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.

Microreview [Book]: The Monster Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson

The long-awaited sequel to Dickinson's brutal tale of economic intrigue is a difficult but worthy instalment.

It's been three long, interesting years between the release of Seth Dickinson's The Traitor Baru Cormorant and its fair to say this long-awaited sequel, in which the Traitor becomes the Monster, has been one of my most anticipated releases of the year. The Traitor Baru Cormorant blew me away when I read it in 2015: I was still relatively new to modern adult SFF, and at the time I didn't realise that it was possible to capture this type of political and economic intrigue in fantasy. Baru's journey from island prodigy to rebel leader was immensely satisfying, as was the fact she was doing it all as a civil servant. Then, like all books, it ended, and as anyone who has read it will sympathise, it ended like that. I lost hours of sleep. If you haven't read the book and don't know what I'm referring to, let me warn you not to look for queer happy endings in this otherwise magnificent book and send you away to do what you will.

The Monster Baru Cormorant starts with a new perspective on that very scene: (really, this is your final spoiler warning) the death of Tain Hu, Baru's Aurdwynni lover, as part of her induction into the inner circle of the Empire of Falcrest (also known as the Masquerade), aka the imperial power that conquered her childhood home and ruined her life. This outwardly heartless act turns out to be the key to putting Baru beyond the empire's plans for her: the empire's elite "cryptarchs" are selected not just for their value, but for having a particular person or secret that the empire can blackmail them with and keep them in line. By refusing to beg for Tain Hu's life as she is executed (a decision which Tain Hu herself made and insisted Baru agree to), Baru becomes one of Falcrest's very few "unbound" cryptarchs, a position which unsettles and impresses the other cryptarchs around her. Her promotion also throws her into a world where, perversely, everyone is now aware of secrets she had previously guarded on pain of death, just as her peers are now open about their own secrets. In Falcresti terms, Baru is a "tribadist" -- that's "lesbian" to you and me -- a sexuality subject to severe punishment in a society that values its version of heteronormativity above all else. To make matters even more interesting, a head injury at the very end of Traitor has left Baru with dextral hemineglect, a neural condition where she is effectively "blind" and cannot pick up signals or exercise full control over the right side of her brain.

I wish I could say I had time for a reread of Book 1 before diving in to The Monster Baru Cormorant, but life is what it is and I ended up returning to Falcrest without the opportunity to refresh my memory on what had come before. Luckily, there's a slow start as Baru is inducted as a cryptarch and adjusts to her new normal in the relative comfort of the Elided Keep, which means there are enough reminders about her two-faced plan to bring Aurdwynn to the brink of victory to jump in without previous events fresh in one's mind (this recap will also help). That said, the first section of this book was far from my favourite. Perhaps it's the weird nicknames, which makes everyone sound like they should be bit players in a Warhammer 40,000 Imperium fic, and which seems out of place in Falcrest's otherwise deliberately sterile culture.

Or maybe it's the sterility itself that's the problem here. The Masquerade is a compelling villain, representing a creeping totalitarianism clothed in civilising influence, but up close it's by far the least interesting culture in Dickinson's otherwise vibrant world. Most of the time this is a feature, not a bug: by making the empire clinical and soulless when it isn't actively employing sexual violence and lobotomies to control its populations, we can't help but root more desperately for the generally more benevolent, or at least more human, cultures that risk being wiped off the map. However, it means that the scenes where Baru -- now, in a move which I really can't take seriously, calling herself "Agonist" (luckily Dickinson doesn't push this too hard) -- is getting to grips with her new role feel a little devoid of anything except relentless, unpleasant political scheming.

