Story has been the lens I use to interact with the world for as long as I’ve been a conscious being. There was never a question about whether I’d be a writer, even as my dreams of becoming a rock star and concert flautist fell apart on me. From Christmas of 1998, there was never a question about whether I’d write science fiction. It was my first hint that I wasn’t alone, that if I just gritted my teeth and waited, then I could go find the parts of the world that would make sense to me and then I could make them mine.
If that means I’m destroying SF, oh well. Someday I’m going to have nieces and nephews, and they’re going to have to be thirteen, too. You’d better believe I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure the perfect book for them winds up in their stocking.
Anaea Lay lives in Madison, Wisconsin where she sells real estate under a different name, writes, cooks, plays board games, spoils her cat, runs the Strange Horizons podcast, and plots to take over the world. Her work has appeared in a variety of venues, including Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Apex, and Daily Science Fiction.
Breaching the Gap
Brooke Bolander
Unlike a lot of you, my fantastic voyage didn’t start until some point in or around 1995. Science I’ve always loved; from five years old onwards, I wanted to be a paleontologist, and nothing in the intervening years caused my digging urges to dry up. The first thing I ever clearly remember reading, at the age of three or so, was a children’s book on Roy Chapman Andrews and his trip to the Gobi Desert to excavate the fossilized nests of Protoceratops. Science fiction, however … well. Innocuous stuff like Flight of the Navigator, Batteries Not Included, and Short Circuit I could get away with watching, but my fundamentalist mother was convinced little gray aliens were actually little gray demons from the bowels of Dis, and so my exposure was severely limited.
At least until 1995 and The X-Files.
As you’ll all no doubt be shocked to learn, I was something of a lonely, outcast nerd in junior high. As many a lonely, outcast nerd has done before and since, I retreated to the comforting cloisters of my bedroom on Friday nights. When ruining my eardrums with loud music and my eyeballs with JRPGs got too boring, I turned to my old babysitter, the television.
Scully was strong, stronger than any other woman I’d seen in science fiction. She was icy and arch and logical. She was a scientist, but sometimes she did impulsive, self-destructive shit, like everybody does once in a while. Her belly was soft in spots, but by no means was she ever portrayed as weak. Her relationship with Mulder was built on mutual love and respect, not some vapid Moonlighting “GOTTA GET ME A MAN AND GET LAID” headlong hormonal charge into non-autonomy. In short, she was shown as a fucking human being. Feminine without resorting to clichés, smart without implying that razor intelligence lessened her somehow as a woman.
I connected with that character in a way I’d never, ever connected with a fictional character before. I didn’t even know you could identify with a made-up person that closely. I was a voracious reader as a child, but Scully just about broke my young heart.
Science fiction has always been to me, at its core, about relationships and the ways we interact with one another. The best of it—the stuff that sticks with you, the stuff you don’t forget an hour after watching or reading—has goddamned heart. There’s nothing more alien or unknowable than another person’s thoughts. We travel through the world in insulated ships made of meat and bone. If you’re lucky, you make contact with others. If you’re extraordinarily lucky, you manage to find someone who understands you.
And if you are very, very lucky (we’re talking lottery numbers and shipwreck survivors, here), you learn to put down words in such a way as to tell stories that everyone gets. Think about how phenomenal that is, to be able to connect with that many people. You’re making contact with alien intelligences. You’re breaching the gap.
Thanks for teaching me about that possibility, Scully. Thanks, Octavia Butler and Ursula Le Guin. If it weren’t for amazing, trail-breaking, iconoclastic women, both fictional and gloriously real, I wouldn’t be writing this today. I gratefully stand on the shoulders of Amazons.
Brooke Bolander attended the University of Leicester 2004-2007, studying History and Archaeology, and is an alum of the 2011 Clarion Writers’ Workshop at UCSD. Her work has been featured in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Nightmare, Reflection’s Edge, and the Prime Books anthology Aliens: Recent Encounters. She can be reached at @BBolander for the Twitter-inclined.
