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In traditional homes in Afghanistan, it is a misfortune to have no son. So in many such homes, a daughter is chosen, to be a bacha posh, a “girl dressed as a boy,” a surrogate to be the family’s son until, the family hopes, a true son is born. These girls dress as boys, have the freedom of boys, and the privileges - school, involvement in public social life, having jobs, as many young children do in underdeveloped nations. Usually, when a boy is born, or when the bacha posh reaches puberty, she is forcibly pushed back into the restricted sphere of female life, no more freedom of dress and action, no more school. Some resist, refuse to be forced into a female role, despite the disapproval of family and mullahs and society.

Ukmina Manoori, author of I Am a Bacha Posh, is one such person. They write: “This is how I am. This is why I wrote this book. So I could tell the truth about Afghani women.

Because I lived as a man for most of my life, I could do this today. What a paradox! But I was seizing the opportunity. I learned not very long ago that I was the only Afghan to know of such a special fate. In our country, we, the bacha posh, the “women dressed as men,” made ourselves discreet. No one could say how many of us there were. We made the choice in a single moment of our lives not to renounce the freedom that our simple masculine clothes give but to risk our lives every single day. I wanted to write this book before I became an old woman or ill, before I was no longer able to remember my life, my special fate. Everyone wanted to know why some Afghan women made this choice. I think that from reading what I am going to recount of my life, they will understand. I want them to talk about us, the Afghans who fight to no longer be ghosts, to come back to the visible world. To no longer hide ourselves under burqas or men’s clothing.”

In telling their story, Manoori also tells the story of what it is like to be a woman in Afghanistan, for every freedom they speak of gaining because they wear men’s clothing is a freedom denied to women. The freedom to go to school, to read, to be literate is one of the key freedoms: “I liked school; I really wanted to know how to read and write. There, I came close to that which separated the men from the women in our country: education. Men have the right to learn. I did not understand why this right was refused to girls, why there were so few schools for them. Later, these boys would become men, and they would make it their duty to prevent women from accessing this knowledge. Why should women learn to read, when it would only pervert their minds? Why would they need to write, if only to tell nonsense? And the Pashtun men argued that they must protect the women, to make them respectable. They prohibited them from showing themselves, especially in public places, like schools.”

By the time that Manoori, now late in their teens, had won their struggle with their family and community, to continue living as a man, the Russian invasion ended any hopes they had entertained for getting a good education and winning respect as a literate, well-employed man. After helping their mother and younger siblings escape into the mountains, Manoori joined the Mujahideen, the guerrilla fighters resisting the Russian forces, despite their qualms over the violence that the Mujahideen often brought against Afghan villagers trying to survive.

By the time the Russians left Afghanistan, Manoori’s father was ill from the privations of living as a refugee, and woukd soon die. Manoori was now the man of the family, respected as one who fought the jihad against the Russians. The family returned to their native village to find their home and farm destroyed. Hard work slowly brought things back, though nowhere near the level of security the family had known before the Russian invasion. But just as the hopes of the family began to grow, the Taliban began its drive to power in Afghanistan. Once more, Manoori was in jeopardy for their choice to live as a man. Under the Taliban, they became a prisoner in their home, unable to go out in case they were seen as a woman, waiting for the knock on the door that meant some neighbour had betrayed their secret. But the knick never came. Only the American bombs, in 2001.

With the restoration of democratic rule, Manoori became valuable to the new government. Because they lived as a man, and had been a Mujahideen, they could travel, attend meetings, talk to her fellow Pashtun with some authority - but because they were a woman, they could speak to women directly, work to engage them in the new government, begin the process of bringing the women of rural Afghanistan into public life as citizens. They would later serve their district as an elected representative on the Provincial Council.

In 2006, Manoori fulfilled a promise to their dying father, and made the Hadj, to present themselves before Allah as they were, a woman living as a man, and receive judgement from Him. And their sense was that Allah accepted them as they were.

Manoori writes in a very simple and straight-forward fashion of their experiences, their life as a woman dressed as, acting as, a man in such a male-dominated society. They have suffered much, as have the Afghan people, but express no regret for their choice to live as a man, even though that has meant, in their culture, that they have had no opportunity to take a partner or lover, to have a family. They say they have never felt a need for love, that respect and freedom have been more than enough in their life.

I am reluctant to frame the experiences of a person like Manoori in the terms we use for gender and sexuality in the West. Are they transgender? Non-binary? Asexual? I’m not sure what those concepts might mean to them. But the story of their life, of who they are on their own terms, is a fascinating one, and in their terms Manoori says clearly, “I am a bacha posh.”

Doing some reading of bell hooks, because it’s been a long time since I read Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, and because I have a few other books by her on hand that I’ve not yet read.

Hooks’ critique of second wave, white feminism, remains as trenchant today as it was when she first wrote about it in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Her analysis of the deadly flaws of liberal feminism - its focus on individual rights and achieving equality within the existing social and economic structure - has been borne out by the stalling of real progress on eliminating sexist and other forms of oppression over the last 30 years. As she notes in this foundational work, “The lack of any emphasis on domination is consistent with the liberal feminist belief that women can achieve equality with men of their class without challenging and changing the cultural basis of group oppression. It is this belief that negates the likelihood that the potential radicalism of liberal feminism will ever be realized.”

While some of her analysis is specific to the time, so much of what she writes here is still relevant, particularly when she looks at white liberal/bourgeois feminism and its failures to embrace a struggle against all forms of domination and oppression, settling for an increased degree of social and economic equality between white women and white men.

“Many feminist radicals now know that neither a feminism that focuses on woman as an autonomous human being worthy of personal freedom nor one that focuses on the attainment of equality of opportunity with men can rid society of sexism and male domination. Feminism is a struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels as well as a commitment to reorganizing society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires.”

Hooks unabashedly connects oppression to capitalism, demanding that feminism address the structural inequalities that come from an exploitative economic system as well as the oppressions based in gender and race. She calls for a change in values, a new conception of power that does not include domination over others, and predicts - sadly, with pinpoint accuracy - that a feminism that seeks equality for women within the existing social and economic structure is a feminism that will fail.

“Before women can work to reconstruct society we must reject the notion that obtaining power in the existing social structure will necessarily advance feminist struggle to end sexist oppression. It may allow numbers of women to gain greater material privilege, control over their destiny, and the destiny of others, all of which are important goals. It will not end male domination as a system. The suggestion that women must obtain power before they can effectively resist sexism is rooted in the false assumption that women have no power. Women, even the most oppressed among us, do exercise some power. These powers can be used to advance feminist struggle. Forms of power held by exploited and oppressed groups are described in Elizabeth Janeway's important work Powers of the Weak. One of the most significant forms of power held by the weak is ‘the refusal to accept the definition of oneself that is put forward by the powerful.’ Janeway calls this the ‘ordered use of the power to disbelieve.’ “

Hooks also looks at the relationship between domination and violence, in the context of the home and family, in social interactions, and in imperialism and war. She reminds us that violence is not inherently male, rather, that a society in which men are assumed to be dominant over women leads to male violence against women, just as other firms of domination and oppression lead to white violence against people of colour, and imperialist violence against the nations of the global south.

In the end, hooks is reaching toward the future of the feminist movement in this treatise, examining the ways in which feminist movements had taken wrong turns, and looking at what would be needed to keep feminism vital and forward-moving as an ideology and as a movement.

“To move beyond the stage of feminist rebellion, to move past the impasse that characterizes contemporary feminist movement, women must recognize the need for reorganization. Without dismissing the positive dimensions of feminist movement up to this point, we need to accept that there was never a strategy on the part of feminist organizers and participants to build mass awareness of the need for feminist movement through political education. Such a strategy is needed if feminism is to be a political movement impacting on society as a whole in a revolutionary and transformative way. We also need to face the fact that many of the dilemmas facing feminist movement today were created by bourgeois women who shaped the movement in ways that served their opportunistic class interests. We must now work to change its direction so that women of all classes can see that their interest in ending sexist oppression is served by feminist movement.”

She continues: “To build a mass-based feminist movement, we need to have a liberatory ideology that can be shared with everyone. That revolutionary ideology can be created only if the experiences of people on the margin who suffer sexist oppression and other forms of group oppression are understood, addressed, and incorporated. They must participate in feminist movement as makers of theory and as leaders of action. In past feminist practice, we have been satisfied with relying on self-appointed individuals, some of whom are more concerned about exercising authority and power than with communicating with people from various backgrounds and political perspectives. Such individuals do not choose to learn about collective female experience, but impose their own ideas and values. Leaders are needed, and should be individuals who acknowledge their relationship to the group and who are accountable to it. They should have the ability to show love and compassion, show this love through their actions, and be able to engage in successful dialogue.”

Hilda of Whitby was a remarkable person, based on what little we know of her. A woman respected for her intellect and spiritual wisdom, Descendant of Saxon royalty, she founded a monastery that was chosen as the site for a religious debate that changed the course of European history.

Nicola Griffith has made her the central character in a profoundly fascinating historical novel, Hild, which gives us enormous insight into not only the way that a woman like Hilda could have lived and thrived in her time and place, but also into the politics, both secular and religious, of her time, and the everyday way of life of the peoples of the British Isles in the seventh century. Griffith’s research is detailed, comprehensive and impressive. Her imagining of Hild, from childhood into early adulthood, is compelling, but equally so is the story of the king who was her great-uncle and patron, Edwin of Deira. In his lifetime, Edwin gained power and authority, through both conquest and key alliances, over a significant part of Britain. His conversion to Christianity was a major advancement of the Roman church. Though much of what he accomplished failed to survive his death, his achievements gave Hild the opportunity to become the power she was in a time when women rarely wielded such influence openly.

Griffith gives us a portrait of Hild as a girl who from her childhood was different from other girls, partly because of her innate gift of intelligence and foresight, and partly because of the relentless pressure of her mother, the ambitious Breguswith of Kent. After a precarious early childhood following the murder of her father Hereric, Breguswith and her daughters, Hereswith and Hild, find safety at the court of Hereic’s uncle, Edwin of Deira. While Hild is still a young girl, Breguswith sets the stage for Edwin to see her as a child with a special destiny, born to be his seer.

This gives Hild a unique position in Edwin’s court, and in the world around her. She moves between male and female spheres of daily life, helping her mother and the other women of the court with weaving, brewing and herbcraft, but also riding out to battle with Edwin as seer and advisor, a party to male pursuits of politics and war. She carries a seax and on occasion uses it, a woman and warrior in the normally all-male world of battle, but when at home, she shares in the activities of other women. Crossing boundaries becomes part of her power - she hears and sees events from multiple perspectives within her world, which adds to her sources of information and her success as a prophetess. Spending time with both the nobles and fighting men of Edwin’s court, and with servants, farmers and peasants, she crosses lines of class, race, and religion, treating both the dominant Anglisc (Angles and Saxons) and the conquered wealh (Celtic and British) with respect, finding counsel with the ascendant priests of Rome, the older priests of Christian Ireland, and the fading priests of Wodan and the old gods.

But her position, hovering between these worlds, not fully a part of any of them, is an uneasy one, sometimes a lonely one, often a misunderstood one. For all the honour that falls on her as kin and counsel to the king, the whispers call her unnatural, a woman who kills, a freemartin, butcher-bird, aelf, haegtes, witch, demon.