Luckily, it doesn't take long before Baru and some of her fellow cryptarchs, including a new-ish "friend" called Apparitor (snort) and Baru's old enemy Xate Yawa (who also now has a silly nickname that I've deliberately forgotten and refuse to look up), are sent off to the known world's remaining superpower, a federation of states called Oriati Mbo. Having subdued Aurdwynn's civil war, conquering the Mbo is next on Falcrest's to-do list, and rogue navy captains and awkward Mbo involvement in Aurdwynn notwithstanding, they'd like to do it without descending into all-out war. Unfortunately, hot in pursuit of Baru and co is Tain Shir, Tain Hu's cousin and former prodigy of Cairdine Farrier, the same older cryptarch who trained up Baru. Tain Shir, having heard of the execution of her cousin, has taken it upon herself to hunt her down and show her the "error" of treating people as disposable elements of her plans. Baru herself responds to this with a combination of intense grief and a sense of sunk cost fallacy: she has to succeed, because the woman she loves has died to make it happen. Interspersed with Baru's adventure on the high seas, Dickinson also weaves in the past and the present of a prince of the Mbo, a non-binary "laman" called Tau-indi. Tau provides a window into the culture of their people (which is much more interesting than Falcrest, because everything in this world is), and on meeting with Baru becomes the token cinnamon roll in a story that's otherwise teeming with vipers.

Once again, it's interesting to see Baru's status as an "economic savant" played out in Dickinson's well-realised world, where her toybox is the economics of empire and conquest. Now that we're past all the twisty betrayal stuff, Baru's motivations and actions are generally more straightforward and limited in scope: she spends most of the book in situations where she doesn't have the power to for kind of machinations that brought down Aurdwynn. I spent a lot of time musing on the way that Dickinson portrays political change and the impact that the cryptarchs have: Baru herself, and her mentors in this book, seem to conceptualise politics as a "great game", to the point where the cryptarchs literally have a strategy game designed to model their own world that they use to consider scenarios to bring down Oriati Mbo. In the real world, of course, the causes of political change are complex and can be modelled only in statistical probabilities, if at all - there is no way to trace causes of political change in the way that a strategy game allows. Ultimately, the narrative recognises this as well , and it becomes even more clear in this volume that Baru's ability to manipulate political situations is actually more a talent at coming up with a plausible move in any given circumstance, rather than having power over long-term outcomes. Where The Traitor Baru Cormorant was about the shock of seeing a character turn their extensive powers towards unforgivable goals in the name of protecting something even more valuable, The Monster Baru Cormorant is about watching that character come up against the limits of their own power, and what it means for someone whose reason for existence is so singularly focused towards overcoming that limit.

Whether this book will work for you, of course, very much depends on how much time you have for this particular character study, especially given the grimdark fantasy backdrop Dickinson sets it in. If you read The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin and maintained sympathy for Essun and the awful choices she makes in response to a world that wants to destroy her, Baru's journey may well appeal along the same lines. Interestingly, what I think sets Baru apart from Essun is her ambition, a trait which female characters (and real human people) are disproportionately punished for having. Baru is setting out to secure the survival of her people and their culture, where Essun simply wants to exist freely; does the fact that Baru's atrocities are in pursuit of that wider goal, rather than pure self-preservation, contribute to her "monstrousness"? It's a compelling question, if you buy in to what Dickinson is doing here: but this is definitely not a book for everyone. It also ends on a cliffhanger, which is honestly an enormous disappointment in a book that was so long in coming! The acknowledgements assure me that the end of Baru's journey is already written, but I am somewhat nervous about the lack of publishing date.

If The Monster Baru Cormorant lacks the "wow" factor I found in The Traitor Baru Cormorant, that's probably a reflection of where I am as a reader rather than the quality of this book. Readers who enjoyed the first will find a worthy continuation of Baru's awful adventures, with more of the same political scheming and cultural clashes that made the first book so outstanding. At the end, I feel like this review could ramble for another 5,000 words about different elements of this book (gender! hemineglect! Tau! The Lloysdanes! Xate Yawa's schemes! The Cancrioth!), and perhaps that's the best stamp of approval I can give a book like this: I'm not sure I agree with every choice it makes, but it makes me want to sit and reread and unpick it more. I'll be scheduling a full series reread before the final instalment for sure, and I can't wait to see how Baru's mission ends.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +0 no, you don't ACTUALLY get a bonus for avoiding more tragic queer deaths. +1 dense political worldbuilding which left me with a lot to think about.

