Feminist Futures: Watchtower

Dossier: Lynn, Elizabeth A. Watchtower [Berkley, 1979]

Filetype: Book

Executive Summary: Watchtower opens with Tornor Keep overrun by raiders, the lord of the keep slain and the heir taken captive. Ryke, one of Tornor's watch commanders, agrees to join the southern invaders in order to protect the life of Errel, the prince and should-be lord of Tornor Keep.

After an eventual escape, Ryke and Errel journey to find allies with the goal of taking back Tornor, but on that journey they find a community offering another way of life, one built on equal contribution and a distinct lack of sexism and classism (unlike the stereotypically feudal Tornor). 

Reclaiming Tornor remains the goal, but much of the story is the evolving discovery of what is possible in this surprisingly small feeling world.

Feminist Future: Despite knowing Watchtower was a feminist fantasy novel, the opening of the novel puts to rest much of the hope for women in this world. Tornor keep, whether ruled by the invaders or the previous lords, is not a welcome place. Women are to be used. Women are not to control their own lives and their own destinies. 

Tornor is not the entire world, though it is representative of the other keeps in the north. It is unclear whether southerners as whole have more open and accepting values or if it that the community collecting themselves are all outsiders looking for a place to belong, and there (and perhaps only there) they can find acceptance and lack of judgment. There are same sex couples and it is no more remarkable than a heterosexual couple. There is opportunity for an individual to contribute to the level of ability, rather than of strictly determined roles of a patriarchal society.

Of course, this isn't precisely a "future" as Watchtower takes place in a world not our own. This isn't a desolate future recovering from some cataclysm and it isn't an alternate timeline.

Hope for the Future: While not offering visions of possible futures for our world and whatever the timeline we happen to be on, Watchtower does offer a glimmer of hope for the future of its own world and for the keep of Tornor. 

This will lead to discussion of the ending of the novel, but Watchtower is a forty year old novel and I think we can be forgiven a bit of the spoilers. 

Watchtower offers an idyllic and somewhat utopian community focused on a level of equality seen nowhere else in the known world, but that's not what the true hope for the future is. The true hope comes at the very end of the novel when Tornor Keep is retaken and Errel is restored to his rightful rule, except that he refuses in favor of his sister Sorren and also offers the regency of a neighboring keep to Ryke. 

This matters because we had previously known Sorren as one of the pair of messengers helping Ryke and Errel to safety. Sorren had fled Tornor years ago because she didn't want the life offered to her as a woman and as a woman who loved another woman. As the new ruler of Tornor and one who lived in that idyllic community for a time, she is likely to offer a cultural shift for both the men and women of Tornor.

Legacy: Watchtower was the winner of the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1980. Also on the ballot that same year, Lynn's follow up novel to Watchtower, The Dancers of Arun. Lynn also won a second World Fantasy Award that same year for her short story "The Woman Who Loved the Moon", first published in Amazons! (reviewed here by Adri Joy).  

Elizabeth A. Lynn is not a very prolific author, with most of her work published between 1978 and 1983 (five novels, a novella, and a story collection). Lynn's work is notable when published, often gaining recognition on the annual Locus Magazine list. 

Watchtower was recognized in 1996 with being listed on the Tiptree Award's Retrospective short list, but it is not an often discussed novel these days. What was daring when Lynn first published is much more commonplace these days, and ultimately that is something worth celebrating. 

In Retrospect: Though there were hints and themes of gay and lesbian relationships in "golden age" science fiction and fantasy, it wasn't until the second wave feminist novels published in the 1960's where homosexuality became overt in speculative literature. This is a gross simplification, of course, but serves well enough as a high level description to lead into how remarkable it felt to read a fantasy novel published in 1979 with a same sex relationship presented in such a way that was utterly casual and besides the point to the story being told.

All decisions a writer makes regarding the narrative is political and there is no question that Elizabeth Lynn's making the relationship between Norres and Sorren a non-point except that it only comes up through the friendship and hoped for romance between Ryke and Sorren (as in, Ryke is interested in more than a friendship and Sorren is in a committed relationship with Norres). Even better, it is a relationship that Ryke respects and leaves alone despite his feelings. That's rare.

For a forty year old fantasy novel revolutionary in part by the handling of a same sex relationship, Watchtower holds up as a novel worth reading today. It is perhaps not the groundbreaking fantasy novel it was when first published, and any number of novels today are doing the work Watchtower did in 1979, but this is a solid (if sometimes frustrating) work.


Analytics

For its time: 4/5
Read today: 3/5.
Wollstonecraft Meter: 7/10



POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 3x Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan.

Feminist Futures: Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre

When we started planning for the Feminist Futures project at Nerds of a Feather last year, I had a lot of thoughts about what I wanted to cover. Russ and Tiptree? Yes please! (Le Guin was already well in hand.) Something to fit within our main time period but also demonstrate the existence of marginalised voices outside white cis women? Enter Jessica Amanda Salmonson's pioneering women-led adventure fantasy anthology, Amazons!. And I knew wanted to do something from a more thematic perspective, looking at how feminisms of the time hold up to modern perspectives, particularly where assumptions of the gender binary come in.

Those posts exist. However, one post that I wanted to write, that I expressed my excitement for to the rest of the team, that didn't happen? That was Dreamsnake, by Vonda N. McIntyre. My copy of that book is currently in a friend's storage box, and I never quite figured things out in time to get hold of them. Dreamsnake, the Hugo, Nebula and Locus winning post-apocalyptic story of healing and hallucinogenic venom, whose author somehow doesn't get offered up in the same breath as Le Guin, Russ, Tiptree and Butler nearly as much as her contributions to the genre merit, would have to wait.

Then, just a couple of weeks ago, Vonda McIntyre died after a short battle with pancreatic cancer. The catalogue of her contributions to genre - in her original stories, her canon-enhancing Star Trek novelisations and tie-ins, her founding of the Clarion West writers workshop and of the Book View Cafe ebook site, and her support and warmth to others - have since been written by those much better placed than I to appreciate the loss her death represents. Through these posts, I learned from these posts was just how much of a contribution McIntyre has made, and learning about these things through obituaries always, always, feels like too little too late.

So, last weekend, I returned to Dreamsnake, to remind myself of how it felt to experience this weird, wonderful story the first time around. It's a post that's been too long in the making, but even though the author is no longer with us, it's certainly not too late to put her feminist future in this series where it belongs.

Dossier: Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre

Filetype: Book

Executive Summary: Snake is a healer in a fractured post-apocalyptic world, travelling through various communities which live out relatively isolated existences in a world which appears to have gone through nuclear war. As you might guess from her name, the title, and almost every book cover Dreamsnake has been released with (except for a 1994 edition which decides to focus on the book's stripey horse. There's also... this.) this healing involves snakes: Mist, an albino cobra, and Sand, a rattlesnake, are both bred to synthesise various cures and vaccinations for illnesses, representing a combination of genetic engineering and on-the-spot biochemistry. The third snake is even more special: Grass is a dreamsnake, an extremely rare "offworlder" breed able to create hallucinations and pleasant dreams which are most often used to ease the pain of the dying.

