Nerds on Tour: Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor

Dossier: Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor (2011)

Location: Nigeria

Package Type: Book

Itinerary:  “Harry Potter in Nigeria” is the high concept here, as a Nigerian raised in America living in Nigeria again Sunny, an albino and the titular Akata Witch, finds out that she is a “Free Agent”, someone capable of magic but not raised by magic-using parents. By means of new friends far more versed in the magical world, Sunny learns what it means to have magical ability, and starts to learn about her power and abilities, while at the same time a serial killer is killing children. A serial killer that has ties to the Leopard People magical community that Sunny has herself just become a part of.

Travel Log: I don’t read a lot of YA, and so for the Nerds on Tour, I decided I would challenge myself by going for a YA novel, to further expand my horizons and my reading experience with this part of the Project. And I was very glad that I did. I was absorbed from the beginning, even before Sunny discovers that she has magical powers, by the strength of the writing to bring the reader into the protagonist’s Nigerian world. 

For all of the “Harry Potter in Nigeria” vibe that the novel gives off as mentioned above, especially in the second half of the novel, where the novel really resonated with me, and will likely resonate with other Western readers is the mundane world Nigerian setting. Sunny is a quasi-outsider to this world, having moved to Nigeria in the past, and the character of Sasha provides an even more Western, American character to allow for explanation, explication and exploration of what life is like in this part of West Africa. Okorafor does this in the large and the small, showing the reader a world that is not theirs, right from the first paragraph (where the author explains the unreliability of the power supply). 

Languages, cuisine, culture, family interactions, sports, Sunny brings the reader into her world, and there is just enough explanation and internal monologue to allow a reader to make connections, correlations and understand the world she is in. Okorafor keeps a careful balance between explanation and immersion, allowing readers to come into a world she knows very well and wants to very much introduce her readers to. I could see how things were slightly simplified and focused for a YA audience, but for a novel set in an unfamiliar place, people and culture, that results for me a better experience in getting myself familiar with Sunny’s world. 

The author uses those skills and techniques, in turn, on Sunny and with Sunny as we the reader go on her journey into the magical world of the Leopard People. And what a world. The author provides a culture-centered built from the ground up that resonates with the Harry Potter experience in some of its structure and building elements, (a small group of students drawn together, a magical sub-world hidden from the mundane world, magical competitions, dread secrets and history coming to the fore). And for all of that, this feels like it is a response and a retooling of some parts of Harry Potter that always annoyed me--Sunny and the others are expected to go to regular school, learn mundane subjects as well learn magic from the Leopard People. The pedagogic style of how Sunny and her friends learn magic is vastly different than the boarding school experience we get in Harry Potter. All in all, it feels a lot more plausible as a secret world that could actually work, that feels real and complete. 

This dossier would not be complete without a discussion of Sunny and her friends, our entry into this world. Reflecting the reader’s own disorientation with the world being presented, Okorafor has made Sunny an albino, meaning that she is an outside already, giving readers who are an outsider to the culture, society and world presented someone they can really identify and connect with, and that goes, I think for adult readers as well as the YA reader audience the book is. Add in Orlu, Chichi and the American Sasha, and you have a fast friend quartet of young protagonists who are learning, growing, making mistakes and providing excellent character beats and development in this unfamiliar world. I also appreciate they are messier, more well rounded, and more complicated than more archetypally drawn characters often found in YA fiction. 

Overall, I can strongly recommend Akata Witch not only to readers of YA, but readers of fantasy who want to learn more about West Africa, its world, people and culture.

Analytics

The Adventure: 4/5

The Scenery:  5/5.

NerdTrip Rating: 9/10 Outstanding in its category, a trip relevant to the interests of many in SFF. Even if YA may not necessarily be your bag, this is a trip that you will likely love.

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know?@princejvstin.

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: 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.

Feminist Futures: Amazons!

