There is a rumour to the effect that science fiction is a fresh, forward-looking, innovative literature. This is, of course, all false. Science fiction is old and weary, forever picking over its own bones, preferring some petty variation on what has gone before to anything approaching novelty. Beyond the Gates by Catherine Wells is an object lesson in how to wring as much variation as possible on a tired theme without once daring to be new. Wells’s previous novel, Mother Grimm, was a finalist for the Philip K Dick Award; for the sake of the award one can only hope that her talent has taken a nose-dive in the interim, or else the judges faced an extraordinarily lean year. Certainly there is nothing in this new book that might excite the interest of a judge.

Which is not to say that this is a dramatically bad book. It is highly competent, smoothly written, hits all the right buttons in more or less the right order; if there is a formula for a novel that will be pleasantly entertaining to the many and not too upsetting to the few, then Catherine Wells has found that formula. If her prose singularly fails to reach any of the poetic heights that her chosen manner of storytelling would seem to demand, then at least it contains no outright horrors. The trouble is, the whole thing is too smooth, there is nothing to snag in the memory, five minutes after closing the book you would be hard put to name anything which distinguishes it from a thousand other novels ploughing more or less the same furrow.

This is the old, old story of science versus religion; and as practically always happens in science fiction the odds are stacked in favour of science. Science, after all, provides the drama, the motivation, the charming central character; all religion does is serve as the force of repression and provide the baddies who are trying to hold the good buys back. Ah, but that doesn’t begin to do justice to the planet-building-by-numbers that Wells is practising here. Let’s see: you have an entire planet given over to one religion; and since the planet is largely a desert world, the religion is inevitably a clone of Islam. Since this is Islam in all but name, then there must be unthinking obedience to strict rules of religious observance, and of course an oblique way of phrasing everything, that Americans seem to think is de rigeur when presenting a Moslem-like religion. Since you have unthinking obedience to strict rules, then the people who enforce those rules, the mullahs (they’re not quite called that but that’s what they are), must be corrupt and are keeping a big secret from the world. Since the religious masters are corrupt, then it is the absolute duty of science to be heroic and defy convention and chase knowledge come what may. And since this is another story of how good science inevitably defeats bad religion, the results of that pursuit of knowledge are of course unfailingly positive: science would never introduce anything dangerous that might upset a peaceful and prosperous world, no siree.

In this instance, science is represented by Marta, a graduate student who discovers a dead dinosaur on one of her field trips. The only trouble is, there isn’t supposed to be anything like a dinosaur in this planet’s native fauna. So she organises another expedition, this time bringing in a scientist from off-world, who turns out to be cowardly, impetuous and more concerned with personal glory than the service of science. Unfortunately, Marta’s sponsor has a rival, who organises a rival expedition with a rival off-world scientist. This scientist turns out to be not only the galaxy’s greatest expert in his field, but also a super-competent soldier, the sort of muscle-bound figure who could win a war singlehanded and not break into a sweat (science fiction writers sometimes seem to have a very peculiar notion of what scientists are like). Of course, Marta manages to outwit the super-soldier, but this is only the start for their discoveries lead them to the forbidden continent (there always has to be a forbidden continent), which the not-quite-mullahs have always claimed is barren. What secret are they hiding? Will the self-serving scientist reveal his true colours and put everyone else at risk as a result? Will Marta and the super-soldier join forces and make the great discovery that changes the world forever?

What do you think?

This review originally appeared in New York Review of Science Fiction 140, April 2000.

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…

Kate Wilhelm, famous for her Hugo-winning masterwork Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976), started her writing career with more modest works. The Mile-Long Spaceship collects some of her earliest short stories from the late 50s and a few written for the collection in the early 60s — Clone, her first novel, co-written with Theodore L Thomas would come out in 1965. However, her best sf was published in the late 60s to the mid-70s. Before then her work tended to be straight-forward with an occasional interesting idea or poignant scene but generally unremarkable….

Three stories are worth reading in this collection: an early work of feminist science fiction – ‘No Light in the Window’ (1963), a moody rumination on the claustrophobia of space travel – ‘The Man Without a Planet’ (1962), and an intriguing but underwhelming first contact story – ‘The Mile-Long Spaceship’ (1957).

Recommended for fans of Wilhelm who are curious about her earliest forays into the genre or those (like myself) who are obsessed with 50s + 60s sf. Less fanatical sf fans will be disappointed.

‘The Mile-Long Spaceship’ (1957): Telepathic alien explorers make mental contact (of the non-verbal kind) with an Earthman. Unfortunately, contact causes him to crash his car and end up in a hospital. In their moments of contact the telepaths “transport” him to a conjured mile-long spaceship. The aliens attempt to find out how to visit Earth by suggesting he watch various “films” on the “spaceship” in order for him to identify stars which might suggest Earth’s location. But the Earthman doesn’t have much interest in astronomy, and assumes his delusions are a result of his crash…. A slightly atmospheric tale — but lacking wonder.

‘Fear is a Cold Black’ (1963): Wilhelm’s take on sf/horror is a slightly claustrophobic tale but plods over old ground. An interstellar space cruiser is stricken with a mysterious illness after investigating an abandoned spaceship wreck. The passengers are transformed by their fear: “Giroden making plans for his funereal pyre, Perez creating an enemy to be destroyed, even poor Custens, the least imaginative man on the ship, theorizing that the thing traveled with the food, depriving himself of the sustenance hoping to forestall further spread” (p21). Soon, the true nature of the disease is discovered and the captain has to make a controversial decision to save the crew.

‘Jenny with Wings’ (1963): A downright silly fantasy installment better suited for the Romance sf subgenre — a girl born with wings is raised by her grandfather and scares off all the boys who fall for her when she reveals her wings. They either think she’s an angel and start praying or want to sell her to the circus for some quick cash. She gets word of a nice doctor who cares for others with strange abnormalities (for example, people who sleep underwater). Her doctor’s office visit is filled with sexual tension as the doctor inquires about her life and examines her. She admits she is not well versed in the ways of sex — the doctors reveals (well, in an early 60s manner) that there are other positions. When she flies off to meet her “love” she discovers his true intentions…. Thankfully, there’s someone who really understands her. And they fly off together. A single word comes to mind, “lame.”

