Monday, 31 October 2005 11:50 pm
It came from the double X chromosomes...
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deckardcanineOn Sunday I finished a collection of women’s short sci-fi stories called Women of Wonder. It’s the 1974 edition (my family has trouble parting with books), but in case you come across the stories somewhere, here are my thoughts:
The 50-page introduction by editor Pamela Sargent is probably my favorite segment. It gives a rather comprehensive history of the role of women in science fiction, both as authors and as characters, though it says little or nothing specific to the stories and authors in this collection. (Each story follows one or two paragraphs for a bio and one to comment on the story’s significance.) The only mentioned story I’d read is C.L. Moore’s “No Woman Born,” about a famous singer who gets a cyborg body to make up for severe injuries. I should check out the foreword of the latest edition to see how women’s sci-fi has developed since.
After the intro comes an 18-line poem by Sonya Dorman, “The Child Dreams.” It’s rather pretty and carries an implied relevance to women qua women, but I’m not sure it really belongs. The imagery is more fantasy if not mythology (yeah, I know the genres aren’t well-distinguished from one another), and most of the writing is less upbeat, so it misleads in segue. Maybe you’ll come to agree:
1. Judith Merril, 1948, “That Only a Mother.” I was fine with this one until I turned a page and saw a new story. It gave me the biggest “WWWHAT??” sensation in quite a while. Not only did I not know for sure what was going on emotionally, and to some extent physically, in the last paragraph, but it felt as tho we hadn’t even gotten to any major conflict. I might reread it someday to get a better idea, but the premise – a baby in an A-bombed region turns out precocious, as reflected partly in letters to an absent father – isn’t quite interesting enough for an immediate rereading.
2. Katherine MacLean, 1950, “Contagion. Another ending that felt cut off, but for a different reason. It had taken a tiresome while to come to its point, and I thought they could have taken the premise further. Only thing is, I’m not sure how anymore. Maybe if we had more of a sense of the characters’ individual personalities…
3. Marion Zimmer Bradley, 1958, “The Wind People.” This could have been downright creepy, but to me it was only dramatic at best. It begins with a wisely conceived problem, tho opponents to the final solution seem heartless. The logical upshot carries itself out pretty far while gradually moving into the other major premise, which dances the line between sci-fi and fantasy. A sudden tragic ending precludes a deeper exploration of the second premise’s ramifications, and the last paragraph, despite helping to smooth things out, feels tacked on.
By this time, I was almost ready to give up on the book. You know from my posts on Philip K. Dick how upset I can get at disappointing endings. Fortunately, there was…
4. Anne McCaffrey, 1961, “The Ship Who Sang.” It’s probably not coincidence that the first author name I recognize goes with the first story to appeal to me in earnest. I have a thing for stories about androids and cyborgs, but this went a step further: humans raised to be brains for spaceships. Naturally, you can’t fully deprive them of their humanity, and the resulting conflicts have a classic beauty to them. I’d like to see or even write more stories with the same basic premise.
5. Sonya Dorman, 1966, “When I Was Miss Dow.” Easily the hardest story for me to follow. It’s narrated by a member of a race of single-gendered aliens who can simulate humans for secret agent purposes. If you think that sounds hackneyed, let me assure you that this rendition is not. I’m sure it’s very intelligent, just a bit much for me.
6. Kit Reed, 1966, “The Food Farm.” There must be a more formal term for this subgenre, but I call it a “social sci-fi”: it involves no new inventions or discoveries and no alternate history, but a society such as the world has never seen. Most of these seem to be dystopias, like The Handmaid’s Tale or Fahrenheit 451. In this case, it is a world where obesity is highly unaccepted – to the point that many run from and even throw wallets at fat people, as if afraid of being eaten. There’s nothing very sophisticated, and one or two details leave me scratching my head on “why,” but the narrator’s humanity keeps it fairly appealing. The ending is bittersweet, about as good as it gets.
7. Kate Wilhelm, 1967, “Baby, You Were Great.” Think Strange Days meets The Truman Show and EdTV, only with no escape. I found myself as enraged as the star (not the narrator, who is too effete to give her honest aid) and would probably have killed somebody in her position. In reality, I’d have to wonder how law enforcement got so wimpy.
Tony Kushner thinks authors are irresponsible if they don’t include some kind of true hope; here the hope is not for the protagonist but for those people who, in a credible future, might have the option of her career route but pass it up. At least, I think it works best as a thoughtful warning, one that almost extends to show business today.
8. Carol Emshwiller, 1967, “Sex and/or Mr. Morrison.” A quirky little narrative, with most of the action being in the narrator’s head. Apparently she loves the title character for being elephantine. There isn’t a whole lot of sci-fi here, but the seemingly ditzy narrator suspects something strange, and it pertains to gender.
