rwallace comments on Open Thread: December 2009 - Less Wrong
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I wrote a short story with something of a transhumanism theme. People can read it here. Actionable feedback welcome; it's still subject to revision.
Note: The protagonist's name is "Key". Key, and one other character, receive Spivak pronouns, which can make either Key's name or eir pronouns look like some kind of typo or formatting error if you don't know it's coming. If this annoys enough people, I may change Key's name or switch to a different genderless pronoun system. I'm curious if anyone finds that they think of Key and the other Spivak character as having a particular gender in the story; I tried to write them neither, but may have failed (I made errors in the pronouns in the first draft, and they all went in one direction).
You traded off a lot of readability for the device of making the protagonist's gender indeterminate. Was this intended to serve some literary purpose that I'm missing? On the whole the story didn't seem to be about gender.
I also have to second DanArmak's comment that if there was an overall point, I'm missing that also.
Key's gender is not indeterminate. Ey is actually genderless. I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear - there's a bit about it in eir second conversation with Trellis.
Your gender pronouns just sapped 1% of my daily focusing ability.
I thought it was pretty clear. The paragraph about 'boy or girl' make it screamingly obvious to me, even if the Spivak or general gender-indeterminacy of the kids hadn't suggested it.