‘A is for Automation’ (1959): A sinister tale that ultimately fails to deliver. An automated factory — whose brain center is named Sarah — creates robotic toys. A government inspection arrives to see whether the facility is safe, if it is there’s the possibility of a lucrative Defense Department contract. Old Man Mike, kept on the payroll for goodwill purposes alone due to the automated nature of the factory, detects some strange occurrences but no one believes him — one better not “teach” Sarah too much or “she” might try to reproduce…

‘Gift from the Stars’ (1958): An unscrupulous urban developed wants to get his grubby hands on an entire city block… Unfortunately for him an electronics store with ridiculously low prices is the only business that won’t leave. Mr Talbot is convinced the store is a front for a racket of some sort — he breaks his watch on purpose in order to get the opportunity to scout out the place — he discovers, a (wait for it), “gift from the stars”. A simple, predictable, alien presence on Earth type short story with similar theme to ‘The Mile-Long Spaceship’ — mankind is too stupid, self-centered, and ignorant for first contact.

‘No Light in the Window’ (1963): Easily the best story in the collection…. A thought-provoking work of early feminist social science fiction dealing with relevant themes — in this case, the ramifications of careers on marriage. Connie, a biochemist, and Hank, an astrophysicist are recently married. However, looming over their shoulder is the possibility that both of them will not be selected for one of the few positions on a colonizing spaceship. Hank is calm and convinced that he’ll be going along with his wife. However, Connie is convinced that she will not be going and struggles to digest the potential ramifications for her marriage. Surprisingly, she is selected for the mission and Hank is not….

‘One for the Road’ (1959): A commentary on cold war paranoia, which strangely retains the “scientists are idealists that wouldn’t dream of hurting others” narrative instead of complicating said narrative. The scientist remains guiltless while the public is simply a paranoid mob needing guidance. Massive riots spread across the world due to a badly edited radio broadcast that claimed that the radioactivity due to atomic testing overseen by scientists would cause most people to die from cancer (the proper context removed entirely from the broadcast). Of course, science comes to the rescue before the rioting gets out of hand. A story weakened by its naive message… Of course, when the true ramifications of nuclear testing became known to the American public such stories would be strangely out of place…

‘Andover and the Android’ (1963): Roger thinks women are “simpering females” and would never dream of getting married. However, if he doesn’t get married he won’t get promoted to the vice-presidency of a company. So, he marries a robot. And falls in love with her…. A satirical take on 50s/60s views of women — humorous but far too slapstick for my taste.

‘The Man Without a Planet’ (1962): The second best story in the collection — a moody, psychologically taught story about the strains of a lengthy space voyage to colonize Mars. And, as the crew feels the effects of close quarters, seat thirteen with its strange occupant casts an aura of unease. This dark and contained rumination hints at the heights reached by Wilhelm’s later masterpieces.

‘The Apostolic Travelers’ (1963): A satirical tale about immortality… The Longevity Board on Earth randomly grants a few individuals every year immortality — all the others on Earth can live a prescribed 250 years. Two Brothers (of the monkish variety) of rather dubious standing are selected to appear before the Board in order to become immortal. The true downside of immortality is revealed but the monks agree anyway so that they can convert others for the faith… So they’re supplied with a FTL spaceship in order to prevent the overpopulation of worlds (if everyone could be immortal…).

‘The Last Days of the Captain’ (1962): The idea behind ‘The Last Days of the Captain’ is far superior than the forced/unexciting/dry delivery — Captain Winters is attempting to move all the colonist on a planet to the evacuation extraction point due to a suspected alien invasion. He holds the planet-bound colonists in low esteem — as do all spacers. However, he becomes personally responsible for moving to the extraction point a colonist named Marilyn, who is unsure whether her son and husband will get to the extraction point in time. Eventually, he overcomes some of his prejudice against the simple folk of the farms.

This review originally appeared on Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations.

A City in the North, Marta Randall (1976)
Review by Ian Sales

It sometimes seems that, at some point in the career, every Western science fiction author tries to write Heart of Darkness. For Marta Randall, that point came early – with her second novel, A City in the North. Though mapping Conrad’s themes of civilisation versus savagery onto a galactic stage now seems a trite and banal exercise, and literature no longer finds colonialism an acceptable subject, its appeal to genre writers of the 1970s and earlier is not hard to fathom. Science fiction is often about the supremacy of science and technology, and “primitive” cultures provided a cheap and easy backdrop against which to demonstrate this. Which is not to say that all such stories were lacking in subtlety or sensitivity. A City in the North is a story which treads a fine line between what was considered acceptable in the mid-1970s and what is considered acceptable in the 21st century, but is a surprisingly clever and subtle novel and a good deal better than any of its contemporaries based on the same theme.

Toyon Sutak and Alin Kennerin have travelled to the world of Hoep-Hanninah because Toyon has long had a dream of visiting the ancient ruins in the north of the planet’s only continent. The ruined city, Hoep-Tashik, is actually off-limits, but Toyon is a rich and powerful man and is sure he can sway the local authorities to give him permission. Hoep-Hanninah is a company world, administered by an ineffectual governor. It is also inhabited. The Hanninah are:

“squat, square creatures with long arms and bowed legs, covered with dark hair save for face, palms, soles, belly … Apes, they looked; apes, they walked, yet they had a name for themselves and their world, engaged in incomprehensible rituals, were sentient, aware of their own condition as living creatures on the way to death.” (p 10)

The humans find it impossible to believe that the Hanninah, who live a simple nomadic lifestyle, could have built Hoep-Tashik, and the aliens certainly refuse to explain themselves or describe their past. The Company employees on the world, seeing this, subsequently treat the Hanninah like either second-class citizens or clever animals – and that’s a narrative that’s all to sadly common in the real world.

