Each of our stories for last week were set in the future, a frequent setting in SF. Each story foregrounds characters who are facing universal human dilemmas: how to triumph when you are different and despised; how to realize your dreams in a world that limits your aspirations, or how to provide for your family when your culture constrains you.

As the characters try to solve their problems, the background information emerges, and in SF this is as much a focus as the characters. Figuring out this background and how it has come to be intrigues the SF reader but can frustrate someone not used to SF conventions. If you don’t read carefully, the background can pass you by in a blur of mystery, or perhaps you come away with just enough detail to tweak your curiosity – a bio-engineered mutant in the major leagues? New Orleans underwater with indentured servants and rebellious teenagers tagging space ships? A religion called Chrislam and an alien from Arcturus?

In our busy lives we may not have time to figure out the backgrounded information of each story we read. But if we want to (or if we're taking a class, say), we should read closely and note details. We are like detectives solving a case. In presenting our theories to others, we argue like attorneys in a court of law, basing our arguments on the evidence (Of course, by doing this, we are developing our mental powers – one of the reasons colleges give these parties in the first place!)

“Science fiction,” writes scholar Jenny Wolmark, "[....]makes the familiar appear strange, and its fantasies of the future provide a critical view of the present.” (Aliens and Others, University of Iowa Press, 8) It delineates fantasies of the future “which are in effect representations of the most intolerable aspects of the present.” (10)

The late Octavia Butler (we’ll read her story “Amnesty” later in the semester) wrote that in order to envision the future in two of her recent books “[a]ll I did was look around at the problems we're neglecting now.”

This is extrapolation – and all three of the stories we read last week are about possible futures in which present day circumstances and trends are extended in classic extrapolatory fashion and in which “intolerable aspects” of our society –- discrimination, unequal opportunity, censorship —- are called into question. These are stories of the “near future.” Some of the SF we read later will go much much farther afield in space and time.

"Diamond Girls" by Louise Marley

The closest to our own time of the three stories, “Diamond Girls” first alerts us to the possibility of a future world with a brief reference to Ricky’s “elongated” fingers and the fact that if she stretches her hands over her head, she can easily touch the ceiling. Further, she is cradling “her first major-league game ball” and receives a summons to leave the locker room and join the guys. A woman, a very tall one, is part of a major league baseball team. Shortly after that we learn she is alone in her own private locker room, not only because she is a woman on a man’s team, but because there is something different about her. Clearly we are not in our world.

The possibility of women participating in sports previously reserved for men is debated today (Like the female ability to read, to write good fiction, to vote, to be doctors, police, fire fighters, university professors was debated in the near past). In the heavily masculine world of sports, there have been no breakthroughs as yet. There is not even separate but equal segregation (perhaps there never is) since girls’ and women’s sports are not heavily funded or popularized.

Today the issue of artificial enhancement of “natural” abilities is apparent in the steroid controversy. Enhancement through engineered viruses which will cause favorable physical and mental mutations -- well, we’re not quite there yet, though prenatal genetic testing is now used to screen against certain inherited diseases or fetal conditions. In our time, to find out the sex of a child in advance is already possible and already a problem in countries like India where female children are sometimes seen as liabilities.   Genetic engineering of gender is certainly not far off. And if gender is engineered, can physical and mental attributes be far behind?

These two issues, present in our world today, are extrapolated into the near future in Marley’s story, forming two kinds of estrangement from our time and planting the story firmly in the SF genre.

At first we think that Ricky’s only problem is her gender -- she’s a woman in a man’s game. The first hint that there’s more going on is early in the story: “Maybe the guys didn't want a woman in their locker room. More likely, they didn't want her in their locker room.” We learn that Ricky mother injected herself with an engineered virus which has made Ricky into a super-woman, the first of her kind. She is almost 7 feet tall, and has extraordinary eyesight and strength. The fact that these abilities are not “natural” –- though her acquisition of them was not her decision, unlike, say, steroid use -- has earned her many enemies and the nickname “lab rat.” But she is not invulnerable. All too human, she makes mistakes in her game and is worried about her career: “Three straight losses after her twelve-and-eight last year. If they sent her down, she'd never get called up again.”

A newcomer Grace Everett, called for contrast “the Natural,” is brought in to play against her to provide even more media-hyped excitement for the fans as they watch these two women trying to defeat each other. But Ricky refuses to take the bait and turn against the only other woman in the game. At first she can only “concentrate on her own problems” and refuses “to think about Everett, about what this game must mean to her.”

But when she is up against Everett, she does not feel hostility or even jealousy, but curiosity and the beginnings of empathy: “Ricky stared at her opponent and wondered if Everett felt like she did. Like a target. Like an outsider. Like no matter how well she played, it would never be enough.”

We learn that Grace does indeed feel this sense of otherness. The coach reminds Grace that her boss “ is an old-fashioned guy. I think he wants to prove you can't do it, that the Natural can't cut it in the bigs." We’re back to the old gender issue with the additional problem that members of oppressed groups often tend to turn against each other rather than against those who oppress them.

That their problems are exacerbated by prejudice is emphasized by the fact that both invoke the memory of Jackie Robinson, the first black man to be admitted to the major leagues, but not without similar suffering.

Each woman comes during the course of the contest to feel greater sympathy for the other. Ricky thinks, “If today was Everett's only chance at the bigs, her only shot. . .that was tough.” Grace in turn is stunned “at the insults that were shouted at Ricky Arendsen.” She feels an unwelcome surge of sympathy but goes ahead to play her best game knowing that all she and Ricky want is to play ball and that this is the important thing.

She knows that Ricky is the only survivor of her mother’s experiment: “Ricky Arendsen —- and only Ricky Arendsen—had grown into a superb athlete, with a mind to match.” At the same time, she recognizes Ricky’s individuality: “the gleam Grace saw in her eye was all hers. No virus had made her the competitor she was. She was a ballplayer. A gamer.” Her love of the game and her devotion to being as excellent as possible were not given to her by the virus. She is an individual who loves her work.

And so does Grace, who realizes they are similar: "This wasn't about modified genes[....] She wanted to win, not because of Arendsen, not because it was her first day in the big leagues, not to prove the Natural could do it. She wanted to win because it was baseball and she was in the game. This was about desire.”

At the end, both successful during the game, the two women shake hands, having become a meaningful part of the game they love but playing it on their terms, as women who enjoy empathy and solidarity, not as rivals pitted against each other by the media. Together they are opening up the game for women. And for people who are born –- deliberately or accidentally -- different from the norm.

The two prejudices, after all, are similar. Discrimination against those who are other -- different, alien -- is a long-standing human trait, and the worldwide oppression of women has gone on for too long.

Other science fiction has looked at the genetic enhancement issue and envisioned future worlds where the engineered or cloned humans constitute a master race and people with “natural” abilities are the ones discriminated against. In other SF, the genetically enhanced are hunted down by the jealous frightened normals.

But this is a hopeful story. “Diamond Girls” raises the possibility that social institutions will adapt to new definitions of human rights and individuals will be able to overcome prejudices against them . In this future world, the change may be slow, but it will come.