Eyes of Amber and Other Stories by Joan Vinge

[james_davis_nicoll]

Being lazy, I clipped the TOC from ISFBD. It's interesting how their version gets the order wrong. I am sure there's a perfectly obvious answer as to why that is. I've put things in the order they are in the book.



Joan Vinge: The Turing Criterion • (1979) • essay by Ben Bova

The Turing test is one where you test to see if a computer is intelligent by checking if an indirect conversation with one can be reliably distinguished from a conversation with a human. Bova then draws a parallel with Joan Vinge by asserting that while Vinge is a woman who writes SF, she does not write SF like a woman (More exactly, he says she does not write "women's stories" or "men's stories").

I myself would not bring up Turing tests in a discussion of women writers but you know it was the 1970s and this was probably a big step forward by the standards of the time. This is roughly the same time frame that Sam Nicholson (a pen name for a woman whose real name I forget just now) was selling stories to Bova's Analog about (among other things) how awful slutty make-up wearing feminists are.

(Am I right in thinking one particularly tragic early version of the Turing test did involve women and not in a growthy sort of way?)


Eyes of Amber • (1977) • novelette by Joan D. Vinge

This is set on a pre-Pioneer 11 Titan, drawing on the extremely limited set of data we had about this moon at the time. NASA has succeeded in landing probes on Titan, which proves to have a significant greenhouse effect (although not nearly enough to make it comfortable by our standards) and a native ecology that includes intelligent tool-users. The probe falls into the hands of a local bandit-queen/assassin, presenting a potential funding stream for the researchers should they decide to sell video of her adventures to the public. Even though snuff films seem to have moved into the mainstream in this history, the researchers are highly uncomfortable about condoning murder even if it means more money for the space program. The bandit-queen has her own dilemma: should she trust the brother of her hated enemy and take his contract massacre that enemy's wife (the bandit-queen's sister) and their children?

First rule of space programs in SF: no matter how successful or large they are by our standards, the people in the stories will always bitch about underfunding. This is probably realistic.

The aliens are not very alien. Vinge talks about the problem of alien aliens in the afterword to the next story.


To Bell the Cat • (1977) • novelette by Joan D. Vinge

A mind-wiped war criminal sentenced to serve a research scientist in any way the scientist sees fit finds himself playing a central role in a first contact scenario.

This must have been written fairly soon after the discovery of the natural reactor at Oklo.

The aliens in this are more alien than in the previous story, although plot-logic requires them to be able to bridge the communications gap between species.

We're only given hints as to what our protagonist did in his old life so it's difficult to judge whether his punishment is appropriate but mind-wiping him first seems counter-productive.


View from a Height • (1978) • short story by Joan D. Vinge

The lone human on humanity's first infrastellar starship learns that the medical condition that isolated her from humanity and which made volunteering for this mission thinkable is now curable. The story details how she handles this revelation.

This was inspired by an idea Robert Forward had and a question he asked about what sort of person would volunteer for such a mission. The main reason the protagonist got to go is because the ship is in that sweet zone where the mass of the human and her life support is comparable to the mass of the automated machinery she is replacing.

I was quite fond of this back in the day. Not sure I still buy the idea that humans can be a cost-effective replacement for machines in space, although I reserve the right to change my mind.

Once again, these people have infrastellar missions but the story spends quite a lot of time bitching about how underfunded space exploration is.


Media Man • (1976) • novelette by Joan D. Vinge

Set in the same system as the Heaven's Chronicles books, a Media Man (something like a reporter, although without any expectation of objectivity and about as respected by the population at large as a necrophiliac), a space pilot and a spoiled rich kid set off to rescue a marooned spacer with an eye to claiming what the marooned man has discovered. The budding romance between media man and pilot hits a road bump when the rich kid murders the spacer in a moment of temper and the other two have to decide whether or not to play along with the drug-addled and armed rich kid or denounce him on the spot despite the near-inevitability of a violent and potentially lethal reaction on the part of the rich kid.

Vinge mentions that this was inspired when she saw a TV show in which a similar scenario played out, except that there was one protagonist and they chose to tell the murderer that they were going to rat the murderer out. This apparently was suboptimal from the points of view of everyone save for the people who had to fill 90 minutes of airtime.

I am not really sure how the pilot thought denouncing on the spot the armed drugged rich guy would work out but I suppose that one of the points of the story.

Vinge mentions that male readers assumed the media man and pilot never reconciled while female readers assumed they did. She was not sure where this split came from.

This turns out to be set in the same universe as Vernor Vinge's Zones novels.


The Crystal Ship • (1976) • novella by Joan D. Vinge

A young human woman learns about the forgotten history of her people and their lost colony from an alien whose people nearly suffered the same fate as the New World natives, save for the happy chance that they had a substance that was far more addictive and destructive to the humans than tobacco was to the Europeans.

I've never warmed to this. It has some fairly standard world-building bits I don't care for, like the interstellar transportation system the colonists depend on having a single point of failure, a homeworld that is utterly dependent on being able to export people for stability (despite which the interstellar transport system has a single point of failure) and plot-facilitating telepathy.


Tin Soldier • (1974) • novella by Joan D. Vinge

This shows the relationship between a cyborg bartender and a female spacer. In fact, all spacers are women because only women are physically capable of handling the job, something men have not handled all that gracefully; there are a lot of Manly Man colonies for the Manly Men out there and the cyborg got chewed up when he was a young man living in one such colony.

There's a horrible infodump near the beginning, something so awkward and intrusive as to be worthy of Poul Anderson himself but this was I believe her first published story.

Given past history I wouldn't expect men to be affronted by an inability to be a spacer. I'd expect them to dismiss the entire profession as beneath them, in as much as it's dominated by women.

Comments

[nelc.livejournal.com]

'The Imitation Game' was also a TV play in the eighties, I think, in which a mathematically-gifted woman working at Bletchley Park during the war, in a position which does not fully utilise her talents, sleeps with the, ahem, fictional, brilliant, awkward mathematician behind Britain's code-breaking efforts. He leaves his notes lying around his rented accommodation, so of course she reads them and – worse – understands them. She is arrested and locked up forever by the security services. The end.

I enjoyed the play when I saw it, but I can see some flaws in the plot now....

[yorksranter.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

Turing test for bigotry; could someone distinguish this person from a misogynist only by reading the context-free printout of their texts?