Millennial Women, Virginia Kidd

Millennial Women, Virginia Kidd (1978)
Review by Ian Sales

The mid-1970s appears to have seen a brief surge in interest in sf by women authors – not just this anthology, Millennial Women; but also Pamela Sargent’s Women of Wonder trilogy (1975 – 1978), a series which would not be repeated until twenty years later. Though long-deserved, it’s hard to know what triggered this interest. Ursula K LeGuin had won the Hugo Award in 1970 for The Left Hand of Darkness, the first woman to do so; and she won again in 1975 for The Dispossessed, only the second female-authored book to win. In 1977, Kate Wilhlem won; and in 1979, Vonda N McIntyre… and books by women writers have won several times ever since – three times in the 1980s, five in the 1990s, and three in the  first decade of this century. It’s by no means parity, but it’s a huge improvement on earlier decades – prior to 1970, only two women had ever been shortlisted for the best novel Hugo: Marion Zimmer Bradley in 1963 and Andre Norton in 1964.

Kidd’s introduction in Millennial Women provides no clues to her motive for putting together the anthology. She gives a few comments on each of the six stories – one is actually a short novel – but there is little real discussion of the role of women in the science fiction field, except this:

But what seems to me one of the most impressive aspects of the collection is that all of these science fiction writers avoid hard-core science fiction for sociology, soft-pedal radical feminism for humanism, and write about women simply as women. (p 3)

Which, if anything, reads like a shot across Joanna Russ’s bows. And it’s certainly true that the contents of Millennial Women are not in the least bit radical. They are, in fact, well-crafted science fiction stories very much in keeping with the less-pulpish elements of the genre of the time. If it was known as “social science fiction” back then – either to distinguish it from sf involving space battles and such, or simply to differentiate it from sf written by men – the label is no longer used, and any need to hold it apart from heartland genre sf has long since vanished. But that quote does feel a little like it’s feeding into the stereotype of women writers in science fiction: “unlike men, they only write a particular kind of sf (which you might like)”. This is nonsense, of course. True, not all women sf writers wrote “radical feminist” sf, but it is deeply unfair to characterise what they did write as “social science fiction”, no matter what characteristics it shared with other subgenres. As Russ herself described it in How To Suppress Women’s Writing: “she wrote it, but she isn’t really [a science fiction writer], and it isn’t really [science fiction]“.

So, it should come as little surprise that the stories in Millennial Women cover a number of subgenres of science fiction, from near-future (mundane) sf to that involve galaxy-spanning spaceships. The various focuses of the stories are no different to what might be expected in any other non-themed anthology of the time, irrespective of the writers’ genders. Perhaps the fact all the stories feature female protagonists might have been considered notable in 1978 – though, in truth, Le Guin’s takes a chapter or two before settling on its eventual female protagonist – but to a modern reader, there’s nothing remarkable in it. Nor should there be.

To be honest, ‘No One Said Forever’ by Cynthia Felice doesn’t even actually read as science fiction, and it’s slightly baffling that it would be considered genre – even in 1978. Carol and Mike are both working professionals – he is a miner, she works for a computer company. And now she’s been offered a contract in Antarctica which she cannot afford to turn down. Neither wants to give up their careers, nor are they keen on separation. Eventually, they reach a solution, but it’s a dilemma predicated on attitudes and sensibilities which no longer hold sway (mostly), and so makes the piece feel bizarrely dated rather than futuristic.

‘The Song of N’Sardi-El’ by Diana L Paxson, as can probably be guessed from the presence of an apostrophe in the title, is much more blatantly science fiction. The narrator is a xenolinguist aboard a merchant ship which is rushing to the world of Cithal in order to be the first to sign a lucrative trade deal with its natives. They also have aboard several survivors from the lifeboat of another ship that was destroyed by aliens while leaving their world. One of these survivors is a young girl who’s suffering from nightmares. The narrator befriends her and then discovers that her ship was destroyed leaving Cithal, and that the girl can speak the native language, Xicithalian. As a result, the traders are well-prepared when they arrive on Cithal. And then the girl recognises the alien repsonsible for the death of her family… The title refers to a Xicithalian epic poem, and its story allows the narrator to use the aliens’ culture to demand concessions and open trading.  There’s nothing untypical about ‘The Song of N’Sardi’ and it would not look out of place in pretty much any sf anthology. Its focus on xenolinguistics does not make it “social science fiction”, though it does it in parts read a little like a story from an earlier decade.

‘Jubilee’s Story’ by Elizabeth A Lynn is post-apocalypse. A group from a women-only settlement stop off en route to another in a tiny hamlet, and find a pregnant young woman close to term. Her husband is afraid she’ll die, so the travellers stay to help. But it seems the situation in the house is somewhat fraught – the husband’s brother claims the baby is his, and the father is an old school Christian fundamentalist, who calls the the young woman a whore and wants her gone. Events come to a head. The set-up may be science fiction, but there’s little in how the story plays out that makes it genre. It could just as easily have been set in some rustic part of the US and nothing would really need to be changed. When you wonder why a story has been written as science fiction, you have to sometimes wonder why it was written at all.

