My opinion of Stirling's ISOT and Emberverse Series

Brian Boru

After reading the First Island in the Sea of Time book and the first three Emberverse books by S.M. Stirling, it has come to my conclusion that the stories would have been just as good without the dadgum Lesbian fetish and would have been about the same with a Marius Alston, and and a Timothy d'Ath. Maybe I am bigoted, but that is my opinion. Now if you excuse me, I'll now go into hiding from the colossal lynch squad that will go after my person.:D;)
 
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Faeelin

Banned
Somehow, I really doubt hot lesbians making out really hurt his sales amongst the chaps who buy scifi.
 

Malta

Faeelin said:
Somehow, I really doubt hot lesbians making out really hurt his sales amongst the chaps who buy scifi.
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Seconded with a Muahahahahah! Still I can't complain. It was his works that introduced me to Neopaganism and got me on my own path.
 

Brian Boru

Maybe but if they ever decide to make a movie of those books, then you know that Marian is going to have a sex change. Though if they used ole' Sam Jackson for that part, I'm sure most wouldn't complain.:D:p;):cool:
 

hopper2cool

Stirling's fascination with lesbians is annoying to me. It made sense in his Draka books that the female Drakas would be lesbians. After all it's not like the boys had to be nice to get laid or the Draka are shy about sex (of course how that happened is another question).
However in the ISOT books I did not see a single reason why Alston was a lesbian. I don't see why she isn't either. Maybe it's because after what happened to Swindapa it would have been squicky to have Swindapa hook up with a man. If Stirling hadn't had lesbians in most of his books it wouldn't have bothered me. What I didn't like about Marian was her attitudes about how funny it was that a black lesbian woman was in charge and how all these white people did what she wanted. More because it got old really fast and would not pass the mirror test.
In the first three Emberverse lesbians are far less involved. The character who was a lesbian was a secondary character and to be honest I could understand her and her motivations. However the next two books she got Mary Sued up to a level somewhere between Honor Harrington and Mara Jade so she gets very annoying.
Stirling does need to avoid lesbians not because they make bad characters but because he feels the need to have a "Look it's a couple of lesbians!". It's the Chakotay principle. If a character is basicly limited by their most obvious characteristic they are not a good character.
 

Tom Kalbfus

Banned
After all Nantucket is a diverse community. Lets see, they'll need some blacks, some asians, lesbians, they had American Indians, Britons, Greeks, Babelonians. I think some diversity makes the story more interesting rather than have everybody named "Joe Friday" and wear suits and ties, its hard to tell what the right balance is. You have to remember this author also wrote Conquestador. The colony of New Virginia, had a lot less diversity than Nantucket of ISOT, it was basically a "white man's paradise", it was a useful read though, it kind of makes you wonder where this society is going. New Virginia lacks diversity, because the "Gatekeeper" did not let in certain types of people, he felt it would cause too much trouble to manage relations between different groups of people when all he wanted to do as to extract resources from the alternate reality with as little social friction as possible, and trade with his home reality and do it in secret.
 
Petike

Petike

Brian Boru said:
the stories would have been just as good without the dadgum Lesbian fetish
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Stirling also obviously has another interesting fetish : Conveniently writing off vast populations of post-apoc people by turning them into mindless cannibalistic quasi-zombies... :mad: :( Anybody notice this pattern in Peshawar Lancers and the Emberverse novels ?
 

hopper2cool

Petike said:
Stirling also obviously has another interesting fetish : Conveniently writing off vast populations of post-apoc people by turning them into mindless cannibalistic quasi-zombies... :mad: :( Anybody notice this pattern in Peshawar Lancers and the Emberverse novels ?
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To be fair I don't think Stirling really thinks that things would suck bad. It was just an attempt to set up the world he wanted in a short amount of time. Look at most of the ISOT threads on this board. No one just says "lets wait 50 years and our grandkids will be able to get by comfortably" it's "lets go out and conquer or free the world right now".
 
