A Little Ambiguity is a Good Thing

I was recently watching a Q & A session on You Tube with the author John Scalzi. One of the questioners was asking about Scalzi's book Lock In. Lock in is an interesting book set in the near future in the aftermath of a pandemic that has left 1% of the population totally paralyzed (locked in), unable to move or communicate verbally. This is a huge health crisis (see any parallels today? But it was written in 2014) To overcome this, the technology has been developed to allow the consciousness of a Locked in patient to control an android body that allows him or her to interact with the outside world. The protagonist and narrator, Chris, is a lock in patient that through the use of a robot avatar is able to work as a FBI agent. What follows is a futuristic police procedural.

The person talking to John Scalzi at this Q & A session said they had listened to the audiobook of lock In and noticed that there were two versions of the audiobook: One narrated by Wil Wheaton and the other narrated by Amber Benson. He asked Scalzi why he did this, and was there any reason he should listen to the other version.  Scalzi said, he purposely left the question of Chris’s gender open. Chris’s gender really doesn’t matter to the story. He said it was interesting that most of the men who read the story were sure that Chris was male while most women listening to the story were certain that Chris was female. This sort of blew me away, I had read the story thinking Chris was male. It never even occurred to me that there was any question of (his) gender. But looking back on it I can see that the gender of Chris is irrelevant to the story. Chris interacts with the world through an android body and through an online virtual space that allows him/her to interact with other lock ins. Chris could be male, female, any flavor of LGBTQ, or asexual. Gender really does not matter to a person in Chris’s situation.

I remembered this when a friend of mine, who had read my book (Star Liner), asked if my main character was male or female. She really wasn’t certain. That gave me pause. I had never considered Jan as anything other than male. The first draft of my story had been written in third person, so there were plenty of friendly pronouns that would let everyone know that Jan was male (he/him/his). But before I had even finished the first draft, I came to the conclusion that the story would really be better if it was told in first person, with Jan telling his own story. I spent days going through the story and changing it, mainly altering those pesky pronouns (to I/we/our), and then making sure that it all made sense. After my friend asked her question, I suddenly realized that there were very few clues given as to his gender. The name Jan, could certainly go either way. Jan does have sex with a woman, but I don’t go into detail, so that doesn’t give it away. After looking through it, I found that there are actually one or two places in the book that make it clear that Jan is a man (one is the second sentence of the novel), but a casual reader might miss that.  

I thought to myself, what a missed opportunity. It would have been great if I had written it start to finish with the intention of making Jan’s gender ambiguous. The reason I say this is because, like Scalzi’s novel, Jan’s gender doesn’t make a lick of difference to the story. If Jan were a woman, the story would play out the same. The sexual relationship would be a homosexual one instead of a heterosexual one but so what? One would think that in the far-flung future, sexual orientation would make even less of a difference than it does today. The novel could have made a passive statement that gender doesn’t matter. What does matter is the content of your character.

Incidentally, I did intentionally do that with race. No race or ethnicity is ever mentioned in my story, because in my far-flung future, race does not matter. The characters can be whatever race the reader wants to assign to them. They are human; that’s all that matters.

I wish I was as clever as John Scalzi (in so many ways!) If you are unfamiliar with his work, I encourage you to check him out. His Old Man's War series, Red Shirts, and his current Collapsing Empire series are must-reads for anyone of a science fiction persuasion. 

(My science fiction novel Star Liner, is now available in paperback or as an e-book through Amazon and other online sources).

Link to Star Liner