Toyon gets permission to visit Hoep-Tashik, but only if he travels there by land. Meanwhile, Alin has been studying the Hanninah and appears to have some sort of unexplained affinity with them. The Company head on the planet, Haecker, has decided that Toyon and Alin are actually government spies, sent to discover what the Company is really doing on Hoep-Hanninah. When Toyon and Alin disappear from the governor’s house, having been offered a lift north by rogue Company driver Quellan, Haecker decides all three must be eliminated.

As the trio travel further north, they meet up with a tribe of Hanninah, and Alin begins to participate in their “incomprehensible rituals”. Clearly, the Hanninah are more than they appear to be. But Haecker is getting desperate, and he doesn’t care how many of the aliens die in his hunt for Toyon, Alin and Quellan.

There’s nothing new in the set-up of A City in the North, except perhaps the fact it’s set on an alien planet. The company outpost which rules a remote corner of some distant land has been a staple of both literature and cinema for decades. Throwing a pair of ingénus into the mix is par for the course. And as the story progresses, it is only expected that they should change just as much as their surroundings change as direct result of their appearance. Unfortunately, such stories are predicated on the superiority – not only technological, but also moral – of the intruders. They are played off against the company man, and the locals are typically little more than background colour. The plot of A City in the North, however, is very much predicated on the nature of the Hanninah. Haecker, the governor, Quellan, even Toyon and Alin, might well be stock characters, and they may be playing out a standard plot of Western literature, but it’s a plot that’s informed and progressed by the Hanninah themselves.

A City in the North is structured as a mixture of journal entries by Toyon and Alin, and tightly-limited point-of-view narratives by other members of the cast. Toyon is, perhaps, a bit of a cliché – the self-made zillionnaire who expects everything to go his way. Alin is better-drawn, with an interesting background – which, in fact, is used in Randall’s next two novels, Journey and Dangerous Game. For all that A City in the North may resemble a science-fictional Heart of Darkness, Randall has certainly put an interesting spin on her version, and that more than makes up for slight datedness in approach or sensibilities.

Marta Randall, a Mexico-born sf writer, seems mostly forgotten these days. While she only wrote six sf novels, published between 1976 and 1984, she was also the first female president of the SFWA. Judging by Islands and A City in the North, the two novels by her I’ve read to date, she deserves to be far better known. I can think of plenty of inferior writers of the same period whose books remain in print. If you ever stumble across a Marta Randall novel in a second-hand book shop, buy it. You won’t be disappointed.

Name a male science fiction writer of the 1950s. It’s not a difficult task: most of the big names were writing then – Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, EE Doc Smith… Not to mention a host of others. Now name a female science fiction writer of the 1950s. It’s much harder. Le Guin wasn’t published until the 1960s. There was Andre Norton, who was first published in the 1940s. Likewise for Leigh Brackett. And Joanna Russ, whose first story saw print in 1959. But what about a woman described as a “renowned author” with “a long and distinguished career in the science fiction field”? Renowned authors do not, as a general rule, get written out of genre history, but these days Margaret St Clair is virtually forgotten. None of her novels are acknowledged as “classics”, though some might know of her 1963 novel, Sign of the Labrys. She was neither nominated for, nor won, any awards. And it took over a decade for some of her stories from the 1950s to be collected.

Change the Sky and Other Stories contains eighteen stories originally published between 1951 and 1961. They appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy Magazine, Startling Stories, Future and The Science Fiction Quarterly – all major sf magazine titles. According to isfdb.com, she was hugely prolific – I count nearly 80 stories published during the 1950s alone. It seems astonishing that an author with that level of output, published in major magazines, should pretty much disappear from the history of the genre. Judging from the stories collected in Change the Sky, her obscurity is not due to the quality of her fiction. While few stand out especially, they are no better and no worse than what was published at the time – and, in some cases, are a good deal more interesting than was typical for the period.

The title story, ‘Change the Sky’ (1955), shows a frequent 1950s sf penchant for unsupported premises. A man who is told he can no longer travel between planets approaches an artist and asks him to build him his perfect virtual world. He will see out the rest of his days in it. Though the concept of virtual worlds is surprisingly prescient – here they appear to operate more by magical technology than computer science – the end of the story is somewhat predictable and banal.

‘Beaulieu’ (1957) is an old story, recast in the colours of Otto Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse or Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch A Thief. A woman picks up a man in her green sports car and offers to take him to the eponymous place. It’s a fantasy locale of his, and St Clair drops a few leaden hints than the woman is a Valkyrie; but the atmosphere of the story is more interesting than its plot.

‘Marriage Manual’ (1954), on the other hand, is a piece of 1950s sf silliness. It’s not about a “marriage manual” of course; it’s about a sex manual. In this case, the manual belongs to the alien dorff, who apparently love to boast of their “erotic possibilities”. Somehow, their means of sex requires an energy source that human beings want in order to power their worlds. But the dorff won’t give up a copy of their marriage manual. At least, they won’t until Bill disappears, and George discovers he has undergone a transformation into a female dorff…

Surprisingly, ‘Age of Prophecy’ (1951) is quite a nasty piece. In a post-apocalyptic California, various prophets have formed religious groups, which operate like small independent states. Unlike the other prophets, however, Benjamin has real powers. He is manipulated by Torbit into founding his own religious group, and later into attacking a redoubt of hated scientists in Pasadena. But the attack goes wrong, and Benjamin learns who his true friends are. There’s a level of biting cynicism and anti-religious feeling to this story that is surprising given the time it was written.

‘Then Fly Our Greetings’ (1951) is another post-apocalypse story, but in this story a device which causes humans to hate the presence of others is co-opted by the military and used… but backfires. Global society crashes, but something new eventually forms in its place. It’s not an especially convincing premise, and made worse by the attempts to explain it.

