Heaven Chronicles, Joan D Vinge

Heaven Chronicles, Joan D Vinge (1991)
Review by Simon Petrie

Joan D Vinge’s asteroid-colony book Heaven Chronicles is novel-length, but it’s not a single novel: instead it combines the works ‘Legacy’ (which I judge to be on the awkward cusp, in length, between a novella and a short novel) and the short(ish) novel ‘The Outcasts of Heaven Belt’. To complicate matters slightly, ‘Legacy’ is itself a combination of two short novellas ‘Media Man’ and ‘Fool’s Gold’. Two of the three component stories (‘Media Man’ and ‘The Outcasts of Heaven Belt’) first appeared in Analog magazine, respectively in 1976 and 1978; ‘Fool’s Gold’ was first published in Galileo magazine in 1980. The Outcasts of Heaven Belt has also all been published separately as a paperback. Additionally, Vinge has apparently revised all of this material, in a book entitled Heaven Belt which, to the best of my knowledge, has not yet seen release.

The tales within Heaven Chronicles all concern the unfolding, and downward-spiralling, history of the colonised asteroid belt orbiting the star Heaven, in a system rich in planetoidal resources but lacking any habitable planets. The two stories comprising ‘Legacy’ explore the adventures of prospector-turned-media-reporter Chaim Dartagnan and pilot Mythili Fukinuki, who meet as participants in an ill-fated mission to rescue the wealthy occupant of a spacecraft marooned on the frozen, inhospitable Planet Two. ‘The Outcasts of Heaven Belt’ deals with the events that unfold following the arrival in Heaven system of Ranger, a well-resourced and technologically advanced starship piloted by Betha Torgussen who, after the ship comes under attack from an overzealous colony defence force, is one of only two survivors from an original complement of seven.

There’s a decidedly old-fashioned and pulpy feel to Heaven Chronicles. (I offer this as an attempt at classification rather than any implied criticism.) There’s a lot of argument, a lot of tension, some well-telegraphed action and a kind of rough simplicity to the characterisation, more so in the space-operatic ‘The Outcasts of Heaven Belt’ than in ‘Legacy’. The most obvious overarching characteristics of the stories are, however, an evidently thoroughgoing respect for the laws of physics and an interest in the exploration of gender politics. It’s probably relevant also to note the book’s thoroughgoing use of “metric time” – ie, seconds, kiloseconds, megaseconds, gigaseconds – rather than the “imperial time” (hours, days, years, etc) to which readers are presumably accustomed. The use of unconventional time units is initially disruptive – the conversion to familiar units has to be thought through, the first few times – but does, I think, encourage a degree of immersion in the story that might otherwise be absent.

I found ‘Legacy’ to be the more rewarding of the assembled components: while neither Dartagnan nor Fukinuki is a particularly compelling viewpoint character, the interaction between them is fascinating, and I appreciated the story’s ultimate (rather elliptical) denouement. ‘The Outcasts of Heaven Belt’ suffered slightly by comparison: the story seemed overlong and meandering in places. Overall, while I found the book enjoyable, I suspect its “bitsy-ness” might irk some readers, since, despite the presence of common characters, the three stories don’t really mesh together to form a complete whole. On the other hand, it would probably hold a strong appeal to devotees of 1950s and 1960s space-based SF.

This review originally appeared on Simon Petrie.

Isaac Asimov’s Space of Her Own, Shawna McCarthy

Isaac Asimov’s Space of Her Own, edited by Shawna McCarthy (1984)
Review by Ian Sales

According to isfdb.org, between 1978 and 2001, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine published thirty anthologies of fiction reprinted from the pages of the magazine. The bulk of these were themed – Isaac Asimov’s Aliens, Isaac Asimov’s Mars, Isaac Asimov’s Sf-Lite (whatever that might be), Isaac Asimov’s Detectives and, er, Isaac Asimov’s Mother’s Day, among many others. It’s a little disappointing that Isaac Asimov’s Space of Her Own is the only women-only anthology they published, especially given the number of women the magazine itself published. And, it must be said, many of the choices for this anthology are somewhat, well, bizarre… Connie Willis is indeed a popular genre writer, but she is the only writer to appear twice in this collection, while Le Guin might arguably be said to be more popular (and surely they could have found a better story by Le Guin than the one they chose?).

‘The Sidon in the Mirror’, Connie Willis (1983) I’m not entirely I understand why this story was framed as science fiction. Certainly it has a science-fictional setting – the surface of a dead star… which doesn’t actually seem all that plausible – and the plot twist is enabled by a science-fictional device… but even that device isn’t entirely necessary. In all other respects, this is a Wild West story, and incorporates all the unlikeable sensibilities of such a story. A new “pianoboard” player has been hired by the brothel on Paylay, where minors “tap” the star’s surface and drill wells for hydrogen and/or helium (the story is not entirely clear on this). At the brothel is a blind girl, whose blindness was caused by a miner on another such dead star. The pianoboard player is a “Mirror”, which apparently means he inadvertently copies the mannerisms and thought-patterns of one of the people around him. I have no idea what the setting is supposed to be, it’s quite frankly too silly to be believable. And the Wild West brothel is a trope long past its sell-by date, even in 1983. A “sidon” incidentally, is some sort of ferocious creature, one of which the brothel’s madame kept as a pet… until it attacked her. A “sidon” is also a nickname for a well or “tap” on Paylay. I would not have expected Willis to have written this story.

‘The Sorceress in Spite of Herself’, Pat Cadigan (1982), is a piece of fantasy fluff. A woman who has a history losing things has just lost a pair of expensive diamond earrings given to her by her husband. She was intending to wear them for their anniversary dinner. Husband finds out, they argue, she explains her “talent” and even manages to demonstrate it with his wedding ring. Over dinner, they discuss her talent and the husband decides it’s triggered by swearing – when she says “damn” or “hell”, or anything like it, items disappear. Husband gets drunk, she is annoyed at having to drive home… Yes, it’s the obvious punch-line.

‘Night of the Fifth Sun’, Mildred Downey Broxon (1982). In a Mexican city, a woman who can trace her ancestry back to the Aztecs lies in a hospital bed in labour. There is also an old man, prepared to enact an old ritual which will rekindle a new sun – and it requires human sacrifice. Broxon evokes her time and place well, something I’ve noticed in other stories by her I’ve read.

‘The Jarabon’, Lee Killough (1981), feels very much like a science fiction story of its time, despite being set at some indeterminate time in the future – but this is no bad thing. Kele was a street urchin, but she was caught trying to rob a gangster’s car. He took her under his wing, and now years later she’s his best thief – and he needs her to steal the titular piece of jewellery from a courier while he is travelling FTL to another world. But in the universe of the story, passengers have to be drugged for “hyperlight” travel because it affects people badly. But the theft means Kele has to be awake during the trip. And so she learns that she’s hyperlight Tolerant, which is what pilots must be… and such people are rare. Kele is an engaging character, and if the mechanics of FTL feel a bit 1970s airline travel it doesn’t spoil the story.

‘The Horn of Elfland’, JO Jeppson (AKA Janet Asimov) (1983), reads like it was written a couple of decades earlier. A men’s club meets – they are all “pshrinks”, whatever that’s meant to be – and one of them tells an amusing anecdote about a patient. There is a gentle twist in the tale. Isaac Asimov used to write a lot of these, and they were never any good. Neither is this one.

