women? destroy? science fiction?

[calimac]

Women Destroy Science Fiction is the title of a special all-women issue of Lightspeed that's the Potlatch Book of Honor. I like short stories, but so many of them at once from different minds and imaginations is exhausting to read. I'd only heard of a few of the authors, and the e-book doesn't have any running heads, so I could never remember the author or title of what I was reading. I went back afterwards and made a list with reminder notes (the mermaid story, the Texas mall story, the aliens occupy our brains story). But I read all the way through, although I admit skimming at times, a tricky process with unfamiliar fiction.

Technically most of these stories looked pretty good. Tiptree's "Love is the Plan," the only one of the 5 reprints I'd read before, did not stand out in this company and actually looked less coherently written than most: possibly the suck fairy has been at it. Although few begin with exposition (I miss the lost practice of stories that begin with exposition), I rarely had much problem figuring out where I was and what was going on, the challenge of which is a large component of that exhaustion I mentioned.

But I'm used to science fiction as a fairly didactic genre - you tell a story because you have a point larger than the story itself to make - but that too seems to be passing out of fashion. I've noticed from other current authors, like Ted Chiang, a tendency to write stories that don't end, they just ... stop. (Possibly an influence from realistic modernism.) That was true of many of these; they read like just a slice of something, yet just depicting the slice didn't seem to be the point. I mean, I liked Gabriella Stalker's Texas-mall story, and the setting is unforgettable, but I couldn't fathom what she was telling it for. N.K. Jemisin's aliens-occupy-our-brains story was searing, and this time I'm sure there was a point to the ending, but I didn't get what it was. Same with Charlie Jane Anders' memory-cube story. A couple historical pastiche stories did not work for me at all; I couldn't buy the premises.

Accordingly, I found more satisfying stories like Kris Millering's artist-in-a-tiny-spaceship, the only real surprise-punch ending in the main section of the book, and laid out with adequate craft. Some of the (mostly) short-shorts in the "flash fiction" section had the same quality, but I didn't even try to keep track of those with notes. The only one I really remember without a reminder was the one with the heaviest didactic point, Ellen Denham's fable of the aliens who communicate by eating. (I also liked that it was mostly exposition, with an outstanding quick opening.) Ellen is, I think, also the only one of the story authors here I know personally.

Given the anthology's title, I was expecting something ground-breaking or fundamentally different from earlier SF, but I didn't get that sense. These were a bunch of decently-good stories of the same kind as other decently-good SF stories I've read from recent decades. Of course, the protagonists were mostly women (Stalker, in the interview section, says she made hers male just for a change from her usual practice), but I'm not the kind of reader who cares much about that. If a more fundamental femaleness to these stories is the point of the anthology, again it doesn't look different to me. As an SF reader I'm a child of the '70s. I grew up reading Le Guin and Russ and Wilhelm and Charnas and McIntyre and, yes, Tiptree. I'm used to women with distinctively and strongly female voices having a big part in this conversation.

The little personal testimonies that form most of the non-fiction at the back are largely about the struggle to establish women's place in SF. Some of them take a historical perspective, but most sound pretty current. And I'm trying to correlate that with what I've read in the past by women about their role in SF. It seemed the '70s was when they got their established places at this table. Is the current struggle for a further advance (because these struggles are never over)? Or, as Jeanne Gomoll perceived, has there been a retreat? And has it persisted since she wrote in the late '80s? Yet if so, whither authors like Willis and Bujold? Surely some of the biggest and most popular names in the field can't be ignored, or are they perceived as tokens?

I'm not giving answers here, I'm asking the questions. I hope to learn more at Potlatch.

Comments

[negothick.livejournal.com]

Wish I were a fly on the wall (a present on the floor?) at Potlatch to hear the discussion. I suspect someone will mention that the retreat has been from commercial publication or mass-market pb publication of anything feminist or non-formulaic. I very much doubt that a new novelist offering something like Suzy McKee Charnas' Motherlines books would be published today--even if Suzy herself were offering them! It seems like an alternate universe now frin the one in which Gilman's Moonwise (1991) could be published by a commercial publisher as a mass-market paperback. Yes, there are more small presses and yes, there's online publication of various sorts--but it still feels like a retreat. There are fewer paying markets than there once was, and advances for "our crowd" are lower in actual dollars than they were for mainstream writers in the 50s. All of these factors affect all writers, male and female, but they may have fallen disproportionately hard on feminist sf/f.

You are more than welcome to pass along my observations at Potlatch, with or without attribution.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Your impressions match mine pretty well, although I still like the Tiptree story, which creates a nice tension between the twee tone and the grim biological determinism revealed. Like you I felt some of the stories just stopped, although with the Jemsin I felt it had a proper ending but that I didn't understand it. I also didn't find the diversity and unfamiliarity of the thing so much exhausting as exhilarating. The testimonies are encouraging me to pull Mitchison's Memoirs of a Spacewoman off the shelves to re-read it. I remember really like it the first time, many years ago, and I'm glad to see that it has had an influence on younger writers.

In general, reading the anthology made me want to read or re-read all kinds of other things. Never have read the full McHugh novel excerpted here, although I've read that excerpt before ...

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

Re the Jemisin story: Fwiw, here's what I think the ending meant: Sadie forces the Master to occupy her body. Enri and the other occupied minds then kill all of the Masters by Channeling dying through her to all of the Masters. I admit, I understand how she's supposed to be facilitating that, but Enri is pretty clear when he says, "The children and the caregivers in the facilities will be all that's left when we're done" and "We can use you, if you let us. Channel what we feel through you."

I liked a few of the stories, but I expected something more. I'm sure the conversations at Potlatch will be interesting.

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

Or maybe there's something else about the Jemisin story that I'm totally not getting? Forgive me if what I said above was perfectly obvious to you.

Also, I too felt like several of the stories, especially the flash fiction, were slice of life style without any particular intent. Not to my taste.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I'm probably just being obtuse. Somehow they're going to channel a dream of death through Sadie to all the other hosts, thus killing all the hosts and killing the Masters with them?

I agree with Kalimac (if I'm not misreading him) that there weren't any great stories, but that all the stories were good.

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

Argh, I see I left out an important "don't" in my comment! I meant to write, "I admit, I DON'T understand how she [Sadie] is supposed to be facilitating that [killing the hosts by channeling a dream of death]." So we are in agreement. Sorry!

I agree with you about the Tiptree story -- great way to put it, twee tone and grim biological determinism. So far, that and the bones story are the only ones that I have remembered without going back and reading a bit (and it's only been 2 weeks! I used to have a great memory.) But I don't think I agree that all of the stories were good. In fact, I thought s few were distinctly mediocre and weakened the anthology. I also think that the editors fell into the trap of thinking that IMPORTANT stories must be about DEATH. Yawn.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That's true, many of the stories are about Death.

At least it makes a change from the even more tiresome male assumption that Important stories must be about Sex.

[(Anonymous)]

It's important to note that a woman Mary Shelly invented the genre. Like many cultural categories Sci Fi was appropriated by men.