The most recent collected story in the book is ‘An Old-Fashioned Bird Christmas’ (1961). A reverend begins a campaign to return to the old non-commercialised Christmases of yore, without all the neon lights and fancy illuminations. This draws the ire of PE&G, and their secret masters “on the far side of 3,000 A.D.”, so they send one of their agents to neutralise the reverend. But she falls in love with him, and the two of them end up battling the magic of PE&G for survival. A bizarre mix of sf and fantasy, it first appeared, unsurprisingly, in the December issue of Galaxy Magazine. It was later republished in 1994 in an anthology of Christmas genre stories edited by David G Hartwell, Christmas Magic.

One of the more unsettling stories in Change the Sky is ‘Stawdust’ (1956), and it’s unsettling because it makes little real sense. Aboard a starship – which is pretty much in all respects like an ocean liner – passengers and members of the crew have been transforming into stuffed dummies. Miss Abernathy is clearly responsible for it, but she does not how she is doing it or why. And neither does the reader. These days we’d likely describe ‘Stawdust’ as a mood-piece.

‘Thirsty God’ (1953) is a typical 1950s sf “little tailor” story. A human on Venus hides from some angry “plunp” in a shrine, knowing they will not violate it. But the god within the shrine is real, and the human is changed by the encounter.

There are many stories in science fiction like ‘The Altruists’ (1953). The “slurb” are so eager to please that their world is a paradise for human visitors. But one human has an entirely different experience and discovers the cause of their altruism. His paradise becomes a prison.

‘Shore Leave’ (1974) is another piece of sf silliness. A ship lands on a planet and its alien crew rush out to experience sex with the natives. The aliens are metamorphs and can adopt the shape of their sexual partners. When they return, they discover they each experienced something completely different – different types of partners, different types of sex; and this is anathema to them as they abhor diversity and worship Sameness. It’s not difficult to figure out that the aliens have landed on Earth, and that they are extremely small and their native sexual partners were insects. ‘Shore Leave’ is original to Change the Sky, which no doubt explains its topic – it’s unlikely such a story would have seen print during the 1950s.

In ‘The Wines of Earth’ (1957), a Californian vintner is approached by a quartet of strange visitors, who readily admit to being tourists from another world. They are interested in Earth’s wine, but the best he can offer them in no way compares  to the best they make themselves. There’s a nicely elegiac tone to the story.

‘Asking’ (1955) is one of the collection’s odder pieces. A female robot – and one of only two female protagonists in the entire collection – approaches a robot mechanic for repair. But the mechanic quickly discovers she is human – which she had not known herself. Later, she returns – and she has adopted all the arrogance of the humans over their robot servants. She has been looking for answers to the questions posed by the human who had told her she was a robot. So the mechanic offers her some moonshine… This is one of two stories in Change the Sky in which the answer to the human question is found in a bottle of grain alcohol.

Perhaps the most successful story in the collection is ‘Graveyard Shift’ (1959). Bloom’s Sportsman’s Emporium remains open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. This is because there is a creature of darkness hiding in the cellar, and whoever takes the graveyard shift must be eternally vigilant in order to prevent its escape. The story first introduces a few typical customers of the Emporium, and suggests there is something slightly magical about the goods they buy – even going so far as to present a customer who confuses the word “wyvern” for “werewolf”. Another customer is described as “Under the coat, he surmised, she would be spindle-shanked, heavy-breasted and knobby-kneed, with her shoulder gnawed and eroded by the constant tug of shoulder straps”. I’m pretty sure no male writer would ever use the latter half of that description.

A number of the stories in Change the Sky are almost ahead of their time in the way they cross genres. Though presented as science fiction, they happily mix outright fantasy, or present a more slipstream aspect. ‘Fort Iron’ (1955) is the latter. In a desert somewhere, a young officer is assigned as adjutant to the eponymous fort. Everything is slack and lackadaisical, and when he tries to inject some discipline and effect some repairs to the crumbling fort, it has unforeseen consequences. The fort is under attack, slow attack, but by what, and how, is never explained. In many respects, ‘Iron Fort’ would not feel wholly out-of-place in a twenty-first century anthology.

‘The Goddess on the Street Corner’ (1953) is about precisely that. A down-and-out finds Aphrodite living rough on the street and takes her home to look after and worship her. The brandy she needs, however, costs much more than the cheap sherry he normally drinks, and eventually he has to pretend Aphrodite’s faded powers are returning and affecting his life. Few genre stories deal with poverty, and while this one feels in parts a little Capra-esque, it treats its subjects with sensitivity.

Another piece of 1950s sf silliness is ‘An Egg a Month from All Over’ (1952). A man collects eggs and hatches them. They’re delivered to him by post by the Egg-A-Month Club from all over the inhabited galaxy. An egg belonging to a mnxx bird is sent to him, the club mistakenly believing it to belong to a chu lizard. It hatches with fatal consequences. The ending is done well, but the central premise is so daft it robs it of any impact.

‘The Death of Each Day’ (1958) is a science fiction staple: the war is over but everyone continues to fight because they’ve forgotten how to stop. In this particular case, that’s because they’re tranquilised every night and wake up believing the decade-long war has only been running for a day. And that the now-vanquished enemy is still out there to be attacked. But Miriam was wounded, and she’s no longer on the drugs, and when Dick goes to visit her in the hospital – which is suspiciously deserted – she persuades him of the truth.

The final story, ‘Lazarus’ (1955), has a group of journalists being given a guided tour of the JuiciMeat factory, which manufactures cultured beef, pork and veal. They grow each product in rotation in a single giant vat, which starts making strange burbling and thumping noises as the journalists are shown around. Then something strange, and not especially plausible, happens…

It seems strange that an author as prolific as St Clair should now be so obscure. Perhaps she never wrote a novel which captured readers’ fancy to the same extent as some of her contemporaries, but her frequent presence in the magazines of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s should at least have given her name some longevity. Admittedly, she did not hide behind a male or gender-neutral pseudonym, but neither did she write genre fiction that might perhaps have made male readers of the time uncomfortable. Of the eighteen stories in Change the Sky, only two have a female protagonists, though most feature women – well-drawn women, usually with agency – in secondary roles. The female customer in ‘Graveyard Shift’ may be subjected to the night clerk’s male gaze, but the details are not typically those a male writer would think to use. Miriam in ‘The Death of Each Day’ is dying of radiation poisoning but she pushes Dick to break free of the drug-induced lie in which he is living. Mazda, the PE&G agent who marries the reverend in ‘An Old Fashioned Bird Christmas’, is the one with the knowledge and the power that drives the story.

