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Edited for Clarity.
Below are ten short passages taken from a sci-fi anthology. In some extracts, I have swapped the sexes of all characters mentioned (so he becomes she, and so on). I have paid attention to pronouns, names where they are obviously gendered, and physical descriptions. Your challenge: Guess which of the ten extracts have been sex-swapped, and if you like, state how you came to that conclusion.
Also, of these ten passages, eight were written by men and two by women. See if you can guess which two were written by women for bonus points! But the main point is to guess which have been sex-swapped.
Once plenty of people have had a chance to guess, I'll post the name of the book, the story title and author name and sex for each passage, and which have been swapped around. Good luck!
Extract One
Have at it! I'd especially love if people making their guesses could state briefly how or why they came to their choice, even if it's just "a feeling".
IMPORTANT NOTE
I really want people's honest thoughts on this. If someone thinks a certain passage was written by a woman because it's "flowery and romantic", or that one passage has been swapped because "a girl character wouldn't know maths" I want them to be able to say just that. So please, don't judge people's guesses!
Below are ten short passages taken from a sci-fi anthology. In some extracts, I have swapped the sexes of all characters mentioned (so he becomes she, and so on). I have paid attention to pronouns, names where they are obviously gendered, and physical descriptions. Your challenge: Guess which of the ten extracts have been sex-swapped, and if you like, state how you came to that conclusion.
Also, of these ten passages, eight were written by men and two by women. See if you can guess which two were written by women for bonus points! But the main point is to guess which have been sex-swapped.
Once plenty of people have had a chance to guess, I'll post the name of the book, the story title and author name and sex for each passage, and which have been swapped around. Good luck!
Extract One
Extract TwoAnd he was no longer in zero-gee. If he fell out, he'd be in a separate orbit. It would still be close to the ship's, and they might be able to rescue him with the shuttle if he missed the atmosphere at perigree, but they might not. And it would cost time and reaction mass they didn't have.
Extract ThreeShe started down the hallway, examining each of the life-sized statues in turn. The first ancestors were the most ancient, the pink wood gone pale and dusty dry. But at some point the statues darkened, every slice of the old awls still deep, each figure decorated with scraps of clothing and jewellery, spines and plates of armour that belonged to each of the men and women being portrayed. At that point, the hallway curled sharply to the right. More statues waited out of sight, but Washen stopped, kneeling down, pretending to examine the meeting mat between her feet.
Extract FourAs she had expected, it ended in fire and light and glory. She saw space and time curve inward beyond the limit of the Planck dimensions; she felt the energy gradients climb toward infinity as the universe approached the zero-point from which it had spontaneously emerged. She felt the universal processors sown through eleven dimensions seize that energy before it faded, and put it to work. It was a surge, a spurt of power and passion, like the memory of orgasm buried deep in the chain of memory that was the days of Gursky.
Extract FiveKonstantin didn't know what to make of the look on Pleshette's funny little face. Maybe that was all it was, a funny little face in a funny little open-all-night world. A funny little open-all-night artificial world at that. For all Konstantin knew, the night manager hadn't seen true daylight for years. Not her problem, she thought as she stuck her head through the doorway of the cubicle where Celestine and DiPietro were now busy jockeying for the stringer's attention while the stringer pretended she wasn't pumping them for information and they pretended they didn't know she was pretending not to pump them for information. No one had to pretend the dead kid had been temporarily forgotten.
Extract SixMada waved the speaker off impatiently and scanned downwhen. She saw that the Utopians had planted an identity mine five minutes into the past that would boil her memory to vapor if she tried to go back in time to undo this trap. Upwhen, then. The future was clear, at least as far as she could see, which wasn't much beyond next week. Of course, that was the direction they wanted her to skip. They'd be happiest making her their great-great-great-grandchildren's problem.
Extract SevenShe stepped aside and stripped off her shorts, then sat down beside him while he scooted over to make room. She looked down the length of the colony, a mile-wide, ten-mile-long cylinder with three transparent windows running its entire length, trying to judge how much time they had before the afternoon rain reached them. The ring of misty fog that worked its way up the length of the cylinder each day looked at least an hour away; plenty of time for an unhurried meal, and maybe even time enough to use some of their recently acquired energy in a more private setting later.
Extract EightIf his marksmanship had not been the worst in his class, he would never have been assigned the task of overseeing proctors down in ship docks. He would not have had to stand for hours, alone except for his familiar, running a laser-stylus across the ore samples the proctors brought back to the swallow-ship, dreaming of finishing shift and meeting Verdin.
Extract NineDeath came as merely a hyphen. Life, and the balance of the statement followed instantly. For it was only when Mada died that she began to live. Yet she could never have called it "living". No one who had ever passed that way could have called it "living". It was something else. Something quite apart from "death" and something totally unlike "life". Stars passed, burning through her as she whirled outward. Blazing and burning, carrying with them their planetary systems, stars and more stars spun through her as though travelling down invisible wires into the dark behind and around her.
Extract TenThe Heart was always crowded, but it was larger than Pao had ever seen it - even though Herm had shrunk back to his original size, so as not to make a scene. The huge muscular chamber arched over them, pulsating wetly in time to the music, as they searched for the perfect location to soak up the atmosphere. Pao had visited public environments in other polises, back on Earth; many were designed to be nothing more than a perpetual framework for group emotion-sharing. He'd never understood the attraction of becoming intimate with large numbers of strangers.
***But she was talking to the air. Taliaferro had run off. Apparently there was only so much an inhaler could do. There was only so much anything could do. Anything, or anyone. Even Occam's Razor. But then, the murder weapon hadn't been the same in the other seven murders anyway. No indeed. And Mank looked good for this one, she insisted to herself. He looked too good. The image of him in the Sitty was too identifiable not to be damning. The ego of the man, using his own face. Although that might be a more widespread practice than anyone realised.
Have at it! I'd especially love if people making their guesses could state briefly how or why they came to their choice, even if it's just "a feeling".
IMPORTANT NOTE
I really want people's honest thoughts on this. If someone thinks a certain passage was written by a woman because it's "flowery and romantic", or that one passage has been swapped because "a girl character wouldn't know maths" I want them to be able to say just that. So please, don't judge people's guesses!
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