‘Belling Martha’, Leigh Kennedy (1983), is one of several post-apocalypse stories in the anthology, although in one respect it’s an odd example of the type. Martha has journeyed home to Austin, Texas, after spending several years at the Central Texan Christian Reform Camp. Her father, who lived outside the city, has died, so she goes to live inside Austin’s walls with an aunt and the people who share her house. They all regard Martha with suspicion because she was a cannibal – those who live outside the cities routinely eat human flesh, and often kill people for food – in fact that’s why Martha was sent to the reform camp. The cannibalism adds a weird flavour to what would otherwise be a superior, if run-of-the-mill, post-apocalypse USA.

‘La Reine Blanche’, Tanith Lee (1983). Having just read a number of variations on this theme in Lee’s collection Women as Demons, I was not expecting much of ‘La Reine Blanche’, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover it’s a clever little fairy-tale-like story. The young queen’s ancient husband has died and she has been locked up in a tower in a cemetery, where she is to remain until the end of her days. But a raven visits her and takes her out on a dream outing to a young and handsome prince, who falls in love with her. Like Cinderella, she makes her escape before dawn, and the prince spends the rest of his life pining for his vanished love… until many decades later he meets a young woman who resembles her in every way. But he dies shortly after marrying her, and she is then locked up in a tower in a cemetery where she is to remain until the end of her days…

‘Miles to Go Before I Sleep’, Julie Stevens (1982), is another post-apocalyptic USA story. The narrator is the mayor of a city, and she is making her way to a meeting of mayors in Des Moines City. But the people in the countryside blame the cities for the collapse of the country and civilisation, and kill any city-dwellers they meet. But the cities are not the hives of violence and depravity they believe them to be. Nonetheless, in a small village where the narrator stops en route, in disguise of course, the villagers catch a city-person, and violence ensues. This is one of those stories where you wonder why it was written as sf.

‘A Letter from the Clearys’, Connie Willis (1982). A second story from Willis, though I’m not sure why she should deserve one. Having said that, neither of her contributions are the dated fluff provided by some of the others, even if ‘The Sidon in the Mirror’ doesn’t make a great deal of sense. This story at least makes sense. It’s post-apocalyptic USA – again – and the narrator is the teenage daughter of a family who survived because they were holidaying at their lodge in the mountains. Now they live in fear of being raided by other survivors. The narrator visits the local post office every now and again to pick up issues of a magazine for a friend of the family who is staying with them, and on this trip she has finally discovered the last letter sent to the family by the Clearys – which explains why the Clearys couldn’t make it to the lodge. The story keeps its premise off-stage, and handles its centre-stage family dynamics well. It is far superior to Willis’ other story in the collection, but I find post-apocalypse stories banal and this one fails to rise above that.

‘The Ascent of the North Face’, Ursula K Le Guin (1983) is framed as a climber’s diary but it is abundantly obvious that the edifice being climbed is an ordinary house – but it is described as if it were a Himalayan mountain. I’m not entirely sure what the conceit is intended to convey, but as it is the story reads like a couple of pages of well-crafted fluff.

‘$CALL LINK4(CATHY)’, Cherie Wilkerson (1983). An engineer is working on a project to create computer simulacra of humans, but the only industry interested in such a project is the pornographic industry – so he’s trying to program virtual adult stars (female only of course, this is 1983 after all). But so far the project has met with little success – after a few days, the simulacra go “insane”. So the engineer is persuaded to allow his young daughter, who is dying of cancer, to upload her own personality as a template. And it works. A child’s mind is apparently plastic enough to maintain coherency in the computer. But after his daughter’s death, the engineer realises he cannot live with what he’s done, and destroys the computerised versions of his daughter. This story was an odd mix of nerdishly technical computer-speak and a hand-wavey premise. The daughter’s situation also added a note of over-heavy sentimentality.

‘Heavenly Flowers’, Pamela Sargent (1983), is one of those rare genre stories which features an old woman as a protagonist. And yet again we’re in post-apocalyptic USA, but this time the cause is explained – a nuclear war, possibly started by a briefcase nuke set off by a terrorist, but no one really knows. Each year, the survivors gather to celebrate their continued existence, to broker sex between those born since the war who have been least affected, and to fire the remaining nuclear missiles into space. The premise doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny, but Sargent handles the voice of her protagonist well, and this is one of the few hopeful post-apocalypse stories I’ve come across.

‘Exorcycle’, Joan D Vinge (1982). Vinge is better known as a science fiction writer, but this story is fantasy. A director of a Shakespearean summer theatre company and his leading lady (also his wife) happen a man reciting from Hamlet who appears somewhat despondent and at a loose end. So they offer him a job. He proves to be an excellent actor, especially at playing Shakespeare’s ghosts. It transpires he is a ghost himself, and dates from Elizabethan times. But he feels he hasn’t caused enough suffering or performed any sufficiently evil acts in order to end whatever it is that is holding him to the earth. Much of the story is presented as flashback, with the framing narrative implying that the actor has gone into politics (perhaps even through possessing the president at a special performance put on for him by the director’s company).

‘Shadows from a Small Template’, Sharon Webb (1982). Steven Gordon has lost his daughter, but the technology exists to allow him to learn if she has really gone or if her “twistors”, which is what thoughts are made from, still remain. It is, of course, a fruitless endeavour, and Gordon’s wife, Anne, realises it better than Steve does. The premise for this is nicely wrapped around the domestic life of the Gordons, a dimension more sf should consider.

‘Packing Up’, PJ MacQuarrie (1981), reads like something from the 1950s. A middle-level manager in a plant of some sort has concerns regarding the industrial process and rings a psychologist’s telephone number. A second call and he learns something he had not expected. There is nothing in this story which would indicate it was published in the 1980s.

‘Blue Heart’, Stephanie A Smith (1982). So far, this collection seems to consist of silly fantasy stories, post-apocalypse America stories, and a few contemporary/near-future genre-light pieces. Actual heartland sf – despite the magazine’s name – seems in short supply. ‘Blue Heart’ is only the second story that fits this description. On an alien world, a woman who uses the Net to manage interstellar and interplanetary traffic in the system is approaching the end of her life. So she plans to upload herself into a robot body, the same as her companion. But he argues against it, pointing out that her new body does not possess the senses of her human body, and that she will be trading touch, taste and smell for immortality. It’s hinted that he’s a local, and that the traffic post is hidden from the locals, and he discovered it by accident – and was fatally injured in the process, hence the robot body. This is apparently only one of two short stories Smith wrote, which is a shame.

‘The Examination of Ex-Emperor Ming’, Cyn Mason (1982), is yet another piece of dated fluff. An agent of the Intragalactic Revenue Korps (why the “k”?) turns up at deposed emperor Ming’s palace with a demand for payment of back-taxes. Ming resists, is subsequently fined, and so bankrupted. But all is not lost as there is an organisation happy to employ someone with his experience and nature… Yes, it really is that corny.

‘The Crystal Sunlight, the Bright Air’, Mary Gentle (1983), is set on Orthe, the setting of Gentle’s Golden Witchbreed (1983) and Ancient Light (1987). It’s a polished piece, although the prose is not up to the level Gentle reached with Ash: A Secret History (2000). An Intendant of the Dominion visits an inner city on Orthe to determine whether or not the ideas it generates deserve Interdiction. The premise is not exactly subtle, or handled with any degree of subtlety, but the protagonist certainly is. This is one of the few stories in the anthology that’s proper sf, and stands out because of that more than perhaps it should.

‘Missing’, PA Kagan (1982), opens with the sentence, “I am writing from jail to acquaint you with important facts in this missing part crisis.” After a paragraph or two, it switches to journal entries, each explaining that something is missing… but not actually what is missing. And it’s only when you reach the last line that you realise. It’s a slight piece, but cleverly done – perhaps not hugely original, though previous examples have not hidden what it is that makes them different.

