A Brother's Price

As part of the ifmud book club, after seeing lpsmith post about it, I too have read Wen Spencer's "A Brother's Price".


Putting aside the gender issues for a sec, this is a pretty decent fantasy/sf novel (I dunno, are fantasy novels allowed to explore what-if implications of societal differences? If they are I have no problem calling this fantasy since it's not particularly interested in technology, but if not, I'm not sure. I guess I'd call Left Hand of Darkness sf. But that's in the future and stuff, and this is sort of alternate late 1800s). The idea of mixing western wild-west type stuff with feuding noble families is fun, although I think it's the sort of thing you can't think about too hard -- it feels like the culture goes from aristocratic to hillbilly with no middle class, but there are supposedly big cities and trade and so on. Perhaps they exist and don't feature in the story. It's an "intrigue" story, which means that there's a bad guy introduced near the beginning who turns out in the last third to be somebody unexpected, and then there's a chase scene and fighting and the heros save the day. All pretty good fun, although I thought most of the twists were telegraphed too much, and I'm not somebody who normally picks up on these things.

Ok, but obviously the big deal about the book is that it's set in a world where gender roles are totally different -- men are rare, but women rule. So you get all the cool gender switcheroos you'd expect, and some you didn't (or at least I didn't) -- the men have long hair, look beautiful and dress pretty (prominent codpieces and no underwear are the latest fashion, so women getting a husband can check out the merchandise); and the women have short hair and do all the military roles and stuff. Men are whiny and fussy and fluttery, although they're generally competent enough about cooking and raising the kids and stuff. The women are spies and soldiers and badasses, and of course queens. Major opera roles of both genders are of course played by women, and all the usual expressions use 'woman' and 'sister' instead of the male versions.

Anyway, so given that men are rare, you end up with these group marriage things where like ten sisters marry one guy. This is interesting since of course that's also the ratio for harems in male-dominated societies in our world, but the power dynamic makes it pretty different -- it's actual marriage, for one thing. The other big societal motivator here is virginity. In our world virginity is usually a big deal because the guys run the society and inherit stuff but don't have the babies, so they don't know for sure that the person who's inheriting from them is actually their kid. Hence the appeal of virgin women, who come with one of those tamper-proof factory seals. In this book's society, on the other hand, that doesn't matter at all -- the women are totally sure about who their kids are. So the author puts in massive paranoia about diseases -- guys who sleep around (or, really, are slept around with) are pretty much assumed to have syphilis. I'm not sure this is really all that plausible, but the effect ends up pretty similar to past times in our society, I guess.

Ok, enough background about the setup, how did it work? Reasonably well but it wasn't as earth-shaking for me as it was for lpsmith. Like, hmm, it felt more like a game of how many switched references can I spot than something that made me rethink stuff. Which was fun, but not exactly deep. That said, the closest I came is something that he mentioned to -- there are a couple points in the book where the female lead is being all noble and egalitarian and "of course men should be practically as good as women and get to learn to read and stuff", and she's still miles away from actually talking about an egalitarian society. There's all these assumptions that she still makes that she assumes are just the way things have to be. And seeing that is awesome, since naturally it makes me wonder about my own.

If you're going to write fiction about gender issues (I dunno if the author has done anything else like this), "Wen" is a great first name, since I had no idea what gender the author was. Then, irritatingly, there are some quotes on the inside cover that give it away. Nuts. I suppose the publisher wasn't thinking about that, but I wish they would have been more careful to leave it ambiguous. What the publisher should have known better about was the cover, though. lpsmith mentions a couple errors about it, but he leaves out the biggest one. Namely, this is a book about a female-dominated society, where men pretty much hang out at home and don't do much exciting, and all the derring-do and cunning and actions are handled by women. So why, exactly, did they decide to put on the cover the one scene in the book where the male lead is carrying an unconscious woman? Yes, it appears early in the book, but it's not particularly important. If you're counting number of times, the male lead is unconscious and passive way more than any of the women. Given the plot, why not put a scene on the cover that shows, oh, a woman being active and competent? Grr.

Anyway, after all this progressive gender stuff, I then went to see Narnia to balance it all out.