My life in books

Venous Hum, Suzette Mayr

Venous Hum is a very funny novel about two women – Jennifer and Lai Fun – with a marriage in the doldrums and a child on the way, who have a shared background of growing up in immigrant families in Western Canada. This might not be the best time for Lai Fun to take on the task of organising a high school reunion with her best friend Stefanja – and not just because she’s having an affair with Stefanja’s spouse Thor – but she gets into it anyway.

As one might expect, some of the key themes involve issues of family, love, parenthood, commitment and loyalty in marriage, the immigrant experience and questions about assimilation vs. maintaining one’s culture of origin, and the ways the experiences and relationships in adolescence can influence life choices. But it’s not really until you finish the book and manage to stop laughing that you realise just how many serious things there are to think about just under the surface.

The satiric and farcical elements are front and centre here, while the speculative and fantastical elements sneak up on you and aren’t fully apparent until the novel’s unexpected yet perfectly suited conclusion.

Reading this was great fun.

I’m way behind on the grand project I embarked on almost a year ago, which was to actually keep an annotated record of the books I read. So, to try to get back on an even footing for the all-too-quickly-approaching New Year, here are some thumbnail sketches of some of the the science fiction, fantasy and speculative fiction novels that I’ve read in recent months (actually, more like the past six months or thereabouts) and haven’t yet written about.


The World of the Fae Trilogy – Anne Bishop
Shadows and Light
The House of Gaian

I wrote briefly about the first volume in this series back at the beginning of the year. It took a while, but I have at last finished the trilogy. It’s interesting – what first interested me about the series was Bishop’s elves – the fae – and their relationship with the witches – almost all women – who are the physical and mystical bond that maintains the link between the human world and the world of the fae. However, what came to dominate my perceptions of the books as I read them was the horrifying and all-too-believable war on women that drives the storyline. Think of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, of the male-dominated society portrayed in the early books of Suzy McKee Charnas’ Holdfast Chronicles, of the utterly evil misogyny that almost destroys both elves and pagan humankind in Gael Baudino’s Strands series. In many ways, Bishop’s trilogy reminds me most of Baudino’s work, in fact, because in both, the answer to hatred and misogyny comes from the mingling of traditions, elven, pagan/wiccan, and human.


The Darker Jewels Trilogy – Anne Bishop
Daughter of the Blood
Heir to the Shadows
Queen if the Darkness

A very different setting and cast of characters from Bishop’s World of the Fae series, although it’s interesting to see that the themes of gender-based power struggles, separate but interconnected worlds or dimensions, and the discovery of lost heritages are also strong elements in the Darker Jewels series. This series is an interesting exploration of power – political power, psychic or magical power, sexual power, the power of conviction and honour, the power of love and hate. And there’s also a nice twist on the standard light=good, dark=bad iconography in a great deal of modern fiction: The devils and the undead are, as much as anyone can be, the good guys here.


The Big Over Easy - Jasper Fforde

Jack Spratt is a detective. He works the Nursery Crimes beat. His latest case: who killed Humpty Dumpty and why? Only Jasper Fforde could have written this book, and I’m glad he did. Absolutely hilarious, and full of not-so-subtle digs at the entirety of the detective genre.


Starship Troopers - Robert Heinlein

After I did the “50 most influential” meme, I just couldn’t resist. I have, after all, been on a project to reread some of the science fiction I grew up with, and Heinlein is a big part of that. I’ve written elsewhere about my love-hate relationship with Heinlein, and this is one of the ones that really pushes all of those buttons. It’s a fun action story, but, and but, and but… tell me again how flogging people publicly makes for a crime-free state. And why military service is the only kind of service to the state that demonstrates one has a sense of responsibility and commitment. And why men are big infantry lugs and women are dainty ship’s pilots and in the future there are no tough ass-kicking grunts like Jenette Goldstein’s Vasquez in Aliens who can smash Bugs with the best of them.


