My life in books

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.

Beth Plutchak’s collection of essays, Borders, Boundary Crossings, and Reinventing Science Fiction, is a part of Aqueduct Press’ Conversations Pieces Series. The works - both fictional and non-fictional - in this series are intended to generate and explore conversations about science fiction. The conversations engendered by this series come in many forms, and touch on many things. The ways that genres influences each other, the ways that writers create works to augment, or subvert, or interrogate earlier works, the creation of variations on themes, the ways that social movements and political and historical events change our understanding of science fiction or key sciencefictional works or themes.

Beth Plutchak’s collection of works are a part of these ongoing conversations. The publisher’s description of the collection says:

“The personal is political, and the political is personal. This collection of essays and an sf tale explores the intersections of representation, science fiction, feminism, social justice, and fandom, specifically in relationship to the feminist sf convention WisCon. Plutchak argues that to build a new future we need new stories, stories that tell us where we have been as well as show us where we are going, and she uses feminist theory to analyze feminist sf fandom's history, present, and future.”

In the first of the essays in this collection, “Is WisCon Feminist?” Plutchak interrogates both the meaning of feminism and the positioning of WisCon as a feminist science fiction convention, drawing on the proceedings of a panel on the title subject at WisCon. She begins with her recollections of her early engagement with second wave feminism, and looks at the ways in which it failed:

“But, I always feel that what we really owe these young women is an apology; I think we need to tell them that if feminism seems irrelevant to their concerns, it’s not because it is irrelevant, it’s because we lost. We made compromises to achieve narrow goals; we threw our sisters of color under the bus. We convinced ourselves we weren’t like poor white women. We asked poor women and all women of color to wait. We wouldn’t ask for full reproductive rights; let’s get abortion and birth control first, we said. We wouldn’t ask for a restructuring of corporate capitalism we’d just be satisfied with equal pay and equal access for now. We wanted the ERA, equality with the boys, even though what the boys had varied wildly by race and class. We weren’t brave enough to think that through, not to mention the white women who never wanted to anyway, thank you very much.

Why do you think the same battles are being fought all over again? It’s not entirely our fault. We were played. But, we have to recognize that and own our part in it.”[1]

Plutchak goes on to discuss the struggle for a safe space for people of colour at WisCon, and how initial failures to act on that need were failures of feminism, and how anger at that failure led to the founding of the Carl Brandon Society. She closes with a discussion of the ways in which supporting the stories of the marginalised is one if the most important functions of an organisation that sees itself as a feminist science fiction convention.

In the next essay, “Challenging the Narrative of the Undeserving Poor” Plutchak takes on an issue very close to my heart, when she says: “We want to help the poor, I suppose, but we don’t want to help people who don’t deserve it, people who won’t help themselves. But, how do we know who is and isn’t deserving? Who controls that narrative? Let’s unwind this a little bit, shall we?”

I’ll interject myself into the conversation for a minute here. I get very annoyed when people make judgements about who “deserves” social assistance programs and who does not. If I was the ruler of the world, everyone would have a guaranteed annual income sufficient to provide them with a private and comfortable place to live, healthy food, full medical care, as much education as they want, clothes and access to recreational facilities, accommodations for disabilities on an individual needs basis. And this means everyone, even the hypothetical lazy slacker who gets all this and does nothing “productive” in return. Because we can’t measure “productivity” in any meaningful way. Lillies of the field, and all that. And simply by being a live human being, one deserves to be provided with the essentials for physical and emotional well-being. And fuck the judgements. So, back to Plutchak.

In this essay, she takes on the master narratives of poverty as the consequence of poor choices and the “culture of poverty.” She discusses the ways in which a comfortable white middle class person may fail to realise that poverty and marginalised status eliminate options that others may have, and that decisions that look like poor choices from outside may be the best way to survive.

In “Reinvent the Future, Change the World,” Plutchak makes visible the connections between science fiction, representation of the marginalised, social change and hope.

Plutchak includes two shorter essays which were included in WisCon souvenirs books (Plutchak edited the convention’s souvenir books for several years) and concludes with an essay looking at the history of WisCon from a perspective of working toward a feminist theory of decision-making that prioritises the needs of the marginalised, those with less voice and less opportunity to influence or create spaces that are both safe and fun for them.