Griffith ends this, the first volume of Hild’s story, with a marriage between Hild and her childhood companion, Cian, who has become an honoured warrior in Edwin’s war band, and the gift to Cian of the lordship over a part of Edwin’s kingdom known ad Elmet - the part of Britain where both Hild and Cian were born, and where Hild holds land in her own name. We do not know whether Hilda of Whitby was ever married, but it is likely, given the general attitudes toward women, and the very real political advantages of binding ambitious men to their overlords through bonds of marriage and kinship. In Griffith’s imagining, however, there are seeds of potential disaster. Unknown to most, including Cian himself, he is the illegitimate son of Hild’s father, Hereric, nephew of Edwin, and a bondswoman.

And here Griffith leaves Hild, married, no longer the king’s seer, but still powerful, as wife of the lord of Elmet, with much of her life’s journey still ahead of her. I hope Griffith is working on the sequel, it’s going to be hard to wait and see what lies ahead for Hild.

I’ve added a number of tags recently, and changed my parameters for others. It’s going to take me a while to go back through 12 years of posting to make the necessary changes, and as I make those changes, I may be adding more tags. So if you use tags to look for things in my backlist of book entries, there are going to be problems fir an indeterminate length of time. My apologies.

On February 8, 2017, SF author Mindy Klasky decided to edit an anthology. She was inspired to do so by the now infamous words used to silence American Senator Elizabeth Warren: “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”

The anthology that resulted from this decision, Nevertheless She Persisted, published by the Book View Cafe collective and featuring works by some of its members, is a collection of stories that aspired, as Klasky says, to show “...the power of women overcoming challenges, of women persisting against the threat of other people, of society, of their own fears.” It’s also generally enjoyable reading, with one glaring exception that I’ll get to later. I was disappointed that the contributors were, to the best of my knowledge, all white - there are many ways in which women of colour might have given us a broader picture of the persistence of women against the threats of society.

The stories are divided into four sections: the past, the present, the future, and other worlds.

I found all the stories set in the past to be interesting and engaging, from Marie Brennan’s revisiting of the story of Penelope in “Daughter of Necessity,” to Deborah Ross’s portrayal of the persistence of faith among the hidden Jews of Iberia forced to convert to Christianity in “Unmasking the Ancient Light.” “Sister,” Leah Cutter’s poignant story of a young Chinese woman’s desperate quest to find a spirit husband to care for her beloved, departed younger sister was deeply moving, as was an extract from P. G. Nagle’s novel about a passing woman during the American Civil War who decides to enlist. While “Alea Iacta Est” by Marissa Doyle was sheer fun - an Englishwoman in the early 19th century who decides to take part in a contest of table top war gaming at her brother’s club, whether it ruins her socially or not.

I was less engaged in many of the stories set in the present. Sara Stamey’s depiction of the generational harm done by male anger in the home in “Reset” is painfully real, and Brenda Clough’s “Making Love” is a charming tale about an older woman whose knitting seems to make things just a little better wherever it’s gifted. “Digger Lady” by Amy Sterling Casil is a bittersweet story of an old woman, an archeologist who has spent her life searching for evidence of a new hominid species. I rather enjoyed the themes of Irene Radford’s “Den of Iniquity” in which Lilith, the original rebellious woman, continues her ancient protest against the rigidity of the Father’s demands - though I must note some racist elements in the description and treatment of several characters named but not present.

Two of the four stories in the future section are frankly dystopian, and powerful. Mindy Klasky’s “Tumbling Blocks” tells a deeply moving story set in a world reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale in the way it treats women, a story about a young woman, pregnant by rape and shunned by her community, who finds an underground connection to women who are risking their lives to see that she and others still have access to reproductive choice. In “Chatauqua” Nancy Jane Moore envisions an America wracked by climate change and civil breakdown, where caravans of people with key skills travel the broken roads trying to save dying cultures, educate those who survive, and help however they can. Jennifer Stevenson’s “The Purge” focuses on a more personal trauma, an artist’s response to a visceral nightmare of war. The final story in the section, Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff’s “If It Ain’t Broke” is in a much lighter vein, telling of a serendipitous merging of artistic inspiration and technological innovation.

The final section, other worlds, contains three fantasy and one science fiction stories that mostly continue the theme, but is, I felt, the weakest of the four sections. Judith Tarr’s “Tax Season” was, In my opinion, the best story in this section, and one of the best in the anthology - a light, fantasy world look at traditions, taxes, and being a woman in some rather non-traditional, and not exactly legal, occupations. Vonda McIntyre’s “Little Faces” is a highly original look at trust, betrayal, and reproduction in a symbiotic, space-dwelling society - pushing boundaries on our notions of famiky, sex and society in some very interesting ways. Doranna Durgin’s “In Search of Laria” is a slighter piece, but also centres on a betrayal of trust, this time between a rider, seduced by power, and her horse.

And then there’s Dave Smeds’ “Bearing Shadows,” which simply did not belong in a volume of stories like this. I am, in fact, deeply saddened and angry that the editor decided this story belonged here, for reasons I will expand on at length, because I’m just that angry to have found such a story in this volume. I am going to include extensive spoilers, because if you’re going to read this story, I think you should know exactly what you are getting into.

“Bearing Shadows” is set in a standard medieval fantasy world. The protagonist, a young woman named Aerise, lives in a typical village in a fairly standard patriarchal and moralistic society. In this world, there are humans, and there are the Cursed, elf-like beings who nonetheless can pass for humans, who live for hundreds of years, use magic, and spend half their time in the physical world and the other half in the dreamworld - in fact, they become ill and eventually die if they do not move regularly between the worlds, which has an unfortunate consequence in that their women cannot sustain a pregnancy. Thus, all the Cursed are the offspring of Cursed men and human women. Because the Cursed are feared and ostracised, not many human women are interested in bearing children to Cursed men. But some do, for a fee. These are often women who cannot prosper in a patriarchal society because they are not pretty enough to get a husband, or are disabled in some way, or have run afoul of the social norms - in short, women who are considered damaged goods, not only by humans, but also by the Cursed who depend on them fir the survival of their race. In the story, the Cursed refer to these women as broodmares, speak of them with disgust, refuse to share living space with them because they are dirty. They are depicted in the story in multiple ways as inferior, undesirable, unintelligent, unwanted.

On to the story. Aerise is happily married, enjoys a reasonable social status in her community, has a good life for the most part. She’s lost two children, but she’s pregnant again, and excited about it. Then her belly starts glowing, a sign that she’s carrying a Cursed child. She’s been a faithful wife, but eventually figures out that she was raped and impregnated one night when her husband was supposed to out late, but, she thought, came home early, woke her in the dark and had sex with her. It doesn’t matter, however, to the village folk or her husband that she was raped. She’s bearing a Cursed child, so out into the cold in her shift she must go. Of course, her rapist has been waiting for this. He finds her, convinces her to come with him to a Cursed encampment, and gives her into the care of two Cursed women who will be her child’s mothers. She’s treated somewhat better than the other human women, pregnant and nursing -“broodmares” - also living in the encampment, but not much. Her rapist, Morel, explains that he wanted a child by a better class of woman than he could get by fair negotiation with a broodmare, so this somehow justifies his rape of her. She is not mollified. She gives birth to a daughter, stays with the Cursed long enough to wean her, and then demands her price - her life back. What Morel offers is that he place her in suspended animation for 60 years, and then, pretending to be her husband, take her back to the village she came from, where no one will likely be alive who remembers her, wait til she gets integrated into the community, and then fake his death so she can find a new human husband among the grown grandchildren of the people she grew up among. Pause for a moment. To get back, not her old life, the husband she loved, her friends and family, but a chance at starting over again with people she doesn’t know, she’s going to have to pretend to be the loving wife of her rapist. Think about that. Anyway, she agrees, and the story ends with her being accepted as a young widow, living in her old village, bring courted by some promising young men, with a new chance at life. And she gets to meet her now adolescent daughter by Morel, who is a charming young girl.

This steaming pile of shit purports to be about a woman who persists against rape, and the loss of everything she ever knew and loved, and is rewarded with a second chance at life. But underneath that veneer is a series of justifications for rape. It’s necessary to ensure the survival of the Cursed. It was necessary because Morel didn’t want one of those disgusting second-class broodmares as the mother of his child. It was ok in the end because the child was so lovely, and besides, she got to have another chance to get married and have a normal life. As I said, a steaming pile of crap. There is so much in this story that made me want to scream and break things. There are far too many male perspectives on rape out there, and most of them misogynist as hell. We did not need another one, especially one disguised as a celebration of the persistence of women.

I have a suggestion. I think it’s time that men stopped writing about rape of women and other femmes. The conversation on rape has been controlled by male voices for far too long. Sure, some sensitive and feminist men have gotten it right, but do we really need more men talking about the rape of women and femmes? Time’s up in more ways than one, and more male perspectives on this subject are not needed. Especially those that try to justify it, or come up with ideas of how to make it all right in the end. There’s only one way to do that - stop raping in the first place.

So.... I mostly enjoyed these stories, despite the spectre of white feminism lurking behind the editorial choices, but reading Smeds’ contribution left a distinctly bad taste in my mouth. I suggest that if you decide to read this, you just ignore that story. You’ll find much more to enjoy in some of the other selections.

*This anthology contains 19 short stories, 18 of which are written by women and one of which is written by a man.

In Rogue Protocol, the third of Martha Wells’ wonderful Murderbot Diaries novellas, Murderbot - having resolved some serious questions about its own past in the second volume - undertakes a mission to unravel the secrets of GreyCris, the corporate entity behind the disastrous events that led to the deaths of most of its clients in the opening installment of the series and led to its becoming a free, if not precisely legal, agent. This time, Murderbot is investigating an abandoned GreyCris terraforming project, having theorised that the ailed project was actually a cover for secret excavations of ancient alien artefacts.

When Murderbot discovers that a small salvage company has purchased the rights to the abandoned project, and is on its way to the terraforming complex to begin surveying the scene, it makes contact with the company’s human-form robot Miki, a simple and innocent being who has never been violated by humans as Murderbot has, and who considers the salvage company personnel to be its friends. Murderbot convinces Miki that it is backup security for the company, secretly shadowing the team of two human security agents hired by Miki’s friends - but as it turns out, GreyCris has left some unpleasant surprises at the abandoned facility to protect its secrets, and it will take all of Murderbot’s considerable abilities to get the vulnerable humans out of the trap and back to safety.

What’s important to Murderbot’s growing sense of itself and its relationships in the world of humans is its observation of the close, caring relationship between the robot Miki, and Miki’s owner/employer, Don Abene. For the first time in its existence, Murderbot sees a model of mutual respect between artificial and human life forms, and the experience is a significant influence on Murderbot’s developing understanding of empathy, responsibility, and connection between intelligent beings. For lack of a better word, the events of this mission show Murderbot a new dimension of its own capacity for humanity.

This is in so many ways a story about becoming a truly empathetic, compassionate, and righteous being, and watching Murderbot, cranky and anti-social as it is, develop into such a being is a delightful experience.

More Murderbot, please.

The buzz about Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone has been building higher and higher, and there’s a host of reviews out there voicing one superlative after another about this book. Some of that buzz, I think, is warranted - but not all of it.

The story is set in the land of Orisha, which is largely based on the place we call Nigeria, and draws heavily on Yoruban culture and tradition. The time period is vague, there are some things - mostly weapons and instruments of control and torture - that hint at a well-developed technology, but at the sane time, people travel on the backs of animals and soldiers carry swords.