Penalties: -0 I'm not penalising Baru for being an "unlikeable" female character with ambition either, no matter how reprehensible her means of achieving it are; -1 the slow start and cliffhanger ending make this a frustrating volume from a storytelling point of view.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

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: Dickinson, Seth The Monster Baru Cormorant [Tor, 2018]

Frankenstein at 200: What Monstrosity Looks Like

One might have been forgiven, in 1966, for thinking, "Welp, that's the end of Frankenstein, right there." It was in that year, you see, that the world got Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter. In this, um, "movie," notorious outlaw Jesse James escapes down to Mexico, where the only doctor in town, and the inhabitant of the ancient castle in the village — you know, one of those great ancient, European-style castles that tiny Mexican villages are always known for — is Doctor Frankenstein's granddaughter. Not daughter, but that's the least of our worries. Jesse's traveling with his only surviving gang member, Hank, who's hurt. When Maria Frankenstein, the "doctor," sends Jesse out into the village to get medicine for Hank, she takes the opportunity to chop out Hank's brain, give him a new one, and turn him into a beefy kill-machine. Even when compared to its awful, awful companion film Billy the Kid Versus Dracula, produced by the same company in the same year, this movie is stunningly incompetent. Words simply fail.

If it were a piece of literature or a cultural icon any less durable than Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, it would have seemed like the gas tank was entirely empty at that point. The book was 150 years old, after all, and James Whale's iconic films were both over thirty years old, and had been followed by over a decade's worth of increasingly dubious sequels and spin-offs that saw Frankenstein's monster paired with several members of the Frankenstein family tree, the Wolfman a few times, Dracula, Abbott and Costello, and...at some point, who could even keep track? So when you've got fly-by-night, drive-in movie producers putting Frankenstein's heirs in the Old West, it would sure seem like the creative well was dry, and the world might have had its fill of Frankenstein movies.

And yet.

You may recall Harry Potter Daniel Radcliffe's recent turn in Victor Frankenstein. Or you might recall the stage play Frankenstein with Sherlock Holmes Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller. Or, unfortunate soul, you may recall the film I, Frankenstein in which the creature gets caught up in the, um, ancient war between...*checks notes*...I guess gargoyles and demons? And there were in the 1990s Roger Corman's Frankenstein Unbound, which featured time travel, and Kenneth Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which featured Branagh and Academy Award-winning screen icon Robert DeNiro wrestling naked in some type of amniotic goo. The point is, if the world should one day tire of reincarnating Mary Shelley's creature, it will be a long, long time hence.

But Shelley's work has invited re-interpretation ever since its original publication 200 years ago — even by Shelley herself. The book first achieved prominence not upon its initial, anonymous publication, but upon its first adaptation to the stage, in 1823. The success of the stage play led to the publication of the second edition of the novel that same year, and the first time Mary Shelley was credited as the author. In 1831, Shelley herself radically altered the text, and published a new version of the book, which takes much of the blame for the events in the novel away from Victor Frankenstein and attributes it rather to fate. There is something primal in Shelley's story, something fundamental that has found continued resonance with the human spirit even through the seismic upheavals in culture, society, and technology that have taken place over the last two centuries.

Shelley's original version of the text carried this epigraph, taken from Milton's Paradise Lost:

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me Man, did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?

Guillermo del Toro has called Frankenstein the ultimate teenage novel, a book forever echoing familiar adolescent feelings like, "I didn't ask to be born," and "How can the people who gave me life not understand me at all?" That is an apt observation, and almost certainly contributes to the book's longevity. And it can't be ignored that Shelley wrote the novel when she was a teenager, herself. But baked into del Toro's observation is a perspective, and it is the Creature's. Del Toro's implicitly suggesting that the reader does and should identify with the Creature, and it is the "monster" who is the point-of-view character. I feel the same way, which is something I discussed in the first installment of this series.

But I also feel that the lessons of the novel, or the cautions and warnings baked into it, extend far beyond one's adolescence and are lessons we must continually re-examine and re-visit on a societal level, specifically because of the cultural and technological upheavals that have led from Shelley's youth to our present. We have accrued greater power over life and death than ever could have been imagined in even the most outlandish speculations of 1818. The casualties of World War I 100 years later could scarcely have been imagined, let alone the notion that organ transplants would one day become routine medical practice. The "horror" of Shelley's imaginings — pillaging corpses for their organs to put into another body — has now saved countless lives. And, unless I am consumed by flame and if I die with my driver's license on me, one day part of me will live on in someone else. Hopefully it's a good part...

