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Category Archives: women in sf


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Science fiction mistressworks

Since 2011 is becoming the Year of Women in SF (and so it should)… and my reading challenge for the twelve months involves reading a dozen sf novels by women writers… and various other websites and blogs have been posting on the topic since the beginning of the year… and today people were throwing around on twitter some suggested titles by female authors for Gollancz’s SF Masterworks series using the hashtag #SFMistressworks… I thought it was time for another leap onto the bandwagon. SF Mistressworks is an excellent term, I feel, to describe classics of the genre by female writers. And here are some of my suggestions. Most I’ve read, but some I’m going by others’ comments. Some are obscure but, I think, deserve to be better known. I have not included any of the titles by female writers already in the SF Masterworks series, although, of course, they deserve to be on a list such as this.

In no particular order…

Canopus in Argos: Archives, Doris Lessing
If they can include the Helliconia trilogy as one humungous paperback in the SF Masterworks series, why not this quintet?

The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
This is pretty much the definitive theocratic US dystopia novel.

Ash: A Secret History, Mary Gentle
Why is this even out of print?

Kairos or Life, Gwyneth Jones
Or perhaps even White Queen or Bold As Love (which won the Arthur C Clarke Award). Certainly she deserves to be on the list. The only difficulty is picking which book (or books, of course).

The Children of Anthi and Requiem for Anthi, Jay D Blakeney
Blakeney was a pen-name of Deborah Chester, who chiefly wrote YA sf novels under the name Sean Dalton. These two are actually pretty good space operas.

Halfway Human, Carolyn Ives Gilman
I remember this as one of those rare sf novels, like Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, which uses the genre to comment intelligently and interestingly on gender.

Jerusalem Fire or Sovereign, RM Meluch
A pair of accomplished space operas. I’ll have to reread them, but one or the other, I suspect, would find an audience if reprinted.

Daughters of the Sunstone, Sydney J van Scyoc
Van Scyoc has long been one of my favourite authors, and the trilogy collected in this SFBC omnibus edition is perhaps her best work.

Cyteen or Downbelow Station or Angel With the Sword, CJ Cherryh
Cyteen is probably her most adult novel, and Downbelow Station her most popular. Angel With the Sword just happens to be a personal favourite.

The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell
It won lots of awards.

China Mountain Zhang, Maureen F McHugh
I know only that this book is highly-regarded. It is on the list for this year’s reading challenge.

Kindred, Octavia Butler
Likewise for this one.

The Steerswoman, Rosemary Kirstein
I just really liked this, thought it was charming. See here.

Shadow Man, Melissa Scott
Another one from my reading challenge, chosen because I’ve heard many good things about it.

Maul, Tricia Sullivan
Also from the reading challenge, but an Arthur C Clarke Award nominee too.

Any of the Jurisdiction series, Susan R Matthews
Why are these out of print? Why were they never published in the UK?

The Marq’ssan Cycle, L Timmel Duchamp
These five books are important.

Native Tongue, Suzette Haden Elgin
I’ve been wanting to read this for years.

Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Naomi Mitchison
I picked this for my British SF Masterworks – see here.

The Silent City, Élisabeth Vonarburg
I’ve only read Vonarburg’s Dreams of the Sea – which I thought very good – but this is probably her most successful English-language novel.

Walk to the End of the World, Suzy McKee Charnas
Another one I’ve always wanted to read.

Angel at Apogee, SN Lewitt
Another favourite author who, I think, deserves to be on a list like this. Angel at Apogee was her debut novel and I still have a soft spot for it. Some of her later books were a bit too derivative to count as possible classics, but her last few were original and interesting.

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, James Tiptree Jr
Because she certainly belongs on this list, but her strength lay in her short fiction. As long as the collection contains ‘And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side’, I’ll be happy.

I have no doubt missed off lots and lots and lots of suitable books. Suggest me some in the comments, then.

 

Edit: now with new added meme-type stuff! See The sf mistressworks meme list of 91 titles by women sf writers.


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Women in sf reading challenge #2: Winterstrike, Liz Williams

Liz Williams is one of those British sf writers who was first published in the US. Her debut novel, The Ghost Sister, was shortlisted for the Philip K Dick Award in 2001, but has never received a UK edition. It wasn’t until her second novel, Empire of Bones, that she had a novel published in the UK. And yet, despite writing more than a novel a year since then, and even being shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award in 2006 for Banner of Souls, she’s not a writer who seems to have impinged much on my map of the genre. I’m not entirely sure why. As far as I could tell, her science fiction was of a variety that would appeal to me. Yet I never bought or read one of her books. Perhaps it was because she seemed focused on her Detective Inspector Chen series of Chinese fantasy novels, which don’t interest me in the slightest.