Dreamsnake's plot falls roughly into three episodic parts. In the first - which originally formed the self-contained novelette "Of Mist, Grass and Sand" - she meets with a nomadic desert community who seek help for a sick child, but panic when she leaves the boy with Grass overnight and kill the dreamsnake, leaving Snake bereft of one third of her abilities despite her success in eventually healing the boy's illness. Initially resigned to returning to her community to admit the loss, Snake is instead persuaded to travel into the mountains to the region's only "city" - an underground vault still closed off to outside visitors but which might be willing to help her in return for information about one of their own. The second act sidetracks this journey somewhat as Snake spends time in a mountain community healing the town's mayor and fixing everyone's problems, leaving with an adopted daughter and a shady follower apparently trying to steal her stuff. In the third act, Snake's interactions with that shady follower leads her to an unexpected source of Dreamsnakes and a dangerous showdown with the man who keeps them. Interspersed with all of this are brief scenes from the perspective of Arevin, a man who despite only meeting with Snake briefly in the opening has now been set up as her designated heterosexual love interest and is seeking to close the gap between them. Arevin is not going to make much more of an appearance in this review, which should indicate how much I think this romance adds to the overall plot.

Feminist Future: Dreamsnake's science fictional underpinnings are mainly rooted in biology and genetic engineering, and the technology-disguised-as-magic of the healers and their snakes is complemented by other assumed developments in humanity, particularly when it comes to fertility. It's assumed that everyone in this world has enough physiological control over themselves to, uh, raise and lower the temperature of different body parts, preventing the release of gametes while letting them have all the no-strings-attached sex that they want. The ability to have sex divorced from threat of pregnancy plays out as a constant through the different communities in Snake's world, meaning that sex for pleasure is widely accepted and cohabitation is usually based on more than pairings, but that people can become ostracised if they get a reputation for not having control, as its assumed that sex with a risk of pregnancy won't be enjoyable for anyone involved. Given the level of technology that societies have in Dreamsnake, there's an implication that these scientific underpinnings came at least in part from whatever society came before Snake's, and while this is left completely mysterious it's still pretty revolutionary to consider that despite apparently wiping themselves out in a nuclear war, these forerunners also found time to take the gendered implications of fertility seriously and focus scientific priorities on it.It's also worth looking at the characterisation here. Dreamsnake follows a protagonist who it's hard to believe predates the "paragon Bioware protagonist" stereotype by two decades (maybe more, I have no idea how pathologically helpful you can be in Baldur's Gate). Snake is practical, sensible in both her actions and her emotional regulation, and constantly able to overcome the biases and irrationalities of people around her, and the narrative is happy to showcase her ability to do so, deepening the worldbuilding through what we see through her eyes. Snake gains different reactions from different people, but they are all through the lens of her being a healer - a non-gendered role - and aside from assumptions of heterosexuality there's no suggestion that Snake's journeys through the world are particularly shaped by her being a woman. It's a refreshing standpoint, reinforced by moments like Arevin taking the lead on childcare within his extended family, which makes me forgive the occasional moments where Snake comes across as a little too annoyingly right about everything, and it's a point that leads me on to...

Hope for the Future: In almost all post-apocalyptic stories I can think of, where human society contracts from a lost age of high technology into pockets of isolation, there's generally a patriarchy involved. Whether it's a return to "natural" hierarchies across society and the assumed erosion of status for women due to lack of average muscle mass, or the creation of pockets of extreme - often religious fundamentalist - patriarchy as part of a patchwork of ideologies, if you're reading a post apocalyptic story in which women exist, there's probably going to be some heightened misogyny, rape and exploitation somewhere, and it's probably going to be at least a side plot to the main narrative. There's an assumption that, without the social, cultural and technological forces of our current society, at least some men are going to go back to the default state of treating women like things.

What sets Dreamsnake apart is that it completely resists this interpretation of post-apocalyptic society. Sure, all of the societies Snake visits have their own permutations of close-mindedness, societal bias and emotional repression, with some interesting, understated nuances here. Arevin's people don't tell their names to anyone except immediate family and very close friends, making the fact that Snake learns his name in the short time they are together an indicator of how quickly and deeply he develops feelings for her; a group of nomadic scavengers are persuaded to overcome their fear of outsiders' medication and experiments with the promise of a Tetanus vaccination; the mountain community are collectively obsessed with beauty and ostracise Melissa, the girl Snake adopts, largely because of facial burns. What none of these societies have is baked-in misogyny: a point which is driven home (as cringey as this is going to be for modern readers) by the rape subplot with Melissa and her guardian. When Snake finds out that Melissa is being raped, she is completely thrown by how monstrous a person would have to be to do something like that, and faces a challenge in bringing the man's behaviour to light because the community's leaders are equally unable to believe that someone would force sex on another person. Although I'm a lot less impressed on a second reading with the introduction of male violence just to drive home how little male violence this book has, it does achieve that effect.

Moreover, the lack of baked-in patriarchy and restrictions on Snake's actions by virtue of being a woman make the antagonist of the third act, North, much more compelling and sinister, because the threat he represents is not overshadowed by the general awfulness of society, or played up to have to compete with the casually awful predators that men without societal constraints are expected to be in post-apocalyptic fiction. There are a ton of predatory undertones to North's behaviour towards Snake and Melissa, but these climactic scenes benefit from being allowed to stand as the behaviour of an awful person, rather than the inevitable result of a woman in post-apocalyptic times trying to do something besides staying at home with the water purifiers.

Legacy: Dreamsnake clearly made quite an impression on its release, winning the Hugo, Nebula and Locus (SF) awards. In doing so, McIntyre became the third author after Larry Niven (Ringworld) and Arthur C. Clarke (Rendezvous with Rama) to pick up all three awards for the same book. What I don't know, but would be interested to find out, is how many other authors have picked up an award for a short fiction piece, as McIntyre did for the novelette "Of Mist, Grass and Sand" (which won a Nebula) and then gone on to win again with a reworked longer piece. I can't think of any other examples, but that doesn't mean they're not out there...

In Retrospect: Four decades after its release, Dreamsnake is a fascinating and worthwhile read, with a world that's just as interesting on a second visit and which is well integrated into an episodic, character driven plot. There are elements that might look different if Dreamsnake were written today: the sexual violence against Melissa feels like an exhausting contribution to an overused plot device from a modern perspective, even though it's not used to humiliate her or to titillate the audience, and despite the expansion in what constitutes a family unit, the actual relationships and humans of Snake's world are pretty heterosexual and binary, particularly given the big biological reveal at the end. Nevertheless, this is a book which deserves all of its current recognition and more: a work which looks the patriarchy of our own world in the face and says "nope, this one's not for you". It may only be a small part of McIntyre's legacy but it's one I'm so grateful to have experienced.

