darusha:
It makes me strangely happy that more comments about this story are dissecting the details of the water plant than discussing the hot-chick-banging-a-dolphin angle.
I LOL'd when you said that.
Did anybody else think of the King of the Hill episode where Hank wins a chance to swim with a dolphins and ends up getting raped by the dolphin?
Not until you said it, but I do remember it.
Among dolphins, sex could be called a form of greeting, like shaking hands.
Didn't I read some Heinlein that treated sex similarly? I've often felt that America places far too much weight on sex. But that's another story for another thread.
***
I won't say I really liked this story, but I didn't hate it. I too felt it was somewhat heavy-handed, and the narrator was very hard to like. I could believe him, rely upon his opinions and his observations, but I thought he was an ass.
As a story written in the late 60s (I'm guessing) and published in 1970, I understand where Silverberg was coming from with all the talk about boobs... sorry, "milk glands"... but reading/hearing it nearly 40 years later (holy crap, it's really been that long, hasn't it) it just feels forced. Differences in culture due to time, I suppose.
Given that Ishmael really thinks he knows so very much about love, he seems to have neglected cross-species/cross-cultural communication in his studies. Had he not read any SF? There's love in a lot of SF -- hell, didn't he watch any Star Trek spools? -- and yet he thinks that boinking the other dolphin in front of Lisabeth is going to work? Humans on the whole (obviously the EP forum readers are not part of this group) seem to be incapable of thinking that any species other than ourselves is as intelligent as we are, except when we read it in sci-fi. A truly-intelligent dolphin would've figured this out and known that, no matter how he felt about Lisabeth, she would never see him the way he really wanted to be seen.
Couched in the comments Eley made after the story, I can understand the point of it -- I've been that dolphin, too -- but I still don't think I took away from this story anything that Silverberg really intended.
I know Silverberg can write cultural-sexual sci-fi plenty well -- I rather enjoyed "The World Inside", even if by today's standards it's a tad ham-handed -- but this story just didn't do it for me.
As for the reading, Eley's readings are always capable and thorough, but because we know so much about him due to intros, outros, and forum posts, I feel influenced by what I know about him from his public persona. I don't read (ie) Jonathan Sullivan's blog, so all I know about him is what I heard in the intro, and that wasn't enough to form an opinion beyond "okay, this dude has a medical background, so he'll probably get all the words right".
I think this is a common problem when people give their writing to their friends. I write, among other things, erotica. I have a friend, John, who enjoys erotica. But he has trouble reading mine -- I value his opinion on my writing, and he has given it on my SF, Fantasy, Tech, and General Fiction -- because he knows me personally. Another example: my best friend Yoshi says he loves my novel, but I know it's a piece of crap -- it was self-published by PublishAmerica (
before I knew what a waste of time they were), it had no good editing, it had plot holes they wouldn't let me fix (that got left in because I didn't have an editor), it rambled, it had cliches up the wazoo... I've grown a lot as a writer since then. But Yoshi still says he loves the book. I allow him to do so -- maybe he honestly does -- but if I showed to anyone on these forums, I'm pretty sure the response would be "has potential, but needs a lot of work".
So, in short, when people tell us stories, we are influenced by our knowledge of the reader. That's why I prefer when stories are read by people who aren't Steve Eley, even though he's a very good reader, even if I have no idea who the reader is or why s/he has been chosen to read a story. As long as the reader can perform the story well, it doesn't matter to me if it's a neurologist or a baseball writer, someone who participates in polyamory or someone who participates in fantasy football. I just can't have gotten to know the writer as well as I've "gotten to know" Eley. (No offense intended with any of this, of course.)