Change the Sky is very much a collection of 1950s science fiction stories. Most of them are based on outdated premises, or use a style of storytelling no longer in vogue. They are historical documents for the most part, but they’re more interesting than many other historical documents of the same period. St Clair may have been hugely prolific, but she had a good eye for detail. While many of the stories are somewhat forgettable, one or two do deserve a longer shelf-life than they seem to have been given.

In 1922 the young David Garnett published his first novel, a brief fable called Lady into Fox. It tells the story of Silvia Tebrick, who one day suddenly turns into a vixen, and of her husband, Richard Tebrick, who tries to protect his newly wild spouse until she is eventually killed by the hunt. This was far from being the first work to feature humans transformed into animals. Think of Ovid’s Metamorphoses or, indeed, Franz Kafka’s novella, ‘The Metamorphosis’, which had appeared, in German, as recently as 1915. But Garnett’s novel was perhaps the first in which we are required to pay attention to the gender of the transformee. Though our attention is more on Richard than Silvia, we might read her increasing wildness as reflecting the increasing independence espoused by the suffragist movement, and the climax suggesting how society, represented by the hunt, crushes women. However we read Garnett’s novel, though, one thing is clear, his central conceit of representing the role of woman by changing her into an animal has become almost a commonplace of later, particularly feminist, science fiction. We still see some iteration of this today in the work of writers such as Kij Johnson, but probably the most extravagant, significant and certainly funniest expression of the trope was in another first novel, Carmen Dog by Carol Emshwiller.

Emshwiller had been writing short stories since the 1950s, so the debut novel, published in 1988, was long delayed. Story titles like ‘Sex And/Or Mr Morrison’ (from Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions (1967)) gave notice that relations between the sexes would be a significant theme in her work. Still, nothing could have prepared us for the extraordinary satirical joie de vivre that is such a feature of Carmen Dog. Oh the satire is angry enough, but never bitter, and there is real elation in the inventive way Emshwiller plays with ideas all the way through the novel.

There are no half measures in Carmen Dog: this is not the story of one woman transformed into an animal, but all women; while, reciprocally, animals change into women. The change has already begun as the novel opens, though it is not yet as widespread as it will become. Before we are even introduced to our heroine, we learn that:

red-headed, plump Christine who had, several times, been taken for an orangutan, can now argue her way out of any zoo no matter what the educational level of the keepers. Mona, on the other hand, can almost fly (though it is unlikely that she ever really will). Her husband complains that she makes funny noises, but her children like her all the better for it. John is divorcing Lucille in order to marry Betty (quite bearish still, but evidently what John wants). Mabel has only recently been given a name at all. (p2)

That passage is actually a fair representation of Emshwiller’s style throughout the novel: brisk, allusive, kaleidoscopic, skimming across the surface of the change without going into too much unnecessary detail (do we need to know exactly what Mona is turning into, or what Mabel used to be?). The women (and animals) are named, though we will never meet any of them again; the men mostly aren’t. Men are titles, roles, “the psychologist,” “the husband.” They are stolid, unchanging, uninterested, and uninteresting; many of them seem to have little or no awareness of the extraordinary societal changes going on around them. Men are mostly the villains in this story as well, though that is not to impute a simplistic all-men-are-bad, all-women-are-good attitude to the novel. The villainy stems mostly from incomprehension: we are in a whole world of the women men don’t see.

Our heroine is Pooch, whose dogness remains as a rather endearing part of her character throughout the novel (though the name presumably says something about the unimaginativeness of the unnamed husband and wife who begin our story as her owners). The wife is turning into a vicious snapping turtle, the husband simply wants the smooth surface of his life to continue undisturbed, and Pooch, slowly becoming human, finds more domestic responsibilities falling upon her: taking care of the children, shopping, cleaning, and so on. She takes all this on out of an innate loyalty, or perhaps more precisely a desire to be loyal, that remains one of her abiding characteristics whatever else happens to her. When, eventually, she gets to see the psychologist (tellingly, all these transformations are seen only as psychological problems for the women) his perceptions are comically banal:

It is clear that Pooch has always wanted to be of service to mankind in any way that she possibly could and from the general look of her, he would guess that her retrieving instincts are strong and that she might be passionately interested in swimming. (p4)

Apply those perceptions to a dog and they tell us only about what we humans have created through breeding and training; apply them to a woman . . . But such is the magic of Emshwiller’s work.

Of course, we have no sooner met Pooch in her cosy but clearly unsatisfactory domestic situation, than she is forced to flee. What follows is a typical picaresque in which our innocent and unwary heroine faces the threats and temptations of the big bad city. These encounters allow us to witness the plight of women-creatures in this new reality, while Pooch, like picaresque heroines of old (Fanny Hill, say, or Justine), remains resolutely undepraved by the depravity she experiences. There is the city pound (equivalent of a gaol and treated as such), where she gives her collar to another dog in danger of being put down, so that it might prove it is owned and thus escape death. There is another version of a prison when she and her friends from the pound are held by the psychologist, who wants to conduct experiments on these new not-quite-people. Here Pooch learns to compose poetry (so we can see her as a civilized person, even if the psychologist cannot), and thrives in the community of her fellows (it is a commonplace in the feminist SF of the period that women are mutually supportive and act communally, while men are isolated and individualist). Given how much the dog part of her character still craves a master to whom she can be loyal, this situation would suit Pooch well were it not for the increasing use of pain in the psychologist’s experiments. Instead, she fights back, and escapes.

