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Emily's people are a society very different from ours, a matriarchal culture in which sentient individuals indulge in a form of sexual cannibalism only seen on Earth amongst non-sentient animals. Their entire culture consists of three individuals - the adolescents Emily and Elmer, and their Momma - together with a sentient spaceship who nurtures them and governs their interactions with other groups.
It is tempting to speculate on the origins of a society in which such behaviour could arise, using the available facts as a starting point.
In A Man for Emily, when Elizabeth asks about Elmer about his male parent, she is told that 'after he helped make Emily and Me, the Momma ate him'. Hence, it can be assumed that Emily and Elmer are twins, born of a single mating. No one comments on this, and the presence of a submissive younger male seems to be a natural part of their society, so we can assume that dizygotic twins (one male and one female) are usual for this species. This would allow a reproductively stable population as long as every female has at least one opportunity to mate in their lifetime, and would suggest that the species arose in an environment where mating opportunities were scarce.
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On Earth, the most basic biological motivation for sexual cannibalism is the need for a newly-pregnant female to obtain a large protein boost in order to successfully nurture her offspring. Such a need suggests that gestation is short - and hence that the periods during which a pregnancy could be successfully carried to term were similarly short.
We also know that Emily's people were essentially wiped out by a catastrophic war. While we are not given any indication of the motivation for this war, the majority of conflicts - both in the natural world and among humans - are fought over the control of natural resources.
Elmer and Emily - Twins? |
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So we develop a picture of the world on which Emily's people evolved in which resources were scarce, and periods during which there was sufficient abundance to allow a successful mating were both short and relatively uncommon. If we were discussing Earth, we might consider desert environments - either hot deserts near the equator, or cold deserts near the poles - which have these characteristics. However, humanity developed in more temperate regions, and became dominant largely because Homo sapiens is not highly specialised for such local conditions. The fact that Emily's people evolved to dominance would suggest that the resource issue was one affecting their entire planet rather than isolated regions of it.
 The Momma - Big is Beautiful? |
One possibility is that their planet was on a highly elliptical orbit around its sun. This would lead to long, cold winters, with short periods of summer between them. Hence food, vegetation, minerals (buried under permafrost in the winter) and other resources are only available in short bursts. In such cold environments, body fat is essential both to insulate the vital organs and to provide emergency energy supplies. Hence the epitome of feminine beauty might become the rotund figure on which The Momma appears to pride herself.
Unfortunately such elliptical orbits are often subject to perturbation from other bodies in the solar system and so are frequently unstable, or slightly chaotic, on astronomical timescales. It is possible that during the centuries leading up to the planet's final war, a shift in the planet's orbit caused the winters to grow longer and harsher, while the summers were growing ever shorter. For a species that had evolved with a stable, if harsh, climate cycle, even a slight change in the planet's orbit could be devastating. Resources, already scarce, could become harder still to find, and the society could easily be plunged into centuries of warfare over what remained. War is one of the great motivations for technological development and the culture's technical ability might well have exceeded their social development. A feudal, undemocratic society could have developed the capacity for space flight, and for self-destruction. |
In those final years before the catastrophe, with resources at a premium and insufficient food available in short bursts to maintain the reproductive cycle, it is possible that some of the men in the society, having spent their youth and middle years fighting for resources, might have chosen to sacrifice their own lives in an effort to ensure their reproductive legacy. The continued presence of the man - doubling the amount of food consumed by a reproductive unit and starving his mate - could be more of a threat than any aggressive neighbour. Over the decades before the final catastrophe, ritual cannibalism after mating might become widespread, or even the norm - especially in a feudal society where an individual was considered subordinate either to others in the society, or to the culture as a whole.
Hence, the remnant population escaping on Emily's ship is likely to have consisted of a group of couples in which the men expected to fight for their resources and then sacrifice themselves to ensure their offspring's survival. The Ship itself is likely to have been poorly resourced on launch, and while the men might initially have had hopes of survival, those would have been set aside if no suitable planet was found by the first generation.
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Of course, this was a culture driven by the need to procreate and by the relentless striving for more resources. Perhaps their programming of the Ship's computer was a manifestation of that striving in which it was impossible to obtain their goal, and in which only the survival of the species was considered important. Indeed, the computer appears not only to condone, but to encourage, the matriarchal society which accepts its authority absolutely.