Petike

Petike

hopper2cool said:
To be fair I don't think Stirling really thinks that things would suck bad. It was just an attempt to set up the world he wanted in a short amount of time. Look at most of the ISOT threads on this board. No one just says "lets wait 50 years and our grandkids will be able to get by comfortably" it's "lets go out and conquer or free the world right now".
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Well, I did say "conveniently" - as in "trying to get something out of the way, so he can establish his fictional world scenario without much fuss". ;)
 
Archangel Michael

Archangel Michael

Petike said:
Stirling also obviously has another interesting fetish : Conveniently writing off vast populations of post-apoc people by turning them into mindless cannibalistic quasi-zombies... :mad: :( Anybody notice this pattern in Peshawar Lancers and the Emberverse novels ?
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Seeing as how groups of starving, desperate humans have turned to cannibalism quickly in the real world, it wouldn't shock me if cannibalism did have a resurgence of sorts if the Change or major meteor impacts did happen.
 

xchen08

As mentioned, for the most part the lesbian characters aren't so bad until you've read a lot of Stirling and realizes that he has a bit of an obsession with them. It becomes more blatant when you realize that there are very few (I don't actually remember any) gay male characters of any prominance, and a good half or more of highly prominant female characters are gay or bisexual.

And Marion Alston's problem is not her being a lesbian, but rather her godawful levels of Mary Sue, between her katana and being a military genius stuck in a dead end job in the Coast Guard. And it really doesn't sit right with me that she is portrayed as fully heroic despite being an unrepentant adulteress.
 

Tom Kalbfus

Banned
xchen08 said:
As mentioned, for the most part the lesbian characters aren't so bad until you've read a lot of Stirling and realizes that he has a bit of an obsession with them. It becomes more blatant when you realize that there are very few (I don't actually remember any) gay male characters of any prominance, and a good half or more of highly prominant female characters are gay or bisexual.

And Marion Alston's problem is not her being a lesbian, but rather her godawful levels of Mary Sue, between her katana and being a military genius stuck in a dead end job in the Coast Guard. And it really doesn't sit right with me that she is portrayed as fully heroic despite being an unrepentant adulteress.
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Let me put it this way. Lesbians are more useful in an action-adventure novel than gay men. Why? Because Lesbians are more action adventure oriented, they pursue "male" professions such as that Captain Marion Alston in Island in the Sea of Time, being a caption of a ship takes her to the heart of the action, puts her in contact with the natives, and puts her life in peril on many occasions. Now imagine there's a gay man on Nantucket when the transition occurs, what sort of profession you think he would follow.

Let me make up a character to illustrate the point, lets say on that fateful night there was a one Melvin Smith - a gay man, he is a chef at a local bakery, he's also a part time floral designer, he does party planning, and interior decorating. So what does Melvin Smith do when all the lights go out on the night of the storm? He screams, he tries calling the Police to complain about the local black out, he worries about the cut flowers in his floral refrigerator, he panics. Without electricity, his refrigerators will grow warm and his flowers will wilt, oh what's poor Melvin to do? He bites his nails and calls his boyfriend.

Now if you were the author of this book, what sort of adventures can you run Melvin through in the year 1250 BC?

You see the point being, Gay men are effeminent, while Lesbian woman are masculine in their outlook or butch. So you see from Stirling's point of view in writing an action adventure novel a character like Marian is more likely to get into the thick of things than a character like Melvin, who's likely to hide under the table.
 

Sovereign12

Tom Kalbfus said:
Let me put it this way. Lesbians are more useful in an action-adventure novel than gay men. Why? Because Lesbians are more action adventure oriented, they pursue "male" professions such as that Captain Marion Alston in Island in the Sea of Time, being a caption of a ship takes her to the heart of the action, puts her in contact with the natives, and puts her life in peril on many occasions. Now imagine there's a gay man on Nantucket when the transition occurs, what sort of profession you think he would follow.