Whatever the reason, it’s a lack I’ve now rectified. Winterstrike is the first book in a planned trilogy. It was first published in 2008, although no sequels have yet to appear. It is set on a far-future Mars which bears very little resemblance to the Mars of science fact. Parts of the story take place on Earth, which is also greatly changed.

There’s a lot of praise for Winterstrike and Liz Williams reproduced on the covers of the paperback edition I read. So it would not have been unrealistic to have high expectations of the book. Perhaps they were too high. While I enjoyed Winterstrike, and thought parts of it very good, it left me overall feeling a little underwhelmed. It may well be that the misleading back-cover blurb didn’t help. It claims the novel is about Hestia Mar who has been sent to Caud, an enemy city-state, “to recover details of an ancient weapon”. Which she finds and passes to her home city of Winterstrike, an act which “has virtually guaranteed the use of the weapon”. Her cousin Essegui, meanwhile, “discovers a plot by creatures who hold the secrets of the Martian past, and its future”. Which all sounds very exciting and science-fictional, but is no real preparation for what the story actually describes.

Hestia is indeed a spy for Winterstrike, looking for data on an ancient weapon in Caud. But when she finds it and passes the data back to her handler, the effects of the weapon’s use are not described until near the end of the novel; and even then it’s peripheral to the main plot. Hestia’s story meanwhile goes off on an entirely different path: while returning to Winterstrike from Caud, she finds herself in the ghostly city of the Noumenon, and stumbles across the army of Mantis, a clone of an ancient despot. Essegui, on the other hand, is searching for her sister, Shorn, who has escaped after being imprisoned in her room for consorting with a man-remnant. But Shorn is not really Eseegui’s sister, nor in fact is she really human. Also important is Earth’s Centipede Queen, who has come to Mars to find Shorn, for reasons not fully disclosed, but which result in Hestia travelling to Earth to tell them their queen has gone missing…

The two main narratives of Winterstrike, Hestia’s and Essegui’s, frequently come close to touching but never quite meet. But they do overlap, often taking place in the same parts of Mars. Such a carefully-braided plot is not especially unusual, but the voices of the two characters are so similar it is sometimes hard to distinguish between them. It’s only when Hestia reaches Earth that the locales differentiate the two threads sufficiently to keep them separate in the mind of the reader. Even then, the novel never quite reveals what’s going on. When Shorn is revealed as a bio-engineered experiment, it comes as a surprise because there’d been no foreshadowing in her character, nor had the existence of the technology to do it been mentioned earlier. Admittedly, this does remain true to the points of view of the narrators, but the revelation still feels abrupt.

As indeed do many of the book’s other revelations. It’s difficult to sense the shape of the story because Hestia and Essegui are in thrall to forces they don’t understand, and their narratives do not allow for an omniscient viewpoint to give the reader greater knowledge. This is not as claustrophobic as it might suggest, but it does mean much of the story has to be read on faith.

Throughout Winterstrike, Williams uses an invented vocabulary to describe many elements of the world,  her word-choices often giving the novel a flavour similar to Gene Wolfe’s The Book Of The New Sun. Unlike Wolfe, Williams has not used real obsolete or antique terms. For example, the Changed, the bio-engineered races of humanity on Mars and Earth, include vulpen, kappa and demothea. I googled the last word, wondering if it had any mythological meaning… and discovered that  it’s apparently a boy’s name from the Wild West and means “one who talks while walking”. Which, I suspect, was not the intended meaning in Winterstrike. None of Williams’ invented terms are glossed, or entirely clear from context; and it often takes a while for their precise meaning to come clear.

I wanted to like Winterstrike more than I did. The Mars Williams has created is bizarre and fascinating, but, while described as a matriarchy, there didn’t seem much that was, well, especially female about it. In fact, for much of the story, Mars might well have been an alien world and its inhabitants entirely unrelated to humanity. I’d like to read the next two books in the trilogy, but I shall not be waiting with bated breath for them. This is not to say Winterstrike is a bad book, just that I didn’t take to it as much as I had expected. But I may very well try Williams’ other sf novels should I come across them.


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Women in sf reading challenge #1: The Steerswoman, Rosemary Kirstein

I forget where I first came across mention of The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein. It was in the last year or so, although the book was originally published in 1989. I do know that it’s not well known in the UK. But whenever, and whatever, I read about it, I decided it might appeal, and so determined to keep my eyes open for a copy. Which I found several months later in a local charity shop.