As long as humankind is faced with the question of "Though we can do this thing, should we do this thing?" I believe Frankenstein will stay with us, constantly re-invented and re-imagined for our times and our contemporary struggles. And, sure, for crappy movies here and there that are just trying to get mileage from the name. But Mary Shelley seemed to believe that Victor Frankenstein was the guilty party, and his creation Frankenstein's first victim. That's how I read it, anyway, sitting here 200 years later. And that remains instructive. What are the ramifications of our decisions? Our technologies? Our innovations? What might the human cost be? What constitutes "acceptable losses" in the pursuit of knowledge?

But maybe none of this applies to you. I doubt it applies to me. I am neither a creator of technologies nor a wielder of great power. So the thing that I take away from Frankenstein, and the thing that maybe we all need to be reminded of more than anything else, is that those who are different from us are no less human, and we all, in fact, have an obligation to one another. This is not, I think, a lesson we will ever fully learn, and if we need Mary Shelley's Creature to remind us of this from time to time, then long may he live.

Published by Vance K — co-editor and cult film reviewer for nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012, songwriter, and longtime Franken-fan.

Feminist Futures: WisCon and Me

Let me set a scene for you. May 2014, and I have just started getting seriously into SFF in all the wrongest ways. And look, I’d love to go to conventions, have been looking for some around where I live (Western Wisconsin), and hear about WisCon. And it sounds amazing. Small and affordable and lots to see and do. Now let me reiterate, I have very little experience with SFF fandom, am not even on Twitter at this point, and my greatest sources of information on SFF are...well, shall we just say not exactly reliable (I am told repeatedly that WisCon is terrible and makes men feel unsafe).

All of this also means that I wasn’t aware of the crisis at the heart of the WisCon, and one that sort of exploded in and around WisCon 38. It’s a hell of a time to have my first ever convention. But listen. The guest of honors are Hiromi Goto and N.K. Jemisin. I get some of their books ahead of time to prep. I read The Killing Moon. People, that book changes me.

Let me reach back a bit more. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, affluent and sheltered. My reading consisted of almost entirely straight white men. I read the entire Wheel of Time series every time a new book came out. I read the Legends anthology and see no lack in its table of contents. At this point I’m still fairly convinced (despite plenty of evidence to the contrary) that I am your average straight cis dude. That’s about to change.

WisCon is energy. It’s learning. And it doesn’t really hide anything. At that first WisCon I listen while people talk about consent, about race, about queerness, about SFF in ways that I have never encountered before. I listen. I keep listening. I don’t think I talk to a single other person during WisCon 38, except to blushingly thank N.K. Jemisin as she signs my copy of Circlet’s Fantastic Erotica (I told you there was evidence). But still, the experience is transformative. It opens my eyes not just to work within SFF that I had been wholly ignorant of, it also prompts me to introspect and examine myself and start actually working through my feelings and identity. I think I can safely say without WisCon, I would be a very different person.

And at the same time, the convention is dealing with harassment and a huge failure to protect attendees. The convention seems to be stuck at a crossroads of sorts, one where it can refuse to acknowledge wrongdoing and one where it can own up to it and do better. I like to think that it chose the second path. Because as I have returned to WisCon year after year, I have noticed only a better and better convention and conversation, one that in large part checks the 101 at the door and really digs into issues and discussions that I don’t really hear talked about anywhere else. And as the convention has moved forward, louder have been the voices claiming the convention too quick to respond to criticism, too receptive to complaints of harassment. Which seems to indicate to me at least that they’re doing something right.

Historically, WisCon has tried to inhabit the space where feminism and SFF intersect. Through its work to organize the convention and the Tiptree Award, the convention has consistently brought a needed light to issues within SFF that are often overlooked or suppressed. This, even as Wisconsin itself has turned its back on a lot of the liberal ideas that helped to birth the convention, even as much of the country has embraced a politics and rhetoric that are unafraid to call any attempt to foster inclusion intolerant, sexist, and racist (for not catering first and most to white straight cis men, basically). In practice, it has been a bumpy road, but one that I think WisCon is dedicated to seeing through. From its policy changes to its guests of honor to its wide range of programming and events, I continue to see improvements and a genuine desire to build a convention that is welcoming and enriching.

