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A review by mrswythe89
Halfway Human by Carolyn Ives Gilman
4.0
Absorbing and fascinating, but hm, I dunno. It's as much about marginalisation and oppression as it is about gender -- well, more about that than gender, really. But I was surprised by the bit where Tedla says that there are blands in Val's world and it's all the people who don't have interests and do menial work and don't aspire to anything better. This was unexpected. I would've thought it'd've said that blands in Val's world are the perfectly ordinary, bright people who are crushed by poverty and oppression and treated like nothing by people who have marked themselves as superior. But maybe that's meant to be a sign of how Tedla's been kind of brainwashed itself by its society?
Ultimately I felt wary of what the book was saying, because e.g. there's the part where the Gammadis people admit to deliberately choosing people to be neuters. Which implies that they are right, to a certain extent, when they say most neuters are mentally deficient or whatever. When you read that as a metaphor for our world, what does that say? Seems kinda hinky.
Ultimately I felt wary of what the book was saying, because e.g. there's the part where the Gammadis people admit to deliberately choosing people to be neuters. Which implies that they are right, to a certain extent, when they say most neuters are mentally deficient or whatever. When you read that as a metaphor for our world, what does that say? Seems kinda hinky.