Category Archives: Books

Canada Writes – A Sci-Fi Odyssey

For the latter part of this month, CBC (Canada Broadcasting Corporation) has turned its Canada Writes pages over to the SFnal set, in “Canada Writes – a Sci-Fi Odyssey“.

I’m a bit late on this (one of those weeks when I growl “You did this to your own self,” at my own pathetic put-upon face in the mirror) but here are the entries so far.

And yes, my name is there! I get to stand under the Twitterfall on Wednesday as one of the readers for their Twitter competition. (Further details, including theme, coming soon).

Utopian science in science fiction by women: Notes from Frankenstein’s Daughters

 

Previously I mentioned Jane Donawerth’s book, Frankenstein’s Daughters, which contains a long, fascinating chapter on “Utopian Science in Feminist Science Fiction”. It’s one of the rare discussions of feminist SF that foregrounds the ‘science’ in SF, instead of rolling up science fiction with fantasy, horror, slipstream, magic realism etc as one of multiple imaginative strategies for critiquing patriarchal and oppressive social orders.

When I originally read it, I took a slew of notes, which I thought I’d post. Comments in square brackets are mine; otherwise all the rest is Donawerth’s. See all the books!

Conventions of science fiction

  • masculinist science, inscribes women as objects of study, not scientist-subject
  • representation of women’s identities (as aliens)
  • history of male narration

culture defines science as a masculine endeavour – women respond by imaginative creation of utopian science [not altering culture? is it possible to alter culture and not alter science?] – coming up with a similar paradigm:

  • participation in science as subjects, not objects
  • revised definitions and discourse of science
  • inclusion of women’s issues in science
  • treatment of science as an origin story that has been feminized
  • re-conception of human-nature relationship
  • ideal of science, subjective, holistic, relational, complex

Participation of women in science

  • Mitis (physicist), Gvarab (physicist), Takver (biologist) – The Disposessed (Le Guin)
  • Jeanne Velory (physicist and astronaut) – Barbary (Vonda McIntyre)
  • Hellene Ariadne (nanotechnologist) – Light Raid (Cynthia Felice, Connie Willis)
  • Mary (biologist, communications specialist) – Memoirs of a Spacewoman (Naomi Michinson)
  • Kira (biologist, physician) – Cloned Lives (Pamela Sargent)
  • Margaret (computer expert) – Up the Walls of the World (James Tiptree Jr)
  • Varian (veterinary xenobiologist – Dinosaur Planet: Survivors (Ann McCaffrey)
  • Marguerite Chase (physician) – The Wall around Eden (Joan Slonczewski)
  • Vivian Harley (chemist, astronomer) – “The Menace of Mars (Clare Winger Harris)
  • Mildred Sturtevant (scientist) – “The Astounding Enemy” (Louise Rice, Tonjoroff-Roberts)

Extending the definitions and changing the discourse

“the boundaries of science are mapped onto the boundaries of masculinity” in Western science

referring to the work of Hilary Rose

  • communication as a science in Memoirs of a Spacewoman, The Bloody Sun (matrix science), After Long Silence (Sheri S. Tepper – communication through music), Woman on the edge of Time, Native Tongue, Triad (Shiela Finch), Hellspark. Communications (traditionally assigned to woman), given legitimacy as science and directed nonhierachically to all species
  • relation to nature – “the web of nature” in Woman on the Edge of Time, the Door into Ocean.
  • science as one of the roads to truth rather than the only one – The Ragged World (Judith Moffett) – female geneticist with AIDS, chooses her field, her experiment, her way of relating to her subjects of study.
  • A Door into Ocean – removes gendering, since all scientists are female. science is part of the home, and therefore invisible to the invaders, and the home as part of the environment
  • science as a social endeavour and social investment – Women on the Edge of Time, Godsfire (Cynthia Felice)

