Affective cyborgs and other artificial constructs in feminist science fiction: Sideshow and Six Moon Dance by Sheri Tepper

This essay examines the emotions of diverse artificial intelligences envisioned by an incongruous feminist science fiction author, Sheri S. Tepper. The focus of the comparison will be on a complex cyborg, the Questioner in Six Moon Dance and the relevant sentient creatures in Sideshow so as to contrast the representation of emotions felt/expressed by constructs, and try to establish the connection with the author’s world view.


Introduction
Science fiction has long presented us with sentient artificial beings (man-made man and woman and other creatures), who-which?-usually show the reader how a human being is defined and treated by contemporary society, while raising awareness and criticising certain societal practices. Contemporary science fiction is also packed with man-made beings whose emotions play an important part in the narrative, from Isaac Asimov's robots of feelings and Stanislaw Lem's hypersensitive and rhymer AIs in The Cyberiad (1965) through Philip K. Dick's angry androids or William Gibson's Wintermute and Neuromancer in the Sprawl trilogy to Ann Leckie's spaceship-bound AIs and their ancillaries, or Martha Wells's soap-opera loving Murderbot, to mention but a few. When these constructs have an essential role, the authors usually confront us with their diverse answers to the favourite ontological question in science fiction-What makes us human?-and reflect upon the human condition by showing the similarities and/or differences between humans and man-made beings, very often putting a special emphasis on (the lack of certain) emotions. However, invention and consistent description of a truly nonhuman emotional state, either organic or inorganic, rarely get into the centre of interest, not even in C. J. Cherryh's Foreigner series where a fundamentally different alien mindset is pivotal to the plot. Thus, such a research about AI emotions should investigate whether it is possible to not attribute human emotions to artificial beings made by man.
This essay examines the emotions of diverse artificially enhanced/constructed intelligent beings envisioned by a female science fiction writer, Sheri S. Tepper. The author had a lot to say on this topic, usually linked with her other main interests such as overpopulation, the struggle for equality, the balance of power between genders, and the effects of religious control on society on the one hand, destruction of the environment, pollution, overconsumption and the resultant climate catastrophe on the other hand. The focus of the paper will be on a very complex cyborg, the Questioner II in Six Moon Dance and the relevant sentient creatures in Sideshow so as to contrast the representation of emotions felt and/or expressed by constructs, and try to establish the connection between that representation and the author's world view.
The topic demands interdisciplinarity, a combination of concepts from diverse disciplines, hence I shall first make the terms I am going to use clear, then briefly introduce the author who, despite her incontestable merits, remains somewhat obscure. Afterwards, the relevant features of the analysed novels will be detailed and contextualised, with particular attention to the problem of gender and emotions as well as gender stereotypes. Lastly, I shall indicate some significant aspects worth further investigation.

Artificial intelligence, emotions, and gender
There are dozens of artificial intelligence definitions, both scholarly and in everyday parlance. However, the term in this essay will be understood in the broadest sense possible, 1 inclusive of cyborgs (partly human, partly computer constructs) and digitised personality copies stored in a computer network, whereas human intelligence will be taken to be inseparable from a human body. 2 Thus the umbrella term AI will encompass enhanced humans, human-computer couplings, and machines with persona like androids. This is necessitated by the chosen literary works, and also by the requisite not to digress from the subject. 3 1 "The automation of intelligent behavior," (De Spiegeleire et al., 2017, p. 27). They also define it as "a non-human intelligence that is measured by its ability to replicate human mental skills" (p. 28), but in the case of science fiction, which abounds in aliens, this definition seems inappropriate. 2 Cyberpunk as such is sometimes viewed as an attempt at escaping the "meat" (e.g. Lavigne 2013;Scott 1994). 3 See e.g. Donna Haraway (1989Haraway ( , 1991Haraway ( , 1997 on the blurrings of animal-human and organic-inorganic divides. Is there a conceptual boundary in the case of hybrid entitites, and if so, where exactly? This question is pertinent: one of the reviewers of this essay criticised the inclusion of some characters 1 3 Affective cyborgs and other artificial constructs in feminist… Clarification of the term emotion also poses a similar difficulty as there are more than a score of definitions in psychology, quite a few of which are also used by other disciplines relevant for this topic such as Literary Studies, Computer Science and Gender Studies. Throughout this essay, emotions will be understood as having a socio-cultural backdrop, not simply matters of biology, that is, from a socialconstructionist approach (see e.g. Locke 2011). One of the key figures of this school of thought, psychologist Robert Plutchik suggests that an emotion should be defined as a chain of events that has certain loosely coupled elements in a complex feedback-loop system. The chain contains the elements of cognition, arousal, feeling state, preparation for action, display behavior, and overt action. The cognitive link in the chain contains elements of attention, memory, and reasoning. And the whole complex process begins with a significant stimulus in the life of the individual (1985, p. 199).
