I recently read The Terror by Dan Simmons. I’ve been interested in it for a while because I love horror and I’m fascinated by the doomed Franklin expedition. I’ve been hesitant to read it because I’ve heard some things about the author that made me feel iffy, but never with solid evidence behind it. I finally gave the book a read and I both loved it and hated it. I wanted to put my thoughts down here and see if anyone else noticed these things and what they thought. Obviously, there will be spoilers.
First of all, I loved the in-depth detail that went into this book. It’s clear Simmons spent a lot of time researching not only the expedition, but also the arctic, the native people, seafaring terms, ice, etc. I normally don’t read doorstoppers, but I really enjoyed how much information and detail went into this book. I thought the slow pace was perfectly fitting, and the chapters punctuated by the monster’s violent appearance were fantastic.
Unfortunately, my love for all the detail in this book is also paired by my real distaste for how women, especially native girls, are treated and described. At first we just get Franklin’s inner thoughts on a native woman during a previous doomed expedition and his focus on her breasts and how he thought she was being sly and sexually evil by sleeping around with his men and pitting them against each other. I felt another explanation for this could be, native teenage girl feels threatened by the dozens of armed white men who show up and feels she must align herself with one of them for personal protection. But, I thought that since this was a Franklin chapter, we’re getting it colored by Franklin’s perspective.
But then Lady Silence shows up, who is also vaguely described as a teenage girl (with several characters thinking about how since “these women” age and mature differently than good ol’ white British women you can’t really tell how old they are… which feels gross), and then proceeds to have her bare breasts out in just about every chapter she appears in throughout the book. There’s also a lo of detail about her bare, sweaty breasts. And how they’re almost touching Irving’s silk handkerchief… it’s a real point of fixation for what felt like an uncomfortably long time. Again, this is through another man’s POV and they have been stuck and isolated out on the ice for a while, but at this point I’m seeing a pattern.
To break away from sexualizing native girls, we get Crozier’s memory… of a woman sexually using him. She has agency and isn’t being forced or coerced, and I understand this is a bit of a reversal of roles, but it’s also part of a larger pattern of the only few women we see in this book who are pretty much there for sexual reasons… unless they’re an old sexless grandmother, or chaste widow Lady Jane Franklin.
The second native woman we see is the one Irving meets… who we are told her name means “Big Tits.” And even though Irving gets this, we are then treated to another man pulling up the girl’s jacket so that we can get a gander at said “big tits.” Also, in the SECOND TO LAST PAGE of this behemoth novel we’re informed that Big Tits is still doing just fine. Cool.
I know this post is really long and I’m just ranting, but I was so unhappy with how tone-deaf the women were treated in this otherwise amazing book. I’ve described these scenes to my friends and they legit thought I was joking or being hyperbolic.
Did this bother anyone else in the book? Do you have a different take?
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Unfortunately, my love for all the detail in this book is also paired by my real distaste for how women, especially native girls, are treated and described.
Word! I was all prepared to give grace for Greenstockings and Lady Silence’s intro because, like you said, it’s Franklin’s POV and Franklin is a puritanical, condescending old Brit with PTSD and period appropriate misogyny.
Then we get Crozier and the Sophia interlude and I was still willing to forgive it, thinking “Okay, he’s a bitter drunk and probably an unreliable narrator”
Then we get the horrendous Act 3 love story with Lady Silence, with lots of assurances of how young and pure (yet sexually dominant) and destined for Crozier she is, and it all reads like she’s God’s gift to Job after his trials.
Despite them destroying the creature design of the Tuunbaq (how do you omit the serpentine neck that was its defining feature?!) I will forever cherish the miniseries for aging up Silence and making the other female characters something more than sexualized set dressing.
I thought the love story kind of made sense if you forget the age gap. The whole idea is that >!they’re psychics who need to marry other psychics to produce psychic children!<, right? I understand how that could supersede irrelevant details like age, race, etc, and create a true spirit bond that goes beyond the physical. There are just two problems:
1 isn’t it a bit convenient that Lady Silence / Silna is young(-looking) and a virgin? For the purposes of the sixam ieua, she could’ve just as well been a thirty-five year old widow with a previous child. In fact, that might have made more sense, since she’s also a skilled and wise spiritual leader who the rest of her clan looks up to.
2 why can’t we get more of her POV? Her backstory? Did she struggle to accept her unusual destiny or know it right away? Did she have to argue with the suspicious old shaman to prove that her >!marrying a kabloona!< was the right thing for her people? Was she shocked to find that Crozier wasn’t a handsome young man, or was she primarily concerned with his mental/moral readiness for his destined task?
The whole 3rd act definitely made me intrigued and wondering how accurate it was to real Inuit religious practices. I’d also read a different version of the Sedna myth in Daniel Pinchbeck’s 2012 book that I found very moving. Can anyone recommend good books by First Nations people from the northern Canada/Alaska/Greenland area that go deeper into this stuff, especially thriller/horror novels?
It is unfortunate that the indigenous people are depicted primarily for their exoticism and through that used as a supernatural element. I don’t think that is the only role, but almost impossible to ignore. A great deal of Simmons’ fiction takes on universal topics, but he strongly writes from a Euro-American approach and understanding of those topics. In some things like his far future sci fi that doesn’t come across as obviously uninformed or limited, but it becomes far more clear in his historical horror. Just one of those things about reading Simmons.
Anyway, as to the “iffy” things you have read/heard, I can say that he is a substantiated islamophobe, and has gone down the road to general right wing crank territory (ranting about political correctness, climate change being a hoax, etc).
So … six stars ?
I love this book but it does have serious problems. I think the way that women/native people are written is glossed over with “oh well they’re 1840s men” but like. The show doesn’t have that problem. I hesitate to recommend the book and it’s one of the rare instances when I would say to watch the show first/instead of the book.
As has been said the TV show is literally a work of art I can’t recommend it highly enough.
I read the book in like a week and it changed the course of my educational pursuits and I ended up mentioning it in my thesis. So it’s got a place in my heart, with all its problems.
This is my all time favorite book.
Its an uncomfortable topic to read about but colonialism was still a thing, and that was the view of women in general and esp of natives on average. Women were by law considered property in the early 1900s/late 1800s, and thats white british women of all classes.
Its a fairly accurate portrayal of the reality of that time, its just the reality was gross.
Book was amazing
The constant pause for sex scenes and fanservice killed the book for me.
They don’t add anything nor do they actually have a narrative purpose. It’s just every other chapter is ‘pause the plot, we need more tits’. Especially when he is resorting to dream sequences and flashbacks that are just there to add enough women to have a sex scene.
I bailed after the first description of pubic hair. I weighed the book in my hands, thought about how much more I had to read, and returned it to the library. More about the rats eating the dead, less about the weird, sad sex lives of the characters, thanks.