For me, WisCon has been an introduction into so much. And as I’ve attended, I’ve grown and learned. As a reader and writer. As a fan. And as a person. I doubt, in that, I am alone. When I first attended, WisCon was a revelation. It was getting to hear K. Tempest Bradford talk in person, which in turn led me to her Reading Challenge, which then led me to completely rethinking my reading habits. It was getting to hear Hiromi Goto’s guest of honor speech, and being floored by it. It was getting to hear every subsequent guest of honor speech, and be moved to tears, or to action. I’ve met friends, and even made some. I’ve been on programming, and gotten to talk about reviewing, yeah, but also about representation, masculinity, and my love of Garak.

I cannot separate out my personal journey that started at WisCon from how I think of the convention. So if you’re looking for an objective source of information, I’m probably not it. But it’s still the one convention I try to make no matter what. The one convention I would choose to attend each year (which is lucky because it’s just about the only one I can afford). I will not try to deny that for many WisCon has failed them, has hurt them, and I can only hope that the convention has truly learned from its mistakes and failures, and will continue to lead the charge for inclusive feminism in SFF.

For those who want to know more about the convention, check out its website here.

For those who want to know more about the issues with the convention, google is your friend, but there’s plenty of info and links here.

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POSTED BY: Charles, avid reader, reviewer, and sometimes writer of speculative fiction. Contributor (now at-large) to Nerds of a Feather since 2014.

Feminist Futures: The Word for World is Forest

Dossier: Le Guin, Ursula K. The Word for World is Forest [Again Dangerous Visions, 1972; Berkley / Putnam, 1976] 

Filetype: Book

Executive Summary:  The Word for World is Forest’s story revolves around the revolt of the native population of an Earth colony, New Tahiti. New Tahiti is even more of a water world than Earth, landmasses on the world is restricted to islands and a sub continental sized landmass. The title of the novella reflects the fact that all of these islands, save the island that men have deforested and destroyed, have a forest ecology. In the Hainish verse of Le Guin, humans are not native even to Earth, and their progenitors, the Hain, seeded many worlds, including New Tahiti, with what we would call Terran like plants and animals, although evolution over the last couple of million years since that seeding has had its way on individual worlds. Thus, there are plants and animals which are close and familiar to human norms and then there are beings like the native Athsheans, who are hominids like humans, but are short, only a meter tall, and are green furred.  

Since Earth is an ecological wasteland, the primary function of the New Tahiti colony is as a logging colony to ship valuable wood back to Earth. Humans from Earth are rapidly destroying the native forest in their logging efforts, and not so incidentally, the health of the entire ecosphere. The future of the natives, even as slaves to the humans, is in serious doubt. The Athsheans are not technologically advanced, having only reached the iron age, and so they were easily cowed by firearms and high technology. They are used as indentured servants but are regarded as being lazy even in that.

The Athsheans, however,  finally revolt successfully against their colonial masters in an extremely bloody uprising that kills many of the humans, including all of the women. They then defang the humans of most of their superior weaponry and restrict them to a small area until the next interstellar ship can arrive and remove the survivors.

Feminist Future: As you can see, the feminist themes may be overshadowed by a first reading of the novella, and I missed them entirely when I first read the story. On a recent re-read however, I began to see how Le Guin explores it from each of the points of view we get.

For Davidson, we get a full thrusted 1950’s style of male protagonist striding across the page, with all the casual violence and misogyny that SF protagonists of that age are known for. He treats women dismissively, casually inflicts violence and suffering on the natives, has abhorrent views on men not as infected with toxic masculinity as himself, and a complete lack of sense of self awareness about any of this. Le Guin takes what would be the heroic led in many of the books she grew up with and shows the very questionable underpinnings of the psychology and nature of such a hero. 

For Lyubov, the scientist, we see a more nuanced view of women and their potential role in the colony, in society. He is shown in his own chapters as a typical man of the colony, even if Davidson mentally derides him in his mind as “effeminate”, further showing the slant and bias of Davidson’s point of view. Like any of the male colonists, he is very happy that there has been a new colony ship full of women, enjoys their company sexually but laments they are not entirely mature and forthright. He is the only human to really start to understand the Athshean pattern of governance and wishes, too late, that the colony ships had brought “a couple of grannies along” to better understand Athshean society.