The next part of this picaresque sees Pooch wandering the city alone, seeing an opera and discovering a desire to sing, then falling in with a libertine who also happens to be the opera impresario. Finally, she is drawn back to the psychologist’s home in the hope of rescuing her fellows, only to discover that the psychologist’s wife is actually the leader of a secret liberation movement. In other words, the choice facing our women-creatures has gone from one between ownership or death in the pound, to one between freedom or imprisonment now that they have taken control of their own future.

It was a time when feminist SF tended to lay out its wares in bold, not to say garish, contrasts, and Emshwiller is not immune to that. But Emshwiller makes a virtue of the broad strokes, making it a part of the comedy of her novel. Big and foolish things happen, because that is precisely in the nature of such satires; but these big and foolish things are handled wittily, so that we find ourselves laughing at them and with them at the same time. We feel for Pooch as a sort of Everywoman as she makes her way through various misadventures, and we hiss at the pantomime villain men; but they are not entirely villainous, and there are good men discovered along the way, and the story has a happy ending because such stories need to have a happy ending.

Emshwiller’s novel is a curious mid-career debut, but there are first novel faults and she has become an even more sophisticated writer since then. None of that spoils the sheer exhilaration of this work. It remains one of the most striking and powerful examples of feminist SF.

This review originally appeared on Strange Horizons.

There is no clue on the cover or back-cover blurb that Cyberstealth is the product of a woman sf writer. It’s pure Top Gun military sf and presented as such –  from the tagline “It’s not easy being the best…” to an approving puff by David Drake, and cover art depicting a handsome male lead and the latest in combat spacecraft. While Cyberstealth is more resolutely mil sf – perhaps even to the point of cliché – there is much in it familiar to readers of Lewitt’s debut, Angel at Apogee. Both feature as protagonists an outsider in an elite branch of the military, and make use of a non-Anglophone culture – Romany in this case; and it’s much better integrated than in her debut.

Cargo was a Romany juvenile delinquent adopted by Bishop Andre Mirabeau, a powerful and well-respected diplomat and politician in the Collegium, a polity of worlds comprising human and alien Akhaid. As Cyberstealth opens, Cargo and his “Eyes”, Ghoster, an Akhaid, have just been transferred from their normal fighter wing to an elite group, where they will fly super-sophisticated stealth batwing spacecraft. They soon learn that there is a spy among their intake of four pilots and four Eyes. Fourways, the commandant of the training facility seems to suspect Cargo.

The Collegium is currently at war with the Cardia, an alliance of breakaway worlds formed after the Luxor Incident, a terrorist attack on a holiday planet. Cargo and Ghoster had flown kraits – star-fighters – against Cardia fighters, and shortly before their transfer to the batwing group, were under investigation for a possible friendly fire incident. Cargo’s wingman, also an adoptee of the Bishop, was killed, and Cargo may have fired the fatal shot. He is cleared by an investigation, but it does make him prime suspect as the traitor.

The first section of Cyberstealth, in which Cargo learns how to fly the batwing, is chiefly introduction to the universe of the story and its cast. Flashbacks detail Cargo’s childhood, and his Romany culture. He finds himself disliking fellow batwing trainee pilot Stonewall, but cannot work out why – but he does think Stonewall may be the spy. He also falls in love with Plato, another fellow trainee.

But then another pilot makes a slip, is interrogated, subsequently commits suicide and it seems the spy has been found. So the group is assigned to a carrier, and their first mission is to accompany the Bishop on a secret goodwill visit to a Cardia world, Marcanter. Complicating matters is the fact that Marcanter is home to the Cardia equivalent of the batwings, called mirages. Cargo and Ghoster are tasked with infiltrating the mirage base. They pull a Firefox –  pretend to be Cardia and steal one of the enemy craft during an attack on the Collegium carrier. Obviously, there is still a traitor in the batwing group, because how else would the Cardia mirages had known where to find the hidden carrier? Cargo saves the day… and then discovers the identity of the traitor…

Lewitt is clearly a firm believer in “show don’t tell” and throws the reader straight in at the deep end. Readers are left to puzzle out the meanings of neologisms from context, and the background is revealed piecemeal, often making the story more confusing than it would otherwise be. Lewitt had also plainly watched Top Gun a few times too often, and Cyberstealth is filled with pilot jargon – some of it obviously invented, but much of it based on the sort of dialogue found in gung-ho military pilot movies. As a result, it takes a while for the novel to get going, and the human characters often feel as alien as the Akhaid.

It is also a bizarrely colourful universe in Cyberstealth. There are frequent descriptions of the spacecraft and, with the exception of the matt black batwing, most seemed to have been “burned” in various dayglo colours like yellow or purple. There are lingering descriptions of food, particularly in the sections set in the Bishop’s point of view. These make for an oddly unbalanced story, conflicting with the macho, hard sf nature of the batwings and Cargo’s experience flying them.

But even that too doesn’t really fit with the Top Gun image presented by the characters. The cyber- in Cyberstealth refers to the “Maze”, the neural interface by which the pilots fly their craft – and interact with their alien crewmates. Lewitt’s Maze is not as clumsy a metaphor as Cherryh’s in Voyager in Night, but the cyberpunk-ish edge to what is essentially a routine Sierra Hotel pilot space opera story never really quite gels.

There are things to like in Lewitt’s fiction: she builds interesting worlds for her stories, her prose is usually good, and she puts interesting spins on somewhat clichéd stories and situations. Her refusal to explain does mean her novels need to be initially taken on trust more so than other writers, but it pays off – her novels are very immersive. Cyberstealth reads like an early work by a writer who was clear from the start how she wanted to tell stories, but still needed more practice in successfully putting the various parts together. It’s perhaps too much like space opera to appeal to fans of military sf, and not quite polished enough to appeal to fans of space opera. It was followed by a sequel, Dancing Vac, and SN Lewitt – eventually using her full name, Shariann Lewitt – then went on to write some very good sf novels.