Older women do not appear very often as protagonists in sf stories, but that’s what the narrator of ‘Mab Gallen Recalled’ by Cherry Wilder is. She served as a medical officer aboard a starship, but now she has retired. Much of the story consists of an extended flashback, describing a scene in which she had to stabilise an injured person in the cargo-hold of a damaged ship. Also present was a lay preacher, and the narrator tries to stress on her the importance of not sacrificing her air in order to save the injured man. She does sacrifice some of it, of course. But they all survive. And the narrator thinks back on that lay preacher, and on a lover she saw defect to the other side, and she compares them to the fresh-faced young medical missionaries to whom she is about to speak.

‘Phoenix in the Ashes’ by Joan D Vinge is also post-apocalypse, but in this world South America has remained technological while North America has devolved to an agrarian society. A Brazilian is prospecting by helicopter in south-west USA for oil, when his helicopter crashes in California. Which is where a theocratic society descended from immigrants from further south now holds sway. The women are very much second-class citizens, especially Amanda, who refused to marry the man her father had arranged as her husband. She has been exiled from the family homestead, and now lives in a hovel on the family land, and weaves cloth to pay for food. The helicopter pilot did not die in the crash, though he was left for dead. Later he stumbles across Amanda’s hovel, and she takes him in and tends to his wounds. He has lost his memory, and can remember nothing of his life before. Eventually, they marry, and he introduces crop rotation to the local farmers – including Amanda’s father, which helps ease his entry into the family. Such societies are almost a staple of the genre, and while ‘Phoenix in the Ashes’ predates The Handmaid’s Tale by almost a decade, the two stories are not dissimilar.

‘The Eye of the Heron’ by Ursula K Le Guin is the longest piece in the anthology. It’s a short novel and this is its first appearance in print. It’s been subsequently reprinted as a standalone novel. In fact, Millennial Women was published in the UK in 1980 under the title The Eye of the Heron and Other Stories, with LeGuin’s name considerably more prominent than Kidd’s. In an interview in Whole Earth Review, LeGuin said of this story:

“While I was writing ‘The Eye of the Heron’ in 1977, the hero insisted on destroying himself before the middle of the book. “Hey,” I said, “you can’t do that, you’re the hero. Where’s my book?” I stopped writing. The book had a woman in it, but I didn’t know how to write about women. I blundered around a while and then found some guidance in feminist theory. I got excited when I discovered feminist literary criticism was something I could read and actually enjoy. I read The Norton Book of Literature by Women from cover to cover. It was a bible for me. It taught me that I didn’t have to write like an honorary man anymore, that I could write like a woman and feel liberated in doing so.”

Certainly the female protagonist is not at all obvious in the opening chapters. ‘The Eye of the Heron’ opens with an expedition returning home after exploring the wilderness. When the explorers reach their home village, they call for a meeting in order to describe what they’ve discovered. But one of the Bosses is also present, and he tells the villagers that they are to make no move without the Bosses’ approval – even though it is plan the villagers wish to found a new settlement elsewhere in order to no longer be in the Bosses’ thrall. This is an alien world, settled by two groups of people – the People of Peace, who live in near-poverty and perform peasant labour; while the other live in luxury from the fruits of the first group’s labours. It’s such a polarised set-up that it’s hard to swallow. The Spanish Colonial feel to the world only helps obscure that this is a new world, and not some colonial period in Earth’s history. At least if it were the latter, there’d be the weight of history to justify the blatant inequality of the society, and bolster the arrogance of the Bosses. The desire by the People of the Peace to found a new colony away from the Bosses precipitates a confrontation, made worse by the Bosses’ plans to open new areas locally for farmland – or, as they see it, plantations with themselves lording it over People of the Peace labourers. Caught in the middle of all this is Luz Marina, the daughter of the head of the Bosses. She doesn’t want to marry the man her father has picked out for her, nor does she want to be like her married friends. When she learns of plans by a new troop of musket-armed Bosses’ sons to attack the People of the Peace, she runs away to warn them. And ends up staying, further throwing the two groups into conflict.

‘The Eye of the Heron’ is perhaps a more blunt story than LeGuin typically writes. The People of the Peace are so committed to their ideals, it seems a miracle they’ve survived as long as they have. The Bosses insist they represent “law and order” and so must be obeyed, but you can’t help wondering whose law and order, and why should they be obeyed given they’re outnumbered. Indeed, the People of the Peace do practice civil disobedience, but a violent confrontation proves unavoidable (and incidentally is the even LeGuin refers to in the first sentence of the quote above). There’s perhaps little too much suspension of disbelief required for ‘The Eye of the Heron’ to work as smoothly as it should – especially since, like some of the other stories in Millennial Women, it’s only really the setting that characterises the story as science fiction. Having said that, it’s clearly the best of the six stories in the anthology, and certainly bears rereading.

If the reasons for putting together Millennial Women are not entirely clear, the end result is still an anthology worth reading. Perhaps the other stories suffer somewhat in comparison to the LeGuin, but in other venues they would be more than strong enough to stand on their own. There is nothing genre-redefining or remarkable about Millennial Women. If anything, it amply demonstrates that labelling sf by women writers as anything other than sf does both women and the genre a huge disservice. There is no plausible justification for segregation, even if it takes a women-only anthology to prove it…

New Eves, Janrae Frank, Jean Stine & Forrest J Ackerman, part 2

New Eves, edited by Janrae Frank, Jean Stine & Forrest J Ackerman (1994)
Review by Ian Sales

This review follows on from part one here.

If New Eves has excelled at introducing long-forgotten women sf writers from earlier decades, it is less successful in regard to more recent years. Though the lengthy introduction mentions a number of writers whose careers have since ended, the names found in the final two sections of the anthology are likely known to most genre fans. While not necessarily a bad thing – some of these writers are indeed important – it does feel a little like it’s undermining the anthology’s purpose.