While each mating leads to two offspring, renewing the population, the size of the group is likely to have dwindled nonetheless. The first problem they faced would have been one of inbreeding. The inhabited part of the ship appeared to be small, but even if there were twenty genetically distinct couples in the first generation, there would only be ten unrelated couples in the second generation and so on. Soon, either some couplings would not result in viable foetuses, or the group would be forced to look to planets they passed for men. Planets with genetically compatible mates are likely to be rare, and those with men willing to conform to this culture and sacrifice themselves rarer still. |
The Ship - The last hope for Emily's species |
Along the way they might lose some fraction of their population to disease, and others might choose to settle on worlds they passed, abandoning their own culture. In the end, the Ship (with its imperative to ensure the survival of the population and continue the search) might limit the opportunities for its crew to abscond by restricting their planet falls, and also stabilise the crew at the smallest possible unit so it could keep them under careful observation.
Devestating Loss - |
Such a unit - a mother and her two children - would be controllable and would not tax the resources, oxygen supply, or medical facilities of the ship. The mother of the group would likely form a close bond with the ship while left alone with two pre-verbal youngsters, further reinforcing the ship's ability to control her and her children.
Clearly such a crew would need to find a new male in every generation, and would be forced to kidnap one if none would come willingly. If the rights of the male were neglected in this respect, it would be easy to come to see the males of the species as property rather than individuals in their own right, and the relentless need to conserve resources would make it natural for the race to abandon their own males when picking up a new man-boy, rather than continuing to maintain them. The males of the species, robbed of their cultural role as procurers of resources on their homeworld, now live only to ensure the health of their female parent and sister until the younger woman is old enough to procreate, and so become entirely subservient. They are kept so by a culture designed to keep them suppressed, and abandoned before they reach maturity (and so before the aggressive instincts they must have possessed to fight for resources can become manifest). |
It is clear that Emily is more eager in her anticipation of 'Man-boy pie' than of mating itself. It is possible that the prospect of impending death for one of the (likely unwilling) participants would throw a damper on proceedings. Hence procreation might not be seen as a pleasurable experience, but rather one of biological necessity.
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Certainly, the role of 'tickling boots' in this culture suggests a certain ambiguity between pleasure and pain. It was a curious choice for them to use an intense form of a naturally pleasurable sensation (tickling) as a punishment. John, when querying the existence of the boots, is told by the Ship that they will 'ensure [his] submissive obedience to the female of the species'. It is also interesting that the control bracelet for a pair of tickling boots was handed to Emily only when she reached maturity. While this may have started as a practical measure (a female child might use the boots on her brother often enough for him to grow accustomed to the sensation, and so the threat of its use would lose any value), it appears to have developed into something that's almost a coming of age ritual. It is clear that the females of this society control both pleasure and pain for their men.
Coming of Age - |
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And so we have the last descendents of a culture that may have evolved over centuries coming to Earth. To the Momma it must have seemed at once attractive and strangely unnatural. It is clear from the broadcasts they pick up that men are abundant on this world, and from their appearance it is certainly possible that they are genetically compatible. Her children are coming of age - one to reproduce and the other to be ejected from the ship before he could develop the aggressive instincts that destroyed their world. Cerrtainly Emily and the Momma both complain that Elmer is starting to get 'uppity'. The ship requires that only Elmer be sent down to the planet to 'procure supplies' lest Emily be tempted away, and the only opportunity for perpetuating the species lost. However the first individuals the Momma encounters - the Tomorrow People - do not conform to how she imagines the world to be. Elizabeth is rather old to be unmated, John is *far* too old to be uneaten, and Stephen is young but does not show the subservience someone his age is expected to exhibit. To make matters worse, the Tomorrow People treat Emily, her family and the Ship with ill concealed amusement and contempt. Only Elizabeth shows any sign of attempting to understand their culture, and even she is clearly entirely opposed to it. It is small wonder that the Ship attempts to leave as soon as a suitable mate for Emily is procured, and that it is reluctant to communicate with John - who carries with him such dangerous ideas!
It is unfortunate that the entire culture of Emily's people was lost when the Ship's computer was deactivated, but it was clearly the degenerate and artificially sustained remnants of a society clinging to a biological imperative that had long since ceased to be necessary. Perhaps, given time and opportunity, TIM could recover the history of Emily's people from the memory banks of the now defunct Ship, and return the original culture of their people to Emily and her brother.
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The 1970s television series The Tomorrow People and the characters of Emily, Elmer and the Momma were created by Roger Price. The theory laid out above is meant as a logical extrapolation from events in the 1975 serial A Man for Emily and do not represent the views of its writer. All screenshots are property of Thames Television and Freemantle Media.
This page created by Elizabeth Stanway (February 2005). Email me here.