Once, long ago, Mark Twain presented his time traveller with a world in which everyone spoke in cod-medieval except for the Connecticut Yankee himself, whose no-nonsense language proved both engaging and salutary to the people of Arthur’s court. Since then, however, writers of time travel stories have made more effort to have their traveller blend in with local time, including speaking in a language that approximates ever more closely to what might actually have been spoken at the time. Of late, however, a curious trend has started to emerge in this type of science fiction. You see it, for instance, in novels like John Kessel’s Corrupting Dr Nice, when not only do the time travellers maintain their modern habits of speech but the people in the time they visit have started to adopt the same language. Now Kage Baker has taken it a step further in her series of novels about ‘The Company’ which has reached its third volume. Here the characters come from the past, but they have been made into immortal cyborgs by visitors from our future, and in their endless journey through time they have picked up a wealth of knowledge of cultures that have not yet happened.

This novel, for instance, is set in 1862 in the wild, drought-stricken hills that would, another half-century down the line, be Hollywood. Not one of these characters has actually seen the 20th Century, but that doesn’t alter the fact that everything they see around them is coloured by the films that will one day be made here. Nor does any of them fail to talk as if they have habituated the late 20th Century all their lives. For these cyborgs the length of their experience (at least centuries, in some cases millennia) has shaped them less than a movie or two. That we accept this as readily as we do while reading this novel says something curious about our perceptions of ourselves and of our culture, I wish I knew what it was.

While centuries of life have done little to shape these characters, it certainly helps to shape the plot. In her first outing, In The Garden Of Iden, immortal Mendoza fell in love with a mortal in Tudor England, only to lose him to the flames of religious intolerance. Now, three centuries and half a world away, she meets him again, or rather she meets another Englishman with the same appearance and the same mannerisms as her lover. This particular Englishman is a spy involved in a hare-brained plot to aid the Confederacy and so wrest California into British rule, but the ramifications of this plot could involve a strange spiritualist episode in 1920s Hollywood and the origins of ‘The Company’ itself. Stirred by the apparent rebirth of her lover, Mendoza embarks on a madcap race to help him, and to keep him alive. It is doomed to failure, of course: this is a determinist universe, the future is known and unchangeable, events move with the inevitability of tragedy but the sprightliness of farce. From the moment the Englishman appears, we are swept along by engaging characters, wacky plot, incident piled upon incident. Baker has a light touch and an ability to keep the pace just right, this is wonderfully entertaining adventure written as light comedy.

Unfortunately, the Englishman does not appear until more than two-thirds of the way through the book. Until he does, what we have is stodgy and ill-controlled. We get endless scene-setting and heavy-handed foreshadowing, but we don’t get the plot that this book so desperately needs to get it going. Instead there is a series of episodic incidents which don’t form a coherent whole and which are mostly played for laughs – Baker’s touch with comedy is much more assured when it arises from sustained action rather than being presented as a series of sketches. Throughout this part of the book Mendoza’s companions are painted with a very broad brush and with little finesse, while Mendoza herself is simply morose. She does not engage either our sympathies or our interest until her lover appears on the scene and suddenly injects a spark of life into her. It reads, for all the world, as if Baker was simply intent upon continuing her series but had no real story to tell until she happened upon the English conspiracy plot. And, of course, coming so late in the book it is necessarily truncated, making this a curiously ill-formed novel. Given how well the whole thing takes off during the final section, that is a real pity.

This review originally appeared in New York Review of Science Fiction 144, August 2000

The somewhat off-putting title, The Outskirter’s Secret, makes perfect sense to those who have read Kirstein’s The Steerswoman (1989), to which it is a direct sequel. In that book, Steerswoman Rowan, with the help of Outskirter Bel, stumbled across a conspiracy involving wizards and a fallen Guidestar. While initially reading as fantasy, The Steerswoman gradually, and cleverly, revealed itself as science fiction. The wizards had advanced technology, and the Guidestars were some sort of geosynchronous satellites. But the aims of the conspiracy remained a mystery.

In The Outskirter’s Secret, Rowan and Bel are travelling east – through the Outskirts, which are inhabited by fierce nomad tribes – in search of the fallen Guidestar. Unlike The Steerswoman, this book makes no pretence of being fantasy. Instead, it describes a fascinating alien world through which the two must travel to unravel the mystery they uncovered in the first book. And while Rowan and Bel – indeed, all the cast – are extremely well-drawn, it’s the world-building in The Outskirter’s Secret which really impresses. The two books are also notably female-centric. Not just Rowan and Bel, but all the female characters have agency, and the Outskirters are wholly egalitarian. Many genre authors could learn a lot from the way Kirstein treats her cast.

While the Inner Landers have replaced the local ecology with their own – ie, flora and fauna recognisable to us – the Outskirters instead are in constant battle with their landscape. They cannot eat the various creatures, nor the redgrass which carpets the land. Fortunately, goats can eat redgrass, and the Outskirters can eat goats. This means that the various tribes of Outskirters travel about the land, denuding areas – and poisoning it with their own waste – and then moving on. As the land renews itself behind them, so it continues to support them.

Kirstein spends much of the story revealing the culture of the Outskirters, which itself is also a response to the landscape. Rowan and Bel are accepted by one tribe – after helping save a member who was attacked by “goblins” – and travel with them for several weeks. Rowan learns more about the Outskirters, and Bel explains the threat posed by the wizards and their conspiracy to them. At Rendezvous, a meeting of the tribes which occurs every twenty years and is usually signalled by strange weather, Rowan learns more about the workings of the Outskirts and the Face, the inhospitable region to the east of the Outskirts. From information given by the leader of a tribe of Face People, who are normally the Outskirters’ enemies, the steerswoman beging to put together the pieces of the plot.

It transpires that the Guidestars are not only required for the wizards to perform their “spells”, but also serve an important function in the slow terraforming of the world. The fallen Guidestar has caused this process to stop. The way in which The Outskirter’s Secret reveals how the terraforming works is extremely well done, but the reason why the wizards have interrupted the process is left for a later book.