The land of Orisha was until fairly recently a place where maji, also called diviners, people who can - or could, at one time, not too long ago, before the magic disappeared - call on extraordinary powers, were in the ascendancy, mostly using their abilities for the wellbeing of the people, but slowly falling into the corruption that power brings, coming to be hated and feared rather than loved and cherished. Eleven years before the novel opens, the powers of all the maji simply vanished, leaving them helpless before the resentment of the ordinary populace. King Saran, not himself of a maji family, ordered the Raid, in which thousands of maji were killed or taken prisoner, the remainder stripped of their possessions and position, condemned to live as a marked and reviled caste, easy to recognise by their darker skin and white hair.

Zelie is a maji, the daughter of a maji woman who died in the Raid and a non-maji father, a simple fisherman. Like several other young women in her village, she has been trained in secret to fight with a staff. The story begins with Zelie and her non-maji brother Tzain traveling from their own village to the royal city of Lagos to sell a rare fish at the market there, in the hopes of bargaining for enough money to pay the crippling taxes levied on families with diviners.

Zelie sells the fish successfully, but before she can leave Lagos, she is approached by a terrified young woman, nobility by her paler skin and rich clothing, who begs her help in escaping the king’s soldiers. Impulsively, Zelie does just that, which results in the three young people fleeing from Lagos, now marked as fugitives.

The young woman is Amari, the King’s daughter, who, horrified on seeing her father kill her closest friend, a diviner servant girl, has stolen an artefact that seems to have the power to awaken the lost gifts of the diviners, and fled from the palace. Tasked with pursuing her and her new allies Zelie and Tzain is her brother Inan, heir to the throne and a captain of the King’s guard. The novel, first in a trilogy, tells the story of Zelie, Amari, and Tzain’s quest to use the artefact to restore the powers of the maji in Orisha.

I have a strange, mixed reaction to this novel. Perhaps because it is intended for young adults, perhaps because it seems to borrow heavily from some of the storylines of The Last Airbender, the narrative line seems overly simple, almost predictable at times. The romantic element was actually somewhat repellant to me, because it reinforces the tropes of a fated attraction to the man who hurts you, and trying to save him through changing him. I became frustrated with what seemed to me to be a repetitive structure through much of the novel where story elements were recycled to create more action, without much real movement. Even more frustrating, in some ways, the story seems to spend more energy on Inan’s journey than that of Zelie or Amari - but that could just be me, identifying more with the two girls and wanting the focus to be on them, not the self-loathing, violent and untrustworthy ‘bad boy’ who is nonetheless positioned as the love object for the story’s main protagonist. However, the final scenes appear to subvert some of the more annoying tropes, so I have hopes that the second novel will be more rewarding in these areas.

But. Despite my criticisms of the novel, there are some solid reasons behind the praise it has garnered.

It’s without doubt a powerful exploration of oppression set in a wholly African-derived world. This is a novel of a kind we still have far too little of, a novel that draws on African history, culture, religion, that assumes as a given that a story in which all the characters are black is just as relevant as the thousands of novels in which all the characters are white. It is important because of where it is set, what are its sources, who are its heroes.

And then, too, there is the kind of world in which this story is set, the circumstances that surround the story. The individual incidents of oppression, violence, dysfunctional family dynamics, and wholly toxic masculinity that the two girls encounter again and again in their quest to restore the connection between men and gods that allows magic to flourish, are powerful, searing, indelible images. It is important that we see the horrors that humanity inflicts upon its most vulnerable, that we never forget why we fight for justice.

In the final analysis, it seems to me as if the weight of meaning behind the story is more potent than the story itself, and that leaves me oddly dissatisfied, wishing for a stronger, more unique story to pin such important messages on. But perhaps I’m asking too much. This is, after all, a first novel from a young writer. And had it not been for the hype, I think I’d have been more receptive. As it was, I kept waiting for this book to astound me, to be life-changing and awe-inspiring, and it simply isn’t a strong enough work to deliver on that overwrought expectation. It’s a good debut novel, it presents its secondary world well, and carries some powerful messages about fighting oppression, and it’s an important addition to the growing number of science fiction and fantasy novels that are not based in European history and culture. It’s a good read, and I expect Adeyemi’s work to mature over time. But for me, Children of Blood and Bone does not live up to the press it’s received.

After many long years, Diane Duane is returning to the World of the Middle Kingdoms, to the tale of the Five, the story of Herewiss and Freelorn, Segnbora and Sunspark and Hasai. In preparation for the publication of the long-awaited concluding volume, The Door into Starlight, Duane plans to release five shorter works, intended as bridging pieces between the first three novels and the series’ conclusion.

The first of these is The Levin-gad, which is a word meaning lightning rod in one of the old Middle Kingdom tongues, and features Herewiss, who has ventured alone out into the night to call out a dangerous foe who otherwise might do great harm elsewhere.

It’s a strong return to the world, a powerful statement of the central themes of the series and a delightful reminder that this is a world where love is welcome as it comes, without limits of gender or number. Family is family, even when it includes multitudes and not all of them human. It is Duane’s vision of the power of love, personified in a Goddess who embodies herself in the world and takes form without regard to male or female, and the idea of life and the joy we find in it as the bulwark against the withering force of despair, that captivated me so many years ago, and holds me still in admiration and appreciation.

So happy to see the return to the Middle Kingdoms.

European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman is Theodora Goss’ second novel featuring the members of the Athena Club - Mary Jekyll, Diana Hyde, Beatrice Rappaccini, Catherine Moreau, and Justine Frankenstein, all the female creations of men of science, members of the secretive organisation the Société des Alchimistes. The monstrous gentlewomen have a new mission - a journey to the Continent, to rescue if they can another woman they feel is by nature a member of their unusual club, Lucinda Van Helsing - whose existence they have become aware if through Mary’s former governess, Mina Murray Harker (who readers of Victorian science fantasy will recognise as the bride of Jonathan Harker). But something is brewing among the English members of the Society, so the gentlewomen decide to divide their numbers - while Catherine hunts down the clues to what is happening in England, and Beatrice takes care of Diana, who Mary feels is still too young and impetuous to be left to her own devices, Mary and Justine (passing as a man) will go to Vienna. Thanks to Mary’s employer, the world’s only consulting detective Sherlock Holmes, Mary and Justine will have help once they reach Vienna, as Holmes has armed them with a letter of introduction to a well-positioned woman of society, the widow Irene Norton, née Adler. As one might expect, this division of labour is rejected by Diana, who follows Mary and Justine, disguised as a young boy, and ultimately proves to be as essential to the mission as the others.

Of course, with the names Harker and Van Helsing so prominent in the narrative, it’s no surprise that this Athena Club adventure deals with vampirism, drawing not only on the original Bram Stoker Dracula, but also on the less familiar novella by Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla, as basis and inspiration for some of its key events.

The literary nerd in me loves what Goss is doing in these novels, playing with the tropes of the foundational literature of both the sf and mystery genres, integrating real cultural history (such as the pivotal role played by Sigmund Freud in the rescue of Lucinda Van Helsing, and ongoing references to the suffragette movement) into the fictional accounts of these “monstrous” women. Goss’ treatment of Irene Adler is a thing of beauty, and her mentorship of Mary, Justine and Diana - giving them an example of an intelligent, accomplished woman fully the equal of any man and prepared to work outside of convention and the law to achieve her goals - is a delight to read.

The novel is written in the same style as the first, largely a standard narrative, but interrupted at regular intervals by conversations after the fact among the members of the Athena Club, in a kind of meta-narrative that is occurring after the fact, back at home, as Catherine reads her account of their adventures to the others and they discuss what really happened, and how Catherine has portrayed them. This technique adds to our understanding of the characters and their relationships, and provides just enough release of tension to reassure us that our heroines will survive, without giving away too much of the story in advance.

The story ends on a cliff-hanger - while the main plot, the rescue of Lucinda and the confrontation with the Société des Alchimistes - is brought to a conclusion in one case, and a suitable resting point in the other, other concerns which had seemed peripheral to the narrative suddenly take prominence, and suggest the shape of the next novel, which I most eagerly look forward to.

Jyn works as a stripper, and she’s very good at her job - albeit rather cynical about the nature of the business and the majority of the customers she encounters. Her real passion, however, is hunting UFOs - and finding evidence to support her theory that not only do aliens exist, and have an interest in Earth, they are actually involved in a vast biological experiment centered on mammalian reproduction. As Jyn explains it: “According to scientists, no more than 300 million years ago, one of the chromosomes in the identical X pair mutated into a male-determining gene. If this rogue chromosome was present, then the organism that carried it would be male, no matter what. Over time, that rogue chromosome altered even more, lost much of its genetic material, and became truncated. That’s where we are now. In theory, this process could go even further, and the Y chromosome could disappear entirely. In fact, this has already happened in other species. But not in humans. Or more generally, primates. Over the past 30 to 50 million years, there has been a sustained pattern of gene migration onto the Y chromosome among primates, and only primates. That’s backwards. Left to themselves, genes should migrate away from the vestigial Y chromosome.”

This is the basic conceit of Lori Selke’s The XY Conspiracy, a short novel published as part of Aqueduct Press’ feminist-focused Conversation Pieces series.

When Jyn notices that she’s being observed by someone with a strong resemblance to the Men In Black familiar to every UFO enthusiast, she decides it’s time to make herself hard to find. Packing her research notes and her working clothes into her car, she hits the road, travelling from the location of one important UFO sighting to another, pausing along the way to earn money at strip clubs from Seattle to Montana, looking fir clues to support her theory. Meanwhile, her friend Dina is researching online, sending her articles about discoveries in the area of reproduction, sex and gender.

It’s an interesting, even provocative, juxtaposition, a narrative that chronicles the environment of a professional sex worker, someone whose livelihood is based in displaying the obvious biological distinctions between sexes, and at the same time looks at scientific evidence of the fragility and perhaps even the eventual disappearance of the chromosomal basis for sexual differentiation in mammals - including man. The protagonist’s often clinical, almost anthropological commentary on the details of a stripper’s life, the clubs, the culture, the men, and the broader attitudes toward strippers and sex workers as portrayed in the media, make a strong counterpoint to her thesis that the Y chromosome, the very basis of the sexually differentiated behaviour that shapes her working environment' is alien.

The novel is open-ended. We don’t know, not for sure, whether Jyn is right or not. But the possibilities are there, waiting for a continued conversation.

Yrsa Sigurdardottir is primarily known for her crime novels featuring Thora Gudmunsdottir, lawyer and mother who keeps being drawn into strange and sometimes flatly eerie cases. Given the sometimes spectral atmosphere of her detective novels, which often link past wrongs with present crimes, it’s not all that surprising that Sigurdardottir would branch out into horror.

I Remember You is a ghost story, told in two parts. In one if the threads, three woefully underexperienced and poorly equipped city folk - married couple Garðar and Katrin, and their recently widowed friend Lif - buy an abandoned house in Hesteyri, a summer fishing community on a remote peninsula, and make a DIY project out of renovating it, hoping to make a living by operating it as a guesthouse. It’s winter, they are alone, and the nearest human is two hours away by boat - if they can climb the steep hill to get mobile reception to make a call, and if the water is calm. But as the days go by, they begin to feel that they are not, in fact, alone. Glimpses of someone - someone with the appearance of child, hooded, who never looks up - where no one ought to be, things going missing, strange sounds in the night. And two broken off crosses, memorials to a woman and child who died in the same year - a mother drowned trying to save her son - taken from the local cemetery and placed near their house.