Plutchak has titled this collection Borders, Boundary Crossings, and Reinventing Science Fiction, but as I read these works, I think that the recurring and overarching theme is more the failure of the imagination and how that has limited what science fiction can do - and how we can reinvent our world by truly expanding our imaginings, by telling the stories we haven’t had enough imagination to tell, or to accept and understand and inhabit when others tell them to us. I see this message in the single piece of fiction included in this collection, the short story “Game Theory.” This is a brilliant deconstruction of the generation ship/closed society trope in science fiction, and makes the point that until the patterns of dominance we have built into our society are altered, there can be no changes to our outcomes - and that story, the ability to imagine a different way, is part of how we come to change those patterns.


[1] As a feminist in her 60s who also began her journey tiward a feminist life with the theory and praxis of second wave feminism, I agree with this analysis. White feminism did focus on white concerns, abandoned anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggles, failed to understand - or perhaps chose not to try - when, for instance, the Combahee River Collective showed us a path toward what is now known as intersectional feminism. Instead, we settled for a few victories in limited areas that benefited white women more than other women, other sexual minorities, other marinalised peole of any gender. We could have committed to the hard choices, to the long struggle for true social justice and a restructuring of a system that marginalised all but the wealthy and white. But we didn’t.

Trials by Whiteness, edited by science fiction author Jayme Goh, is the latest in Aqueduct Press' series of published essays and conversations arising from the annual WisCon (the oldest feminist-focused science fiction convention, held in Wisconsin). In recent years, Wiscon has ben making attempts to make its focus on feminism an intersectional one, looking at issues of representation, and safer space for POCs in conventions, among other things. In this, the Chronicles of the 40th WisCon, Goh has chosen to interrogate whiteness:

"I want to start a conversation on whiteness. We talk a great deal about representations of people of color in science fiction, because they are erased, invisiblized — they need to be foregrounded, in order to combat the overwhelming whiteness of the genre.

What we do not talk about is how whiteness, so pervasive, all-encompassing, is also invisible, like the water that fish live in. To talk about it is like naming racism — it’s bringing the bogeyman to life. In this logic, racism would not exist if we simply didn’t talk about it — similarly, the problem of whiteness, the problem of white culture, the problem of white supremacy, simply would not exist, because we do not talk about whiteness, do not pinpoint its murky edges. It is only a problem when Nazis are involved, and even then, mostly unremarked upon, because Nazis are not normal, so let’s not normalize them by talking about them."

She goes on to specify her theme as 'trials by whiteness': "... trials by whiteness that people of color face. The slow and steady stream of microaggressions and invalidations. The sudden eruptions of violence. The cold betrayals from loved ones in what should have been a safe and understanding space. We could talk about just white people, but the problem with whiteness is not really about white people per se, but about them in relation to non-white, the Other. To center white people in an analysis of whiteness is to repeat the problem."

The essays and creative works collected in this volume touch on this theme from many perspectives, in many voices. There's much to learn for this white reader in them. And much to remind me of how much I wish I could be a part of this community, these conversations, this learning and teaching and sharing.

Sarah Tolmie's latest book, Two Travelers, is a collection, just barely - it contains two separate works, a novelette, "The Dancer on the Stairs," and a novella, "The Burning Furrow." Both are stories of travellers, people caught between worlds, coming to terms with being out of place in the the place they find themselves.

"The Dancer on the Stairs" is about a woman, possibly from a world much like ours, who finds herself transported to a palace so vast and complex it is a world in itself. Confined at first by her lack of knowledge and status to the vast staircase that connects the various levels of the palace - where she finds many others, all exiles without the status or means to influence the doorkeeper stationed at each level to let them return - she slowly learns enough about the intricate and protocol-driven society beyond the stairs to gain entrance and place, though she is never truly one of them.

In "The Burning Furrow", a man called Eyo't finds himself moving between worlds - our own, modern world, and the world of his birth, where his people are oppressed and he is part of a resistance movement. He can bring other people with him, and so he has taken his family - wife, son and daughter - from his world to ours, where they own a restaurant and have access to education and medical care. Yet he continues to cross back and forth, bringing his family home with him at regular intervals for the rite that binds his people together. Events and new relationships formed in both worlds eventually force him, and the members of his family, to make choices about which world is theirs. At the same time, through her connection with Eyo't, the countess Ienne, a member of the ruling class on Eyo't's world, crosses the lines between class and culture.

Both stories are excellent, thoughtful pieces about making the best of changes one cannot control, adapting to new realities, learning to be at home despite being always the outsider.

