The Shore of Women

I found this in a local bookstore when I was in middle maybe?? so a good 6-8 years ago and i remember being so fixated by the cover because i hadn’t seen anything like it and of course that peaked my interest. I hadn’t quite explored sci-fi so it sounded like an exciting read and after reading the summary i was even more roped in. i have fond memories of reading this book and it introduced me to the venus of dreams trilogy. i love pamelas writing style she’s so talented at what she does. definitely read. it’s hard to describe how well she intertwines real life experiences emotions and events with her level of world building. it makes you feel like this fictional reality is very much real and i love how much foresight you see within her books it’s all so surreal and believable because it partially feels like she’s foreseeing the future in regards to what our current society and world looks like today.

"The Shore of Women" is a richly textured work of feminist science fiction by Pamela Sargent which deserves long overdue recognition as a classic, highly literate example of the genre. It compares favorably to the classical dystopian novel "A Canticle for Leibowitz", as yet another mesmerizing tale set long after a nuclear holocaust. In Sargent's richly imagined future, men are leading primitive lives as hunters and gathers, while women reside in a technically advanced culture comprised of cities equipped with forcefields, death rays and aircraft. Sargent has melded the epic journey with romance, crafting a most unusual futuristic romance novel devoted to her main protagonists, Arvil - whose notions of what it means to be human is radically altered when he meets and falls in love with - Birana, who has been cast out of one of the cities of women. I truly treasure the author's compelling exploration of their relationship from strangers to devout lovers ever respectful of the other's desires and needs. Sargent's compelling work of fiction may be familiar to those familiar with Ursula Le Guin's beguiling exploration of gender in her Hainish series of novels and short stories, but much to her credit, Sargent has created her own fascinating futuristic world to explore the natures of love and of relationships between man and woman. I am delighted that this book is finally back in print courtesy of BenBella Books; this edition includes an excellent foreword by science fiction writer Catherine Asaro.

Pamela Sargent is a prolific writer who unfortunately does not have a vocal support group. Her novels and novellas are not of the type "This is Cronon from the planet Abuzz, stop your atomic testing of be destroyed" They are instead, intelligen far-reaching reveries on the future. In several of her stories she has extrapolated a Mulism planet but this book goes beyond that to a time we can barely fathom.What happens when a woman in a strictly segregated society commits the ultimate sin - falling in love with a man? The descriptions of the two varying societies and their need for each other is told with a sense of disquiet. And when the lovers finally "find each other" the language approaches a confession. This is a book that can be read again and again on several levels.

Pamela Sargent's The Shore of Women works out in persuasively anthropological detail--almost Geertzian "thick description," if you will--a post-apocalyptic world in which women rule with space-age technologies from walled citadels, exiling male children into literal stone age societies of isolated bands clad in animal skins, where lives are nasty, brutish, and short. The violence of Sargent's largely paleolithic male society is mitigated only by its loving devotion to "The Goddess" and her cult, visits to the shrines in which prayer and worshipful communion with the deity transpires, and the occasional "callings" to the enclaves--simultaneously the preeminent male rite of passage and the sole (blind and thoroughly mediated) interaction with the ruling society that enables both worlds to procreate and persist. Within city walls, the master society is strictly bifurcated into elite and masses, in which the custodians of established order replace themselves, presiding over the bought indifference of commoners. Sargent is a beautifully expressive writer who works out the logic of her story to persuasive conclusions and, along the way, has smart, thoroughly rendered observations to make on societies of women and of men, the humanistic origins of religion, small group interactions under duress, the transformation of nomadic bands into sedentary cultures, the possible retreat of civilization from its points of greatest advancement, a variety of contemporary feminist political ideas, and more. At times, The Shore of Women brought to mind a host of antecedents, including A Canticle for Leibowitz, Lord of the Flies, The Golden Bough, Greek and Roman mythology, captivity stories from 17th and 18th century prisoners of American woodland Indians, the writings of Margaret Meade and other classic anthropologists, and other possible references, but without seeming directly dependent on any. Its principal characters, the inquisitive newly "called" man Arvil and the cast-out woman Birana, are beautifully developed and pass through punctuated sequences of change and unfolding awareness. A third point of view is provided by Laissa, who as the daughter of one of the "Mothers of the City" progresses on her own surprising journey of discovery...

An excellent story of a gender divided society. Women live in a techical society in advance of our own but where technology is frozen as are other social elements of the society. Men live as hunter-gatherers or herders who are held in line by a religion of "The Goddess". The chief rite is orgasmic. In numerous shrines to one or another aspect of the goddess men are lead to manufactured wet dreams. Women live in domed cities without an obvious mechanism for growing food. The novel makes heterosexuality ( and thus homsexuality) more of a social construction and less of a instinct than I believe it to be. All the characters are sympathetically but sharply dilineated. The one fault is that the love scenes are all hetersexual despite the fact that both sexes are stated to be largely homosexual in behavior. The economic basis of the women's world is not imagined as in the lack of any clearly imagined agriculture Similarly the practical basis of the men's religion The shrines to the Goddess are built and maintained by measures not presented . One excuse for the shortage of imagined facts about the social and economic basis of the women's society is the women characters are mostly young members of the ruling class.

Ms. Sargent does an excellent job of mixing the best aspects of "women's consensus" decision-making and the stark reality of only needing males for keeping the gene pool viable. Also the story of one exiled woman who does survive in the "survival-of-the-fittest" world of the men. A must-read.