We Who Are About To…, Joanna Russ

We Who Are About To…, Joanna Russ (1975)
Review by Bart

After finishing a book, I usually read up on other reviews and stuff before starting my own. There’s no use in repeating what others already have written. When I came across a review by L. Timmel Duchamp – an SF author herself – published in the February 2006 issue of the New York Review of Science Fiction, it quickly dawned on me it was no use of even starting the review I had in mind, as her text said about everything I wanted to say – references to Robinson Crusoe included – but better. It also opened up my understanding of the novel. Not that I had totally missed one of the political messages of the book, but I hadn’t perceived its full importance:

As I read it, the soliloquy not only allows the narrator to put herself – once a “Neochristian” – on trial for murder, but also explores enough of her history to make it possible for the reader to understand her series of responses to the situation following the crash. Through the soliloquy we discover that the narrator’s despair is not so much existential as political in the most fundamental sense of the word. At the time of the crash, the narrator was in full flight from a life of political activism and idealism that had smashed on the rocks of discursive politics. As part of a burgeoning movement of dissent, she learned the painful lesson of who may speak in a polis controlled by vast political and financial machinery (which these days we generally name “global capitalism”).

The main gist of what I want to say is that We Who Are About To… is a lot more than a feminist novel. Framing the novel only as such – an easy mistake as Russ is the author of the better known The Female Man, and maybe even more importantly as identity politics is important in today’s discourse on culture – does the novel a tremendous disservice. Not that its feminist stance is not important, on the contrary, and well-done at that. But I’ll refrain from elaborating further, and urge you to read the entirety of Duchamp’s take – if you’ve read the book already that is, as the first experience of this book suffers badly if you’ve had too many spoilers.

What’s left for me to say? I thought maybe of writing a text on how the unnamed protagonist of this book is a kind of opposite to the childbearing character in PD James’s Children Of Men, but doing so would also focus on the feminist side of the novel, and that wouldn’t be in sync with what I wrote above.

For that same reason I’ll refrain from elaborate comparisons to The Handmaid’s Tale, a book that’s about forced pregnancies as well. Atwood’s book is 10 years younger, but it’s a lot less radical in conception. More importantly: as a social analysis, it is also a lot less believable.

Then Lord Of The Flies popped into my head, and sure, there are parallels aplenty, if you just look at what Wikipedia has to say about Golding’s themes:

At an allegorical level, the central theme is the conflicting human impulses toward civilization and social organization—living by rules, peacefully and in harmony—and toward the will to power. Themes include the tension between groupthink and individuality, between rational and emotional reactions, and between morality and immorality.

What’s maybe left underdeveloped in Duchamp’s review, is the existential, philosophical aspect of We Who Are About To… Not that I have a lot to say about that either, just that at certain times the main character seems to live out her life simply being – and explicitly referring to Eastern modes of thinking: acceptance, the works, including Tao – yes, Tao, again. I think it’s one of the important themes in the book, and I could quote a few bits here and there, but ultimately it would be like reading a rehash of stuff you’ve already read on all those millennial lifestyle blogs – I know they didn’t exist in the 1970s, but hey, what kind of reader of speculative literature would you be if you’d object to a bad time-travel paradox?

There’s one final thing I want to highlight, and that’s Russ’s visionary power. Certain aspects of male chauvinist psychology are brilliantly evoked in the following passage, and without a lot of words Russ nails a part of the reason why movements opposing the importance of identity politics have gained so much traction recently.

Alan looks happy. I mean it: not triumphant, not overbearing, simply happy. He glows. The twenty-first century can’t have been kind to this enormous fellow, and now he’s discovering other interesting things to do: chopping down trees, lifting rock with his bare hands, fighting, knocking down women. Too bad he’s so young…

It might read like caricature, but I’m quite sure it isn’t. The increased empathy of the last couple of decades indeed hasn’t been kind to the mindset of those people that reserve their moral concern for a circle that’s less expanded than the circles of the progressive discourse that was dominant before Trump got elected.

I guess I’m only left with a quick assessment. The prose is snappy and confident. Russ shows keen psychological insight more than a few times. As far as plot and structure goes her choices are awesome: this book is not what you think it will be when you start reading it with only the feminist-planet-crash blurb in mind. Russ made some radical decisions, and it’s best those aren’t spoiled.

In short, We Are About To… is a brave book, not an easy, generic read. It’s definitely recommended for fans of vintage scifi that do not mind their stuff a bit different.

This review originally appeared on Weighing a Pig Doesn’t Fatten It.

The Hidden Side of the Moon, Joanna Russ

The Hidden Side of the Moon, Joanna Russ (1987)
Review by Ian Sales

There can be little doubt by now that Joanna Russ was one of the most important figures in American twentieth-century science fiction, although for many years, particularly afterward, her contribution to the genre was downplayed or ignored. Much, in fact, as she described in her important work, How to Suppress Women’s Writing. Of course, she was not the only female sf writer to be “forgotten”. From the twenty-first century it seems like there was a concerted effort from the late 1970s through the 1980s to write female authors out of science fiction history. Only a few managed to hang on in there – Ursula K Le Guin, of course, who is often the only woman writer on so-called lists of “classic sf”. And this despite a huge number of female mid-list writers publishing throughout the 1980s, some of whom went on to bestseller status, like Lois McMaster Bujold.

Joanna Russ won four major genre awards, and was nominated 41 times, during her career; and yet by the turn of the century she seemed to be known only as the author of a little-read classic, The Female Man. In part, I suspect this was due to the fact she was a vocal feminist and feminist writer, and conservative sf fans, echoing a move in wider US culture, tried to demonise feminism and feminist sf. Fortunately, science fiction is a progressive genre, and many of its fans fought against this reactionary rewriting of sf history.