The 60s & 70s
‘Sense of Duty’ by Phyllis Eisenstein is phrased as a monologue toward the narrator’s child, and as it progresses it cleverly reveals that the speaker is part of an alien force secretly living on Earth as humans. The final twist is far from unpredictable, but it’s done well nevertheless.

Sydney J Van Scyoc’s ‘Bluewater Dreams’ also appeared in Women of Wonder: The Contemporary Years (see here), and I said of it there that “Van Scyoc’s strength has always lain in her invention and depiction of alien societies, and ‘Bluewater Dreams’ shows this in microcosm.”

‘Death Between the Stars’ by Marion Zimmer Bradley, on the other hand is less successful. It’s the sort of hand-wavey space opera which was popular in earlier decades. A woman needs to urgently return to her home planet and so is forced to share a cabin aboard a starship with an alien, a Theradin. The starship’s crew are horribly racist towards the alien and it dies through their neglect. The neat sting in the tail comes too late to save a quite nasty story.

James Tiptree Jr is the only male name to appear in New Eves (other than editor Ackerman), but, of course, he was really Alice Sheldon. ‘The Snows Are Melted, the Snows Are Gone’ is a post-apocalypse story and thin on plot. A young woman with no arms leads a healthy male savage a merry chase, so he can be captured to breed vitality back into civilised people with birth defects. The last sentence is “Before them the road stretched away neutrally to the crests above the Rift, in the land that had been Ethiopia.” Perhaps this is meant to be some ironic play on the Great Rift Valley being the birthplace of humanity… but both the young woman and the savage are white.

‘The Last Days of the Captain’ by Kate Wilhelm is another story which did not strike me as entirely successful. A military officer has to oversee the secret evacuation of a settlement on an alien world before the enemy arrive and bomb it into oblivion from orbit. A woman’s husband and son are out hunting and have yet to return. Though the captain and her wait until the last minute, they do not return. So the pair have to make a long journey in a low-flying aircar. As a result, the captain decides his previous contempt for colonists was unwarranted. I didn’t think the change of heart had been set up particularly well.

‘Changeling’ by Anne McCaffrey was apparently written for Dangerous Visions, but Harlan Ellision rejected it. He took another story by McCaffrey instead. I can understand why McCaffrey thought the story suitable for that anthology, and also why Ellison rejected it. A woman and a homosexual man enter into a marriage of convenience (their sexuality is open and public). A third man joins the family as the husband’s lover, and then a fourth man as the wife’s lover. All four are happy and contented and prosperous. The woman then gets pregnant with her husband’s baby and he kidnaps her so… he can deliver the baby himself? The motivations all seemed a little confused.

Pamela Sargent’s ‘Fears’ is another story which also appeared in Women of Wonder: The Contemporary Years. I didn’t think it was entirely successful when I read it in that book, and rereading it in this one has not led to me re-evaluating it.

‘Gleepsite’ by Joanna Russ is a strange piece. It’s short, it’s set in polluted post-apocalyptic city, and its narrator visits women and sells them a “Circle of Illusion”, which seems to be a device to make dreams appear real. The narrator may or may not be who she says. The title apparently refers to a made-up meaningless word. It doesn’t appear in the story other than in the title.

‘Winter’s King’ by Ursula K Le Guin is, as the title suggests, set on the same world as The Left Hand of Darkness. Each section of the story is introduced using a description of a painting depicting an incident in the titular king’s reign. But the story is far from that simple. The king is kidnapped and brainwashed, but no one knows in precisely what way she has been programmed. So she abdicates in favour of her young son, and travels by NAFAL ship to Hain. Years later, she returns to Gethen… to discover her son has not proven a good ruler. Given the size of her output and its uniformly high quality, it’s difficult to pick favourites among Le Guin’s short stories, but this is one. Unfortunately, it is also marred by some unfortunate typos, like “Her guards fled, her city bums, and now at the end she is face to face with the usurper” (p 315).

The 80s – and Beyond
‘Symphony for a Lost Traveler’ by Lee Killough, although originally published in 1984, felt like a story from the preceding decade. A famous composer is invited to the Moon to meet a reclusive billionaire. He has an unusual commission for her: operatives of his asteroid mining company have discovered an ancient alien starship with a working FTL drive, and he wants her to write a piece to use during his announcement of his discovery. The composer’s music is based on DNA, and it strikes me that four notes are somewhat limiting when it comes to writing music. I disagree with the rich-man-driving-progress trope, though it’s sadly deeply embedded in science fiction. Though most of Killough’s novels were sf, her more recent have been urban fantasy. The sf ones look worth a go.

‘Speech Sounds’ by Octavia E Butler is another post-apocalyptic story. This time, humans have lost the power of speech – all, that is, but a handful of them of which the protagonist is one such person. As a “last person” story, it’s done well, and also manages to somehow read as if it could be set at any time during the late twentieth or early twenty-first centuries.

The more I read by Maureen F McHugh, the more surprised I am she is not held up by everyone as one of science fiction’s very best writers. She has won only three awards during the twenty-four years since her first story was published: a Hugo for best short story in 1996, a Tiptree in 1993, and a Shirley Jackson Award this year for her recent collection. ‘The Missionary’s Child’ is an early work from 1992, but reads like a section of a very good novel. On a low-tech world visited by more advanced humans known as Cousins, a mercenary gets into trouble when hired as a guard for a dodgy deal by a merchant. It’s the mercenary’s background, however, that makes this story – the idea that the Cousins tried to uplift the world’s inhabitants but were blocked the entrenched power structure… and the mercenary is a survivor of one community which accepted the Cousins’ teachings and technology. One of the anthology’s better stories.

