Customer Reviews

Benefits

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Benefits is an excellent feminist sci-fi book.

The story is riveting, stunning and compelling: the British government from the 1970s through the new millennium tries to "manage" its women using many of the typical tools of government: money, policy, social stigma -- and finally through medical control. A few strong personalities get involved to bring about chilling changes. Though written in the 1970s, the threat of such an event happening is very real and modern.

My only complaint is that development of the female characters is limited. In the decades in which the story takes place, the ideas and actions of the women -- especially the feminists -- remain stagnant, stuck in the mid-1970s. Government evolves, men evolve, but women don't, and hindsight of the modern reader sees a great disconnect in that lack of evolution. Even when I read this 25 years ago, I wondered how women could fail to evolve through time.

Do other readers of science fiction find this a universal issue throughout the genre, where later readings of beloved science fiction stories suffer in modern light?