Women and Magic, Part 2

by Jean Roberta

Heiresses of Russ 2016 is a best-of compilation of lesbian-flavoured speculative fiction stories which were published in 2015. The guest editor of this edition is “Alyx” (named for a character in the late Joanna Russ’ fiction) Dellamonica, who teaches writing at the University of Toronto in Canada and has won several awards for her own spec-fic. She is married to another award-winning female writer, Kelly Robson. It’s hard to imagine a writer who would be better-suited to co-edit this annual anthology with publisher Steve Berman.

As I suspected before I opened my review copy, several of the seventeen stories in this book originally appeared in the Lethe Press anthology Daughters of Frankenstein: Mad Lesbian Scientists, which I reviewed earlier. This book contains introductory material about the history of science fiction by women AND of actual female scientists, some of whom were theorizing about the universe much earlier than you would probably guess, unless you have studied the subject in depth.

(At this point, I could go into a long riff about the erasure of women from history, but that’s been done, and I’d like to reserve some steam for another issue that I’ll bring up later on.)

One of the stories from Daughters of Frankenstein (“Doubt the Sun” by Faith Mudge) is about an advanced robot or artificial intelligence, which is one of the themes in that collection. Another of these stories (“Love in the Time of Markov Processes” by Megan Arkenberg) is about a kind of hermit-scientist who studies the ocean from an underwater lab, somewhat like Captain Nemo in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The third story from Daughters of Frankenstein (“Eldritch Brown Houses” by Claire Humphrey) is set in the witchy New England of H.P. Lovecraft.

Like the previous ones, this edition of Heiresses of Russ is a spellbinding read, but it is more eclectic than Daughters of Frankenstein and other themed collections of speculative fiction. “The Wollart Nymphs” by Melissa Scott (a writer of well-constructed plots) starts out suggesting that the “nymphs” (actually three ships) have supernatural capabilities, but the historical mystery surrounding them is resolved by a factual explanation.

At the opposite extreme of mystery and sci-fi stories are those that use characters from fairy and folk tales (monsters, talking animals, evil monarchs who control kingdoms by magic) in symbolic ways. In “Where Monsters Dance” by A. Merc Rustad, a young lesbian who is terrorized by her stepfather is taught to dance by a protective monster from a parallel realm where dancing destroys hatred.

Speculative fiction by women often deals with alternative (imaginary) ways of creating new humans, or humanoid beings, but surprisingly few of the ones I’ve read really tackle the political implications of the fact that humans who were born female (including some transmen) can get pregnant, while those who were born male cannot. The term “patriarchy” points to time-honoured attempts to keep reproduction in the hands of men by controlling women, especially those capable of breeding.

“The New Mother” by Eugene Fischer is a sci-fi story in Heiresses of Russ 2016 about that very thing. The science part is based on the fact that conception in several species, including humans, is actually triggered by the pricking of the mother’s egg rather than by the addition of a father’s DNA per se. (Presumably the mixing of two sets of genes to produce a new individual is an evolutionary development.) In this story, a virus which is transmitted by males to females causes women to conceive during ovulation (the release of an egg from an ovary), and the results are baby girls who are genetically identical to their mothers. Virus-infected women can no longer be impregnated by men.

Giving birth to girl after girl, all looking exactly like oneself, does not seem empowering to the unfortunate women infected by the virus, as it wouldn’t in real life. However, this phenomenon seems very threatening to men who don’t want their whole gender to become a genetic dead-end, as it would in real life. In the story, a lesbian journalist follows the trail of the virus. To add to her anxiety, she is pregnant by an anonymous sperm donor. Like a sexually-active gay man in the early 1980s, the protagonist in this story can’t be sure she is virus-free.

Although this story is definitely speculative rather than strictly realistic, it undercuts a currently-fashionable kind of queer theory that gender (however defined) is either a strictly personal choice, or at least a socially-determined set of characteristics with no real connection to biology. In biographical descriptions, various individuals now define themselves as “non-binary” and “gender-queer.” Since speculative fiction plays with imaginary spinoffs from reality as we know it, it provides a welcoming setting for androgynous characters who have floated free from binary classifications of all kinds.

As exhilarating as it can be to imagine that we are all living in a post-binary world, it just ain’t so. Young women are still afraid of the possibilities that scared me when I was young and fertile: I could be impregnated without my consent (possibly through rape), and I might not be able to get a safe, legal abortion--or I might not want to destroy the strange, tadpole-like being inside me. After giving birth, I might have trouble earning enough money to support myself and my child and to ensure that the baby would be cared for if I had to work outside the home.