Karen Tidbeck, Jagannath

I was completely enthralled by this collection of short stories by Karin Tidbeck, translated from Swedish by the author herself. These are, for the most part, stories that inhabit the space between fantasy, science fiction and horror often refered to as weird fiction. Short-listed for the Tiptree award, many of the stories are told from the viewpoint of women, and deal, in one way or another, with variations on the themes of inheritance, bloodlines, reproduction. Tidbeck's brilliantly written tales are unsettling, disturbing, and rarely give the reader a clearly defined and closed off ending. Instead, she invites the reader to carefully consider the situation she presents, and come to their own conclusions about what happened, or will happen next.


Octavia Butler, Unexpected Stories

Octavia Butler died eight years ago. That voice of true genius was stilled. But sometimes the universe gives us an unexpected note of grace - or in this case, two notes, two early, previously unpublished stories by Butler, found among her papers by her agent and literary executor.

In these stories - A Necessary Being and Childfinder - Butler speaks to us again, about power and difference and finding solutions - but not always satisfactory ones - to the ways such thing divide and harm us. It was both sad and marvelous to read new words from Octavia Butler.


Eleanor Arrnason, Big Mama Stories

Arnason's Big Mamas are the stuff of folk tales - marvellous creatures who span space and time by their whim and will, who have the kind of adventures that gods and folk-heroes have, meeting all kinds of incredible situations with confidence and wit - Big Mamas who enjoy the occasional company of Big Poppas, but don't need them. This wonderful collection of Big Mama stories, published by Aqueduct Press, is sheer delight to read. As Karin L. Kross notes in her review of this collection on Tor.com,

Arnason’s Big Mama mythos is a highly enjoyable and strongly feminist synthesis of science, history, and sheer imagination. Like the best fairy tales and folk tales, her stories sometimes go to dark and unsettling places, but they’re really about how to overcome the darkness—how to take a long view of the universe, where individual lives are at once very small but also very important and precious.

Eugie Foster, Mortal Clay, Stone Heart and Other Stories in Shades of Black and White

It's not often that you find a collection or anthology where every single story is a gem, but that's exactly what this was. Foster writes stories that are both technically sound and emotionally powerful. Her genre choices range from straight-up fantasy to something akin to magic realism, so I urge anyone who enjoys short fiction of that kind to check out her work.

Brit Mandelo's momgraph, We Wuz Pushed: On Joanna Russ and Radical Truth-Telling, is yet another of the wonderful volumes of feminist sf criticism and history published by one of my favourite small publishing houses, Aqueduct Press.

In this study, Mandelo examines what she sees as one of Russ' primary foci in both fiction and non-fiction - the telling of the truths that lie beneath, and are obscured by, the mystifications of sexism (and heterosexism), and by doing so, bringing those truths into everyday life.

It's hardly a secret to anyone who's followed this blog that Russ is one of my favourite wrtiers, both for her groundbreaking fiction and for her fierce and uncompromising feminist criticism (How To Suppress Women's Writing should be on the reading list of everyone who chooses to engage with the printed word/world). Mandelo's exploration of Russ's development as a radical truth teller deepened my appreciation and understandingof her work - and what more can one ask for in a work of criticism?

Robert Boyczuk, Horror Story and other Stories

This was a delightful surprise. To begin with, I know the author – I studied C and systems design under his direction in my second foray into the academic world about 25 years ago, and I remember at the time he did mention working on some short stories. So when I wandered across his name in a list of recent speculative fiction publications, I just had to a) see if was the Bob Boyczuk I remembered, and b) read the book. Well, it was and I did.

The stories in this collection inhabit the worlds between fantasy, science fiction and horror. They are well-written, original, sometimes very provocative, often very powerful, and always interesting. And they are available under Creative Commons licence (https://cs.senecac.on.ca/~robert.boyczuk/writing/collected-works.htm) if you can’t find a dead tree version. Read. Spread the word.


Peter S. Beagle, We Never Talk About My Brother
Peter S. Beagle, The Line Between

Beagle is truly one of the masters of the short form in speculative fiction. I savour every new collection of his stories that I read. Beagle tells such quintessentially human stories, with such range and depth, that his work regularly takes my breath away. If you are looking for a more considered examination, you could always look at the articles in this issue of Green Man Review devoted to Beagle and his work (http://www.greenmanreview.com/oneoffs/peterbeagle.html) or you could just go and read anything he’s written.


Lavie Tidhar, HebrewPunk

Fantasy and alternate history that makes use of Jewish tradition, myth and archetypes is rather rare. I may be that I have been missing out on many such examples, but I am hard-pressed to think of many who have made significant use of Jewish culture and tradition in their works. The names that come first to my mind are Peter Beagle, Lisa Goldstein, Ellen Galford, Michael Chabon, Avram Davidson, and of course (though he is claimed by the literary fiction people as one of their own) Isaac Bashevis Singer. – and now, Lavie Tidhar. In this collection of four linked fantasy stories, Tidhar gives us a wealth of characters out of Jewish tradition. I am looking forward to reading more of his work.


