Taurus Four by Rena Vale

Dorian Frank XIV is a space sociologist and explorer, though he chose this career not out of a yearning to understand alien cultures or the thrilling call of the unknown. No, he's convinced that men on earth have lost their masculinity; they're weak-willed and under the thumbs of their mothers and wives. Thankfully, women don't like space or adventure(s), so exploration is an opportunity to break free and get that testosterone pumping.

Great start.

Then Dorian crash-lands on his first assignment. Without the ability to repair his solo ship, his freighter captain tells him to stay put and that they'll be back in two months with the necessary parts and evacuate him ... if he's still alive and there. There will be no scouting party or rescue mission. When they return, he has something like two days to respond to their messages or be abandoned on the planet forever.

Dorian explores, claiming that he hates to kill animals while killing every new animal he encounters because "it might be dangerous," and shuffles around close to the cave he made as home-base. The space-explorers manual strongly recommends staying out of the jungle, or deep water, or ... most places, it seems.

Also, Dorian is just cowardly and weak. He gets lonely and starts longing for companionship in about three hours flat. Within a day or two, he decides (essentially) he'd rather die than be alone for two months and stalks off for the jungle in search of other intelligent creatures that he has no reason to suspect exists.

The sexism in these chapters is absolutely absurd. I had to stop taking notes, or else I'd have never finished reading the book. I'd still be documenting all the sexism.

Here's the quote that made my brain make weird screeching/stabbing sounds like out of a horror movie when someone has finally cracked:

Dorian came to the conclusion that space explorers were the Vikings, the Conquistadores, the Indian fighters and gold rushers of the twenty-third century. They were Men; the women who came with them or to them were their slaves or playthings, or both in one. They were, in short, the "washing machines" of the ancient quip: Where Men are Men and women are washing machines.

I cannot articulate the rage that paragraph instills within me. So why the fuck did I keep reading this cod-awful drivel?

Before I answer that, here's some backstory on the author, Rena Vale. She was born in 1898. In the early 1900s, she was a cowgirl and teacher before becoming a ballroom dancer. In 1916, she sold a screenplay to a motion picture company, then added technical writing to her repertoire. In the 1930s, she was a card-carrying member of the communist party. In 1941, she was the secretary for the California State Assembly Committee on Un-American Activities, where she eschewed her communism and threw countless people under the bus ... including Lucille Ball and John Steinbeck. Then, many years later, she became a science-fiction author.

Now, that backstory is ... bizarre, and let's ignore the unforgivable act of betraying Lucille Ball. What matters here is that Rena Vale lived a complicated life, full of incongruities. She was a cowgirl and a ballroom dancer and a communist and a career-woman all before the 1950s. How on earth could she write such simple-mindedly sexist bullshit in earnest?

I hoped I read something between the lines of Dorian's machismo attitude yet pathetic and incompetent actions. It would be bold starting a book in the 1970s with overt and seemingly straight-forward sexism, then using the book to poke fun at how men can't live up to their own impossible standards, but it was possible. I had hope.

Eventually, Dorian does find sentient life. Implausibly, they're the descendants of a hippie commune transported by aliens to this paradise planet to live out their groovy lives without the man ruining everything. Due to perfect weather, food literally falling from the trees, and plenty of caves for sleeping, they have regressed to a primitive lifestyle. They have no village, no clothes, no material belongings.

And then Teeda appears. Described as "between 16 and 18" and "virgin-white," she's young and dumb and trusting and good-natured but also seems utterly devoid of thought.

Naturally, Dorian wants her.

Worse, he seems to want her more the more he infantilizes her. He regularly thinks of her as "this sweet child" in the same thought where he wants to "take her." At one point, her weakness and abject dependence on him explicitly turns him on. He wants her exclusively because of what she isn't (like the women back home) rather than what she is.

Unfortunately, she wants him, too. It feels like the unreasoned infatuation of a child, but this doesn't bother him. When he tells her he cannot take her back to earth with him because his ship will only accommodate one person, she literally starves herself for days to lose weight. And when he figures out that's why she hasn't been eating, he thinks it's sweet ... not definitely a sign that this would be the unhealthiest relationship ever.

