Roberson's Interminable Ramble

In the preproduction stages of the space opera project, I've been reading a lot of novels. Sooner or later I'll post my reading list, when I get it finished (hopefully sometime in April), but the last few months have been a real eye-opener. I've previously mentioned my late discovery of Cordwainer Smith's genius, but that's the tip of the iceberg. I've had loads of hands-t0-forehead, "How long has this been going on?" moments recently. Last week it was Dan Simmons' Hyperion, which ripped the top of my head clean off. The week before it was Iain Banks' The Use of Weapons (I'd read Consider Phlebas years ago, but clearly it was years before I was ready for it, since I recall liking it, but not loving it), which is an almost perfect novel.

In any event, last week I discovered that I adore Greg Egan. I've enjoyed his short stories over the years ("Singleton" and "Oracle" in particular, for reasons that should be apparent to anyone who's read Here, There & Everywhere), but Diaspora was the first of his novels I'd read. It is, in a word, awesome. Mind-expanding stuff, that had the effect of messing with my worldview for a while after I finished reading it. One thing in particular that worked its way into my consciousness was his use of the gender-neutral pronouns ve, ver, and vis, for polis-citizens who are not gendered.

In my in-progress space opera, the probe Xerxes, broadcast back into human space by the Exode at Ka-Band frequencies, doesn't self-identify as either gender. I'd toyed with just referred to Xerxes as "he" and "him," for the sake of convenience, and then thought about using "it" instead, but I wasn't happy with either option. After reading Diaspora, I considered using "ve" and "ver," but wasn't too keen on the idea of ripping off Egan so blatantly.

Well, a bit of googling over the weekend turned up the Gender-Neutral Pronoun FAQ, which in addition to being fascinating reading in and of itself, revealed two interesting tidbits: first, that Egan wasn't the originator of the "ve, ver, vis" pronoun, and second, that there was another pronoun I much preferred.

(1975) — S:ey, O:em, PA:eir, PP:eirs*, R:eirself*. —
Good: Complete set of distinct forms, acting as the singular form of the already-existing pronoun set of "they, them, their, theirs, theirself."

This is genius. I already use the third-person plural whenever possible, when describing someone of unknown (or indistinct) gender, but it becomes problematic when using it to refer to a specific individual. The idea of dropping the initial dipthong to make the plural into a singular form, which would inherit the gender non-specificity, is brilliant.

So when Xerxes wants to refer to another like eirself, ey'll have a full set of pronoun declensions available to em. That solves eir pesky pronoun trouble nicely, I think.