Finally, there is our Athshean protagonist, Selver. It is from his semi-omniscient point of view that we get the major worldbuilding of the novel as regards to how the Athesheans see themselves, and how their societies actually work. Davidson and even Lyubov, for his sympathies for the native inhabitants, simply doesn’t see or know about. We find that the Athsheans, at least as far as the “Forty Lands”, it is women who run the cities and towns, men who go on trading and exploring journeys, Men have power and authority within the Men’s Lodges, but in the end, Selver is only listened to by women like Ebor Dendep because of his ability to dream, because he is taken to be a god. 

The ultimate fact of the inciting of the events of the novella, as revealed in the text, shows what Le Guin is doing here. The Athsheans are enslaved. Their forests are being cut down. They are physically abused by the Humans. There are intimations by Davidson and some of his like minded Humans that the Athsheans should simply be wiped out entirely,.It is ultimately, none of that that is the inciting incident that causes the Athsheans to rise up against the humans and reclaim their world. It is the fact that Selver’s wife was sexually assaulted by Davidson, and subsequently died, that caused Selver to start his result, that made his revolt happen. In the end, it is violence against women that was the bridge too far. 

This further shows that among other things, the novella is criticizing those earlier works that a character like Davidson would have been the hero in. Instead of a world where men are men and women be submissive to them, and reinforcing that toxic cultural norm, in the novella, Le Guin shows us that sort of world--and then shows us just how those sorts of assumptions look from the outside, from a society that does things very differently. 

Hope for the Future: The Word for World is Forest is ultimately a feminist critique of older styles of science fiction. It provides a way to show a science fictional future that ultimately breaks away from the harmful stereotypes and limited values of those earlier novels, and so doing proves the hope and idea that when Humanity heads to the stars, it will be with the chance of becoming better than we were. 

Legacy: The novella's polemic, strong, unyielding tone meant that it had an immediate impact on readers, especially since it was in the high profile Again, Dangerous Visions anthology edited by Harlan Ellison. It deservedly was nominated for and won a Hugo award. It's anti-colonial and ecological themes were likely the greater focus of readers at the time, given the Vietnam War, and the realization and maturation of the work into recognition for its gender and feminist ideals is something that has become a function of seeing it placed within the Hain-verse. 

In Retrospect: Is the novella as great or as groundbreaking as The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed? Perhaps not. Is it an important landmark of the Hainish cycle of stories and novels, a part of her exploration of gender, feminism and sexuality? Absolutely. In the midst of its more explored and obvious themes, Le Guin, even in the straitjacket of what is arguably a very polemic text about ecological devastation and destruction, finds room to also explore feminist themes and ideas that are a running theme of her work in general.


Analytics

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

New Books Spotlight

Welcome to another edition of the New Books Spotlight, where each month or so we curate a selection of 6 forthcoming books we find notable, interesting, and intriguing. It gives us the opportunity to shine a brief spotlight on some stuff we're itching to get our hands on.

What are you looking forward to? Anything you want to argue with us about? Is there something we should consider spotlighting in the future? Let us know in the comments!

Hutchinson, Dave. Europe at Dawn [Solaris]
Publisher's Description

The phenomenal conclusion to the Fractured Europe sequence.

Alice works at the Scottish Embassy in Tallinn in Estonia as a member of the Cultural Section. When two men bring her the jewelled skull of a Scottish saint her world gets turned on its head, and she becomes the latest recruit to Les Coureurs des Bois.

On a Greek island Benno is just one of hundreds of refuges dreaming of a new life in Continental Europe. After hatching an audacious escape plan, he may just get his dream, but at the price of serving some powerful mysterious new masters.

Rudi and Rupert, the seasoned Coureur and the scientist in exile from a pocket universe, discover that someone they thought long dead is very much still alive. Not only that, but the now defunct Line – the railway that once bisected the European continent – may be being used for nefarious means.

