These days I try to see the bright side as much as possible, and there is certainly a light in the dark; more than one, in fact. Women continue to write genre-defying science fiction, which I continue to read, and magazines like Tin House (Fantastic Women: 18 Tales of the Surreal and the Sublime), the now-defunct Electric Velocipede, and, yes, Lightspeed, release issues devoted entirely to women and all their glorious destruction. I am proud to be part of this, to be one of the women working to tear down the gendered walls of SFF, so that in the future, teenage girls can easily find themselves in the science fiction that they read.
Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam lives in Texas with her husband and two literarily named cats: Gimli and Don Quixote. Her fiction and poetry has appeared in magazines such as Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Goblin Fruit, and Daily Science Fiction. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program and reviews short fiction at her blog, Short Story Review. You can visit her on Twitter @BonnieJoStuffle or through her website: www.bonniejostufflebeam.com.
The Wendybird
Stina Leicht
When I was a little girl, my mother read Peter Pan aloud to me. As often happens, life got in the way. She stopped before she got to the end. Thus, for me the story ended when the Lost Boys shoot Wendy for hoping to set foot on Neverland. That was my first real experience of fantasy. Neverland was a place that killed girls. Still, I wanted to be a Knight of the Round Table. Dolls were okay, and so were tiaras, but I wanted to wear a pretty silk dress and slay my own dragons—better, I wanted to be good at it. And then I found SF through Madeline L’Engle. L’Engle said women could have adventures in SF. If females were only nominally present, at least no one would kill me for showing up. I thought SF was for smart, open-minded, forward-thinking people.
However, I soon discovered that SF wasn’t all that different from Neverland.
The funny thing is that everyone assumes the most difficult part of being a woman in a white straight man’s world is the struggle to be accepted. Sure, someone flipped over the “No Girls Allowed” sign on the clubhouse, but the sign still exists. The external world still informs you in one way or another that you don’t count, and you never will. That’s bad enough, but then there’s the more powerful aspect—the internal voice.
Like it or not, people are partly a product of their environment. I was raised in a misogynistic culture. I have to double-think everything I write because if I’m not careful, I’ll act in a way that runs against my own (and other women’s) best interest. It sucks that I’m more comfortable writing in a male character’s point of view than a female’s. It sucks that I can’t write for young kids or even write a sex scene without feeling like I’m selling out to a system that insists these are my only creative outlets. It sucks that when a man successfully writes from a female point of view, he’s showered with praise, but if a woman successfully writes from a male point of view, it’s shrugged off as just one of a million expected aspects of good writing. It sucks that every single time I tell someone I’m an author, I have to explain that no, I don’t write children’s books, nor do I write erotica. It sucks that I’ve never seen a male author asked those questions. It sucks that men’s voices are given more importance than women’s—so much so that whenever I see a piece mocking Girls on HBO, I’m left wondering if the show really is that banal or if it’s just another moment where women’s problems are belittled? I question everything. I have to. Being self-aware is survival, and when I hear men whine about being asked to do the same, I just want to say, “Welcome to my world.”
Stina Leicht is a two-time Campbell Award nominee for Best New Writer (2012 and 2013.) Her debut novel Of Blood and Honey, a historical fantasy set in 1970s Northern Ireland, was shortlisted for the Crawford Award. The sequel, And Blue Skies from Pain, is available now. Her shorter fiction is also featured in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s surreal anthology Last Drink Bird Head, and in the anthology Rayguns Over Texas.
I Wanted to be the First Woman on the Moon
Sylvia Spruck Wrigley
When I was six years old, my teacher asked everyone to tell her what they wanted to be when they grew up. She went to each desk, one by one, and we were to whisper it in her ear, and then she would tell the class. When it was my turn, I whispered in her ear that I wanted to be the first woman on the moon.
“You what?”
The class tittered. I whispered it again. I wanted to be the first woman on the moon.
She smiled and nodded. But then she started giggling as she told the room. Everyone laughed. The class stared at me, uninterested in Becky, who wanted to be a mom and Tom, who wanted to be a fireman. I kept my head up and stared at the blackboard.
The principal walked past the classroom and our teacher beckoned him in. “Come here, you have to hear this. Sylvia, tell him what you told me.”
So in front of the whole class, I said it again. I want to be the first woman on the moon.
He laughed and said, “But what if some other little girl, some little girl who is already sixteen, wants the same thing. What then?”
I chewed my lip, looked at my feet. He patted me on the head and left the room.
It was my first lesson that some things aren’t worth trying for, because you aren’t going to get them anyway.
No one said, hey, so you want to be an astronaut! No one noticed that I had already internalized that women were only in competition with one another. I didn’t want to be the first person on Mars or the first person to explore to the edges of the solar system. The best that I hoped for was to be the first woman to do something that a man had already done. This was our world. This was how it had always been.
I gave up on that dream. When people asked what I wanted to be, I picked more realistic goals. A rock singer. A movie star. An author. And no one laughed anymore.