‘Fire-Caller’, Sydney J Van Scyoc (1983). I’ve been a fan of Van Scyoc’s science fiction for a couple of decades. She is very, very good at evoking alien societies, which is what she does here. The Pachni have been enslaved by the Washrar for several centuries; and when the Washrar want to rid themselves of unwanted slaves, they send them to the world of Tennador, where they are building their own society. But there’s more to it than that, as Pa-lil discovers when she’s sent to Tennador by her father and master. Because the Pachni actually have psionic powers – which the Washrar have been breeding out of them, but are still very much scared of. This is a typical Van Scyoc story, with a well-rendered alien society, a sympathetic female protagonist, and clear character growth from start to finish. Text-book sf.

There are also a pair of poems – ‘Ancient Document’ by Hope Athearn and ‘Stargrazing’ by Beverly Grant – neither of which are especially memorable.

I’m not sure what Space of Her Own was intended to achieve – that Asimov’s published sf and fantasy by women writers? Any awards shortlist would likely have demonstrated that. Perhaps, the breadth of genre fiction by women that Asimov’s published? But the stories in Space of Her Own are either fluffy fantasy, post-apocalypse USA, or heartland sf, so there’s not that much variety. There are some good stories in this anthology, but there are also a number whose presence, quite frankly, is mystifying. I am not, I admit, a long-time or regular reader of Asimov’s, but from the couple of dozen issues I have read over the decades, Space of Her Own doesn’t strike me as especially representative. Asimov’s first issue was published in 1977, so by the time of this anthology there were five or six years’ worth of material (around seventy issues by my count) to draw from, and consequently McCarthy’s selection feels somewhat disappointing. Of course, without analysing the contents of those issues myself, I can’t say whether McCarthy chose the best stories that met her criteria – ie. written by women –  but I would be surprised if they did.

The Crystal Ship, Randall, Vinge & McIntyre

The Crystal Ship, edited by Robert Silverberg (1976)
Review by Joachim Boaz

Only a handful of SF anthologies have hit print solely featuring women authors – none were published before 1972 and, surprisingly, few after 1980 (there seems to be a resurgence in the last few years). The Crystal Ship (1976) is one of these. It contains the three novellas by three important SF authors who got their start in the 70s: Marta Randall, Joan D Vinge, and Vonda N McIntyre. The latter two achieved critical success: Joan D Vinge won the Hugo for her novel The Snow Queen (1980) and Vonda N McIntyre won the Hugo for her novel Dreamsnake (1978). Marta Randall, on the other hand, despite her Nebula nomination for the intriguing Islands (1976) remains to this day lesser known.

All three of the novellas feature impressive female protagonists and narratives that subvert many of SF’s traditional clichés. All three protagonists are outcasts, striving against worlds characterized in turn by decadence, colonialism, and sadistic prison systems. Tarawassie in Vinge’s ‘The Crystal Ship’ is cast in the vein of Alvin in Clarke’s The City and the Stars (1956). She takes on the mantel of “the one who knows how the world really is”. The eponymous heroine of Randall’s ‘Megan’s World’ is shunned by her fellow humankind due to her mechanical and strangely-coloured body. She is accepted by the natives of a soon to be exploited planet and feels compelled to fight, in the final confrontation, against her own. It takes all mental and physical strength of Kylis in McIntyre’s ‘Screwtop’ – imprisoned for minor infractions including “stealing passage” on a spaceship – to not succumb the hellish environment of the world and the sinister whims of a particularly disturbed guard.

‘Screwtop’ is the highlight of The Crystal Ship. Neither Randall or Vinge can match the raw psychological power, evocative world building, and solid storytelling of McIntyre.

‘The Crystal Ship’ Joan D Vinge: In the past I have found Vinge’s works from the late 70s deeply flawed – for example, Fireship (1978) and The Outcasts of Heaven Belt (1978). She would refine her style/characterizations in The Snow Queen Cycle of novels from the 80s and 90s. In a far future environ, a vast (mostly empty) crystal spaceship orbits a distant planet. The occupants of the vessel lived a drugged and satiated existence where they end their lives by jumping into a mysterious contraption called a “wishing well” (p 14). Like Alvin in The City and the Stars, Tarawassie sees the sad state of the world after her mother, who lives on the planet’s surface and refuses the life of the crystal ship, seeks to end her life in the wishing well. Tarawassie escapes the “Loom’s catch-spell of light/music” (p 19) and strikes off for the planet’s surface.

On the surface she encounters the “real humans”, ie some new strain of humanity (mixed with the native population?) with pouches, telepathy, and tails. These rat-like creatures believe themselves superior to the inhabitants of the spaceship. With the help of a native named Moon Shadow (*wince*), Tarawassie learns the true history of their peoples, and reason for the strange crystal ship.

‘The Crystal Ship’ is an inarticulate allegory with an intriguing premise but a flawed delivery. Moon Shadow’s “‘What it’ – he grimaced, concentrating – ‘what it – mean?’” (p 29) attempts at dialogue are beyond frustrating for the reader. The unease generated by the world and the hints of past cataclysmic confrontation are the most praiseworthy elements of the story. For die-hard Joan D Vinge fans only.

‘Megan’s World’ Marta Randall: Randall’s novella is on the surface a traditional SF narrative. Engineer Padric Angelo, whose past is filled with ignominy, lands on an alien planet in search of natural resources with an inept ethnologist who knows little about dealing with aliens. The ethnologist believes that it will be easy to convince the natives to desecrate their planet, ie just speak into the universal translator and they will think that the Terrans are gods and thus get whatever they want with superior technology.

And then Randall subverts the paradigm: the feline aliens are far from simplistic naturalistic aliens who are one with nature. Rather, they worship bloodthirsty gods and are stricken with internal political and social dissension. The biggest realignment concerns Padric’s sister, whom he encounters on the planet. Megan is “thin and immensely tall; has gray hair; a second and transparent set of eyelids set above liquid crystal irises that shift colors with changes in temperature and pulse in time to her heartbeat. Her bones are formed of high-impact, stress-resistant biosteel allow, and her bluntly shaped finger- and toe-nails are of a dully gray metal” (p 95). Megan was developed as an experiment in spaceship construction (integration of human with machine) – however, the experiment was a failure. She escaped the ridicule she faced by her fellow Terrans and fled via a stolen yacht. In part because she is accepted by the natives of the planet, she feels closely for their plight and the danger her brother represents.

The story is somewhat bogged down with needless exposition. Most frustrating is the lack of nuance dealing with the key themes of the novel – alienation, colonialism, etc. The frustratingly abrupt ending does little to ram home the more intriguing elements. Recommended with reservations.

‘Screwtop’ Vonda N McIntyre: is by far the most satisfying and evocative novella in the collection. Kylis, a spaceport “rat” who spent her childhood at spaceports stowing aboard ships, is captured for stealing passage and is imprisoned on the planet Redsun. A perpetually hot planet filled with strange parasites, fern plants, and volcanoes, Redsun is powered by some form of geothermal energy (how exactly this works is not altogether clear). Kylis spends her day working with other prisoners removing vegetation and drilling into the planet’s crust. She encounters two disparate characters who become her friends: Jason, an writer, arrested and imprisoned for vagrancy; and a tetraparental, ie a designed super-intelligent individual culled from the DNA of four parents, named Gryf. However, the prison guard named Lizard is commanded to force Gryf to return to the life he escaped and uses Kylis affection for Gryf and Jason as leverage.

There are indications throughout of non-traditional relationships – for example, group living and non-monogamous relationships such as Kylis, Gryf, and Jason. McIntyre’s avoids info-dumps and only carefully reveals each character’s back-story. The narrative is well-told and ultimately, downright heart-rending.