Why We Want It: Dave Hutchinson has been a favorite of the flock here at Nerds of a Feather. Each of his three previous Fractured Europe novels have been very highly reviewed (Autumn, Midnight, Winter). Of course we're super excited about a new Fractured Europe novel.

Jemisin, N.K. How Long Til Black Future Month [Orbit]
Publisher's Description

Three-time Hugo Award winner N. K. Jemisin’s first collection of short fiction challenges and enchants with breathtaking stories of destruction, rebirth, and redemption. 

N. K. Jemisin is one of the most powerful and acclaimed speculative fiction authors of our time. In the first collection of her evocative short fiction, Jemisin equally challenges and delights readers with thought-provoking narratives of destruction, rebirth, and redemption.

Dragons and hateful spirits haunt the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. A black mother in the Jim Crow South must save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. And in the Hugo award-nominated short story “The City Born Great,” a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis’s soul.

Why We Want It: It's like this: N.K. Jemisin was awarded three consecutive Hugo Awards for Best Novel for each volume of her Broken Earth trilogy. It was a monumental achievement and one richly deserved because those novels are the new benchmark of what excellence looks like. We're much more familiar with those novels than we are Jemisin's short fiction. How Long Til Black Future Month is our opportunity to remedy that. This is her first short story collection and we're ready for it.

Kress, Nancy. Terran Tomorrow [Tor]
Publisher's Description

Nancy Kress returns with Terran Tomorrow, the final book in the thrilling hard science fiction trilogy based on the Nebula Award–winning novella Yesterday's Kin. 

io9—New Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books You Need to Put on Your Radar for Fall 

The diplomatic mission from Earth to World ended in disaster, as the Earth scientists discovered that the Worlders were not the scientifically advanced culture they believed. Though they brought a limited quantity of the vaccine against the deadly spore cloud, there was no way to make enough to vaccinate more than a few dozen. The Earth scientists, and surviving diplomats, fled back to Earth.

But once home, after the twenty-eight-year gap caused by the space ship transit, they find an Earth changed almost beyond recognition. In the aftermath of the spore cloud plague, the human race has been reduced to only a few million isolated survivors. The knowledge brought back by Marianne Jenner and her staff may not be enough to turn the tide of ongoing biological warfare.

Why We Want It: We've been following Nancy Kress's Yesterday's Kin trilogy since the first novel Tomorrow's Kin (review) and while it has never quite reached the heights we had hoped for, the first two books have been solid and enjoyable reads and we're looking forward to seeing how she wraps up the story with this third volume.

Martin, George R.R. Fire and Blood [Bantam]
Publisher's Description

The thrilling history of the Targaryens comes to life in this masterly work by the author of A Song of Ice and Fire, the inspiration for HBO’s Game of Thrones.

With all the fire and fury fans have come to expect from internationally bestselling author George R. R. Martin, this is the first volume of the definitive two-part history of the Targaryens in Westeros.

Centuries before the events of A Game of Thrones, House Targaryen—the only family of dragonlords to survive the Doom of Valyria—took up residence on Dragonstone. Fire & Blood begins their tale with the legendary Aegon the Conqueror, creator of the Iron Throne, and goes on to recount the generations of Targaryens who fought to hold that iconic seat, all the way up to the civil war that nearly tore their dynasty apart.

What really happened during the Dance of the Dragons? Why was it so deadly to visit Valyria after the Doom? What were Maegor the Cruel’s worst crimes? What was it like in Westeros when dragons ruled the skies? These are but a few of the questions answered in this essential chronicle, as related by a learned maester of the Citadel and featuring more than eighty all-new black-and-white illustrations by artist Doug Wheatley. Readers have glimpsed small parts of this narrative in such volumes as The World of Ice & Fire, but now, for the first time, the full tapestry of Targaryen history is revealed.

With all the scope and grandeur of Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Fire & Blood is the ultimate game of thrones, giving readers a whole new appreciation for the dynamic, often bloody, and always fascinating history of Westeros.

Why We Want: Okay. This is not The Winds of Winter, but it is a return to Westeros. Fire and Blood is not a novel, rather a history of the Targaryens. I'll take what I can get.

