Rediscovering Naomi Mitchison

Naomi Mitchison: A Profile of her Life and Work, Lesley A Hall.

Naomi Mitchison was an amazing woman, ahead of her time in many ways. Born in 1898 into the rather remarkable Haldane family, she was many things during her life: an activist, a writer, a journalist, a farmer, a baroness, a Marxist, to name but a few.

Her novels cover a remarkable range of genres, from science fiction and fantasy to history and social commentary, but possibly for that very reason, she has failed to gain the stature she deserves in the lists of authors well worth reading. Every once in a while, it seems, her work – or at least some fraction of it - gets remembered and written about and brought forward, and a few more people have the chance to read something her wrote.

Literary fashion has from time to time tried to abandon her but always returns, fascinated, for another 'rediscovery'. (Source: UK Guardian)

Now, Lesley A Hall has written a short but detailed profile of Mitchison’s life and a critical bibliography of her works that serves as a valuable introduction for anyone interested in this exceptional woman and her work. It is to be fervently hoped that this volume is part of a new, and perhaps more long-lasting than usual, “rediscovery” of Mitchison’s writing. Certainly, in reading this book, I’ve benefited from and enjoyed Hall’s scholarship, which has brought me closer to one of the early feminist voices in speculative fiction.

Representations

Orientalism, Edward Said

I have, at long last, read this classic work that is considered to be one of the foundations of post-colonial studies. As I understand it, Said's underlying premise - one that is now very much a part of post-colonial criticism and political activism - is that the colonial and imperial cultures of Europe (and North America), by the very fact of their colonial and imperial position, create images of colonised nations and peoples that are not congruent with how these colonised people and nations perceive themselves, or with the realities of life and culture in these nations and among these peoples. Nonetheless, colonial powers, even after they lose direct control of colonised people, continue to impose these images from a position of assumed superiority, and this colours all discourse in colonial and former colonial powers about the colonised nations and peoples. The representation of a colonial nation in literature, art, and other cultural artefacts, becomes the nation itself, in Western eyes, and all discourse - including consideration of current economic and political policy - occurs within the framework imposed by the representation.

Said applies this premise to an examination of Orientalism - at the time of his writing (in 1978) the term used to describe the academic field of study devoted to the literature, history and culture of countries of "The Orient" - with particular focus on how Orientalists represented in their work the cultures of the Middle East.

It is a fascinating jounrney through the processes by which first, all Islamic, Arab and Middle-Eastern cultures are elided into one, and that one is represented as both oppositional and inferior to Western cultures in very specific ways.

What is particularly important about Said's argument is that he directly connects cultural representations with political ideology and goals:

Too often literature and culture are presumed to be politically, even historically, innocent; it has regularly semed otherwise to me, and certainly my study of Orientalism has convinced me... that society and literary culture can only be understood and studies together. (p. 27)

My whole point about this system is not that it is a misrepresentation of some Oriental essence — in which I do not for a moment believe — but that it operates as representations usually do, for a purpose, according to a tendency, in a specific historical, intellectual, and even economic setting. In other words, representations have purposes, they are effective much of the time, they accomplish one or many tasks. (p. 273)

While I had gleaned many of the principles of Said's arguemnts from later discourses in both post-colonial literary criticism and political theory, it was well worth it to go back to the beginning and look at the evidence, so to speak.

(no subject)

I enjoy reading essays about politics, life, culture, current events and other such things from a feminist or a socialist perspective (or if I'm lucky, both together). In fact, it's probably from such American essayists that I get most of my ideas about what life in the US is probably like for real people (as opposed to the people in American-made films and TV shows, which would be my other source of information on life in America).

Three collections of essays with somewhat different perspectives that I've read recently are:

Don’t Think, Smile! – Notes on a Decade of Denial, Ellen Willis
Virginity or Death, Katha Pollitt
On Sex, Motherhood, Porn and Apple Pie, Susie Bright

Willis' collection of essays touch on a number of social, political and cultural issues and events from the 90s in America, from free speech to racism, the ideology behind The Bell curve to the million Man March, from the authoriarianism of the right to the complicity of the left. The seven essays collected here form a very thoughtful review of crucial social and political themes in the last decade of the 20th century, it's well worth reading.

Pollitt has assembled five years' of columns for The Nation in this collection, which touches on just about everything that's happened in those years, from the furor over the death of Terry Schiavo to the erosion of abortion access to the American response to the 9/11 attacks to war in Iraq to the growth of the anti-science movement among the right, and on and on. Short and pithy, each essay gave me insight and the pleasure of reading a fearless, intelligent and witty analysis of events and issues as they unfolded.

Bright is a fearless analyst of contemporary sexual mores, and recounts with humour and intelligence her own journey toward an erotics of feminism. This collection of essays continues to challenge mainstream American (and North American) ideas about sex, women, pronographyrelationships, mothering, and other such topics, and includes a great recipe for apple pie.

All three essayists offer food for thought on the American condition , and I'm richer in knowledge and insight for having read these three books.

Time Travellers in Tudor England

In the Garden of Iden, Kage Baker

I've been reading all sorts of recommendations of Kage Baker's The Company series for some time now, and I must say, having read the first book of the series, that the recommendations were right.

