Eleanor Arnason

A Woman of the Iron People

Janice Hopper

For some reason I thought I had read this years ago. But when I actually read it here, I remembered nothing about it. So it must just have been the title that stuck in my brain.

A spaceship from a kinder, gentler earth arrives at an alien planet. There is indigenous, intelligent life there. The societies are nomadic or pre-urban and mostly unindustrialized. It's also a matriarchal society, because when males reach puberty, they become extremely quarrelsome and difficult. So the men go off to live with the herds or on the verges of society. Women have annual estrus cycles, and go out to mate with the men once a year or so. 

Most of the story is about Lixia, a researcher who's put down with one of the small villages. She meets Nia the smith, the titular Woman of the Iron People. Nia lives on the outskirts of a village far from home. That's a story and plot point all on its own. But because of it, Nia may be a little more tolerant of the Lixia's strangeness than less solitary females in the culture. Then another member of the ship's crew, Derek, joins Nia and Lixia as they travel back across the planet.

There's a lot of anthropological musing in this book. We see human society through the indigenes' eyes. Humans see a world where living with men on a daily basis is Just Not Done. When the human crew discovers that the planet is metal-rich, they talk about exploiting the resources there, and possibly exploiting the indigenes too. The humans are also 120 years from earth. They can't go back to the world they know, because it's changed out of recognition with the passage of time.

Some of the plot points are a little dated. The crew is multicultural. The Chinese talk about Revolution; the Russians talk about Marxism. 

Still, I liked the story a good bit. I liked the indigenous society. The humans weren't too heinous in their approach to the society. For example, when they found out that males weren't welcome most places, they pulled the men out.

A classic of the genre, an interesting look at a very different kind of culture. I liked it.

A Woman of the Iron People

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