On the Episode "Power" and Overtly Marxist Editor's Response

Meta
Title:	On the Episode "Power" and Overtly Marxist Editor's Response
Creator:	Judith Proctor and Neil Faulkner
Date(s):	1996
Medium:	print, then online
Fandom:	Blake's 7
Topic:
External Links:	at AO3 at Hermit]
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

On the Episode "Power" is a 1996 Blake's 7 essay by Judith Proctor. Neil Faulkner wrote the response Overtly Marxist Editor's Response.

It was originally printed in Altazine #2 (where it had the title "Sex and Power"), archived online at Hermit.org, and is now on Archive of Our Own.

Notes

"This is a repeat of an e-mail posting, but I think it's worth a wider circulation. [It is also an amalgam of two lengthy pieces that I've tried to mesh together as unclumsily as possible]."

Some Topics Discussed

• the episode, "Power"
• female infanticide
• Neil quotes a lot of Joanna Russ' essay "Amor Vincit Foeminam: The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction" (reprinted in "To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction")
• dominance and sex

Excerpts from Judith's Portion: "On the Episode 'Power'"

'Power' is frequently cited as a pet hate episode and with some good reason. However, it occasionally strikes me that the Hommik and Seska culture was not all that it appeared to be on the surface.

I see their private relationship as that of a long married couple. They probably had several children, and I think they loved one another. That's why Nina said twice that she was now a woman, not a Seska. It wasn't a case of being raped instantly converts you into a pliant, willing sex slave. I think it was a case of a relationship building up over time (its origins might have been nasty, but we have no evidence one way or the other to show how Hommiks treated newly captured Seska after they removed the Dynamon crystals). There's more to sex than being 'a woman' [But not more to being 'a woman' than sex?]. A large proportion of the human race find themselves trapped in a long term relationship with a member of the opposite sex. Is it so surprising that Nina should? Nina was there when Pella was born and she remembers Kate as a child. At the time of the video-clip that Tarrant looks at, the Seska procreation vaults were attacked and the seminal stocks contaminated. There were 52 children at that time, and that was 20 years ago.

The Seska were a totally female culture, but the Hommiks were a *male- dominated* culture. There is more evidence to suggest that the Hommiks were not 100% male chauvinist. Dayna challenged GunnSar to a fight for the leadership. He laughed at her, but he also accepted the challenge and it was treated seriously enough by the rest of the tribe to be fought on the challenge ground. The implications are two-fold. Firstly women didn't have zero status or he wouldn't have accepted the challenge. I can't see GunnSar claiming her on his kill list if it brought him no status at all. If she was viewed as no threat at all, he would have been laughed at for accepting the challenge.

Avon tries to establish his 'nice to women' credentials early in the episode by stopping GunnSar when he is about to hit Nina. From then on, GunnSar never tries to justify himself with claptrap about the man's strength being superior. GunnSar is a product of his culture and not a particularly bad specimen (I still love the fact that he does his own sewing <grin>). It is possible that Pella was more bigoted than any of the Hommiks. I always remember the scene where she makes Avon's crossbow go off and kill a Hommik. Power is a naff episode, and will always be a naff episode, but it could have been even worse than it was. My own interpretation is that it was not so much a war of the sexes (that was Avon's interpretation), but war between a group of women who chose to lead a highly technological life and the rest of society (both men and women) who chose to return to a more primitive lifestyle.

Excepts from Neil's Portion: "Overtly Marxist Editor's Response"

It just so happened that I received this LOC just a few days after reading Joanna Russ' essay *Amor Vincit Foeminam: The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction* (reprinted in *To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction*, Indiana University Press 1995). My thanks to Jan, who might not be a B7 fan but has the most interesting bookshelves of any friend I've had. In this essay Russ discusses six examples of sex war in SF, all but one of them (that written by a woman, 'James Tiptree Jr') echoing *Power* very strongly. The parallels are quite strong.

These stories, like *Power*, are nothing more than a reactionary affirmation of traditional patriarchal values which simultaneously idolise and repress women. Your discussion above lists a lot of the give-aways, but I would say you've drastically misinterpreted them.

What *Power* is really about is a fear of women. The Seska are arrogant, independent women. Their long, flowing skirts wrap them in a mystique of untamed sexuality. The fact that they live without any need of men suggests that they might be Lesbians - the ultimate repudiation of male dominance. They have mysterious, supernatural powers of the *mind* (translated into telekinesis for the sake of science fiction). Rather than usurp the trappings of male power (for which they are anatomically unequipped), they have assumed their own, which must be forcibly removed from them (the equivalent of castration). They then cease to be Seska, instead becoming Women - submissive wives who can be trusted and respected because they have been robbed of any independence.

Basically, the Seskas are the evil forces of Feminism. They are led by Pella, who cynically and secretly manipulates the others, disposing of them (shooting Kate) when her sinister plots are uncovered. The manipulated Seska are thus poor, innocent, deluded souls ripe for enlightenment by the Hommiks.

*Power* IS about a war of the sexes, not a conflict between high-tech and primitive lifestyles. These, again, are *symbolic* - Hommik culture is essentially not primitive, but traditional. Their technology is an ancient ('god- given') legacy. Seskas are technological because they are modern, new, counter-traditional, and have seized the reins of technological power to which they have no right (they lost the war, after all). *Power* is the open manifesto of the reactionary anti-intellectual attitudes Ben Steed implies in his earlier episodes (Jarvik's domination of Servalan - notice how he has to die so as not to usurp her position, since that would bugger up series continuity - or the way the women of Sardos are reduced to being sexual consumables). To say it's a naff episode is something of an understatement.

Fan Comments

The latter explains writer's (Ben Steed's) motivation, the first is an attempt at coping with the episode in-verse by over-analysing it. But the first only lead to self-harm (internalizing writer's motivation, I felt brainwashed when I read it) so I'd prefer the latter, sorry. The only coping for me therefore is ignoring the whole episode. And I love genre of coping with canon by over-analyzing it and twisting its meaning, that's like 70% of my fics.