A review by danprisk
Halfway Human by Carolyn Ives Gilman
5.0
A really fantastic book, with so much going on. I recommended this to an English teacher friend of mine right away as it's layered with so many different potential readings.
The primary reading is likely to always be a gender one, as one of the main characters in the book is asexual and comes from a planet where this is a normal third gender. This allows Gilman to talk about a lot of gender inequality issues in an indirect manner, and makes for some thoughtful points reading where I found I'd accidentally assigned genders to the asexual characters in my head without meaning to.
There's also race, slavery, caste, capitalism, ecology, etc all going on here. For instance, there's an interesting dichotomy setup between an info-capitalist culture living on a barren moon with relatively equal gender relations, and the ecologically founded culture living on a lush planet with a 3rd gender who are treated as a slave caste.
In terms of the actual story, it starts off feeling a lot like a classic science fiction - the manners of description and context of the story seem more like something from the 70s than the 90s. This is definitely present throughout the book, but get's pushed to the background by the fantastic themes that start coming to the fore. That said, some of the characters are a little wooden, and if you're really sensitive to this you might find it frustrating - for me, it was something I just noted in passing, but it didn't impinge upon my reading experience at all (and could be read as a homage to classic sci-fi in itself).
The primary reading is likely to always be a gender one, as one of the main characters in the book is asexual and comes from a planet where this is a normal third gender. This allows Gilman to talk about a lot of gender inequality issues in an indirect manner, and makes for some thoughtful points reading where I found I'd accidentally assigned genders to the asexual characters in my head without meaning to.
There's also race, slavery, caste, capitalism, ecology, etc all going on here. For instance, there's an interesting dichotomy setup between an info-capitalist culture living on a barren moon with relatively equal gender relations, and the ecologically founded culture living on a lush planet with a 3rd gender who are treated as a slave caste.
In terms of the actual story, it starts off feeling a lot like a classic science fiction - the manners of description and context of the story seem more like something from the 70s than the 90s. This is definitely present throughout the book, but get's pushed to the background by the fantastic themes that start coming to the fore. That said, some of the characters are a little wooden, and if you're really sensitive to this you might find it frustrating - for me, it was something I just noted in passing, but it didn't impinge upon my reading experience at all (and could be read as a homage to classic sci-fi in itself).