Rating: 3/5, average
Warning: This review contains spoilers! It really ended up being more of a summary than a review because I was having a hard time understanding the plot and I thought others might benefit from seeing the story written out. It’s well-written but there’s a lot of complexity in the language as well as the ideas and I think it’s more enjoyable if you understand it holistically as you read.
The first time I read it the 1950s language in the Herb and Smith sections was really confusing to me, but all you need to know is that they speak in puns a lot and it’s just meant to be funny. Those sections are there to contrast contemporary society which is struggling with defining (and un-defining and re-defining) gender roles with the gender-equal utopia of the Ledom. I didn’t include those sections in the summary though because they’re more for illustration and don’t really impact the plot.
CW: This book contains strong sexism, transphobia, and intersex-phobia on the part of the characters but the main themes are pretty progressive, especially for the time.
SUMMARY
Venus Plus X by Theodore Sturgeon was written in 1960. It’s a very strange story about a society that gets rid of sexual differences. The people of the society (the Ledom, “model” backwards) are modified to have both male and female genital organs (actually two uteruses, for some reason). The genitals are designed to retract when they’re not aroused, so rape is impossible in this society. The people are broad-shouldered and wide-hipped, appearing somewhere in the middle between male and female.
Into this future world appears Charlie Johns, transported by time machine, a salt-of-the-earth kind of guy from 1950s America. Charlie experiences the Ledom world from the perspective of an outsider, experiencing first the A-field, a technology which is a force field the Ledom use for everything from spoons to buildings, then the biostatic clothing which clings onto the wearers, and the cerebrostyle, a device that can record and replay thoughts.
Charlie Johns meets 5 leaders of the Ledom:
Seace – the head of the Science One
Mielwis – the head of the Medical One
Philos – a historian
Nasive and Grocid – heads of the Children’s One
Seace is the one that welcomes him first out of the time machine and shows him the flying invisible subway. Then Philos shows him how to wear Ledom clothing (a silk sporran that covers the groin) and tells him that “your world is finished”, implying destroyed by nuclear war. Charlie says he wants to be sent back to his time and Philos promises that he will send him back as soon as he learns enough about the Ledom to make an informed opinion. The Ledom summoned him because they wanted an objective opinion about their society.
Then he goes to see Mielwis in the Medical One and Mielwis explains how Ledom anatomy works and how the sexes are not so different even in humans.
Charlie finds his way into the room with the time machine was and tries to go home but he’s interrupted by Seace. Seace explains the how the A-field works.
Then Charlie and Philos go to the Children’s One and meet Nasive and Grocid. Everything in the Children’s One is very rustic and homemade, in stark contrast to the futuristic shininess of the One buildings. Everybody in Ledom society learns basic survival skills.
They go outside and see an eleven foot tall statue of a small adult looking up at a huge naked child that they call The Maker. Nasive says “The parent makes the child. The child makes the parent.” They meet up with a lot more Ledom and have a feast. At the end the children go in the middle and the adults sing them (not of or to, but they “sing the children”). After, Charlie asks Philos questions and Philos says, “We worship the child because it is inconceivable that we would ever obey one.” God as we know it is a God of the past, but the God that the Ledom worship is a God of the future, of passage.
Charlie asks Nasive why everyone ribs Philos. Nasive tells Charlie that Philos’s mate Froure was killed in a rockslide and he hasn’t shown any interest in taking another for many years. It’s apparently really unusual in Ledom to be without a mate.
Philos plugs Charlie in to the cerebrostyle. Everyone comes in every 28 days for a ‘checkup’. They go into a room locked with a handprint sensor that reads Philos’s palm.
Charlie Johns “reads” a letter in the cerebrostyle that is a kind of manifesto of the Ledom society.
It says:
Humans focus too much on sexual differences and are obsessed with sex. “There are more basic similarities than differences between men and women.” He points out that there are strong women and small men, and people whose genitals are naturally in between male and female (intersex). Clothing styles are arbitrary. The cultural exaggeration of the differences between men and women are so that men can feel superior – inferior men who feel insecure on a personal level can feel secure if they believe that men as a collective are better.
He says Christianity is a “charitic” religion, which he defines as “a religion in which the congregation participated, in the hope of having a genuine religious experience, an experience later called theolepsy, or seized of God”. Early Christianity and Dionysic religions were love religions and were gender egalitarian.
