Mitchison's book is playing with ideas that are far more than a science fiction story. If this passage should make the reader snort with derision, I would urge caution. It seemed most peculiar that in its non-communication aspect it should have any effect on a Terran.' I reached for his sexual organ and began to communicate on that. I wanted to pass this on as quickly as possible. 'Before I knew where I was, I was beginning to feel elated. The consequences are unusual, as Mary explains: Such manipulations are, apparently, very subtle and often require touch. Martians communicate through the manipulations of different parts of their bodies, including their sexual organs.

Mary, for instance, is made pregnant by a Martian in one chapter. What makes Mitchison's book different, and the reason it perhaps shocked many on its original publication, is that it is fairly uninhibited about sexual changes in the future. Often the solutions arise from looking at available evidence in a non-human way. Mary, like the characters in the Sector General, have to try and understand alien behaviour as well as completely foreign ecologies and metabolisms. On occasion I was reminded of the stories in James White's Sector General series which deals with a space-going hospital that cares for aliens. Most of the chapters concern Mary's encounters with various alien flora and fauna, which she tries to understand and communicate with. The story centres on Mary, the spacewoman of the title, whose job is to establish communications with alien species, in order to further humanities understanding of the universe. Mitchison is not particularly concerned with great plot arcs, though it is not quite true to say, as it does in the introduction to my edition, that there is no plot at all. There is little detail of science and technology, in this future, humans can travel to far galaxies and communicate, often telepathically with alien species. To the modern reader of science fiction it seems a little strange. She seems to have mixed from an early age with scientists, Niels Bohr, apparently gave her a tiny jug for her dolls house and she is thanked in James Watson's Double Helix.īoth these aspects of her life come through in Memoirs of a Spacewoman, her 1962 novel that is perhaps her most well known. Married to a socialist politician, she certainly seemed to have shared some of their politics. Born into an English establishment family, she was the younger sister of the communist scientist J. Naomi Mitchison seems to have led an extraordinary life.

Naomi mitchison memoirs of a spacewoman