I knew that I couldn’t rely on any man, including the biological father of my child, to help us survive. As I found out, none of the legal mechanisms of Western society (including marriage) really force fathers to accept responsibility for “their” children.

As far as I can tell, young women (including non-heterosexuals) still have reason to worry about these possibilities, and young men of all sexual orientations do not. Although I could say that menopause brought me “beyond” the reproductive binary so that I can be as sexually carefree as a male, the binary hasn’t been wished out of existence.

Now that Donald Trump is President of the U.S., and he is in touch with other right-wing politicians all over the world, reproductive rights for women are being threatened, as they always are when patriarchy objects to freedom of choice. At such times, speculative fiction can enable us to escape momentarily from grim reality and give us hope, but we can’t really live in another dimension or in perfectly invulnerable bodies just yet.
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Tears from the Sky

by Jean Roberta

Bodies, human and animal, exude body fluids. Do sweat glands “cry” when the temperature goes up? Do women’s pussies really “cry” or "weep" when they’re hungry? (They’ve been described this way, but that seems like a stretch to me.) Do clouds “cry” rain?

Here is the opening paragraph in a story, “Tears of the Gods” by Sarah L. Byrne, that I chose from a pile of excellent stories to include in Heiresses of Russ: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction:*

“Legend has it that the blue rain was the tears of the gods, though just why gods would weep in blue no one could quite explain. Modern science said the odd meteorological phenomenon was simply a matter of copper sulphate, spores from the blue copper-feeding algae in the deep vents forced into the atmosphere by volcanic activity. Gita knew differently.”

Of course she did. And of course, since this story is closer to sci-fi than to fantasy, there is both a scientific and a metaphorical explanation for rain as tears. Gita has accepted an assignment to a desert outpost on an out-of-the-way planet where she is exposed to rain that blisters her skin, even though this was not a “career-boosting move.” Gita is grieving for her former research partner, who was also her life-partner.

Everyone who studies literature learns to avoid the “pathetic fallacy:” using weather to represent the emotions of major characters. Most writers do this anyway, because it’s just so tempting. (I think it’s unfair to single out the famous nineteenth-century sentence by Edward Bulwer-Lytton that starts: “It was a dark and stormy night.” Victorian writers who wrote like this had a lot of company, and still do.)

This week, snow finally fell on my town in Saskatchewan so that it looks picturesque for the holidays. Before that, the weather had been so unseasonably warm (apparently due to a worldwide natural phenomenon called “El Nino”) that many were predicting a “brown Christmas” of bare ground.

Drifting snow, consisting of beautifully individual snowflakes dancing on the breeze, is not usually associated with tears. Au contraire. The first snowfall is usually seen as a blessing or a sparkling blanket to cover the litter, dog poop and decaying vegetation that lingers on the ground in winter.

Just as the snow seemed like a magical surprise, I got an unexpected letter in the mail from the local law firm that handled my late parents’ will. As one of the heirs, I am entitled to an equal share of the next “disbursement:” more money from a large pot that has been subject to mysterious (to me) accounting practises. (One of the factors that makes this complicated is that there are four heirs, three in Canada where inheritance is not taxed, and an executor in the U.S., where inheritance is taxed by the federal government, and possibly by the relevant state government, as a smaller version of Uncle Sam.)

My parents passed away within six months of each other in 2009. As far as I remember, I didn’t cry over either death. Both my parents had been in failing health in a nursing home for a few years before the end. In 2010, I received a fairly large amount from their estate, and I was grateful.

When each parent left this world, I had a sense of relief that was at least as complicated as the process of sorting out the money they no longer needed. Yes! I thought. They are no longer in pain, and that’s a good thing. I honestly hoped they had gone on to a better place, and I still hope they are around in some form, and at peace. Their ashes rest in an outdoor vault in a cemetery. I rarely go to visit them there because I don’t think they are more likely to hover over their physical remains than to hang about in their former house, or in other places they loved when they were alive (e.g. the local Unitarian Centre, the large park in the middle of town).

To be honest, I was also relieved when each of them passed away because this meant they could no longer confide in everyone they knew that I was “mentally ill,” and that they hoped I would find a second husband to take care of me.

I can forgive them for everything they did that hurt me, on grounds that they—like other parents—were probably raising children as well as they knew how. They got it right more often than they got it wrong. However, I can’t forget certain frustrating disagreements over the nature of reality, when I would report something that had really happened to me, and one of my parents would respond, “Honey, I’m sure that’s not true.”

One of my father’s staunch beliefs, which my mother “went along with” (as wives accepted so much in her generation) was that all stories of supernatural events were bogus, the products of mental illness or deliberate fraud. If my parents are now disembodied spirits who could contact me if they chose to, would they choose to?

