bibliogramma: (Default)




Last year, on International Women's Day, Tor.com published a series of short stories on a theme drawn from the silencing of American Senator Elizabeth Warren during the confirmation hearings for Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. Commenting on the silencing, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said:

"She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted."

The phrase has quickly become a feminist slogan, a cry of resistance against the worst injustices of the new American administration.

I read most of these last year, but wanted to bundle all the comments on them together in one post, so here, very late indeed, is that post. Links to all the stories can be found here: https://www.tor.com/series/nevertheless-she-persisted/


Kameron Hurley, "Our Faces, Radiant Sisters, Our Faces Full of Light"

The title is, of course, a direct reference to a short story by James Tiptree Jr (Alice Sheldon) writing as Racoona Sheldon - a woman who certainly persisted, writing about a woman driven mad by warnings and explanations, who resisted to the end. And the story is a grim, but somehow glorious fable of women’s persistence across the years, the centuries.


Alyssa Wong, “God Product”

This is not a happy story. It’s a story about a woman led to believe she is nothing, that she must destroy the thing she values in order to gain the respect she craves.


Carrie Vaughn, “Alchemy”

A paean to every woman who has ever labored, thankless, hindered, belittled, mocked, in a field designated as being “for men” and who has succeeded against all odds.


Seanan McGuire, “Persephone”

A bitter tale that touches powerfully on many painful things - poverty, desperation, the futility of hope in a capitalist dystopia, the delegitimising of non-standard relationships, the traffic in human flesh and blood, the dehumanising of the underclass by the powerful, and the anger that grows from all these and more.


Charlie Jane Anders, “Margot and Rosalind”

A slightly comic, slightly snarky, quite delightful story about a female “mad scientist” who’s building a brain in her basement, despite the efforts of everyone trying to stop her.


Maria Dahvana Headley, “Astronaut”

Reimagining the story of the first primate to survive a flight in space. It’s an all-too-familiar story with a sweetly triumohant ending.


Nisi Shawl, “More than Nothing”

Cora knows what’s expected of her, the sister if a pastor’s wife, a member of a black community, but Cora feels the call of other ways, and even more dangerously, she dares to hope.


Brooke Bolander, “The Last of the Minotaur Wives”

This story speaks of an inheritance of hope, generations of quiet resistance that build to the culmination, the moment when all is ready for the last in the chain to stand, to run, to leave the prison behind.


Jo Walton, “The Jump Rope Rhyme”

Important lessons are often encoded in children’s games and rhymes. Walton, an accomplished poet as well as writer of fiction, has built a skipping rhyme for future generations on the theme of persistence. A poem of hope.

“Persisting, in bad times, with only hope,
For you, in space, for the dream we share
Of a better future everywhere.”


Amal El Mohtar, “Anabasis”

Fir those who do not recognise the reference, Anabasis, which means, in the Greek, journey/expedition up from below, is the title of a book written by Xenophon describing the experiences of an army of Greek mercenaries fighting for the Persian would-be emperor Cyrus the Younger. After Cyrus was killed in battle, the Greeks faced a long and dangerous journey home, and it is this journey out of civil war that occupies most of the account.

El Mohtar writes in this powerful short story about a woman struggling to bring her child to safety, to a new home, and about her own identity as an Arab, a Muslim, a Canadian immigrant, a writer, a voice crying for justice. It’s a story about being a refugee, about borders and documents and human lives. It calls up the specific memories of Muslims trying to cross out of a suddenly far less welcoming US and into Canada during the winter of 2017 and Donald Trump.