Having said all that, I still think Russ is under-appreciated. While her novels now often appear on “classic sf” lists, much of her short fiction output has been overlooked. And she wrote a lot of short fiction – fifty-six stories between 1955 and 1996. The Hidden Side of the Moon, a collection from late in her career, contains twenty-six stories published between 1959 and 1984. Some are less than a page long. Not all were originally published in genre venues.

Twenty-six stories is too many to cover individually.  Overall, they give an impression of fierce intelligence I don’t recall getting quite so strongly from other Russ collections (although certainly from individual stories). This is especially odd given I don’t believe the collection was curated, or its contents chosen for particular reasons. It may simply be a consequence of the fact that not all of the stories are science fiction or fantasy.

The opener, ‘The Little Dirty Girl’, is a chilling ghost story, told in epistolary style. In ‘Sword Blades and Poppy Seed’, a female writer rails against society, before being told she should, in fact she will, use the nom de plume George Sand. ‘This Afternoon’ describes a play in a park, in which one of the actors plays a satyr, only he may not be an actor…

‘”I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket … But By God, Eliot, It Was a Photograph from Life!”‘ is a Cthulhu story. In fact, a number of the stories in The Hidden Side of the Moon play with, or reference, other literary works, something Russ did throughout her career. Given that ‘Window Dressing’ was originally published in 1970, in New Worlds of Fantasy 2, I suspect it’s not referencing the film Mannequin, although it shares the same story.  ‘The Clichés from Outer Space’ is about a friend of the writer who is an anthologist of science fiction stories and, well, the title says it all. After reading the slushpile for the anthology, the narrator: “… that pile of rejected mss must have been the vehicle for a curse … How do I know? I began to write trash.” Some of which is then given.

‘Nor Custom Stale’, published in 1959, is the oldest story in the collection. It’s a variation on ‘The Machine Stops’ by EM Forster, although here it’s the reverse which is true, and which leads to a strange, inexplicable result. ‘The Experimenter’ is a sort of fantasy, but ‘Reasonable People’ is definitely science fiction. Russ’s stories – and these two are good examples – often seem to end on single lines which question everything has gone before. The final three lines of ‘Reasonable People’, for instance, go:

Isn’t it a lovely world?
And so it is. It is.
For reasonable people

 

Both ‘Visiting’ and ‘Visiting Day’, titled here ‘I. Visiting’ and ‘II. Visiting Day’, although originally published in 1967 and 1970, and ‘Old Thoughts, Old Presences’, which contains two stories, ”The Autobiography of My Mother’ and ‘Daddy’s Girl’ are more literary experiments than genre fiction. And yet, genre reading protocols still work on them – if anything, Russ’s genre fiction had a tendency to confound genre protocols more than her non-genre work did. Or rather, ‘Old Thoughts, Old Presences’ can be read as genre; but something like ‘The Mystery of the Young Gentleman’ (collected in Extra(Ordinary) People) is clearly genre but resists an obvious read.

The more of Russ’s fiction I read, the further I want to explore her oeuvre. From what I have seen to date, it is variable but, to borrow from Longfellow, “when she was good, she was very, very good”. But more than that, there was a fierce intelligence driving her fiction – and her non-fiction too, of course – and a fierce commitment to feminism evident in pretty much every word she wrote. As I have said before, the giants of twentieth century fiction we have been lumbered with are Heinlein, Clarke and Asimov; when the true giants were, and are, Russ, Delany and Le Guin.

Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Naomi Mitchison

Memoirs of a a Spacewoman, Naomi Mitchison (1962)
Review by Ian Sales

The narrator, Mary, is a communications specialist on missions to visit planets inhabited by alien races. She uses her knowledge and skills – and, it is implied, some telepathic ability – to communuicate with the natives of planets previously unvisited. Memoirs of a Spacewoman recounts some of the missions the narrator embarked upon. And their consequences. It is a book clearly not written by an author steeped in science fiction, which lends the whole more of a fabulism air than a science-fictional one; but in contrast, it also covers areas not generally explored by actual genre writers.

The book is structured, more or less, as the reminscences of the narrator, often referencing later events, or commenting on the incidents being described. It does not really feel like a written memoir, as you’d expect from the title, as it’s far too chatty. And yet, although it has a sense of verbal narration to it, the prose is too clear and controlled to convince as speech. If anything, it makes the book a… friendly read, making it likeable even if other elements of the narrative might be hard to like.

There’s something very haphazard about the expeditions described by Mary, although the way her story-telling drifts from breathless to calm and considered from one page to the next probably makes the missions seem less organised than they actually were. (Although some of the events described were clearly the result of bad planning and/or bad leadership.) The aliens she meets are certainly inventive, and most definitely alien – there are no corrugated foreheads in Memoirs of a Spacewoman. Martians, however, are described as “in some ways so like ourselves”, but they communicate tactilely, even using their sex organs… a fact which makes human-Martian relations somewhat strained on expeditions… Among the aliens Mary meets are a race who are “distressingly like centipedes” and who live in transparent houses; a weird protplasmic blob which she has grafted onto her body; and, the mission which takes up the most of the book, a planet that is home to a race of caterpillar-like and butterfly-like aliens.

It’s these last aliens which Mitchison uses to illustrate the point at the heart of Memoirs of a Spacewoman. On first arriving on the planet, the expedition members find the caterpillars and determine they are sentient because of the patterns they make using their colourful droppings. Mary manages to communicate with the creatures, and they prove to be an unsophisticated race. Some time later, the caterpillars are attacked by butterfly-like aliens. The members of the expedition find this aggression baffling. (It doesn’t take them long, however, to discover that the caterpillars undergo metamorphosis to become the butterflies.) Mary manages to make herself understood by the butterflies, and learns that sometimes one of their number breaks out of its chrysalis with deformed wings. While the butterflies have lost all memory of their lives as caterpillars, they do know that they came from. And they blame the caterpillars’ habit of wallowing in stagnant bogs and making patterns with their droppings for causing the incomplete metamorphoses.