Analytics

For its time: 5/5
Read today: 4/5.
Wollstonecraft Meter: 9/10

POSTED BY: Adri is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy.

Reference: McIntyre, Vonda. Dreamsnake [Houghton Mifflin, 1978].

Feminist Futures: The Female Man

Dossier: Russ, Joanna. The Female Man [Bantam, 1975]

Filetype: Book

Executive Summary: Two women -- Joanna, a writer living in 1970s New York, and Jeannine, who lives in a parallel reality where the Great Depression never ended -- find their lives uprooted when Janet Evason, a time traveler from a future, all-female society called Whileaway, gathers them into her orbit.

Joanna is a staunch feminist and shows Janet around her world as the two women attempt to explain each's reality to the other. Jeannine is obsessed with the idea of marriage, and her mother's constant pressure doesn't help things. Jeannine is not enthusiastic about marriage, or her current best prospect, a guy named Cal, but the prospect of either getting married or remaining unmarried consumes most of her thoughts. After Janet collects Jeannine, the three women retreat to the home of a "typical family." This home is provided by the Wildings, and their daughter, Laura Rose, who begins exploring a sexual relationship with Janet.

Janet explains Whileaway's technologically advanced, but largely agrarian society, where all sexual relationships are homosexual, since a plague killed off all men many generations earlier. Children are conceived through a scientific process, and children only stay with their biological mothers for a few years before going away to school and then the series of work placements that will occupy the rest of their lives. Joanna and Jeannine are able to briefly visit Whileaway, and meet Janet's wife. 

In visiting Jeannine's milieu, Jeannine visits her family and goes on dates with several men, trying to imagine what a marriage to one of them might look like, and if it would be better than settling for Cal.

Ultimately, all three women find themselves transported to yet another reality, this time by Jael, an assassin from a dystopian future where the men and women are locked into a literal battle of the sexes. Jael takes the three women through her reality, assassinates a male leader, and reveals the technology that has allowed her to pull together these four versions of the same woman, but from different, parallel timelines.

Feminist Future: Jael suggests to Janet that there was no plague that wiped out the men of her timeline, but rather a literal battle like the one Jael is currently living through, and then the female survivors eradicated that narrative from their histories as Whileaway evolved from the resulting peace. Although Janet doesn't believe her, this suggests that the book is positing three possible futures: one in which the men and women continue on with women struggling to achieve equality and making small progress here and there, which extends from Joanna and Jeannine's presents; another in which, as women are ascendant in power, the men literally fight back against any further progress and the sexes are segregated; and finally, a future in which only one sex survives. The final scenario is the only peaceful one, although Whileaway is shown to have its own share of violence, however rare.

Hope for the Future: At the end of the book and after their stay with Jael, Joanna and Jeannine return to their timelines with a new sense of power and purpose. There is a stronger sense that they will not only advocate more strongly for themselves, but for other women, as well. There's no clear roadmap toward peaceful co-existence between men and women, but the sense that progress is possible is definitely there.

Legacy: This book is probably Russ' most influential work of fiction, where her book How to Suppress Women's Writing is likely her most heralded work of non-fiction. It takes the ideas of feminism and foregrounds them in a fairly didactic way, and confronts head-on many assumptions about ability and the place of women in society. It's interesting to think of this book in conversation with Herland (which Russ may or may not have had access to), because both are largely works of explication, where there isn't a whole lot of plot movement. In the same way that Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote three men that were meant to capture three aspects of masculinity, Russ' four women are clearly archetypes of different aspects of the female experience, if not "femininity." 

It is a near-certainty that, for many female readers in 1975, this book was the first time they were able to see themselves in science fiction. From Joanna's ardent striving for equality in a world that isn't interested, to Janet's deft and capable discharge of her many different roles and jobs, to Jeannine's inner monologue and back-and-forth with her mother about what she was doing with her life, to the ferocity of spirit and desire to exact vengeance that Jael encapsulates, there are so many aspects of womanhood that Russ just comes out and addresses frankly and directly. In The Female Man, there's no way to hide behind the narrative or pretend, like so many of James Tiptree, Jr.'s readers did, that the subtext isn't really saying *that.*

In Retrospect: Stylistically, this book is a challenge. I don't know how critics have parsed it into which literary movements, but to me, the style is postmodern in the same way that the works of Donald Barthelme or some of Kurt Vonnegut's works are. In Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, there's a moment where he writes himself, the author, into the book as he attempts to deal with the repercussions of his mother's suicide, and in Timequake, he seemed to not really want to write the novel, so he largely wrote about writing the novel. Russ' work here pre-dates those books by at least a decade. She writes herself into the novel, and out of it. Her character Joanna is both her and not her. The writing is elliptical and tangential, and seems less concerned with narrative than emotional clarity. And there are a lot of emotions the Russ is attempting to work through. So certainly, the style of the telling will be a barrier to some readers, as even contemporary experimental novels are. 

The closest we really get to a propulsive narrative happens in the last third of the novel after Jael gathers the other three Js together. This is also the most problematic section of the book. I'm not the right person to have a discussion about intersectionality, but I will say that as a contemporary reader, Russ' characterizations of the marginalized within Jael's gender segregated society made me feel icky. Given what I've already said about the style of the novel, it can be hard to pin down exactly what I think Russ was saying at the time of the writing about non-conforming individuals, but it didn't feel great. I had a bigger problem with those passages than I did with Jael extolling the virtues of killing all men.

I think that in the end, The Female Man is a profound time capsule of a moment in which feminism was undergoing a radical shift toward the mainstream, and as a book that asks more questions than it gives answers, it's still an important read. As a guy, reading this book provides both an analytical and empathetic framework for understanding not just other works by female authors in a broader context, but it also offers a window into moving through the world as a woman. Conversations that Russ presents from a party, or an evening out, I know I've heard before, but they are so cringe-inducing, I can only hope I've never been one of the participants.  

The stylistic experiments are probably less engrossing than they were when they were new, but they help anchor the book in an emotional now that still resonates, almost fifty years after the book was first written.

Analytics

For its time: 5/5
Read today: 3.5/5.
Wollstonecraft Meter: 8.5/10

Published by Vance K — co-editor and cult film reviewer at nerds of a feather since 2012.

Feminist Futures: The Future is Female!

Dossier: Yaszek, Lisa. The Future is Female! [Library of America, 2018]

Filetype: Book

Executive Summary: The subtitle to The Future is Female! is "25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin", which is a fairly accurate summation of the anthology editor Lisa Yaszek has put together, though it is interesting that in collecting the stories from three eras she has chosen to note Pulp as an era but mark the ending as a single author.

