The book That Time Will Come, set in the year 2350, begins with an Asian woman pleading with Goddess Kali to give her a son this time, because she cannot validate herself as a wife, or receive acceptance by her in-laws until she has provided them with the son who will look after them in their old age. This attitude, which is prevalent in many cultures, spoken or unspoken, denigrates not only daughters but also mothers, as if it is seen as the mother’s fault if a child’s gender is not what her in-laws require. But science teaches us that the gender of the child is in fact determined by the male, who carries both male and female sperm in the testes. So women in many cultures have been forced to live with a myth that never had any basis in fact.
The denigration of the feminine can also be seen as the denigration of Mother Earth. This is why, in the book, the build up of repeated requests to produce sons, to get unfortunate women out of the fix they are in, results in Mother Earth metaphorically shrugging her shoulders and saying ‘All right then, from now on you can all have sons, and see how you like it.’
It would be good if the world was a place of learning and systemic progression to higher standards of ethics. People often describe life as a journey during which much can be learned, and of course we have before us examples of so many who by hard work and determination have raised the bar on human behaviour. But historically, we don’t seem to have learned that much. There is still war and invasion of other countries motivated by greed, and the assumption that people can do what they like because no one can stop them - the old argument that ‘might is right.’
This book reflects that. As it becomes clear that in future only boy children will be produced, terrorists and criminal start fighting to seize and possess all the remaining women for themselves, even though this can only be a short term strategy. Females have to be chaperoned in the street, and specialist transport for women becomes a growth area, as women can no longer travel safely by public transport.
But the book features some strong female characters, such as Haima, a young Indian girl, whose father is murdered when bandits kidnap all the women in her village, except a few who escape. Haima goes on to learn how to defend her family, in place of her father, and she rescues one of her schoolmates from the bandits. After she herself is rescued to planet Diamot, she volunteers to join a space ship which works with the United Nations to assist in the transportation of people from Earth to places of safety, since without any more girl babies being born, humans are facing extinction on our planet.
Conversely, the book also features Michaela, a charismatic black American woman scientist from New York who carves out her own empire from the Virgin Islands, using the ethics of ‘might is right,’ in a bid to take over control the planet. She might have succeeded, had it not been for circumstances outside human control.
The introduction to this book quotes the words of Chitresh Das, a highly acclaimed dancer of Northern India, who once said:
Goddess Durga (another aspect of the archetypal Mother) is like a mother image which has enormous power, but if you abuse, it can back fire on you. Ultimately it is benign and brings peace and harmony.’
In the end, as portrayed in this book, the only way we can progress as a human race on planet Earth is to tear the whole thing up and start again, but this time at a higher octave of our planet where bad actions no longer occur. Of course this is science fiction, so we do not need to take it too seriously, and it all ends happily for everyone in the end. There is hope for a better future, but only for those who are willing to turn their back on the outdated mores of ancient patriarchal traditions and move into a new level of existence.
Short bio:
Martha Twine was born in London in 1948. She moved to Surrey, England in 1956. Educated at Guildford County School and Oxford University, she worked for over forty years in the public sector, mainly in London and the North East, during which time she gained a chartered accountancy qualification. She is now retired and lives in Haslemere, where she enjoys gardening, writing sci-fi books and singing in local choirs. Her website is at www.marthatwine.com.
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