He says the authorities persecuted love religions because there was nothing in between worshipper and Divinity, so there was no role for authority. Adherents of love religions don’t have guilt, but the authorities need guilt to control the populace. “The only way to achieve that is to organize and systematize worship, and the obvious way to bring this about is to monitor that other great striving of life – sex.”
“There are only three ways of dealing with sex. It may be gratified; it may be repressed; or it may be sublimated. The latter is, through history, often an ideal and frequently a success, but it is always an instability.”
Then he talks about how the Agape or “love feast” was slowly phased out of Christianity for the Eucharist which eliminated all the love of fellow Christians and replaced it with obedience to the priests.
“And for all this capped volcano produced in terms of bridges and houses, factories and bombs, it gouted from its riven sides a frightful harvest of neurosis.”
“We Ledom renounce the past… We come from a nameless mountain and as a species we are unique; as all species we are transient. Our transience is our central devotion. Transience is passage, is dynamism is change, is evolution, is mutation, is life.”
This section summarizes it:
“Homo sap. Claimed to be searching for a formula to end its woes. Here is the formula: a charitic religion and a culture to go with it. The Apostles of Jesus found it. Before them the Greek found it; before them, the Minoans.
Men – or at least, the men who moved men – always found that the charitic is intolerant of doctrine, neither wanting it nor needing it. But without doctrine – presbyter, interpreter, officiator – the men who move men are powerless – that is to say, not superior. There is nothing to gain in charitism.
Except, of course, the knowledge of the soul; and everlasting life.
Father-dominated people who form father-dominated cultures have father-religions: a male deity, an authoritative scripture, a strong central government, an intolerance for inquiry and research, a repressive sexual attitude, a deep conservatism (for one does not change what Father built), a rigid demarcation, in dress and conduct, between the sexes, and a profound horror of homosexuality.
Mother-dominated people who form mother-dominated cultures have mother-religions: a female deity served by priestesses, a liberal government – one which feeds the masses and succors the helpless – a great tolerance for experimental thought, a permissive attitude towards sex, a hazy boundary between the insignes and the sexes, and a dread of incest.
The father-dominated culture seeks always to impose itself upon others. The other does not. So it is the first, the patrist culture which tends the establish itself in the main stream, the matrist which rises within it, occasionally revolts, more often is killed. They are not stages of evolution, but phases marking swings of a pendulum.
The patrists poison themselves. The matrists tend to decay, which is merely another kind of poison. Occasionally one will meet a person who has been equally influenced by his mother and father, and emulates the best of both. Usually, however, people fall into one category or the other; this is a slippery fence on which to walk…
Except for the Ledom.
We are liberal in art and in technological research, in expression of all kinds. We are immovably conservative in certain areas: our conviction, each of us, never to lose the skills of the hand and of the land. We are raising children who will emulate neither mother-images nor father-images, but parents; and our deity is the Child.”
After Charlie comes out, Philos takes him to the edge of Ledom because he wants to tell him something. He tells him how tasked to know and preserve the history and secrets of the Ledom. He explains that he was injured in the landslide and lost both the babies in his belly, and he realized the babies were homo sapiens. Froure actually survived and had one of her babies, which they named Soutin (the other one died). Philos decided not to have them return to Ledom society and live in the tunnels instead.
He tells Charlie that the Ledom are operating on babies without parents’ consent or knowledge:
“No one ever thought to question total anesthesia for our monthly physical, for example, and we have that all our lives; no one wondered why our babies were ‘incubated’ for a month before we ever saw them.”
Philos tells him about the Control Natural, a homo sapien with “his mind kept asleep; something they can check their work against.” Philos doesn’t want Soutin to end up cooped up and used for science like the Control Natural, which is why he won’t take them back to Mielwis.
Charlie immediately recognizes Soutin as Laura and passes out. When he comes to, he sees Froure and looks at Soutin again and realizes she’s not Laura, but has Laura’s hair. She wasn’t changed, so she is a human woman. Philos had been using the gender-neutral pronoun, which Charlie had been interpreting as male, and is shocked to see Soutin is a woman. Immediately Charlie takes control of Soutin as they walk to the Ones to help her escape into the past, telling her not to scream and pushing her face into his shoulder to keep her from screaming when they drop on the invisible subway thing. Charlie is still thinking of the Ledom as “man with grafted uterus” and thinking of the medical interventions as “the knives and needles stitching a manmade and inhuman newness into the bodies of babes.”