Yaszek reaches farther back in time than most with The Future is Female! The earliest story, "The Miracle of the Lily" was published in 1928 and the next two, "The Conquest of Gola" and "The Black God's Kiss" were published in 1931 and 1934 respectively. "Black God's Kiss" is a particularly well considered selection as marks the first appearance of the legendary sword and sorcery character Jirel of Joiry. 

Yaszek divides the anthology into three major Eras: Pulp, Golden Age, and New Wave. Three Pulp Era stories are included here, a whopping thirteen from the Golden Age, and a solid nine from the New Wave era. There is perhaps a wider gulf between the final pulp era story "Black God's Kiss" to Leslie Perri's "Space Episode" than there is between the Golden Age to the New Wave, at least as defined by Yaszek. There isn't much of a line dividing the Golden Age stories of "Car Pool" and "For Sale, Reasonable" from the New Wave "Birth of a Gardener" and "Tunnel Ahead". There is strong narrative and thematic similarity on either side of the line.

Ending The Future is Female with the powerhouse trio of Joanna Russ, James Tiptree, Jr, and Ursula K. Le Guin is a power statement and an incredible way to close out an anthology.


Feminist Future: Though not all of the stories included in The Future is Female are explicitly feminist, the act of a woman existing is feminist in nature and a woman carving out a place for herself in any industry is a feminist act. It can also be a revolutionary act. In her introduction to The Future is Female!, Lisa Yaszek writes

"Adopting personae ranging from warrior queens and heroic astronauts to unhappy housewives and sensitive aliens, women were pioneers in developing our sense of wonder about the many different futures we might inhabit, partners in forging the creative practices associated with the best speculative fiction, and revolutionaries who blew up the genre when necessary to address the hopes and fears of American women." 

In revisiting the history of science fiction and in noting the continued presence of women most often forgotten at all times in this genre's history, Yaszek reminds us that the existence of the work itself is feminist even if any individual story may or may not be.

Legacy: Much as Pamela Sargent was intending to do with her Women of Wonder anthologies, Lisa Yaszek is reminding readers that women have *always* been a part of science fiction and fantasy. It would be an impossible task to offer up a proper survey of women in science fiction in just one volume or even two. What Lisa Yaszek accomplishes here is a broad as possible survey showing off the range of achievement of women in science fiction and fantasy. 

While luminaries such as Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree, Leigh Brackett, Andre Norton, and C.L. Moore are included, Lisa Yaszek reminds readers that the field includes a number of names that we might not remember today but really ought to. When we talk about the earliest science fiction writers, we should remember Clare Winger Harris and Leslie Stone. When we talk about that Golden Age, we should remember Rosel George Brown and Alice Glaser and Mildred Clingerman. With The Future is Female!, Lisa Yaszek ensures we don't forget.



In Retrospect: The Future is Female! stands on its own as an anthology surveying some of the history of women in science fiction and fantasy, but I cannot help but compare it to Pamela Sargent's seminal Women of Wonder anthology. More than forty years separate the two anthologies, but they share a common theme and a common purpose: the acknowledgement and remembrance of where science fiction and fantasy has come from, the opportunity to create a platform placing a spotlight on the women of the genre.

Yaszek covers some of the same ground as Sargent did in the original Women of Wonder, including four stories also selected by Sargent for her anthology: "That Only a Mother" (Merril), "Contagion" (MacLean), "When I Was Miss Dow" (Dornan), "Baby You Were Great" (Wilhelm). 

The difference, of course, is that Yaszek has the benefit of time. Though beginning with a story published in 1948, Sargent also included contemporary stories to when Women of Wonder was published. The most recent story in The Future is Female! is fifty years old and Yaszek has had the benefit of a wider range of subsequent anthologies and a revitalized interest in classic science fiction and rediscovering the lost masters. 

Some of that benefit of time makes Yaszek's decision to include a story co-authored by Marion Zimmer Bradley a very curious and uncomfortable one. Bradley's status as an important writer is not in question, but given that Bradley's own daughter came forward in 2014 stating that Bradley sexually abused her and other children, as well as permitting and facilitating the same abuse perpetuated by Bradley's husband, I just don't know how to justify the inclusion of "Another Rib". It is not as horrifying a story as compared to "The Wind People" (which was included in Women of Wonder) in terms of content compared to the personal life of MZB, but continuing to anthologize Bradley is to continue to celebrate Bradley. 

Moving on to writers worth spending the time on, in Leigh Brackett's "All the Colors of the Rainbow" aliens visit Earth, the backwater planet thta we are, to help uplift the planet to eventual membership in a galactic federation. The aliens seem to look just like us (or close enough), except they're green. This is straight up a story about racism as she has two aliens visit a small southern town that never bothered with integration because, well, black folks just didn't want to live there (aka, they were run out of town the same vicious way these aliens are treated). It's a bit simplistic, but compelling and well written. It's also a science fiction story overtly dealing with racism, and I'm not sure how often that happened, especially in 1957. Maybe I would be surprised.

Though I've heard of Jirel of Joiry for almost as long as I've read fantasy, I've never read any of C.L. Moore's stories. I don't think I realized just when these stories were published, certainly not as far back as 1934. "The Black God's Kiss" holds up. It is a classic sword and sorcery story featuring a bad ass heroine and it is told with such timeless craft that with some minor exceptions it could almost have been published for the first time this year. It's good, period.

With "The Tunnel Ahead", Alice Glaser offers up a future with significant overcrowding (the United States has a population of 1 billion), resulting in tightly crammed automated cars and limited opportunities for outside play - a 40 mile trip the beach takes 5 hours, plus several hours waiting in line to go into the water, and no opportunity to actually swim just tread. It's a fairly tightly controlled domestic story, but with a hard twist at the end that's just delightful if you find twists delightful. The twist, in a different sense, in reminiscent of Judith Merril's story "That Only a Mother", a domestic story that lives on a gut punch of an ending.

I enjoyed Joanna Russ's "The Barbarian" far more than I did her seminal novel The Female Man, likely because "The Barbarian" is a story of a strong female warrior reminiscent of Jirel of Joiry, though working from a different base. I'm already looking for more of Russ's Alyx stories.

Ending The Future is Female! with Ursula K. Le Guin's "Nine Lives" was an excellent choice. I still find it interesting that Le Guin is almost an era onto herself here, but I also can't find much to argue with that decision. Originally published in Playboy under the byline "U.K. Le Guin", "Nine Lives" was a finalist for the Nebula Award and that recognition is very much deserved. "Nine Lives" deals with cloning and the idea of self, as well as life in a very hostile environment. 


This is a top notch anthology. If you're looking for a contemporary anthology putting a spotlight on many of the great science fiction and fantasy writers of the past, you can't do much better than The Future is Female!.


Analytics

For its time: 5/5
Read today: 3.5/5
Wollstonecraft Meter: 8.5/10 


POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 2017 & 2018 Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan.

