“The Queen’s Lab has always been my first choice,” said Dorie, because it seemed to be expected, and because it was true.
He smiled kindly, secure in his position as leader of the foremost biological research institution in the country. “Dorie, I would like you to be our special liaison to our donors. It is not false praise to assert how important you would be to our cause. The lab cannot exist without funding. Science cannot prosper. We need people like you, people who can stand on the bridge between the bookish boy scientist with a pencil behind his ear and the wealthy citizens that can be convinced to part with their family money; someone, in fact, exactly like you.”
Her hands rose up, went back down. A profusion of thoughts pressed on her throat—with effort she focused to make a clear sentence come out. “And I would be doing what, exactly? Attending luncheons, giving teas?” He nodded. “Greasing palms at special late-night functions for very select donors?”
“You have it exactly.”
“A figurehead, of sorts,” said Dorie. Figurehead was a substitute for the real word she felt.
“If you like.”
“Not doing field work,” she said flatly.
“You must see that we couldn’t risk you. I am perfectly serious when I say the work done here in the lab is as important—more important—than the work done by the hotheads out gathering hydras. You would be a key member of the team right here, away from the dust and mud and silvertail burns.”
“I applied for the field work position,” said Dorie, even though her hopes were fading fast. In the terrarium behind him, the adolescent wyvern was awake now, pacing back and forth and warbling. The large terrarium was overkill—their steam was more like mist at this age. It could as easily be pacing around Dr. Pearce’s desk, or enjoying the windowsill. All it would take was a little flicker of the fingers, a little mental nudge on that bolt. . . .
Dr. Pearce brought his chair right next to hers and put a fatherly arm on her shoulder. She watched the wyvern and did not shove the arm away, still hoping against hope that the position she wanted was in her grasp. “Let me tell you about Wilberforce Browne,” Dr. Pearce said. “Big strapping guy, big as three of you probably—one of our top field scientists. He was out last week trying to bring in a wyvern egg—very important to the Crown, wyvern eggs.”
Dorie looked up at that. “Wyvern eggs?” she said, trying to look innocent. This is what she had just seen. But she could not think what would be so important about the eggs—except to the wyvern chick itself, of course.
Dr. Pearce wagged a finger at her. “You see what secrets you would be privy to if you came to work for us. Well, Wilberforce. He stumbled into a nest of the fey.”
“But the fey don’t attack unless provoked—”
“I wish I had your misplaced confidence,” Dr. Pearce said. “The fey attacked, and in his escape Wilberforce stumbled into the clearing where his target nest lay. Alerted, the mated pair of wyverns attacked with steam and claws. He lost a significant amount of blood, part of his ear—and one eye.”
“Goodness,” murmured Dorie, because it seemed to be expected. “He must have been an idiot,” which was not.
Dr. Pearce harrumphed and carried on. “So you see, your pretty blue eyes are far too valuable to risk in the field. Not that one cares to mention something as sordid as money”—and he took a piece of paper from his breast pocket and laid it on the desk so he could slide it over to her—”but as it happens, I think that you’ll find that sum to be very adequate, and in fact, well more than the field work position would have paid.”
Dorie barely glanced at the paper. Her tongue could not find any more pretty words; she could stare at him mutely or say the ones that beat against her lips. “As it happens, I have personal information on what your male field scientists get paid, and it is more than that number.” It was a lie—but one she was certain was true.
Shock crossed his face—either that she would dare to question him, or that she would dare talk about money, she didn’t know which.
Dorie stood, the violent movement knocking her chair backward. Her fey-infused hands were out and moving, helping the words, the wrong words, come pouring out of her mouth. “As it happens, I do not care to have my time wasted in this fashion. Look, if you did give me the field job and it didn’t work out, you could always fire me. And what would you have wasted? A couple weeks.”