9. Ursula K. LeGuin, 1971, “Vaster than Empires and More Slow.” Actually, I read this one right between “The Ship Who Sang” and “When I Was Miss Dow,” just to reassure myself that I should keep reading. You see, LeGuin is the only author in the collection I’d read at all before, so I rather trusted her. The lovely title comes from a line in Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” but I didn’t make any connection until later.
An excellent idea: space travel at ultra-high speeds for long periods is intolerable to sane people, so interstellar crews consist of otherwise competent astronauts with various mental disorders. Most notable is one man who’s had his autism experimentally turned “inside-out” for a perverse kind of super-empathic ability, ultimately key to dealing with a unique life form on a bizarre planet. The only thing I’d change is the presence of aliens on the crew: they add very little to the already interesting setup and really deserve their own story. (How would we even know if an alien of an unfamiliar race is crazy?) The story has, for the context, surprisingly little to do with women, who don’t seem significantly different from the men on the crew. Nevertheless, a woman becomes the focal character, and as such the most sympathetic and perhaps sanest. She comes darn close to loving the unanimously unloved.
10. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, 1972, “False Dawn.” Definitely the most disturbing and possibly the scariest story in the collection, the only one I can say without reservation to be a dystopia. Widespread hostility to specialized mutants following a disaster may bring to mind the X-Men, but there’s nothing particularly “cool” herein. I had long feared the presence of female violation in the book, and here it finally came on strong. You know, maybe I don’t want the later stuff after all.
11. Joanna Russ, 1972, “Nobody’s Home.” Pamela Sargent calls the setting a utopia where “certain problems still remain.” So why does it remind me of Brave New World, even with nobody controlling society? Probably the Huxleyan mastery in making the present look like the distant past with regard to the imagined future. Thanks to worldwide teleportation devices and other big labor savers, people pack a heckuva lot of brainy yet trivial activities, many not yet existent, into their day – or what passes for a day when they’re constantly switching time zones. The blitz almost made me laugh, but there is also a shock to the things said so lightly as if we knew them already. Society would change in more ways than I would have imagined independently: they would refer to “the bad old days when people actually did things for money.” And maybe you like the idea of widespread polygamy, but consider why it’s happening herein. Would I last a “day” there without being marked a hermit? Also Huxleyan is the one outcast who seems more at home in our century. The story is just the right length.
12. Vonda N. McIntyre, 1973, “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand.” Much in contrast to the previous story, these intertribal humans have no post-Renaissance technology. (They do have polygamy, tho, apparently just for an example of foreign customs.) The protagonist truly loves the snakes she handles, which may explain her success in the strange heart of healing with venom. But between instincts and culture clash, even she doesn’t find it easy.
That’s enough sci-fi for a little while.
The 50-page introduction by editor Pamela Sargent is probably my favorite segment. It gives a rather comprehensive history of the role of women in science fiction, both as authors and as characters, though it says little or nothing specific to the stories and authors in this collection. (Each story follows one or two paragraphs for a bio and one to comment on the story’s significance.) The only mentioned story I’d read is C.L. Moore’s “No Woman Born,” about a famous singer who gets a cyborg body to make up for severe injuries. I should check out the foreword of the latest edition to see how women’s sci-fi has developed since.
After the intro comes an 18-line poem by Sonya Dorman, “The Child Dreams.” It’s rather pretty and carries an implied relevance to women qua women, but I’m not sure it really belongs. The imagery is more fantasy if not mythology (yeah, I know the genres aren’t well-distinguished from one another), and most of the writing is less upbeat, so it misleads in segue. Maybe you’ll come to agree:
1. Judith Merril, 1948, “That Only a Mother.” I was fine with this one until I turned a page and saw a new story. It gave me the biggest “WWWHAT??” sensation in quite a while. Not only did I not know for sure what was going on emotionally, and to some extent physically, in the last paragraph, but it felt as tho we hadn’t even gotten to any major conflict. I might reread it someday to get a better idea, but the premise – a baby in an A-bombed region turns out precocious, as reflected partly in letters to an absent father – isn’t quite interesting enough for an immediate rereading.
2. Katherine MacLean, 1950, “Contagion. Another ending that felt cut off, but for a different reason. It had taken a tiresome while to come to its point, and I thought they could have taken the premise further. Only thing is, I’m not sure how anymore. Maybe if we had more of a sense of the characters’ individual personalities…
3. Marion Zimmer Bradley, 1958, “The Wind People.” This could have been downright creepy, but to me it was only dramatic at best. It begins with a wisely conceived problem, tho opponents to the final solution seem heartless. The logical upshot carries itself out pretty far while gradually moving into the other major premise, which dances the line between sci-fi and fantasy. A sudden tragic ending precludes a deeper exploration of the second premise’s ramifications, and the last paragraph, despite helping to smooth things out, feels tacked on.