Dossier: Salmonson, Jessica Amanda. Amazons! [DAW, 1979]

Filetype: Book

Executive Summary: Amazons! is a slim anthology from DAW books, collecting 13 tales of "Heroic Fantasy" with women protagonists. As that genre description suggests, most of the stories here are  secondary world fantasy, involving warriors of some form, although a couple do stretch the definition beyond that. The contributor list is formidable: Andre Norton, C.J. Cherryh, Tanith Lee, Megan Lindholm (better known now as Robin Hobb), and Elizbeth Lynn all put in appearances. There's even a contribution from Joanna Russ in which she compiles and speculates on the fantasy worldbuilding of Emily Bronte, and the queen of her fantasy childhood world of Gondal.

The editor of Amazons!, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, is known to me through her Tomoe Gozen series of novels, which are on my "must read someday" list. Through this anthology, I also learned that in the late 70s she was editor of a small press zine called Windhaven, which apparently printed both fiction and non-fiction from a feminist angle. I couldn't find any issues of Windhaven online in my admittedly short research attempts for this piece, but I'd love to know if any of it is still accessible to audiences of the intertubes. 

Feminist Future: Although most of its content isn't as overtly politicised as some of the other works of this period (or, indeed, from these authors), Salmonson makes it very clear in her introduction to the anthology as a whole, and to some of the individual pieces, that this work is very much situated in the context of feminist SFF and its concerns at the time. Her introduction, which reminded me of Kameron Hurley's "We Have Always Fought", she notes the historical legacy of women warriors from cultures across our world, and the way in which these have been forgotten or overlooked by writers. In line with that, Amazons! feels primarily like a reclamation - using that legacy to re-situate women in the myths and archetypes that heroic fantasy builds on, and showcase the potential that these magical worlds have for telling stories beyond those of gruff half-naked murder-men. This is also the first fiction anthology I have read with a "further reading" section at the back, which feels very fitting: Joanna Russ' seminal How to Suppress Women's Writing was still a few years off at this point, but I have no doubt that the community represented here were already well aware of the cycles of erasure and lack of canonisation that disproportionately impacts women's work.

Hope for the Future: As an anthology, there's obviously no one worldview being portrayed here. However, the dominant theme of the anthology is one of triumph, and almost every story ends in an unambiguous (though not necessarily simple) victory for the worthy hero who has put themselves out there to achieve it. There are only a couple of stories where this victory is predominantly against "the patriarchy", such as "the Woman of the White Waste" by T.J. Morgan; more often, any struggles that women face by virtue of being women are secondary to the main plot.  It's not all happy endings, however: some stories, like Cherryh's "The Dreamstone", are tinged with tragedy (although I understand Cherryh updated the ending of this story in later printings), or "Morrien's Bitch" by Janet Fox.

Legacy: I read Amazons! in 2018, sandwiched between the Deed of Paksenarrion by Elizabeth Moon, a trilogy about a sheepfarmer's daughter who finds her calling as a warrior, and Redemption's Blade by Adrian Tchaikovsky, in which a woman veteran seeks restoration after killing the renegade demigod who took her entire world to war. In that context, the legacy of Amazons! - and, perhaps more importantly, the writers in it and the movement it represents - is one that has made a huge difference to the range and depth of well-crafted woman-centred fantasy narratives out there to discover. Reading the anthology has definitely piqued my interest in the stories that prefaced full novels, namely "The Dreamstone" - which started the Ealdwold series - and "Bones for Dulath" by Megan Lindholm, which was the first appearance of Ki and Vandrien (although neither is a work that the authors are primarily known for now). 

It's also important to note that this is likely the first major SFF anthology edited by a trans person. While this doesn't really affect the content, I think being aware of the position that trans and queer authors have played in the genre - and particularly in the feminist SF of this era, which often feels a bit "heterosexuals and binary lesbians only" in its focus - is very important to counter the erasure and objections to "exceptionalism" that queer voices still face in genre today.