In the other thread, set in the town of Ísaforþur - the closest year-round community to Hestryri - police office Dagny, confronted with a disturbing case of vandalism in the local school, asks physician and psychiatrist Freyr, her neighbour and maybe boyfriend, for his professional opinion. Unpleasant as it is to have such a thing happen in a small community, the mystery deepens when one of Freyr’s patients, an old man dying on cancer who taught in the same schoolhouse sixty years ago, tells him about a similar act of vandalism that took place then - an act so similar that the same words had been scrawled in the walls. This is followed by another disquieting event, the suicide of a woman from a nearby village, who hung herself in a church - a church which we later learn was moved from Hesteyri to its new home in Súðavík in 1960. Exploration of the two cases, and the earlier act of vandalism, reveal connections between the dead woman, the first violation of the school, several other residents of the area who have died under strange circumstances in recent years, and the unsolved disappearance of a young boy named Bernodis in the community sixty years ago. Over these things hangs the shadow of Freyr’s missing son, Benni, who disappeared three years earlier while playing hide and seek with some friends, and is presumed to be dead - and whose name appears in the suicide note of the dead woman.

As the two narrative threads develop, the sense that all of these things - the strange events on the island, the vandalism, the deaths of several old classmates and, strangest of all, the disappearance of Freyr’s son, are somehow connected to old tragedies, lost children whose ghosts remain, seeking some kind of closure. Connections build slowly, linking Freyr and his son to the group stranded in Hestreyi through a chain of coincidence, linking the lost child Bernodis to the house that Garðar, Katrin and Lif bought in Hestreyi.

As with so many of the best ghost stories, the roots of the haunting and the horror lie in the cruelty of humans, in lies and deceits and torments that result in unintended consequences that haunt those responsible until the truth is finally uncovered. Yet this is more than just a morality tale, it’s a look into the darknesses of the human soul, and a reminder that horror breeds horror.

February Thaw is a collection of short contemporary fantasy from Tanya Huff. Contemporary fantasy - and its wildly successful subgenre, urban fantasy - is everywhere these days, but Huff was one of the early popularisers of the genre, back when most fantasy was epic and pseudo-medieval and heavily influenced by The Lord of the Rings. Oh, there had always been contemporary fantasy floating around - C. S. Lewis and H. G. Wells wrote some contemporary fantasies, and there was a air amount written for children, such as Mary Norton’s The Borrowers. But it wasn’t really until a few authors like Susan Cooper, Emma Bull, Peter S. Beagle, and a few other authors - definitely including Huff - started writing large amounts of contemporary fiction that the genre came into its own.

In this collection, Huff spins tales about many of the creatures that populate traditional fantasy - elves, dragons, wizards, elementals - placing them in modern settings, reminding us that the imagination can take root anywhere, in any time. From a look at the lives of the Olympian gods in today’s world, to the education of a new wizard, to a spiritual adventure in which the symbolism of the Tarot comes to life, these seven stories blend the sense of wonder that all fantasy evokes with a modern sensibility and often a large helping of humour.

I have not read much on trans history, theory and activism. I’ve read Feinberg and Bornstein, but in general, this is an area where I feel a real need to learn more, to widen my perspectives and understanding. I approach the topic from an absolute conviction that trans men are men, trans women are women, trans non-binary folk are non-binary folk, and that in everyday circumstances, the question of one’s being trans or cis is relevant for health and medical issues and otherwise is no one’s damn business. But it’s important to me to learn from trans folk what they want me, as a cis person, to know, and so I’m reading more theory and lived experience by trans folk.

Julia Serano’s book, Excluded: Making Feminism and Queer Movements More Inclusive, seemed an obvious place to start. I’m a feminist, and queer, and have long been aware that trans folk have not been fully included in these activist spaces. And as a feminist and a queer person who has cis privilege, it’s my responsibility to understand why that’s happening and how to change it.

In her Introduction to the book, Serano briefly discusses the ways that transgender folk are excluded, noting that “... they are all steeped in sexism—in each case, exclusion is based on the premise that certain ways of being gendered or sexual are more legitimate, natural, or righteous than others.” She goes on to state: “... I believe that sexism-based exclusion within feminist and queer circles stems primarily from a handful of foundational, albeit incorrect, assumptions that we routinely make about gender and sexuality, and about sexism and marginalization. These false assumptions infect our theories, our activism, our organizations, and our communities. And they enable us to vigorously protest certain forms of sexism (especially sexisms that we personally face!) while simultaneously ignoring and/or perpetuating other forms of sexism. In short, the way we describe and set out to challenge sexism is irreparably broken. My main purpose in writing this book is to highlight these fallacies in our theory and activism, and to offer new and more accurate ways of thinking about gender and sexism that will avoid the pitfalls of the past.”

The book takes the form of a series of essays in two sections, the first dealing with exclusion, particularly from the author’s perspective as a trans, bisexual, femme woman. The second section consists of essays “... that forward a new framework for thinking about gender, sexuality, sexism, and marginalization.”

Serano begins with the observation that transexualism and transgenderism are often critiqued in feminist theory because they, as some feminists argue, “reinforce the gender binary.” A significant body of feminist work sees the source of sexism in the existence of a ‘gender system’ and posits that the way to end sexism is by ‘moving beyond gender’ - these theorists see gender as wholly socially constructed. Serano calls this approach gender artifactualism, and identifies it as a perversion of the famous statement that the personal is political.

Gender artifactualism may be seen as a response to gender determinism, the belief that women and men are born with predetermined sex-specific behaviors and desires. The argument that gender roles are ‘programmed’ by one’s biology implies that the observed differences between men and women are both natural and immutable, and this is frequently used as a justification for a vast range of sexist attitudes and behaviours.

Serano sees both gender artifactualism and gender determinism as ‘homogenising’ - either one assumes that there can be little to no individual variation in gender and sexuality, because in either case, behaviours are programmed, either by biology or by socialisation. In truth, however, variety is widespread in these areas - there is a wide range of gender identifications, ways being gendered (or not), and ways of being sexual (or not). Looking at this variety, Serano argues instead that a theory that matches this reality must be holistic, and include multiple factors in understanding the genesis and nature of gender, including factirs associated with biology, environment, and socialisation.

“The holistic model that I am forwarding here begins with the recognition that while we may be biologically similar to one another in many ways, we are also the products of biological variation—nobody shares our unique genetic and physiological makeup. And while we may share the same culture, or may be subjected to the same social expectations and norms, we are also each uniquely socially situated—nobody shares our specific set of life experiences or environment. Therefore, while our shared biology and culture may create certain trends (e.g., a preponderance of typical genders and sexualities), we should also expect the variation in our biology and life experiences to help generate diversity in our genders and sexualities.”

She goes on to say that “Because gender and sexuality have many biological, social, and environmental inputs, they are not particularly malleable—in other words, changing one or a couple inputs would not likely result in a huge overall effect. This explains why most of us find that we cannot easily or purposefully change our genders and sexualities at the drop of a hat (despite some people’s claims that “gender is just performance” or that one can simply “pray away the gay”). Like our tastes in food, most of us experience our genders and sexualities to be profound, deeply felt, and resistant to change. Sure, sometimes people experience shifts in their gender or sexuality, just as our taste for certain foods may change over time. But when these shifts do occur, they are almost always inexplicable, unexpected, and sometimes even downright unwanted (at least at first). Such shifts might occur as a result of changes in some combination of our physiology, environment, and/or life experiences.”

Serano argues that, rather than locating the source of sexism and cissexism (and other forms of oppression based on identity) in a monolithic gender system, we need to see this too as a complex set of interactions derived from the existence of multiple marked states - that is to say, characteristics or behaviours which are noticed because they differ from what is assumed or expected.

“... unmarked/marked distinctions may arise from our own personal biases and expectations, or they may be culturally ordained. In either case, the process of marking a person or trait often occurs on an unconscious level, and therefore takes on an air of common sense: It just seems “natural” for us to focus our attention on people who we view as exceptional or different from us in some significant way.”

As Serano points out, reactions to marked states can be positive, negative, or neutral, but they define the marked state as both remarkable and questionable, in that we feel entitled to notice and comment on the marked state, and to ask questions about someone exhibiting a marked status. Marked traits which are seen negatively, or stigmatised, are often thought of as being suspicious, artificial, dubious, inauthentic, invalid, unnatural, exotic, or alien. The effect is often to dehumanise the people possessing the marked trait. For Serrano, the importance of understanding the distinctions between marked and unmarked states is that “... it appears to underlie all forms of sexism, as well as marginalization more generally. This is not to say that being marked is the same thing as, or necessarily leads to, being marginalized—as I alluded to in previous examples, we are just as capable of being indifferent to, or even impressed by, someone who is deemed marked as we are of invalidating them. But what is true is that the act of marking automatically creates a double standard, where certain traits are viewed and treated differently than others. This act of marking essentially divides the world up into two classes: those who have the trait in question (for whom meanings and value judgments will tend to “stick”), and those who do not (and who are therefore beyond reproach). These double standards provide the underlying architecture that enables sexism and marginalization.”

It is the existence of such double standards with respect to stigmatised marked traits that leads to marginalisation, as those exhibiting such traits are consistently seen and treated differently, in a multitude of ways. The fact that multiple double standards can be applied to a single marked trait, and that the same double standards can be applied to many different marked traits, results in the complex experiences of marginalisation reported by those exhibiting marked traits - being seen, for instance, as sometimes dangerous, sometimes exotic, sometimes ignored, sometimes to be pitied - but never to be seen as simply another individual human being.

“Thinking about sexism and marginalization in terms of myriad double standards implores us to challenge all double standards: those that are prevalent, and those that are rare; those that negatively impact us, and those that negatively impact others; those that we are currently aware of, as well as those that are currently unknown to us. Having such a mindset can make us more open to learning about new double standards when they are first described to us (rather than outright dismissing them because they do not fit into our worldview), and more mindful of the fact that we ourselves are fallible (as we may be unknowingly engaging in, or enforcing, certain double standards ourselves). Perhaps most importantly, thinking in terms of myriad double standards encourages humility, as it forces us to admit that there are many aspects of gender and sexism that we do not personally experience, and therefore cannot fully know about. For this reason, it would be conceited for us to project our fixed and limited perspective of the universe onto other people.”

Serano identifies three general types of double standards at work in marginalisation: universal assumptions, hierarchies, and stereotypes or attributions.

“When we talk about sexism and marginalization, we often talk about them in terms of some overarching ideology or ism that is prevalent in society. Isms are generally composed of the three types of double standards that I have discussed so far. For instance, traditional sexism (the overarching ideology) consists of a universal assumption (that maleness and masculinity are the norm), a hierarchy (that women are seen as less legitimate and important than men), and a slew of stereotypes and attributions.”

Having established the basic tenets of this theory of gender, and the processes of sexism and marginalisation, Serano goes on to propose a holistic approach to feminist as a means of combatting such marginalisation. She begins by defining holistic feminism as “...a wide-ranging movement to challenge all double standards based on sex, gender, and/or sexuality. Furthermore, this approach to feminism remains committed to intersectionality and working to challenge all forms of marginalization, rather than focusing solely on specific forms of sexism.”

Some of the tools or methodologies of a holistic approach to feminism, in Serano’s model, include:

Expecting heterogeneity - combatting the homogenising of marginalised groups that arises from stereotyping and universal assumptions by recognising that individuals within a marginalised group will differ in many ways;

Challenging gender entitlement - rejecting the societal expectation that people identify and express their genders in particular ways and the punitive response to those who do not follow social expectations, refusing to police the autonomous and consensual genders and sexualities of others; and

Self-examining desire and embracing ambivalence - examining our attractions (and lack of attractions) for indications of unacknowledged double standards, and understanding that sexual attractions and practices can have both empowering, positive, aspects, and disempowering, negative aspects.