Most of the novel covers Rowan and Bel’s stay with the Outskirter tribe. The steerswoman learns about their culture and about the ecology of the Outskirts. The nomads, their history and their way of life, provide clues, but Rowan figures most things out for herself – as does the reader. This slow process of revelation is one of the novel’s strengths, and Kirstein is clearly good at it. Rowan herself is an engaging character – clever, but not so vastly clever than the rest of the cast that she reads like a Mary Sue. In one telling scene, Rowan realises something important about Fletcher, one of the adopted members of the tribe. He is duelling another warrior – there’s a history of enmity between the two, but the duel is ostensibly for the metal sword wielded by Fletcher. As the two fight, Rowan analyses Fletcher’s fighting style, and comes to a realisation which affects the tribe, her personally, and indeed all of the Outskirter tribes. It also shifts the story into a higher gear, as the wizards promptly strike at the Outskirters and they must force-march to safety. Unfortunately, this does mean the final scene, in which Rowan and Bel find the fallen Guidestar, comes across as a little disappointing – especially since it doesn’t resolve the mystery of the wizards’ conspiracy. But the way the various elements of the ecology – including the Outskirters and Face People – are slowly revealed throughout the book as part of a terraforming process is very cleverly done.

The Outskirter’s Secret is, I think, a better and more likeable book than The Steerswoman – and not simply because it is more overtly science fiction. Though it continues to use the language of fantasy, what it describes is plainly sf, and for a clued-in reader the world-building as described suggests so much more than would be the case for a stock mediaeval Europe-derived fantasy world. When Fletcher is revealed as a “Christer”, who worships a single god symbolised by a cross, that small piece of background information implies something much greater – that there is a link between our world and the world of the two books, that the latter is somehow derived from ours. And since The Steerswoman and The Outskirter’s Secret are both science fiction, the implication is that their world is an alien planet colonised centuries before from Earth or some Earthly interstellar civilisation. Few authors can imply such depth of universe using such seemingly trivial details, but Kirstein is extremely good at it.

Both The Steerswoman and The Outskirter’s Secret are currently out of print, but they are still available in an omnibus edition, The Steerswoman Road. Go buy a copy.

Although strongly linked with fantasy – her most famous novel is the Arthurian fantasy The Mists of Avalon; and between 1988 and 1999 a fantasy magazine bore her name – Marion Zimmer Bradley is also well-known for science fiction, particularly her Darkover series. Between 1958 and her death in 1999, and over twenty-three novels and a number of short stories, two share-cropped trilogies and eleven anthologies, she wrote of events on a pseudo-feudal planet inhabited by several alien races and ruled by telepaths. She did also write other works of science fiction, and Endless Voyage is one of these. Originally published as the third book in Ace’s second series of Ace SF Specials, Endless Voyage was later revised and expanded under the title Endless Universe.

In the universe of Endless Voyage, a vast number of human-populated worlds are stitched together by Transmitters, which allow instantaneous travel across light-years. But the process requires Transmitters at both ends, and so virgin worlds must be reached the old-fashioned way. By spaceship. This is what the Explorers do. And when they find suitable worlds, they build a new Transmitter and open the world for settlement. Then a year or two later, they head off to find another virgin planet…

All this travelling through space means the Explorers experience years while decades pass for the planet-bound who travel by Transmitter. This has made a breed apart of them, as the narrator of Endless Voyage, Gildoran, ruminates in the novel’s first chapter. Occasionally, even Explorers decide to settle down and, within the space of a dozen pages, Gildoran mourns a failed relationship with a planet-bound woman, a fellow Explorer who chose to settle down on a planet, and a young man who saves him from a tricky and violent situation but is too old to join Gildoran’s ship, Gypsy Moth.

A protagonist who belongs to special group may be a science fiction staple, particularly of the genre’s early decades, but one or two artistic decisions made by Bradley regarding her Explorers are questionable. For instance, a life in space renders the Explorers sterile, so they must steal or buy babies from inhabited worlds. They prefer to buy, of course – though apparently selling babies is considered perfectly normal, and is done through businesses called “hatcheries”, where infants are picked out like supermarket produce. Not all such babies survive their early years aboard an Explorer ship – some even die, of mysterious causes, during their first launch. Those that do live are looked after by “Poohbears”, large ursine aliens about which the Explorers know nothing and are remarkably incurious.

Space radiation [sic] has also made the Explorers pale of skin, with white hair, irrespective of their original colouring. Perhaps thirty-five years ago, no sf reader would have remarked on a novel featuring special snowflakes who are distinguished by being white, but these days it is no longer acceptable. While some people of colour are mentioned in the story – including “big red men from Antares and small bluish men from Aldebaran” (p8)! – Endless Voyage is the story of the crew of Gypsy Moth…

After some initial chapters introducing the set-up and characters, the Explorer ship discovers a new seemingly idyllic world and lands to investigate it. But, of course, nothing is as it appears, and the world proves as deadly as it is Edenic. It takes a while to discover what it is that’s giving the Explorers persistent headaches and a vague feeling of unease, and when they do learn it is more by accident than design. It takes them even longer to work out what killed two members of the crew – including the captain. The death of whom also forces a lottery for a new captain, and Gildoran is picked – the youngest person to hold the post, and the most inexperienced. As the situation worsens on the new world, leading to injury and further deaths, Gildoran tries desperately hard to hold the crew together and find the cause…

Bradley’s Darkover novels are still being produced – 2013 sees the publication of The Children of Kings, the second book of the second Darkover trilogy written by Deborah J Ross (both of which were allegedly “in progress” fourteen years before when Bradley died). Bradley also managed to edit four editions of the Sword and Sorceress anthology after her death. In other words, she has become a brand, and she is likely to be remembered for her contribution to fantasy and for Darkover and its countless sequels. This is just as well since Endless Voyage is not an especially good novel and, despite being published as an “Ace SF Special” is probably best left to languish in obscurity.