It’s hard not to read it all as an allegory for religious creeds and their concept of heaven. The caterpillars fear the butterflies, and yet they’re supposed to stop doing what comes naturally to them because the butterflies promise they will lives of joy after their metamorphosis – despite not presenting any evidence of this to the caterpillars. It’s not exact but the point is clear. And it’s reinforced by the rest of the book’s general message of peace and understanding.

Having said that, Memoirs of a Spacewoman is by no means a religious book, and presents its thesis in a form that is clearly science fiction – alien planets, telepathic communication – and was, in fact, first published by Gollancz, who put the phrase “her first science fiction novel” on the cover. Mitchison’s science fiction, however, owes more the British tradition from Lewis and Wyndham, than it does the US tradition which grew out of the pages of Amazing Stories. It lends the book, as noted earlier, a fabulist air, rather than scientific tale of derring-do the actual plot would normally suggest. But Mary’s breezy narration of events, and the almost child-like depiction of alien worlds, do not detract from the many serious points Mitchison makes.

Some of the attitudes in the book read a little dated, some are almost prescient. It’s an entertaining book, and a deal more thoughtful than its prose suggests. Mitchison went on to write two more science fiction novels – Solution Three (1975) and Not By Bread Alone (1983); but she wrote over forty novels, and around ninety books in total, between 1923 and her death in 1999 at the ripe old age of 101.

The Female Man, Joanna Russ

The Female Man, Joanna Russ (1975)
Review by Megan AM

“Everyone knows that much as women want to be scientists and engineers, they want foremost to be womanly companions to men (what?) and caretakers of childhood; everyone knows that a large part of a woman’s identity inheres in the style of her attractiveness.”

“Laura is daydreaming that she’s Genghis Khan.” (p 60)

Joanna Russ’s 1975 turbulent treatise on female oppression, The Female Man, begs for interaction from the reader. It taunts with its candor. Even as a forty-year-old book, it dares you to disagree. For the modern reader of this not-really-tale, side effects may include chest tightening “buts”, understanding “ohs”, and flustered “oh come ons”.

In a recent article with ShelfAwareness.com, Kim Stanley Robinson describes Russ’s The Female Man as the “book that made me laugh the hardest while slapping me in the face”. He couldn’t be more precise.

The lives of four women collide: the uber-feminine doormat Jeannine, the rough-and-tumble person Janet, the agro-reactionary murderer Jael, and the rational, scholarly Joanna, our dear author, who communicates her own internal arguments and confusions via these four women. On the face of it, the women are presented as coming from four alternate worlds, but one infers quickly that the characters are non-entities, and that Russ is essentially arguing with herself, and with society, via these personalities. She conveys a divided female psyche that despises the status quo, yearns for gender equality, yet doesn’t want to annoy people, and feels guilty for achieving her own version of equality by essentially giving up her femininity in the academic world.

Four women. Four J names. Different facets of Russ. Different facets of womanhood. Sometimes the narrator refers to “the Weak One” and we don’t know who that is. Is it Jeannine, the young and naïve girly girl, who wants ever so much to get married, but for some reason she won’t? But she’s the quickest to accept and justify violence.

Uncertainties like that define the relative amorphousness of this novel. Its structure is as fractured as the author’s identity, with chapters ranging in length from one sentence to one paragraph to ten pages. Storylines bounce to and fro, interrupted by personal statements, poems, anecdotes, and uncomfortable revelations about self and society.

This is a book of harsh truths, stylized in biting, provocative, funny ways:

In 1975, Russ reminds us, “There are more whooping cranes in the United States of America than there are women in Congress.” (p 61)

She takes on marriage: “You can’t imbibe someone’s success by fucking them” (p 65).

She discusses social conditioning:

There is the vanity training, the obedience training, the self-effacement training, the deference training, the dependency training, the passivity training, the rivalry training, the stupidity training, the placation training. How am I to put this together with my human life, my intellectual life, my solitude, my transcendence, my brains, and my fearful, fearful ambition? …You can’t unite woman and human any more than you can unite matter and anti-matter… (p 151)

She posits a world without men by introducing Janet, from Whileaway, which is ten centuries ahead in an alternate future, where men have been long ago wiped out by way of disease: “And about this men thing, you must remember that to me they are a particularly foreign species; one can make love with a dog, yes?” (p 33)

Russ’s witty cantankerousness is hard to put down, even if some of her references feel outdated to younger readers. Her portrayal of a typical party includes inane social chatter that illuminates the patronizing gender games people play (“His Little Girl” and “Ain’t It Awful”), which seems ridiculous to this late-born Gen-Xer, who hopes no one still talks that way today. It’s hard to believe people ever talked that way.

Even if some of her portrayals might not quite mesh with today, enough truths bubble up to make this a relevant and influential discourse on gender relations. The majority of women I encounter still view marriage as a goal and career, their identities exist through their kids, and the career gap is still gaping.

But most compelling about this novel is the intimacy Russ shares. She splays out her soul, a psychic vivisection for the world to see. Blood pumping, heart beating, eyes agape, and mouth roaring. Sometimes it’s too much and we feel embarrassed for her. Its cringe-inducing roughness is a little too roar-full. Younger generations like myself may balk at the more extreme portrayals of casual sexism, or find this mid-century roaring tiresome. (Women of my generation don’t roar. We death-stare. Much more effective.) Most surprising for me is realizing that this was written only four years before I was born. I was born into this society???