McIntyre’s Dreamsnake is the only Hugo-winning novel published between 1960 and 1980 I have yet to read. After experiencing the refined and psychological power of ‘Screwtop’, I desperately want to get my hands on a copy. Highly recommended.

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

The Snow Queen, Joan D Vinge

The Snow Queen, Joan D Vinge (1980)
Review by Shannon Turlington

The Snow Queen is an epic story set on a distant planet, about the fall of one queen and the rise of another. The novel is based on the fairy tale by Hans Christian Anderson and tackles such weighty themes as immortality and the power of knowledge.

The strength of this novel lies in its world building. The planet of Tiamat is a fully realized world, an ocean-covered planet orbiting twin suns. Two tribes live there: the sea-going, island-dwelling Summers, characterized by a fear of technology and a superstitious worship of their sea goddess, the Lady; and the Winters, who live in the Northern regions and the shell-shaped city of Carbuncle, embrace technology and freely trade with the Offworlders.

Tiamat’s culture and history are shaped by the oddities of its planetary and solar system orbits. Every 150 years, it moves closest to one of its suns, bringing a long summer to the planet. This signals a complete power shift, as the Summers move north from the equatorial regions and the Snow Queen abdicates to the Summer Queen. In fact, the Snow Queen and her consort are sacrificed to the sea in a paganistic ritual following a multi-day festival similar to Carnivale or Mardi Gras.

During the same period, the planet orbits close to and then away from a black hole that enables interstellar travel to other planets in an empire called the Hegemony. While Tiamat is close to the black hole, the Hegemony maintains a presence there, sharing technology with the ruling Winters. When the planet starts to orbit away, the Offworlders must leave, and they destroy all technology before they go to keep Tiamat from advancing too much without their influence and perhaps declaring independence. The Offworlders’ interest in Tiamat comes down to the planet’s one valuable asset: immortal sea creatures called Mers. The Mers’ blood, called the Water of Life, can be harvested to provide ever-lasting youth.

The Snow Queen takes place at the cusp of this great Change. The 150-year-old Snow Queen, Arienrhod, has been scheming to maintain her power after the Summers take over. Her plan involves cloning herself, producing her Summer twin, Moon. But even though the two look alike, they are diametric opposites in personality. Arienrhod is self-absorbed and power-hungry, emotionless in her extreme age, a manipulator of everyone she meets. Her young twin Moon is compassionate and empathetic, someone who inspires adulation and devotion in everyone she comes across.

Moon has become a sibyl, a prophetess who can answer any question. Through this power she taps into an ancient network of knowledge and discovers the true significance of the Mers and why they must be protected. This prompts her to compete for the mask of the Summer Queen and the power to, as she puts it, change the Change.

Moon and Arienrhod are both in love with Moon’s cousin, Sparks. His character is probably the novel’s biggest flaw, because it seems implausible that these two strong women would go to such lengths for him. Sparks is narcissistic, petulant and tends to make rash decisions or sulk when things don’t go his way. His character doesn’t improve or change much over the course of the story. He commits atrocious crimes, witnessed by Moon, who still wants to be with him even when much more attractive options are available to her.

This is a long novel that probably could have been a good deal shorter, but there is enough action and interesting dynamics to keep the reader involved. In fact, I would like to know more – about the ruling planet of Kharamough, for instance, and its rigid class structure, which we visit only briefly. Clearly, the novel is setting up for a sequel, since many conflicts are left open-ended and the resolution is not quite satisfying as a result.

The Snow Queen won the Hugo Award in 1981. The sequel, The Summer Queen, was published in 1991, and a third novel in the trilogy, Tangled Up in Blue, was published in 2000. Vinge also published a novella, ‘World’s End’ (1984), set in the same universe.

This review originally appeared on Books Worth Reading.

For more information about this book, please see the entry on kwerey.com.

Fireship, Joan D Vinge

Fireship, Joan D Vinge (1978)
Review by Joachim Boaz

Like so many SF fans, my first exposure to Joan D Vinge’s work was via her wonderful Hugo-winning novel The Snow Queen (1980). Eventually I found a copy of her first published novel, The Outcasts of Heaven Belt (1978), which had an intriguing premise but a less than satisfactory delivery (poor characterizations, pacing, etc). The collection Fireship (1978) is comprised of two novellas: the Hugo- and Nebula-nominated ‘Fireship’ (1978) and one of her earlier works, ‘Mother and Child’ (1975).

The title story is the lesser of the two despite its (dare I say dubious) award nominations. It’s a light-hearted and unchallenging proto-cyperpunk novella. I would characterized the work as “popcorn SF”. Its plot is straight from the pulps with some late 1970s technological updates and told in a vigorous and readable manner.

The second novella – ‘Mother and Child’ – is more a product of 1970s anthropological science fiction. It attempts (with intermittent success) to develop a premise, a culture clash between humans groups and alien “observers,” which exudes social commentary. Although nowhere near as eloquent as Michael Bishop or Le Guin who are true proponents of literary prose and though-provoking scenarios, Vinge’s ‘Mother and Child’ is easily worth the price of the volume for any fans of her more famous work and 1970s social SF in general.

‘Fireship’: A single human body contains three distinct personas. First, there is Michael Yarrow, a generally unintelligent man with little ambition. The second is ETHANAC, a super computer whose entire circuitry is easily hidden in the structure of a portable case. When jacked into Yarrow’s body “his” voice “speaks”. When this machine/man conjunction occurs between Yarrow and ETHANAC a separate altogether different persona emerges, Ethan Ring. Yarrow was selected for this dangerous experiment because of his lack of ambition and disposable nature. However, Yarrow’s transformation – into the altogether more manly/intelligent/and ambitious Ethan Ring – allows him to escape from the confines of Earth to Mars. The settlers on Mars are comprised of a vast assortment of various cults and other renegade individuals like Ethan desperate to escape the increasing totalitarianism of Earth.

Post-WWIII, Russia and other superpowers have been mostly wiped out. Two forces gain hold sway in the changed world, the US and the Arab states due to their natural resources. The Arabs are one of the key proponents of investments in the Mars colony. Khorram Kabir is one of these “sheikh-like” investors who establishes a lavish and highly profitable casino, aptly named Xanadu. During an intensive bought of gambling where ETHANAC took over and acquired vast sums of money, Ring encounters the luscious Hanalore Takhashi. Little does Ring know that she works for a shadowy organization that seeks to blackmail him unless he hacks Kabir’s computer network!

I enjoyed the idea of the Arab states taking an active role in colonization (just think of all the massive building projects and investments in Manchester City and other teams in the EPL princes and sheikhs from the region are engaged in). This reminds me of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars) where one of the main groups of colonists are from the Middle East. The shifts between the weakly Michael Yarrow, the more manly Ethan Ring, and the super computer ETHANAC are effectively done. The proto-cyperpunk premise filled with computer hacking, portable super computers, man-machine hybrids is entertaining but forgettable.

‘“Mother and Child’: A three-part novella where each section is told from the perspective of male character whose life becomes increasingly intertwined with Etaa, a human “priestess” of Mother (ie, the personification of the planet). It is slowly revealed that the humans are not on Earth but some planet colonized long before. A mutation causing plague wiped out the majority of the colonists and destroyed many of their senses. Etaa’s people, who placed the mother as the center of the society, hold priestess with “special abilities” (ie, hearing) in high regard.