He argues that emotions have adaptive purposes, and has later developed an emotion classification, criticised, but still in use today (Plutschik's wheel of emotions: joy vs sorrow, anger versus fear, trust versus disgust, and surprise versus anticipation, 2001; cf. Ekman's theory of basic emotions and Russel's circumplex model of affect, Kim & Klinger, 2019). Computer scientists Leysia Palen and Susanne Bødker provide a summary of how emotion has become an important issue in human-computer interaction and the diverse approaches in their field, claiming that emotion is so large an idea that it can be descriptive of all kinds of interaction and non-interaction, meaning that it is fundamental to these things, and so therefore it is not powerful to us as analysts of human computer interaction. We need instead […] to rely on more pointed understandings of what interaction means in different contexts and at different units of analysis, and give those experiences their proper notice and place. (Palen & Bødker, 2008 (mis)quoted in the Introduction, p. 3) Kringelbach and Phillips point out that "[f]or centuries, the real experts on emotions have been novelists, poets, artists, and creators of popular entertainment" (p. 8), and a marked interest in literature and emotions has recently been observed (e.g., Carr, 2005;Hogan, 2010Hogan, , 2011Hogan, , 2018Locher & Jucker, 2021;Lyytikäinen, 2017;Robinson, 2005). Similarly, distinct attention has been paid to the relation between gender and emotions, the perceived and actual gender differences in emotion, and the ensuing stereotypes, particularly in psychology, sociology, and Gender Studies (Robinson & Johnson, 1997;Fischer, 2000;Shields et al., 2006Shields et al., , 2017Brody, 2010;Latu et al., 2013;Ruberg & Steenbergh, 2013 among others). I have found the above mentioned studies especially useful, although they made me definitely incline towards the examination of emotions to the disadvantage of the artificial intelligence angle.
(the Questioner, the Core and the dinka-jins) on the basis that they started as humans so they should be regarded as humans.

Footnote 3 (Continued)
Emotion is indisputably gendered. Based on our socialisation and culture, we shall consider certain emotions and emotion-based behaviours more feminine or masculine, and react to them accordingly. 4 This, a very profound personal experience of Tepper's will be important later. Sheri S. Tepper "the apparently born story-teller" 5 Sheri S. Tepper (1929Tepper ( -2016 was a radical American eco-feminist 6 novelist and onetime poet. She first wrote poems and stories until 1964, but when after her retirement she took up writing again in 1984 she only wrote prose: speculative fiction, mystery and horror, altogether 47 novels, seven short stories, and six essays 7 all of them with a bent towards social criticism. As has been mentioned, she had a set of deep-seated convictions and philosophical positions which constituted the core of her fiction, that is, she was a self-confessed preacher of ecological concerns and women's rights (Anon., 1998;Sohár, 2015;Szpatura, 2008), 8 and writing-in every sense of the word-fantastic fiction served as a means of spreading (sometimes controversial) ideas and making readers think about otherwise unacknowledged or taken-forgranted issues, including the problem of artificial intelligences, either embodied or not. Perhaps this strong commitment and, as a result, her tendency to carry notions to their extremes, to "moralise excessively" as well as the gender/genetic essentialism imputed to her explain why literary criticism rarely mentions her name and analyse her works. Even Attebery (2002) only refers to her twice in his Decoding gender in science fiction, a monograph specifically dealing with the uses of gender in the genre which was Tepper's chosen medium. Frankenstein's daughters: Women writing science fiction (Donawerth, 1997), and Ecofeminist science fiction (Vakoch, 2021) do not even mention her name. "The canon is built to exclude," states Reid (2017) in her reminiscences about Tepper, and this holds true both in science fiction and feminist literature.
Nevertheless, Tepper was a fine writer. The encyclopedia of science fiction calls her "one of science fiction's premier world-builders." 9 Many of her novels were shortlisted for major awards-Beauty won the Locus Award for the Best Fantasy Novel in 1992-and, though she wrote short fiction only rarely, her novella "The Gardener" (1989) was a World Fantasy Award finalist, and she received a World Fantasy life achievement award in 2015. Private commemorations generally 5 Tepper, Sheri S. https:// sf-encyc loped ia. com/ entry/ tepper_ sheri_s Accessed 19 January 2022. 7 Data from the Internet Speculative Fiction Database http:// www. isfdb. org/ cgi-bin/ ea. cgi? 173 Accessed 19 January 2022. 8 Science fiction has always had a strong didactic tradition, beginning with Jules Verne. 9 Nicholls et al. n.d. Tepper, Sheri S. https:// sf-encyc loped ia. com/ entry/ tepper_ sheri_s Accessed 19 January 2022. underscore her influence on the commemorators' thinking, the wondrous secondary worlds, the captivating story-telling, and the often disturbing concepts (e.g. Fosse n.d.; The Rejectionist 2011, Scalzi, 2016Valentine, 2016).
Tepper required the engine of story to provide impulsion for the other things she could do, which tended to tilt her work towards melodrama and excess, and thus to obscure a little her remarkable sophistication. In the space of only a few years she became one of sf's premier world-builders; the diversity of invented societies in Sideshow-this diversity being the actual point of the book-is breathtaking, as is the vivid ecological mystery of Grass, the bizarre discovery of a bona fide "god" in Raising the Stones, and the planetary dance that climaxes Six Moon Dance. She was one of the most significant newand new Feminist-voices to enter 1980s sf, and a figure whose daunting singlemindedness about the disasters threatening this planet has significantly affected the world of sf. (SFE) The two novels to be examined for the present study exhibit important similarities, representation of artificial intelligence among them, but Six Moon Dance is a standalone story, while Sideshow, as the third instalment of a tale spanning galaxies and millennia, completes the loosely-connected Arbai trilogy, sometimes called Marjorie Westriding trilogy. 10 Both can be categorised what Csicsery-Ronay calls future history (2011, p. 78). Both have an omnipresent narrator and several storylines focalizing on diverse characters, 11 the point of view may switch from a character to another once or several times within a chapter. Consequently, the chronological order in the narratives is not always linear, chapters move both in space and time when describing people and events. Although they touch upon many of Tepper's idées fixes, both centre on an issue of substance, Six Moon Dance on gender, particularly the relation between identity and gender as a cultural imprint 12 (and their consequences in society), whereas Sideshow thrashes out the questions of diversity and the destiny of man. In both cases, artificial constructs and their emotions play a principal role in the plot: without them the happy ending would not ensue.