But even if society has progressed beyond the immobile social roles of Russ’s generation, and even if younger generations can’t completely relate to the society Russ depicts, The Female Man still gives us kernels of familiar insidiousness that peek out from the corners. Today, social media has allowed us to see more brash displays of dangerous misogyny, but it’s the subtle sexism that’s most overlooked, and easiest to ignore. Russ reminds us of those places where our standards have been calloused, where our vigilance has waned.

Although The Female Man is a product of its time, we are not quite living in its desired legacy. This should be required reading for all. We should never become comfortable enough to allow this novel to be forgotten.

This review originally appeard on From couch to moon.

Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1915)
Review by Jack Deighton

This is one of the earliest pieces of feminist Science Fiction, an attempt to imagine what a society without men might look like. In its form it is perhaps rooted in its time; on an expedition three men from the US hear rumours of a land of only women somewhere in the upper reaches of “a great river” – a land which no-one has ever seen but was said to be “dangerous, deadly” for any man to go there; and from which no man had ever returned – in other words a similar scenario to “Lost Worlds” of dinosaurs. That this is merely an authorial device to entice the men (and the reader) into Herland is revealed when they in fact travel by aeroplane into that mythical place, cut off by earthquake in the long ago, and find no danger but rather an initial sequestration along with a tolerant acceptance mediated by a kind of amusement.

As tends to be the way of these things all is couched as a remembrance by one of the three men, Vandyck Jennings, tracking his progress from a belief that there must be men somewhere in Herland and that social organisation without men must necessarily be lacking to an understanding of the dynamics and motivations of this strange country. But there are no men. The women in Herland reproduce parthenogenetically (how this happened is rather skipped over, being more like a miraculous occurrence than a demonstrable process but there would have been no Herland without it.) Social relations in Herland are such that violence and criminality do not occur. In effect they have been bred out. Roles – including childcare and education, though the latter is something of a life-long endeavour – are performed by those who have an aptitude for them and who specialise in that field. The contrast with the outside world is stark, especially in regard to the valuation of each member of society.

Initially the three are bemused by the appearance of their captors, “In all our discussions and speculations we had always unconsciously assumed that the women would be young. Most men do think that way, I fancy,” and – a telling aside – “‘Woman’ in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow.”

The three do eventually form relationships with inhabitants of Herland (somewhat oddly the three women whom they first encountered on arrival) but with the difference in societal norms things do not go smoothly. Of the three intruders Terry O Nicolson is the one who thinks women like to be mastered. “His idea was to take. He thought, he honestly believed, that women like it. Not the women of Herland! Not Alima!” This conflict drives the novel’s conclusion and his banishment.

In his explanations of his world to those in Herland, Vandyck realises that, “Patriotism, red hot, is compatible with the existence of a neglect of national interests, a dishonesty, a cold indifference to the suffering of millions. Patriotism is largely pride, and very largely combativeness. Patriotism generally has a chip on its shoulder,” and religion’s “common basis being a Dominant Power or Powers, and some Special Behaviour, mostly taboos to please or placate.” His leads his companion Ellador to envisage sex as Vandyck describes its place in the outside world not, as with animals, for the one purpose of procreation but as specialised to a “higher, purer nobler use”.

Books such as this cannot be subjected to the usual reviewing criteria. The central focus of a novel about a utopia is that of the nature of the society described and how it differs from, and reflects on, ours. The idea is the substance of the novel. Though illumination of the human condition is not, such considerations as plot and character are secondary. Not that there is no character development in Herland: two of the three male adventurers who venture into this world come to their own terms with it. Nicolson the macho man of course does not. (Arguably he cannot, and without his following his instincts the events which led to Jennings providing us with this account would not have occurred.)

It might be argued that Herland is not Science Fiction. But if Science Fiction is the literature of ideas (often a reason for why some SF fails to produce rounded characterisation, but the SF background can be as much of a character as any humans in the story) then Herland definitely counts. Whatever, one hundred years on from its first publication Herland can still be read with facility. It still stands up. It still marks a contrast between what our society is and what it might aspire to.

This review originally appeared on A Son of the Rock.

Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Naomi Mitchison

Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Naomi Mitchison (1962)
Review by Megan AM

First published in 1962 by Gollancz, then reprinted by The Women’s Press in London in 1985, it’s no argument that this novel has experienced swings of attention at times, yet without a place on any of the major SF lists, and despite Mitchison’s long literary career, its memory as a critical piece of genre is threatened.

In Memoirs of a Spacewoman, we meet Mary, a communication specialist for Terran interstellar missions in the far undetermined future. She writes about some of her more memorable experiences in this capacity, describing the strange planets and beings she has visited, including her struggles to decode the various unique ways other beings communicate, including by touch and telepathy. Her memoirs also reflect upon her relationships with former lovers, a couple of unusual pregnancies, and the way in which parent/child affiliations have changed in the far future, particularly when interstellar space travel is involved.

A kind of anthropologist, Mary inserts herself into these strange alien civilizations to decode the mostly nonverbal communications of lifeforms drastically different from humans. Ambigendered Martians. Psychic radiates. Centipede-like creatures with brain matter smeared on their sides. Oozy tissues that symbiose with Terran hosts in a kind of pregnancy. Giant butterflies in need of some surgical lessons on C-sections. Mitchison presents a wide variety of strange lifeforms, all encapsulated in this little novel, making this the most creative book I’ve read about alien cultures.