There's a plot that goes all off the rails. Teeda's drug-crazed chieftain engages in human sacrifice to try to keep strangely sentient/intelligent carnivores from raiding his people ... though it appears he likes this ritual mostly because he gets first dibs on the virgin sacrifice. His drug-crazedness, btw? Entirely from chewing on hemp. Super realistic, that, but there are plot-holes aplenty.

As Teeda is the virgin sacrifice, Dorian gets entangled in the surprisingly brutal ways of this tribe of hippies. He's in over his head, and his ass is saved by women multiple times ... and always headstrong older women that buck the social norms of this patriarchal tribe. Despite this, he still mostly thinks about how disgusting their naked bodies are. The sexism just does not let up.

At one point, Dorian introduces Teeda to clothes. They're on a day-long hike, so their clothes need cleaning, and he shows Teeda how to do it. She watches for a second, giggles, grabs his clothes from him, and says, "I think I can do this better than you." Dorian chuckles at that womanly instinct that inherently makes women better at cleaning. So cute.

Later he talks to her about shoes, and she immediately has to know more—styles, colors, you name it. Now that she knows about shoes, she's a shoe-obsessed woman. It was loathsome, but it gives me an excuse to break out an IT crowd gif, so I guess it balances out?

Eventually, Dorian contacts his freighter again. The captain is pissed that Dorian missed earlier hails, but whoo boy, there's even bigger news.

Dorian's fiancee and mother were furious that he'd been abandoned on some alien planet and raised every sort of bureaucratic hell they could manage to ensure Dorian would be rescued. Suited-up femme lawyers swarmed the freighter, promising every sort of lawsuit imaginable if Dorian didn't make it back to earth.

Here we go, I thought. Here's where Dorian realizes that strong-willed women get shit done, and without them he'd be stuck on this planet that he has said many times that he does not want to be stuck on any longer than necessary. He realizes that while Teeda has her own strengths and charms, they're not better than those of his fiancee or mother. Maybe he even feels bad about drooling over a teenager when his betrothed is moving heaven and earth to see him safely found.

This hope is proof that against all odds, I'm still an optimist.

Instead, he's embarrassed and furious at his mother and fiancee for causing such a stink and being such nags. If the company wanted to let him die on a strange planet due to the mechanical failures of their inadequate machinery, that's his business! Who are they to get involved?

If that sounds like sarcasm, like we—the readers—are supposed to laugh at Dorian for thinking that, then I portrayed it wrong. Those sentiments were made in earnest.

In part due to Teeda starving herself, Dorian is able to bring her with him to the freighter. Never mind that earlier in the novel, he rightly recognizes that going from "we sleep on the ground and have literally no possessions" to 23rd-century earth would probably break her. He plans to marry her instead of his fiancee. He even plans to rub his fiancee's face in it. 

The freighter captain, mad that Dorian's fiancee and mother made him give a shit about Dorian, offers to officiate the marriage then-and-there as payback. Dorian grins wickedly at his revenge-marriage.

Taurus Four over.

There's so much more to it—it's racist, repeatedly, and specifically about folks of Native American descent. It's disgustingly ableist. It's sexist beyond comprehension. It's fatphobic—Dorian is struggling for survival against unreasonable odds and is mostly excited that he's lost weight...

There's an unexpected twinge of religious supremacy, where Dorian gets all high-and-mighty about his god, and it's clear he's talking a Catholic or Protestant god.

There's also some weird stuff going on with Dorian's thoughts about Teeda's tribe. They're white folk whose ancestors originated from San Francisco, so it's not exactly racism, but the number of times he thinks something like "I never expected primitive people to possess nobility" is off-putting.

Throw in some disgusting sexualized violence (told in an off-hand way) against women and children, and Taurus Four wraps up as one of the worst stories I've ever read. Amusingly, compared to Charlemagne's Champion, the technical writing was ... fine. But hell, everything else was awful. Put this up there with Song of the Pearl as a novel I would purchase if only to keep it out of circulation because it's that fucking awful. I would give it negative points if I could.