Dr. Pearce stood, too, retrieving her chair. “And our reputation, for risking the safety of the fairer sex in such dangerous operations. No, I could not think of such a thing. You would need a guard with you wherever you went, and that would double the cost. Besides, I couldn’t possibly ask one of our male scientists to be with you in the field, unchaperoned. . . .” His eyebrows rose significantly. “The Queen’s Lab is above such scandal.”
“Is that your final word on the subject?” Her long fingers made delicate turning motions; behind him the copper bolt on the glass cage wiggled free. The silver wyvern put one foot toward the door, then another.
“It is, sweetheart.”
The triangular head poked through the opening as the glass door swung wide. Step by step . . .
“Thank you for your time then,” Dorie said crisply. “Oh, and you might want to look into the safety equipment on your cages.” She pointed behind him.
The expression on his face as he turned was priceless. Paternal condescension melted into shock as a yodeling teenage wyvern launched itself at his head. Dorie was not worried for his safety—the worst that could happen was a complete loss of dignity, and that was happening now.
“I’ll see myself out, shall I?” said Dorie. She strolled to the office door and through, leaving it wide open for all to see Dr. Pearce squealing and batting at his hair as he ran around the wide, beautiful office.
Copyright © 2014 by Tina Connolly.
Excerpted from Silverblind by Tina Connolly.
Published by permission of the author and Tor Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tina Connolly lives with her family in Portland, Oregon. Her stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Tor.com, Strange Horizons, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Her first fantasy novel, Ironskin (Tor 2012), was nominated for a Nebula, and the sequel Copperhead is now out from Tor. She narrates for Podcastle and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, runs the Parsec-winning flash fiction podcast Toasted Cake, and her website is tinaconnolly.com.
NONFICTION
Language and Imaginative Resistance in Epic Fantasy
Kameron Hurley
I couldn’t tell you the first word I learned. “Cheese,” maybe. That delicious cream cheese my mother rolled in pea sprouts and fed to me on a plastic tray. Cheese was fucking delicious. To this day, I can’t shake my cheese habit—it’s the stuff of the gods, cheese is.
When we learn language as children, we often come to associate particular images with each word we learn. “What’s that?” we’ll say, pointing to the pale male figure in the blue uniform in a children’s picture book, and we’re told, “That’s a police officer.” Then someone will point to a pale female figure in white and say, “That’s a nurse.”
None of those professions is as great as cheese, but you get the idea.
The images we associate with these words are not only formative, but reinforced in much of the media we consume. “Police officer” conjures the image of that white man. “Nurse” delivers unto us that pale woman in the white hat, though really, outside a picture book or historical drama, who sees a nurse in that folded hat anymore? On occasion, yes, we’ll see representative examples that contradict these early images, but no matter how many times we encounter policewomen, or male nurses, many of us find ourselves conjuring the same old imagery we learned to associate with the words as children whenever someone brings them up.
And writer? When I think the word “writer,” my formative image is a
pale man with a long white beard, like Walt Whitman, followed by Shakespeare, Thoreau, and maybe, if I’m lucky, Virginia Woolf, somewhere there in the unfolding kaleidoscope of images. My formative experience of the word “writer” was not me pointing to an image of Toni Morrison in a book and having my mom tell me “writer.” In truth, it would not be until grade school when I learned of writers who were something other than the pale like me. Oh, sure, logically, you hear that “anyone” can be a writer, or “anyone” can be a nurse, but just like “cheese” initially elicited images of those cream cheese blobs slathered in pea sprouts to me—no matter how many goudas or manchegos I ate—so “writer” has always been, first and foremost, some old Walt Whitman-looking dude.
This is what I mean when I tell people that our view of the world, and reality, is a constructed one. Our brains—in their unending quest to be more efficient—often pull on early images and memories to construct our view of the real world. After all, what other information do we have to achieve this but those early stories about how the world is, how it works? When one is building an entire world from scratch—which is literally what our brains are doing in our early years—our first exposure to media is going to be the foundational media. Everything we encounter after that will be used to readjust that first framework for our world.