Let me make up a character to illustrate the point, lets say on that fateful night there was a one Melvin Smith - a gay man, he is a chef at a local bakery, he's also a part time floral designer, he does party planning, and interior decorating. So what does Melvin Smith do when all the lights go out on the night of the storm? He screams, he tries calling the Police to complain about the local black out, he worries about the cut flowers in his floral refrigerator, he panics. Without electricity, his refrigerators will grow warm and his flowers will wilt, oh what's poor Melvin to do? He bites his nails and calls his boyfriend.

Now if you were the author of this book, what sort of adventures can you run Melvin through in the year 1250 BC?

You see the point being, Gay men are effeminent, while Lesbian woman are masculine in their outlook or butch. So you see from Stirling's point of view in writing an action adventure novel a character like Marian is more likely to get into the thick of things than a character like Melvin, who's likely to hide under the table.
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I'm not sure if you are stereo-typing or are you trying to say Stirling is the one who is strereo-typing.

There are allot of gay men who are not effeminate, look at the whole "don't ask-don't tell" policy in the US military. Even if they are gay, they are people who are interested it what has been historically conceived as masculine activities.
 

Tom Kalbfus

Banned
Sovereign12 said:
I'm not sure if you are stereo-typing or are you trying to say Stirling is the one who is strereo-typing.

There are allot of gay men who are not effeminate, look at the whole "don't ask-don't tell" policy in the US military. Even if they are gay, they are people who are interested it what has been historically conceived as masculine activities.
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You got to admit that Marion Alston is a rather "butch" Lesbian who fits the stereotype of what Lesbians are, don't you think. If an author goes against stereotypes all the time he's going to make alot of implausible characters, and in science fiction the name of the game is suspension of disbelief. The first thing Stirling's got to do is suspend the readers disbelief about the sudden transferrence of the Island of Nantucket back in time and create realistic characters who behave in realistic ways to an unbelievable event. If too many unbelievable events take place one right after the other, he starts to lose the reader. One way to put that increadible event at the beginning of the book behind him is to create a cast of stereotypical characters, and usually stereotypes have a kernal of truth to them, not every gay male is effeminate, but a lot are, not every lesbian is "butch" but a lot are. There are exceptions to every rule of course, but the exceptions are not the rule, they are the exception.
 

eschaton

Man, so much fail in this thread I don't know where to start.

First, Brian - out of all the glaring issues with Stirling's work, you pick lesbians? I can't even remember who the lesbian character was in Dies The Fire - was it someone in the Clan Mackenzie? Oh, you mean Tiphaine D'Ath. I paid that character next to no attention, but I barely remember the second two books in the series anyway.

As for Marion Alston, I was frankly quite happy he decided to have a black lesbian as the main character. Partially because yet another white male heroic would have been cliched (his books are full of them), and partially because I'd have strong suspicions, based upon his literary themes, he was sexist if he didn't have a female protagonist. He didn't really "get" how to write women until Juniper Mackenzie IMHO.

He's an entertaining writer, but his themes are generally so...vile. Conquistador in particular was a hard read - it was damn difficult for me to pick up another of his books after that. I know he's defended himself to me before he got banned, but his books have a "romantic" tendency in them a mile deep, frankly bordering on authoritarian at times.

And as Petike said, Stirling has a weird obsession with cannibals. Not just any old cannibals, but the idea once you eat human flesh, you somehow degrade to subhuman status. Every single one of his books has at least one scene of a hunt (preferably of big cats, somehow), and a huge feast involving large quantities of meat.
 

Faeelin

Banned
Tom Kalbfus said:
You see the point being, Gay men are effeminent, while Lesbian woman are masculine in their outlook or butch. So you see from Stirling's point of view in writing an action adventure novel a character like Marian is more likely to get into the thick of things than a character like Melvin, who's likely to hide under the table.
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Umm, you know there are plenty of gay men in the military.
 
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