By this time, I was almost ready to give up on the book. You know from my posts on Philip K. Dick how upset I can get at disappointing endings. Fortunately, there was…
4. Anne McCaffrey, 1961, “The Ship Who Sang.” It’s probably not coincidence that the first author name I recognize goes with the first story to appeal to me in earnest. I have a thing for stories about androids and cyborgs, but this went a step further: humans raised to be brains for spaceships. Naturally, you can’t fully deprive them of their humanity, and the resulting conflicts have a classic beauty to them. I’d like to see or even write more stories with the same basic premise.
5. Sonya Dorman, 1966, “When I Was Miss Dow.” Easily the hardest story for me to follow. It’s narrated by a member of a race of single-gendered aliens who can simulate humans for secret agent purposes. If you think that sounds hackneyed, let me assure you that this rendition is not. I’m sure it’s very intelligent, just a bit much for me.
6. Kit Reed, 1966, “The Food Farm.” There must be a more formal term for this subgenre, but I call it a “social sci-fi”: it involves no new inventions or discoveries and no alternate history, but a society such as the world has never seen. Most of these seem to be dystopias, like The Handmaid’s Tale or Fahrenheit 451. In this case, it is a world where obesity is highly unaccepted – to the point that many run from and even throw wallets at fat people, as if afraid of being eaten. There’s nothing very sophisticated, and one or two details leave me scratching my head on “why,” but the narrator’s humanity keeps it fairly appealing. The ending is bittersweet, about as good as it gets.
7. Kate Wilhelm, 1967, “Baby, You Were Great.” Think Strange Days meets The Truman Show and EdTV, only with no escape. I found myself as enraged as the star (not the narrator, who is too effete to give her honest aid) and would probably have killed somebody in her position. In reality, I’d have to wonder how law enforcement got so wimpy.
Tony Kushner thinks authors are irresponsible if they don’t include some kind of true hope; here the hope is not for the protagonist but for those people who, in a credible future, might have the option of her career route but pass it up. At least, I think it works best as a thoughtful warning, one that almost extends to show business today.
8. Carol Emshwiller, 1967, “Sex and/or Mr. Morrison.” A quirky little narrative, with most of the action being in the narrator’s head. Apparently she loves the title character for being elephantine. There isn’t a whole lot of sci-fi here, but the seemingly ditzy narrator suspects something strange, and it pertains to gender.
9. Ursula K. LeGuin, 1971, “Vaster than Empires and More Slow.” Actually, I read this one right between “The Ship Who Sang” and “When I Was Miss Dow,” just to reassure myself that I should keep reading. You see, LeGuin is the only author in the collection I’d read at all before, so I rather trusted her. The lovely title comes from a line in Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” but I didn’t make any connection until later.
An excellent idea: space travel at ultra-high speeds for long periods is intolerable to sane people, so interstellar crews consist of otherwise competent astronauts with various mental disorders. Most notable is one man who’s had his autism experimentally turned “inside-out” for a perverse kind of super-empathic ability, ultimately key to dealing with a unique life form on a bizarre planet. The only thing I’d change is the presence of aliens on the crew: they add very little to the already interesting setup and really deserve their own story. (How would we even know if an alien of an unfamiliar race is crazy?) The story has, for the context, surprisingly little to do with women, who don’t seem significantly different from the men on the crew. Nevertheless, a woman becomes the focal character, and as such the most sympathetic and perhaps sanest. She comes darn close to loving the unanimously unloved.
10. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, 1972, “False Dawn.” Definitely the most disturbing and possibly the scariest story in the collection, the only one I can say without reservation to be a dystopia. Widespread hostility to specialized mutants following a disaster may bring to mind the X-Men, but there’s nothing particularly “cool” herein. I had long feared the presence of female violation in the book, and here it finally came on strong. You know, maybe I don’t want the later stuff after all.
11. Joanna Russ, 1972, “Nobody’s Home.” Pamela Sargent calls the setting a utopia where “certain problems still remain.” So why does it remind me of Brave New World, even with nobody controlling society? Probably the Huxleyan mastery in making the present look like the distant past with regard to the imagined future. Thanks to worldwide teleportation devices and other big labor savers, people pack a heckuva lot of brainy yet trivial activities, many not yet existent, into their day – or what passes for a day when they’re constantly switching time zones. The blitz almost made me laugh, but there is also a shock to the things said so lightly as if we knew them already. Society would change in more ways than I would have imagined independently: they would refer to “the bad old days when people actually did things for money.” And maybe you like the idea of widespread polygamy, but consider why it’s happening herein. Would I last a “day” there without being marked a hermit? Also Huxleyan is the one outcast who seems more at home in our century. The story is just the right length.
12. Vonda N. McIntyre, 1973, “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand.” Much in contrast to the previous story, these intertribal humans have no post-Renaissance technology. (They do have polygamy, tho, apparently just for an example of foreign customs.) The protagonist truly loves the snakes she handles, which may explain her success in the strange heart of healing with venom. But between instincts and culture clash, even she doesn’t find it easy.
That’s enough sci-fi for a little while.