In Retrospect: Basically, it's hard not to believe that Amazons! is a victim of the genre's own progression since the point at which it was written. While the stories still hold up, for the most part what makes them radical is the presence of women protagonists, rather than any inherent message in the stories themselves. Salmonson specifically notes in the introduction to Tanith Lee's stories that she had passed up more "message heavy" submissions when she felt these detracted from the story, because "the depiction of strong women in heroic fantasy (or any other art) is, in and of itself, so innately political to our male-dominant society that any additional polemic is redundant". While I follow the logic, I don't think this was as true in 1979 as Salmonson believed (this is a very white lineup of authors and there's no overt recognition of intersectionality between gender, race and other marginalisations which were just as salient then as now). 

Moreover, I certainly don't think that its true any more: I could probably fill a library with books about "Strong Female Characters" who spend their time getting rescued and/or undermined despite their expertise, and take time out of their limited third person narratives to describe how their breasts feel at random moments. An anthology of stories which just happens to be about women - especially when most of those women happen to be straight and white - isn't inherently radical now in the way Amazons! was intended, and while that description does a disservice to the intent that clearly went into this volume, it's a sad fact that the impact of the stories themselves has been largely lost in the intervening years.

That's not to say there isn't still relevance here, and areas where concerns authors were raising in 1979 are still with us today. This is particularly the case for perhaps the most morally ambiguous, and interesting, story of the bunch: "The Rape Patrol" by Michelle Belling. This is effectively an urban fantasy about a group of vigilante women who hunt down men who have committed crimes like rape and assault, and dispense their own violent justice upon them, before disappearing back into their regular lives. "The Rape Patrol is uncompromising and strongly resonated as a tale of holding men accountable for gender based violence in the face of systems that fail to do so - a story which most of us will find all too familiar.

As a whole, Amazons! is, I think, a book we should know about, whose overall message and design resonates across the ages, even where its specific content has not retained its radical intent. It's a book I'd love to see back in print, at least as an e-book, and one that I'd recommend picking up if it crosses your path. If nothing else, you'll have a diverting evening with a series of kickass women to look forward to - and lots of further reading to follow up on once you get to the end.

Analytics

For its time: 4/5
Read today: 2.5/5
Wollstonecraft Meter: 6.5/10


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.

DYSTOPIAN VISIONS: Dishonored

Dossier: Arkane Studios. Dishonored. [Bethesda Softworks, 2012]

Filetype: Video Game

File Under: Statist Dystopia

Executive Summary: You are Corvo Attano, royal protector, and you've just witnessed your empress murdered by assassins and the heiress kidnapped. You're arrested for her murder and locked in Coldridge Prison. During your interrogation, the Lord Regent reveals that he's framed you for the murder and orchestrated the assassination to further his own agenda. However, before you're execution, you're visted by The Outsider, a mystical being who brands you and grants supernatural powers. Using these powers, and with the support of Loyalists to the heiress, you escape Coldridge Prison and start unraveling the conspiracy and rooting out the corruption the infects the city of Dunwall. Or you can get bloody revenge and murder every single person who ever wronged you, contributing to the rivers of blood that drive an infectious disease that's ravaging the poorer parts of the city.

Dystopian Visions: The world of Dishonored, specifically the city of Dunwall, is a city divided deeply by class. The poor are being wiped out by disease, while the upper classes plot against each other. It's also an industrial world, where whale oil powers everything. This morbid cycle of finding great living things, and literally flaying them alive for the oil that powers everything in the city contributes to the atmosphere of death and decay throughout Dunwall.

Utopian Undercurrents: Dunwall is a city past its prime. The technological advances of the alternate industrial age it exists in are still there, but they're used to suppress underclasses. Parts of the city still reflect the opulence of the peak, and the upper classes are still enjoying the benefits.

Level of Hell: Sixth. You can heal your injuries with a drink if you can afford it, but you'll need those health elixirs whether you're part of the elite or working for one of the many gangs that control the slums.

Legacy: Dishonored took the stealth gameplay of Thief and combined it with the open-ended level design of Deus Ex to create something great. It generally skews towards stealth, no-kill playthroughs or violent, murder-everything playthroughs because it has two endings based on how much murderin' you do, but the gameplay is extremely flexible. It's both an excellent stealth game that nails all of the tools you could want to be sneaky, and a robust action game that gives you dozens of options for killing.

