How could I write that as SF? (It's what I write.)
Off and on, from the late 1970s to the 2020s, I struggled with how to get from our society to the precursor one as a future society. I wanted to write stories about modern people, not a Jean M. Auel The Mammoth Hunters book (also highly recommended). It hit me somewhere in 2022: To some extent it's what you don't say or show. We drive our cars, we don't discuss the physics of combustion or how to machine the parts. The other enabler was finding characters that could carry the requisite burden of an antiestablishment story while intriguing, not putting off, readership.
What brought it al ltogether (the reluctance series, actually) was the realization that I could take certain cartoon ideas far too literally, then then out the concept beyond absurd until it made sense. Discussing the exact details would be spoilers. I hope you'll be able to read the stories (beyond the samples I've posted here on Mastodon) in the coming year or so.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
† I credit my liberal education with teaching me skepticism and critical thinking. I think this is why many ultra-conservatives want to kneecap education in my country of origin. The end game is to force children to attend parochial schools that teach subservience to authority, or to attend underfunded schools that can teach little more than working hard and not thinking for yourself.
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
#BoostingIsSharing and #CommentingIsCool
#gender #fiction #writer #author
#mystery #thriller #romance #sf #sff #sciencefiction
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion
#RSstory #RSReluctanceStory #PennedPossibilities