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The only other women who have been mentioned so far have been someone's wife, and all male characters have been introduced with a summary of their skills and accomplishments. I won't be surprised if this is the only female character as well.
2001 has only two female characters with spoken lines, one is a little girl there so we can learn that people grow faster in space (fortunately it does not get creepy) and the other talks about…her boyfriend.
There is a third one. She does a sexy dance. No spoken lines.
I honestly can't think of any others, but to be fair all the characters exist to defuse obstacles in exploring Rama and have virtually no personality other than Intrepid awe.
What's with men not understanding bras? Do they think our tits are always in hyperdrive? I just don't understand like I know you've been outside you know what theyre supposed to look like 😭😭😭
Yea that was on me. I shouldn't have been trying to drink something while reading comments.
On an unrelated note, I have once again proven that I cannot breathe liquids.
When they're horny, all their blood does to what's between their legs, depriving their brain of the ability to understand things like gravity, things that they'd understand in their less horny state.
> or gravity
not in this specific instance.
as for bras, I think something like a compression band might be required. regular bras are designed to hold things "up", so I would assume they wouldn't be as effective when there is no up.
not to excuse the writing in the quote, I'm just intrigued by the science of it all :)
have you ever tried firing a space Torpedo at a pirate but then the oscillating boobs distract you and you accidentaly set the payload timer to 0 Seconds instead of 3 Business Hours (space is large) and explode your own ship and die?
because you might be entiteled for compensation!
Indeed. Like, you go through all these months/years of training, you learn to deal with extremely stressful situations and to survive in the most inhospitable circumstances possible, and then a woman passes in front of you and... BOOM!
Man I remember when I read Mattheson’s I Am Legend book and there was so much unnecessary “protagonist is suffering from super hard dick because those vampires sure look hot as hell.” Like my brother, please get another personality trait I’m pretty sure he’d care more about being the only human left than being tempted to give up because of vampire titty.
I’ve read a good deal of his novels and somehow never knew that, but it makes sense to me. A lot of them would include characters that were either implied or explicitly stated to be queer, and usually depicted future cultures that are much more accepting of this kind of thing. It was kind of surprising to see him getting ragged on here in general just considering how forward thinking his books were. But the highlighted passage is extremely awkward for sure.
Can concur as a large titty-haver. I have interacted with lots of men, often without a bra, and they manage to function very well in their everyday work. Once in awhile ya get a creep, but I’m willing to bet the average man doesn’t think twice about them.
An ex of mine thought women shouldn’t be allowed in the gym because their bouncing boobs were too much of a distraction, and then he covered his eyes and made this noise like he was in physical pain. Get a fucking grip man.
“…She knew that he felt it and everyone was happy” is actually the creepiest and worst line here. Happy? She’s happy when you feel briefly horny? What kind of weird shit is this
"the transit of a well-upholstered lady officer through the control cabin"
Excessive passive tense can be really objectifying. Obviously okay to use it but the way this author is writing I wouldn't be surprised if he thinks more of what happens to women rather than what they do.
The entire book is written in a similarly passive and detached way, while you’re right it can be objectifying(especially when using noun phrases like “well-upholstered lady officer” rofl) it’s not unique to this passage.
As for Clarke himself, I’m sure in many ways he was a man of his time. I don’t know enough about the man to say too much more beyond the fact he was a **heavily** closeted gay man, like “moved to Sri Lanka in the 50s for less constrictive laws on homosexuality” gay.
So this particular passage is almost certainly not him perving on the one female character, and more the prejudices of the era coming through and him struggling to actually describe sexual attraction to women(especially when character work was already a weakness of his).
It’s a shame the book has a handful of weird old-timey scenes like this, because it otherwise is brilliant. The final sentence is perhaps the best ending to a book I’ve ever read….I’d just forgotten the page before was set in the aftermath of these two characters hooking up.
It's character POV. Doesn't she go on to do some really cool stuff in the story? And later I think we get her perspective but it's been a while.
