The Stainless Steel Rat
Aug. 6th, 2010 02:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
purplecatThe Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison is another book that cropped up in my grand-bookshelf-organisation-plan and which I thought I maybe ought to read. It's a lot of fun, I was quite happily carried along by its con-man/caper plot with added scifi trappings although, it has to be said, it's more a sequence of outrageous plans than anything particularly coherent but they are written with verve, and never lose sight of how basically ridiculous they all are.
The plot-hole spotting side of my brain was mildly caught up in observing that, for a society which has, apparently, eradicated crime in all but a few specialised cases, it was a society peculiarly rife with bribery and corruption. Slippery Jim DiGriz gets a long way by slipping people a few notes and by threatening to expose evidence of their corrupt practices.
But primarily I was struck by an odd kind of sexism in the world-building. A brief Google actually turns up very little by way of in-depth criticism of The Stainless Steel Rat. What little I found is inclined to attribute the sexism to Slippery Jim, rather than to the world he inhabits itself which is, in fact, the precise opposite of my impression. Slippery Jim makes an error early on (and I'm going to spoil this because, frankly, you could work it out from the back cover of my edition of the book) in mistaking his antagonist for the male company boss, as opposed to the female secretary. However, that mistake could easily have followed from ingrained notions of hierarchy, especially in this (or so we are frequently told though, I would argue, rarely shown) remarkably regulated society, than from assumptions based around gender roles. Thereafter, Slippery Jim never doubts the abilities or ruthlessness of his opponent. He underestimates her a couple of times, but there's no indication this is because of her gender as opposed to his own vast ego. He has a moment of possessive patriarchal sexism at one point, but again this takes place at a juncture when he has deliberately placed himself in a psychotic mind-set and is being pretty viciously misanthrophic in general. However, there is a stunning passage where he muses on his antagonist's thoughts and motivations and sympathises with the way her ambition must be thwarted in a society in which she must always be the secretary and never the boss, or (once she reaches her government toppling phase) always the consort and never the King.
I found it very odd. I didn't really detect any overt sexism in the protagonist or the author, beyond this completely unexamined assumption that women, while as capable as any man, could never acquire roles of authority in a well-regulated society. The book doesn't read as if it is trying to be a social critique or satire. It seems quite content as a well-written, tightly paced, caper novel so this contradiction between what women can do and what they are allowed to do seems like an odd failure of the imagination. And yes, obviously that is sexist, but in a different way to any explicit idea that women are incapable of acting in certain roles. However, Wikipedia tells me that The Stainless Steel Rat is the first in a sequence of novels and short stories and I wonder if the others reveal a more overtly sexist attitude.
The plot-hole spotting side of my brain was mildly caught up in observing that, for a society which has, apparently, eradicated crime in all but a few specialised cases, it was a society peculiarly rife with bribery and corruption. Slippery Jim DiGriz gets a long way by slipping people a few notes and by threatening to expose evidence of their corrupt practices.
But primarily I was struck by an odd kind of sexism in the world-building. A brief Google actually turns up very little by way of in-depth criticism of The Stainless Steel Rat. What little I found is inclined to attribute the sexism to Slippery Jim, rather than to the world he inhabits itself which is, in fact, the precise opposite of my impression. Slippery Jim makes an error early on (and I'm going to spoil this because, frankly, you could work it out from the back cover of my edition of the book) in mistaking his antagonist for the male company boss, as opposed to the female secretary. However, that mistake could easily have followed from ingrained notions of hierarchy, especially in this (or so we are frequently told though, I would argue, rarely shown) remarkably regulated society, than from assumptions based around gender roles. Thereafter, Slippery Jim never doubts the abilities or ruthlessness of his opponent. He underestimates her a couple of times, but there's no indication this is because of her gender as opposed to his own vast ego. He has a moment of possessive patriarchal sexism at one point, but again this takes place at a juncture when he has deliberately placed himself in a psychotic mind-set and is being pretty viciously misanthrophic in general. However, there is a stunning passage where he muses on his antagonist's thoughts and motivations and sympathises with the way her ambition must be thwarted in a society in which she must always be the secretary and never the boss, or (once she reaches her government toppling phase) always the consort and never the King.
I found it very odd. I didn't really detect any overt sexism in the protagonist or the author, beyond this completely unexamined assumption that women, while as capable as any man, could never acquire roles of authority in a well-regulated society. The book doesn't read as if it is trying to be a social critique or satire. It seems quite content as a well-written, tightly paced, caper novel so this contradiction between what women can do and what they are allowed to do seems like an odd failure of the imagination. And yes, obviously that is sexist, but in a different way to any explicit idea that women are incapable of acting in certain roles. However, Wikipedia tells me that The Stainless Steel Rat is the first in a sequence of novels and short stories and I wonder if the others reveal a more overtly sexist attitude.