Sideshow 13
In science fiction and fantasy, 'elsewhere,' from Faerie to space stations, from an alternate prehistory to a galaxy far, far away, that is, somewhere different from our consensual reality, is a stock phrase and offers a very wide range of possible 10 The two preceding volumes are Grass (1989, Hugo and Locus Awards Nominee next year), and Raising the Stones (1990). 11 "[…] in Tepper's trademark fashion, there is a plethora of auxiliary characters, whose points of view complement the picture of the alien world" (Gomel, 2014, p. 158). 12 Butler (1993). extrapolations and thought experiments. Tepper excels in this. She is particularly good at creating fascinating and thought-provoking secondary worlds from little communities to interstellar and intergalactic alliances. In Sideshow, she elegantly combines being elsewhere and its role in self-reflection, metaphorization, migration, identity, travel literature, utopias/dystopias, galactic journeys, mental spaces, meeting with other cultures, and culture shock. And three different types of artificial constructs: the dinka-jins, the personality copies in a computer network called the Core, as well as the Arbai device, and its creatures.
The novel consists of five parts, each of them contains three numbered chapters (1-3, 4-6, 7-9, 10-12, 13-15), resulting in a well-balanced structure. 14 It also has several threads with diverse point of view characters, and omniscient narrator who sometimes interrupts the narrative to comment upon something or provide information, for instance, right away in the opening sentence: "Humanity was saved from certain destruction when, on their wedding night, Lek Korsyzczy informed his wife that their first child was to be a son" (Tepper, 1992, p. 3). Humanity's fate is usually decided on the last pages of a science fiction or fantasy novel, with this opening spoiler Tepper indicates that her narrative will run counter to traditions and expectations, and in many respects it does indeed. The novel commences with a cutting social and religious satire: late twentieth century United States and bigot Catholic faith on the one hand, the setup of social systems and diverse but equally bigot religions in the far future on the other hand. The parallelism is inescapable.
The story mostly takes place on the planet Elsewhere which is divided up amongst the various refugee religious groups, those people who fled from the Hobbs Land Gods, 15 assuring each of them mutual tolerance and non-interference, mandated by law. Elsewhere's capital Tolerance guards this status quo.
Out of the thousand and three provinces on Elsewhere, 16 City Fifteen is the realm of the dinka-jins, or dinks, human beings who "eschew the flesh" (Tepper, 1992, p. 62), and decide to compartmentalize their bodies according to their inclinations: approximately half of the population keeps only their brains in the box which replaces their bodies, and moves and receives nourishment by gravitics, while other organs are maintained in storage, the rest keep all body parts in such boxes and may gather together or disperse their body if they wish so. 14 Part One presents the background, from their parents' wedding night until the twins disappear from Earth; Part Two introduces the problems to face, from the twins' re-appearance on Elsewhere until they learn its true nature; Part Three continues to describe problems, from starting the quest to asking the 'gods' to answer the great question; Part Four begins to solve the aforementioned problems, from escaping Derbeck to falling into captivity/the arrival at Noplace; and Part Five furnishes the rest of the problems with solutions, from saving the captured to saving Elsewhere. 15 "[…] the Hobbs Land gods are not gods, or aliens, but merely a creation, the Arbai Device, left behind by the Arbai as a means for species to solve the problems of living together. Tepper is always trying to blur the distinction between human and alien; here, she suggests that this blurring is human destiny" (James, 2019, p. 264). 16 It seems to be an allusion to the famous Leporello aria (Madamina, il catalogo è questo) listing his master's conquests in Don Giovanni by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, implying that those human societies had been seduced into fleeing the Arbai device and establishing the so called diversity of Elsewhere which later the Siamese twins will rightly identify as a human zoo.

Affective cyborgs and other artificial constructs in feminist…
City Fifteen was three-quarters occupied by dinka-jins, about half of whom were dedicated to the life of the mind. Why, after all, go through disassembly if not to free the mind from fleshly concerns? Why put one's germ plasm on standby, one's innards in cold storage, if not to focus upon the attainments of the intellect? (p. 255).
Having anything to do with dinka-jins is distressing for the protagonists. The Provost, the Head of the Council Supervisory has to force himself to look at the box containing the dink whose help he seeks, and Fringe Owldark, an enforcer of the mandatory diversity, who plays a key role in the narrative, definitely dislikes them: She wove her way among the revelers: […], scattered parts of some City Fifteen dinka-jins visiting the Swale to experience reality. Dink eyes darted about, peering; dink noses slunk, smelling. The modulator boxes had to be across the room somewhere, along with the arms and legs and other parts. She didn't bother looking for them. Assembled or disassembled, dinks were not her favorite thing. (p. 154) The so-called brain dinka-jins are interested only in intellectual matters, do not have emotions, and do not really comprehend them as is demonstrated when they view the sensory recordings of the people who moved into the Core and became purely electronic beings: they do not grasp either why those recordings were kept or their significance. However, they are fully aware of this shortcoming, and learn to deal with it, for instance, asking a standard human to interpret what they could not. The other type of dinks-regardless of their actual state-do exhibit feelings (sneer, sulkiness, belligerence, curiosity etc.) as is proved by the confrontation between a rowdy dinka-jin and Fringe. Apparently, purely electronic signs in themselves cannot stimulate feelings. Yet, the main researcher brain dinka-jin expressly says: "We share your feelings. We feel the situation to be basically immoral. Of course, we dinks feel it is difficult to be a man and still be moral. Which is why we've become as we are." (p. 271), referring to the central trope of Grass, the first volume in this trilogy, "all flesh is grass," where the protagonist naming herself a grass discarded her human identity and embarked on a journey through space and time with an alien, as well as to the age-old concept of sinful flesh 17 as a difficult obstacle to overcome in achieving morality. But, as we shall see later, incorporeality does not guarantee high moral standards. However, the dinka-jin's statement either contradicts the earlier established fact that brain dinks have no feelings, or, our communication is so much based on expressions referring to sensory and emotional experiences that even emotionless beings cannot avoid using such phrases. This question is answered later when the wholesale destruction caused by the self-proclaimed deities fill the dinkajins with fear and dismay.