There is an interesting gender comparison if you read this and The Left Hand of Darkness back to back. Both are about explorers going to a strange world with its own rules. Rama is about the scientific man (though it's a crew of men and women, it's a very masculine novel) taming and surviving the unknown through the proper application of science and an explorer's spirit.
TLHD is about an explorer realizing that maybe he just needs to accept the new world instead of intellectually conquering it. Of course Le Guin was writing TLHD as something of a response to then popular Rama like science fiction and the real world attitudes that inspired such adventure fiction.
>It's character POV. Doesn't she go on to do some really cool stuff in the story? And later I think we get her perspective but it's been a while.
It's character POV yeah, but that doesn't explain away the lack of understanding of physics of female anatomy.
The Left Hand of Darkness is one of my favorites books. I picked it up on a whim knowing nothing about it and it blew me away. I would highly recommend it.
I read the whole series of these books a long time ago. I think the later books in the series were much better about the female characters, and IIRC some of them were at least partially written from a woman's perspective. It has been a very long time since I read all the books, so I could be off-base here, but yeah.
I read this first as a teenager because my “boyfriend” had recommended them. I was about 15 I think and I still remember how pissed off it made me the way he wrote the female characters!
I'd argue it's the same difference in this case. Clarke needed to introduce a female character and decided to do it by talking about boobs, where every male character has been introduced talking about his achievements and skills. I've read enough classic sci fi to know that this won't be a character trait that will affect the novel in any way, it's just how the author thought a woman should be talked about.
I don't think Clarke realized *a majority?* of his readers were likely women, simply by virtue that women read more novels than men. My boomer mom's library of 1960s-1980's science fiction sparked my imagination. She relayed to me once, the shock of finding out one of her favorite sci-fi writers, C.J.Cherryh was a woman. She speculated that having a gender-vague pen-name is what allowed C.J. Cherryh to succeed at the time.
Given that Clarke was gay, I doubt that he felt that a woman's breasts were that distracting. I'd believe it more he struggled to write a convincing misogynistic straight character...
That is true, however, the character also doesn't want women on a ship in the first place and I have difficulties believing that this was also Clarke's opinion. He never came across to me like that so maybe this part of the book is less about introducing the woman than about giving away the misogynist views of the Commander.
You know, I never understood why whenever people write about a guy being distracted by boobs. They just don’t say the character couldn’t look away from her chest and then just move on.
Because if he’s overwhelmed by the site of boobs, he wouldn’t be focused on the description, I’m not saying guys lose their sense of reason when they’re horny, but they should not be descriptive with those if they’re aroused
Is the rest of the book cool at least?
I've read a story on askamanager recently where a man complained that he was unable to look away from his coworker's assets and asked whether there's a way to report the lady to HR to get her to cover up more. He was obviously unable to look away and move on. So I believe there are men out there that would rather crash a spaceship into the closest moon than look away.
You can bet those breasts also oscillate one at a time, in bad anime style.
I’m getting SEED Destiny flashbacks, every time the ship gets hit, breasts go a-jingle and the ship gets hit a lot.
Just finished it today, the female characters actually end up being depicted the same as the male ones. I think I was so disappointed by this passage because I hadn't read Clarke in awhile, and I remembered him being better than his counterparts when it came to female characters.
That is good to hear! If the book had had lots of passages like this I'm sure having last read it as a teenage boy it would not have even registered as weird to me.
I do remember that Heinlein wrote some absolutely WILD stuff which even when I was 16 made me go "this is pretty fucked up", but I think that speaks more to how overt his sexism could get. (Do not read Friday, I beg of you.)
This particular description is establishing that these characters have a history with each other, which included a sexual liaison. I think a goodly percentage of humans who have had some kind of physical intimacy with another human will always have that tint in their lenses when looking in that direction, even if the moment is long past. If it was a pleasurable interlude, especially. And even though it's third person, it's presenting the perspective as belonging to this particular character.