Themes of blame and guilt are touched upon in each of Mary’s stories, starting with her bungled operation with the blood-thirsty Epsies, where her objectivity as a scientist is colored by her own surprise at their disturbing behaviors and her guilt over her subsequent judgment of these creatures. She learns from her mission leader, “humiliation, however it was produced, was a necessary stage in exploration” (p 45). Following chapters hint at her guilt over a couple of misguided pregnancies, which produce a haploid Martian daughter, and a couple of unsuccessful alien grafts. She sometimes regrets the estrangement that life among the stars causes between herself and her children and lovers (although this is the norm for her society).

Then, the longest of the tales, Mary introduces us to a planet where happy, innocent caterpillars engage in fecal art displays and group sexual wallowing, until angry butterflies attack with a psychic guilt ambush:

The wretched caterpillars curled up or crept aside, the colours paled, the eye spots dimmed. They seemed to shrivel as from an inward searing. We watched with intent sympathy,… Yet we were also aware of the attackers, the whirl and flurry of wings, the colours beyond anything I have ever perceived on any planet of any sun, the antennae stiff and pointing like weapons of offence, the legs glittering and jointed as strange armour might have been.

… Even if one is not directly under it, such a torrent of blame is unnerving. (p 92)

Clearly a commentary on emotional abuse and the paralyzing guilt it creates, as well as an absurdist reframing of moral attitudes toward idleness and sexuality, but it’s also a cool alien depiction that is both bizarre and ambiguous. The scientists soon figure out this strange and puzzling situation, but find themselves at odds with their objective constraints and moral inclinations to intervene and educate the butterflies, and it’s never clear whether the butterflies’ behavior, disturbing as it is, is appropriate. As one of Mary’s colleagues takes decisive action, serious consequences occur and the mission is terminated early.

Lots of focus on sexuality and weird pregnancies put this book in the danger zone of bad SF cliché, and I’ll be the first to admit I run screaming from weird pregnancy fiction, so I can understand why some people might choose to ignore this book. It doesn’t help that Mitchison’s narrative embraces many of the deterministic gender values of the day, when valuing women means reinforced gender coding (“I always feel that biology and, of course, communication are essentially women’s work, and glory” (p 18)). But ignore that because Mitchison touches all the right sci-fi buttons: she captures the imagination without the neon-colored message flags one might expect from feminist science fiction. This is pure science fiction: weird, wondrous, and way out there.

Speaking of alien communication, sexuality, and gender determinism, I also view this as a suitable companion piece to its timeline peer, the 1961 award-winning Stranger in a Strange Land. Read both and tell me which one feels more relatable, relevant, and genuinely “of the future”, and which one feels like poorly-aged, sixties schlock.

This review originally appeared on From Couch to Moon.

Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Naomi Mitchison

Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Naomi Mitchison (1962)
Review by Joachim Boaz

Naomi Mitchison’s first science fiction novel, Memoirs of a Spacewoman, is a brilliant episodic rumination on the nature of non-violent interaction with alien species that challenge (and transform) conceptions of ourselves and others. The first sentence of the novel narrows in on Mitchison’s central themes:

“I think about my friends and the fathers of my children. I think about my children, and I think less about my four dear normals than I think about Viola. And I think about Ariel. And the other. I wonder sometimes how old would be if I counted the years of time blackout during exploration” (p 5)

Technological change (the crews of FTL spaceships experience time-dilation called “blackout”) yields a unique set of sociological problems. The conception of family is forced to evolve as the relationships between explorer parents and children who do not accompany them on voyages – and how each experiences time – generate distinctly different ways of living. Society also transforms as humankind contacts bizarre new lifeforms, attempts radical communication experiments, and interacts with neighboring aliens for prolonged periods of time.

Highly recommended for fans of thought-provoking 1960s social science fiction (especially of the feminist bent). For those who are willing to read along the more esoteric and unjustly forgotten fringes will discover a wealth of worthwhile SF by women authors pre-Le Guin.

Caveat: Do not expect pulp heroes, space battles or political intrigue. This is social science fiction at its best.

Judith Merril’s radical and inspiring short story ‘Daughters of Earth’ (1952) traces the history of the space program – from the first spaceships to the first colonization program attempts – through women scientist/astronaut descendants of a single family. Memoirs of a Spacewoman follows similar lines: The narrator, Mary, is a communications officer who follows in the footstep of her explorer mother on a series of expeditions to alien worlds with their unique biological organisms and communication problems. Despite the loss of her mother on one of these voyagers she is irresistibly drawn to the challenges of space. Likewise, her daughter Viola, although physically disabled after her mother experiences an unusual pregnancy, feels the allure of scientific discovery.

Most appealing about Mary is her incredible devotion to her own area of expertise and her empathy, regardless of differences she encounters, with others. She has the credentials and experience to be the leader of new expeditions but refuses to take them: “I know I would forget about my expedition if I came on a really interesting communications problem” (p 5). Although some of her fellow astronauts (mostly women) cannot help but judge the aliens she attempts to be openminded: “one reads and watches, one steeps oneself in 3D and 4D; one practices detachment in the face of apparently disgusting and horrible events; one practices taking bizarre points of view” (p 7).

Of course, it is never that simple: Mary’s experience with her “daughter” Ariel is case in point. In one of the novel’s many episodes – often attached to a particular expedition/biological puzzle – scientists bring back a life form that might not be sentient. This being regenerates from the smallest fragment: “if kept in a suitable environment, they developed into the whole animal, but on a very small scale and barely viable” (p 41). Initially they decided to graft the animal on other non-human animals. They discover that they survive and flourish, at least for short periods of time, and before detaching from the host.

Mary decides that she will take on a graft to learn more about the creature. The experiment is transformative: “I can still remember, past any memory of my later children’s fathers, the peculiar feel and taste on my tongue of Ariel’s pseudopodium, something altogether of itself” (p 49). Ariel grows on her body, Mary experiences similar physical experiences linked to pregnancy, she becomes deeply attached to the unusual form attached to her… With time dilation blackout and long periods away from her children she is less able to form parental connections with them. But she can with Ariel who is attached to her body and soon some elements of communication become possible. But Mary’s joy is short lived as the grafts detach they wither and die.