It is not a book , if I had known nothing of it, that I think I would have looked at twice. Had I not known of it when I found it in that charity shop, I would not have bought it. I’d heard it was quite good – but how often do you hear that about books, which promptly disappoint? I’d heard it read as fantasy but was really science fiction – but there’s so much room for manoeuvre in that statement, it’s hard to take it as any kind of useful description. Something brought The Steerswoman to my notice, something persuaded me it was worth reading…

And I’m glad I did. The Steerswoman is a gem. It’s by no means great literature, but it is most definitely appealing.

Rowan is the steerswoman of the title. Quite what these are, or how they came about, is never fully explained. They travel the land, observing, gathering facts, drawing and redrawing maps. Any one can ask them questions, and they must answer to the best of their ability. Should, however, they ask a question and are refused, then they can ban that person from ever being answered by a steerswoman again. There are, incidentally, steersmen, but they are greatly outnumbered. (In fact, The Steerswoman states there are three during the period the story takes place, and that it’s the largest number they’ve had in the organisation’s history.)

While investigating the origin of a strange blue jewel she has found, Rowan comes to the notice of the wizards. She is attacked by one of their soldiers but, with the help of new-found companion, Bel, a barbarian warrior woman from the Outskirts, she fights off the attacker. This only makes her more determined to solve the puzzle presented by the jewel. She returns to the steerswomen’s Archive to discuss her problem with her colleagues.

Bel has told her of a large bed of such jewels in the Outskirts. Rowan and Bel head for that bed, in disguise since the wizards are still after Rowan. En route, they are joined by William, a fourteen-year-old boy who has run away from home with the intention of being taken on as an apprentice by a wizard. He has magic of his own – charms which can do everything from crack stone to make things disappear noisily. En route, they are attacked by more soldiers, but win the fight. They trail the surviving soldier to the wizards’ keep and infiltrate it. But Rowan is captured, and subsequently learns some of the secrets behind the wizards’ powers…

The world The Steerswoman presents is a standard Dark Ages fantasy. People fight with swords, use candles to light their homes, and ride on horses when travelling great distances. There’s nothing especially original or distinctive about it. The wizards are not the rulers of the world, but they are an elite who appear to control everything. They are also split into two factions, Red and Blue, who periodically fight each other.

The Steerswoman is cleverly revealed as science fiction as the story progresses (unlike the cover art to the US paperback). There is nothing overt about this. William’s “charms”, for example, from their description are clearly chemical explosives. The magic lighting in the towns is plainly powered by electricity. The wizards, then, are a technological elite, presenting their science and technology as magic (rather than as, say, divine powers, as in Roger Zelazny’s Lord Of Light).

This slow evolution to science fiction is more subtle and immediate than in Jim Grimsley’s Kirith Kirin, which opens up its story’s universe in a series of appendices and so becomes almost a space opera; or even the hints dropped regarding the Age of Legends in Robert Jordan’s bloated Wheel of Time series.

The Steerswoman is not a novel whose prose shines; but neither does it put a foot wrong. It may resembled some sort of McCaffery sf lite/romance, but it is not in the slightest bit mushy – it features several graphically-described swordfights and a torture scene, for one thing. The protagonists are engaging and the mystery is enticing. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Kirstein went on to write three sequels to The Steerswoman: The Outskirter’s Secret, The Lost Steersman and The Language of Power. All four are available in an omnibus volume, The Steerswoman’s Road. I shall have get me that omnibus volume. (Edit: apparently the omnibus only contains the first two books. Ah well. I shall try to find all three books, then…)

A good start to 2011’s reading challenge.


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A challenge found, possibly

I received lots of suggestions to my request for a reading challenge for 2011 – both here on my blog, on LibraryThing, and on Twitter. So, ta very much all those who commented. But I think I’ve decided what I’m going to do…

Torque Control’s Women in SF Week has inspired me to read twelve science fiction novels by women writers during 2011 as my reading challenge. I’ve tentatively identified the dozen novels I’m going to read. I didn’t want to pick only those published since 2001, although many are from the last decade. Nor would I limit myself to books published in the UK. But I did want my list to be comprise only authors I’ve not read before (bar one or two slight cheats).

The twelve books go like this:

I already own some of the books on this list – Winterlong, Winterstrike, The Steerswoman, and Dark Space – and so it gives me the perfect excuse to read them. It’s also a nicely varied list, covering several different types of sf. One or two authors I might have read other works by them before. I have a vague memory of reading an Octavia Butler novel when I was at school, and I think I’ve read one by Melissa Scott many years ago too. I’ve certainly read short fiction by one or two of those on the list, but that doesn’t matter.

