Space Traps, and Gomorrah...

For last week’s reading, I read the short story of Aye, and Gomorrah… by Samuel R. Delany. In the narrative, the author portrayed the idea of a world where astronauts, commonly referred throughout the story as Spacers, were prepared by being neutered before puberty as a precaution to the effects of radiation and other hazardous threats found in outer space. However, today with new technological advancements, male astronauts can enter the space without being neutered. Another effect of being neutered was that it prevented the astronauts from going through puberty. As a result, the astronauts turned into androgynous adults, making their sex difficult to identify. (Would they be allowed into the Hideyoshi gender baths?). In this world, there was also a subculture of people referred as “Frelks”, however I wasn’t able to confirm whether they were just men or women. The “Frelks” were the people that were aroused by the Spacer’s androgynous looks and naive unattraction to anyone. The story mainly depicts the daily life of the Spacers; talking about their troubles and share their desire to feel sexual attraction. The Spacers also traveled to places and took advantage of the Frelks’ attraction towards them through prostitution by sexually teasing them. This raises a moral issue today since prostitution is illegal in majority of the states. In addition, today, prostitution is seen as a forced practice mainly through human trafficking or a result of poverty.

Personally, I think that because it was a short story, it lacked explanations in some part of the story, which made it more complicated to understand. Also, I found the grammar structure to be a bit complex. When I first started reading the dialogue, I was under the impression that the Spacers were children. This essentially fits the plot since they are basically adults with childlike mindsets because they were never able to go through puberty.