Barbara Whitley meets Davis Bertram.
Davis' surname precedes his personal name and he swears by Cosmos. Thus, to knowledgeable readers, he reveals himself to be a denizen of Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History. Barbara is described as a hereditary huntress, a wing leader and a novice in the Mysteries and thus is revealed to belong to a more primitive society. Although that society turns out to be women only, Barbara swears not by a goddess, by the Goddess or by Mother but by Father because Men are known to be absent but are expected to come. Her first impression of Davis is of remarkable ugliness simply because masculine features are completely unfamiliar.
People reveal their received conceptual schemes or belief systems on first meeting:
"'Jesus Christ!' cries Tomas...
"'Name of the Gods!' said the Martian in his own tongue."
-Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (London, 1977), p. 105.
Davis' Cosmos and Barbara's Father reminded me of Tomas' Jesus and the Martian's Gods.
(The fictional dates of The Martian Chronicles are 1999-2026 so it is close to being a past future.)
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
IIRC we see mention of the women only inhabitants of Atlantis retaining remnants of Christian beliefs in VIRGIN PLANET. Which makes this one of the few Psychotechnic stories mentioning Christianity.
Ad astra! Sean
I think Poul underestimated how weird Bertram would look to the locals.
And how difficult it would be for them to see him as anything -but- ugly. By the time you're in your 20's, those things are mostly set at a preconscious level.
There's a hilarious skit I saw once, about a man and a woman sizing each other up on a subway in Toronto.
You hear their thoughts, but of course they can't.
Him: I bet she works at something glamorous.
Her: I am so sick of being a dental hygienist.
Him: I bet she likes football.
Her: I bet he likes to shop.
Him: I bet she'd like a fishing holiday up north.
Her: I can just see him helping me pick out curtains.
-- they exchange names and phone numbers when they get off the subway and you can tell it's going to be a disaster.
The point being that men and women aren't all that compatible even when they grow up with each other.
I strongly suspect that a culture that had been all-female for a long multi-generational time would be extremely difficult for a man to comprehend or exist in without arousing strong negative feelings on both sides.
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