Serano also stresses the importance of understanding the ways that invalidation is used as a technique against multiple marginalised groups - indeed, she notes that it is possible to identify a previously unrecognised marginalisation by observing that those who share in are invalidated in specific ways. There are many forms that invalidation can take, such as: suggesting mental incompetence; sexualising the marginalised group; attributions of immorality, danger, deceitful or manipulative behaviour; describing and treating the marginalised group as being unhealthy, sick, or diseased; seeing the marginalised group as anomalous, exotic, open to fetishisation or being an object of fascination or study; identification as unnatural, inauthentic, or fake.

This model of holistic feminism, and the theory of marked states and double standards that underlies it, appeals strongly to me. It recognises the multiplicity of marginalisations and invalidations that are at the root of any oppressive situation, and leaves room for differences and commonalities among marginalised groups to be acknowledged and incorporated into an ongoing life of activism. It allows for the identification of unacknowledged firms of marginalisation, and their inclusion in an activist framework. There’s much to consider here, and I’m now looking forward to reading more of Serano’s analysis and theoretical work, to see the development of this model.

Deep Roots is the second volume in Ruthanna Emrys’ fascinating and intensely readable series inspired by the Cthulhu Mythos. These books are told from the perspective of the last on-land members of the sea people who once lived in Innsmouth, before the US government kidnapped and interned them in a concentration camp in the desert where all but two - brother and sister Aphra and Caleb - died from lack of the ocean and the conditions required to make the change to their near immortal sea-dwelling form. Emrys begins from the assumption that everything we think we know about these people is wrong, based on twisted propaganda spread by those who hated and feared them.

In the first novel, Winter Tide, Aphra, who is a student of the ancient magics known to her people (and others), formed a confluence, or chosen family, comprised of an unlikely group of people with the ability for pursuing magic and a commitment to trying to rebuild the land community of the sea people: her brother Caleb; his lover DeeDee, a black woman recruited by the FBI as an informant, seductress and spy; Charlie, a gay man who is Aphra’s friend and student in the magical arts; Neko, the daughter of the Japanese couple who adopted and cared for Aphra and Caleb when when the internment camp they and the few other dying sea people were held in was repurposed to imprison Japanese Americans during WWII; Catherine Turnbull, a mathematician and scholar of magic who had been the host of one of the time-travelling, body-borrowing, and rather arrogant Yith; Audrey, a woman of mixed heritage, part ‘ordinary’ human (the people of the air), part descendent of a third human subgroup, subterranean dwellers called the people of the earth; and, on the periphery of this family, Ron Spector, Charlie’s lover, and an FBI agent working in a branch of the bureau established to investigate magical threats to the USA.

In Deep Roots, Aphra and her confluence have been following leads and rumours of other sea people who may have survived the genocidal actions of the government, ‘mistblooded’ descendants of he few who left the Innsmouth community and married into families of the people of the air. Having learned of a woman, Frances Laverne, and her son Freddie, who live in New York City, they travel to the big city, only to discover that Freddie - who could be Aphra’s only chance to bear a new generation of sea folk - has become involved with a community of Mi-Go and other humans.

Lovecraft’s Mi-Go are, alternatively, the origin of the Abominable snowman myth, or other-dimensional aliens, winged and clawed, technologically advanced, who take human minds and place them in cannisters which they can then transport across space. Emrys has taken the latter description as her starting point. Her Mi-Go - who are more properly referred to as the Outer Ones - see themselves as benefactors, travellers who set up communities on many worlds, recruit followers - or travel-mates, as they refer to them - from the indigenous populations, and offer them the same experiences they themselves spend their lives pursuing, the exploration of and communication with minds across the vastness of space. While the Outer Ones can travel in their own bodies, other races must be separated mind from body in order to travel, their minds placed in devices that the Outer Ones can carry with them as they travel. The process is reversible, but many who join the Outer Ones find themselves less and less inclined to return to physical form.

The Outer Ones have a long and not particularly positive relationship with Aphra’s people, not least because the mind-body separation process is more dangerous to the people of the sea and those who travel with the Outer Ones are likely to be unable to return to their bodies and remain healthy - thus, those lost to the Outer Ones are lost forever. Also, The Outer Ones and the Yith, with whom the people of the sea have a strong and positive relationship, are enemies at a deep philosophical level - the Yith are firm believers in non-interference, the Outer Ones often try to ‘save’ species they fear are on the verge of extinguishing themselves, often by interfering with the political and cultural life of the planet.

Aphra is drawn into contact with the Outer Ones because she hopes to extract Freddie Laverne from their fellowship, seeing him as a possible father for the children she must have fir her race to continue growing. At the same time, the FBI is drawn into the unstable mix because of all the disappearances reported by families of those who have joined the Outer Ones.

Aphra learns that the majority faction among Outer Ones are considering taking action to intervene in human affairs because of the tensions of the Cold War and their fear that the human race will destroy itself. Part of this manipulation involves discrediting Aphra, her confluence, and the sea people with the FBI branch involved with magic and non-human activities - a nit too difficult task, considering the extreme paranoia of the FBI and the existing distrust between the two. Yet the only chance for humanity to maintain control of its own destiny is for Aphra to convince the FBI agents that they must help her in putting the faction that favours non-intervention in charge of the Outer One’ colonies on Earth.

Emrys does a wonderful job of subverting the racist tropes of Lovecraft’s work, while keeping the real sense of potential menace - locating it in the institutions of a racist society instead. The novel ends in an uneasy truce between the surviving sea people and the government, with Innsmouth beginning to live again, though after some degree of compromise with the very people who once destroyed it. So eager for the next installment.

When you start reading a book, and the first three named characters are a young lesbian, and two young gay men, one black, one Latino, who have just met and are bonding over The Force Awakens, then you kind of know you’re reading something different and good. But I had no idea just how powerful the experience if reading this would be.

It starts out as a ‘meet cute’ scenario. Moss - Morris Jeffries Jr. - and his best friend Esperanza are stuck on a stalled BART train. When the train starts moving suddenly, the passengers are jostled a bit, and Moss connects, literally and figuratively, with Javier Perez. But the light opening gets dark almost immediately, as they arrive at the station to find police confronting a demonstration against yet another police shooting of an unarmed black man. And that sets the tone for what is to come. Short notes of sweetness amidst the bitterness of life as a person of colour in a racist world.

Mark Oshiro’s debut, the young adult novel Anger Is a Gift, is a portrait of growing up in America today, the kind of America that’s multi-racial, where immigrant families from Korean and Ethiopia mingle with black and Latinx families whose roots on the land go back further than most whites. Where your friends at school are Nigerian and Muslim and trans non-binary and one of them needs a mobility device to get around.

Where there’s an armed guard at the school door and random locker searches. Where there’s no money for school supplies and they sold all the books in the school library, so your English teacher reluctantly arranges for you to get pirated epubs of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. And you have panic attacks every time you see the cops because you saw your father killed before your eyes just because he was black and in the wrong place at the wrong time - which translated means he was just doing the same things everyone does, stopping off at the local market to do some shopping, but he was black and some cop decided he was a criminal.

This is a book about what it’s like to be young and not white in America, to be the focus of unrelenting racial profiling at school, on public transit, in the streets, in any public place. About the school to prison pipeline. About the brutality of the state toward the young and marginalised. About trying to resist and find joy in the midst if it all.

The narrative follows Moss as he navigates both traditional young adult topics like dating and figuring out what to do when you grow up, and far more difficult issues, like trying to block your school from installing metal detectors and discovering that your best friend, despite her Puerto Rican heritage, doesn’t always see past her privilege as the adopted daughter of well-off white intellectuals who send her to private school where she doesn’t face the same things you do every day. And what to do when the cops strike and your fiends are hurt and dying.

The metal detectors are installed because of a “brawl” - students reacting when one of their own, Shawna, is brutally handled by the school’s ‘resource officer’ because he found her epilepsy medication in her locker and assumed it was illegal drugs. On the first day the metal detectors are in operation, Reg Phillips, a student recovering from major surgery after a car accident that left his legs badly damaged, refuses to go through the detector because he is concerned about its effects on the metal pins and other hardware in his legs. The police officers grab him and shove him through the machine, which malfunctions, tearing the metal in his legs out of position and sending him to the hospital, where surgeons determine that not only has the damage undone the progress he’s made, but it’s made his condition worse - he is now unlikely to ever walk again.

It’s the last straw for Moss and his friends. Drawing on the help of some adults, like Moss’ mother Wanda who was an activist and organiser before the murder of her husband, they call a community meeting and decide to demonstrate as a community against the use of the detectors at school. The students plan a mass walkout to co-incide.

One of the few narrative threads that isn’t overtly filed with tension over the coming confrontation with the authorities is Moss’ budding romance with Javier, who we learn is, along with his mother, an undocumented migrant from Guatemala. Their gentle courting, getting to know each other, all the sweet high notes of falling in love for the first time, is like an island of peace in the midst of the heightened anxiety of waiting for the day of the walkout. And yet.... the very presence of this oasis of comfort and hope is a site of tension because what should be unthinkable, that this innocent awakening of love can not survive the brutality of this place and time, is all too possible.

On the day of the walkout, the students arrive to a sea of police in riot gear. When the time comes for the protest, everything you would expect from a military operation primed to view young people of colour attempting a peaceful demonstration as a gang of violent criminals takes place. There are multiple horrors, and tragedies large and small. Armed cops against children. The essence of modern America.

There’s a lot here that hits hard. I’m a middle-aged white cis woman who has none of the lived experience that kids like Moss and Javier and Shawna and their friends know, but this helps me understand as much as I’m able too - that’s the gift of art. It lets you see from other perspectives, feel what it’s like, to a degree, to be someone other than yourself, to live under other conditions. But this book does something else, too, something that white readers need to see and understand. There are white characters in this book. The cops, obviously. But there are white teachers, some white folks who live in Moss’ neighbourhood, Esperanza’s adoptive parents. Some of them even think of themselves as allies, as people trying to help. But the thing for white people reading this book to understand is that allyship is hard. Because we don’t understand. We don’t get it. And the book demonstrates that. There are no examples of good white allies here. Only white people who don’t try, or try and fail, some of them with disastrous results. And that’s the essence of modern America, too.

But one of the most important messages here is right in the title. Because what moves the story past the tragedy and horror is Moss’ anger. Anger is a gift. These days, there’s a lot of what we call tone policing going on. Marginalised people are angry, and yet when they speak up, act on their anger at the years of injustice they’ve faced, the white liberal response is far too often about being patient, engaging in dialog, being persuasive, using the ‘right’ tactics. Waiting your turn. Not antagonising people who maybe could help your case if you’re properly calm and respectful. Anger hurts the movement, they say.

I call bullshit on that. If being polite and waiting your turn could have made this world more just, we’d all be living in a social justice paradise. And as for not antagonising potential allies - if your commitment to doing the right thing is dependent on people being nice to you, your commitment isn’t worth shit and won’t last past the first rough patch anyway.

Anger is fire. It lights the way, it gives us the energy, the determination, the will, to survive and to keep fighting. It blazes against the darkness of injustice, cruelty, hatred. It burns out evil, and makes a space where we can rebuild something better, if we have the will and desire. Anger is a gift.