Women’s issues in science

1. alternatives in reproduction
2. disputes with sociobiology

  • combining ova – “When it Changed” (Joanna Russ), A Door into Ocean
  • cloning, with heterosexuality and biological birth discouraged – Solution Three (Naomi Michinson)
  • in-vitro conception and extra-uterine gestation – Woman on the Edge of Time
  • artifical insemination – The Gate to Women’s Country
  • androgyny – The Left Hand of Darkness (Le Guin)

women freed from control by heterosexual relationships – women freed, and allows for more equitable distribution of childcare – writers explore positive and negative consequences, effect on personal relationships

  • refutations of sociobiology – The Handmaid’s Tale, Native Tongue (and sequels), the sex-role reversal novel, eg, The Pride of Chanur, The Shore of Women, Leviathan’s Deep, Double Nocturne, Xenogenesis (several of which look to liberate males from biological stereotype of inferiority)

Science as an origin story

women SF writers offer feminized versions of science as origin story; science not a body of facts dispassionately accumulated, but “as social movements threaten social order, scientific theories emerge that implicitly defend status quo” (Ruth Bleier).

  • challenge to nineteenth century evolutionary theory, female as primary sex, social evolution towards altruism natural – Herland (Gilman)
  • challenge to Darwinism, contemporary, removing competition – Penterra (Judith Moffett)
  • multiple origin stories, in conflict with each other – Emperor, Swords, Pentacles (Gotlieb), Becoming Alien (Rebecca Ore)

Partnership with nature in subjective, relational science

male scientists viewed nature as potentially unruly woman to be mastered and penetrated. nature associated with women. vs female view of women’s nature and identification with Nature, need for connection rather than domination

  • partnership with nature, limits to questioning and growth – Breed to Come (Andre Norton), Penterra (Judith Moffett)
  • men’s and women’s view of nature in divergence – The Shore of Women (Pamela Sargent)
  • valuing subjectivity in science – The Garden of the Shapes (Sheila Finch)
  • scientists trying to establish connection with aliens to protect from exploitation and destruction – Dinosaur Planet Survivors, After Long Silence, Hellspark
  • intuition of value – Up the Walls of the World, An Exercise for Madmen (Barbara Paul)
  • empathy as a science – Witch World series, Darkover series, The Wanderground (Sally Miller Gearhart), Serpent’s Reach (Cherryh)
  • ethics in science [most if not all]
  • a vision of science as sustainable, not based on scale, in much of women’s science fiction – Herland, Women on the Edge of Time, A Door Into Ocean
  • emphasis on science in decentralized, non-hierarchical society, operated as craft industry – problematic for recent women novelists, who seem to be anti-science reactionaries to typical SF fans – Always Coming Home, A Door Into Ocean

Detailed discussion, pulling themes together, of Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Under the Canopy (Barbara Paul), “Bloodchild” (Octavia Butler)

Sources

  • Donawerth J. Frankenstein’s daughters : women writing science fiction. 1st ed. Syracuse  N.Y.: Syracuse University Press; 1997.
  • Donawerth J. Utopian Science: Contemporary Feminist Science Theory and Science Fiction by Women. NWSA Journal. 1990 Autumn;2(4):535–57.
  • Rose, Hilary. Love, Power and Knowledge: Towards a feminist transformation of the sciences. Bloominton: Indiana Univ Press, 1994
  • Rose H. Dreaming the Future. Hypatia. 1988 Spring;3(1):119–37. (on presentations of science in SF)

 

Postscript: The (woman) scientist in the world

 

In my 1999 article on women scientists in fiction, I identified the prevalent theme of the women’s scientist’s withdrawal from science. Discouraging, to say the least, but I’m chagrined to say that, until I read Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer, I never asked myself what happened next?

[Note: I go into detail about events and resolution in these novels (particularly Prodigal Summer and Animal Dreams), so if you haven’t read them, and mind such things, then please read them first!]