So when someone told me what epic fantasy was, sometime in my early years, and they pointed to Tolkien and his medieval castles and orcs and wizards . . . well. That was epic fantasy, defined. Anything else that came after that—any other type of author, in any type of other setting, either needed to be put outside that frame or somehow be mangled to fit within it.
Epic fantasy was defined. It made it harder to make other things fit into it.
What I soon realized is that it wasn’t just me who struggled with that frame.
When I see the bestsellers in epic fantasy today, I can’t help but see the same genre-framing contortions I did as a child played out on the shelves. I see what folks line up next to Tolkien, and Terry Brooks, and George R.R. Martin—them and their imitators and the not-so-imitation-but-what-publishers-would-like-to-market-as-such in nice neat rows, and there is a startling sameness to these writers and their milieus that is heartbreaking. Every epic is grand, the first time: the first Dragonlance novel, the first Joe Abercrombie book, but after those come the waves of imitators, the ones pushed on the reading public by publishers frantically scrambling to find more of the same—but just a little bit different, like, instead of a stable boy who’s really a prince, can we have a courier boy who’s really a prince?—before we weary of the latest iteration.
I see an entire “genre of the epic fantastic” that’s been defined in the most narrow way imaginable. I want to see the weird cities of K.J. Bishop and Steph Swainston up there next to the dudes with the swords and fiefdoms on the bestseller lists. These days, Adrian Tchaikovsky has pushed into the fray with an uncommon setting, as well as David Anthony Durham, and Brian McClellan replaces feudal swords with flintlocks . . .
But what’s missing here, in my list of names? What am I writing out?
Where have all the women in epic fantasy gone?
Or, when we say “epic fantasy,” does that just prompt us, immediately, to forget about everything outside the frame, to remember only, at best, the pseudonyms—the Hobbs or the K.J. Parkers?
I’ve seen a lot of women writers struggle in the epic fantasy field, facing reader and publisher expectations that assume their work must be something else, anything else, besides epic fantasy. Epic fantasy is Tolkien. Epic fantasy is men.
Kate Elliott, who has been writing epic fantasy for decades, has had recent work reviewed as solidly YA, and if one were to ask, today, what Elliott writes, many reviewers would answer “YA” or the more generic “fantasy.” Author Delilah Dawson has related on Twitter that her original Blud series was, to her mind, a fantasy novel, but she was encouraged to play up the romantic elements and pitch it as a romance. Ann Aguirre writes books across a bunch of genres, but ask folks what she writes and you’re likely to hear “YA” or “romance,” not “science fiction” or even “fantasy.” Women are often told, time after time, that they have a better shot of making it as novelist if they position themselves as romance writers than epic fantasy writers. Even when writers like N.K. Jemisin and Jaqueline Carey are positioned as epic fantasy, I still encounter readers who make faces and say, “Oh, that’s not fantasy, really. Too much romance.” Yet all the sex in the dude books? Totally fantasy!
It’s hard for us to change our frame.
Romance and YA are not, for marketing reasons, bad places to be, but why do readers and reviewers continually place epic work by women, in particular, into another category, all but ensuring what we view as “epic fantasy” today becomes a clutter of male writers and women writing under male or gender-neutral pseudonyms like Mazarkis Williams, Robin Hobb, and (likely) K.J. Parker?
I’d argue this has little to do with content, as the three pseudonymous authors above write in a cozily epic and somewhat dark tradition reminiscent of the rest. Instead, it has to do with how we’re taught to view and categorize artistic work.
Epic fantasy seems to have drifted into a prescriptive mode characterized by gritty descriptions, multiple POVs, abuse and maiming, medieval milieus, and, oddest of all (!), work that does this as written by male authors. Karen Miller and Anne Bishop need not apply (Anne Bishop’s pain-dealing cock rings, one imagines, may be too much for many grimdark epic fantasy readers to stomach).