Some of Heinlein’s early published novels - Revolt in 2100, Methuselah’s Children - are, I think, among his best. At least, they are some of my favourites. They’re tightly written, with lots of action and not a lot of editorialising or rambling - although both Revolt in 2100 and Beyond This Horizon have a number of passages where the characters, or the authorial voice, present large chunks of background on topics ranging from semantics to Mendelian genetics.

At the same time, two of Heinlein’s novels that I think are among his worst, Sixth Column and Orphans of the Sky, were also published in the first few years of his writing career, though Sixth Column we can perhaps excuse, as he wrote it to John Campbell’s specifications.

His first published novel, “—If This Goes On” - which is packaged, along with two linked shorter works, “Coventry” and “Misfit,” as Revolt in 2100, is the first of his Future History novels.

Methuselah’s Children, the novel that follows “—If This Goes On” introduces two key elements of Heinlein’s universe, to which he would return again and again at various points in hus writing career - the Howard Families, and the iconic figure of Lazarus Long, the irascible, irreverent, Senior of the Howard Families, the oldest human being thanks to a genetic quirk at the early stages of the Howard Family longevity breeding experiment. There’s a line in Methuselah’s Children that places Lazarus in the background of Heinlein’s first published short story, “Life-Line,” and Lazarus will play a key role in the last novel Heinlein wrote, To Sail Beyond the Sunset. In a way, Lazarus is Heinlein’s Everyman, not as he is but as he should be, the personification of everything Heinlein sees as quintessentially human, from his eternal restlessness to his refusal to be broken in spirit, no matter what befalls him.

Methuselah’s Children opens in the year 2125, a quarter-century after the end of the American theocracy described in Revolt in 2100. America is now part of a global world government, and is back in the space era - we can assume from various comments in both books that the exploration and development of colonies in the solar system continued under the management of other countries while the US was isolated. The establishment of a planetary civilisation the has as its main values peace and tolerance, in which we assume economic inequality has been overcome through technology and global resource management, has led the secretive Howard Families to believe that they can finally come out of hiding and live among short-lived humans without the need for changing identities and moving on every few decades to conceal their longevity.

Of course, it’s a mistake. Shorter lived humans refuse to believe that it’s just a matter of genetics, and set aside the Covenant that guarantees the rights of every human bring so that the Howard Families can be arrested and the ‘secret’ of long life forced from them. Fortunately, Federation Adnimistrator Slayton Ford, recognises from the early reports of interrogated Howards that there is no secret, and decides to try and resolve the situation without more violence - he, Howard Foundation Chief Executive Zaccur Barstow, and Lazarus, develop a daring plan - to highjack the generation star ship New Horizons, which is about to be launched on the Second Proxima Centauri Expedition, and use it to evacuate all the Howards to another solar system, so the two branches of humanity can continue in isolation.

The plan works, and Ford, deposed and labelled as a traitor, joins the fleeing Howard Families as they seek a new home world. While a trip that would ordinarily take generations would be less daunting to the long-lived Howards, the timeline is further shortened by the invention, by Andrew Jackson Libby - last seen in Misfit - which brings them to a possible planet in a much shorter period of time, relatively speaking (a minor character, Hubert Johnson, who is an infant at the time of the evacuation, has grown into a nasty spoiled brat when they reach their destination). But the planet they land on is inhabited, and as it turns out, is no place for humans - the most numerous species, the Jockaira, may be intelligent and human-like, but they are all the willing servants and worshippers the dominant species of the planet, whom the perceive as gods. When it becomes apparent that the humans cannot, and will not, enter into the same relationship with the true rulers if the planet, the ‘gods’ of the Jockaira use their advanced abilities - whether science or psionic, is never clearly determined - to send them to another system, also inhabited. At first it seems like a paradise, but eventually the deep differences between the two species - the Little People are in fact a society of communal minds, with each ‘individual’ living in many different bodies - make it clear that this is no home for humans either. Frustrated and homesick, they return to Earth, prepared to fight for their rights as members of the human race - only to find that in their absence, determination and allocation of vast resources have achieved what the Howard Families’ more limited resources were unable to - a real technology of rejuvenation that is affordable for all, and which puts Howards and non-Howards back on an equal footing. And their exploration adventures - and Libby’s star drive - are enough to wipe clean the criminality of their escape. Humanity is reunited, the stage is set for real space exploration, and all is well.

The inability of humans to become, like the Jockaira, servants, or perhaps pets, of a dominant race, and their general reluctance to merge into communal groupings of Little People, are, like Lazarus himself, keys to Heinlein’s beliefs about the essential nature of human beings. Throughout his novels runs the theme of the ‘free man’ - an individual who can be captured, even killed, but cannot be conquered. There’s an interesting tension here - on the one hand, Heinlein sees this as the defining quality of humanity, and yet so often, it’s only his heroes and their associates who display this trait, and they are surrounded by weaker men who give up and give in.

Hidden in the story of the highjacking of the New Horizons is the seed of Heinlein’s next novel, Orphans of the Sky - which comprises two distinct sections, Universe and Common Sense. The New Horizons was built for the Second Proxima Centauri Expedition. Heinlein’s next novel would backtrack slightly and tell the story of the first Proxima Centauri Expedition.

The first part of Orphans of the Sky, Universe, begins with the notation “The Proximo Centauri Expedition, sponsored by the Jordan Foundation in 2119, was the first recorded attempt to reach the nearer stars of this galaxy. Whatever its unhappy fate we can only conjecture . . .” The novel is the story of what happened to the lost expedition. The protagonist is a young man named Hugh Hoyland, who is apprenticed to become a scientist - which, we quickly learn, has nothing to do with science, and is rather his culture’s term for priest. It is through his eyes that we discover what’s happening on the lost ship, generations after its launch. For Hugh, there is only Ship. It is his universe, and he has no concept of an outside, a space through which the ship moves. Few people can read or write, outside of the ranks of the scientists, and what oral history there is has become entangled with a theology in which Jordan, the supreme god, created the ship and its people, who when they die will go to Centaurus to live forever in paradise. There’s a memory of a mutiny, in which most of the original ship’s crew was killed, which is probably the point at which survival needs took over and much of the basic knowledge about the nature of the true universe was lost. What books remain have been interpreted by the scientists as religious allegories.

The plot begins to develop when Hugh, on an expedition with some other young scientists to the sectors where Muties - mutants born as a result of higher radiation levels in the ship, though it’s generally attributed to the resurgence of the original sin of mutiny - live, is injured and left for dead. He’s taken as a servant by conjoined twins, Jim and Joe, who share one body and who are also possibly of Howard stock, being several generations old. Jim and Joe are highly intelligent, and have gained a position of some leadership within the Mutie community. They have also read extensively, explored the low-gee areas of the ship, found the main control room, and looked out at the stars. They have deduced much of the true nature of the ship and its voyage - though their sense of scale is sadly lacking - and they introduce Hugh to the truth as well.

The second part of the novel, Common Sense, is largely about Hugh’s attempts, with the backing of Jim and Joe, to take control of the Ship and carry out ‘Jordan’s Plan’ - colonisation of a new planet. Of course, the attempt to convince the other ship’s officers of the truth eventually fails, and Hugh, Jim, Joe, and a small handful of supporters find themselves hunted, with no way out - except the single shuttle remaining after the catastrophe that was the mutiny. The novel ends as Hugh and the others - minus Jim and Joe, who died in the fight to get to the shuttle, land through the greatest of luck on an unknown planet that can sustain human life. We would not learn if Hugh and his followers survived until ears later, when Heinlein revealed their fate in a casual discussion in the novel Time Enough for Love.

Orphans of the Sky has never been one of my favourite Heinlein novels. It’s an interesting concept, with a reasonable amount of action, but the characters are thinly realised and even Hugh Hoyland doesn’t have much depth to draw one into the story. Conjoined twins Jim and Joe are perhaps the most memorable characters, but it’s rather annoying the way that Heinlein can’t quite figure out whether to treat them as one person, because they share a body, or two people, because each head clearly belongs to a distinct individual with a definite sense of personal identity. Plus, there are virtually no women in the story, other than a mutant woman knifesmith who has one short appearance, and the wives of Hugh and his handful of human supporters. Women on the Ship are slaves, used for domestic and sexual service, treated with physical violence even by the supposed hero, and don’t even have names of their own, only what their men choose to call them - at least among the ‘normal humans.’ Hugh hasn’t even bothered to give one of his wives a name. It is clear, hiwever, that the female Mutie, Mother of Knives, has not only a name but a degree of respect within her community.

It’s an early novel, but where his other early novels, Revolt in 2100 and Methuselah’s Children, and even, to some degree, Sixth Column, are already clearly ‘Heinlein’ novels - well-written, strong characters of both genders, solid plots - Orphans of the Sky does not pass muster.

The last of Heinlein’s early novels for adults is Beyond This Horizon, written in 1942. The world as portrayed in Beyond This Horizon owed much background to his unpublished novel, For Us, the Living. It’s not hard to see where he built the flesh and muscle of this book, on the skeleton of the socialist-influenced, socially progressive society he invented in that very early work. Gender equity in many respects (though in an armed duello society, women generally go unarmed and have immunity from challenge), a multi-national government (in Heinlein’s future, Asia and Africa were virtually destroyed by imperialistic wars their people are considered to be at the developmental level of barbarians), guaranteed annual income, respect for privacy and personal choice - there’s a lot here that’s admirable. What’s highly questionable is his whole-hearted embrace of eugenics - the deliberate breeding of human beings for so-called desirable traits - which underlies both the entire notion of the Howard families in the Future History novels, and the way that, in Beyond This Horizon, ‘genetically compatible’ humans are urged to create children together, with or without any existing or on-going relationship between them. He goes to some lengths to differentiate ‘bad’ eugenics, which produced humans bred for specific functions and purposes and the horrors of two world wars, and the ‘scientific’ eugenics of his near-utopian civilisation that sought to conserve positive traits and eliminate inherited weaknesses, from bad teeth to depression.

The protagonist of Beyond This Horizon is Hamilton Felix, a product of multiple generations of genetic selection designed to conserve several favourable traits, who presents a serious problem to the genetics planners - he sees no particular reason why the human race should continue, genetically improved or not. Felix is intelligent, rational, highly adaptable, a survivor on many levels, the kind of person the natural selection would favour if civilisation wasn’t making that aspect of evolution obsolete. He himself enjoys life, but he does not see much real happiness around him, nor a clear argument for continuing humanity, or at least, an argument fir him contributing to its continuation.

It’s clear, though, that he’s not as disaffected as he seems. When he comes into contact with a revolutionary group planning to overthrow the current world government and replace it with a fascist regime that sounds far too close to the ideas behind the empire that was responsible for the Second Eugenics War, he willingly volunteers to infiltrate the organisation and report on its plans. In the meantime, his life becomes complicated when Longcourt Phyllis, the woman who’s been selected as the best match to conserve and strengthen the genetic lines that make him of some importance to the genetic planners decides to look him up, he discovers that she’s exactly the sort of woman he’d like to be involved with - except for the fact that she, like every perfect Heinlein woman, wants a passel of kids.

Everything comes to a head when, during the attempted coup, Felix, Phyllis, and Mordan Claude, the genetic planner responsible for the breeding lines they represent, are all pinned down in Claude’s office, fighting off the rebels trying to seize control of the valuable stores of germ plasm Claude is responsible for. Facing death, Felix realises what it is that would make him sufficiently interested in the future of humanity to participate in its continuation - answers to, or at least, a serious investigation of, the great philosophical and metaphysical questions that have haunted humankind. The nature of consciousness. The fate of the self after death. The limits of human knowledge. The beginning and the end of time.