Besides cognition and the temptations of flesh, morality also depends on emotions, or their lack thereof, as is clearly shown by Fringe's case. She is a human woman who loses her emotions after being reconstructed by the Arbai device, also known as the Hobbs Land Gods. Since her turbulent and conflicting sentiments have always distressed her, she wishes to free herself from all emotional bonds, and the device obliges her. But without her feelings, she is cut off from her humanity, for instance, when she is informed of the death of her best friend, she does notcannot-mourn for him. However, her attitudes remain unchanged and upon learning that the Hobbs Land Gods altered her (emotional state), she believes herself possessed and refuses the device's assistance: for her, the value of independence and freedom exceeds even her heart's desire. Her behaviour is consistent in this regard, for not even a strong sexual attraction offering the possibility of a loving relationship can divert her from her chosen destiny. Bagging Prince Charming is no longer the consummation of a woman's life. The feminist message here is less subtle than later in Six Moon Dance.
One of the storylines concerns the only differently gendered Siamese twins (Nela and Bertran Korsyzczy), the Eighth Wonder of the World, born back in the late twentieth century, joined in such a way as to be inseparable, who eventually get transported to Elsewhere (after centuries in stasis), where they, together with a few locals, take part in the investigation of strange appearances in a mysterious province never explored whose name is Noplace, another allusion. The twins will have to face getting new bodies with the same consciousness three times in the narrative: first, they will be disembodied and made dinka-jins by the Core, which revolts them so much that they ask Fringe to kill them, that is, they do have very strong emotions despite being reduced to little more than their brains and skull, contradicting how the brain dinka-jins were presented. After escaping from the Core's captivity, they are freed from their boxes, disassembled, then assembled as mythical creatures, an otter-seal and an angel-gylph, by the Arbai device which misunderstands their desire for the ability to move, and move separately, to soar and to swim, but recognising its mistake from the twins' agitation, finally gives them standard, although beautiful human bodies, based on their own DNA. The twins are certainly emotional in all of their forms and, together with other able-bodied human characters, serve as a sort of counterpoint both to the personality copies in the Core also full of feelings, and the assumedly emotionless dinka-jins, demonstrated by the cultural shocks they go through and/or elicit from others whenever they encounter deviations from their own late twentieth century American expectations.
In the maze under the capital, the digital copies of once alive people preserved in the so called Core for centuries get restless and decide to rule the planet as gods and goddesses in another storyline. Unlike the Questioner whose conception, construction and goals are discussed in a neutral way quite soon in the narrative, before she acts as an independent agent, these artificial constructs turn up later in the tale, in very different circumstances: they kill two siblings when a group of youngsters venture into the old and sealed barracks under the city for a dare. There is no doubt they are the villains in the tale; their emotions and behaviour suit their role.
Subsequently, it is revealed that most of the one thousand people put into cold storage, the four factions of scholars and professors of Brannigan Galaxity, whose minds were supposed to be woken and updated only once a year as per specifications 18 to prevent corruption, decided to stay awake and refused the automatically done updates and error correction in spite of warnings from the engineer who participated in the design of the whole project. The warning scene was recorded, and the Provost, the political leader of Elsewhere and his helpers, who are trying to find a way to protect everybody from these violent and self-centred artificial intelligences, experience it in full sensory details and hear the engineer's explanation: "Time in the matrix is not like time outside, it is more like dream time.
Episodes that seem to go on for days may actually last only moments. If you are awake in the Core you may achieve many years' worth of memories while a single year passes outside.
"These memories will not be anchored by sensory feedback as they would be in the real world. In the outside world, sensory feedback provides the necessary referents to anchor our emotional and intellectual experiences. Our experiences are separated and made discrete by sensory trivia-by movements, smells, the sound of voices, the sight of a face. In the Core, there will be no sensory data at all, and where there is none, minds tend to create it, just as they do during dreaming.
