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going back through Orwell, Huxley, and Swift. It surpasses anything that such of his contemporaries as Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut have attempted. (. . .) |
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To reveal the mindset of the Yankee Americans as quickly and vividly as possible, Pohl shifts the narrative focus to the youthful Jupe (Jupiter), a "blazing patriot" preparing to venture forth to Space City to celebrate the long-awaited arrival of the yacht of that most mythical of all beings, the President of the Real Americans. Handsome in his uniform (every American wears a tailored uniform from the age of ten) and practicing "fierce military expressions before a glass," Jupe represents that ''tiny minority of males" on World who are "not merely combat ready" but are "combat-prone" because "they are warriors." A product of "his age and life . . . and gender," he longs to fight for his lost Homeland: "Recapture! Recover! Revenge! Those were the key words in the litanies he had learned with his first lisped baby words." Cloaked in military paraphernalia, Jupe is Pohl's caricature of that macho image which shapes so many American males and goes back, in part at least, to the popularized myths of the cowboy and the frontiersman. |
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Incarnate in the Yankees on World is that hawkish, combative self-righteousness which characterizes so much of contemporary America. In addition, male sexual fantasies have been structured into their society. During the thirty-one-year space voyage, the astronauts aboard the Intrepid "enjoyed" themselves as they chose, but they carefully preserved the monthly ova of the twenty-eight women aboard as well as selected sperm from the males so that, when they arrived at Van Maanen's star, they had twelve thousand eight-day embryos and "twenty-five robust young adults"the result of the single occasion when the twenty-eight women received embryo implants. On World, into the third generation, this "lost colony of human beings" has been "breeding like maggots"; they number eighty-five hundred. As in the manipulation aboard the Intrepid, the number of males is kept minimal, one male to each "nest" of one-hundred-seventy "sisters." Necessarily the women run the society, including the government (Governor, Senators, and "Congressones"). Ironically, because they are kept pregnant, "once a year at most, usually," Jupe explains to Mirandathey represent the sexually submissive woman who eagerly desires to serve any male available. Yet trained to fight if necessary, they avidly share the vision given the Yanks by the Original Landers: ". . . arming themselves . . . readying themselves to invade the Earth at whatever cost in life and destruction." |
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