The first portion of the novella follow’s Hywel, Etaa’s mate, and his childhood and the events leading up to a disaster. Etaa’s people, the Kotaane (“Mother’s children”) are bordered by the Neaane (“Motherless ones”). The Neaane king Merton steals Etaa from her spouse and rapes her. His society is a more traditional male-centric one – with pseudo-medieval inspired social systems – where an hair is of paramount importance. Merton himself the narrator of the second portion. He does not believe in his “gods” who take for the form of humans and physically wander among the Neaane… Despite his initial treatment of Etaa, whom he wants to bear his heir, he begins to feel for her. And, in her own way, Etaa does as well (she thinks that Hywel has been killed). Vinge’s characterization of Etaa, who despite her rape/imprisonment/and Merton’s less than honourable intentions, begins to see virtue in her captor strikes me as odd. The third portion is from the perspective of one of the gods who in reality, is neither male nor female.

The most effective element of the novella is the shifting male narration on Etaa, the connecting character in all three parts. Hywel is clearly a good man yet his goals are simplistic, he seeks to recover Etaa who has been stolen from him rather than change resolve the culture clash between the Gods and the Neaane and Kotaane. King Merton is much more flawed although again, yet his beliefs (or lack thereof) about the Gods are instrumental in changing Etaa’s view of the world. The final “male” God who “rescues” has represents a people desperate to modify the make human society malleable and easy to “guide.” He too is transformed by his “friendship” with Etaa.

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

The New Women of Wonder, Pamela Sargent

The New Women of Wonder, edited by Pamela Sargent (1978)
Review by Ian Sales

This is the third of the Women of Wonder anthologies published during the 1970s, and while its title would suggest its aim is to introduce new female science fiction writers, only two – Eleanor Arnason and Pamela Zoline – did not appear in either, or both, of the two earlier volumes (see here and here). Unusually, there is no story by Ursula K Le Guin in the book, but Alice Sheldon does make an appearance under her male pen-name, James Tiptree Jr. It’s difficult not to wonder who exactly the “new” in the title refers to. The Women of Wonder series was rebooted in 1995 with two volumes: Women of Wonder: The Contemporary Years ( reviewed here and here) and Women of Wonder: The Classic Years.

Once again, Sargent opens the anthology with an introduction, this time 34 pages long. And, sadly, this only demonstrates that nothing ever changes. After a quick history of women in science fiction, she writes:

Even so, most science fiction is to this day has remained conservative in its sociological extrapolations. In pointing out this flaw, one is likely to be accused of seeking to impose an ideological test on the genre, rejecting works that do not measure up. But in fact I am asking why the the overwhelming majority of science fiction books limit female characters to traditional roles. (p xv)

After descriptions of several sf novels which break this mould – Samuel R Delany’s Triton, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover series, Kate Wilhelm’s The Clewiston Test – Sargent stresses that restrictions on female writers, and what they were allowed to write, still exists, and even notes:

One author of a successful first novel had her second novel rejected by the same publisher because the book was about an all-female world and there were no male characters in it. (p xxv)

While there are several such books now – Joanna Russ’s The Female Man and Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite immediately spring to mind – they are still very much in a minority… and yet sf novels which feature almost entirely male casts (and what few female characters do exist in them are either presented as victims or have no agency) are still relatively commonplace. Sargent identifies a nostalgia “in recent years” for “traditional stories with familiar trappings”. And that, according to the skewed view of the history of science fiction which seems to be the current-day accepted narrative, means science fiction stories for, by and about men. The fact that the three Women of Wonder anthologies were not repeated until almost twenty years later is testament to this. These anthologies were clarion calls, but more than thirty years later the message still hasn’t been heard:

Perhaps the genre as a whole, having often ignored women – as well as the old, the non-white, and the non-Western – does not quite hold together. It is within this context that we can view the role of women in sf. By adding their voices, they enrich the entire fictional system of science fiction. (p xxix)

The original The Women of Wonder anthology opened with a poem by Sonya Dorman, and so too does this one: ‘View from the Moon Station’. It’s a short poignant piece, which is pretty much described by its title – although its imagery is driven by memory. Though the passage of time has rendered its sentiments somewhat clichéd, it still manages to impress with its choice of imagery and its careful build-up to its emotional payload.

‘Screwtop’, Vonda N McIntyre. The title refers to a penal installation in the jungle on the human-settled world of Redsun. The prisoners are forced to labour drilling holes to deep underground pockets of superheated water, which is used to generate power for the various cities on the planet. Kylis is one such prisoner, and she has joined forces with Gryf, a “tetraparental”, and Jason, a new arrival. It’s Kylis who graces the cover art of The New Women of Wonder, although she does possess a disturbing likeness to Karen Carpenter. Kylis is a space rat, a person who travels from planet to planet as a stowaway, but the Redsun authorities caught her and sentenced her to Screwtop. Gryf is a political prisoner – as a tetraparental, a manufactured genius, he is obligated to work on government-chosen projects, but he refused. He only has to agree to the authorities’ demands and he will be set free. The three of them are plotting to escape Screwtop, although this would involve a potentially-fatal trek through hundreds of miles of alien jungle… There actually is not much in ‘Screwtop’ which actually demands it be science fiction. The penal facility could just as easily be on Earth, and the three inmates guilty of crimes against an existing earthly regime. Also, the entire installation itself doesn’t sound right. The inmates must drill a new hole when the last one has emptied itself of steam… Except that’s not how geothermal power works. Usually, water is pumped down the hole to be heated deep underground, and the steam which results is used to generate power. It is then cooled, and pumped back down the hole. Why would they actually siphon off all the superheated water? It makes little or no sense. It seems a shame that a story with such well-drawn characters and a nice sense of place should fail in such a fundamental fashion. ‘Screwtop’ was originally published in The Crystal Ship, a 1976 collection of three novellas also featuring Joan D Vinge and Marta Randall – but edited by Robert Silverberg.

‘The Warlord of Saturn’s Moons’, Eleanor Arnason. I expect that within weeks of the first science fiction story being written, someone wrote a story about writing a science fiction story. Certainly it’s an established tradition within the genre, if not within literature as a whole. The protagonist of ‘The Warlord of Saturn’s Moon’s is writing a story titled ‘The Warlord of Saturn’s Moons’, a pulp sf tale with spaceships, chases across “Titan’s methane snows”, “strange psychic arts from Hindu mystics”, assassins and the fate of the moon(s) in the balance. Unusually for the form, however, her story has a heroine. And the villain of the piece is perhaps not so villainous after all. As she considers her story, the rescue of her partner, 409, by the heroine, so the writer reflects on her own world. It’s a nicely-judged story, gently mocking the conventions of pulp sf while it carefully subverts them. Presenting it as a meta-fictional piece also makes it more thoughtful than perhaps it would have been had it been presented straight – at the very least, doing it this way doesn’t allow for misinterpretation of its subverted tropes. The story first appeared, unsurprisingly, in New Worlds and was deservedly shortlisted for a Nebula Award.

‘The Triumphant Head’, Josephine Saxton. I’m not entirely sure what to make of what little of Saxton’s fiction that I’ve read, and ‘The Triumphant Head’ is a case in point. It describes the beginning of a day for a married woman, as she wakes up, washes, puts on her make-up, and gets dressed. Yet it is presented as if the woman were an alien in disguise – or certainly not human. It feels like too obvious a conceit to bother fictionalising, but Saxton maintains a slight undercurrent of farce to the story, which not only works in its favour but also makes it an enjoyable read.

‘The Heat Death of the Universe’, Pamela Zoline. If there is one story which is often held up as emblematic of New Wave science fiction in Britain, it is this one by US author Zoline. (The introduction to the story mentions a novel, Dream-Work, on which Zoline is working; it was apparently never published. A shame, it would be interesting to read it.) Structured as 54 sections of text, some of which are titled, the story presents episodes – vignettes, almost – in the life of middle-class American housewife Sarah Boyle, juxtaposed with science-fictional commentary and short essays on a variety of topics, scientific and otherwise:

30. Sarah Boyle is a vivacious and witty young wife and mother, educated at a fine Eastern college, proud of her growing family which keeps her happy and busy around the house, involved in many hobbies and community activities, and occasionally given to obsessions concerning Time/Entropy/Chaos and Death.