In Prodigal Summer, Lusa, an entomologist, meets and marries a farmer, Cole. When he is killed in an accident before their first anniversary, she decides to assert her claim to his farm and settle there. Ultimately, as well as her husband’s profession, she adopts both her husband’s name and the children of her dying sister-in-law.

On my first read, I characterized it as another withdrawal from science novel. But when I re-read the book, I saw how Lusa continued to be a scientist, and once I saw that in Prodigal Summer, I saw it in Kingsolver’s other books, too.

Kingsolver’s descriptions are informed by a biologist’s intimate knowledge of the natural world. Kingsolver’s scientists, although no longer identified as belonging to the institutions of science, continue to apply the same observation and analysis they used in their work to the world. Lusa’s experience in agriculture and entomology help with her farming. Her knowledge of the wider society lead her to take the novel step of raising goats, knowing that with three major religious holidays coinciding, they will be in demand.

 

Kingsolver also points up the environmental and social responsibility of the scientist in the world. Lusa expresses her responsibility through her resistance to pesticide-intense farming methods, her refusal to grow tobacco as a cash crop, and her refusal to allow hunting on her land, even by members of her own extended family-in-law. Cody (Animal Dreams) is a dropout from the profession of medicine, who has been drifting around the world with her lover, an emergency-room locum as alienated as herself. When her father’s faltering health brings her back to her hometown, she falls into the job of substitute science teacher at the town high school. On a field trip, she and her students discover that the water in the town’s river is so acidic with industrial effluent that it is sterile under the microscope. Cody turns activist, helping organize efforts to save the river, and lending her authority as a scientist and teacher. (Ironically, it is not science that saves the town—the proposed rescue plan being to contain the pollution by damming the river—but culture. To raise money for their activism, the ladies of the town have turned to their traditional crafts. Their distinctive piñatas become collector’s items, and attract the attention of a shrewd expert who advises them how to apply to become an historic site, which gives the town the protection that the environmental laws cannot.)

The second expression of Cody’s social responsibility is her quirky one-woman sex-education campaign. At the age of fifteen, she gave birth to a premature, stillborn child, alone, and in secret. So when yet another one of her female students falls pregnant, she whips out a condom in class and gives an impromptu demonstration of its application to a zucchini. Trouble ensues, but in a reversal from her avoidant past, she stands firm.

Kingsolver’s scientists also use their science to make a connection to estranged children. Cody shows her students the power in knowledge. Lusa’s dying sister-in-law has a daughter whom Lusa initially takes for a boy because of her dress and fierce manner. The girl resists all the aunts’ efforts to nurture her, mixed as they are with denial about her mother’s condition, emotional coercion, and expectation of gender conformity. She is sent to Lusa as a last resort. In an extended scene, the pair work their way through Lusa’s chores and then go hunting bugs. Lusa shares her knowledge with Crystal, and that conversation moves on to touch on matters of sexuality and mortality. In Kingsolver’s Bean Trees, Taylor reads to her little adopted daughter from a library book about rhizomes and nitrogen fixation. It’s a moment of intimacy and safety for an abused child, and a metaphor for the interrelationship of their community.

Science also cinches a connection between Cody and her own origins. Her father, a proud man from the wrong side of the tracks, married the cherished daughter of one of the town’s elite families, and then estranged himself and his daughters from them when his wife died. When Cody finds the yellowing records and fading pictures of her father’s study of an idiosyncratic feature of the town’s newborns, and recognizes her own picture among them, she is able to feel herself as one of them.

Lessons learned along the way

In an exchange on a listserver I am on, the question of writing lessons learned along the way came up. This was my list . . .