But I keep thinking about the past and the future and how that six-year-old could have been told being an astronaut was a worthy goal, whether or not she was the first. Luckily, my mother encouraged me to dream, so all those dreams about outer space made it onto paper … and still do. I write about recreating recipes on far-off colonies and the trials of living a million miles from Starbucks. I write about the daughters and the mothers and the great aunts. I write about the lack of Tampax. I write about those left behind. And in the end, I believe that, as a woman writing real science fiction, I bring more than I ever could have if I’d actually traveled to the moon. Although there’s still time, maybe, if I act fast.
Sylvia Spruck Wrigley obsessively writes letters to her mother, her teenage offspring, her accountant, as well as to unknown beings in outer space. Only her mother admits to reading them. Born in Heidelberg, she spent her childhood in California and now splits her time between South Wales and Andalucía, two coastal regions with almost nothing in common. Her short fiction has most recently appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Crossed Genres and Lightspeed. You can find out more about her at http://intrigue.co.uk.
Never Think of Yourself as Less
Helena Bell
Last spring I got a voicemail on my phone from an unknown number. After listening to it, I said, more to myself than to my parents, who happened to be in the room with me, “My story has been nominated for the Nebula Award.”
“Oh,” my father said. “Is that good?”
My mother immediately went to the shelf and started pulling down books: Kevin J. Anderson, Frank Herbert, Orson Scott Card.
“Here,” she said. “Look.” And she showed him back covers and inside flaps: writers my father had heard of mentioning here and there that yes, they too had once been nominated for or won a Nebula.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s good.
• • •
It was my mother who read the Timothy Zahn Star Wars novels to my brother and me as bedtime stories. She’s the one who bought me a copy of Jurassic Park when I was ten, then Congo, Sphere, The Andromeda Strain.
She gave me other books too, of c
ourse: Black Beauty, The Little Princess, ALL the Misty books. But we always veered slowly back into science fiction.
Yet there was no Ursula K. Le Guin in her recommendations. No Russ, Tiptree, Asaro, or Bujold. By the time I finally started reading speculative short fiction, I could name a dozen favorite female poets, female literary writers, and essayists … But not a single female science fiction writer other than Ursula K. Le Guin, whom I only really knew thanks to A Wizard of Earthsea.
It’s taken me years to slowly correct the course I was set upon, lovingly, by my mother. Last spring may have been the first time that she’d read any science fiction by women, as she quickly devoured all the stories nominated in my category. She liked Cat Rambo’s story a lot. Less so Aliette’s story “Immersion,” because I told her it would win and, well, she’s still my mom.
So no. She didn’t hand me a battered copy of The Left Hand of Darkness or scour the SF section in the bookstore for female sounding names in order to broaden my (and her) reading tastes. She gave me the books she knew, that had been recommended to her by the few other people she knew who read SF—all of whom were men.
But she gave me lots of them. As many as I could read. SF, fantasy, horse books, princess books, Nancy Drew, and Judy Blume. And when my teachers wrote on my report card “Helena is very bright, but sometimes she reads during class when she should be paying attention,” she just laughed and bought me more.
“Never let a teacher tell you to read less,” she said. Or to write less. To dream less. To think of yourself as less.
So thanks, Mom. For everything.
Helena Bell is a writer living in Raleigh, NC, where she is an MFA Candidate in Fiction at North Carolina State University. She is a graduate of the Clarion West Workshop and her work has appeared in Clarkesworld, The Indiana Review, and Electric Velocipede. Her short story “Robot” was a nominee for the Nebula Award in 2012.
An ABC of Kickass, or A Partial Exorcism of My TBR/TBRA* Pile
Jude Griffin
A is for Athena Andreadis’s To Seek Out New Life: The Biology of Star Trek: an entertaining and erudite look at the strength of the science in the science fiction classic. (A is also for Annoying my husband by bringing up her points like why the differing blood color of Vulcans and humans means no Spock.)
B is for Leigh Brackett, Queen of Space Opera, and her unbeatable story titles like “The Beast-Jewel of Mars,” and “Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon.”
C is for Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, who wrote of submarines in the sixteen hundreds in The Blazing-World.
D is for Aliette de Bodard’s “The Heartless Light of Stars”: “In space, distance is time.”
E is for Ekaterina Sedia’s “Herding Vegetable Sheep,” where entertainment conglomerates run for and win presidencies.
F is forever for Frankenstein, written by the nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley, laying bare the hubris of science unhinged from ethics and one of the most important science fiction works ever written.
G is for Glotolog, documented in Joanna Russ’s searing tale of the encompassing cultural oppression of the Whelk-finned Glotologs over the Crescent-finned, Spotty, and Mottled populations, How to Suppress Women’s Writing.
H is for Nalo Hopkinson, whose science fiction is unconstrained by anyone’s rules or expectations, who weaves together magic and science as suits the story, and who made a dress that hangs in my closet (shameless fangirling by me, sorry).
I is for “In Hiding,” by Wilmar Shiras, a short story that became the first chapter of Children of the Atom—thought to be the inspiration for the X-Men comic books.
J is for Jezebels, sterilized, state-controlled prostitutes in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
K is for Kameron Hurley, rescuing the history of soft, downy, non-cannibalistic llamas in “We Have Always Fought.”