"So, you will create environments and experiences. And by the time a year has passed, your pattern will have deviated considerably from its original. Returning your pattern to its original configuration would be equivalent to wiping out years, perhaps decades of your life! They will be the most recent, vivid years. To wipe them out will be like dying. You won't ... we won't be able to bring ourselves to do it!" (pp. 295-296.) However, the four faction leaders in their arrogance remained unconvinced, grew insane and became monsters during their one thousand years in stasis. They absorbed all the other personality copies in a process which kept the shared attributes but deleted individual traits, thus the resultant four personages were reduced to a few basic emotions, attitudes and urges: greed, vanity, cruelty, an overwhelming wish for adoration and respect, for power and control over people which, when all is said and done, culminates in mass murder. The four assemblages, "deities" gradually lose their original (not too likeable) character, as is expressed by their changing epithets. 19 They have created an extensive network of microgravitics which covers most of the planet and enables them to wreak havoc upon the provinces. Their hunger for adoration seems insatiable and the cruel, arbitrary rules they contrive are clearly devised to make people default. 18 He has read the original specifications several times, specifications informing him that they are down there below, ail their fleshy parts severed and cold, white-rimed and asleep; all their mind patterns being awakened once a year to run through the matrix like scurrying pets on an exercise wheel, whirring, whirring as they update themselves and take exercise, prior to going back into unconscious stasis once more. Finally, the Arbai device, 20 an "empathetometer" (p. 315) designed to assist interspecies and interpersonal communication, a fungus-like contrivance spreading underground and connecting all creatures, should also be considered an artificial intelligence of sorts since it is capable of assessing the recipients' needs, beliefs as well as mindset, and act accordingly at both species and individual levels. Although references to the device appear very early in the narrative-as Hobbs Land Gods in the description of the settlement on the planet Elsewhere (p. 9)-and recur frequently eliciting the planet-dwellers' abhorrence, the explanation of its real goal and effects is only given almost at the end (p. 435), when the destiny of man on Elsewhere had to be decided. The Arbai device is evidently sentient, otherwise it could not react to its reception. It communicates the feelings of everybody linked to it, but has no feelings of its own based on the principle that true understanding, 'being in someone else's shoes' prevents most societal problems. The device was created with an effective self-adapting program, and by the time of Sideshow, it connects almost the whole Galaxy, giving rise to Fauna sapiens (the human/animal interface, the "amborg" will be also in Six Moon Dance, see Gordon, 2008).
As a closing remark, I would like to draw attention to the nursery rhyme Fringe's tutor recites to the Provost when he first seeks help against the people in the Core: "'Breaze and Bland and Thob and Clore/ran till they could run no more/then Jordel of Hemerlane/chased them all right back again. One two three four/you're it.'" (Tepper, 1992, p. 30.) Similarly to the opening sentence, it foretells the happy ending, but projected into the past, illustrating Csicsery-Ronay's point about the historians' voice resembling that of a backward-looking prophet (p. 79).

Six Moon Dance 21
Six Moon Dance (1998) allows Old Earth to survive (by the skin of its teeth) in the background, focusing instead on a colony planet […] whose native indigenes do all the physical labour for humans but are "perceived" as invisible […]. The story, however, becomes far more complex than its beginning chapters suggest, and its subtleties of social analysis-along with some highly intricate Godgame manoeuvres by a sentient distributed network evolved beyond real comparison with Computers-make it perhaps Tepper's finest late work. (SFE) In Six Moon Dance, Tepper also examines demographics that would lead to men being oppressed in the same way as women are in most social systems in reality by Affective cyborgs and other artificial constructs in feminist… presenting a repressive matriarchy on the planet Newholme, and to some extent, in the reproduction of an alien species, the Quaggi. These cases are contrasted with the Questioner who contains three human brains whose identity will prove crucial in the narrative, with the Wilderneers, the first settlers on Newholme from the planet Thor, who represent toxic masculinity, and with the planetary consciousness, Kaorugi who, being sexless and genderless, expresses great interest in other species' sexual and gender-based behaviour.
The Timmys of Six Moon Dance are the invisible slaves who do not wholly fit into this pattern, in that their subservience and their labors on behalf of humans do seem to be in large part voluntary: if they wish, they could disappear at any time through the hidden passages in the walls of the houses, and, indeed, by the time the Questioner appears on Newholme to enquire after any possible infringements of Haraldson's Edicts (such as settling a planet that has an indigenous population, as the Timmys seem to be), they have already disappeared. They turn out to be merely individualized parts of Kaorugi, the vast being who fills the planet, but otherwise they fit the pattern. After a certain age, children are taught that the Timmys do not exist; they do not see them and never talk about them.
Kaorugi is just one of several planetary beings, or world-spirits, that we meet in Tepper's works. Kaorugi, in Six Moon Dance, is changed by its encounter with a Quaggi, a huge star-roving being with wings that act as solar sails. Tepper's ideas on world-spirits are probably influenced by Lovelock's ideas about Gaia (James, 2019, p. 263) As has been mentioned, Tepper usually employs several-sometimes interwoven-threads in her novels, and Six Moon Dance is no exception. It is a complex story, consists of sixty-one chapters, each with a short, descriptive title foreshadowing the events, 22 altogether nine point of view characters. Out of those sixty-one chapters seventeen feature, an additional twenty-two mention the Questioner, who can therefore be considered a central figure and the second most important character in the novel. Only the protagonist (Mouche) appears as frequently (in 38 chapters), always as a POV, all other focalisers play a considerably less prominent role in the narrative. 23 It is important to note that the peritextual Cast of characters placed before the story proper (between the motto and the first chapter) names the Questioner "a device." In all likelihood most readers overlook this hint. However, it is confirmed later when she is called "a device of the Council of Worlds" (Tepper, 1998, p. 92). 22 For instance, Assorted Persons in Pursuit, Round the Down Staircase, Sailing the Pillared Sea, The Farther Shore (the last is an obvious reference to The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin). The peritexts of this novel (Genette 1997) are strongly evocative, and play with the narrative traditions of both 19th century popular literature and 20th century American science fiction. 23 The other focalisers: Madame Genevois 34, Ellin Voy 28, Ornery 21, D'Jevier 18, Marool Mantelby 17, Bane 16, Calvy g'Valdet 12. Of course, the number of appearances in itself is misleading, for instance, Madame Genevois appears much more often as Mouche's owner and teacher than a POV.
And "an object designed and manufactured to perform one or more functions" 24 will surely not be able to experience emotions, therefore any feelings expressed by it can be disregarded as illusions or fancies. So even before the narrative starts, the reader is informed that the Questioner's feelings are of no account. I shall come back to this later.
