More Words, Deeper Hole

I just reread it. I wouldn't use the word reprehensible, but the story's attitude toward women is certainly very dated. Sturgeon still thinks that fainting dead away when you hear bad news is a thing. And I notice that while the woman in the story gets some fairly good lines to say, she doesn't seem to have a past, a job, a family, or really any specificity except for an unusual hair and eye color; she fears death, but we never find out what she hoped for from life; she's a young woman with breast cancer and apparently that's all we need to know.

She also seems inordinately impressed with the great man she's blundered into, but I think that has less to do with Sturgeon's attitude toward women than with his attitude toward the scientist character. The story depends for its effect on the reader's willingness to go along with her, and be impressed by his library, his bonsai, his philosophizing, and his bitterness against the world. When I was fourteen I ate this stuff up. Now the story just seems sententious and unconvincing.