Feminist Futures: Her Smoke Rose Up Forever

Dossier: Tiptree Jr, James. Her Smoke Rose Up Forever [Tachyon, 2004]

Filetype: Book

Executive Summary: This collection of 18 short stories and novellas spans the publication career of Alice Bradley Sheldon, who wrote chiefly under the pseudonym "James Tiptree, Jr." until her identity (and gender) was revealed. She also wrote under the name Racoona Sheldon, a persona also represented by a pair of stories included here.

The stories included in this anthology span a wide range of sci-fi settings, from present day ("The Last Flight of Doctor Ain" and "The Women Men Don't See") to established outer space operations ("And I Have Come Upon this Place by Lost Ways" and "We Who Stole the Dream") to scientific or space exploration ("The Man Who Walked Home," "The Girl Who Was Plugged In," and "Houston, Houston Do You Read?"). There are a number of other stories that center the point-of-view in an "other" or "outsider" character, whether it's a human gripped by some form of madness or psychic distress ("Your Faces, O my Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!" and "With Delicate Mad Hands") or some type of far-future, evolved human or sentient, decidedly non-human alien ("Love is the Plan, The Plan is Death" and "Slow Music"). The breadth of the collection is truly staggering. 

One of the best-known works here is "The Screwfly Solution," which tells the story of a mysterious pathogen that is driving men all across Earth to commit femicide — murdering women without seeming to realize what they're doing. I will not spoil the reveal buried in the last line of the story, which gives some clarity to what's been taking place. 

Another story that has come to take on something of a legendary status is "The Women Men Don't See." In this one, a male narrator — Don Fenton, a comfortably middle-class businessman who has nothing much to distinguish himself — tells the story of an ill-fated jungle tour in Mexico when the chartered plane he's on crashes on a sandbar in a storm. He and Ruth Parsons, one of the other passengers, set off to cross a marsh in order to find help, leaving Ruth's daughter and the pilot, Esteban, behind with the plane. Don struggles to perceive Ruth as anything but a collection of types — a "Mother Hen" with her daughter, one of the countless "Mrs. Parsons" working in accounting and billing et cetera throughout the D.C. bureaucratic corps — but as Ruth begins behaving very strangely and mysterious lights and sounds accost them in the marshes at night, Don begins to realize that Ruth might be preparing to go to extreme lengths to get away from the world of men...the kind of men who refuse to acknowledge in her any individuality or unique humanity.

One of the more heartbreaking stories in this collection of heart-breakers and gut-punchers is "Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!" This is a parallel narrative of the authorities and family members of a girl who has escaped from a psychiatric hospital, and the story of the girl herself, who believes that she is a courier in a far-future after the nuclear wars, when all men have died off. The collision of her beautiful fantasy world and the ugly, brutal reality that she (thankfully) can't see but is nevertheless tightening its net around her is a painful journey to go on, but one that is beautifully rendered.

Feminist Future: There are a number of feminist futures (and presents) on display throughout Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. And, truth be told, most of them are pretty grim. These are stories where individual women and groups of women are victimized by men just as a matter of routine, where women are expected to perform scientific as well as sexual roles for their male crewmates during space exploration, and about women in societies where men have vanished, but (unlike Herland) hardly find themselves at peace in a worry-free utopia. 

Hope for the Future: These are not hopeful futures. The worlds of James Tiptree, Jr. reflect in various far-flung settings a profound, nuanced, and lived-in understanding of the big and small ways in which women might be victimized, ignored, made invisible, or treated like property throughout most of the 20th century. Alice Sheldon took her lived experiences, which clearly filled her with a pervasive sense of righteous outrage, and transposed them into speculative frameworks that could illuminate her struggles and the struggles of women more broadly. By couching daily rituals of degradation or possessiveness in narrative and genre trappings, Sheldon was able to discuss and probe with deep empathy the effects of gender inequality that plagued her own era, and many of which sadly persist to this day, despite some progress. So in that way, thirty years after her death, her pessimism was at least partly justified.

Legacy The work of Alice Sheldon inspired generations of female authors who felt that, for the first time, they were able to see themselves in science fiction. At a time when Arthur C. Clarke was writing stories where a hyper-intelligent ape might be a member of a space crew but a woman could not, Alice Sheldon was telling stories with female protagonists that could make women who experienced the same kinds of societal constraints that she did feel seen. That she had to do it in the guise of a man was instructive to the science fiction community at large, and Sheldon's contribution remains memorialized today in the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award and Tiptree Fellowships.

In Retrospect: First, a quick primer on "James Tiptree, Jr." For a wonderful audio profile, check out this story from KCRW's Unfictional in 2015. Tiptree appeared on the science fiction scene in the late 1960s with a string of short stories that immediately landed on lists for the top awards in the field, but he never arrived to pick up the awards. Never made personal appearances at all. But Tiptree kept up correspondences with a number of fans and young genre authors, particularly young women. Known to these correspondents as "Uncle Tip," Tiptree wrote overtly sexual, explicitly phallic stories in a muscular, brash style that often centered on female protagonists or on men confronted with a woman or group of women who explode against their plans, perceptions, or worldview, forever altering or imperiling them. In the landscape of late-1960s science fiction, this was a startling anomaly. Men simply didn't write women's stories in that field. Women's stories largely weren't told — unless women were included in roles like the ones in which Don Fenton saw Ruth Parsons...secretaries, mothers in the background of men's stories, assistants, etc. 

So people began to wonder if maybe James Tiptree, Jr. wasn't secretly a woman. It's hard to imagine this detective work coming from anything but a place of ill will. Whether to discredit the stories or the author, the digging into who Tiptree *really* was ultimately forced "Uncle Tip" to come clean as Alice Bradley Sheldon, formerly of Army intelligence and the CIA. Alice Sheldon and Racoona Sheldon never received the acclaim James Tiptree, Jr. did, but the work remained astonishing, gripping, and bleak. 

In reading Tiptree, I couldn't help but be reminded of Flannery O'Connor in that wherever the stories started or whichever direction they may start heading, they would always veer hard to death. Characters don't get happy endings, hope is inevitably extinguished just when it seemed likely to pay off, and those misgivings nagging at the back of characters' minds always turn out to be harbingers of a doom lurking just up ahead. The writing veers from aggressively straightforward to experimental, but the characters remain vibrant and engrossing. Even though plowing through this anthology winds up taking a toll, making the world look perhaps a little more gray, a little less trustworthy when you look up from the pages, these stories represent a towering body of work. 

Analytics

For its time: 5/5
Read today: 5/5.
Wollstonecraft Meter: 10/10

Published by Vance K — co-editor and cult film reviewer at nerds of a feather since 2012.