The story takes place in the far future, when a galactic Council of Worlds (COW) adheres to the so called Edicts of Equity which define humanity in terms of intelligence, civility, and the pursuit of justice rather than by species or form. Certain Earthian creatures other than mankind were immediately rendered human by the edicts, gaining the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of satisfactions thereby, and some extremist individuals and groups who had previously paraded themselves as human were disabused of this notion (p. 27).
In addition, the edicts forbid "slavery, genocide, settling on previously occupied planets, racial crowding, and the destruction of either habitat or biodiversity" as well as discrimination "on the basis of species, morphology, color, hispidity, gender, age, or opinion, except as species, morphology, gender, et al. provably altered the consequence of any given situation" (p. 27). All member worlds must conform, and their conformity is regularly assessed by a cyborg, named The Questioner.
They would develop a bionic construct that contained a human mind or minds, a construct infallibly programmed with Haraldson's edicts. The construct would be capable of learning, applying, and adapting those edicts while retaining their spirit and sense. Even though the technicians would start with one or more human brains-a more ideal interface could not be foundhuman memories and emotions would be repressed. The construct would have no vanity or greed, it would be incapable of pique or sloth, and would, thus, be immune to influence. The brains within it would be harvested from among persons who were already dying (p. 30)/ Not any brain can be 'harvested' for the Questioner, only healthy and young ones, and, because they have to be prepared for their later use, brains of the accidentally deceased cannot be taken. Moreover, since the planets belonging to the COW have strict regulations what is allowed and in which circumstances, suitable brains can be more easily appropriated from unjoined worlds. 25 Both facts will have an impact on the plot. 26 The Questioner is the second such bionic construct, a cyborg "formed by a human, machine brain/nervous system coupling" (Warwick, 2003, p. 131). She is designed to fulfil three tasks: first, to judge the inhabited planets and systems of COW periodically whether they comply with the edicts, if they do not, they are not humans, just pests, and the Questioner will exterminate them; and second, "assess other mankind-settled worlds to determine if cultures meet minimal standards of ethical conduct regarding human rights" (Tepper, 1998, p. 165), and third, to collect information about the already known non-mankind races. In view of the first task, as well as the long-standing fear from artificial intelligences (Anderson, 2005;Kumar et al., 2019), it is little wonder that her frightening aspect is mentioned first in the novel: she is referred to as a sort of bogeyman, to frighten a child into proper behaviour, without explanation. 27 This terrifying feature of hers runs through the whole narrative, it comes up whenever she is mentioned, her original purpose seems already forgotten, she has practically turned into an angel of retribution: "What does the Questioner do?" asked one boy. "It destroys worlds," whispered someone else, "if they don't conform to the edicts." None of the boys knew much about the edicts, but most of them supposed Newholme didn't conform (Tepper, 1998, pp. 120-121).
The Questioner was the monster under the bed, the bugaboo in the closet, the sound creeping up the midnight stairs. To anyone without a clear conscience, the Questioner was the ultimate terrifier (p. 174).
The Questioner resembles a woman, has a motherly appearance, and a large mechanical body without the characteristic signs of any ethnic group so as to display no favouritism. Her body is equipped with many sensors she can shut off at will, but she is not supposed to have feelings, so her feelings are disregarded (p. 17). She is portrayed as an uninvolved and impartial outsider, a workaholic who recurrently feels "amorphous and aimless sadness. Or maybe anger. Or maybe sheer peevishness" (p. 53), whenever she is between jobs to do. She exhibits intellectual curiosity (interested and intrigued are her most frequent modifiers), and closely linked to it, and takes delight in finding novel facts, in research. Interestingly, winning card games also gives her pleasure. Despite her extensive experiences and vast knowledge, she is able to be surprised by the unexpected: when she receives the information about the incorporated brains, twice at unusual findings, twice at the protagonist's (Mouche's) way of thinking, and twice at herself, seven surprises altogether. She has a wry sense of humour. She can imitate the facial signs of emotions even when she is not emotionally affected. Charm and flattery amuse her. However, her initial calmness, patience and serenity gradually transform into irritability and anger clouding her judiciousness, and this transformation makes her more "mankind-like." DuMond focuses on the Questioner in her review, 28 and rightly so as this cyborg holds the key to a satisfactory closure of the events, that is, a happy ending would not be possible without convincing her that she could and should change her mind, her decision based on the edicts. But can "a device" provided with a set of coded working instructions change her mind?
The Questioner's physical, emotional and intellectual qualities are described as soon as she makes her first appearance in the narrative (these will be nuanced later). Of course, she has superhuman abilities. 29 What is more, "[s]he could feel comfort, she could perceive beauty, she could appreciate music, she had pleasure receptors for tastes, smells, and touches, but when duty took her to worlds where comfort, beauty, and pleasure were absent, she turned her receptors off" (p. 53), but she cannot feel pain, although she does perceive something similar when she keeps putting off maintenance for a time. Her ability to think and reason is supposed to surpass that of the human intellect, and Tepper elegantly solves this quandary: 30 in the beginning the reader is informed of the Questioner's potential agency in general terms, but only sees her in action after she has decided to break the implicit rules which hide the identities and stories of the three incorporated brains from her consciousness, and her behaviour and decisions become governed by emotions and biased, that is, human.
