Four from Aqueduct Press

Aqueduct Press is a small publisher specializing in feminist science fiction, and if one can be said to have a “favourite” publishing house, Aqueduct Press is mine. Founded by L. Timmel Duchamp, whose innovative feminist dystopic series “The Marq’ssan Cycle” I have been praising loudly for some time now, Aqueduct has made an effort to publish a broad range of works with a feminist perspective, and I must admit that so far, I want to own every volume that Aqueduct has published so far. Every once in a while, I treat myself and send in an order for a few more books from their catalogue, and the most recent of these treats (a Christmas present to myself) included two novellas and two collections of short stories.

Novellas

Of Love and Other Monsters, Vandana Singh

Singh begins with one of the classic situations for a journey of self-discovery; her protagonist, Arun, a young man has no memory of life before being rescued from a terrible fire, is also aware that he is different from other people in that he can he can in some way “feel” the minds of others, experience and appreciate them, as other people sense physical bodies: “I sensed the convoluted topography of each mind, its hills, valleys, areas of light and darkness, the whole animal mass trembling and shifting with emotional fluxes.” Arun’s journey touches on a number of themes: the quest for self-knowledge, a history, a past; the desire for relationship with someone for can see/perceive the world as you do, who can see you the same way you see them; the experience of being other, immigrant, alien in a world where some cannot abide the other; the nature of love when it is in fact the “meeting of two minds” that is most deeply desired, and how this affects questions of gender; and the process of discovering and coming to terms with limits and the existential isolation that is part of the human condition. Singh is too good a writer to give us a traditional happy ending, but she does give us a story of coming to terms with past, present and future, and with self.

The Red Rose Rages (Bleeding), L. Timmel Duchamp

Duchamp has already demonstrated in the very difficult second volume of her Marq’ssan Cycle, Renegade, her ability to unflinchingly hold up before our eyes the most naked of power dynamics, the processes of torture and brainwashing, and show us how this horrifying spectacle is in many ways a condensation of so many other kinds of relationships based on power and submission, enforcement of conformity, creation and maintenance of systems of oppression that are masked as “they way things are.” In this novella, Duchamp again forces us to look at the way in which a society that is in its essence based on conformity and unquestioned acceptance of hardened institutional structures of power reveals its moral bankruptcy in its treatment of the non-conformist, the questioner, the rebel. Set in a futuristic prison where those society rejects “pay for their crimes” by being experimental subjects and organ donors (and indeed, let’s be honest here, just how “futuristic” is this, really?), The Red Rose Rages (Bleeding) is a powerful examination of the methods used by a conformist society to reform, punish, and ultimately destroy those who would question its authority.


Short Story Collections

Love’s Body, Dancing in Time, L. Timmel Duchamp

The five stories in this volume can certainly all be said to be about love, among other things. Love and sacrifice, love and secrecy, love and forbidden knowledge, love and devotion to the voice of the divine, love and regret, love and passion, love and remorse, love and risk, love and loss, love and vision, love between being and love of art, god, tradition… love in a great many contexts, places and times. In different ways, I loved all five stories: “Dancing at the Edge,” “The Gift,” “The Apprenticeship of Isabetta di Pietro Cavazzi,” “Lord Enoch’s Revels,” and “The Heloise Archive.”

The Travelling Tide, Rosaleen Love

The seven stories in this collection by Australian writer Rosaleen Love are all, in different ways, influenced by Love’s background as a teacher of the history and philosophy of ideas, and a science writer with a particular interest in the geology of Australia and the indigenous lifeforms of the seas surrounding it. From a tale told in email of “cousin Bridie’s” search for the roots of Southern American music, to a very feminist look at Alexander the Great and his little-known wife Roxanne, to stories of giants transformed, to an appreciation of the songs of a coral reef, to losses and resurgences of friends and geological eras in water, earth and stone, and more, Love brings together the sense of the long stretch of time in which ideas and landscapes change, billow and recede like the tides, and the vastness of seas and continents and structures of thought and tradition.

Strange Horizons has an excellent review of this collection by Lesley Hall here.