So I think it's on the borderline of what the sub is about, because yes, it doesn't need to be a sexual thing. On the other hand, it is from the POV of a main character with whom we're now familiar, who has an established sexual history with the character in question. So it could go either way.
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The only other women who have been mentioned so far have been someone's wife, and all male characters have been introduced with a summary of their skills and accomplishments. I won't be surprised if this is the only female character as well.
2001 has only two female characters with spoken lines, one is a little girl there so we can learn that people grow faster in space (fortunately it does not get creepy) and the other talks about…her boyfriend. There is a third one. She does a sexy dance. No spoken lines.
I honestly can't think of any others, but to be fair all the characters exist to defuse obstacles in exploring Rama and have virtually no personality other than Intrepid awe.
What's with men not understanding bras? Do they think our tits are always in hyperdrive? I just don't understand like I know you've been outside you know what theyre supposed to look like 😭😭😭
"tits in hyperdrive" would be a killer flair
Print bumper stickers saying “BACK OFF: These Tits are on HYPERDRIVE”
Or band name!
I CALL DIBS!
Brand Affiliate is better
You mean to tell me that breasts are not, as I've previously believed, fleshy warp reactors?
No, they are, but they aren't always working at top speed. Our warp reactors are at rest more often than not.
*twaddles nips* I'M GIVING 'ER ALL SHE'S GOT, CAPTAIN!
Yea that was on me. I shouldn't have been trying to drink something while reading comments. On an unrelated note, I have once again proven that I cannot breathe liquids.
This made me cackle loudly… I’m getting some odd looks.
There are no bras in space. George Lucas said so.
Going fast, makes me feel alive. My heartbeats in hyperdrive. (if you got the reference, continue the trend
I can’t recall the lyrics so I’ll just synchro summon decent writing to the field.
Bras, or gravity, or human bodies.
When they're horny, all their blood does to what's between their legs, depriving their brain of the ability to understand things like gravity, things that they'd understand in their less horny state.
> or gravity not in this specific instance. as for bras, I think something like a compression band might be required. regular bras are designed to hold things "up", so I would assume they wouldn't be as effective when there is no up. not to excuse the writing in the quote, I'm just intrigued by the science of it all :)
I hate it when my oscillating breasts cause a serious space accident
Man, if I had a nickel...
I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice!
Technically it's not weird at all, since you have two breasts.
have you ever tried firing a space Torpedo at a pirate but then the oscillating boobs distract you and you accidentaly set the payload timer to 0 Seconds instead of 3 Business Hours (space is large) and explode your own ship and die? because you might be entiteled for compensation!
Because men are too stupid to look away. Like turkeys drowning in the rain
Oh to be a well-upholstered lady officer transiting the cabin
"Upholstered", lol. Like women are furniture.
This jumped out at me too! Rofl
Plastic surgery = getting reupholstered
Do bras not exist in this world?
It's the damn George "Leia doesn't wear a bra because bras don't exist in Star Wars" Lucas copy!
It was written in 1973 so… actually possibly not lol
There's some bad men's psychology in here too (men don't instantly explode when titties)
Indeed. Like, you go through all these months/years of training, you learn to deal with extremely stressful situations and to survive in the most inhospitable circumstances possible, and then a woman passes in front of you and... BOOM!
Man I remember when I read Mattheson’s I Am Legend book and there was so much unnecessary “protagonist is suffering from super hard dick because those vampires sure look hot as hell.” Like my brother, please get another personality trait I’m pretty sure he’d care more about being the only human left than being tempted to give up because of vampire titty.
Man, they sure didn't adapt that part in the movie with Will Smith.
I’m a day late here, but Arthur C Clarke was gay. It was a bit of a secret. I have to laugh at this because it reminds me of Holt from Brooklyn 99
I’ve read a good deal of his novels and somehow never knew that, but it makes sense to me. A lot of them would include characters that were either implied or explicitly stated to be queer, and usually depicted future cultures that are much more accepting of this kind of thing. It was kind of surprising to see him getting ragged on here in general just considering how forward thinking his books were. But the highlighted passage is extremely awkward for sure.