"Tell me, truly, when you make these terrible judgments, or at any other time, do you feel anything?" She was taken aback. Still, they had a bargain. It was incumbent upon her to answer as honestly as possible. "When I make a judgment, I always feel I am doing right," she replied. "If I do not feel it is right, I cannot do it. 29 "The Questioner knew perfectly well what he was thinking. Most people expected something more exotic. To outward appearance, she was simply a stout woman of indeterminate age with a rather large head covered with iron gray hair worn in a bun. She was, however, a good deal more than that. She was enormously strong; she could swim, dive, fly, brachiate, crawl, or climb mountains. She could provide emergency medical assistance and do quick field repairs on a great variety of complicated equipment. She could cook, sing quite well, and compose fairly literary poetry in several languages. She supposed she could fall in love, though she had never done so. Though the senses were there, the stimulus was not." (Tepper, 1998, p. 58) 30 With a brain which is part human, part machine, a Cyborg would have some links to their human background but their view on life, what is possible and what is not, would be very much different from that of a human. The values, morals and ethics of a Cyborg would relate to its own life, what it feels is important and what not. In fact, humans may not figure too highly in such a scenario. (Warwick, 2003, p. 136) 28 In Six Moon Dance, the focus of the action is Newholme, a planet that has developed along very different lines from most of Earth. And ready or not, the people of Newholme are about to receive a visit from the Questioner. The arbiter of the Council of Worlds (COW) is coming to review every aspect of their society. If things don't align with the humanist ideals of COW, the Newholmians will suffer the consequences. Their suffering will be brief, though, because failure to measure up means extermination. Total extermination. A visit from the cybernetic Questioner might not be a cause for concern on some planets, but those worlds don't have as much to hide. Or as little chance of keeping their sins hidden. About as much chance as they have of preventing the volcanic eruptions that represent the other threat to Newholme.
Reveal the truth and face certain death or hide the truth and face certain death. Either way, the Questioner will out (DuMond 1998).
"At other times, however, I have other kinds of feelings and I do not know why, or how, or from what source the feelings come. When I am intent upon my work, I am largely unaware of existing as an entity separate from the task. When there is a pause in my duties, however, sometimes I feel sadness or fear or longing for things I have never had, or cannot define. Sometimes I know things, and I cannot find the source of knowing anywhere in my files or my perception systems. I have thought, perhaps, that these feelings come from the human brains that were incorporated into me, but I cannot tell for sure." "Ah," murmured the trader. "What brains were they?" She shook her head. "I don't know. I wasn't informed." "Would you like to know?" She felt the mental equivalent of a gasp, a brief cessation of sense, a networkwide shock (p. 57).
She learns the life stories of the three brains (Chapter 31), and later reveals these to a companion during their quest to save the world in the best fantasy tradition, a cross-dressed young woman (Chapter 47): all three young women aged 13 or 14 suffered an untimely death in patriarchal social systems, an untouchable girl saved a high caste baby's life from fire and was buried alive for having touched it, another was burned alive so that she would not inherit when the old man who had married her a few days previously died, and the third was stoned to death for adultery because her old husband's grown son taught her to read and gave her books. However, even before the Questioner becomes fully cognizant of the fate of her brain donors, she is prejudiced when she supposes that the assaulter is male: The captor transmitted a howl of triumph. The captive screamed in a blast of waveforms. The Questioner understood both howl and scream, the one of triumph, the other of terror and pain. She knew that pain would gain the victim nothing. Her, the Questioner told herself, assigning roles to this drama. The victim would be female. The attacker would be male. It was his tentacles that held her fast (p. 61).
The Questioner is convinced that the captive died "after being waylaid and raped, or perhaps in the act of laying the egg or hatching the young," and seems reluctant to accept a different interpretation of this event offered by the same companion (p. 291). Relying more and more on the experiences of her human brains, the Questioner ceases to question her premises and her deductions, discards rationality and becomes fully emotional. 31 From the context given, that is, the behaviour of the misogynistic femicidal men, the first settlers on Newholme on the one hand, and the strictly regulated matriarchy with its artificially produced scarcity of female children on the other hand, attributing the gender roles this way seems evident and remains unquestioned until the end, when the Questioner has to face that she misapprehended the gender of the assaulter. In hindsight, the omens presaging this twist can easily be identified. Tepper, who also published mystery fiction, employs this classic technique very well: she has hidden the clues in plain sight and let the Questioner-and all point of view characters, not to mention the reader-mislead themselves. Twice, since being strongly biased by her human brains the Questioner commits another error of judgement: she believes that sex-based infanticide is practised on Newholme, that half of the new-born girls are murdered to achieve the above mentioned gender imbalance as the matriarchy in the described form is only feasible if surplus women do not exist. 32 The second false assumption is doubly damnatory as she arrives at it after re-examining her inferences after her first mistake, realizing the falsehood of the provided explanation for gender imbalance, and jumping to this conclusion. The repetition emphasizes the inevitability of such flawed judgements in emotionally loaded issues, where the emotions involved lead to deficient reasoning. The whole concept of the Questioner proves itself to be shaky: nobody can be immune to the influence of their own brain(s).
Six Moon Dance convincingly demonstrates that not just people are culturally pre-programmed, but cyborgs and planetary conciousnesses, that is, any sentience as well, and that cultural biases may lead to misconstruing what intelligent beings experience. This begets communication failure which may end in wholesale destruction. Creating a light-hearted comedy out of this potentially tragic human condition with a lovely though not unexpected twist does credit to Tepper's storytelling.