They come to Seace’s laboratory. Seace is shocked to see Froure after believing them dead for so long. Froure puts up their mirror-field to distract Seace so that Charlie can work the controls of the time machine. Charlie gets it going and throws Soutin into it. She says she wanted to say goodbye to her parents but he wraps his arms around her and reassures her it’s going to be alright.
Charlie and Froure are in the blank space between the future and the past. Soutin tells Charlie to open the door and he does. When he opens it, Mielwis is there. Soutin runs out of the machine, passing Grocid, Nasive, and Seace, and flinging herself down by Philos and Froure, who lie prone on the ground. Charlie accuses Mielwis of killing them, he says he just put them to sleep. Mielwis asks for Charlie’s opinion of Ledom. Charlie says, “You’re the rottenest pack of perverts that ever had the good sense to hide in a hole.” Mielwis asks what made him change his mind, since he seemed positive earlier. He says the fact that there is no mutation and they’re changing themselves. Mielwis asks why that makes a difference, and Charlie replies that what they do is homosexual and incestuous.
Charlie says what they do is wrong because it’s unnatural. Mielwis replies that homo sapiens broke the natural law of survival of the fittest with medical improvements. Mielwis asks what humanity would do if they knew about Ledom. Charlie says, “We’d exterminate you down to the last queer kid.”
Nasive sighs and tells Mielwis he was right. Mielwis says, “Nasive has held all along that we should share ourselves and the A-field and the cerebrostyle with homo sap. I feel you would try to do as you just said – and that you’d turn the field into a weapon and the ‘style into a device for the enslavement of minds.” Charlie says, “We probably would, to wipe you off the earth. Now crank up your time machine.” Mielwis says, “There isn’t any time machine.” Mielwis tells him he set up the scenery to make it look like a time machine, and Charlie just assumed.
Charlie demands to be sent back, and demands Soutin as if she’s a prize to negotiate for: “I want Soutin as well. You’ve gotten along fine without Soutin so far.”
Grocid agrees. Mielwis speaks the word that breaks the hypnosis: “Quesbu”, Charlie’s Ledom name, and Charlie reverts to being Quesbu, the Control Natural.
Mielwis knocks Quesbu and Soutin out with his white spheres and lays them down next to Philos and Froure.
Nasive and Mielwis are conferring after, and Mielwis tells Nasive that the real Charlie Johns was found injured in a plane crash. Seace saved him and Mielwis copied a record of his mind into the cerebrostyle. Quesbu was the Control Natural, so they suppressed Quesbu’s personality and replaced it with Charlie John’s cerebrostyle record.
Mielwis says Quesbu and Soutin can’t live together with the Ledom because they’re too different and their society relies on total homogeneity (except for individual differences). He says the Ledom are only in their fourth generation. Mielwis says the point of the Ledom is to keep humanity alive after nuclear apocalypse, and then to bring humanity back. They aim to keep the species, religion, and love alive forever.
Mielwis says sexual dimorphism is a “crutch”, implying that it forces humans to learn how to love even if they haven’t really learned how. At times, the Ledom will find a human to check to see if humanity is ready and then the Ledom will cease to exist.
Mielwis says he’s going to let Philos, Froure, Quesbu, and Soutin live at the edge of Ledom, with a minimal amount of help, and have them pass down their stories of the Ledom as a myth to their children.
One night after this Quesbu comes to Philos and Froure and says he can’t stop thinking of Laura. Philos laughs softly and tells him to forget Laura, Laura was Charlie’s and Charlie is dead. Philos tells him to remember the loving but forget Laura and give his love to Soutin. Then nuclear fallout starts hitting the A-field in the sky and Philos tells him to run and tell Laura it’s okay, they’re being protected by the Ledom. After he leaves Philos tells Froure that Laura married someone else and Charlie had crashed on his way to a bulldozing job cleaning up after earthquakes.
At the end, Philos and Froure sit back watching the nuclear fallout explode in the sky.