Feminist Futures: Woman on the Edge of Time

Dossier: Piercy, Marge. Woman on the Edge of Time [Knopf, 1976]

Filetype: Book

Executive Summary: After attempting to protect her niece from an abusive pimp, Connie Ramos is brutally beaten and then institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital where she is frequently medicated and not believed that *she* is the victim and not the aggressor. Connie has a history of mental illness, drug abuse, and had previously lost custody of her child. 

It is as part of that mental instability that Piercy reveals Connie can see and hear Luciente, a woman from the future who wishes to show off that nearly utopian future as something Connie needs to aspire to because it is women like Connie who can help make that future come true. 

Traveling somehow to 2137 Connie is introduced to a possible future that has solved pollution, racism, classism, sexism, and has upended every social and political structure in order to build a better world than the one Connie knows.


Feminist Future: From the opening scenes of the real world dystopian hellscape of 1970's era poverty, mental illness, and sex trafficking, Marge Piercy paints a damning picture of instutionalism and the social politics of poverty and mental health. It rings all too true and echoes the horror stories many of us have grown up reading.

That part of Woman on the Edge of Time isn't the feminist future. At the time Piercy was writing, that was telling the truth through contemporary fiction. The feminist future is Connie's initially inadvertent time travel to the year 2137. This is a vision of the future offering a return to a more pastoral and cooperative society. As mentioned in the Executive Summary, that future has solved the problems of pollution, racism, classism, sexism, greatly reduced crime to almost nil, and the nature of the community is so foreign to Connie that she can barely accept how it could work or that, despite the hell she is traveling from, it could even be desirable. 

On the surface (and a bit deeper), it is a utopian future. There is still conflict, but that conflict is far away. The ruined Earth is not fully healed and restored, but it is well on its way. The society of Mattapoisett has eliminated hierarchy. Everyone contributes based on their skills and inclinations. There is widely available mental health care without stigma. Oh, and children are raised by three non biological mothers, some of which are male.

"How can men be mothers! How can some kid who isn't related to you be your child?"

[. . .]

"It was part of women's long revolution. When we were breaking all the old hierarchies. Finally there was that one thing we had to give up, too, the only power we ever had in return for no more power for anyone. The original production: the power to give birth. Cause as long as we were biologically enchained, we'd never be equal. And males never would be humanized to be loving and tender. So we all became mothers. Every child has three. To break the nuclear bonding."

Piercy envisions a far more equitable society, balanced and harmonious in all (or most) ways. That Connie is Mexican-American (her full name is Consuela) is completely unremarkable in the future she visits. Mattapoisett is a comfortably mixed race community where gender and sexual preference is unimportant.


Hope for the Future: Marge Piercy presents an ultimately hopeful future, but offers no promise that it will be achieved. One of the central points to the scenes set in the future is that Luciente is hoping that Connie will be one of the change agents to help move society a step closer to making that future a reality. On the surface, the idea that a lone individual forcibly locked into a mental hospital and non voluntarily undergoing experimental treatment could be a focal point for change seems somewhat absurd.

On the other hand, the bestselling book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks details how the cells of a poor woman, taken without her knowledge or permission, became vital to the development of vaccines and other advances in medicine. So, whether from an act of resistance or a violation of Connie's autonomy, perhaps Connie could be that change agent. Perhaps there is a future where she is out of the facility and her actions spark a movement. 

There's no way to know, of course, because Woman on the Edge of Time ends with ambiguity. Not only do we not know if that future was true, we don't know if Connie's resistance put humanity on the course of positive change or if it will move to the corporate hell that she glimpsed in a different visit to the future.


Legacy: Consistently mentioned among the most notable feminist science fiction novels of the 1970's, Woman on the Edge of Time has maintained its status as a major feminist novel for the last forty years. It may not be in the first tier of novels mentioned (for that, you would consider works like The Female Man or The Dispossessed), but it is pretty firmly in that next list of titles discussed.  

It is notable that when Wiscon included a Retrospective Award when presenting the James Tiptree Jr Award in 1995, Woman on the Edge of Time was included. It is also notable the novel has remained in print and a new edition published in 2016, marking the novel's 40th anniversary. Not many otherwise classic works can say the same.


In Retrospect: To the point that we consider "literary" fiction as its own genre rather than a false marker of quality, Woman on the Edge of Time is arguably more of a "literary" novel than it is a speculative fiction novel. 

I'm a "big genre" reader, meaning that if a novel has speculative elements it's part of the genre. So, by no means am I pushing Woman on the Edge of Time out of the genre. It's stone classic and there is no question that it is an integral part of the genre. One of the more interesting aspects of the novel, though, is whether Connie's time travel is all in her mind or not. 

If it is all in her head, this is a straight up literary fiction novel detailing the horror and barbarism of experimental mental health care when the novel was written in the 1970's.

More than forty years later, it holds up. Perhaps some of the details of institutionalism have changed, and hopefully for the better, but the presumed lack of humanity of the poor and the ill is something we see all too often today. The power and pain in Piercy's storytelling is just as strong today as it must have been when readers first encountered this novel in 1976. The portrayal of Connie's medical "treatment" after being involuntarily committed is incredible in its raw alienation.

Whether readers accept the future setting of Connie's time travel as something that really happened or if it is viewed as part of Connie's mental illness (or drug abuse), the simple fact is that Woman on the Edge of Time is a straight up gripping novel that has stood the test of time.


Analytics

For its time: 4/5
Read today: 4/5.
Wollstonecraft Meter: 8/10


POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 2017 & 2018 Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan.

Feminist Futures: The Women Who Are About To...

Opting out of the patriarchy in Tiptree and Russ.

"This will never be found.

Who am I writing for, then?"

Following on from my essay last week about feminist separatism in SFF, I wanted to move on to look at two stories which rely on women "opting out" of patriarchy not on a separatist societal level, but on a destructive, individualistic one. These are "The Women Men Don't See", a novelette by James Tiptree Jr. (also known as Alice Sheldon), published in 1973; and We Who Are About To..., published in 1976 by Joanna Russ. Each story offers a different perspective and tone to what is ultimately the same question: what does it take to truly escape from patriarchy?

(Note: this is a spoiler-heavy essay which discusses themes and events all the way through both stories -- proceed at your own risk!)

I'm nowhere near well read enough to make authoritative sweeping statements like this, but I'm going to go for this one anyway: The Women Men Don't See must be one of the best and most timeless genre stories out there today, not to mention one of the most riffed-upon story titles (although, frankly, almost every title in the Her Smoke Rose Up Forever collection is excellent). It's a title that's hard not to link to Sheldon/Tiptree's own status maintaining a cis male cover identity in science fiction, while presenting as female in her daily life. That "The Women Men Don't See" manages to be a successful and readable-in-2018 story is even more impressive given that it contains an utterly insufferable male narrator, through whose flawed lens the real story is filtered.