31. Sarah Boyle is never quite sure how many children she has. (p 110)

A quick check on isfdb.org reveals that ‘The Heat Death of the Universe’ has been anthologised 16 times, the most recent in 2010. Zoline wrote a further four short pieces of fiction, the last of which appeared in 1988 in her only collection, Busy About the Tree of Life. I can only wonder what more she might have written had the genre been more welcoming to women who chose to write about women’s lives in a science-fictional mode.

‘Songs of War’, Kit Reed. In Los Angeles, the women decide they have had enough and form their own army, which occupies a farm up in the hills overlooking the city. Over a period of several weeks, women leave their husbands and families and join the army, which has itself already split into several factions. On first pass, this story reads like a criticism of the women’s movement – for all their ambitions, the women who gather at the farm soon begin to bicker and the various factions begin to work covertly and overtly against each other. The radical militants attack a few soft targets – a shopping mall, for example – while the housewives are given housewifely duties (kitchen, creche, etc). The teenagers are more interested in boys than solidarity, and the woman who becomes the army’s unofficial spokesperson would sooner promote her media career than the army’s manifesto. Eventually, the army disperses in ones and twos, although not after some violence, and the wives and daughters return to their homes, changed by what they’ve experienced – as, in some cases, are their husbands and fathers. As a commentary on the frationalisation of movements, especially ones without clear goals and policies, ‘Songs of War’ is a witty commentary, as it also on the quotidian lives of the women in the story. But there’s nothing in it that’s, well, science fiction. It appears to be set in the present day of its writing (ie, 1974), and there’s not a single sf trope to be seen anywhere. Which begs the question, does it get a pass as science fiction because sf is so bad at incorporating the lives of women into its stories?

‘The Women Men Don’t See’, James Tiptree Jr. This is one of Tiptree best-known stories, though personally I think some of her other works are stronger. The narrator is heading to Mexico on a fishing trip, but his charter plane from Cozumel proves to be unavailable. He persuades the pilot to let him hitch a ride on another plane heading south – and the other passengers prove to be a totally innocuous mother and daughter. The plane crashes en route, leaving narrator, pilot, mother and daughter stranded. Running short on potable water, the narrator and the mother leave the other two – the pilot is injured – and head for an inlet about a day’s walk away. Except it’s not really a walk, as they have to struggle through a mangrove swamp. The two of them witness something very strange – and the narrator belatedly realises it is a landing by extraterrestrials… and the mother has taken something from them. She persuades the aliens to return the two of them to the crashed plane, which they do. She then persuades the aliens to take her and her daughter with them on their interstellar travels. While the story is predicated on the (male) narrator’s realisation that such women have never really impinged on his worldview before, and that such women have thoughts, desires, ambitions no different to his own, like many of Tiptree’s stories it makes its point with a thumb heavily pressed on the scales. The central premise – aliens visiting Earth somewhere in the Mexican jungle – is presented without any real commentary, or any interrogation of the trope. Which perhaps weakens the point the story is trying to make. ‘The Women Men Don’t See’ feels like a story which was written as science fiction only because its author wrote science fiction. I don’t really see that as a strength.

‘Debut’, Carol Emshwiller. I would categorise ‘Debut’ as fantasy rather than science fiction, which does make its presence in this anthology somewhat puzzling. A blind princess is taken to the queen after years of being pampered, but the princess is paranoid and tries to stab the queen… who removes the mask blinding the princess so she can now see. But she cannot interpret what she sees and so fails in her assassination attempt. She escapes the palace and takes refuge in a wood… And, to be honest, I’m not entirely sure what’s going on in this story. It feels like I’m missing the metaphor. There’s no denying that Emshwiller writes excellent prose, but the obliqueness of her imagination often leaves me foundering.

‘When It Changed’, Joanna Russ. This story describes the time men from Earth arrived on the world of Whileaway thirty generations after the Whileaway men all died in a plague. The Earthmen can’t process an all-female colony, especially one that functions perfectly well without men, and are by turns befuddled or deeply patronising. The narrator shows remarkable restraint. But the women of Whileaway have decided to accept the presence of the men, and reluctantly accept that their way of life may well be over forever. Though the story only suggests the path the future may take for the colony, it’s a far from happy ending – and all the stronger for what it leaves unsaid. This is easily one of Russ’s best short stories.

‘Dead in Irons’, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. This is heartland sf, both in terms of setting, tropes and its politics. Aboard an interstellar starship, stewards look after the passengers, including the frozen steerage ones. The stewards are run like a satrapy by the most brutish and violent steward, and anyone he dislikes or won’t do what he is told is given steerage duty. Shiller has only just joined the ship, and refuses to be Wranswell’s mate, and so is assigned steerage. But she quite likes it there. Wranswell’s previous lover wants to persuade Shiller not to accept Wranswell’s offer and so sabotage’s Shiller’s cold gear, which makes the duty even more onerous and dangerous. Eventually Shiller is waylaid and frozen with the steerage passengers. When she wakes, she discovers the ship is lost and the stewards have eaten all of the steerage passengers. This is not a pleasant read, and it’s, er, hard to swallow a starship crew that is so violent and savage.

‘Building Block’, Sonya Dorman. Norja is a space architect, but has been forced to visit a recall doctor to help retrieve Norja’s forgotten design, the Star Cup, a “radical and innovative” design for a space home. Norja’s business is failing because she is blocked, and even her frequent drinking binges have failed to unlock her memory. But Dr Bassey withholds the tape containing the results of the recall session and demands money for it. So Norja visits a family friend, Dr Moons, and asks for his help in recalling the memory. But once he has a tape of the design, he insists on being paid to hand over the tape. Since she can afford neither person’s demands, Norja decides the Star Cup is lost forever and so throws herself into the design for something new – a multi-occupant space condominium. It proves very successful, and as she leaves it, a contract for a second already signed, she sees a competitor building a Star Cup, and knows that she has just killed the market for single-occupant space homes… I’m not sure which is sillier in this story – that two people would ransom the information they obtained from a memory retrieval operation (and one of them is a medical professional); the whole “space home” thing; or the revelation that one form of space habitat would comprehensively kill the market for other forms. Norja may be a personable narrator, but as science fiction ‘Building block’ is sadly weak.

‘Eyes of Amber’, Joan D Vinge. T’uupieh is a cast-down noble and assassin who has been befriended by a demon, which possesses the eyes of the title. Except it’s not a demon, it’s a space probe from Earth, and T’uupieh is a native of Titan, the moon of Saturn. Although T’uupie’s narrativeh reads like a fantasy – but for the odd details which reveal her to be an alien, such as the mention of wings – Titan’s environment is rendered quite accurately for the story’s time of writing. It’s an impressive piece of worldbuilding. If the male human protagonist, Shannon, who is the sole human capable of communicating with T’uupieh, is a bit wet, that’s a minor flaw – T’uupieh is much more interesting a character. I’m not entirely convinced by the story itself, however. Shannon tries to impose his own morality on T’uupieh, which she roundly rejects. But in the end, she learns a lesson which aligns her moral compass a little more closely with his. But such sentiments were more widely acceptable in the 1970s than they are now – indeed, ‘Eyes of Amber’ won the Hugo Award for best novelette in 1978.