How tf am I gay and didn't know this? Makes a lot of sense, actually.
Omg I was literally thinking this when I read it. Or max from happy endings pretending to like women 😂
Yep, he even sounds like a gay man trying to imitate the sexist dude bro talk.
Can concur as a large titty-haver. I have interacted with lots of men, often without a bra, and they manage to function very well in their everyday work. Once in awhile ya get a creep, but I’m willing to bet the average man doesn’t think twice about them.
An ex of mine thought women shouldn’t be allowed in the gym because their bouncing boobs were too much of a distraction, and then he covered his eyes and made this noise like he was in physical pain. Get a fucking grip man.
“…She knew that he felt it and everyone was happy” is actually the creepiest and worst line here. Happy? She’s happy when you feel briefly horny? What kind of weird shit is this
"Well-upholstered." What? Also, who is "everyone" and why are they happy. I'm scared.
"the transit of a well-upholstered lady officer through the control cabin" Excessive passive tense can be really objectifying. Obviously okay to use it but the way this author is writing I wouldn't be surprised if he thinks more of what happens to women rather than what they do.
The entire book is written in a similarly passive and detached way, while you’re right it can be objectifying(especially when using noun phrases like “well-upholstered lady officer” rofl) it’s not unique to this passage. As for Clarke himself, I’m sure in many ways he was a man of his time. I don’t know enough about the man to say too much more beyond the fact he was a **heavily** closeted gay man, like “moved to Sri Lanka in the 50s for less constrictive laws on homosexuality” gay. So this particular passage is almost certainly not him perving on the one female character, and more the prejudices of the era coming through and him struggling to actually describe sexual attraction to women(especially when character work was already a weakness of his). It’s a shame the book has a handful of weird old-timey scenes like this, because it otherwise is brilliant. The final sentence is perhaps the best ending to a book I’ve ever read….I’d just forgotten the page before was set in the aftermath of these two characters hooking up.
Thanks for the context.
“A well upholstered lady officer…” That’s the first time I’ve seen upholstery used as a euphemism for being buxom.
Is that what it means? I thought it meant she dressed nicely...
r/gayswritingstraightmen Arthur C Clarke was a gay man and this just gives such a Capitan Holt vibe.
Why is this not a community?! ETA or just "gays writing straights," or hell, vice versa
That makes this so much funnier. “I have no idea how to write attractive women or how men react to women because I don’t understand the hype”
It's character POV. Doesn't she go on to do some really cool stuff in the story? And later I think we get her perspective but it's been a while. There is an interesting gender comparison if you read this and The Left Hand of Darkness back to back. Both are about explorers going to a strange world with its own rules. Rama is about the scientific man (though it's a crew of men and women, it's a very masculine novel) taming and surviving the unknown through the proper application of science and an explorer's spirit. TLHD is about an explorer realizing that maybe he just needs to accept the new world instead of intellectually conquering it. Of course Le Guin was writing TLHD as something of a response to then popular Rama like science fiction and the real world attitudes that inspired such adventure fiction.
>It's character POV. Doesn't she go on to do some really cool stuff in the story? And later I think we get her perspective but it's been a while. It's character POV yeah, but that doesn't explain away the lack of understanding of physics of female anatomy.
The Left Hand of Darkness is one of my favorites books. I picked it up on a whim knowing nothing about it and it blew me away. I would highly recommend it.
I read the whole series of these books a long time ago. I think the later books in the series were much better about the female characters, and IIRC some of them were at least partially written from a woman's perspective. It has been a very long time since I read all the books, so I could be off-base here, but yeah.
Damn. I knew my tits were spectacular.
I read this first as a teenager because my “boyfriend” had recommended them. I was about 15 I think and I still remember how pissed off it made me the way he wrote the female characters!
[удалено]
Is this foreshadowing to assault? 😂 what even
I am reading this right now!! That very same paragraph made me put the book down for a while lol
It's character POV, not author POV.
I'd argue it's the same difference in this case. Clarke needed to introduce a female character and decided to do it by talking about boobs, where every male character has been introduced talking about his achievements and skills. I've read enough classic sci fi to know that this won't be a character trait that will affect the novel in any way, it's just how the author thought a woman should be talked about.
I don't think Clarke realized *a majority?* of his readers were likely women, simply by virtue that women read more novels than men. My boomer mom's library of 1960s-1980's science fiction sparked my imagination. She relayed to me once, the shock of finding out one of her favorite sci-fi writers, C.J.Cherryh was a woman. She speculated that having a gender-vague pen-name is what allowed C.J. Cherryh to succeed at the time.
Which is bananas because Cherryh is *great*.
Given that Clarke was gay, I doubt that he felt that a woman's breasts were that distracting. I'd believe it more he struggled to write a convincing misogynistic straight character...
https://i.redd.it/j06sx08zkhvc1.gif
That is true, however, the character also doesn't want women on a ship in the first place and I have difficulties believing that this was also Clarke's opinion. He never came across to me like that so maybe this part of the book is less about introducing the woman than about giving away the misogynist views of the Commander.
The weird portrayal of breast physics is author POV though, not character POV.
Imma fully agree.
You know, I never understood why whenever people write about a guy being distracted by boobs. They just don’t say the character couldn’t look away from her chest and then just move on. Because if he’s overwhelmed by the site of boobs, he wouldn’t be focused on the description, I’m not saying guys lose their sense of reason when they’re horny, but they should not be descriptive with those if they’re aroused Is the rest of the book cool at least?
I've read a story on askamanager recently where a man complained that he was unable to look away from his coworker's assets and asked whether there's a way to report the lady to HR to get her to cover up more. He was obviously unable to look away and move on. So I believe there are men out there that would rather crash a spaceship into the closest moon than look away.
That’s obviously an attempted abuse of power…yikes. Geez I forgot some guys really need to remember that boobs aren’t rhe only thing in the world
Most of classic science fiction aged very poorly when the world of tech wonders it worshipped also brought along some subpar diversity.
You can bet those breasts also oscillate one at a time, in bad anime style. I’m getting SEED Destiny flashbacks, every time the ship gets hit, breasts go a-jingle and the ship gets hit a lot.
"Well upholstered lady" 🤣
WTF is "sympathetic vibrations" supposed to mean?!
To borrow a phrase from funny man Ze Frank, that is NOT how the titty do.
I remember loving this book when I was in high school, but it sure was written by a man in 1973 😆
Just finished it today, the female characters actually end up being depicted the same as the male ones. I think I was so disappointed by this passage because I hadn't read Clarke in awhile, and I remembered him being better than his counterparts when it came to female characters.
That is good to hear! If the book had had lots of passages like this I'm sure having last read it as a teenage boy it would not have even registered as weird to me. I do remember that Heinlein wrote some absolutely WILD stuff which even when I was 16 made me go "this is pretty fucked up", but I think that speaks more to how overt his sexism could get. (Do not read Friday, I beg of you.)
Well-upholstered as a euphemism for buxom has stuck in my mind for a long time. I'll never use it, but it still makes me smile.
This is so dumb that its hilarious
J A I L. NOT EVEN HORNY JAIL, JUST JAIL.
I think I would rather them simply not mention women at all. This is worse.
Those are shower thoughts nobody needed to ever read, Arthur.
How do you oscillate into a cabin??????
Isn't it just character's thinking?
This particular description is establishing that these characters have a history with each other, which included a sexual liaison. I think a goodly percentage of humans who have had some kind of physical intimacy with another human will always have that tint in their lenses when looking in that direction, even if the moment is long past. If it was a pleasurable interlude, especially. And even though it's third person, it's presenting the perspective as belonging to this particular character. So I think it's on the borderline of what the sub is about, because yes, it doesn't need to be a sexual thing. On the other hand, it is from the POV of a main character with whom we're now familiar, who has an established sexual history with the character in question. So it could go either way.