Don Fenton is a man travelling through Central America on his way to a fishing spot in Belize (except, of course he isn't), when a change of plans puts him on a plane with a mother and daughter on their way to Chetumal. When the plane goes down, Don, pilot Esteban, and the two women - who we gradually learn are called Ruth and Althea Parsons - find themselves stuck in the jungle, and after taking a trip away from the plane wreckage for supplies, Don and Ruth find themselves even more isolated with each other. The mundane aspects of the story take what to Don - and therefore the reader - comes across as a complete left-field shift into the supernatural when a speedboat full of aliens comes to collect them. Ruth has made contact with these aliens, and has seen in them an escape from the patriarchal structures in which she and her daughter must operate.

Don Fenton's narration puts a filter of misogynistic, racist sleaze over nearly every event in the story. He is outright objectifying towards Captain Esteban, constantly referring to his Mayan heritage through odd remarks about appearance and discussion of outdated, stereotypical customs. Indeed, Esteban is probably sexualised more than either of the Parsons: although Don does get in an early opinion on Althea -- otherwise a largely absent player in the story -- and spends a fair bit of time thinking nasty things about Ruth while the two are stranded together. Within the novelette, Tiptree has limited space to bring nuance to the other characters, especially given the limitations of Don's viewpoint, and its only Ruth that really comes out as three dimensional, even while central mysteries around her actions remain. Ruth's conversation about the reality of women's lives is literally one of existence in the margins, where it is only possible for women (note, both of these stories are very binary) to operate in the cracks left behind by male power and violence. This position is perhaps a little lacking in intersectional nuance, given that Ruth is a white woman who has been able to raise a daughter alone with money left over to charter a plane in the Yucutan, but it's one that fits the story to great effect: you can almost feel Don winding up the smug retorts for a conversation about "women's lib", only to be shut down by a woman who completely fails to follow her side of the script.

What's most fascinating, and repulsive, about Fenton is that his narrative is told in past tense - he is telling us a story with the foreknowledge of what these women will do - and yet he is still incapable of centring them in the story, or of reevaluating their emotions in light of the information he gains at the end. At one point, after being stranded with Ruth Parsons for a day, he watches her gutting fish and marvels at her strength and resourcefulness, before literally dismissing it: "I blink away the fantasies and see a scared little woman in a mangrove swamp". Yet, it is this woman who defies Don (and his gun), makes contact with an alien species and leaves the planet and the patriarchy behind, an unthinkable act for the actual patriarch. It's a highly effective way to underline the point about coexistence, and I can only assume from the fact that this story didn't blow Sheldon/Tiptree's "cover" that it's a believable portrayal of a man by someone writing as a man, at least in the context of mid-70s science fiction.

While Tiptree's characters only crash in the Yucutan, Russ sends her castaways much further afield. The narrator of We Who Are About To... is a passenger on an automated spaceship that crashes, stranding eight passengers (five female, three male, the only demographic detail the book feels the need to aggregate) on an uncolonised planet with limited supplies and no hope of rescue in their lifetimes. The narrator is immediately fatalistic about the group's chances of survival, which rubs up against the optimistic colonising spirit of the rest of her compatriots. Within days, they are attempting to set up long-term plans for childbirth (discussing the ideal "rota" to ensure genetic diversity before even establishing safe food and water supplies) while she seeks the most painless, drug-assisted way to kill herself. Compounding the difficulties Russ' narrator has with her fellows are their quickly evolving relationships with each other: initially, a black woman called Nathalie emerges as leader, using her intelligence and willingness to get things done to assert authority; however, she quickly ends up in a violent altercation with Alan, the youngest and physically largest of the men, who takes issue with her telling him what to do. The narrator laments that "patriarchy is coming back, has returned (in fact) in two days", and there's a clear sense of building tension as the interactions within the camp start to strain.

Except, of course, this is a 100-page barely-novel, not a slow-burning social drama, and no sooner have these tensions been established than Russ' narrator's desire to die comfortable and alone is brought into sharp, fatal conflict with her fellow humans. Ironically, it's fatal for them first, not for her: after leaving with less than her share of resources to a nearby cave (travelling off on a "broomstick", no less), she is hunted back down by the remainder of the group, who try to punish her for her non-compliance. Despite the first person narration, we don't really get a sense of her emotional response to this; she not only kills the group who try to bring her back, but goes out of her way to shoot the last two women (an old, rich mother and her chronically ill, adoptive daughter) back at the camp as well. This takes place just over halfway through the book. The remaining half is her slow starvation, complete with hallucinations and meditations on her life and choices (though much remains obscured from the audience - in particular, we never learn what she means when she mentions she is "not exactly an amateur" at the "game" of dealing death). This makes for an unusually structured story, but one which allows for a great deal of depth to be given to the narrator's motives and thoughts as she processes what is happening to her, which come to a more personal climax towards the end of the book.

Taken purely from the perspective of the ends it achieves, Russ' narrator's violent rejection of her compatriots' survival plan is pointless: she herself notes the multifaceted absurdity of killing people who tried to kill her to stop her from dying, and her reasons for believing that the rest of them would have died as well are all too compelling. However, We Who Are About To... isn't about the narrator's choices, or even the outcomes of those choices, so much as the lengths she must go to in order to make them. Once she starts exploring that unwillingness to compromise, we also get hints at how this plays into her life before the spaceship, which one of her hallucinations characterises as "starving" in a parallel to her current end state. In the language of more recent media, the narrator is "non-compliant", and while it appears that her previous life in a technologically comfortable 21st century gave her the scope to live out her choices safely, its only in this hostile, isolated environment where "freedom" is truly possible - in what turns out to be the emptiest of victories. Its a choice Russ' narrator shares with Ruth Parsons, whose glimpses of past also hint at a life lived deliberately in the margins, out of the reach of male power.

And, while the stories end in very different ways, ultimately they share a simple message: if you're inside the patriarchy, life without its influence is literally unknowable, both to the characters and to us as readers. The experiences they share are somewhat limited in their speculative scope - centring relatively privileged, well resourced women who have had certain choices to get to the "point of no return" they end up at - and neither offer much in the way of hopeful progress. But both hold up very well today as vital, defining works from two of the most important voices in feminist science fiction from the 1970s, and are well worth looking up.

POSTED BY: Adri is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy.

Feminist Futures: A Door Into Ocean

Dossier: Slonczewski, Joan. A Door Into Ocean [Arbor House, 1986]

Filetype: Book

Executive Summary: This is the story of a planet of women, the Sharers of Shora, and what happens when they come back into contact with a patriarchal society after thousands of years of isolation. Shora, a completely ocean-covered planet, is in a binary system with Valedon, a “normal” world; the latter is one of the ninety-odd members of a galactic order decimated by a long-ago calamity, which has led the remnants of humanity to adopt strict prohibitions on certain types of technology, notably nuclear power. The million inhabitants of Shora have only recently been “rediscovered” by Valedon, and have escaped notice of this remnant government, but the situation is not going to last: the representative of the Patriarch (did I mention that the ruler of the galactic order is literally called "The Patriarch"?) is due to visit, and thanks to increasing trade between the two planets, he’s finally putting Shora on his agenda.

