"The Pirate" is about a conflict between two men, Coordinator Trevelyan Micah and Captain Murdoch Juan. Each is shown in the company of a woman. Braganza Diane cares about Trevelyan and hopes that he will spend his next leave with her although he makes no promises whereas Faustina has grown up in poverty and attached herself to a strong man for survival purposes. The two women could not be more different. In this particular narrative, each serves to define the role of the man that she is with. Poul Anderson, of course, shows us many men and women in different contexts, contrasting sharply with EE Smith's
Lensman series in which stereotypically bad women realize the futility of trying to seduce stereotypically heroic Lensmen who are either celibate or monogamous. (I am remembering a particular scene in one of these novels.)
I suppose that my introduction to male-female relationships in sf was the complicated set of interactions between the Okies, John Amalfi and Mark Hazleton, and the Hamiltonian Woman, Dee, in James Blish's Cities In Flight. One marries her but...
Sf is mainly about men and women and their relationship to the universe.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I thought Anderson's depiction of Faustina in "The Pirate" to be very plausible. I would expect the miserable early years of her life to make it likely she would be fierce and aggressive. More so, in some ways, than Murdoch.
I consider "The Pirate" to be one of the better Psychotechnic stories, a series I otherwise find largely unsatisfactory (another exception being VIRGIN PLANET). And we both know Anderson also became dissatisfied with that "history."
Ad astra! Sean
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