Ironically, several months after this story was published, El Mohtar, a Canadian citizen traveling on a Canadian passport, was detained by American Customs agents while on her way to a writers’ retreat in the US. As a result of the interrogation, she missed her flight and was traumatised. (http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-author-calls-out-canadian-government-border-questioning-1.4430916)


Catherynne M. Valente, “The Ordinary Woman and the Unquiet Emperor”

In a world where everything that is not required is forbidden, an ordinary woman has the chance to change everything. She is warned. She is given an explanation. She persisted, and the world changed.

bibliogramma: (Default)


Catherynne Valente, "Down and Out in R'lyeh"; Uncanny Magazine, September/October 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/down-and-out-in-rlyeh/

This is not your average Cthulhu mythos story. In a style reminiscent of its other literary inspirations - Orwell's Down and out in Paris and London, Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - it's a travelogue, a drug-fueled expletive-filled exploration of the fetid underbelly of a city where that most fetid of all things, dead, lies dreaming. The narrator is an inconsequential 'eerie' named Moloch - not "the" Moloch, of course, just one of the thousand children of Shub-Niggurath, out for a night of tripping on the fumes of Cthulhu's farts. It's one wild ride, and it's worth it.


Allison Mills, "If a Bird Can Be a Ghost"; Apex Magazine, August 1, 2017
https://www.apex-magazine.com/if-a-bird-can-be-a-ghost/

Shelly's Grandmother is a Ghostbuster. Shelly has the gift as well, to see and communicate with ghosts, to send them on. Her grandmother has a lot to teach her, about when to send a ghost on, and when to let them be. About treating them like the people they were. But when Shelly's mother dies, she has to learn the hardest lessons on her own. Very strong story, it starts out sweet and turns powerful and full of meaning. By the end I was near tears.


Cassandra Khaw, "Don't Turn On the Lights"; Nightmare Magazine, October 2017
http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/dont-turn-lights/

Oh, this is a dark little piece of horror indeed. Or, considering that it consists of multiple variations on a simple horror trope, a series of dark little pieces, each one successively darker and taking its motivations from deeper in the human psyche. Khaw turns the screws sublimely.


Mary Robinette Kowal, "The Worshipful Society of Glovers"; Uncanny Magazine, July/August 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/worshipful-society-glovers/

Kowal's novelette, a historical fantasy set in Tudor times, features a journeyman glovemaker in a world where the crafting guilds have arrangements with the queen of fairies to produce enchanted goods - all properly licensed, of course, and the penalties for making unlicensed ensorcelled goods can be grave indeed. But laws intended to protect can also trap a good but desperate person in a maze of deceit and worse, with no way out. A story that is, ultimately, about the cruelty of class, the desperation of poverty, and the callousness of a system that makes no allowances for circumstance or simple human necessity.


Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali, "Concessions"; Strange Horizons, published in two parts, March 6 and 13, 2017
http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/concessions-part-1-of-2/

In a world where religious strife has led to wars and a suppression of faiths of all kinds, where religious exiles live in small communities in barren lands becoming increasingly less habitable, a muslimah doctor and scientist struggles to balance both her callings, and find a way to atone for her part in the devastation. A thoughtful, moving story about healing, responsibility, science and faith.


Vina Jie-Min Prasad, "A Series of Steaks"; Clarkesworld, January 2017
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/prasad_01_17/

A delightful sf caper about a prime beef forger and her assistant threatened by a nasty client with blackmail on his mind. The details of the forged food business - and its cousin, the printed replacement organ business - are actually fascinating, and the way the women turn the tables and ride off into the sunset is delightful.


Kathleen Kayembe, "The Faerie Tree"; Lightspeed Magazine, November 2017
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-faerie-tree/

Striking a bargain with the faeries is never something done lightly, but when the need is great enough, some are willing to pay the price. But the sacrifice can be even worse than you thought it would be. A well-told tale with a bitter lesson.


Rachel Swirsky, "The Day The Wizards Came"; Lightspeed Magazine, November 2017
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/day-wizards-came/

A short but many-layered story. What if wizards - mere schoolchildren, on brooms, not unlike the wizards everyone has been reading about - suddenly appeared and stopped a terrible thing from happening. And what if the mundanes, who the young wizards didn't have much respect for anyway, instead if being suitable grateful, wondered why now, why, if they had such power, they hadn't stopped other terrible things before then. And what if... But as I said, there are many levels to this unsettling tale, having to do with responsibility, and power, and expectations, and wanting things to be better without having to do it yourself, and other tricky questions.