  • Published novels are the finished product: one never sees the messes, failures and train-wrecks on the way, so one is completely misled as to how easy certain things are to execute. The downside of a diet of the best is that the emerging writer can become inadvertently overambitious and try things that are too difficult for them.
  • I did two dumb things and two smart thing in my first novel. Dumb things (ie, things I wasn’t developed enough to do): writing a quest novel, and using that past-present structure that Ursula Le Guin made work so beautifully in Dispossessed. I didn’t realize until a year or so after Legacies came out where I’d got it from, and why I was so wedded to it. The sort-of-quest structure is difficult to pull off because it doesn’t innately have a strong narrative drive behind it. Smart things I did: having a single viewpoint, and having a character I had deliberately written as attentive and extremely perceptive. Sometimes, wrestling with the need to convey something essential via a viewpoint character for whom it’s not in character to notice that, I miss Lian.
  • Certain plots are more bomb-proof than others – they carry their own structure and drive with them. Blueheart‘s initial plot is a mystery, and once I’d got that – the dead body in the ocean – it found its shape quite quickly, carried along by the central question of who and how. By midway through the book the reader actually knew everything, and it turned into a political novel, but by then the central conflict was established and on its way to the climax. I did myself an inadvertent favour, there.
  • Quest plots – frequently the first plot an SF&F writer tries – are not as easy as they look: certain choices have to be made to ensure the quest plot gets and keeps its narrative drive and doesn’t become picaresque (a right-on editorial comment about an early draft of Legacies). If I were writing a quest, even now, I’d make sure that what was being sought and who was seeking it were established in the first chapter, and not lose sight of that for a moment. I’m still not sure enough in my plotting to do the young man/woman goes off all unknowing and find his/her destiny on the way. I was unwittingly smart enough to have the quest front and center in the beginning of Legacies’ frontstory, interspersing it with the interleaved backstory in which Lian had to find his mission.
  • Passive, reflective characters fall under the heading of Advanced Work. Again, writers have pulled off the reluctant hero wonderfully, but life is much easier if a character wants something and goes after it. Lian climbing over the wall, throwing himself into the path of Lara and Rathla and the story itself, was a wonderfully liberating moment for me.
  • Sometimes the writer just has to give up and do what’s obvious – usually because they’ve set themselves up that way. In one of my unpublished novels I was resisting a particular idea because it seemed too obvious. When I finally accepted that it had to be that way, a whole lot of other problems were suddenly solved, because my characters’ repugnance (they didn’t like the idea any more than I did) prompted them to actions that led directly to the showdown. Moral: It’s a bad idea for the writer to argue with their own story.
  • Even after (almost) 9.5 novels, I still don’t get control of the plot until my second draft (or later). I’ve just had to do a massive overhaul to keep two of my main characters on the scene for a major action setpiece (this was Shadowborn). I also had difficulties setting up a crucial event in that conflict, because I needed not to surprise the reader, but I knew that if one of the characters knew about it, it would be out of character for him to leave. So overhaul. And it works. So. Much. Better. Moral of the story: keep the viewpoints where the action is. As long as the action is essential to the plot.
  • If I reach the end of my first draft, and it isn’t right (usual metaphor: large plate of spaghetti, stands slithering over the sides), I start cutting. I usually have a fixed idea of the endpoint from fairly early on in the novel, and I reshape the novel to line up with the end. I cut out everything that that isn’t related to the end. Then I put in everything that’s missing.
  • On the other hand, all the scenes that end up on the cutting-room floor mean that by the time I get the scene I need, it practically writes itself because all the decisions are made and I have the characters rounded out. Ibsen described his growing familiarity with his characters through successive drafts. In the first draft he knew them as if he had met them on a train (‘One has chattered about this and that’). By the second draft he might have spent a month at a spa with them (‘I have discovered the fundamentals’). By the third draft, he knew them thoroughly (‘as I see them now, I shall always see them’).
  • I try to obey Chekov’s Law (‘One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.’), which usually means I have to round up a certain amount of unused artillery during revisions. One of the downsides of writing a trilogy is that once Darkborn was committed to press, I was committed to firing off the guns lying around. Twelve of them, when I did the inventory in my notebook. I was delighted when I found a way to get four to pop off at once in the archduke’s breakfast.

