***Group Read: The Postman

It was said that last year's Halloween discussion of The Postman inspired this years Future Women read, but when a couple of us tried to catch up on the Postman read this year it turned out that there hadn't actually been a dedicated discussion thread. So, better late than never?

I'm particularly interested in hearing what people thought about the portrayal of women in The Postman. The author's attitude came off as strangely condescending to me.

Zoe, you got an extra 1 at the end of the URL for your link, so it isn't working. I went to the group page to find this, but you probably want to fix it.

Oh, weird. I wonder how that happened? Fixed now, anyway; thanks for letting me know!

Linked to this thread on the wiki...

Thanks! You're so efficient.

I didn't get the condescending bit at all. I felt that, while Gordon clearly wanted to protect women, he had a lot of respect for what they felt they had to do, and the sacrifice they made.

Spoiler warning....

It just seemed so weird to me when Tracy(?) was killed by an enemy, and Gordon's line of thought was something like: "Now a girl is dead. This is awful. Obviously it shows that women shouldn't be fighting." I'm not sure how that follows at all.

I didn't think his reaction would've been much different if it was a young man's dead body he had found. She shouldn't've been by herself.

(Though she probably was by herself because Gordon wouldn't let her go with them)

I feel I would've gotten more out of this book if I had ever been to Oregon.

Have to say that The Postman is one of my favorites of David's books, partly because it's not full of physics and "hard science" discussions. Gordon's thinking about the world at large, the world at hand, and people goes through a lot of filtering, including the standard sexism of apocalyptic novels. Most have brainy and brawny men who save the day, while the girls fight when they must and carry on the home front work. (Check out Verne's heroes--the women are only in the movies, not the novels.) This novel was one of the first, at that time, written by a man, where the roles were more equitable.

#9 And LOL! I would have gotten more out of Twilight if I lived anywhere near the story's "home."

By the way, I found out recently that David Brin has been invited to be a member of the science team for the spacecraft project I've been leading. I'm hoping to meet him soon!