Theodora Goss, "Come See the Living Dryad"; tor.com, March 9, 2017

Goss' novelette deals with an issue that I feel rather strongly about - the treatment of people who have visible differences and disabilities, by society, by those close to them, by institutions and media. Set in 19th century England (and thus evoking echoes of the life of a similar medical curiosity, Joseph Merrick, the famous Elephant Man), this is the story of the life and murder of Daphne Merwin, the Living Dryad. There is a real, and very rare, genetic condition known as Lewandowsky-Lutz dysplasia, in which damaged skin develops into hardened tissue and forms papules that resemble treebark, and branches. It is this condition that the fictional Daphne suffers from, and the reason that her husband - the man who found her alone and starving in the streets of London - exhibits her under the name of the Living Dryad.

The story is told through Daphne's journals, the internal narrative of her great-great-granddaughter, also named Daphne, who has inherited her condition, and various documents - handbills, news reports, excerpts from the younger Daphne's book on Victorian Freak Shows. The younger Daphne, reading the journal for her research, becomes suspicious about the official version of the murder, and seeks to resolve the questions she has. Daphne's journals provide clues. But what lies beneath the murder mystery - which is interesting in itself - is the tragedy of two woman turned into objects for display, for the financial benefit of the man who wooed and used them both, and the voyeuristic pleasure of others.


Carlie St. George, “If We Survive the Night”; The Dark Magazine, March 2017
http://thedarkmagazine.com/if-we-survive-the-night/

There’s a house in the woods where the girls who die in horror films go. Every day there’s an angel who calls on them to repent their sins, and every night they are murdered again. Because everyone knows it’s the bad girls who die. But who decides what’s good and what’s bad? And who determined that the appropriate punishment for any sin that a teenaged girl could commit is to be horrifically murdered?

In an interesting literary coincidence, shortly after reading this story, I encountered the following passage in Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life: “You can be made responsible whether or not you have modified your behavior in accordance, because gender fatalism has already explained the violence directed against you as forgivable and inevitable.”


Kirsten Valdez Quade, “Christina the Astonishing (1150 - 1224); The New Yorker, July 31, 2017
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/31/christina-the-astonishing-1150-1224

More mainstream/literary fiction. A thought-provoking story recounting the life of a late Medieval female saint from the perspective of her sister. Reading with a modern eye, one is unable to discern sanctity from madness. Did Christina really return from death, or from a paralytic fit that seemed like death to the uneducated villagers and barely educated priest? Her sisters suffer greatly from her ranting, accusations and erratic, sometimes violent behaviour - is it the wrath of God or schizophrenia? What tears at the heart is the anguish of a sister torn between love, resentment, anger and reverence.

bibliogramma: (Default)



Catherynne Valente's novella The Refrigerator Monologues is a savage deconstruction of one of the nastier snd more misogynist tropes in genre fiction. Actually, it dominates literary fiction too. The woman in the refrigerator.

As reviewer Carrie S. explains in her discussion of the novella on the website Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, "The trope name comes from the unfortunate girlfriend of Kyle Raynor (the Green Lantern) who comes home one night to find his girlfriend murdered and her body stuffed in his refrigerator. This leads Kyle to finally fully assume his role as Green Lantern as he seek vengeance and then goes on fight other battles, now secure in his superhero role." [1]

More broadly, the term refers to the countless women in books, comics and films who are raped, mutilated, killed, or otherwise violently disposed of as a device to facilitate the hero's character development.

In Valente's hands, feminist deconstruction of this trope takes the form of interlocking narratives voiced by the women of Deadtown, the place where the superheroes' refrigerated women go after their task of inspiring a man has been completed. It doesn't matter that some of these women are superheroes in their own right. They are the refrigerator women, and they exist as the leftover pieces of the stories of men.