Other episodes deal with forms of loss. On a world with a deep muddy chasm caterpillar-like aliens seem to spend their lives eating, arranging their multi-colored rock-like fecal matter in brilliant patterns, and rooting around in the mud. Mary and the other scientists feel deep attachment to the caterpillar creatures. Francoise, one of the scientists, goes to extraordinary lengths to communicate with them. But the biological deepens when butterfly-like creatures descend and slaughter some of the caterpillars: it appears that the “butterfly had no maternal feelings, could not have” (p 117). But Francoise becomes too attached, too willing to intervene, to willing to judge and alien species that seems distinctly alien…

Despite Mary’s frequent concerns about her children whom she can only maintain brief contact with, her all consuming career, her infrequent interaction with her lovers (often male colleagues) due to constantly shifting assignments, her strange experience with time (years and years go by on Earth while the astronauts age only when they are out of blackout), and the loss of her “daughter” Ariel she finds solace in her work and the valuable interactions, however brief, that she is able to form with others.

A powerful vision.

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

Across the Acheron, Monique Wittig

Across the Acheron, Monique Wittig (1985)
Review by Ian Sales

Monique Wittig is perhaps best known as a radical feminist, and one of her half-dozen novels, Les Guérillères (1969), is considered a landmark in lesbian feminism. Across the Acheron was her fifth novel, and originally published in French under the title Virgil, non. It’s based on Dante’s The Divine Comedy, and features a protagonist called Wittig, who travels through Limbo and the various levels of Hell in order to find a route to Paradise.

Accompanied by Manastabal – referred to throughout as “Manastabal, my guide” – Witting makes her way through Hell and Purgatory. Various of the incidents are couched as encounters in San Francisco, and while Wittig is critical – very much so as writer, inasmuch as she is writing the encounters as violent and lethal; but also as narrator, in her response in the narrative to the encounters – Manastabal is a voice of sympathy reason and frequently castigates for her reaction and asks her to question her response. Across the Acheron is very much about the incidents Wittig witnesses during her journey. Some are obvious references to Dante: the Lake of Suicides, for example. Others less so. But all of the incidents Wittig witnesses relate to women and their role in society. Whether it is women being hunted by men, women being dragged about by the neck by men, women prettifying themselves (and so making themselves more vulnerable) for men, in all cases Wittig is contemptuous and unsympathetic and it is Manastabal who suggests she reinterprets or re-evaluates what she has seen.

At one point during the story, Wittig bathes in the River Acheron, and so loses her memory – specifically of the sight of hundreds of women being dismembered by a train in their rush to board it. Manastabal is particularly scathing about Wittig’s response to that:

“You showed an absolute lack of morality towards the distressed souls at the central station … But that gives you no right to crush the souls we encounter with your personal judgement … As for me, I congratulate myself I remain free. All the same, as long as one has this privilege it’s a poor show if you use it to grind down even further the unfortunate creatures who are deprived of it.” (p 33)

As Wittig slowly regains her memory, it gives her sufficient distance to no longer be enraged by the memory of the railway station. While crossing the Acheron later, and plunging into its water when her boat disintegrates, her memory remains intact. The next day, she enters the lowest circle of Hell. But what she sees there in the Temple of Love enrages her as she witnesses “what is called in Hell the practice of Love”. She sets about herself, attacking the men with a whip:

“I pursue them without striking a blow and, after rounding them up with my lash, I whip them as a herd, catching several with one stroke. Some of them, hurt in their tender parts, double up and fall to the ground, their legs drawn up against their bellies.” (p 97)

Eventually, Wittig reaches Paradise, where the angels ride on motorbikes, there is an open air kitchen, all manner of birds frollick, and a “bare-breasted cherub sounds a trumpet” to announce the kitchen is open.

Across the Acheron is somewhat relentless as a read. Wittig the author pulls no punches in describing the depredations and torture visited upon women that Witting the narrator witnesses. What makes this worse is their anonymity. While the men are also unnamed, and referred to throughout simply as either “the hunters” or “the men”, it is the facelessness of the victims which makes their torment more affecting. Nothing in the book is unrecognisable, and while perhaps Witting’s Hell seems mostly a manifestation of the lives of Western women, it makes its points readably and yet quite forcibly. It’s a difficult book to like or enjoy because of its unremitting scenes of torture and violence, and though Manastabal’s commentary offers a welcome sane voice on the proceedings, Wittig’s rage is clearly justified. Despite its slim size of 119 pages, Across the Acheron packs a heavy punch.

 

Women as Demons, Tanith Lee

Women as Demons, Tanith Lee (1989)
Review by Ian Sales

SF Mistressworks exists to review science fiction books written by women and published before the beginning of the twenty-first century. While two of those criteria are quite clear, genre can be a nebulous thing. Yet it makes little sense to err on the side of caution in such matters – it’s the fact that the books reviewed here were written by women that is of paramount importance. In other words, the occasional piece of fantasy or mainstream may appear on this site – providing, of course, it’s not too overt, and it has some connection with science fictions that do fit within SF Mistressworks’ remit. Which is why Women as Demons by Tanith Lee, a collection of short stories which are mostly fantasy, is being reviewed here. Admittedly, it was originally published by The Women’s Press and quite clearly states “sf” at the bottom right of the front cover. And the back-cover blurb also says, “In this rich and varied collection of fantasy, science fiction and horror stories…”. Given all that, it would seem churlish to exclude the book because it’s not heartland science fiction. So here we go…

Women as Demons contains fourteen stories, which originally appeared between 1976 and 1988, and two original to the collection. Most are from the late 1970s, and were published in a variety of magazines and paperback anthologies.

