Val inverse perceptions of positive and negative because she felt it was easier to go to Antartica than to deal with "real life". But this isn't so shocking... people admire my travels throughout Europe without money or security, but it was easier to go abroad than to stay here where I have a comfortable life but see no future, no change, and feel as if life is just waiting for the tomb stone.

Although I thought talking Grandma out of a tree deals with a serious issue and is surely done from time to time, I felt it was mentioned more to introduce some levity than to add weight to the book. As serious as it may be, it sure sounds funny.

I will agree that Val's pulling the man to safety is a reversal of traditional roles where the man rescues the woman. But is this really subversive? I don't think it denies the possibility of men rescueing women or implies that every woman is indeed capable of such heroism. Perhaps this is intentionally part of some "literature of exhaustion" but I know nothing about it to comment upon whether this is intentional or whether the movement has validity.

I will also agree that Val is a superwoman who remains possible, but how subversive is this to patriarchy? She is not Jane Schmoe. She is a woman who is physically as capable as many men, typical perhaps of women in Antartica, but atypical of women in general. How goes it elevate women as a group when the heroine is so atypical of women? I should be more impressed if the heroine was a plane Jane, not too big, not too attractive, who someone manages to save the day through skills and talents typical of women and perhaps generally absent from men. A subversive heroine has to be a woman who readily represents women, not a woman who has masculine attributes (such as size) or caters to masculine fantasy and feeds female self consciousness (such as through excessive beauty). Val was large and beautiful; therefore she could not be subversive.

Why go to the pole? Why not? It is there. It is a goal. As part of Western Civilization we have a goal oriented mentality. This may be wrong, but it will not change so easily. It is true in a sense that any point in Antartica may be as good as the next, but people want something to strive for. They want to feel they are accomplishing something. They want to feed their pride and inflate their self worth. It is true that they can throw a dart at a map of Antartica and in reality whereever that dart lands will have its own adventure, its own reality, its own value, but even if they head for some other random point, they are still goal oriented. Westerners do not know to go for the sake of going and even if they do, they still enjoy setting an end point to give themselves direction. To go to the South Pole isn't a matter of being silly, it's a matter of being a human raised to the orientations of Western Civilization.

I don't know whether Robinson meant to imply that heroism is about taking care of X instead of going to X. The statement reads nice and poetic, and certainly Robinson does value nurturing as heroism, but I don't think X was named thus to set up the analogy which is never stated and I don't believe X was an extremely nurtured character throughout the story.

I think someone has missed the point of what it means to be a hero... To call the ordinary person is not to elevate the ordinary person but to devalue a hero. We may question what qualifies a hero, but we can not rank the heros with the mundane. And the fact is human culture needs heros. They needs heros as sources of inspiration and sources of hope. Every culture has its legends of men or women whose feats ranked them next to Godhood. There is something within us that needs that.