Solution Three [Paperback]

Naomi Mitchison (Author), Susan Squier (Afterword)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 1995

   As a fast-paced novel about a future shaped by feminist ideals of sexual and racial equality, "solution three" at first seems to be a peaceful answer to the world's problems. Homosexuality as an international norm and reproduction by cloning have minimized aggression and overpopulation. The sexes have equal rights and status, racial tension has been eliminated through genetic intermixing, and scientists work closely with the governing body, the Council, to keep an eye on the food supply and to heal the earth of prior environmental terrorism.

   Except in a few outlying areas, things seem to be going smoothly. But even in the privileged center, two women are quietly rebelling. Miryam, a geneticist, is secretly married and rearing her own children. Lilac, a surrogate mother chosen to carry a clone baby, tries to evade releasing him, as customary, for social conditioning.

   When a mysterious virus appears in distant wheat crops, when deviant sects kill a Council member and a Clone, when even the Clones exhibit unexpected sexual behaviour, Mutumba, the strong and wise leader of the Council, ponders whether the principle of diversity, essential to the food supply, might also hold for people. What is the cost to women of this new model for reproducing life? With Mutumba, and others, one wonders: is it time for a new solution-a solution four?

   Originally published in 1975, Mitchison's visionary science fiction presents a world created by both women and men that is far ahead of our own. "Like Herland, Solution Three imagines a society in which women have used reproductive control to shape a more equitable life for all, eradicating aggression and providing social support for motherhood...Solution Three presents a new, more positive vision of science as a realm in which women could indeed make a difference, and shape the course of knowledge."-From the Afterword by Susan M. Squier.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

NAOMI MITCHISON has written over seventy books for adults and children, including the well-known science fiction novel Memoirs of a Spacewoman. SUSAN M. SQUIER is Julia Gregg Brill Professor of women’s studies and English at Pennsylvania State University. --This text refers to the Library Binding edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 183 pages
• Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY (March 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1558610960
• ISBN-13: 978-1558610965
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #450,617 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars bonus trivia: the working title was "The Clone Mums" (true!), February 5, 2011

By 

A. C. Walter "awalter" (Lynnwood, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Solution Three (Paperback)

Two centuries in the future, humankind and its world are almost unrecognizable, a Utopia in progress. After an apocalyptic period in which most cities and food-producing regions were ravaged, the essential dangers facing the race were identified as overpopulation and aggression. Soon, three Solutions were set in place, one after the other. These Solutions were (if I've got this right): the stigmatization of heterosexuality to combat overpopulation, the apportioning to everyone of rather small "reasonably equal living spaces" to eliminate envy and possessiveness, and finally the replacing of ordinary childbirth with homosexual mothers giving birth to "perfect" clone children who would then be taken from the mothers as toddlers, around the age of two, and raised by the State.

As Mitchison notes in the introduction, her emphasis here is with a biological science fiction and not with the sci-fi of physics. So this is hard sci-fi, but heavy on social situations . . . and none of that fun spectacle-oriented aliens-n-spacecraft stuff. Over the course of the novel, a parallel develops between crises in social engineering and agricultural engineering. Something unexpected and frightening is happening with the genetically tampered-with food supply, and something similar may be afflicting the clones.

In the end, the novel illuminates the growing and disturbing superstitious belief in scientific progress as something that will outpace its own horrendous destructive effects, as something that will--in the words of Wendell Berry--accomplish a "long end run that will carry us and the environment over the goal line of survival." This belief is not merely hope; it is faith.

In terms of literary merit, there is some similarity here to Brave New World (Aldous Huxley was a childhood friend of Mitchison's); however, I found Mitchison's characters far more convincing and lifelike than Huxley's. She also demonstrates a deft hand with fluid viewpoint technique and concise narrative structuring (this ambitious book runs to just 160 pages). If I have one complaint with the novel, it's that we're left wondering: did they really solve anything, and just how big of a mess are these people left with? A similar novel, which perhaps takes things a bit further (and with a fair amount of black humor) is Anthony Burgess's The Wanting Seed, published 13 years earlier--another problematic-Utopia novel not to be missed.

Doing a little background search, I found that Naomi Mitchison led quite a life. She was an activist for women's rights in Britain (indeed, my edition of Solution Three was published by the Feminist Press), married a Labour politician who became a Life Peer, wrote some 90 book . . . . Oh, and in the collected letters of JRR Tolkien we find a substantial correspondence between Mitchison and himself as well as notice that she was a proofreader for The Lord of the Rings.

A final note: the Feminist Press edition of the novel has a long afterword with some great information on Mitchision, but it also judges the engineered Utopia of the novel in too positive a light when, after all, the author herself labeled it a "horrid idea" in her dedication.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars old fashioned sciencefiction, February 1, 2005

By 

D. Rascon "Metro polymorpha" (Waco, TEXAS) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Solution Three (Paperback)

with the small twist of having a society of homosexuals, the story was interesting, alittle slow in the beginning, and it gives you a sense that your getting a very brief lesson on population genetics, But IT IS still a Great "what If" book,and one which i enjoyed.