When one holds up as examples of a type of fiction only work written by men, and only dark, pseudo-medieval work by men, it’s an effective way of shutting out all other types of work. The strange thing is to watch people try and keep out what they don’t believe fits into the frame. I’ve had people push my own work out of the “grimdark” mode of fantasy for having spaceships, and Karen Miller for not being “epic” enough, and Anne Bishop, naturally, for skirting that “romance” line too closely (too many cock rings!).
Once one has constructed a frame, one has to work very hard to maintain its borders, even when those borders can clearly be far broader. This was the frame they were shown. This is what fits. Everything else must be put in different boxes.
What we fail to understand when we critique the reading habits and choices and shoring up of the frames that people have made when called out about this—this lack of memory and categorization of women authors, this constant pushing out—is that though these are things done by individuals, the actions themselves are part of a broader system of dismissal and un-seeing that we’ve been internalizing—all of us—from the time we were children. We grew up in a system that wanted us to see and remember and prioritize particular voices and worldviews, and we perpetuate them whether we’re aware of them or not.
If we’re told that the only cheese is blue cheese, it’s the first cheese we’ll think of, and the cheese by which all others are measured. For those who don’t care much for blue cheese, it may even lead one to think that all cheese is horrible, because they don’t have an inclusive frame that can hold all the rest.
One of the greatest lies we’ve ever been told in the United States is that we are free and independent individuals. Most people will tell you marketing messages don’t work on them, and they aren’t sexist or racist at all—everyone is equal, everyone is the same. But the frame we’ve built for the world is not built on those ideas. The frame tells you these people do things, and these people have things done to them. These are assumptions and preconceptions built into our very language. It’s no wonder it becomes an epic undertaking to try and dismantle them.
When I tell other writers these sorts of stories, about the inherent resistance of readers to including them in genres they actively want to write in, I get a lot of sour, grim faces. For good reason. Who the fuck wants to deal with all that? Who wants to fight all that? How can we kick down and help somebody re-build a frame of reference that’s reinforced from every media me
ssage?
The answer is: We have to be part of rebuilding the landscape. The truth is we must be part of building new stories. But first we must pull down our own preconceptions of what we can and should and ought to write. We need to tear down the internalized despair over the long slog we’ve got ahead, and get to work.
I’m not saying that’s easy. In truth, it’s really, really hard. But the more I work at it, the more I’ve reimagined cheese not as some pale lumps covered in pea sprouts but a full-on Spanish cheese sampler, and you know? My life is richer for it. I’m branching out. There’s hope.
Will any of this change the world? Will a single act change the narrative, and reimagine our language? No. But I can tell you that every great act starts with someone saying, “This isn’t okay. This isn’t truth.” Where the real shift comes is when a small, passionate group of people sees it too, and takes on the task of reimagining the world with you.
I don’t just write stories. I don’t just sell book widgets. I create new narratives of the way we can be, of the way the world can be.
Are you with me?
© 2014 by Kameron Hurley.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kameron Hurley is the author of the subversive epic fantasy novel The Mirror Empire and the science-fantasy noir God’s War trilogy. Her work earned her the Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer and Kitschy Award for Best Debut Novel. Hurley has been a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Hugo Award, Nebula Award, Locus Award, and BFS Award for non-fiction. She pens a bi-monthly column with Locus Magazine on writing-related topics and blogs regularly at KameronHurley.com.
Women in Fantasy Illustration Roundtable
Galen Dara
At this year’s Illustration Masters Class, I took the opportunity to sit down and have a conversation with Julie Bell, Irene Gallo, Rebecca Guay, Lauren Panepinto, and Zoë Robinson. It was an incredible chance to talk to three very influential art directors and two internationally renowned artists about their personal journeys, their careers in the speculative fiction industry, and the state of women today working as illustrators.
Fantasy Magazine Issue 58, Women Destroy Fantasy! Special Issue Page 22