We get a couple of interesting snapshots of Valedon’s caste-based society, and its internal conflicts and interactions with the galactic patriarchy. However, most of the book’s narrative and effort is expended on fleshing out Shora itself. Plotwise, this is a book of two halves. The first is a slow build introducing the characters, their worlds, and the conflicts between them: Sharers Merwen and her daughter Lystra; a Valan called Berenice who is part of the first family to re-establish contact with Shora; and a Valan boy called Spinel, who undertakes an “apprenticeship” with Merwen and becomes the lens through which we learn about more alien aspects of Sharer culture. Inevitably, despite Berenice’s best efforts, Valedon ends up sending a military force to subdue Shora, headed by her fiance Realgar, and the second half deals with the fallout from and resistance to this occupation, and its ultimate effects on both societies.

Feminist Future: The Sharers’ entire existence relies on immense knowledge of and adaptation to the ocean world around them, but the “men = technology, women = nature” stereotype is undermined by their reliance on advanced biological engineering to maintain their existence. The Sharers themselves are a product of this engineering: they are hairless, with webbed hands and large feet, and they develop a symbiotic relationship with a dermatological microbe that helps store oxygen and prolong the time they can spend underwater, while also turning their entire skin purple. They are all female, and must also use their technology for reproduction. Sharer women are considered adults when they take a “selfname”, which is supposed to represent their own worst trait – “the impatient”, “the inconsiderate”, “the lazy”, and they are then encouraged to spend their adult lives disowning that name.

Reinforcing their alien-ness, to the Valans if not to the audience, is a completely different outlook on life and society, based on the concept of (you guessed it) Sharing. This approach borders on silly at times, and I was unconvinced by the linguistic representation in particular; we are told, in the language, that there is no distinction between subject and object for verbs, so “dog eats bone” and “bone eats dog” are literally the same sentence, represented on the page by “the dog shares eating with the bone”. Slonczewski illustrates this by having Merwen, one of the major Sharer characters, mysteriously say “oh, but does not the bone eat the dog?” a few times, except with examples picked to be a bit more convincing. This linguistic element is by the far the most prominent weak link in the otherwise excellent worldbuilding.

Hope for the Future: On a community level, yes. Despite trials and losses (of which the greatest may be… their innocence…) the Sharers manage to overcome the Valan invasion through a combination of non-violent resistance, quiet reasoning and good old fashioned winding people up. The galactic patriarch hanging in the background adds useful short-term constraints on Valan behaviour: they can’t commit genocide against the Sharers, because genocidal technology is a power which can only be employed by the patriarch, and he won’t hesitate to use it against them next time he is in town – such is the balance of power when masculinity is on the line. However, it also leaves a cloud over proceedings at the end, with Sharer society safe from Valedon but perhaps not from the return of an overwhelming and unreasonable masculine force.

A Door Into Ocean is pretty gender essentialist, and the biological engineering of the Sharers means it also embraces eugenics, at least in terms of physical adaptation to Shora's environment. In its defence, the plot does try to contextualise this somewhat: yes, the Sharers are an idealised version of a "feminine" society, but the explanation is not because they’re all female – rather their extreme living environment in the best way they can requires utter adherence to a cooperative, communistic way of life. Sharers still make difficult choices, fall in love, fall out of love, deal with criminals using a dismal understanding of mental healthcare (not that idealised after all...), and fail to live in close proximity to their annoying mothers. But they don’t have more than isolated incidents of murder or violence and or stratification within society, because their society is too precarious to allow those things, and their grasp of technology allows them to still make those precarious lives comfortable and well-connected in a way which doesn’t map onto any human society that I’m aware of. The conflict with Valedon pushes them into more difficult internal debate, particularly regarding the development and use of biological weapons which would be well within their capacity, but the justifications for using these are very different to the usual rationale for inflicting violence on an enemy. On the other side, the Valans and their different factions are a little more broadly painted and generally ended up blending together for me, although I was pleased that most of the military units were depicted as having women at all levels below the very top, and one of those women in particular is very much an ally to patriarchy and instrumental in keeping the conflict going, reinforcing the idea that we are watching a clash of societies and not some narrow, patriarchy-dependent Battle of the Sexes.

The two POV Valans blend well in that mix, and it’s telling that of these two, it’s Spinel who ultimately takes the teachings of Shora to heart, though not by completely rejecting the things he’s learned from his own upbringing. Spinel starts off extremely uncertain and closed off to the Sharers, having been brought unwillingly to the planet to satisfy his parents. However, his experiences on Shora, and a brief return to Valedon, allow him to re-evaluate his own identity and the ways in which one can derive meaning and status in a community. Of course, there’s also an inevitable romance with Lystra.  I can’t say the book needed this romance specifically, but their overall relationship is useful for providing an in-universe answer to the “is The Other human?” question which plagues the characters on both sides for most of the book.

Legacy: A Door Into Ocean was published in 1986, the same year as Pamela Sergeant's The Shore of Women and two years before Sheri S. Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country. It won the John W. Campbell Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (not to be confused with the John W. Campbell award given to best new writers), making Slonczewski the first woman to win the award. Despite this, A Door Into Ocean doesn't seem to have maintained the same level of cultural relevance as other titles in its subgenre, which is a shame because I think it's actually one of the best of the bunch. Slonczewski's biology-driven science fiction puts me in mind of authors like Julie E. Czerneda, who also incorporates a lot of biological science into her books, and A Door Into Ocean also deserves a place among the canon of speculative fiction which makes use of "hard" science beyond the manly domain of astrophysics where too many conversations about hard science fiction still start and end.

In Retrospect: It’s ultimately hard for me to separate my enjoyment of this book out from the fact it ticks a lot of my personal boxes: ocean planet, brilliant interactions between women, and a set of political tensions that has an interesting, complex conclusion. I also feel it avoids some of the missteps that make some of its contemporaries make. There’s a lot here to enjoy even for a less partial reader, both in terms of the worldbuilding and technology, as well as in its approach to conflict. If you’re not sure whether you like novels about planets of women taking on the patriarchy, you could do a lot worse than to start here — despite its more essentialist moments. 


Analytics

For its time: 4/5
Read today: 3/5
Wollstonecraft Meter: 7/10

[Note: this review has been adapted from a 2017 review originally published on Adri's Book Reviews. In the 18 months since I wrote the original, I've learned and changed my opinions on the portrayal of all-female-societies and how they impact the marginalisation of trans and non-binary genders and sexes in fiction. The content of this review has been updated to reflect that and, though I'm leaving the original alone for posterity, I consider this updated version to be the one that reflects my current feelings on the text.]



POSTED BY: Adri is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy.