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yourbookishbff's review
adventurous
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.5
Based on the book's back cover blurb, I fully anticipated an erotic space adventure, and would have guessed Naomi Mitchison to have been her generation's Ruby Dixon. That is not at all what this story is, and the contrast between how it was positioned and described to readers to its actual thematic content still has me reeling. In Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Mitchison writes in first-person the fictional adventures of Mary, a communications specialist and space explorer. As readers, we see glimpses of her life through her other-worldly missions to faraway planets. We see her learning to communicate in a variety of mediums with alien communities, and we see flashes of her own personal memories and desires and dreams.
While this story reflects on a number of questions familiar to science fiction readers - that of time warping and off-Earth travel and alien communication and human adaptability - most compelling are the questions it raises about reproductive freedom and motherhood. Mary, like all human women, is able to choose fathers of her children outside any expected long-term relationship or legal commitment. She weighs personal connection, appearance, availability and comfort and selects a number of partners during and in between her own independent missions. She feels fondness for them, as she does the children they share, but she is first and foremost Mary, a space explorer, and reproduction is a specific mission she undertakes when she chooses to, children becoming new members of a loosely defined crew with its own freedoms. At one pt, as she worries for her half-human/half-Martian daughter, Viola, she admits to the reader that such "motherly" worry is unnatural, as she respects her children as independent humans with rights to freedom of thought and expression and movement. For a woman in the 1960s - herself in an open marriage and a mother to seven children - to imagine, so boldly, a world in which women have complete agency in reproduction and child rearing, in which women feel no pressure to exhibit maternal "instincts" or to show maternal affection, in which women choose partners or don't choose partners, as they see fit, is remarkable. In her book Hatching: Experiments in Motherhood and Technology, Jenni Quilter, contrasts Mitchison's exploration of the future of reproduction with that of her contemporary Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. And now I can't stop imagining a different version of my life where Memoirs of a Spacewoman was on my high school syllabus instead of Brave New World. What would my conception of self have been in my earlier, impressionable years, had I encountered a mother envisioning new paths to motherhood? Had I encountered a woman unashamed to imagine an independent existence outside of parenting?
Absent in Mitchison's reflections are any meaningful reflections on race or class, and our willing suspension of disbelief in the effortless economy Mary enjoys is necessary. Aware of those shortcomings, though, this is a book I wish was more well-known, and I'm grateful to have finally stumbled upon it.
While this story reflects on a number of questions familiar to science fiction readers - that of time warping and off-Earth travel and alien communication and human adaptability - most compelling are the questions it raises about reproductive freedom and motherhood. Mary, like all human women, is able to choose fathers of her children outside any expected long-term relationship or legal commitment. She weighs personal connection, appearance, availability and comfort and selects a number of partners during and in between her own independent missions. She feels fondness for them, as she does the children they share, but she is first and foremost Mary, a space explorer, and reproduction is a specific mission she undertakes when she chooses to, children becoming new members of a loosely defined crew with its own freedoms. At one pt, as she worries for her half-human/half-Martian daughter, Viola, she admits to the reader that such "motherly" worry is unnatural, as she respects her children as independent humans with rights to freedom of thought and expression and movement. For a woman in the 1960s - herself in an open marriage and a mother to seven children - to imagine, so boldly, a world in which women have complete agency in reproduction and child rearing, in which women feel no pressure to exhibit maternal "instincts" or to show maternal affection, in which women choose partners or don't choose partners, as they see fit, is remarkable. In her book Hatching: Experiments in Motherhood and Technology, Jenni Quilter, contrasts Mitchison's exploration of the future of reproduction with that of her contemporary Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. And now I can't stop imagining a different version of my life where Memoirs of a Spacewoman was on my high school syllabus instead of Brave New World. What would my conception of self have been in my earlier, impressionable years, had I encountered a mother envisioning new paths to motherhood? Had I encountered a woman unashamed to imagine an independent existence outside of parenting?
Absent in Mitchison's reflections are any meaningful reflections on race or class, and our willing suspension of disbelief in the effortless economy Mary enjoys is necessary. Aware of those shortcomings, though, this is a book I wish was more well-known, and I'm grateful to have finally stumbled upon it.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Colonisation
Moderate: Medical trauma and Medical content
Minor: Sexual content
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