Sheila Finch fares poorly at the hands of New Eves proofreaders – the only place her name is spelled correctly, and not as “Shelia”, is underneath the title of her story, ‘A Long Way Home’. An amnesiac with healing powers on a barren world wonders why she is so different and so hated – “… whose two eyes were set evenly in her brow, the ears likewise on either side of her head, neither one larger than the other; whose nose was a slight protuberance on her face, not a beak the size of a fist or a gaping hole” (p 377). In despair, she leaves the village… and meets up with someone she recognises, someone like herself, and so learns the truth of her world and her origin. There’s a bleakness to the world-building that’s perhaps only been matched in recent years by Paolo Bacigalupi, but Finch pulls back from this to deliver a more uplifting, albeit not happy, ending.

It would be a strange anthology of sf by women writers that did not include Karen Joy Fowler, and her ‘The Lake Was Full of Artificial Things’ is typical of her oeuvre. A woman undergoes a procedure which allows her to confabulate encounters with people from her past as reconstructed from her memories. In this case, it’s one particular person – a boyfriend who left her to go fight in Viet Nam. It’s that Viet Nam connection which makes the story feel a little older than its 1985 year of publication, though that’s the only criticism that can be levelled at it. Not Fowler’s strongest work, perhaps, but still extremely good.

A massive earthquake has hit California in Mary Rosenblum’s ‘California Dreamer’, but Ellen was unaffected as the house she shares with Rebecca is outside the affected zone. Unfortunately, Rebecca was in San Francisco when the quake hit and did not survive. Ellen doesn’t think she can carry on without the love of her life. Then Beth, a ten-year-old girl, turns up at the house with her sick mother. Except the woman isn’t the girl’s mother, and who she is provides a way for Ellen to go on living. Though initially not reading like sf, and finally teetering on the edge of genre, this is one of New Eves‘ strongest stories. It has certainly persuaded me to read more by Rosenblum.

Nancy Kress’s ‘Down Behind Cuba Lake’ is an odd choice on which to end the anthology because, well, it’s not sf. A woman trying to reach a married lover’s home gets lost en route, and every road she takes leads back to the eponymous body of water. As a result, the woman realises the errors of her ways.

New Eves opens with a long introductory essay outlining the history of women in genre writing. Though it tries to put a positive spin on events, it does not make for edifying reading. Initially, fiction magazines were seen as family-oriented, and work by women writers was not uncommon in their pages. This carried over to the early pulp sf magazines – Hugo Gernsback, for example, “eagerly welcomed women writers” in his Amazing Stories. However, when he lost control of his magazines, the companies that owned them decided to reposition the titles alongside men’s adventure story magazines. Women were no longer welcome. It wasn’t until the 1950s that some women writers began to reappear in the magazines, and by the 1960s and 1970s they dominated the genre, and have gone from strength to strength ever since…

Except I look around at sf now and I have to wonder, what went wrong? Books by men from those decades are more likely to remain in print, more likely to be judged “classics”, more likely to be recommended to non-genre readers. Male authors from those decades had longer careers. Many are still writing now; but only a handful of the women writers are. I’m not convinced the editors of New Eves entirely believe their own argument. The introduction ends on too self-congratulatory, too positive a note. It seems to be saying, the war is over. Even twenty years ago, it is unlikely the future looked as rosy as the editors would like to have readers believe.

And then there’s the  final section of the introduction which, with painful irony, undermines the entire argument laid out in the rest of the  introduction. Many male sf writers too, it points out, have written strong female characters. This may be true, but is irrelevant. Worse, to suggest writers such as Heinlein, EE ‘Doc’ Smith, Niven and Asimov, among others, as examples is to completely miss the point. The section feels like it was added at the insistence of the book’s one male editor. He should have kept his mouth shut – the male authors named have nothing to offer in support of the anthology’s thesis, and, in fact, demonstrate only how badly it has been misrepresented over the decades.

New Eves, Janrae Frank, Jean Stine & Forrest J Ackerman

New Eves, edited by Janrae Frank, Jean Stine & Forrest J Ackerman (1994)
Review by Ian Sales

Part 1
Hands up if you’ve heard of Francis Stevens, Leslie F Stone, Helen Weinbaum, Leslie Perri, Miriam Allen deFord, Sonya Dorman, or Betsy Curtis? All were popular science fiction writers in the first half of the twentieth century, and regularly appeared in pulp magazines. Sadly, as the magazines repositioned themselves to be sold alongside men’s magazines, their gender, and the gender of their stories’ protagonists, meant they found it increasingly harder to place fiction with the big magazines and were relegated to the lesser-known titles. Few, if any, of their stories are currently in print, or have been reprinted since their original appearances. Even those who wrote novels – such as Francis Stevens – are also mostly forgotten.

