Halfway Human [Paperback]

The heart of Ives' story takes place on the planed Gammadis, where a neuter third gender, known as Blands, serves as a slave population to the males and females that comprise the rest of the population. The situation is further complicated by the fact that all children of Gammadis are essentially neuter, with gender not manifesting itself until puberty. The story opens with Tedla, a Bland refugee from Gammadis, meeting a xenologist from another world. Tedla tells "its" life story to the sympathetic Val.

"Halfway Human" is a gripping drama filled with political intrigue and populated by a fascinating group of characters. Gilman fully fleshes out the complex culture of Tedla's world. The novel deals with such compelling issues as prejudice, slavery, sex, power, and the relationship of an underground subculture to a dominant culture. The story also looks at education and empowerment, hypocrisy and lust, and the longing for a love that transcends vast gulfs of difference.

There are some really horrific and painful scenes in this story, but there is also much that is life-affirming. "Halfway Human" is a brilliant contemporary fictional version of a slave narrative, a genre which has played an important role in American literature; good companion texts for this novel would be such 19th century works as "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass" or Harriet Jacobs' "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl."

That's the setup, but what about the good part, the reason to read this novel? Well, the strange thing about Gammadis humans is that they are born neuter. At puberty, about 1/3 (very roughly, and the ambiguity about the actual numbers is a point of the novel) stay neuter, and the others turn half into males and half into females. There is no way to tell whether a given child will be male, female, or neuter. The kicker is that the neuters, also called blands, are condemned to life in "grayspace", literally underneath and "behind" the "human" world, and they live lives of slavery, performing the menial tasks of their society, leaving the "humans" free for the more intellectual and artistic pursuits. This is regarded on Gammadis as natural: neuters are supposed to be stupider, and less energetic, and literally to have no souls. The whole setup is monstrous, and at the same time quite clearly analogous in many ways to slavery in the US, and in many other cultures. In fact, though the novel seems to be promoted as a novel about gender roles, it really isn't. Certainly Gilman makes some such points, and it's not without value for its exploration of gender, but the central issue is definitely slavery and not gender. And it seems to me that many opportunities for a more probing (no pun intended, God help me) exploration of gender issues are missed: but I should emphasize that that's not a weakness, just a different focus than one might have expected.

The book works because of the believable but horrifying society revealed on Gammadis, with its uncomfortable parallels with our history and even to an extent our present. There are many disturbing scenes, and many moving scenes. The portrayal of the bland society, and the secret behind the Gammadian characteristics, is very well done, and at times has a "Ones who Walk Away From Omelas" sort of message to it: they have created a near-Utopia, at one level, and they try so hard to ignore the "screaming child in the back room": except it's not one child but 1/3 of their population. Much of the characteristics of the Gammadian society are very nicely shown, instead of told, and some important details are very subtly planted in the background. Details which seem trivial take on powerful new meaning later in the novel, after we understand the society better.

I had a few reservations with this book plotwise, but all in all it's a first-rate read, and very provocative. In many ways, this is a pure SF novel, in that its value derives mostly from the ideas it explores, rather than a particularly exciting plot (though the story moves nicely), or any outstanding "literary" values (though it's certainly well-written, and decently characterized.)