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2.0étoiles sur 5
What was once groundbreaking is now horribly dated, Aoû 9 2008
For anyone who's unaware, Strange Relations is a collection of two novellas and several short stories, all of which were originally published in the 50s and 60s. At the time, they were considered groundbreaking and incredibly controversial, and they've been said to belong in every science fiction library. Well, I just so happen to have a science fiction library, so I figured I'd better check 'em out.
Strange Relations is essentially a series of stories about first contact between humans and aliens. They take place on different worlds with different life forms, but each one entails the struggles of man when he comes up against something for which he has absolutely no frame of reference. The results are always perilous and often deadly to one side or the other.
Farmer seems to hold a dark view of humanity, and his characters act accordingly, making them hard to like. I'm honestly not sure if we're expected to like the characters, but we're clearly meant to understand and sympathize with their actions and decisions. I just found myself appalled by most of them. Instead of sympathizing and rooting for the protagonists, I felt bad for the secondary characters who had to deal with them. Perhaps this is Farmer's point, though: when we feel nobody is looking, the decisions we would make are selfish, the sorts of choices we wouldn't want others to know we secretly want to make.
Farmer has a fantastic imagination. Each alien species is unique, not only unlike anything on Earth, but vastly different from each other. Since these are short stories, the alien worlds are not explored as fully as they might have been, but the small details thrown in make them memorable.
Something to be noted is that all the characters are very much a product of the time in which they were written. Every character is middle-class, caucasian, and Christian. Homosexuality is right out. All significant characters are male, with female characters relegated to hysterical young girls, unfathomable aliens, or overbearing mothers. To be fair, the men don't seem dismissive or contemptuous towards women, they're just never the strong adventurous kinds, the way the men are.
For the record, I can see how these would have been groundbreaking at the time they were written and published. However, that doesn't necessarily mean they remain relevant today. It's perhaps unfair for me to hold something written 50 years ago to today's standards, but I'm not only a modern critter, I'm woman, so my bias is going to be very different from Farmer's. They're not a bad read, and I do admire the different cultures and alien species he's created, but the flavour of the 1950s is so strong in these stories, it's sometimes hard to look past.
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