Suri, Tasha. Empire of Sand [Orbit]
Publisher's Description

A nobleman’s daughter with magic in her blood. An empire built on the dreams of enslaved gods. Empire of Sand is Tasha Suri’s captivating, Mughal India-inspired debut fantasy. 

The Amrithi are outcasts; nomads descended of desert spirits, they are coveted and persecuted throughout the Empire for the power in their blood. Mehr is the illegitimate daughter of an imperial governor and an exiled Amrithi mother she can barely remember, but whose face and magic she has inherited.

When Mehr’s power comes to the attention of the Emperor’s most feared mystics, she must use every ounce of will, subtlety, and power she possesses to resist their cruel agenda.

Should she fail, the gods themselves may awaken seeking vengeance…

Empire of Sand is a lush, dazzling fantasy novel perfect for readers of City of Brass and The Wrath & the Dawn.

Why We Want It: We're always excited about a debut. There's so much promise and so much unknown. This could be our new favorite writer and a career we'll avidly follow for decades. We love us some epic fantasy here at Nerds of a Feather and it's always thrilling to see one take another path away from standard European inspired epic fantasy. We're here for Empire of Sand.

Willams, Sheila. Asimov's Science Fiction: A Decade of Hugo & Nebula Winning Stories, 2005-2015 [Prime]
Publisher's Description

Veteran editor and two-time Hugo winner Sheila Williams picks the best of recent award-winning stories first published by Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, the world's leading science fiction magazine. 

Why We Want It: The Hugo Awards are on brand for Nerds of a Feather. So are the Nebula Awards, though we haven't spent much time talking about them in recent years. If you've followed the Hugo Awards for any length of time, you'll have seen the shift of stories on the final ballot from the traditional print magazines to online only magazines which have made their fiction available for free. It's about ease and accessibility (and a slightly changing demographic of voter), but that's a conversation for another time. Asimov's hasn't gone anywhere, but the recognition of the fiction published there has dipped. Sheila Williams wants to remind everyone just how kick ass Asimov's is. Details are weirdly hard to find, but there should be plenty of excellent award winning stories to be found here.


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

Thursday Morning Superhero

I hope you all had a wonderful and spooky Halloween and were able to hand out a lot of comics to your trick-or-treaters!  In honor of the holiday this edition of TMS will focus on a special issue of Wytches that debuted yesterday. It has been quite some time since we have had any Wytches material, but Scott Snyder said that we can expect two arcs in 2019 and that this one-shot serves as a prequel to the first arc and introduces us to a new character who will play a bigger role in 2019.

Wytches: Bad egg Halloween special - Wytches are creatures that have been around for centuries. It is not known if they are unique creatures of their own or are genetic mutations of humans. They live underground in burrows and feed on human flesh. They thrive with the help of humans who incubate their young in holes in the ground in exchange for tinctures that can cure disease and offer other benefits.

Sebastian learns early on that his parents are part of a group called Irons, who have been attempting to stop the wytches for generations. His mom specializes in younger wytches and his dad specializes in the old wytches that are burrowed deep beneath the earth.

This story thrives because of the relationships that Snyder develops. In order for horror to be effective you have to care about the characters and feel genuine concern for their well being. Snyder hits the nail on the head as we see the story through the eyes of a child trying to make sense to the world in which he is born. It is hard enough on a kid when you are the new person at school, but for Sebastian, this is a common occurrence due to the lifestyle of members of the Irons.

This one-shot focuses on a brief stint in a small town in the Midwest in which Sebastian develops a bond with the kid next door despite instructions not to make friends. At moments this book feels whimsical due to the friendship the two possess, but we are frequently reminded of the horror in which they dwell.

Co-created by the extremely talented Jock, I can't think of an artist more appropriate to set the mood in this series. One of the scariest elements of the wtches is that Jock never gives you a clear glimpse of what they look like. Not knowing and seeing the reaction of the kids when they first see them is what makes this book genuinely creepy.

After reading this one-shot I am very excited about the prospects of returning to this series in 2019. This has always been a very personal story from Snyder and you can sense the care he puts into the narration.  Hope you all had a happy Halloween!

POSTED BY MIKE N. aka Victor Domashev -- comic guy, proudly raising nerdy kids, and Nerds of a Feather contributor since 2012.