It's an interesting set-up - a time travel corps recruited among abandoned children across the millennia with the purpose of saving things - from artwork to biological specimens - that would otherwise have perished and "hiding" them in time so they can be discovered later. Later being when the 24th century corporation running the show unearths them for profit.

Because these recruits really don't have much of a choice - or rather, their choice is, esentially, join or die - this is not a bunch of happy and idealistic self-selelcted folks, but rather a collection of real people drafted into work that is sometimes dangerous, some of whom like the job they're doing, some of whom don't, many of whom are perhaps not the best suited for the task but they're all there is.

The protagonist of the first book is Mendoza, who was snatched from certain death at the hands of the spanish Inquisition when she was only five (under suspicion of secretly being a Jew), raised in the australian outback of several million years ago, given extensive modification that end up making her, like other members of the Comapny, virtually immortal, and sent out at 18 on her first mission, to salvage what will become rare plants from the estate of a 16th century gentleman gardener/collector/botanist.

And yes, the book is about a loss of innocence, on many levels.

And it's a very good read. Baker at times uses a tone that is breezy, almost flippant, but this only serves to underline some the the very serious issues she is exploring in between the plot points of a time travel adventure. I expect to be returning very soon to the universo of The Company.

Binging on Space Opera

My excuse is that I had a week of relative down-time (work was slow) and I really wasn't feeling very well, and I wanted some light reading that was interesting and engaging but not intense or overly challenging. And I'd gone out and bought a number of books in this particular series based on my enjoyment of the first one. So I read seven more of Catherine Asaro's Skolian Empire books.

The sheer fun of a sprawling space opera continues, along with enough strange dynastic and family secrets, ancient artifacts from long-lost civilizations, political intrigue and adventuring to satisfy just about anyone who'e into that sort of thing.

Schism
The Final Key

These two books are set before the time period of Primary Inversion, and focus on first introducing us to Sauscony Lahaylia Valdoria Skolia and her very unusual family, and thenshowing us how Sauscony becomes the kick-ass warrior and Imperial Heir that we met in Primary Inversion.

The Radiant Seas

This book immediately follows the events of Primary Inversion and covers about 15 odd years in familial and political developments for the Skolia family and the Empire they head. It ends with a really big space war, which is of course a necessity in a space opera, sooner or later.

Ascendant Sun
Spherical Harmonic
The Quantum Rose
The Moon’s Shadow

All four books cover roughly the same time period, from the perspectives of, respectively, Sausony's brother Kelric, her aunt Dyhianna, her brother Havyrl and her son Jaibriol. I found it very cool the way the four books interlocked, each one telling a little more of the events in the year or so following The Radiant Seas as the invlove the family of Skolia, and the politics of the Skolian and Eubian empires, until in the final book of the quartet, all the lines pull together and you finally have the full story of what's going on.

One thing I will note that became annoying for me was the increasing emphasis put on some of the more annoying of romance tropes, including the ones about people meeting for just an instant and becoming totally obseesed with each other, and forced marriages turning into real love. Sure, with telepaths, you can, I suppose, get an instant grokking of eachother - but not all of the relationships that form in weeks or even days are between two telepaths. And sure, royal families have been forced into political marriages for as long as humans have had royal families - but that's not always the reason behind the forced marriges in this series. I found The Quantum Rose particularly disturbing on this count, and it is my least favoured of the series to date. The later books of this series are definitely not for someone who in not able to deal with such tropes as extensions of romantic or sexual fantasies that, one hopes, are not sought after in real life.

The space opera aspect of these books is, for me, far preferable to the romance aspect, which I am largely ignoring at this point.

So, mixed feelings. There are three more volumes in this series, and I do intend to read them all, and I'll probably check out Asaro's other series to see if the blend of sf and romance remains acceptable, but I really hope that whatever romance there is in them is a little more realistic and a little less Wuthering Heights.

The Mystery that is the Knights Templar

Knights of the Black and White, Jack Whyte

Novels about the Knights Templar are one of my fetishes, and when I learned that Jack Whyte, who has written a number of novels that give a plausible historical treatment of one of my other fetishes, the Arthurian legend, was writing a sereis about the Templars, well, you can imagine my delight.

This, the first book of the proposed trilogy, covers the founding of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, as the Knights Templar were originally known. Yet it is not, strictly speaking, a historical novel, although it does not diverge from anything that is known about the Templars. Instead, Whyte is drawing on the large body of myth about the Templars (and far more skillfully than He Who Shall Not Be Named, the author of that ubiquitous Da Vinci thing), and selelcting bits and pieces of legend to create something that seems as plausible as it is in fact unlikely.

His premise is that, at the height of Catholic Christendom, the time of Pope Urban's Crusade, a secret society of proto-Masons descended from Essene Jews who fled to western Europe at the time of the destruction of the Temple has survived within selected noble houses of France and newly Norman England.

In Whyte's version of the tales of the Templars, the founders of the Order of the Temple, Hugues de Payens and Godfrey de Saint-Omer, knights and veterans of the first Crusade, are scions of these secret families, sent on Crusade to find a way to locate the ancient mysteries of their Essene ancestors hidden beneath the ruins of the Temple.

It's well-researched, inventive, interesting and good fun. A valuable addition to the Templar mythos.