The Puppet Masters - Robert Heinlein

This was the uncut version, although to be honest, it’s been so long since I’d read the original that I didn’t realise this until my partner pointed it out. Then it was sort of obvious – the sex wouldn’t have been quite so explicit in the early 50s when this was first published, but I’ve read so much of Heinlein’s later work, where the sex is pretty much unending, that I didn’t notice. glaurung, who actually compared the versions as part of a grad school paper on Heinlein, also tells me that the first publication had also toned down some of the elements intended to evoke the horror of being possessed, but I remember finding it chilling back in the 60s when I first read it, and it’s still chilling at that level. What I didn’t see so clearly when I first read the novel, although I’ve long since figured it out, was how the puppet masters are so openly paralleled with Russian state communism/totalitarianism. And how much this is a cold war, McCarthyist horror tale in which the communists could be anywhere, even in bed beside you, and you’d never know unless you practised unrelenting vigilance.

One thing that I had not noticed before was that for once, Heinlein’s super-competent, super-sexy, gun-toting female protagonist has a real psychology behind her. Mary, who we learn in the last chapter of the book has undergone horrifying experiences as a child including one of the more traumatic kinds of abandonment imaginable, is almost certainly overcompensating out of a form of PTSD – even if Heinlein didn’t have a clinical description of the condition available to him at the time. Which finally clears up one aspect of her behaviour that always bothered me – her about-face virtual submission to the male protagonist after he rejects her emotionally and assaults her.


Smoke and Mirrors - Tanya Huff

The second of the Tony and Fitzroy novels, though this one is somewhat Fitzroy-light. Doesn’t matter, Tony does just fine. And let me assure you, this is one killer of a haunted house story. With all the insanity of a TV location shoot thrown in for laughs. I’m really loving these books.


The Wizard of the Grove duology – Tanya Huff
Child of the Grove
The Last Wizard

I first read Child of the Grove years ago, alerted by a friend who knew Huff and had read the book in manuscript, and it was this book that made me an instant fan of Huff’s work. It’s always been an interesting duology – the first book is heroic, mythic, epic in nature, all about the wars of nations and the clashes of ancient powers, a classic good versus evil scenario, although with a greater degree of sophistication than many such. The Last Wizard is much smaller and more personal book – what is the life of the hero after the quest is over. Of course, there’s magic and adventure and all of that good high fantasy stuff, but it’s more about the last wizard herself, and what does she do now that she’s met her destiny and survived. An unexpectedly mature sequel to a fine high fantasy epic.


More to come....

Action Chicks New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture, ed. Sherrie A Inness
Girls Who Bite Back: Witches, Mutants, Slayers and Freaks, ed. Emily Pohl-Weary

In case it isn't obvious, I have a rather well-developed interest in how women are portrayed in popular culture, and one aspect of images of women that I find of particular interest is the woman who gets to be the hero, who gets to do the stuff that is usually reserved for men, the physical, technical, action-oriented stuff, the stuff of comics and adventure films and space operas. Some of it is the social and cultural critic in me, but a lot of it comes from the very personal experience of wanting to be able to see someone like me - a girl, a woman - being that special, iconic, mythical hero, that human beings have been telling telling stories about since Beowulf and Rustrum and Heracles and all those other - male - heroes were invented.

There's something very satisfying about the idea of a mythical hero. Heroes do exciting things, they face unimaginable dangers with courage, they battle the most terrifying foes with skill and strength, they face evil with wisdom and conviction, and they (almost) always win, even if they have to sacrifice their own lives to do so. They are the best of us, in every way - physically, mentally, ethically, spiritually - even modern heroes, who have doubts and inner turmoil, face those inner demons and keep on fighting the way a hero should.

It's because of all these characteristics of the hero - including their perfected physicality and their battle skills - that I enjoy reading the stories of heroes, or watching portrayals of them on TV or in movies. But until fairly recently, there's been something that put up a wall between me and my heroes - the matter of gender.

Heroes are presented as the epitome of humanity. And almost all of them, until recently, have been men. (Heroines, you see, are something different - they may be the epitome of womankind, but it was men who got to represent the whole of the species, as usual.)