New Eves, subtitled ‘Science Fiction About the Extraordinary Women of Today and Tomorrow’, is an anthology of short stories from the 1920s through to “The 80s – And Beyond”. There are number of familiar names among the thirty-two contributions – including, among others, Leigh Brackett, Andre Norton, James Tiptree Jr, Ursula K Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Karen Joy Fowler. However, where this anthology really scores is in the early decades it covers, reprinting stories that have likely not been seen since the days of All-Story Weekly, Thrilling Wonder or Startling Stories…

“The 20s & 30s”
‘Friend Island’ by Francis Stevens originally appeared in All-Story Weekly in 1918, and it’s very much a product of its time. In a matriarchal world, a curious young man listens to an old sea salt tell a story of her shipwreck on a desert island with a man with whom she “come the nighest in [her] life to committin’ matrimony”. It’s a tall tale, written in a prose style that now seems awkward and over-written, but it offers a glimpse into a world astonishing for the time it was written.

‘The Man of Stone’ by Hazel Heald from 1932 is only science fiction by the very loosest of definitions – and indeed, Heald was better known as a regular contributor to Weird Tales. Tales of strange statues in the Upper Adirondacks lead the narrator and his companion to investigate. But the statues are so lifelike it’s as if they were actually a petrified man and his dog. The cause is later discovered, revealed through the diary of mountain man “Mad Dan”, and it’s more to do with magical formulae than chemical ones. Despite its age, and its strange construction – one half first-person narrative, one-half journal entries – it’s still very readable.

There’s no doubting the sf credentials of Leslie F Stone’s ‘The Conquest of Gola’ from 1931, although there’s much in its science which is doubtful. Humans reach Venus and discover an alien, telepathic and matriarchal society who are not at all interested in trading with them. The humans – all male, of course – return with conquest in mind. They lose. The story is told from the point of view of one of the aliens, and I suspect time has not been especially kind to its prose.

Helen Weinbaum was the sister of Stanley Weinbaum and, after his death, completed one of his unfinished stories, and then went to write several under own name. ‘Honeycombed Satellite’ from 1940 is, like the preceding three stories, pulp sf. A newly-married couple visit Thetis, the eponymous moon, to discover why the supply of blue amber from the moon’s indigenous termite-like aliens has shrunk to almost nothing. Although the wife spends much of the time acting like a typical female pulp heroine, at the end she turns the tables on the villain. That may have been shocking at the time.

“The 40s”
‘Space Episode’ by Leslie Perri was published in 1941 and, while it has all the verisimilitude of a Flash Gordon serial it is astonishing in that the sole female character is the only one to behave rationally – even going so far as to sacrifice herself to save the two men. It may be dated and the writing in it somewhat overwrought, but it still packs a punch.

Leigh Brackett, of course, needs little introduction. ‘Water Pirate’ from 1941 is a typically polished Brackett piece, set in a populated Solar System in 2148. Someone has been stealing tanker ships, and so Jaffa Gray, son of the Chief of Special Duty of the Convoy Fleet, investigates. A Keshi woman leads him to a strange crashed spaceship, but Jaffa is captured and forced to fix it, and so is taken to the pirate’s lair. There’s some great imagery in this story, though for all its spaceships and blasters and “By the Nine Red Hells of Jupiter!” it’s more fantasy adventure than science fiction.

‘Aleph Sub One’ by Margaret St Claire from 1948 is, sadly, the sort of silliness that gives sf a bad name. A ditzy housewife inadvertently causes the “Vizi-Math” to create a spacetime vortex by feeding it a made-up equation for it to work on. As the city is slowly subsumed by the vortex, she realises – for no reason whatsoever – what her mistake was, and feeds in a correction. The vortex disappears.

Miriam Allen deFord was a popular sf writer during the 1940s and 1950s, but is forgotten today. On the strength of ‘Throwback’ from 1952, there’s no real reason she should be. It’s all very Brave New World, though the gender roles are sadly traditional and unquestioned. A young woman in an over-populated future risks all for an unlicensed pregnancy. It’s not especially original, but there’s a good sting in the tail.

“The 50s”
Sonya Dorman is another forgotten writer. ‘The Putnam Tradition’ from 1963 reads a little like Zenna Henderson but also reads like, so far, the most feminist story in the anthology. The women of the titular family had all been special, but the latest may not be because her father is an engineer.

‘All Cats Are Gray’ from 1953 is typical Andre Norton, although it features a strong female heroine. It’s a shame Norton didn’t understand how colour blindness, or indeed colour, works. A man, woman and cat attempt to salvage an infamous derelict, but the woman’s colour blindness fortunately means she can see the invisible monster. But only against a grey background. Pulp tosh.

Zenna Henderson is best known for her stories of the People, though New Eves claims that until the appearance of Le Guin, she was “the leading woman writer in the field”. So it’s a shame that 1962′s ‘Subcommittee’ is a piece of feelgood tosh with fluffy aliens, a fraught housewife, and sternly protective military men.

Of all the stories so far in New Eves, ‘Idol’s Eye’ by Carol Emshwiller probably comes closest to modern sf, despite being published in 1958. A young woman is about to be married off to a man she hates, but she has unknown talents and that results in her being rescued by aliens.

According to New Eves, ‘The Last Day’, also from 1958, was apparently Helen Clarkson’s only piece of published fiction. In fact, Clarkson was a pseudonym used by Helen McCloy, who had half a dozen stories and a novel published under that name. ‘The Last Day’ itself was also expanded to novel length, as by Helen Clarkson. It’s a nicely-written end-of-the-world tale, and would not look amiss in any modern reprint anthology.

