Reading classic sci-fi can be such a frustrating experience sometimes, like this afternoon I started reading Redezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke, and I was really enjoying it, this book has a very engaging plot and I’m very curious about what is going to happen next, and then out of nowhere comes this sentence:
In english for those of you who don't speak portuguese:
And it’s not said by a character presented as a chauvinistic buffoon but by a character that so far appears to be one of the heroes of the story.
I really don’t know why this type of casual sexism seems to be so much more common in sci-fi than in other books written at the same time, like this is a book published in 1973 for fucksake. Maybe because sci-fi for so long was erroneous considered a literary genre for men that the authors thought it was okay to be misogynists because they thought almost no women would read their books so who gives a fuck.
And I was so immersed in the story, but finding this sentence made me pause and start to think about sexism and about what the author thought the world more than a century ahead would be and what he might have thought about the feminist movements of his day and etc.
I will continue to read this book because I’m still interested, but I’m much more guarded now and it sucks.