If anyone has any must read suggestions for the list, I’m prepared to bump one or two of my choices.


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Long live rock n roll, side A

I first read Bold As Love back in June 2002, a year after its publication. While it was very different from Jones’ previous novel, Phoenix Café (the third book of the Aleutian trilogy), I enjoyed it and thought it very good. I wasn’t the only one – it was shortlisted for both the BSFA Award and the Arthur C Clarke Award, and won the latter. I started the sequel, Castles Made of Sand, shortly after finishing Bold As Love, but ground to a halt about halfway through it. Another three books in the series were published over the following years: Midnight Lamp (2003), Band of Gypsys (2005) and Rainbow Bridge (2006). I bought each one as they came out and put them on the bookshelves… but, after my experience with Castles Made of Sand, I never actually got around to reading them.

It had always been my intention to read the five books, preferably one after the other. But like many people who suffer from my condition – procrastination – I’m more likely to do something if it becomes part of my routine, or I make a project of it. This summer I did the latter. Jones’ Bold as Love quintet became a Summer Reading Project (along with L Timmel Duchamp’s Marq’ssan Cycle and Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos quintet; see here). The start of the project was delayed somewhat, for a number of reasons, but in late August I started rereading Bold As Love… and by 15 September had finished all five books.

It was well worth doing. And this is how it went…

Shape is important to a story. It is even more important to a story which stretches over several novels. Gene Wolfe’s The Book Of The New Sun is one novel split into four books (see here); Paul J McAuley’s Confluence trilogy is one novel split into three books; EC Tubb’s Dumarest series has no shape, merely a direction (ie, Dumarest is seeking the location of his home world, Earth). Gwyneth Jones’ Bold as Love series is neither one novel split into five, nor is it a quintet possessing direction only. It has a five-book shape, which is itself comprised of five one-book shapes. The novels can be read individually, but are richer if read in order as a quintet.

The overall story of the quintet is the near-future of the world. It begins in the UK, but over the course of the five books encompasses Europe, the US and China. It begins during the dissolution of the union of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. For reasons not completely explained, the English government puts together a think tank, comprising members of the “Counter Cultural Movement” (CCM) – rock and pop stars, in other words. This goes horribly wrong when one such rock star, Pigsty Liver, machine-guns members of the government and seizes power. This is not, it has to be said, especially convincing. But Jones is busy setting up her “Rock n Roll Reich”, and the authorial hand-waving is forgivable. I mean, counter-cultural types are generally anti-authoritarian, government types are generally all about authoritarianism – there’s an obvious conflict of philosophies. But that’s neither here nor there, because the world as Jones wants it – and gets – is an England effectively ruled by the Triumvirate.

The Triumvirate is the three protagonists of the five books: Ax Preston, guitar hero; Sage Prender, AKA Aoxomoxoa, frontman and driving-force for a techno group; and Fiorinda, daughter of rock god Rufus O’Niall, and his incestuous victim in her early teens. That incestuous incident is important – both for what it does to Fiorinda, and for what it nearly did to Gwyneth Jones.

The opening chapter of Bold As Love was published in Interzone’s July 2001 issue, under the title ‘The Saltbox’. Apparently, someone bought that issue of Interzone in a shop, decided ‘The Saltbox’ was obscene (paedophilia and incest), and reported the magazine to the police. Who promptly descended on the editorial address and carted away several copies of the issue. Happily, nothing came of it. Gollancz published Bold As Love as planned, and Interzone is still going strong today.

But Ax, Sage and Fiorinda: the Bold as Love cycle is the story of these three, the world they create, the world in which they find themselves after they lose control of it, their accommodations with the future which results, and a final game-changing event which rewrites geopolitics for the future.

Bold As Love
Several things about Bold As Love struck me on this reread. I’d noticed the first time I’d read the book that it was structured more as a series of vignettes than it was a linear connected narrative. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but I was surprised that I’d remembered the story as less episodic than it actually was, almost as if I’d confabulated something into the gaps in the chronology. I said in a review of Jones’ Flowerdust in Vector back in 1994 that the worlds she created felt so complete it felt as though they continued to live on after you’d finished the book. The same is true of Bold As Love.

Ax and Sage often came across as very similar, which was occasionally confusing in dialogue. The same cannot be said of Fiorinda, who is in many respects a typical Jones heroine – i.e., broken. The story-arc, and especially the plots of Bold As Love and Castles Made of Sand – seem driven as much by the need to “fix” her as it is by the unfolding of the future-history of the series’ world.