It is a difficult narrative to read, story after story of betrayal, pain, abandonment. I'm not a big comics fan, so I didn't necessarily know which particular comic book narratives each section of Valente's work is based on. But it didn't matter. These stories stand on their own merits, and the stories they tell are ones you've seen or read a hundred times. But never quite like this, from the woman in the fridge, full of grief and rage.


[1] http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/reviews/refrigerator-monologues-catherynne-m-valente-annie-wu/

bibliogramma: (Default)

The Grass-Cutting Sword, Catherynne M. Valente

In this book, Valente turns her exquisite literary style and her extensive knowledge of the roots and meanings of myth to a tale based on Japanese legends. The storm god Susanoo-no-Mikoto, cast out of heaven by his sun goddess sister, sets out to find his mother, the goddess Izanami, dead before his birth and now become the Root country, the land below the surface of the world, the place of death and decay. En route, he learns of the sad tale of eight daughters, all stolen away by an eight-headed, eight-tailed serpent, and decides to kill the monster and rescue the women. Valente tells the story from multiple perspectives, that of the god, the monster, and each of the eight sisters who have been consumed into the body of the monster.

Running through the various threads of the story is a grim examination of the experience of women in the family, whether they be goddesses or mortals. Particularly disturbing is the revelation that the eighth sister, having witnessed her older siblings' relationships with men, chooses to give herself to the monster rather than marry.

Very interesting reworking of Japanese mythology, but then, would you expect any less from Valente?

Tapestries

Dec. 28th, 2008 07:48 pm
bibliogramma: (Default)

The Orphan’s Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice, Catherynne M. Valente

Valente continues her tour de force of storytelling in this, the second volume of Orphan’s tales. Similar in structure to the first volume, with its nested tales and interwoven strands, the focus of the tales shifts in the second volume, as the threads of the characters' lives become more tightly woven and the quests change slowly from searches for what is past, for origins and beginnings, from “how it happened” stories, to questions of identity, of who the characters are, and what do they need to fulfil their futures.

The division between story-teller and audience is blurred in this volume as well, for the tales that remain to be told are written on the eyelids of the orphan girl in the garden, and so, the more completely she embodies her text, the more deeply the young prince, formerly a passive listener, is drawn into the storytelling as he now must read to them both the tales that are still written on the body, but in places that the teller can not see by herself.

Valente's subtle imaginings speak on so many levels- if the eyes are the windows to the soul, then can the secrets within only be read by another?

As with the first volume, this book is mesmerising to read and almost impossible to describe. What Valente does in this book is nothing short of magic.

bibliogramma: (Default)


Think of a matroyoshka doll, but with multiple dolls within the first one, nested two or three to a level. Or one of those computer programs with so many nested subroutines you need the flowchart to follow the logic.

That's the structure of the enthralling The Orphan’s Tales: In The Night Garden, by Catherynne M. Valente. A child prince listens to the stories told by a young girl who lives in one of his father's gardens, sotires that tell of people who listen to stories told by the people they meet about the stories that they have heard... and on and on. As the stories move from one protagonist to another, it becomes, slowly, clear that all the various tales are interwoven accounts of different elements and times and places of one larger story.

Not only is it fascinating to see the threads coming together as one person's tale links to that of another's, but the source material Valente draws on in crafting the individual stories come from a myriad times and places - I think I recognised themes and styles from cultures as far apart as Saami and Dravidian.

It's like putting together a literary jigsaw puzzle. I suspect this book or its sequel, In the Cities of Coin and Spice might not be for everyone, but I was delighted by it and I recommend it to those who enjoy threading their way through the labyrinth and putting the pieces together.

Profile

bibliogramma: (Default)
bibliogramma

May 2019

S M T W T F S
   1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
2627282930 31 

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 16th, 2025 12:19 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios