"Joanna Russ - Female Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russ Joanna)

MC: Yes.

JE: How foolish of you. Of course we do.

MC: Ah? (He wants to say, "Don't tell me.")

JE: With each other. Allow me to explain.

She was cut off instantly by a commercial poetically describing the joys of unsliced bread. They
shrugged (out of camera range). It wouldn't even have gotten that far if Janet had not insisted on
attaching a touch-me-not to the replay system. It was a live broadcast, four seconds' lag. I begin to like
her more and more. She said, "If you expect me to observe your taboos, I think you will have to be more
precise as to exactly what they are." In Jeannine Dadier's world, she was (would be) asked by a lady
commentator:

How do the women of Whileaway do their hair?

JE: They hack it off with clam shells.




VIII

"Humanity is unnatural!" exclaimed the philosopher Dunyasha Bernadetteson (A.C. 344—426) who
suffered all her life from the slip of a genetic surgeon's hand which had given her one mother's jaw and
the other mother's teeth—orthodontia is hardly ever necessary on Whileaway. Her daughter's teeth,
however, were perfect. Plague came to Whileaway in P.C. 17 (Preceding Catastrophe) and ended in A.C.
03, with half the population dead; it had started so slowly that no one knew about it until it was too late.


file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruisw...cumenten/spaar/Joanna%20Russ%20-%20Female%20Man.html (10 of 153)22-2-2006 0:45:56
 Joanna Russ - The Female Man

It attacked males only. Earth had been completely re-formed during the Golden Age (P.C.300-ca. P.
C.180) and natural conditions presented considerably less difficulty than they might have during a
similar catastrophe a millennium or so earlier. At the time of The Despair (as it was popularly called),
Whileaway had two continents, called simply North and South Continents, and a great many ideal bays
or anchorages in the coastline. Severe climatic conditions did not prevail below 72° S and 68°
N latitude. Conventional water traffic, at the time of the Catastrophe, was employed almost exclusively
for freight, passenger traffic using the smaller and more flexibly routed hovercraft. Houses were self-
contained, with portable power sources, fuel-alcohol motors or solar cells replacing the earlier
centralized power. The later invention of practical matter-antimatter reactors (K. Ansky, A.C. 239)
produced great optimism for a decade or so, but these devices proved to be too bulky for private use.
Katharina Lucyson Ansky (A.C. 201-282) was also responsible for the principles that made genetic
surgery possible. (The merging of ova had been practiced for the previous century and a half.) Animal
life had become so scarce before the Golden Age that many species were re-invented by enthusiasts of
the Ansky Period; in A.C. 280 there was an outbreak of coneys in Newland (an island off the neck of
North Continent), a pandemic not without historical precedent. By A.C. 492, through the brilliant
agitation of the great Betty Bettinason Murano (A.C. 453-A.C. 502) Terran colonies were re-established