But the 20th century started seeing the occasional woman creep into that mythic, sprawling, brawling heroic role. Fantasy and science fiction, and to some extent comics, were in the forefront, as women like Jirel of Joiry and Red Sonja and Wonder Woman began to appear; by the mid-century, it wasn't exactly common, but it was no longer rare to find a woman who could go a-heroing with the best of the boys. There were, by Hera, action heroes who happened to be women, but who could do the same things as the men - whether it be with swords and in armour, or with blasters in spacesuits.

And over the last 30 to 40 years, other media forms have been catching up, with Emma Peel and Modesty Blaise, then Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor, and now the glorious profusion of heroes in the 90s and beyond - Xena, Buffy, Ivanova, Lara Croft, Nikita, Storm and Aeryn Sun, and so many more, the women of TV and movies and comic books and video games, so many now that I can pick and choose among them for the ones that mean the most to me, rather than hunting each one down to feed my habit for action heroes who are women like me.

Which leads us to these two books. Because I'm an analytical sort, I like to think about what the presence and the presentation of these heroes, the context and the content of their stories, means in my context, my world. Does it send a message when Buffy kicks ass but looks anorexic? Why do the women of Dark Angel and Highlander: The Raven have to have male sidekicks (I refer to them as goat-boys) who sometimes get more screen time than the leads? Do Lara Croft's breasts (and those of almost any comic book hero who is female) undercut her heroism, turn her into just a sex object, rather than an action subject? What else are we taking into our psyches along with our images of women heroes in pop culture?

Action Chicks is a collection of critical essays that explore aspects of the contemporary woman action hero. They are thought-provoking, for the most part, even - or should that be especially - the ones that make me shout at the absent author "No, no, no, you're got it all wrong!"

The issue of the supposed "masculinisation" of heroic women of action gets a fair amount of consideration in some of these essays - the image of the aggressive, tough-talking, hard-fighting, sometimes sexually adventurous woman with muscles and big guns. Is this a "masculinised" woman, or is this a woman who is challenging gender stereotypes by saying that this is one kind of representation of an action hero, and it is as appropriate for a woman to be this kind of action hero as it is for a man?

Another question considered: is the kick-ass comic book hero in her eight-inch heels and skin-tight costume (what there is of it) and enormous, gravity-defying breasts a subversive image of independent and powerful women, or an oversexualised, adolescent wet dream - or could she be both?

Action Chicks is full of essays that pose answers and prompt questions.

Girls Who bite Back is a very different kind of collection, and one that was, as a whole, less interesting and less satisfying for me. An anthology of critical essays (not, alas, very many), personal essays, short stories, poetry, artwork, comics and thought experiments, the extreme range of styles and forms, as well as the variations in quality, made the whole rather disjointed and, to me, disappointing.

But there were some stand-out pieces, ones that I'm glad I found.

"'Cuz the Black Chick Always Gets It First: Dynamics of Race in Buffy the Vampire Slayer," by Candra K. Gill. I don't think anyone can deny that there were some real problems with the dynamics of race in BTVS, and this is an excellent look at some of the most problematic issues.

"The Smile on the Face," by Nalo Hopkinson. A very strong and moving story about an adolescent girl connecting with her power.

"Cinematic Superheroes Are Breakin' My Heart: It's Hard to Go All the Way with the New Breed of Lady Killers When They Just Won't Let Go of That Man," by Lisa Rundle. Part critical, part personal essay on the enforced femininity and heteronormativity of the pop culture action chick, and whether feminists should settle for flawed representations of women as heroes.

"Bond, Jane Bond," by Halli Villegas. A thought experiment/film treatment - what would Jane Bond be like - in what ways would she be like her counterpart, James, and in what ways would she be different?

To sum up, the two collections provide very different approaches to exploring the idea of the action hero who is also a woman; my preference is for the most traditional collection of critical essays, but there's something to think about in both.