When the conversation turns to influential science fiction anthologies of the past, the ones most usually mentioned are Asimov’s Before the Golden Age series, or some of the New Wave anthologies such as Dangerous Visions or England Swings. I’m surprised the Women of Wonder books are not mentioned in the same breath. It’s hard to say which is the strongest of the three – it’s probably best to get all of them – because they are all very strong collections of short science fiction, and there’s not a dud story in them (though some stories are more successful, or have aged better, than others). It’s only a shame they have not proven as influential as they should have. Perhaps if cyberpunk had never happened, or had been a little more discerning in its choice of inspirations, they might have been. As it is, it took a further twenty years before the series was rebooted. And yet Sargent’s five Women of Wonder anthologies remain outliers in the genre. I have, to date, identified only a further six women-only science fiction anthologies, published between 1976 and 2006 (see here).

That’s not really a record to be proud of.

More Women of Wonder, Pamela Sargent

More Women of Wonder, edited by Pamela Sargent (1976)
Review by Ian Sales

Why do such a collection at all? Should it not be evident that women can and have written fine science fiction? (p xlvii)

As in the preceding volume, Sargent opens More Women of Wonder with a long and well-argued introduction. The purpose of this book, she tells us, is to showcase longer fiction – novelettes – written by women, as well as include works she couldn’t fit into Women of Wonder. She also gives a potted history of women in the genre, beginning with Francis Stevens and working her way forward through Brackett and Moore and Norton to the careers of “Vonda N. McIntyre, Suzy McKee Charnas, Joan D. Vinge, Marta Randall, Eleanor Arnason, Lisa Tuttle, Brenda Pierce, and Joan Bernott” (p xxiii), one of which appears in More Women of Wonder and only five of which are still writing in the twenty-first century (although Randall had two stories in F&SF in 2007, and McIntyre two in 2005 and a short-short in 2008). While Sargent claims that women were usually readily accepted as writers, the lives of women as a topic for genre stories was far less common, if not actively discouraged:

When one considers the impact that technology has had on human life throughout human history, it is surprising that more writers have not considered the effects such technical tools might have on women’s lives. (p xxxviii)

Sargent then goes on to consider four contemporary sf novels – Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, Joanna Russ’s The Female Man and Thomas M Disch’s 334, before veering off to discuss childbirth, the lack of women characters in hard sf – or rather, the lack of women as characters with agency in hard sf – and then commenting on the infrequent mentions of homosexuality in science fictions. It’s not entirely clear what point Sargent is trying to make. That in its early days science fiction did not actively discourage contributions from women? But Norton admits to being told to use a non-gender-specific pseudonym, and both Brackett’s and Moore’s gender is not obvious from their names. That there is still a problem – in 1976, that is – with the role of women in science fiction stories? This is certainly true, and sadly remains true even today. Six of the stories in More Women of Wonder show that it is not wholly true across the genre – which does make you wonder why Sargent chose Brackett’s ‘The Lake of Gone Forever’ – which features two female characters, both of whom are defined by their relationships to male characters. Despite an argument which could have been tighter and more focused, Sargent’s introduction makes a number of valid points and is an interesting read. Indeed, given that so many anthologies’ introductions are just chaff and waffle, Sargent’s are excellent examples of how it should be done.

In the introduction, Sargent quotes CL Moore on the ease with which she sold her first story, ‘Shambleau’: “My own perfectly clear memory tells me that I sent it first to WT because that was the only magazine of the type I knew well, and that an answering acceptance and check… arrived almost by return mail” ( p xxviii), in part to counter claims that women writers in those days found it hard to get published. There is no mention of whether Moore’s covering letter mentioned her gender, or if the editor believed the writer to be male. However, Moore’s ‘Jirel Meets Magic’ (1935) is clearly the product of a woman writer – the title character is a warrior woman, and I know of no male genre writer using female protagonists writing at that time (all of Robert E Howard’s protagonists’, for example, were male). Despite Jirel’s gender, Moore’s first story featuring her was a success and readers demanded more. ‘Jirel Meets Magic’ is the third such, and it’s notable more for the roles men play in it than for its plot or writing. Jirel has sworn revenge on the wizard Guischard after he ambushed and killed some of her men. She storms his castle with some of her soldiers, but the wizard has vanished… through a magic window in a room in a high tower. Jirel follows him, and finds herself in a mysterious land. She immediately stumbles across a sorceress in the act of killing a dryad, and though she doesn’t prevent the murder, the sorceress flees before taking an important talisman – which the dryad gives to Jirel because. Jirel tracks down the sorceress to her lair, where she discovers that her name is Jarisme, and she is extremely powerful, very much more powerful than Guischard who, in a neat role reversal, fawns over her and wibbles fearfully at Jirel’s presence. There then follows a series of dreamlike episodes in which Joiry tracks down Jarisme in a variety of settings and tries to killer her. Because there is a prophecy that Jarisme will die at the hands of someone she let live three times (clue: the meeting over the dying dryad was the first). There’s a sort of fevered colourfulness to ‘Jirel Meets Magic’ – Jarisme, for example, is repeatedly associated with the colour purple – and the prose reads like the sort of cod-olde-time-speeche popular in fantasies of the time: “For a while there was tumult unspeakable there under the archway” (p 3). But there’s also a pulpish relentlessness to Moore’s vision and it’s easy to see why Jirel proved so popular a protagonist. The plot may be straightforward to the point of banality, and the prose style somewhat over-egged for modern tastes, but the story shines in its clever and natural-seeming reversal of gender roles. Jirel does not feel exceptional; nor indeed, does Jarisme.  And that, I think, is this novelette’s greatest strength.

‘The Lake of Gone Forever’ (1949) by Leigh Brackett is, conversely, a very masculine story – as indeed is much of Brackett’s genre output. Rand Conway has persuaded the wealthy Rohan to mount an expedition to the mysterious planet of Iskar. Conway has history with Iskar – his father journeyed to the world, the first and only human to do so, years before and his experiences there made him a broken man, especially something that happened at the eponymous lake. Rohan’s ship finds and lands on Iskar, and Conway leads the way to the nearby village described to him by his late father. But Conway is after the treasure hidden in the Lake of Gone Forever. The Iskarians are not happy to see Conway and his party and initially threaten them, but Conway persuades them to let them stay. Relations quickly sour, Conway sneaks away in the night – with the help of a rebellious young Iskarian woman – and discovers the secret of the Lake of Gone Forever, and a not-especially-hard-to-figure-out truth about himself. ‘The Lake of Gone Forever’ is typical Brackett from start to finish. While the Iskarians do not possess the sense of history with which Brackett managed to imbue her tales of old Mars, and the existence of an unknown – so much so that only one man ever found it – planet in the Asteroid Belt is wildly implausible… Conway is certainly a characteristically two-fisted Brackett hero.

There’s quite a leap in time from the Brackett to Joanna Russ’s ‘The Second Inquisition’ (1970), and much changed in the genre during those intervening twenty years – and not just the role of women in stories, or number of women writing science fiction. For one thing, the Moore stretches the definition of sf well past breaking point, and Brackett’s planetary romances cannot be mapped onto the real Solar System, and by 1970 most science fiction was expected to contain more rigour and more scientific verisimilitude… and certainly not show its pulp roots quite so plainly. So I suppose it must be perversity which led Sargent to choose a time-travel story by Russ which is set in 1925. The narrator is a teenage girl whose parents have taken in a strange lodger, a forthright woman who is allegedly from the circus. She’s not, of course; and it’s hardly a spoiler to reveal she’s from the future. It’s not clear whether she’s a criminal or a rebel, but she is eventually tracked down by a man from her time who tries, and fails, to take her into custody. All witnessed by the narrator. It’s a curiously laid-back story for Russ, and driven not so much by anger as it is by futility. The narrator has seen what the lodger – she is never actually named – can do, has witnessed her independence, her power and intelligence, and rues her own lack of the same. There is a nice conceit throughout the story in which the visitor reads a lurid romance, and encourages the narrator to read it (she, of course, falls in love with the heroine and her lifestyle in the book) – despite the book being banned by her parents, and her mother actually counting the book among her favourites. Whether that’s intended meta-fictionally is open to question, but given Russ’s meta-fictional games in other stories – such as those in The Adventures of Alyx – then it’s likely deliberate. ‘The Second Inquisition’ manages to feel very 1970s without actually containing any details which refer to that decade – in fact, the time-travellers and their equipment manage not to feel at all dated – and which rather than being a weakness only makes it more appealing.