The twist needed for a total happy ending which includes the Questioner is just as carefully constructed as the way to the erroneous assessments: the need for and right to "compensatory joys" when a society is built upon compromises and one has to comply with societal requirements are acknowledged and observed: for instance, women have to marry and provide progeny since there are so few of them, and in compensation, after a set number of years, they are allowed to have trained consorts. The protagonist Mouche is such a consort in training, and employing his learnt masculine wiles, he coaxes the Questioner into the future removal of unpleasant memories with the help of Karougi the planetary consciousness so as to restore her original functionality, hence wellbeing. Tepper is very vocal about the unwisdom of living in the past and carrying "pain like a label." In her opinion all human beings, including sentient contraptions as per the edicts' definition, deserve joy and happiness. Without her spelling out, the dividing lines between human and artificial entities grow indistinct, disappear by the end of the narrative.
Environmental concerns are inseparably connected with ravaging androcentrism on the one hand, since the first settlers kill all but one Corojumi-semi-independent mobile parts of the planetary consciousness in charge of choreography-and sell their skins off planet, with almost fatal consequences for everybody, and the planetary consciousness, Karougi on the other hand, since it is Kaorugi's body mankind settles on, and affects.
To recapitulate: the Questioner does not display any non-human emotion or attitude consistently throughout the narrative, her behaviour and "gut reactions" often seem emotion-governed. It does not matter whether she is regarded as a device or a woman, she is hardly ever believed to be a real person with real needs and desires. As a moral arbitrator, she can ask for anything in order to carry out her duties as well as possible, but it does not even occur to her, nor anybody else except the alien, to have a much-needed respite after several centuries. The symptoms she exhibits are those of a work addict, close to burnout. All in all, she is presented as a typical overworked woman in charge of the wellbeing of many dependants, and this is why the final seduction scene is so funny and sad at the same time (the Questioner even flushes like a girl in her teens). At the end of the novel the readers, one may hope, will realize that Tepper has gradually tricked them into accepting all sentient beings as human, including the cyborg.
Six Moon Dance is also a serious warning against thinking in discrete categories about gender roles instead of a continuum.

Concluding remarks
Tepper is an anomaly in feminist science fiction. Not only because the publisher found her first novel (The Revenants, 1984) too complex for a first novel and asked her to write something "more accessible," which she did within a month writing a YA book (King's Blood Four, 1983) promptly developed into a trilogy of trilogies, 33 but also because she had a unique take on second-wave feminism in her science fiction (Price 1992) as opposed to those heavily influenced by post-feminist times (see Whelehan 1995). She experienced patriarchy at its worst, both personally 34 and in her professional life at Planned Parenthood, and the anger at injustice made her return to writing. Despite this fundamental indignation, she preferred the comical mode (Frye 1957), and employed humour and wordplay sometimes vigorously, sometimes in a low-key way, particularly her denotative skills stand out. Humour, ranging from silly puns like HoLI COW, Men of Business (or MOB) to snide remarks, for instance, about the seven official government expressions ("kindliness with smile and/or chuckle, business-like with tight lips, censorious with narrowed 33 Later she developed the True Game Metaverse which connected these nine novels (King's Blood Four, Necromancer Nine 1983, Wizard's Eleven 1984, The Song of Mavin Manyshaped, The Flight of Mavin Manyshaped, The Search of Mavin Manyshaped, Jinian Footseer 1985, Dervish Daughter, Jinian Star-Eye 1986 with A Plague of Angels (1993), The Waters Rising (2010) and the final instalment, her last novel, Fish Tails (2014). 34 In an interview, she is still embittered when she recalls her grandmother's remark upon her brother's birth: "I have a grandson now, I don't need you girls anymore," or her employer's unjust behaviour: "I feel as I felt at twenty-nine, when I was told to interview for my replacement when I'd left the job I'd been doing for 5 years for CARE. They told me to give it to a male applicant at a certain salary with these words: "I know that's more than you were making, but he's a man." The fact that I was supporting two children and that he was a retired army major on full pension, supporting no one but himself, made no difference.
[…] I'm angry. Thinking of this makes me angry" (Szpatura, 2008). eyes, threatening with mouth distended, rage with red face, forgiveness with nod and gesture of benediction, and pity with sorrowful mouth and dropped eyes and chin") in Six Moon Dance, from the astonishing first sentence to the social and religious satires in Sideshow, also plays an important role in the presentation of (any likeable) characters as well as in the narration itself. It is important to note that all artificial intelligences appearing in her novels furnish evidence of their ability to appreciate and/or express that which is humorous.
Tepper's insistence on becoming human instead of remaining 'mankind,' evolving into more than Homo sapiens (Fauna sapiens in Sideshow, and a human-alien hybrid in Six Moon Dance) results from her firm ethical beliefs based on her own life and work experiences. Gomel, who praises Tepper's nonhumanistic subversive ethics, points out that it is undercut by her writing skills, the superlative worldbuilding, likeable characters, "easy style, and masterful deployment of focalization, allowing us access to the protagonists' inner worlds," it is too easy to identify with her romantic heroines and heroes, and overlook the transformation into something more than human and the "ethics of scale" (Gomel, 2014, p. 161). However, in the two novels discussed here, the comparable female protagonists, both of whom possess human brains and artificial bodies, Fringe and the Questioner, overcome this obstacle by being uncomfortable heroines: Fringe declines the proffered romance that used to be a key factor in happy endings, the consummation of a woman's life, for self-fulfilment, while the cyborg advances into a romantic relationship, it is subversion at its best. It is no mere chance that she quotes this saying from the Analects of Confucius in Six Moon Dance: "Major principles suffer no transgression. Minor principles allow for compromise" (Tepper, 1998, p. 99). Indeed, Sheri Tepper remained true to her ecofeminist principles in all her career.
Funding Open access funding provided by Pázmány Péter Catholic University.
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