‘The Demoness’ (1976) is straight-up fantasy. A woman waits in a tower, and is visited by a man and he learns the hard way that she is a succubus. Some time later, another man visits, a friend and brother-in-arms of the first, but he does not succumb to the succubus’s charms and rejects her. So she sets off in pursuit of him. The story tries for a Matter of Britain atmosphere, but doesn’t quite pull it off. The title character is pretty much the embodiment of the collection’s title, but she still feels like a fairy-tale staple. It didn’t seem as though the story added much to the cliché, and for much of its length it felt somewhat over-written.

‘Deux Amours d’une Sorcière’ (1979) is another fantasy, and is not dissimilar in broad shape to ‘The Demoness’. A beautiful woman kept by an older man meets two young heroes and falls for one of them. Everyone assumes she is in love the blond of the pair, so to protect the brunet, the true target of her affections, she plays along. Her sugar daddy is unhappy, however, and arranges for the putative lover to be murdered by footpads. This is one of those fantasies where it all feels a bit like some 1960s romance of the Age of Chivalry but with names slightly changed – eg, Parys, Jhane…

‘The Unrequited Glove’ (1988). Once you’ve finished groaning over the title, you slowly realise this is quite an effective little horror tale. A Mediterranean resort in the early part of the twentieth century, all very Bonjour Tristesse meets The Talented Mr Ripley, and an obsessive young woman falls for the local desirable playboy. He casts her off once he’s had his fun, she takes it badly… and one of her gloves remains to haunt the playboy until he eventually meets an untimely end. Like the previous two stories, this one relies a lot on atmosphere, and Lee is skilled at generating the necessary ambience through her use of language.

‘Gemini’ (1981) is the first of the science fiction stories in the collection, but its setting is not explained. The narrator appears to suffer from a fear of other people – she refers to it throughout as It – but in this world she must work in “Service” for a specified period every three months. She chooses a job which would limit her interaction with other people, but is soon given an assistant, a young man, who tries to get to know her better. So she kills him. The setting is vague, as is whatever It is.

‘Into Gold’ (1986) is, I think, set in Roman Britain, although it is hard to be sure as Lee gives few details. A fortress commander and his sidekick become de facto leaders of a small town, and under their rule it begins to prosper. Foreign traders appear, their caravans festooned with gold, and the commander takes a fancy to the chief trader’s daughter – who apparently can turn objects into gold. She stays and marries the commander, but the sidekick is suspicious of her. She has a child by the commander, but when she takes it on a trip to a distant village to cure its sick residents, he follows as he’s convinced she plans to either perform witchcraft or run off with the child.

‘The Lancastrian Blush’ (1989) is original to Women as Demons, and though it pretends to historical fiction – as its title would suggest – it’s pure fantasy. A Yorkist on his way to Bosworth Field has doubts about his allegiance. En route he comes across a strange castle, and falls in love with the lord’s daughter. Castles weren’t actually that common, even in the fifteenth century, as they are hugely expensive to build. The lord of the castle magically keeps the Yorkist prisoner so he won’t fight at Bosworth Field (incidentally, the battle was not known by that name until at least 1510, twenty-five years later). The Yorkist manages to escape, with the help of the daughter, fights in the battle, and does indeed swap sides.

‘You Are My Sunshine’ (1980). I have no idea if the title was inspired by the song made so famous by the Muppets. I’d like to think it was. The story originally appeared in Chrysalis 8, one of a paperback anthology series, so it seems unlikely. As, in fact, does the premise of the story. Leon Canna is a sort of chief steward aboard a starship. The story is framed as his testimony after the total loss of the vessel on which he served (he’s the sole survivor). Canna claims the disaster was caused by a woman, but his interrogators are unconvinced… so he explains what happened. He persuaded a dowdy young woman to use the starship’s solarium, which is a side-benefit of the starship’s method of refueling itself from suns. The more unfiltered sunshine she takes in, the more beautiful – and radioactive! – the young woman becomes. And she’s in love with Canna. It ends badly. The central premise of ‘You Are My Sunshine’ is, quite frankly, nonsense, and its “Plain Jane to charismatic beauty” plot is no better.

‘The One We Were’ (1984). Reading this collection, it occurred to me that Lee’s somewhat florid prose was best-suited to this sort of near-Gothic horror fiction, much like the earlier ‘The Unrequited Glove’. Here, a famous writer of “historical romantic novels” in Paris is persuaded by a popular clairvoyant that she is a reincarnation of a minor poet who had died young a century or so earlier. The writer obsesses over the poet, changes her appearance to match the one existing photograph of him, and collects everything and anything she can find about him. And then a young man appears, who also believes himself to be a reincarnation of the poet – and was informed as much by the same medium, in fact. There’s really only one way it can end. And so it does. Bizarrely, most of the characters are named, but some use that fin de siècle convention of an initial capital and an em-dash.

‘The Truce’ (1976) is one of the collection’s few science fiction stories, although it is well-disguised. Two warring tribes – it is implied this is a post-apocalypse world, but it’s not categorically stated – try to make peace by joining a member from each in a sanctioned relationship. But one tribe rejects the other. It comes as no surprise to discover that one tribe is female and the other male. This is the sort of “Shaggy God” story that used to crop up regularly in sf magazines back in the 1940s and 1950s.

‘The Squire’s Tale’ (1980). A knight and his squire pass through a clearing in which a witch has been burned at a stake. At the next town, the squire discovers he is turning into a woman, and is driven out of the castle. He has become possessed by the witch. And that’s pretty much all there is to this story – the setting is identikit Fantasyland, the central premise is obvious from the second page, and the narrative neither resolves the squire’s situation nor uses it to make any kind of commentary.

