On page 57 of Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson describes the problem that the Black Sun staff has understanding Juanita’s work as “sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.” To some degree, it seems that he may be, intentionally or not, describing himself.
For a male author whose work contains so many female protagonists, Stephenson tends to write them into surprisingly familiar paradigms. While it’s relatively subtle, his heroines tend to function as sex objects, and operate around the men among them. Juanita, for instance, despite being the most broadly functional holder of the information in the Babel/Infocalypse stack, abdicates a large portion of the responsibility involved in order to do relatively academic research. The ‘real work’ of unraveling L. Bob Rife’s evil master plan is left to the men: Mr. Lee, Uncle Enzo, Ng, and Hiro, who, most of the time seems to be involved primarily to the end of getting back together with Juanita. Even Y.T. describes her as “that piece of tail…”
Y.T., while pretty much as empowered as anyone can get, is rather disenfranchised, for the simple reason of being 15, and possessing the maturity level of a 15 year old. She’s mostly just playing with the power she has as a middle class white girl in America, until she’s kidnapped and brought to the Raft. When she ends up in an unfamiliar place, living as she realizes much of the world lives, she gets scared and stays in her place. She too ends up needing a man to come rescue her, and once again, Raven ends up helping her cause trouble purely because he’s enamored of her physical charms.
The frustrating thing about Stephenson is that he’s clearly trying. Most of his work, and all of his recent work, is built around strong, driven female characters. However, their power is consistently derived in a fairly traditional form. Eliza, of the Baroque cycle, possesses astounding business acumen, but is still far more successful at acquiring power through sex, marriage and subtle politicking. Princess Nell of The Diamond Age takes her astounding skill set and works as a writer for a bordello.
On the other hand, this may be a critique of Stephenson’s reader base. His fans consist, in great part of the very same type of well-intentioned male techies he’s describing, each thinking, as they read the sentence, that he’s talking about someone else. Perhaps the forms of power with which Stephenson endows his female characters are those he thinks will go down most smoothly, and make the most impression in the end. Or maybe it’s just disturbing that a smart, thoughtful, modern male science fiction writer still can’t give the women in his novels power unmediated by men.