Women Who Are More Than Strong
Georgina Kamsika
It might have taken a while for the world to cotton on to “geek stuff” being cool (despite Star Wars doing so well so long ago), but for as long as I can recall, science fiction has been my favourite genre for books and films.
I’m happy to say that I feel science fiction is really thriving. This is good, because it’s not like we want to write for a small niche group alone. I love that it’s okay for mums and grandmas and sons to read science fiction on the bus or the tube and no one stares. At the end of the day, it’s all stories about people, even if some of them might be alien or undead.
The part that’s missing, the part I really want to change, is for there to be more stories about people like me written by people like me. Women in the main role. Not a plucky sidekick, not a screaming damsel to be saved from the monster, but the leader. The protagonist (or antagonist) who drives the story forward, who has power and meaning and weight to her role. Women who are more than strong, who have personalities, friends, lovers, and enemies. Now that’s science fiction I really want to read.
Georgina Kamsika is a speculative fiction writer born in Yorkshire, England, to Anglo-Indian immigrant parents and has spent most of her life explaining her English first name, Polish surname, and Asian features. She reads widely, everything from E.M. Forester to Chuck Palahniuk, and values her vast comics collection. She remembers being very proud when her story was chosen to be displayed on the wall (this was at infant school). Many years later, she began taking her writing seriously and has had numerous short stories published in magazines and the odd anthology. Her debut novel, The Sulphur Diaries (Legend Press), was released in November of 2011. Georgina is also a first reader for Lightspeed Magazine.
A Science-Fictional Woman
Cheryl Morgan
Last year, when we were going through one of the periodic “Worldcon is an evil conspiracy run by old, white men” phases in social media, I saw a young person say that what Worldcon needed to do to become relevant to the modern world was to start having some programming on LGBT issues. Ha!
The first Worldcon I attended, eighteen years earlier, had Samuel R. Delany as a Guest of Honor. I’ve done my share of LGBT panels at Worldcon since then. But truthfully, I felt at home in science fiction long before that.
As a kid growing up, changing gender was something that could only happen by magic. Later, when people like Christine Jorgensen and April Ashley entered my consciousness, I understood that life for me was possible. But that life was most definitely something that was a gift of Science! Being a transsexual was something that belonged to The Future. If you did it now, you were a freak, an outcast, someone who could only be at home in Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. Or at a science fiction convention.
So what has gone wrong? How have we got to a place in which a simple request for more science fiction that doesn’t assume a default gender binary can get treated as a greater threat to dude-kind than, say, banning football or beer? Why are works written fairly and squarely in a tradition established by Tiptree, Le Guin, and Russ suddenly viewed as something science fiction readers wouldn’t buy?
Part of the problem is, I think, that The Future has happened. When Joe Haldeman postulated, in The Forever War, a future world in which homosexuality was the norm, everyone knew that he was just winding up the conservatives. Now those same conservatives are terrified that Haldeman might have actually been prescient. When I was a kid, being gay was
a crime. These days in the UK, we have gay ministers in Parliament, and changing gender is a human right. Social changes are so less scary when viewed from the other end of a wormhole, or through the lens of relativistic time dilation.
The other issue is that we have won the culture war. Science fiction is no longer a haven for misfits and outcasts; it is part of mainstream society. People can no longer become science fiction fans because they don’t feel welcome anywhere else. The ghetto doors are open. What happens here is reflective of what happens everywhere.
Women have, of course, always been destroying science fiction. Scholarly works such as Justine Larbalestier’s The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction show this to be true. The dudebros of the day were just as terrified of catching cooties from Joanna Russ as their modern day equivalents are when faced down by Kameron Hurley. But these days the stakes are bigger. People like me are living proof that the gender binary isn’t the immutable biological divide that we were taught it was in school. And if that wall crumbles, what future is there for patriarchy?