REVIEW
I gave this a 3 because even though I really, really admire Theodore Sturgeon’s talent, I didn’t think this was a fun read. It’s utopian fiction which tends to be philosophical and very dry. Utopian fiction spends a lot of time explaining every aspect of the society, and a lot of it I just didn’t care about. The A-field just seemed like some magical thing rather than something that would actually work. The food and clothing were just kind of weird. It was definitely the cultural and religious aspects if anything that I was interested in, and that actually didn’t get that much attention relative to the trappings and aesthetics. We know the Ledom have relationships with each other, but we’re not treated to descriptions of their dynamics in detail and why they’re better than present-day human relationships. I think it’s sometimes assumed that gay relationships are better and more egalitarian than straight relationships, but I think that’s a pretty bold assumption.
There’s also some serious plot holes in this book related to the nuclear apocalypse and the purpose of Ledom. Charlie Johns is told the nuclear apocalypse already happened and all the humans are dead, but at the end nuclear weapons are exploding again… but who’s shooting them? The Ledom are supposed to be preserving humanity in order to bring it back after nuclear apocalypse, but does that mean they’re going to go back to being homo sapiens at some point? If so, why would they do that if they’re an improved form of humanity? They also want to check humanity’s progress to see if they’re egalitarian enough, but what are they checking to see if they’re egalitarian enough for? And where are they getting humans to check if all the humans are dead?
I tried to distill the statements Venus Plus X is making:
- Women and men aren’t that different (it states this explicitly many times).
- Sexism is created by men who feel inferior on an individual level to make themselves feel superior on a group level (it states this explicitly too).
- Humanity’s need to feel superior and our adherence to patriarchal ideals prevents us from achieving or even accepting universal love and equality when we encounter it.
- It’s hard to achieve full equality without doing something unethical.
Ledom is set up as this wonderful utopia and contrasted with the sexist 50s era, but then its secret is revealed and Charlie (the reader surrogate) and Philos (the teacher figure) both reject it. Charlie rejects it because of his close-mindedness, but Philos rejects it because the methods used to support Ledom society are unethical. The whole book the reader is told the Ledom’s possession of both sexual organs is a mutation, but at the end it’s revealed to be the result of nonconsensual surgery.
I wonder if it would have ended differently if it really was a mutation? Would Philos have still rejected it? Probably not – he doesn’t seem to have a problem with the nature of the Ledom, just with the methods used to achieve their equality.
I think Ledom as it is could be a utopia or dystopia depending on your perspective. If you’re an outsider who knows about the surgery it would probably seem like a dystopia to you, but if you were born and raised in Ledom and were happy there you would probably consider it a utopia.
As far as we know, there aren’t different races or classes in Ledom, and in our world those axes also impact our standing in society. I’m not sure if making society gender-equal would solve all the strife, but that’s beyond the scope of the book. There are the scientists who live in the Ones in relative luxury to the Ledom who live in the country, but it seems like they can choose where and how they want to live, so it’s not really a class boundary, but it does kind of resemble one.
It’s kind of hard to gauge Sturgeon’s stance on homosexuality or gender-neutrality. The Ledom are described in a way that makes them sound kind of creepy-looking, but we’re only seeing them through Charlie’s perspective. Charlie is pretty freaked out by their appearance and keeps trying to put them into the ‘male’ or ‘female’ box even though they don’t fit (and the Ledom are very patient with him, haha). I’m not sure how much we’re supposed to identify with Charlie since he’s the only human there and he’s the main character, but he does and says some pretty awful things which make him less sympathetic (but would people reading this in 1960 have sympathized with him regardless?).
In the postscript Sturgeon says he got a lot of hate mail for this when it came out:
“I wrote an empathetic sort of tale about some homosexuals and my mailbox filled up with cards drenched with scent and letters written in purple ink with green capitals. As good Philos says herein: you cannot be objective about sex, especially when it’s outside certain parameters. Hence this disclaimer, friend: keep your troubles to yourself. I wear no silken sporran.”
It’s also interesting that it’s the homosexuality that people had a problem with over the transness or intersexuality… that says a lot about the 50s. Correct me if I’m wrong, but trans, nonbinary, and intersex people probably weren’t even on the radar yet!
This book is a trip! Hopefully this helped for anyone who wanted to get an idea of what this book is like or helped refresh your memory if you read it many years ago. I’m still not sure if I liked it or not… let me know in the comments if you’ve read it or if you’re interested in reading it, or if you have fun facts to share about Theodore Sturgeon or 60s scifi.
Peace!
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