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the psychological device of ''splitting" the character into Kidder and Conant, the author manages to give the destructive aspect play without destroying the idealization. In the fantasy of the Neoterics, the story invents a form of social progress that escapes the dilemma of the genius, but the story also abstains from pursuing the social implications of this idea. In the fantasy of the Neoterics we can see hints of an idea that neither American SF enthusiasts nor scientists themselves have much encouraged: that progress is a cultural (rather than individual) product. Recently one can find this idea argued explicitly by Paul Feyerabend in "CreativityA Dangerous Myth" and, in a slightly different form, by Robert Weisberg in Creativity: Genius and Other Myths. I do not mean to suggest that Sturgeon's story makes such an argument, but that at some level it is aware of it. In such a story one observes a process of cultural (rather than individual) thought. |
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John Huntington, Rationalizing Genius: Ideological Strategies in the Classic American Science Fiction Story (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), pp. 5354, 57, 59 |
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One gains a sense of the reception given Venus Plus X by the reaction of Alfred Bester, the book reviewer for F&SF, who asserted that Sturgeon "has permitted himself to blunder into the trap that undoes many lesser American authors, . . . a deadly and stultifying seriousness about sex." Sturgeon structured the novel as a classic utopia; Charlie Johns, seemingly an American aviator who has survived a crash, is guided through the kingdom of Ledom by the historian Philos, who asks Johns to judge the society. From the outset the only mystery remains the sexual identity of its inhabitants until Johns sees two of them pregnant; Philos and others allow him to infer that he has somehow revived in a future time when humanity has mutated so that it is hermaphroditic. Although this makes him uncomfortable, he accepts it and learns that an all-encompassing love, particularly for their children, governs the lives of the Ledom. |
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Against this unfolding but essentially static background Sturgeon inserts a series of sharply satirical vignettes focusing primarily on Herb and Jeannette Raile and their two preschool children in order to attack the hypocrisy and inconsistencies in the prescribed sex roles characteristic of mid-century, suburban American society. In addition to referring to a wide variety of sources including Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Erich Fromm, and |
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