‘The Power of Time’ (1971) by Josephine Saxton also has a very 1970s feel to it, though half of the story is set at its time of writing. The other half is set in the distant future, when some people on Earth possess great power – so much so, in fact, that one of them, the narrator, has decided to transplant Manhattan from the US to Nottinghamshire, just for shits and giggles. Meanwhile, an unnamed housewife in the present day (as was) has won a competition for an all-expenses trip to New York. A succession of male escorts show her about the city, wine and dine her, and engage in sparkling conversation with her. Meanwhile, in the future, Manhattan is shifted in its entirety – including inhabitants – across the Atlantic and placed in the middle of an artificial lake. There’s a lightheartedness to ‘The Power of Time’ which belies the seriousness of its point – the future narrative feels a little flippant, as indicated by the novelette’s opening sentence:

“It shouldn’t present much difficulty if you approach it in a positive way,” I said to the Chief of the Mohawks, Flying Spider. (p 149)

And while such lightness of tone works well for the sections set in the present day (of the story), the flippancy undermines the difficulty of the narrator’s “project” and the seriousness of its consequences. ‘The Power of Time’ reads as though it were written as a comedy rather than a commentary, but it succeeds better at the latter than the former.

It’s near impossible not to think of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale when reading Kate Wilhelm’s ‘The Funeral’, (1972), even though Wilhelm’s novelette predates Atwood’s novel by thirteen years. Carla is a pupil at an all-girls school in a US very different to the one we know. It’s not entirely clear what happened to create the US of the story – Wilhelm reveals some details in italicised flashbacks, but she leaves much unexplained. Men and women now appear to be separated into different categories by profession. These are “citizens”, who are enfranchised. One such category for women is “Lady”, which is little more than a courtesan. Carla has been made an apprentice Teacher, and the funeral of the title is for Madam Westfall, who invented the educational system which has led to the society depicted in the novelette. Madam Westfall will be buried in state, and Carla is in attendance on the body. But it seems Madam Westfall had a secret, and Carla’s Teacher, Madam Trudeau, who she hates and fears, thinks those girls who waited on Madam Westfall during her last few months – and Carla is one of those girls – know the dead woman’s secret. ‘The Funeral’ is one of those sf stories which impresses more through its world-building than its plot. It’s a stronger piece than others I’ve read by Wilhelm, though some of the vagueness about its setting does work against it.

The ‘Tin Soldier’ (1974) by Joan D Vinge is the first story in More Women of Wonder which might qualify as heartland sf – the Moore is fantasy, the Brackett pulp sf, the Russ is set in the past, part of the Saxton is set in the present day, and the Wilhelm is set in a post-apocalypse USA. ‘Tin Soldier’ has starships and alien worlds and an interstellar human civilisation. It’s also very much about people. Maris, the “tin soldier” of the title, is a retired soldier and a cyborg. He runs a bar also called the Tin Soldier. Because Maris does not age, his bar is popular with crews of visiting starships who travel between worlds AAFAL – Almost As Fast As Light. A trip to another world and back takes them three years, but twenty-five years passes on Oro. Oh, and all starship crew are female, as neither men nor cyborgs (of either gender) can handle AAFAL, as revealed in one of the most egregious examples of info-dumping I’ve come across in sf:

She frowned in concentration. “‘After it was determined that men were physically unsuited to spacing, and women came to a new position of dominance as they momopolized this critical area, the Terran cultural foundation underwent severe strain. As a result, many new and not always satisfactory cultural systems are evolving in the galaxy…'” (p 218)

Because of the time-lag, women cannot form relationships with men on worlds and have a rule of only having sex with a man once – they call them “Tails”. Because Maris is a cyborg, some starship crew occasionally think it is funny to set up new crew with him. As soon as they show interest, he admits to his cyborg nature. Cue laughter. When her shipmates do this to Brandy, she remains interested and Maris privately admits that he’s not wholly a cyborg. Afterwards, the two become friends, and manage to maintain their friendship for almost a century – Brandy visits Oro every twenty-five years, Maris barely ages… though everything else changes. Eventually, their relationship too changes. There is some very nice descriptive prose in ‘Tin Soldier’ and the central relationship is handled well. There’s also a slight Delany-esque atmosphere to the story, though less so in the language used.

‘The Day Before the Revolution’ (1974), Ursula K Le Guin, is actually a short story rather than a novelette, but since in the previous volume, Women of Wonder, Le Guin appeared with a novelette, one of only two in the anthology, that seems fair enough. Back in April of this year at the Eastercon, EightSquaredCon, in Bradford, I was on a panel about older women in science fiction and fantasy, with Rochita Roen-Luiz, Caroline Mullan, Fred Warrington and David Tallerman. I mentioned the story ‘Mab Gallen Recalled’ by Cherry Wilder, which appears in Millennial Women (see review here), but had I known of it I could also have mentioned Le Guin’s ‘The Day Before the Revolution’. Laia Asieo Odo is a famous revolutionary. In her younger years, she wrote a number of seminal revolutionary texts while in prison. Now, she is in her seventies; now, she remembers he husband, who died decades before; now, she remembers the heady days when she was a political agitator. Though there was no revolution, during the story one happens in another nation, and it’s implied that one is about to begin in the city in which Odo lives – and that this revolution eventually leads to the anarchist society on Anarres in Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed. The story is a reflection by Odo on her life, and her thoughts on the position she now holds in the minds of her followers and the public in respect to what she achieved in the past. It paints her as occupying an elder stateswoman sort of role, one she doesn’t really feel she deserves – and she spends much of the story remembering her husband, and how she first met him. It’s a clever juxtaposition of beginnings and endings, but I suspect that putting it last in More Women of  Wonder has done it few favours. Very little actually happens in ‘The Day Before the Revolution’ and it makes for a slow end to the anthology.

In my review of Women of Wonder (see here), I suggested a similar project should be put together now. Of course, it already has been – Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century, edited by Justine Larbalestier, published in 2006 by Wesleyan University Press, and containing stories by Clare Winger Harris, Leslie F Stone, Alice Eleanor Jones, Kate Wilhelm, Pamela Zoline, James Tiptree Jr, Lisa Tuttle, Pat Murphy, Octavia E Butler, Gwyneth Jones and Karen Joy Fowler. But that is just one anthology, and published by a university press. Common perception has it that anthologies don’t sell, and yet more than ever seem to be published each year. Admittedly, of late many have used Kickstarter to finance themselves, but even the big publishers put out half a dozen or more themed anthologies each year. Happily, in late 2014 there will be The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women, edited by Alex Dally McFarlane. Until then, Pamela Sargent’s five Women of Wonder anthologies – three from the 1970s and two from the 1990s – are worth tracking down. They’re excellent anthologies in their own right, and Sargent’s introductions are worth reading.

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 involving 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 they represent, and why they should 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 event LeGuin refers to in the first sentence of the quote above). There’s perhaps a 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…