There will always be a need to destroy science fiction. Tearing down the old and bringing in the new is something that art does. But in one little corner of the genre, that corner concerned with gender, trans people have been busily taking science fiction and turning it into science fact. It is no wonder that the dudebros are scared. They can see that the tide has turned, and that their pretty little sandcastles of social privilege are about to be swept away. What sort of brave new world we end up in remains to be seen. Brit Mandelo’s anthology, Beyond Binary, offers all sorts of possibilities. Some people may choose to abandon gender altogether. Others, like me, will be perfectly happy to live whatever gendered life suits them best.
Here’s the rub, though. Iain Banks has said that when he came up with The Culture, he realized that if gender were mutable, and patriarchy still existed, then everyone would opt to be male. There’s an argument to be made that the male-dominated science fiction of the so-called Golden Age is set in a world like that. Everyone lives as a man, and babies are made in tanks. It’s science, right? A future in which women exist is a future that destroys that science fictional promise of no longer needing them. So there is still work to be done; still imagination needed; still a world to change.
Keep writing, ladies; we have a patriarchy to destroy.
Cheryl Morgan was, to her knowledge, the first openly trans person to win a Hugo Award. Science fiction was not destroyed as a result. She now runs a publishing company, Wizard’s Tower Press (http://wizardstowerpress.com/) and an ebook store, Wizard’s Tower Books (http://www.wizardstowerbooks.com/). This has not destroyed science fiction either. If at first you don’t succeed …
Your Future is Out of Date
Pat Murphy
I credit Robert Heinlein and the Holy Roman Catholic Church and San Francisco’s Exploratorium with making me the writer I am today.
The Church gave me the time and tedium needed to practice skills I would later need. As a child, I accompanied my parents to mass each Sunday. I had no choice in the matter. I knelt, stood, and sat on cue while the priest droned on in Latin.
Since I wasn’t allowed to read in church, I told myself stories. That is to say, I took stories that I had read and rewrote them in my imagination (while maintaining an appropriately pious look on my face). My rewrites almost always involved reworking a story’s narrative to make a place for myself in the tale—an active role, where I could play the hero.
This was in the late ’60s, and I was a fan of science fiction. The stories I read lacked heroic girls or women. In most science fiction of the time, technology had advanced, and yet somehow women were still mothers or helpers or secretaries or in need of rescue—if they were there at all.
It was a stretch to squeeze myself into these stories, but I managed it. I usually imagined a fictional me, dressed in boy’s clothes and passing as a boy. In my version of Tarzan, a scrawny fourth-grade girl accompanied the lord of the jungle on his adventures. I credit all that exercise in daydreaming and plotting with forcing me to develop the skills I needed as a writer.
The church provided me the incentive to practice my plotting skills, but it was reading the work of Robert Heinlein that gave me the deep motivation to write. As a child, I discovered Heinlein’s juveniles. Exciting stories—well told and compelling—like Rocket Ship Galileo, Time for the Stars, Tunnel in the Sky. Of course, creating active and interesting roles for myself in these stories required extensive reimagining, but I was used to that.
But then I read Heinlein’s Podkayne of Mars, the story of a teenaged girl from Mars who was traveling to Venus. I was thrilled to find a girl in the novel’s starring role. At last, I thought, I had found a story I would not have to rewrite. Podkayne’s mother was a famous engineer; Podkayne wanted to be the captain of an explorer spaceship. It was perfect.
Unfortunately, as I read, I discovered that this was not a story for me after all. Podkayne talked about using her “feminine wiles” to learn astrogation from crewmembers. She wrote: “It is a mistake for a girl to beat a male at any test of physical strength,” and “It does not do to let a male of any age know that one has brains.”
Throughout the book, Podkayne proved incompetent at everything except taking care of babies and some social relations. In a time of crisis, she went to pieces and wanted to crawl back into her uncle’s lap for comfort.
