Cf. Wolfe's There Are Doors

Mon, Jan 2, 2006

I think foreign policy should definitely be taken out of men’s hands. Men should continue making machines, but women ought to decide which machines are being made. Women have far better sense. They would have never introduced the infernal internal combustion engine or any other of the evil machines. Most kitchen machines, for example, are good; they don’t obliterate other skills. Or other people. With our leaders it is too often a case of one’s little boy saying to another: “My father can lick your father.” By now, the toys have gotten far too dangerous. (Auden, Paris Review Interview 57 [1974]).

Wolfe’ novel describes a shadowland where women set different technological priorities.