The revolution is, of course, unsuccessful. Felix, Phyllis and Claude survive. And Claude presents Felix’s questions to the world ruling council, who realise that Felix has in fact identified a key lack in their modern, rational world. After some discussion, they establish a massive foundation (a society where technology ensures high productivity and values tend not to encourage obscene concentration of wealth and power being a society with cash to spare) to explore exactly the kinds of questions Felix wants answers too. He and Phyllis marry and proceed to have children who are even more exceptional than they are. The end.

What’s interesting about Beyond This Horizon is Heinlein’s argument, presented through Felix, that freedom, love, and material well being, as important as they are, are not enough to satisfy the human soul. That there are needs beyond the physical and emotional, questions that reach beyond the realm of the rational and phenomenological world, that are of importance to human societies. That the driving question that underlies all others is simply “is this all there is?”

The publication of Beyond This Horizon marked a sharp change in Heinlein’s writing career, likely brought about at least in part by the entry of the US into WWII and Heinlein’s war work. After this novel, he would spend the next ten years writing mainly short stories and juveniles, until 1952 when he would write the thinly disguised Cold War, Communist-under-the-bed novel The Puppet Masters.

Judy Fong Bates describes her book, The Year of Finding Memory: A Memoir as a work of “creative non-fiction.” It is a story, but not necessarily “the” story, of her family’s journey from Kaiping County, in Guangdong Province, southern China, to Canada, their lives in Canada, and the family and homes they left behind in coming to Gam Sum, North America, the Golden Mountain.

Fong Bates’s family is a complex one, with a complicated story of crossing borders - these days, we’d call it a melded family. Her father Fong Wah Yent had married in China, but came to Canada originally as a single man with his brother, leaving his wife and children behind. Though he travelled back to China several times, due to the passage of racist immigration laws, it would be years before he would be legally able to bring any of his family - which had grown to include three sons Hing, Shing, and Doon, and a daughter Jook - to Canada. But before that time, his first wife would die, and he would return to China and remarry, a widow with a daughter of her own, Ming Nee. But his plans to spend the remainder of his life in China ended with the Communist revolution, and in 1949 he returned to Canada, where he was finally able to sponsor his new wife Fong Yet Lan and unmarried children under the age of 21 - Hing and Jook remained in China, Shing, Doon, Ming Nee, and his youngest child - the author, Judy Fong Bates - by his new wife, were allowed to enter the country.

The occasions which prompted Fong Bates to write this memoir were two journeys to China, the first undertaken by the Canadian siblings, Shing, Doon, and Fong Bates herself, accompanied by their spouses, to China, to reconnect with the surviving members of their divided family still living there, the second by Fong Bates and her husband. In the first part to this memoir, Fong Bates intersperses her account of her experience returning after decades to a birthplace she left as a very small child, with her memories and reconstructed stories of her family’s life in Canada. The second part continues to tell her memories of visiting China with her siblings, and of her own childhood in Canada and her parents lives in both countries, but begins to weave into the narrative web elements of her current life as a middle-aged Chinese-Canadian author living in a small town in Ontario with her white husband. Two strands become three, then four as she writes about her second return to China in part three of the book.

Much of the book echoes with the vast differences between Fong Bates’ memories of her parents, and the stories about then that she discovers on her journeys to China. Her memories are of sad, defeated, often bitter, people, unhappy in their marriage, worn down from years of working in their laundry to clean the clothing of people who offered them no respect or understanding. Missing their homeland, their plans for a comfortable life together in China destroyed by the Communist revolution. Cut off from relatives, friends, culture, in a foreign land, sacrificing and denying themselves even the smallest comforts to send money home to numerous relatives struggling to survive under Communist rule. The stories she hears are of a respected, well educated woman, the best school teacher her father’s village had ever known, and a well-loved Gold Mountain visitor, generous, learned, who cared for each other, but were thwarted in their love by her father’s first wife, who refused to allow him to take a second wife into the home.

“The story of my family is filled with ghosts, their presence resonating from beyond the grave. In the course of a year, their whispers have turned my doubt and arrogance into a richer sort of knowing, and I have watched my parents grow into fully fleshed human beings. At the same time they have also turned into strangers. The more I find out about them, the further they are removed from the people who eked out a living in a small-town hand laundry. I cannot connect this charming, much-admired and respected woman to my sharp-tongued mother, consumed by bitterness. I cannot connect this confident man with high standing in his community to the diminished man whom I knew as my father, to the man who ended his life at the end of a rope. My parents were unhappy exiles in the Gold Mountain, shadows of their former selves. I am left aching to know the man and the woman who knew each other before I was born. Whatever truth I now hold feels insignificant and false.”

The Year of Finding Memory is at once an exploration of the universal nature of family histories, with their tensions, secrets, losses, fragmented stories, enduring connections and bitter disappointments, and the particular experiences of Chinese immigrants in North America, a place that seemed so alluring that its name in China meant the Golden Mountain, but which was for so many a daily struggle to survive in the midst of cultural shock and racism that ranged from the thoughtlessly callous to the brutally violent. It tells of families torn apart by ruthless immigration policies, messages of deception concealing from those left behind the difficulties of live in a new country that valued neither the people who came to its shores nor the back-breaking labour they undertook. Of obligations to send money home to those suffering under first the invasion of Imperial Japanese forces and then the Communist regime and the Cultural Revolution, when those who were safe from these horrors, at least, had barely enough to live on themselves. And it tells of the healing and becoming whole that comes of finding unknown family, piecing together the fragments of past lives only partially known and understood.

Fong Bates’s memoir of her families is rich in profound emotional truths but never sentimental or overwrought. She gives us all the facets, fragments, from her own memories and the shared remembrances of others, slowly building pictures of her parents’ lives that hint at the unrealised possibilities taken from them by the forces of history. We watch as the lives of her siblings, cousins, and the extended web of family and neighbours her parents had known in China become as real to her as her own memories, and her own life in a country that is hers as it was never her parents’.

It’s a powerful book, a vital living story, rich and rewarding on many levels.

And the great Heinlein reread continues. This post finishes off the primary (first reprint) collections of Heinlein’s shorter fiction that have been in print recently enough for me to acquire them. I’m not bothering with secondary collections, or modern omnibuses, and there’s one collection, Off the Main Sequence, which contains some stories not collected anywhere else, which I have been unable to acquire

Rereading the collection of Heinlein stories containing the novella “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag,” which has been published both under the title of that novella, and as 6 X H, served double duty, as part if this reread project, and as part of my reading for the 1943 Retro Hugo nominations.

The novella is quite a neat, if occasionally terrifying, piece of prose. I enjoyed the combination of mystery and horror, the sense of discovering a secret, occult history of the world, the image of the world as art, compete with Critics who assess its virtues - though given their ability to decide on changes to the work, perhaps they are better viewed as editors (either way, labelling Jonathan Hoag’s profession as an unpleasant one is a delightful writerly in-joke). As usual, Heinlein’s gift for character and dialogue is strong, and his ability to pull off a complex and baffling plot yields considerable entertainment.

Heinein could write stories that make you cry as easily as he could change his shoes. The Man Who Travelled in Elephants is a n unsurpassed love story. Not just the story of Johnny, who travelled in elephants and his beloved Martha, lost and then found, but the story of an America that was passing, an America of spectacle and circus and county fairs and amusement parks. The small, intimate details of Johnny and Martha’s life together as they travelled the country, first fir work, later for their own joy, are delightful, bittersweet, familiar to any family that creates its own secret shared mythology. The growing anticipation of the reader once the truth of the tale becomes clear and you know that somewhere in the vast carnival crowd, Martha is waiting for her Johnny, that’s what starts the tears, slowly brimming, finally flowing at the end. It’s a beautiful love story.

—All You Zombies— is a tale that, oddly enough, treats intersex/transgender realities very sympathetically but can’t seem to imagine a role for women in space that doesn’t involve sexually servicing men. It’s the story of a temporal agent who is his own father and mother... or his own son and daughter, depending on what part of his timeline you’re looking at. Heinlein seemed to enjoy the time paradox theme, he wrote several of them. This is perhaps the best one.

They is an interesting piece of psychological fiction. Wr’ve all felt, at times, that we are alone in the world, different, that no one understands us. We know that in some people, at some times, this feeling intensifies, slides into a kind of delusion in which all the world is united in some strange kind of manipulative conspiracy. We call this madness. But what if it were the truth?

Political satire is a tricky thing to write well. Heinlein’s satire was usually well-disguised, but in Our Fair City, he gives us a very funny look at corrupt municipal politics, thanks to an unlikely alliance between a newspaperman, a parking lot attendant, and a playful sentient whirlwind named Kitten with a penchant for collecting pretty bits of paper and string and other sorts of things.

The final story, —And He Built a Crooked House—, is just plain fun. An architect tries to build a house modelled after an unfolded tesseract... but then an earthquake causes the house to fold up through a fourth spacial dimension and the architect and his clients are trapped inside. The set-up requires a certain degree of spacial perception to begin to visualise it, but the story itself is mostly an interesting but throw-away idea.

The Man Who Sold the Moon is a collection of short stories from Heinlein’s Future History sequence, most of them strongly focused on technological advances that form the background to the later, space-faring novels. Included here is Heinlein’s first published short story, “Life Line,” about Dr. Pinero, a man who develops a scientific method of determining the date of a person’s death. The apparatus is destroyed when Pinero is murdered by the insurance companies,and the only reason it’s part of the Future History sequence is that Lazarus Long will later mention meeting Pinero. What is of interest is Heinlein’s dark perspective on the ethics of corporations, a theme continued in “Let There Be Light,” in which a pair of scientists discover a means of generating cheap energy, heat and light, and encounter interference and threats from representatives of the power industry - a problem they decide to sidestep by giving away their methods for a minimal licensing fee to anyone who wants access. This story also introduces the classic Heinlein woman, beautiful, sexy, intelligent, with multiple degrees in science and engineering, and more than ready to be the male protagonist’s wife.

The theme of emergent technologies continues in “The Roads Must Roll” and “Blowups Happen” - both stories about adapting society to new technology, and adapting the technology to the needs of human society. In “The Roads Must Roll,” reliance on the automobile as the means of transportation has become untenable, due to rationing of oil and massive traffic congestion in cities. The technological fix is to build ‘rolling roads’ - giant conveyer belts large enough to transport not only millions of people, but also service establishments, across the countryside. In response, cities spread out, building both factories, homes and amenities along the roadways. A person can wake up, head to the nearest roadway, have breakfast in a restaurant on the road itself, get off at his place of work, and return home the same way, possibly having that afterwork drink, or picking up some necessities for the household, while the road carries him along. In the story, the dependance of the new social and economic structure on the roads leads to a revolt among a small group of roadway technicians who believe that those who control the means of transportation should also control the government. At its heart, it’s a critique of the idea that those who can cut off access to a service that society depends on should wield power simply because of that fact.
“Blowups Happen” addresses dual, linked issues - how to balance need against risk in a society, and the shortsightedness of corporations who willingly ignore long-term risk for short-term gain. It also plays on fears of atomic reactions we now know to be overstated, which dates the specifics of the story. In this story, the need for energy has finally exceeded the ability of the process introduced in “Let There Be Light” to provide it, and atomic power has been brought into the energy mix. However, the potential dangers of a nuclear plant exploding are sufficient to slowly drive anyone working on the plants into states of profound anxiety - the stress of knowing one slip could destroy a whole city, or more, becomes unbearable. And then, a close examination of atomic theory reveals that one slip could destroy, not just a city, but half the planet. The ultimate solution - move the plants into space - reduces the risk enough that people can now stand the stress, and everyone is happy. One interesting theme that underlies both stories, and can be found in a number of other instances of Heinlein’s work, is the idea that psychological testing can determine who is stable enough to work in certain professions, and who is not. There’s a naive faith in the ability of psychology to accurately determine who is capable of what.