All this led her to alter her aspirations and accept a traditional woman’s role. Her new opinion: “A baby is lots more fun than differential equations. Every starship has a crèche. So which is better? To study crèche engineering and pediatrics—and be a department head in a starship? Or buck for pilot training and make it … and wind up as a female pilot nobody wants to hire.”
At age twelve, I found myself outraged. Heinlein was telling me about how the world worked—and I understood that was the way his world worked. But I didn’t, I wouldn’t, and couldn’t believe in his teenage girl or his version of the world. I was jarred out of the story and out of Heinlein’s future. It wasn’t fair that Podkayne couldn’t be a starship captain. It wasn’t right that she had to act like she wasn’t as smart as the men around her.
I was pissed. And that was when I realized something about the power of fiction writing.
Fiction writers have, in a limited sense, the power to control your mind. When you give yourself over to a good book, you come to believe in the author’s world, the author’s way of thinking about the way the world works. If a book is compelling, you believe in it on some very deep level. The world portrayed in the book seeps into your unconscious and becomes part of your experience of the world. The writer’s truth—Heinlein’s truth, my truth—becomes your truth.
As a child, I believed Heinlein’s view of the world—until he wrote about something that I knew better than he did—the mind of a teenage girl. That’s when he lost me. That was when his worldview bumped into something I believed in even more: my own ability to do whatever I wanted to do.
I realized that I wanted futures that were very different from the future that Heinlein described in Podkayne of Mars. To change the world, I had to write new futures, ones in which gender roles and social relationships were different from the ones deemed normal at the time.
My stories are viruses, carrying my version of the world. My goal is to control your mind for the duration of the story—and in the process to introduce you to different possibilities. If writing those new futures means the destruction of science fiction as we knew it, then so be it.
All that was long ago. I’ve been writing science fiction—and some might say destroying science fiction—for over thirty-five years. Along the way, Karen Fowler and I co-founded the Tiptree Award, which rewards those writers who are bold enough to contemplate shifts and changes in gender roles, a fundamental aspect of any society.
Recently, when I was visiting Japan, I found a copy of Podkayne of Mars in translation. I was surprised to see it—and even more surprise
d by the Japanese tagline on the cover. In loose translation, it read: “Shame on you, Mr. Heinlein. You have shattered the dreams of young girls.”
I doubt that this tagline will sell the book, but I believe it nailed the essence of Heinlein’s novel. It also described in a single line why I am committed to writing new futures. It warmed my heart.
• • •
Pat Murphy has won numerous awards for her thoughtful, literary science fiction and fantasy writing, including two Nebula Awards, the Philip K. Dick Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Seiun Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. She has published seven novels and many short stories for adults, including Rachel in Love, The Falling Woman, The City Not Long After, Nadya, and Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell, a novel that Publisher’s Weekly called the “cerebral equivalent of a roller-coaster ride.” Her children’s novel, The Wild Girls, won a Christopher Award in 2008. In 1991, with writer Karen Fowler, Pat co-founded the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, an annual literary prize for science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender roles. This award is funded by grassroots efforts that include auctions and bake sales, harnessing the power of chocolate chip cookies in an ongoing effort to change the world. Pat enjoys looking for and making trouble. Her favorite color is ultraviolet. Her favorite book is whichever one she is working on right now.
Stray Outside the Lines
E. Catherine Tobler
You speak your mind and they ask you what’s wrong with you.
You question the words they’ve published and they say you want to censor their work.
You suggest a new path forward and they call you a fascist.
You see a problem and they wonder what the hell you’re talking about.
They trip over themselves to tell you you’re ugly, but to also not let the door hit your perky ass on the way out.
Every day, women are told and taught not to speak up. By the response our words garner, we are told our opinions are not wanted or valued. We are shown that our voices have no place alongside the words of male colleagues. Whether our words are fictional or not, we are told in subtle and blatant ways that we are still not entirely welcome to play with the boys.
Lightspeed Magazine Issue 49 Page 55