I can’t help thinking of the unexpected promise of money as a Christmas present from the Beyond. I’m tempted to tell a photo of my parents, “Really, you didn’t have to. You’ve already been incredibly generous.”

The letter made my eyes sting, but I couldn’t cry. It’s a mysterious process, crying. Maybe the questions of who owes what to whom else need to be sorted out further before my tears can flow as naturally as rain or snow. Time will tell.
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*Heiresses of Russ was co-edited by Jean Roberta and Steve Berman, published by Lethe Press (December 2015). All the stories in it were first published in 2014.

An Irresistible Temptation

I held out as long as I could. After all, I have other books to review. I started a review of the marvelous Red Velvet and Absinthe (an anthology of gothic erotica) about a year ago, and I think it would be appropriate to post a finished review somewhere before Halloween.

I finished reading Heiresses of Russ 2011 several months ago. This collection of sci-fi or speculative fiction is divergent and uneven, but the book is based on a noble concept: celebrating lesbian sci-fi. Heiresses of Russ 2012 is already out, and I hope the series continues for many years. The stories are all reprints of the best lesbian sci-fi of the year, named for the late Joanna Russ. She is probably best-remembered for her novel The Female Man, which was a kind of Bible for imaginative feminists of the 1970s. Several of the authors in the new anthologies seem like worthy successors.

Lately, I’ve been seeing copies of J.K. Rowling’s novel for grownups, The Casual Vacancy, in every local store that carries books. A recent issue of The New Yorker carried an article, “Mugglemarch,” on Rowling’s career, her vast fortune, her upbringing, and the relevance of all this to her recent novel, which took her approximately five years to write.

Every time I’ve seen a stack of hardcover copies with their loud red-and-yellow covers marked with a thick black “X” in the centre, I’ve thought, No. I’ll get it when it’s out in paperback. Then I saw it in a grocery store for 40% off the original retail price. I snapped it up.

So far, the novel is cinematic: it has a large cast of characters, and the third-person narrator (like the roving eye of a movie camera) dives into various houses to show how the inhabitants of Pagford, a village in the English “West Country,” react to an unexpected death.

I’m always interested to see how other writers describe experiences they haven’t had, and death probably tops the list of these. By definition, it’s one that no living writer could have experienced. Although I’m not fit to judge the accuracy of Rowling’s description of a brain aneurysm, it looks convincing to me. Here a fortyish businessman, Barry Fairbrother, has arrived at the golf club restaurant with his wife, Mary, to celebrate their nineteenth wedding anniversary. He is trying to ignore the “thumping headache” he has had for days:

“Mary switched off the mirror light and closed the passenger side door. Barry pressed the auto lock on the key ring in his hand; his wife’s high heels clacked on the tarmac, the car’s locking system beeped, and Barry wondered whether his nausea might abate once he had eaten.

"Then pain such as he had never experienced sliced through his brain like a demolition ball. He barely noticed the smarting of his knees as they smacked onto the cold tarmac; his skull was awash with fire and blood; the agony was excruciating beyond endurance, except that endure it he must, for oblivion was still a minute away.”

Mary screams, other people rush out from the restaurant and someone phones for an ambulance, which must come from the neighbouring city of Yarvil. It takes 25 minutes, and by then Barry is dead.

The rest of the novel deals with the aftermath of Barry’s unexpected death, which has an effect on local politics.

None of the characters is described in great depth, but Rowling writes in the great tradition of British social satire (thus the implied comparison with George Eliot’s nineteenth-century novel Middlemarch), and the plot gathers momentum as it unfolds. I’ve just finished reading a grimly funny description of a morning assembly in a rundown comprehensive school filled with 1200 sarcastic teenagers from Yarvil and surrounding area. When the assistant headmaster announces Barry Fairweather’s death, a girl at the back of the hall makes a sound which the speaker interprets as a laugh – how dare she?

Krystal, the suspect, tells the school counsellor that she “din’t do nothing!” and she seems sincere. The counsellor has been trying to win Krystal’s trust while trying to clean up Krystal’s language, but attempting both those goals at once is a losing game. The drama of the generation gap seems true to life.

Like the sullen boy in this novel who usually sneaks a fag (cigarette) on his way to school, I’ll read this big novel in installments when I have time, mostly on the bus to and from work. I’ll probably post some comment after I’ve finished, though I’ll try to avoid giving too much away. (The death at the beginning is a catalyst, not a climax, and it is mentioned in the trailers.)

I can’t help wondering if there will be a movie before long, and if the author was already visualizing it as she wrote.
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