Pam Baddeley's Reviews > Get off the Unicorn

** spoiler alert ** This is a collection of short stories dating in publication from 1959 to 1973 and first published in 1977, with my British Corgi edition dating from 1979. Some were subsequently expanded into novels. There is some interest in the author's introduction to each group of stories and the explanation that the title came about because of an orphaned title on the publisher's schedule, 'Get (meaning offspring) of the Unicorn' which her editor asked if she could do something about. Thus, a short story collection.

The first two stories became novels - 'The Rowan' and 'Damia' - I have a vague recollection of reading the second years ago but either got it from the library or didn't enjoy it enough to keep it. They concern a far future in which interstellar commerce is enabled by powerful telekinetics/telepaths. The first story is set on Callisto station where the star player is The Rowan, a woman with enormous ability but who languishes without love, and is the tale of how she finds it over interstellar distances. Her second-in-command, Afra, an alien from Capella, is a main character in the sequel which is about the daughter of The Rowan (the nickname is never explained) and husband Jeff. Damia, like her mother before her, contacts a mind across space but this one gives grave cause for concern on the part of her parents and Afra. As in the previous story, she, too, is bereft without love, and the closing paragraphs include an explicit statement of what has troubled me in the Pern books by this author, when Damia is temporarily unable to use her telepathy and has to rely on sight: "And he was suddenly a very different man. A man! That was it. He was so excessively masculine.
How could she have blundered around so, looking for a mind that was superior to hers, completely overlooking the fact that a woman's most important function in life begins with physical domination?"

Well! That explains a lot about the various non-consensual sex scenes in the Pern novels where people are either swept up in the lust of their mating dragons, or the man just decides that the woman needs a good 'seeing to' to sort out her hangups as in a particularly disturbing scene in 'Dragonquest', where F'nor decides to "initiate" Brekke, a reluctant virgin who naturally gets over her refusal and decides she likes it. And in 'The White Dragon ', Jaxom is wound up after proximity to raunchy dragons - not even his own, which is asexual - and overpowers his girlfriend though his dragon assures him that it's OK because she likes it. There are many pernicious assumptions in that statement, not least being the implication that women's most important role is childbearing, but also the idea that they just need to be forced and then they will enjoy the 'physical domination'. It does suggest a certain masochism on the part of the author which she projected onto women as a whole.

'Daughter' and 'Dull drums' are stories written for young adults about a young woman from a futuristic collective farm in a society where everything is based on social cohesiveness and conformity. Nora Finn's father has little time for her despite the fact that she has more aptitude for farm work - rather implausibly handled by computer control and automation - and has helped twin brother Nick with the assignments he is too bored to do. Things come to a head but societal rules come to her rescue: her father can't prevent her going to university. In the second story, incomprehensibly to modern readers, Nora is thrown off the computer course and told to do socio-pysch dynamics, a much better use of her talents apparently. The author obviously had no idea that the real interest in the field of IT is in the applications to which it might be put. Disturbingly, Nora's boyfriend spends quite a bit of time shaking her in every interaction and of course is against her studying computer science.

The misogyny hits a new low in a story which the author admits was never previously published, having been rejected by Harlan Ellison for his 'Dangerous Visions' anthology (to his credit, Ellison wasn't a misogynist). In it, Roy, a gay man, has a friendship with a woman despite finding other women repellent - she's the token exception - and she ends up in a household with him and his boyfriend and her own husband. She agrees to become a surrogate mother so that Roy can fulfill his dream of having a son - no daughters allowed - and he kidnaps her and takes her to a cabin in the woods to deliver HIS child. The idea for this story apparently stemmed from bitterness among her gay friends at being unable to adopt. Given the fairly widespread prejudice at the time this collection was published, it's a pity this very nasty story, which could only have exacerbated such prejudice, was included.

After all the foregoing, 'Weather on Welladay ' came as a refreshing mouthwash to dispel the sour taste of so much internalised misogyny. It concerns piracy on a remote planet where someone is killing docile whales by over milking their glands of a radioactive iodine used to control plant diseases throughout the populated galaxy. Shahanna is shot down as the story begins, and her mercy ship - she has been sent to obtain iodine as shipments have dried up - crash lands in a remote lagoon during one of Welladay's fierce storms. There is plenty of action, misdirection as suspicion falls on various characters who might be in league with the pirates, and thankfully a female character who is allowed to be competent and brave with absolutely no pining for men or having any need to be overpowered. This was the first story I liked.

Unfortunately, the following story - 'The Thorns of Barevi' - was a return to all the things wrong in the collection. Weirdly, the author introduced it as one of her humorous stories. I saw nothing funny in a tale of Christin, a student from Denver, abducted by aliens and sold in their slave market. As the story opens, she has been living off the land for a few weeks after stealing her master's flitter, a flying vehicle. She helps one of the master race evade others who shoot down his flitter, but even while they are hiding from his enemies, he rapes her and, this being a McCaffrey story, she 'enjoys' it. The author states that this story was an attempt to "cash in on the lucrative market for soft- and hard-core pornography in the 60s". Another one she should have consigned to the round file.

'Horse from a Different Sea ' is an odd story about the varied visitors to a brothel and what happens after their liaison with a woman there who happens to be an alien. 'The Great Canine Chorus ' features a police dog the author knew while living in the town in which it is set. The dog and his handler are contacted by a telepathic child whose father exploits her for criminal purposes. They try to help her, but gradually she becomes a hardened character. Given the story 's downbeat nature, its label of humorous is odd.

The next three were written for Roger Elwood, a prolific editor of fantasy and science fiction anthologies at the time. In 'Finder's Keeper ', Peter has an uncanny knack of finding lost things, so uncanny that the police became interested and he and his mother had to move town. Now their precarious breadline existence is threatened by a greedy insurance investigator who plans to exploit Peter's ability for his own gain. 'A Proper Santa Claus' concerns a small boy with a magical talent and what happens when that comes into contact with prosaic reality: the author implies that she had to give it a happy ending in its first publication as she reinstated the original ending here. And 'The Smallest Dragonboy ' as might be expected is about a boy small for his age who has to overcome bullying - there's an awful bullying culture among children on Pern - to have the chance to impress a dragon. A sweet story but nothing new if you've already read the first few Pern novels. There do seem to be some contradictions though: here the prospective candidates are encouraged to touch the eggs whereas in the novels that is a strict no-no. It is set in Benden Weyr as F'lar and Lessa feature. Yet in ' Dragonquest ' , their son and his friend Jaxom had to sneak through a back way to get near the hatching ground and both boys were concerned Jaxom would be punished for touching an egg. Also, Lessa isn't the only person who can receive telepathically from all dragons: so can Brekke.

The penultimate story is 'Apple' set in a future in which psychic talents have almost won legal protection when the telekinetic thefts of a wild talent threatens to unravel everything. There's a certain racist assumption in the identity of the thief.

The final story is 'Honeymoon' , a follow up to 'The Ship Who Sang '. The author says that it won't make sense to anyone who hasn't at least read the short story if not the novel of that name. I definitely read it years ago but remember very little about it. Again, some of the assumptions, this time that a 'cripple' is good for nothing but to be brain-wired to a space ship, is problematic when read today. Compounded by her having to have paid off a debt for her upbringing and even her installation into the ship. There's also the dodgy references that Niall, who runs the ship in partnership with her as her "brawn" is so highly sexed that he might be tempted to open the shell encapsulating her mid flight for some 'light
relief '.

I initially thought this would just about reach 3 stars but having worked through the stories for this review, I've realised I didn't like many of them so I think I will have to designate this as an OK 2 star read.