In Retrospect: Dishonored got two pieces of downloadable content that expanded upon the story, which showed the point of view of the Empress's assassins. It also got a recent sequel that received a generally positive if mixed reception. But Dishonored is a fantastic game for all of its world-building. It's beautifully realized in a dark way, and utterly filled with little stories and characters that give it life.

Analytics

For its time: 4/5
Read today: 4/5.
Oppressometer Readout: 8/10.

DYSTOPIAN VISIONS: Bioshock by Irrational Games

Dossier: Irrational Games. Bioshock. [2K Games, 2007]

Filetype: Video Game
 
File Under: Stateless Dystopia

Executive Summary: After your plane crashes into the Atlantic ocean, you swim to the shore of a strange lighthouse. A bathysphere inside takes you to Rapture, an underwater city built by Andrew Ryan. Ryan built this city to escape the governments of the surface world, to build a place where a man could stand on his own without civic obligations or morality weighing him down. His vision realized, Rapture was soon overrun with splicers, people who've infused themselves with genetic manipulations to give themselves superhuman abilities. 

Trapped in Rapture, you find aid in the form of Atlas, another person trying to escape Rapture with his family. While Rapture descends further into chaos, Atlas guides you through territories controlled by Rapture's most cunning or powerful monsters.

Dystopian Visions: Rapture is a city in decay. Every corner is moldy and wet, the city on a precipice in an environment inhospitable to humans. The city itself is as much a character as any others in the game.

Making things worse, the splicers are everywhere. Without laws or morality, the citizens of Rapture reached great heights, but they also committed horrible acts against each other because they could. One's capacity for power was only restrained by what they were willing to do to get it, so the splicers juiced themselves up on genetic enhancements until they went insane.

Some of Rapture's most prominent citizens got there power by taking their interests further than any other. To this end, one of the most interesting characters is Sander Cohen, an artist who eventually grew tired of conventional media and began to use people as his canvas. 

Utopian Undercurrents: Rapture is very obviously the Ayn Rand/Libertarian utopia taken to its furthest extreme. "No gods or kings, only man" reads a banner that hangs under a bust of Andrew Ryan within the lighthouse seen in the first 5 minutes of the game. It's this philosophy that drives Rapture to exploit ADAM, the material that allows for easy genetic manipulation, and drives them to create the Little Sisters and Big Daddies. The Little Sisters are children who've been used to harvest ADAM, and the Big Daddies are their monsterous adult protectors, unbreakably bonded to their duty. This constant drive for more and better builds Rapture to paradise on Earth, until it's pushed over the edge by simple human greed and ambition.

Level of Hell: Sixth. Rapture is a bad place to be if you're not spliced up, but obviously some in Rapture have flourished. If you have no personal limits on what you're willing to do, you might do well in Rapture, provided someone else doesn't kill you off before you get a foothold.

Legacy: Bioshock is important for changing how video games were perceived. At a time when the arguments over whether video games could be art were still fresh, Bioshock told a compelling story with a few twists that could not be as simply replicated with film, the media video games get compared to the most. While the game itself was a natural evolution from some of the games that preceded it (namely Irrational's previous game, System Shock 2), it arrived at a time when consumers were ready for more ambitious story and experience. 

Bioshock led to one direct sequel, Bioshock 2, which was developed by a different team but still set in Rapture, and Bioshock Infinite, set in the cloud city of Columbia. They both take the approach of "thinking person's shooter" with different angles and degrees of success. 

In Retrospect: Bioshock is still absolutely worth playing today, even if it does show its seams and edges more readily than in the past. It changed storytelling in games, so you may not be as susceptible to its wiles but know that your favorite story-heavy FPS game probably got its influences from Bioshock. It's unlikely that you haven't had the story spoiled for you yet, but you might not realize it until your deep in it. Also, few games do world building as well as Bioshock. Rapture is a place you will wish you could experience and return to more often.


Analytics

For its time: 5/5
Played today: 4/5
Oppressometer Readout: 9/10