My life in books

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.

Rosemary and Rue, the first of Seanan McGuire's October Daye urban fantasy novels, starts off in a manner most uncharacteristic of the genre. Toby Daye, private investigator and half-fae changling, is tailing a fae lord suspected of kidnapping his brother's wife and daughter when she is caught and transformed into a koi. She spends the next 14 years swimming in a pond, her selfhood submerged in the limited mind of a fish.

Unlike many urban fantasy protagonists, Toby Daye doesn't always get away safely. That was the first thing that caught my attention and made me think this might be a cut above the masses of urban fantasy series on the market these days. Then there was the fact that rather than bouncing back ready to avenge her losses - years of her life, a relationship with a lover and a child who believe she abandoned them and want nothing to do with her, a sidhe mother who was slowly losing her mind when the transformation took place and is beyond reach by the time Toby breaks free of enchantment - she withdraws, repudiates everything of her former life, shows all the signs of PTSD you would expect from such an assault, such losses.

And then one of the Sidhe nobility, Evelyn Winters, also known as Evening Winterrose, Countess of Goldengreen someone Toby has known all her life, is murdered by cold iron, and her last act is to bind Toby with an ancient curse to stop at nothing to find her murderer.

The complexity of October Daye's world, encompassing faerie beings from multiple cultures, changelings, kingdoms anchored to the world but not wholly in it, and the politics of all these levels is fascinating, and watching Toby navigate all these realms - while still living in the world and dealing with jobs and rent and the human relationships severed when she was imprisoned in the body of a fish - is enough to engage the reader's interest. Add in the mystery of Evening's murder and the twists and turns of Toby's investigation, and you have a roaring good read.