I didn’t get ‘The Lady Was A Tramp’ by Judith Merril, from 1957. A young “IBMan” fresh out of the academy joins the crew of a slovenly tramp spaceship. The ships’ medic is an attractive woman who appears to offer more than just medical services to the crew’s five male members. I couldn’t work out if the woman’s role was exactly what was implied, or how Merril felt it was a good thing.

‘A Peculiar People’ by Betsy Curtis from 1951 reminds me of similar stories by male authors, and is unremarkable for precisely that reason. Mars is so underpopulated it has robots who appear entirely human and are treated as such. One of these is now an attaché on Earth but, for obvious reasons, cannot reveal his true nature. But then he gets friendly with an Earth family… only it seems Earth has a secret of its own. In many respects, this story reads like something from an earlier decade, though the prose is perhaps slightly better than its contemporaries.

”The Captain’s Mate’ by Evelyn E Smith from 1956 is a fairly standard piece of 1950s science fiction, although I can imagine the final twist might not have sat well with most readers. A shrlangi – a type of matriarchal insectoid alien with tentacles – has crewed her ship entirely with humans, and they’re now close to mutiny because she doesn’t appear to know how to pilot it. When one of the engines exploding, throwing the ship out of hyperspace, they have to lighten the load, but the captain refuses to give up her trunk… because it contains the pupa of her mate. And then it turns out she’s not exactly who she claims to be.

Few reprint anthologies could be described as important historical documents, but New Eves is, I think, one such anthology. While perhaps not all of the stories in the book’s first three sections deserve to be remembered, their authors certainly should not be forgotten. It’s a shame the book has been so badly proof-read, with every story featuring far too many sentences with typos or words missing. Even the sections themselves seem somewhat arbitrary – they are perhaps based on the careers of the authors, but the stories chosen were often published in other decades. The 1960s section, for example, features two from 1950s magazines.

Women of Wonder: The Contemporary Years, Pamela Sargent, part 2

Women of Wonder: The Contemporary Years, edited by Pamela Sargent (1995)
Review by Ian Sales

This review follows on from Part 1 here.

Part 2
At $15 in 1995 for twenty-one stories, Women of Wonder: The Contemporary Years could never be accused of poor value. Given the quality of the contents, that price-tag becomes even more of a bargain. Of course, these days, sixteen years later, only second-hand copies can be found, but the anthology is certainly worth hunting down.

The title of ‘Reichs-Peace’, by Sheila Finch (1986), signals immediately that the story is a “Hitler victorious” type alternate history. Unfortunately, this results in a couple of early inelegant info-dumps in order to explain the history of the story’s world, but ‘Reichs-Peace’ does possess a number of appealing conceits. Greta is a scientist in isolationist USA. She defects to Germany, but rather than be debriefed for the secrets she carries – Germany is technologically superior to the US, but the US leads in biological sciences – she is taken to meet the widow of Adolf Hitler. Frau Hitler – Eva Braun as was – needs Greta’s help because her son, Wolfli Hitler, is one of the astronauts at the Nazi moon base but he has gone on EVA and can’t be contacted and a solar flare is due. Greta is Romany, smuggled out of Germany as a child; she is also Wolfli’s twin. Frau Hitler believes that Greta can psychically contact the brother she never knew she had, and warn him to return to the base before the flare hits. Marrying the most oddball aspects of Nazi science to this type of alternate history story makes it stand out from others of its ilk, and the character of Frau Hitler is handled especially well.

Pat Cadigan is best known for writing cyberpunk, and while ‘Angel’ (1987) borrows some of the tropes of that sub-genre, it is not a cyberpunk story. The narrator has an angel as a lover. The pair of them just about manage to make enough to survive as rent-boys. And then one of the angel’s previous lovers, a rich woman, turns up and tries to abduct him. There’s a half-hearted attempt to explain the angel as an alien exiled to Earth, but it’s the manner in which this story is told, rather than the story per se, which impresses most.

‘Rachel in Love’, Pat Murphy (1987), was nominated for the Hugo for best novelette in 1988, and won the Nebula. It’s easy to see why. Rachel is a chimpanzee, but she has had the personality of a girl implanted in her brain – the daughter of the scientist who invented the procedure, in fact, after she died in a car crash. But when the scientist dies in his sleep, the animal handlers of the Primate Research Centre see only an ape and not the young girl Rachel knows herself to be. So she plots her escape.

‘Game Night at the Fox and Goose’, Karen Joy Fowler (1989), originally appeared in Interzone, and is one of the stronger pieces in an already-strong anthology. Alison, lonely and disenchanted after being abandoned by her lover, and pregnant, visits the eponymous pub in order to cheer herself up. There she meets an enigmatic women who tells of her a parallel world in which the relationship between women and men is very different.

‘Tiny Tango’, Judith Moffett (1989), is perhaps the longest story in Women of Wonder: The Contemporary Years, and is one of Moffett’s Hefn stories. It’s science fiction lite, inasmuch as what few tropes appear in the story only book-end the main narrative. The narrator is an early victim of AIDS, and chooses to maintain a stress-free healthy lifestyle in order to maximise her chances of survival. This includes growing her own fruit and veg, and she decides, as a project, to develop a strain of virus-resistant melon. But then an accident at a nearby nuclear power plant renders the area where she lives uninhabitable. Meanwhile, the alien Hefn have visited Earth, had a look around, and then left. Later they return, and the narrator’s story is one they have asked her to tell as some sort of lesson. ‘Tiny Tango’ is also part of Moffett’s fix-up story about the Hefn, The Ragged World. On the strength of this novella, I plan to track down a copy.

Connie Willis’ reputation rests as much on stories like ‘At the Rialto’ (1989) as it does on her novels. Certainly this story has appeared in numerous “best of” anthologies. It’s a comic piece, set in the eponymous hotel during the International Congress of Quantum Physics Annual Meeting. It’s also not really science fiction. Some of the strangenesses of quantum physics are mirrored in the interactions between the characters – in other words, the congress is pretty chaotic. It’s an entertaining story, but I must admit to being slightly puzzled by the obvious high regard in which it’s held.

Not all of the stories in the anthology have been overtly feminist, and none have been misandrist, though ‘Midnight News’, Lisa Goldstein (1990), comes perhaps closest to the latter. Aliens have arrived at Earth, judged the human race and found it wanting. And selected a representative to make the final decision on the planet’s fate. That representative is Helena Johnson, an OAP… who is being treated like royalty in order to influence her decision. Stevens and Gorce are two of the reporters interviewing Johnson. There’s something slightly old-fashioned about ‘Midnight News’, something which harkens back to the days of Hildy Johnson – including its sexual politics.

‘And Wild for to Hold’, Nancy Kress (1991), is another long piece. The Time Research Institute exists out of time and its role encompasses more than just research. It also identifies in alternate time streams pivotal historical figures and abducts them as “Holy Hostages” in order to prevent the suffering their existence cause. The practice of taking hostages to prevent wars in well-established in the Institute’s reality – there is even a Church of the Holy Hostage. In the past, the Institute has abducted Hitler, Helen of Troy, and a Romanov prince. But now they’ve taken Anne Boleyn – chiefly to prevent the English Reformation. But Boleyn is a practiced schemer and does not accept her new role willingly. The Church too is trying to seize control of the Institute. The sf in this story never quite convinces, though the characters are well-drawn – especially Boleyn.

‘Immaculate’, Storm Constantine (1991), is another story which presents science fiction as another genre – or rather, tries to offer a science-fictional explanation of its tropes. Donna claims she can feel computers dreaming. She is a model for VR-type entertainments by Reeb, who was nearly killed in a freak accident when his data-suit caught fire. Donna tells him he left part of himself “in the wires”. The title refers to the fact that Donna is an “immaculate” birth, though it is not a miracle but a medical procedure available to anyone. This is another story whose strength lies in its prose style rather than in its plot.

Some writers are better at depicting aliens than others. Ore has always been good at it, and ‘Farming in Virginia’ (1993) provides ample evidence of this. Two aliens have been exiled to Earth and are living quiet lives under the protection of the US government. But Earth has decided it’s time to send them back, as the female of the pair is pregnant. She is also an alcoholic. And the male is addicted to a drug. I will never understand why writers think that throwing random apostrophes into made-up names will make them convincingly alien, but Ore does it here. However, she does well with the biology and psychology of her aliens, especially the male alien’s perception of the humans he interacts with.

Worth mentioning is the excellent introduction to the anthology by Pamela Sargent. It gives a quick history of women writing in science fiction, as well as quoting a number of male reactions to their output. The anthology ends with a fifteen-page ‘Recommended Reading: Science Fiction by Women 1979 – 1993′ bibliography. At some point, I will transcribe this and add it as a separate page to the blog.

An excellent anthology, and certainly worth reading. Recommended.

Women of Wonder: The Contemporary Years, Pamela Sargent

Women of Wonder: The Contemporary Years, edited by Pamela Sargent (1995)
Review by Ian Sales

Part 1
In 1975, Pamela Sargent edited the first in a trilogy of women-only science fiction anthologies for US publisher Vintage. Fast forward twenty years and it’s time for more, this time published by Harcourt Brace & Company. Women of Wonder: The Contemporary Years is subtitled “science fiction by women writers from the 1970s to the 1990s”, and its contents are just that. There is also a companion volume, Women of Wonder: The Classic Years (1995), which contains some of the more notable names who appearing to be missing from this volume’s table of contents.

The title of ‘Cassandra’, CJ Cherryh (1978), references the Ancient Greek doomsayer but this story is set in the near-future. Alis can see ghosts – or rather, everyone she sees has the spectral presence of ghosts. Because she can see their future deaths. That is until she meets someone who does not look like a ghost to her. And then she learns why everyone appears spectral… In terms of subject, this is not your typical Cherryh, though the brusque muscular prose is familiar.

‘The Thaw’, Tanith Lee (1979) is one of those stories which forces a science fictional explanation onto a fantastical conceit. At the tail end of the twenty-second century, those who had themselves cryogenically frozen in the twentieth century are defrosted. Or rather, the first of them, the narrator’s many-times- great-grandmother, is resuscitated to see if the process is actually possible. And so it proves. And os Carla Brice becomes something of a celebrity, her every whim catered for, her every desire met. Except the narrator can’t quite understand this power her ancestor has over everyone. It’s unnatural. In fact, it’s almost as if Carla had made a pact with the Devil. Lee turns this suggestion on its head by providing a science-fictional explanation, though it’s all very hand-wavey. The somewhat irritating voice of the narrator doesn’t help much, either.

Given the title of ‘Scorched Supper on New Niger’, Suzy McKee Charnas (1980), and the fact that Charnas is best-known for her post-apocalypse feminist trilogy which begins with Walk to the End of the World, it comes as something of a surprise to discover that ‘Scorched Supper on New Niger’ is actually a light-hearted space opera. Dee Steinway is a freighter pilot, but the ship she flies – with her uplifted cat, Ripotee – is stolen. Sort of. Her brother-in-law has seized control of the haulage firm her mother founded, and wants Dee hand over the ship and settle down (there is a swing against feminism in the background of the story). Desperate to keep her ship, Dee lands on New Niger, a planet settled by Africans, and does a deal with Helen Nwanyeruwa, head of a rival firm. Except it doesn’t quite go down as Dee expected, or was promised. This is a fun, staunchly feminist space opera, and I’d happily read more stories set in the same universe.

There’s an elliptical quality to Carol Emshwiller’s ‘Abominable’ (1980) which both makes the story a difficult read and yet perversely makes it hard to forget. The central conceit is plain enough: women have become as elusive as the Abominable Snowman, and a group of men have set off to track down and capture the Commander’s wife. The story is too dream-like, for all that its conceit verges on absurd, and while this initially makes for an unsatisfactory read, it is also the reason why the story bears multiple reads.

I’ve been a fan of Sydney J Van Scyoc’s science fiction for many years, and her ‘Bluewater Dreams’ (1981) provides ample reason why. (The story, incidentally, has nothing to do with her 1991 novel Deepwater Dreams.) On the world of Rahndarr, human colonists and native Birlele co-exist peacefully. Except, every now and again, those Birlele which live with humans develop a fatal disease to which there is no known cure. Driven to return to their mountain home, they usually die en route. But human Namir choose to help her Birlele friend Mega journey home to the dreaming pools of her race… only to learn something important about the aliens. Van Scyoc’s strength has always lain in her invention and depiction of alien societies, and ‘Bluewater Dreams’ shows this in microcosm.

‘The Cabinet of Edgar Allen Poe’, Angela Carter (1982), is perhaps the least overtly science-fictional story in the anthology. It is an alternate life of Poe which drifts perhaps more into the fantastical than the alternate history mode. There’s more in there than that just – references to various fairy tales, for one thing; though I am sure I missed many of the references. While Carter certainly belongs in a volume such as Women of Wonder: The Contemporary Years, her inclusion here is a puzzle as her career actually began in the 1960s and this story isn’t sf per se.

‘The Harvest of Wolves’, Mary Gentle (1984), first appeared in Interzone and is typical of the magazine during that period in British sf short fiction. It’s the near-future and Britain is ruled by a New Puritan government after the near-collapse of society and the economy – this is the future of Thatcher’s Britain, V for Vendetta territory; and not so very far from what is imaginable now as the future of Cameron’s Britain. Flix is an old woman, an activist in the old days, living in poverty and being helped, and reported on, by a youth on community service. It’s all very grim and very British, and does elicit a sad nostalgia for the days when science fiction used to be an angry genre.

‘Bloodchild’ by Octavia E Butler (1984) must be one of the most anthologised science fiction stories of the 1980s, and yet it is often missing from lists of great sf short fiction. But then it was not written by a white male. Gan is  a young human boy living in a preserve on an Earth dominated by the alien Tlic. The aliens procreate by laying parasitic grubs in human hosts, and Gan has been brought up to be one such host. Except the realities of the process of “birth” have been kept from him. And he rudely discovers them when a man carrying Tlic grubs ready to hatch appears on the family doorstep. Though ‘Bloodchild’ features on of my pet hates, the apostrophe used in “alien” names, it’s a minor quibble.

‘Fears’, Pamela Sargent (1984), is perhaps the least successful of this batch of stories. In a near-future US, the ability to choose the gender of babies before birth has led to a very sharp decline in the number of women. so much so, in fact, that they have once again become highly-prized chattel. The narrator is female, but can disguise herself as male. She lives outside of society and the story recounts one of her visits to a nearby town for supplies, and her conversations with the bodyguard she hires for protection.

The name Jayge Carr was new to me, but on the strength of her ‘Webrider’ (1985) I’m tempted to seek out some of her longer fiction. In the space opera setting of the story, FTL interstellar travel is only possible via matter transmission. But only certain people can survive the process, and even then the odds of lethal failure are extremely high. Such people, known as “webriders”, are feted when they arrive on worlds, and their every whim catered to. But when the companion – groupie – selected by Webrider Tamarisk during her stay proves a little too interested in the web and its workings, his actions have unforeseen consequences. An accomplished sf tale with a cast of aliens and an interesting universe.

‘Alexia and Graham Bell’, Rosaleen Love (1986) suggests that the invention of the telephone by a young Australian descendant of Alexander Graham Bell actually causes the past to change such that it seemed Bell did really invent the device in 1875. Gone is the peaceful alternate present of telegraphs and letters, in which all long-distance communication is written down and so open to censorship. Which has, perversely, led to a peaceful twentieth century, without world wars. The story is played for laughs – which is just as well as the central conceit doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny. But it’s an entertaining idea and handled well.

While the modes of science fiction in Women of Wonder: The Contemporary Years are varied, the quality is not. Some stories are more successful than others, but there are no duds. This is no real surprise – the anthology is, after all, to some extent a “best of” as it is a showcase of science fiction written by women, and its table of contents were chosen accordingly. That there is no discernible difference in quality between sf written by women or sf written by men should be obvious to all, but the fact of the existence of Women of Wonder: The Contemporary Years suggests it’s a lesson many still need to learn. They should immediately seek out a copy of this volume and read it.