Minneapolis/St. Paul

Moving into the house of the future

ELEANOR ARNASON

by Terri Sutton
September 9, 1998

At age 7, Eleanor Arnason moved into Idea House #2, a "house of the future" built in 1947 by the Walker Art Center as a design project. She spent 11 years there with her father H. Harvard Arnason, director of the Walker Art Center beginning in 1951, and her mother Elizabeth Yard, a social worker who grew up in China. In 1961, Eleanor's father got a job in New York, and Eleanor chose to attend college in the East. She took leave of the Idea House. But it did not leave her. As a feminist and a speculative fiction writer, she has kept the lights on in the house of the future.

Lots of people think that fantasy and science fiction oppose realism, even seek to escape it. Arnason, by contrast, imagines only lived-in, scuffed-up worlds. Whatever dazzling technology or magic her characters have in hand, they continue to behave like stubborn, fallible humans. They get angry, trip over rocks, hunger, lust, greet the morning with full bladders, become confused, and talk endlessly. In more than one language. Her narrators often end up as mediators, trying to explain the odd customs of one people to another--while themselves struggling to comprehend their surroundings. No understanding is ever complete.

Arnason's best novels, Ring of Swords (1993) and A Woman of the Iron People (1991), picture human space-explorers confronting alien cultures. In both books, the aliens are big, furry, and vigorously segregated--at work and at home--along sexual lines. Ring of Swords posits a homosexual society where the women maintain the "hearth planet" and the men stick to the "perimeter," constantly warring among the stars. The men of Iron People's preindustrial world are exiled at puberty to live alone and rootless outside close-knit women's communities. Arnason, with an anthropologist's zeal, allows these aliens their rich strangeness. But it would be a mistake to see these creatures as (the) only aliens.

One viewing of Saving Private Ryan shows the basis for Ring of Swords; the aliens' sexual divisions are embroidered versions of traditions Arnason was born into 56 years ago. A Woman of the Iron People simply makes material the psychological separations American men have long been expected to perform (not to mention the mental homesteading demanded of American women). Arnason's "aliens" are chiefly confounded by the future humans' nonchalant sexual mixing: women and men working, discussing, eating, and loving together, for the most part peacefully. It's safe to say current human understanding of this behavior also remains sketchy.

Arnason further portrays her evolved humans as culturally careful, ecologically aware, well-read (especially in Marxism), and remorseful/pissed off about the mess made by 20th-century people. This race would be unbearable (and unbelievable) if not for their irrepressible sense of humor and humble determination to live mindfully. Their wit and will are Arnason's, really, and they set her earthy prose alight. Through her words, history and possibility are translated into present time, and we readers begin to move into the house of the future, our shoes in our hands.

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