The last two stories in the collection, “The Man Who Sold the Moon” and “Requiem” tell the life story of a Moses figure, D. D. Harriman, financial genius who all his life wants only to go to the moon, builds a massive corporate empire to get the money and connections to do ir, then risks it all - only to be shut out of the trip himself, until, in the short story “Requiem” he is dying and all his money can’t legally buy him a waiver to risk his life to do the only thing he’s ever wanted. Frankly, “The Man Who Sold the Moon” has to be the most boring thing Heinlein ever wrote - it’s financial wheeling and dealing from start to finish, with a few engineering hitches thrown in here and there. “Requiem” is by far the better piece, and it really tells you everything you needed to know about Harriman. And it takes the Future History to where it really begins to take off, to the point where man begins to explore space.

In 1966 The Worlds of Robert Heinlein was published. By this tine, Heinlein was no longer writing short stories, he’d moved on to sprawling novels and there he would stay. This was the last collection of Heinlein’s work that included short stories not previously collected elsewhere. In 1980, Heinlein took the stories from this collection, added a massive number of essays, rants, and contextual pieces, and released it as Expanded Universe. Some of the stories can also be found in previous collections - “Life-Line,” “Blowups Happen” - but most pieces, fiction and non-fiction, are not collected elsewhere.

Of the stories not collected in other volumes, it’s sometimes easy to see why. “Successful Operation” is a message story, and it quite lacks any of the qualities that distinguish Heinlein’s writing. In the forward to this story, he notes that he wrote the story because he had not yet learned to say ‘no,’ and it shows. It is an anti-racist, anti-fascist, revenge fantasy, but the merits of the theme do not hide the wooden characterisation, the simplistic plot, or the lackluster writing. “Solution Unsatisfactory” on the other hand, is vintage Heinlein at his best. This is the story that is essentially a parallel universe story about the Manhatten Project, the development and first use of a radioactive weapon of mass destruction, and the conceptualisation of the Cold War and the MAD culture - although Heinlein’s unsatisfactory solution of a global military dictatorship sidesteps the reality of the latter two events. It is interesting to note that even then, Heinlein doubted that America would be able to refrain from turning the world into its own private empire if it had the opportunity. “Free Men” revisits the concept behind Sixth Column, depicting a single incident in the struggle of an underground resistance fighting an unnamed conquering nation. “On the Slopes of Vesuvius” returns to Heinlein’s deep fear of an impending nuclear war. “Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon” is a Boy Scout themed story about a young Eagle Scout from Earth on his first scouting trip on the moon. “Searchlight” is a tech-heavy short short about searching for a blind child with perfect pitch lost on the surface of the moon.

And there are a fair number of non-sf stories - “They Do It with Mirrors,” a murder mystery set in a strip joint run on the lines of the famous Windmill Theatre - full nudity allowed if no one moves a muscle; “No Bands Playing, No Flags Waving,” an exploration of the nature of bravery; “A Bathroom of Her Own,” a quite realistic story about the nitty gritty of politics and dirty tricks and fighting a corrupt electoral machine; “Cliff and the Calories,” a rather typical Heinlein writing female viewpoint story which is notable for its appreciation of women who have good appetites and are not emaciated;

The essays included in Expanded Universe reflect some of Heinlein’s basic concerns. “The Last Days of the United States” and “Pie From the Sky” argue that the only way to prevent and eventual global atomic war is through the creation of a legitimate world government, while “How To Be a Survivor” is a fear-based guide to living through a nuclear attack on the US (or any other country, for that matter) - the underlying message being that it’s better to do what’s necessary to prevent an atomic war than be forced to survive after it’s over.

One article struck me as particularly worthy of comment. “Where To?” was originally written in 1950 and was a speculative article that attempted to look forward and see the shape of society in 2000. And so much of it is so very very wrong. He gets some little bits of technology fairly close - mostly personal telecommunications devices. But his middle class family lives in a ‘smart’ house well beyond anything that’s available to the ultra rich early adopter, and cities have been decentralised, with commutes if an hour or longer by personal helicopter. And there are colonies on the moon, where older folks can retire in peace and low gravity. One area where he was very close - and later edits brought him even closer - was the revolution in family structures and the development of non-traditional families of choice. He was close on medical research, far off on investment in space travel, and in general thought that science would achieve more to improve global conditions than it has. But prediction is hard, and not really the role of a science fiction author. “The Third Millennium Opens,” while framed as a fictional piece about a person writing in 2001, looking back at the past century and forward to the next, is far more daring, suggesting the scientific development of telepathy and the technology of FTL travel is waiting in the wings.

Many of the essays, and the forwards for the various pieces, make clear Heinlein’s ever growing concern with nuclear war, and Russian domination. He becomes almost fanatical in his opposition to communism - which includes anything that involves socialising any sphere of public life, or anything resembling that American shibboleth, the ‘welfare state.’ Like many Americans, Heinlein confused communism with Russian imperialism - and now that Russia is the worst kind of capitalist state in all but name, we know that it was never about an International Communist Revolution, and always about Russia’s desire to be a world dictatorship. Heinlein visited the USSR, and wrote several scathing essays about how Intourist deals with foreign visitors, managing what they see, who they talk to, where they go. These are also included here.

Heinlein also gives much attention to matters such as the decline in education and the rising interest in astrology, witchcraft, religious cults and other things that detract from what he values above all else - science and engineering, with a side order of history. There’s a lot of material in the essays to make a modern social justice advocate like myself boil with anger, though it’s clear that he wants a society in which people don’t face discrimination, he would shudder at the idea of identity politics or critical race theory.

Essentially. Expanded Universe is Heinlein’s statement of principles, and there’s a lot that’s interesting, and sadly, a lot that just doesn’t hold up well.

The third of Heather Rose Jones’ Alpenna novels, Mother of Souls, continues the story of Margerit Sovitre, wealthy thaumaturge and famed swordswoman Barbara, Countess of Savese.

Their circle of friends and associates has continued to expand, drawing more women from various professions and ways of life. Margerit’s extensive fortune has enabled her to continue being the patron of a number of women, both upper class and working class, who are expanding the scope of the female professions, women’s scholarship, and women’s engagement in the Mysteries - the very real forms of religious magic that can be seen, generated, shaped and directed by ritual, words and music.

The focus of the novel lies in one of the great mystery rituals which is supposed to bring safely to the small country of Alpenna. Margerit has already rewritten it, and yet the new version is not without flaws, a fact brought to her attention one of the new characters in Margerit’s circle, Serafina Talarico, an archivist, born in Rome but of Ethiopian ancestry, who has a rare gift for being able to see in detail the energy flows invoked by rituals. The flaw that reveals itself to Serafina’s vision may have some connection to rumours that have come to Barbara about mysterious, possibly unnatural storms in the mountains along part of Alpennia’s border. Amid the unfolding of this greater plotline lie a number personal stories: Serafina’s unhappy marriage, and her despair at being able to see the great mysteries but not evoke them; Barbara’s engagement in bringing order to a recently inherited title and lands that have been ignored for years by their previous lord; the revelation that Barbara’s armin, Tavit, is a trans man, deeply conflicted in a world that has no place or understanding of his nature; Luzie Valorin, an impoverished widow with a remarkable gift for musical composition and performance that evokes the energies associated with the Mysteries.

While I love the woman to woman relationships that are the backdrop to this series - Margerit and Barbara, Jeanne de Cherdillac and Antuniet - the most fascinating part of the culture in which Margerit’s adventures in ritual magic, and Barbara’s exercises in statecraft, take place is the feeling of watching a renaissance of women’s scholarship. In this novel, one of Margerit’s new projects is the creation of a college for women, with a print shop attached so that the works of the women Margerit has supported through her substantial fortune, and as well as more commercial projects, can be published without having to rely solely on subscriptions - which are harder for women scholars to generate. Interwoven in the major and minor plots are important stories about women struggling to be recognised for their work, intelligence, talent and skill, and the ways in which their efforts are undermined, blocked, trivialised, and even plagarised by men who cannot deal with women who think, and create, and do other such things with serious intent that have been by tradition reserved for men. Jones writes with a fiercely feminist vision, and an unabashed love for the hearts and souls of women making their own ways in the world.

Kristen Britain’s latest novel in the Green Rider series, Firebrand, is an entertaining addition to the saga of Karigan G’ladheon, the exceptional young woman who so far has foiled the assassination of a king, cleaned out a corrupted centre of ancient evil, travelled to the future, seen visions from the past, uncovered and helped to foil a revolution, and various and sundry other things, Karigan is definitely a hero in the tradition of David Weber’s Honor Harrington, in that she does everything astonishingly well, gets showered with unusual accolades, and just keeps going on, facing more and more challenging enemies. She’s also clearly a ‘chosen one’ - there are all sorts of portents and prophecies and odd coincidences that of course are no such thing, but Britain pulls it off well. And despite all her heroic deeds, Karigan remains an approachable, human hero, who needs coffee, gets grumpy, loses people dear to her and grieves them, holds grudges and has doubts.

There’s a lot going on in this latest installment. Karigan is on a mission to the north, not far from the lands held by the Second Empire accompanied by the Eletian envoy Enver. (Eletians are an ancient, very long-lived race with unusual magical abilities, this world’s version of elves.) During one of her previous adventures, Karigan uncovered evidence suggesting that another ancient race, the p’edrose, long believed extinct, may yet live, and she has been sent to try and find them, with Enver’s help, and ask them to ally with Sacoridia. Travelling with them is Estral, a musician, daughter of the country’s chief bard, searching fir her missing father, and the unknown person who used magic to steal her voice.

Meanwhile, an ice elemental, summoned by the leader if the rebel Second Empire forces, which had been routed by the defenders of the palace including Karigan, has returned, infatuated by the vital life force and beauty of the queen of Sacoridia, who is carrying twin heirs to the throne. The elemental has trapped King Zachary, the ruler of Sacoridia, in its secret air two others, a human and an Eletian woman, that it has kidnapped for its amusement, and taken the king’s place by enchantment.

Other plotlines of some significance are the stories of a young servant girl, Anna, who aspires to become a Green Rider, and of Mr. Whiskers, the last known surviving gryphon, in search of a mate.

As usual, the book ends with several pointers toward the next planned adventure for Green Rider Karigan, and the series continues to be fun reading so I’ll be waiting for the next volume.

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My life in books

Books in my life

Recent Entries

Ukmina Manoori: I Am a Bacha Posh

bell hooks: Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

Nicola Griffith: Hild

Some notes about tags

Anthology: Nevertheless She Persisted

Martha Wells: Rogue Protocol

Tomi Adeyemi: Children of Blood and Bone

Diane Duane: The Levin-gad

Theodora Goss: European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman

Lori Selke: The XY Conspiracy

Yrsa Sigurdardottir: I Remember You

Tanya Huff: February Thaw

Julia Serano: Excluded

Ruthanna Emrys: Deep Roots

Mark Oshiro: Anger Is a Gift

Rereading Heinlein: The Early Novels

Judy Fong Bates: The Year of Finding Memory

Robert Heinlein: Short Story Collections

Heather Rose Jones: Mother of Souls

Kristen Britain: Firebrand