‘Discovered Country’ (1989). An ultra-rich woman in a future in which the Solar System has been settled has a son whom she ignores for much of his life. But when he turns thirty-two, she welcomes him into her life, though neither seem especially happy with the arrangement. So they go their separate ways. Then she dies suddenly, and she has one last bequest, something he must do in order to inherit her vast wealth. The title refers to Hamlet’s “undiscovered country”. This is a story that succeeds more on its prose than its plot.

‘Winter White’ (1978). Crovak is a Conan-like chief of a clan who, while on a trip, discovers a strange flute in an abandoned “drom-hall”. He blows the flute, which makes a noise like a woman in pain. And from that point on he is haunted by a woman in white that only he can see. And over the following months he gradually falls to pieces. There’s a Celtic fantasy feel to this story, although the central character smacks more of the Cimmerian barbarian than Pryderi fab Pwll.

‘Written in Water’ (1982). The sole survivor of a global pandemic finds a young man who has apparently dropped from the sky in her garden. He’s clearly alien and cannot speak. She looks after him, but after an abrupt epiphany in which she realises – or supposes – he was sent to Earth as an Adam to her Eve, she kills him. And that’s it. Another Shaggy God story which, although it subverts the trope, still manages to be somewhat obvious.

‘Mirage and Magia’ (1982). This one is Lee channelling M John Harrison, and it’s quite effective. A mysterious woman enters the town of Qon Oshen, and at regular intervals entices young men to her magically-protected mansion. The following morning, they are found wandering brain-dead. A master thief breaks into the house and discovers that the woman is searching for someone, and that the young men appear to be captivated by the thousands of mirrors which decorate the house’s interior. And then a mysterious young man appears in Qon Oshen… This is a story which relies more on its prose style than it does its plot, and it works pretty well in that regard.

‘The Thaw’ (1979). This story also appears in Pamela Sargent’s 1995 anthology, Women of Wonder: The Contemporary Years. In the future, they have finally discovered how to resurrect those who have cryogenically frozen their bodies, but it seems the first person they resurrect is not quite what they expected. Though she appears to be Carla Brice, her descendant, there to welcome her and help her adjust to the future, learns there is something far from human about her.

‘Northern Chess’ (1979). A female knight happens open an investment of a magician’s castle. The sorceror is dead, but this is his last standing castle and the knights are determined to destroy it. But its magic has beaten them at every turn. Unused to the concept of a female knight, in fact downright misogynistic about it, the knights motivate her to have a go at the castle herself… and she succeeds. Because the magician’s curse said it would be destroyed by “no man”. Yes, it’s really that corny.

Sadly, the title of Lee’s collection promised more than I felt it delivered. Fans of her writing might well enjoy it more than I did, but in terms of what I was led to expect, I was disappointed to find mostly stories of women as femmes fatales, women whose agency existed only in counterpoint to that of male love interests, and women who formed one half of a romantic situation. For all Lee’s fancy prose and inventive – albeit often vague – settings, and her obvious facility at various styles and modes of genre, the stories themselves were not especially original, and their dénouments were all too often all too obvious. I was hoping for something a little more subversive, something that was more of a commentary on the roles women characters play all too often in genre fiction. But this is not that book.

The Incomer, Margaret Elphinstone

The Incomer, Margaret Elphinstone (1987)
Review by Jack Deighton

I picked this one up in a second hand bookshop in Edinburgh a few months ago. For two reasons. One, it was a Women’s Press SF publication I hadn’t bought at the time so it filled a gap and two, it fitted the Read Scotland 2014 Challenge. The book has the impeccably Scottish word “incomer” as part of its title. Though born in Kent, author Margaret Elphinstone has lived extensively in Scotland – in Galloway when the book was published – and has a professional academic interest in Scottish literature, especially of the islands. (She does have a character say, “Aren’t I?” though.)

As dark is falling a human figure falters through a vaguely menacing forest to a crossroads with a village on its north side. The village has several ruined houses but we are given to understand this is by no means unusual for the times. (Almost incidentally we find out some sort of change has reduced the human population compared to our time and advanced technology is conspicuous by its absence. Despite this, familiar things such as flower pots, nappies and sheep crop up from time to time. Heat is provided by burning wood, which seems to be a precious resource despite the surrounding forest. The North Sea is dangerous, referred to as dead, in contrast to the reviving Irish Sea.)

The figure, a travelling musician named Naomi, finds room at the inn. Her fiddle playing at a gathering a day or so later ensures her acceptance to stay for the rest of the winter. The village is called Clachanpluck (the novel has been republished as The Incomer or Clachanpluck) and holds a secret. A path through the forest leads to an entry into the earth hidden behind a waterfall. (No spoilers.)

Naomi’s presence has an impact on the relationships within the village but the main theme of the novel is mutual incomprehension, the lack of understanding Naomi has of the local norms, the assumed knowledge she doesn’t have, the care with which she has to tread. Her main driving force is her music but during her stay in the village she nevertheless – if somewhat unconvincingly – throws off her long-maintained celibacy in a relationship with fellow fiddle player Davey to whom she teaches tunes that she learned on her travels in Europe. Old, powerful music, written by Beethoven. Despite the almost unspoken matriarchy in Clachanpluck human nature hasn’t much changed. Other misunderstandings take place among those who have lived there all their lives.

This is a quiet, understated novel whose depiction of a restrained, unfussy, reticent lifestyle where people no longer exploit nature unsustainably and have a deep attachment to the land may be nostalgic and idealistic yet resists being idyllic.

This review originally appeared on A Son of the Rock.