L is for Madeleine L’Engle: Her genre-busting science fiction and fantasy novel, A Wrinkle In Time, is one of the most marvelous introductions to SFF a child could have.
M is for Mistressworks: go.
N is for Nnedi Okorafor: vengeful swordfish, robotic spiders, rapacious multinationals, elgorts, clack beetles, aliens, apocalypses, and goddesses—what’s not to love?
O is for Octavia Butler: the first science fiction writer ever to win the MacArthur Fellowship (aka, Genius Grant).
P is for Parrish Plessis, the star of Marianne de Pierres’s rollicking SF action adventure series.
Q is for the Quetz, Joyce Chng’s empathic, pterosaur-like creatures. With feathers!
R is for Rukbat 3, aka Pern, the setting for Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders series.
S is for Memoirs of a Spacewoman by Naomi Mitchison, where space exploration is the skeleton for an exploration of empathy, binary thinking bias, sexuality, and whose own life is a fantastic tale of its own.
T is for Tiamat, home of the Winters and the Summers in Joan Vinge’s The Snow Queen.
U is for Ursula Le Guin and her Hainish explorations of physics, gender, sexuality, politics, and religion. And who published her story “Nine Lives” in Playboy as “U.K. Le Guin” because, as an editor noted, “Many of our readers are frightened by stories by women.”
V is for Eliza Victoria’s Project 17: Orwell with robots! And worldbuilding that feels all too real.
W is for Clare Winger Harris: the first woman to be published in SF publications and a visionary for her recognition that one gender need not embody all the courage, curiosity, intelligence, abilities, daring, and strength in a tale.
X is for all the names and stories and worlds and ideas lost to us through willful blindness, dismissal, fear, and antipathy.
Y is for Yod, the cyborg at the center of Marge Piercy’s novel, He, She, and It, exploring love, gender, and identity in a corporate-controlled dystopia.
Z is for Zinzi December in Zoo City, Lauren Beukes’s novel of an alternate South Africa, animalling, the music industry, and a criminal underworld. Bonus points for wearing a fake sloth while accepting the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
* TBRA=To Be Read Again
Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She has trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon. Jude is also an editorial assistant at Lightspeed Magazine.
Stocking Stuffers
Anaea Lay
It’s Christmas of 1998. I’m thirteen, in the eighth grade, and hate just about everything.
I’m supposed to get Confirmed in the spring, but have deep theological concerns that I want resolved first. You see, I’m very serious, very snobby, and commitments to omnipotent deities are not a thing I’m inclined to take lightly. Instead of getting answers, I’m warmly invited to stop coming to CCD.
That’s upsetting, but there’s more. I have to spend most of my time with other thirteen-year-olds, and they’re busy doing the adolescent sexual awakening thing. None of it makes any sense to me since the amount of cheating via illicit hand-holding going on makes it pretty clear that exclusive relationships are a recipe for heart-break. I’m reeling with horror after a conversation with another girl wherein she confessed that she had a crush on two different boys and was sincerely worried that made her a slut. If being a slut is that easy, I’m convinced we’re all doomed.
On top of that, all my peers think fart jokes are the funniest thing ever, and that finishing your classwork in ten minutes and spending the rest of the time reading is a social faux pas. Also, no matter how much I practice the flute, there is no overcoming the fact that I couldn’t keep a beat if the fate of the universe depended on it. So, basically, being thirteen sucked for me just like it did for everybody before or since.
This Christmas is special, though. I go downstairs at my
grandparent’s house to pillage my stocking and in with the usual socks, lip gloss, and nail polish is a book. A weird book with cover art of carefully posed naked people swimming underwater. I give my Dad a look. A “Dad, are you nuts?” look. He disavows all knowledge of what the elves were up to. I put the book at the bottom of my massive stack of Christmas-gift-books and figure I’ll get to it if I run out of things to read before my birthday in June brings more.
Spring comes, and with it the eighth grade English class project on persecution. This is the unit where everybody reads one of four books: The Diary of Anne Frank, 1984, Animal Farm, or Fahrenheit 451. I do not want to do one of those books. I also don’t know how to pick out a book about persecution without having read it already. “Do you still have that book I gave you for Christmas?” my dad asks when I lament my conundrum at the dinner table. “Have I ever lost or given up a book?” I reply. “Read that book,” he says.
I was not the first person to read Stranger in a Strange Land and have my mind a little bit blown. In fact, I was so far behind the curve there that only the cannibalism would cut it as a scandalous idea anymore. But it was the first time I ran into something that said, “Hey, you can be a good person without being Christian,” and also said, “Monogamy is a bit messed up, don’t you think?” These were things I really needed to hear, not because they were my introduction to those ideas, but because they were my introduction to the idea that I wasn’t alone for having them. I wasn’t even so weird that my dad couldn’t notice what was going on and slip a message into my Christmas stocking.
Or maybe Dad just wanted us to have a literature canon in common and that was the Christmas I was finally old enough that the sexual content of later Heinlein wasn’t too mature for me. It could have been an accident that he handed me the perfect book at the perfect moment. I’ve never asked and don’t plan to; that’d risk ruining a really good story.
Lightspeed Magazine Issue 49 Page 54