The musical dimension to the series I never found wholly convincing, perhaps because my own taste in music is defiantly niche (ie, extreme metal). While I could map Aoxomoxoa and the Heads onto Prodigy and their like, and there are plenty of female singer-songwriter analogues for Fiorinda, I could never quite figure out how Ax’s band, the Chosen Few, might sound, what position they might occupy in the rock universe. They felt out of time – too modern for the 1960s or 1970s, too old-fashioned for the 1980s and 1990s. The fact that three such acts might appear at the same festivals, sufficiently often for them to know each other, also seemed to me to depict the UK music scene as a curiously small world. The music is important, of course – Jones even provides a soundtrack to the novel (see here) – and plays its part during a national tour in which the country tears up the old to usher in the new.

As an introduction to the five chief elements of the Bold as Love series – the three members of the Triumvirate, the world of the novel, and the music – the novel Bold As Love works extremely well. And the prose, as is usual from Jones, is very, very good indeed.

Castles Made of Sand
This I expected to be a less satisfying read – I’d bounced out of it once before, after all. And the somewhat inelegant précis of Bold As Love which opens the novel didn’t bode too well. The first third of the story focuses on the Triumvirate’s relationship, depicted in a strange Delanyesque-Heinleinian fashion – character dynamics by Delany, dialogue by Heinlein. This may be why I bounced out of the book the first time I tried reading it. I’m not a big Heinlein fan. However, once Ax steps out of the relationship, things start to improve. In fact, the sub-plot concerning human sacrifice is very good indeed, and the way it slowly introduces magic to what has chiefly been a near-future sf story is cleverly done.

It is this last which eventually lifts Castles Made of Sand above what those early chapters had promised. The near-future of Bold As Love is slowly contaminated by magic – and yet, all the clues were there in the first book (not least the aforementioned saltbox). Castles Made of Sand is a darker book than its predecessor, and it’s the introduction of magic which is the cause.

This is especially obvious in the book’s finale, the magic duel with Rufus O’Niall. It recasts the story arc of the five books completely – the story-arc which starts to take shape in the second half of Castles Made of Sand is not the story-arc of which the first book offered misty glimpses.

To be honest, I found Castles Made of Sand a less satisfying read than Bold As Love. And yet, thinking about the books to write this post, I find that I remember more of Castles Made of Sand than I do Bold As Love. It’s a more impactful novel, I think, partly because it builds on the promise of the first book and partly because it warps and twists that promise into something very different. Which may be why I feel I want to reread the books more so after finishing this one than I did Bold As Love.

The remaining three books I’ll cover in another post, side B (of course). There may even be a third post of bonus tracks.


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Women sf writers of the last ten years

If you have a week or so free, there’s an excellent discussion worth reading on Torque Control here regarding women sf writers and the Clarke Award. It spilled out of its topic somewhat to cover women sf writers in the UK, and the paucity of them. Which resulted in a lot of comments.

Following on from the discussion, Niall Harrison has asked here for people to email him their “top ten sf novels by women from the last ten years (2001–2010)”. I thought I would post them here instead:

Destroyer, CJ Cherryh
Alanya to Alanya, L Timmel Duchamp
Ilario: The Lion’s Eye, Mary Gentle
The Rapture, Liz Jensen (my review here)
Life, Gwyneth Jones
Spirit, or The Princess of Bois Dormant, Gwyneth Jones (my review here)
Lavinia, Ursula K LeGuin
Warring States, Susan R Matthews
Natural History, Justina Robson

… and that’s only nine. And even then I had to cheat a little.

Annoyingly, the specified years means Mary Gentle’s Ash: A Secret History doesn’t make it. It’s an excellent novel, and everyone should read it. But, while I own but have yet to read Ilario: The Lion’s Eye, I have read Under the Penitence, the novella on which it was based. Likewise, I’m a fan of LeGuin’s fiction but haven’t read Lavinia yet. The same is true of CJ Cherryh. And I had to add two titles by Gwyneth Jones because both are excellent and should be read. I’d also like to have added all five books of the Marq’ssan Cycle by L Timmel Duchamp, of which Alanya to Alanya is the first, but that would have been silly.

Matthews has not been published since the book listed above, although according to her website (which has not been updated for two years) she had at least another two planned. A shame. I really liked her Jurisdiction universe, and would happily pay for more novels set in it.

I should point out that I have read and admire a large number of books by women sf writers. Unfortunately, most of them were published before 2001. Which is, I suppose, the whole point of the list, and the discussion which generated it. I’ve also read a few of those mentioned in the lists posted on Torque Control here, but didn’t like them enough to put them in my own list.