Yesterday, on my way back from a business trip, I had the most enchanting encounter, which led to an unexpectedly satisfying discussion about whether we will ever unravel the black box that is the human mind, and from there to books and to philosophical musings.
At one point, the woman asked me who my favorite authors are, and when mentioned Asimov as one of them, her reaction caused a pause in me. Her reticence about him was due to the fact that his stories have no strong female characters. In the moment, I was unable to counter the point and simply stated that he was, unfortunately, a man of his time.
However, while on my return flight, I returned to her comments and thought to myself “Well, Asimov did actually have strong and prominent female protagonists in his books, characters such as Susan Calvin, the head psychologist of US Robotics, who was involved in numerous shorts and novellas about the evolution of the positronic mind.”
But does one character absolve Asimov from his failure in this domain? I googled strong characters in Asimov’s works, and Gemini (Google’s AI) remarked that although his early works had few, Asimov eventually understood that times were changing and that his stories should include more female characters in prominent roles. Gemini then listed quite a number of them…none that I recalled particularly well, if I recalled them at all.
So, perhaps he did fail at fully representing women in his body of work. Still, I loved his books and still do; Their breadth, their scope, their intelligence are simply too fascinating to be dismissed. I am glad, nonetheless, that [male] authors have become not only more sensitive to the need for proper representation in their stories, but also naturally and thankfully more inclusive, though there is still work to do in this domain. Let us hope, as well, that what we have gained, as a society, since the early part of the 20th century will not be erased by current ill-informed backlash.
And my thanks to the chance encounter which led me to this reflection.
L.A.