Bursting out in all directions (Among Others)

 

I probably don’t have to explain Jo Walton’s singular new novel, Among Others, by now. If I do, in brief, it is the journal and reading diary of a fifteen-year-old girl who, after a series of traumatic events that left her twin sister dead and herself lame, has found a physical refuge in a girl’s boarding school, and a spiritual refuge in books, particularly SF. Which makes it sound mundane, except that Mor speaks to fairies—and not the Disneyfied, sentimentalized version, but the original wild spirits of wood, earth, and stone—works magic, and she and her sister sacrificed themselves to save the world. This is about the aftermath. It’s set in England in 1979-1980, and as someone who fell into SF while a teenager at a girl’s school in Scotland in the 70s, I really looked forward to the evocation of the time and the place.

I got that, and more. One of the unique aspects about the book was how well it portrays a young mind bursting out in all directions. I’d largely forgotten about that experience of intellectual flowering, of being in possession of an adult vocabulary and intellectual capacity, not to mention the toolkit that comes with a decent education, and being let loose with a fistful of library tickets to go romping through the best works of kindred and strange minds. I don’t think I ever found that experience—which has to be one of the best parts of adolescence, up there with the creative experimentation that goes with all those discoveries—portrayed in mainstream fiction—and how I snickered when when I read Mor’s caustic comments on Teen Problem Novels, because that is exactly what I thought, even then [i]. SF was a wonderful liberation from the mandated dreariness of adolescence. (I wonder if the experience gets encoded in SF and fantasy in the form of the emergence of psionic powers or magic . . . a topic for another time.)

The portrait of a character and a mind being formed by reading also made something go click in a way that hadn’t before: Reading is experience, as opposed to being a way of avoiding experience, or an inadequate replacement for it, a cultural assumption that I’d accepted (though not without resistance) for years [ii]. And because Mor absorbs her reading into her experience, on a number of occasions she simply says, “Oh, that”, and carries on, proceeding by the map her reading has laid out. Which in a couple of instances made me wince, and in others, laugh—pity the teenage lout who encounters a girl versed in Heinlein. Well, that was a laugh and wince, in sympathy.

And what about the magic? For myself as an SF/F reader, reading by a SF/F protocol, there’s no doubt: there’s magic. I like the magic, the subtlety of it, the way it merely leans on the possible. Having bounced off the endings of fantasy novels aimed at young readers (Silver on the Tree, The Last Battle), I like Mor’s explanation as to why she thinks that she will do less magic as she matures. Yet the very subtlety of the magic, makes it, as Mor says herself more than once, “deniable”. Mor has the hallmarks of reliability: she’s not a “fanciful” person; she might see fairies and ghosts, sense and work magic, yet she likes chemistry and physics, and would like maths if it would but like her back. She self-consciously challenges the putative reader’s skepticism only once, at the end of the first section of the book, unlike most first person unreliable narrators, who do so repeatedly. She’s prickly—I suspect Mor and (prickly!) fifteen-year-old me might not have got on—and sometimes brusque in her judgements, but deeply grounded and thoughtful, and has moved far beyond a self-centered view of right and wrong. Nevertheless, switch off the SF reader’s protocol, take a quarter turn, and consider the book from that angle, disbelieving in the magic, and the book still works as a study of a young woman’s imaginative response to loss. Which is another unique, and very neat, thing about it.

Footnotes

[i] I decided Teen Problem Novels were a product of cultural reaction against the teenage years of the the baby boom. Twentysomething boomers were embarrassed by adolescence, the rest of the culture was burned out on it, and nobody had anything good to say about it.

[ii] A few years after I discovered SF, I discovered feminism, and Joanna Russ provided me with a workable explanation as to the whole experience issue, which had preoccupied at least two generations of women writers before me (Mansfield, Plath, Russ herself): setting up ‘experience’ as a prerequisite, and certain kinds of experience at that, was another strategy that condemned women writers to insignificance. Worked for me for years, but I like this one better.