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

questioned with her eyes, pantomimed comprehension, nodded, and walked out of camera range. They
never did show you the government guards.

I heard it another time and this is how it went:

MC: How do you like it here, Miss Evason?

JE (looks around the studio, confused): It's too hot.

MC: I mean how do you like it on—well, on Earth?

JE: But I live on the earth. (Her attention is a little strained here.)

MC: Perhaps you had better explain what you mean by that—I mean the existence of different
probabilities and so on—you were talking about that before.

JE: It's in the newspapers.

MC: But Miss Evason, if you could, please explain it for the people who are watching the program.

JE: Let them read. Can't they read?

(There was a moment's silence. Then the M.C. spoke.)

MC: Our social scientists as well as our physicists tell us they've had to revise a great deal of theory in
light of the information brought by our fair visitor from another world. There have been no men on
Whileaway for at least eight centuries—I don't mean no human beings, of course, but no men—and this
society, run entirely by women, has naturally attracted a great deal of attention since the appearance last
week of its representative and its first ambassador, the lady on my left here. Janet Evason, can you tell
us how you think your society on Whileaway will react to the reappearance of men from Earth—I mean
our present-day Earth, of course—after an isolation of eight hundred years?

JE (She jumped at this one; probably because it was the first question she could understand): Nine
hundred years. What men?

MC: What men? Surely you expect men from our society to visit Whileaway.


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 Joanna Russ - The Female Man


JE: Why?

MC: For information, trade, ah—cultural contact, surely. (laughter) I'm afraid you're making it rather
difficult for me, Miss Evason. When the—ah—the plague you spoke of killed the men on Whileaway,
weren't they missed? Weren't families broken up? Didn't the whole pattern of life change?

JE (slowly): I suppose people always miss what they are used to. Yes, they were missed. Even a whole
set of words, like "he," "man" and so on—these are banned. Then the second generation, they use them