Gwyneth Jones, The Buonarotti Quartet

Four stories set in the same universe as Jones’ Aleutian Trilogy, which use the existence of an instantaneous transit technology as the foundation for storytelling. Jones discusses these stories – which I found as thought provoking as I have come to expect Jones’ work to be – in a post on the Aqueduct Press blog: http://aqueductpress.blogspot.com/2009/05/gwyneth-joness-buonarotti-quartet.html

My Death, Lisa Tuttle.

Lately I seem to have been reading, by happenstance I presume, books that in one way or another make me think about what I can only describe as the secret history of women, and the ways in which women as whole, real individuals are erased in our culture and its products. Sometimes it’s been an obvious theme, the writer’s intent being to examine either the reality of women’s lives, or some aspect of how women are disappeared and what they may have been doing that no one wanted to, or was able to, record. Sometimes – as in some of the classic SFF (written by men) that I’ve been re-reading of late - it has been about the total absence of women, or the absence of independence and agency in the women who are represented. Sometimes, it’s just been about a sense that there are untold women’s stories behind a narrative that’s focused more on the stories of men – something that would be less problematic if only there were as many narratives where men’s stories were left in the background in order to tell the stories of women.

Lisa Tuttle’s My Death is very much a story about ways in which women’s stories are erased – and reclaimed. It is also at some levels a vast metaphor for the act of creation when artist and subject merge in order to create a new vision.

In this novella, an unnamed narrator, an author still working through her grief at the death of her husband, is led by a series of apparent coincidences to embark upon writing a biography of an earlier novelist (supposedly a contemporary of Virginia Woolf et.al.) who influenced her when she was younger and which whom she has always felt a strange sense of connection. This novelist – Helen Ralston – had served as model and muse for her older lover and former teacher Willy Logan, whose paintings and novels became well-known, while Ralston’s slipped into obscurity. Ralston, thus, is simultaneously the women whose work is overshadowed by the man she is associated with, and the woman whose individuality is erased by her assigned function as inspiration.

The narrator’s quest to discover what happened to the real woman behind the muse leads her to the discovery of a painting by Ralston, titled “My Death,” which is a visual paradox, simultaneously picturing an island that she and her lover visit; and a woman’s body with the focus on her exposed vulva – yet another form of disappearing of the real woman, this time through the classic tropes of woman as the earth/the land/the soil and woman as sex.

There is much more to this novel, including a profound shift in perspective near the end that cannot be logically reconciled yet illuminates the core truths that Tuttle has to offer about the distinction between Woman as muse and women who themselves create art, between women who are observed, submerged, erased, and women who are seen, known, remembered for who they are as individuals and what they do for themselves.

It is only after this shift takes place that the speculative elements of this work emerge, but once they do, it becomes apparent that this novella – one of the Conversation Pieces series published by Aqueduct Press – lies securely within the scope of literary speculative fiction.

This not a book that can be understood wholly from a rational perspective, for like the painting that give the book its name, the story itself is more than one thing at once, and at the same time symbolic of other things entirely. But it works, and powerfully so, as a an exploration of women and their relations, historically and potentially, to art.

The final two volumes of L. Timmel Duchamp’s absolutely enthralling and thought-provoking Marq’ssan Cycle, Blood in the Fruit and Stretto are on my list of the best books I read in 2008.

In this series of novels, Duchamp has written not only an engrossing science fictional saga story about the effects of a global intervention by aliens proves the catalyst for meaningful change, and the women who in various ways give their lives to that change, but also a truly masterful analysis of how oppressive and fascist states and organisations (and personalities, there’s more than a whiff of Reich and Marcuse in some of Duchamp’s characterisations of both states and characters in these books) function and respond to resistance, and of the various ways of resistance to oppression, whether it be at the level of the personal, the social, or the state. It’s also a deeply feminist analysis of power relations and how they can operate constructively or destructively, depending on the means, methods and goals.

Reading the series, following the lives and thoughts of the various viewpoint characters in your head, is a curiously multi-layered experience – each book is at the same time a complex political/psychological thriller and a workshop in identifying, resisting, subverting and ultimately, replacing the fascist architecture built up in one’s own mind from years of living in a society where authority is defined as coming from without and from above, difference is used as a tool of control, not a resource to be shared.

This series really is some of the most important feminist and political writing out there at this time.