I'm continuing to work my way through Gwyneth Jones' Top Ten novels by Women SF Writers. This was Fowler's first novel, which I read when it was published in 1992, and it's just as rich and strange as when it first came out. To call it science fiction is to acknowledge that it was published as such. It's by no means a traditional genre novel. A strange babbling woman shows up in the Washington Territory in 1873. She becomes attached to a Chinese railway worker named Chin, whose uncle is concerned that a white woman in Chinese company will lead to trouble for the Chinese, so he asks Chin to return her to her people -- a risky business. Along the way they acquire other followers, including the innocent, delusional dreamer, BJ, and the menacing, guilt-ridden Andersonville survivor, Harold, and the crusading feminist lecturer on the female orgasm, Adelaide.

As much a story of the Old West and an American quest novel as a work of science fiction, Sarah Canary features a protagonist who is all thing to all people -- an immortal, a madwoman, an incomprehensible alien. It's full of folk lore, scientific speculation, tall tales, and magic realism. It's an extraordinary literary debut by a writer I haven't kept up with, although she's gone on to great success.

It's been a couple of weeks since I last posted about my health. So here's the latest.

I had another seizure. It didn't fully develop, because I felt it coming on and ran upstairs to take a Lorazopam, which is intended to stop seizures in their tracks. This one kept coming on, moving past the shuddering in my chin and jaw that is the first sign of a seizure for me. So I ran back upstairs (evidence that my seizures are NOT grand mals) and took another Lorazopam. I also told Denys what was going on, and he called the nurses station at the Alvord Brain Tumor Center. By the time he got someone on the line, the second Lorazopam had pushed the seizure back, and I was able to tell Mandy Myers (yes, her real name, which has given us a special bond) what was going on. She didn't seem too concerned about the seizure, and basically told me that the increase in dosage of my regular anti-seizure med (a generic version of Keppra) probably hadn't taken effect yet. I was to call if I had any more seizures.

Previous to this episode my sister and I had seen a new physician's assistant at the Center, and along with increasing the dosage of the Keppra, she told me that the plan was to switch me to a new chemo called Lomustine and discontinue the Temodar. This was fine by me, since it felt like my body was done with Temodar after thirteen monthly rounds, nor to mention the daily "micro-doses" that I took on my Micronesian trip. I felt exhausted all the time, could no longer walk more than a few hundred yards at at time, and was sleeping more than half the day. I felt very uncertain of my balance and felt miserable in general. I liked the physician's assistant, whose last name is Stockhausen (I didn't ask if she was related to the composer, but I probably will if I see her again).

Hopefully switching to a new chemo will help with some of my problems. It has taken quite a while for my insurance company to agree to subsidize it, and I'm supposed to receive my first dose today. This one is a pill that I'll take once every six weeks, rather than the five days our of every 28 of the Temodar. I'll still be getting infusions of Avastin every two weeks, and I'm beginning to wonder if that's what's making me feel so worn out and weak. Or it could be that sixteen months of treatment has taken its toll on me.

Anyway I haven't had any further seizures, although I've given up caffeine because it was causing premonitions of seizures, and I've taken a precautionary Lorazopam a couple of times when it felt as though something was getting started. The PA also wants me to work with my physical therapist to build up my core strength, but the PT has been sick for a couple of weeks, so we haven't started on that yet. I've been trying to take little mini-walks every day to see whether that helps. I hate feeling this weak!

But I'm trying to be patient. In a way, none of this is a surprise, but just because you know chemo is going to knock the stuffing out of you doesn't mean you'll be ready for how it FEELS. It feels like crap, and I begin to wonder how much more treatment I can take. I guess I'll see how the Lomustine makes me feel and what the MRI in August shows.

I read Synners not long after it was published in 1991, but I don't remember what I thought of it. I liked it a lot the second time. It's a novel full of furious energy and lots of ideas. What surprised me a little bit was how much it's about a counterculture, but also how realistically the countercultural life is depicted. At time it reminded me of Delany's Dhalgren on that front, with free spirits squatting in utter squalor, eating badly in filthy surroundings. It's not a very romanticized portrait.

Cadigan is also more sympathetic to the corporate drones than I remembered, especially to Gabe, who is a mid-level corporate toady just ttying to get by as best he can, which is not actually very well. Of course the corporation he serves is an amoral profit-consumed machine that makes a bad situation worse by trying to capitalize on a new neural computer interface that threatens to integrate human brains into the internet and thus expose them to hackers who have nothing but chaos and viruses on (and in) their minds.

This is a novel of many characters that weaves back and forth between the members of the large cast. I had a hard time at first keeping track of everyone and their agendas, but eventually I mostly figured it out. After that the weaving of character points-of-view and ideas about consciousness and perception became hypnotic. This came out at a peak moment in cyberpunk history, and it is loaded with tropes and ideas of the era, practically an encyclopedia of the form.

Basically one character -- a video artist who wants to be a machine -- creates a video that goes viral and and starts to cause people to stroke out. The novel has a romantic resolution to this problem that seemed a little out of tone with the rest of the story. The other problem I had with it was the attempt to create a future slang -- e.g. "stone home" this and "stone home" that -- which sounded just as phoney as any attempt to create future slang. TANSTAAFL, anyone? For the most part, however, I found Cadigan's linguistic riffs to be rich and dense.

The third installment in my trip writeup. I'll post the final installment tomorrow, for anyone who is saving them up to binge read.

I'm having trouble working with pictures in Dreamwidth, so I think I'll be posting my personal posts to my old film blog from now own. I've started with my first post about the Micronesian trip. Feel free to comment here, if you're on Dreamwidth.

I haven't been keeping up with my busy life on dreamwidth. Last weekend I was in LA for Corflu, where my name was drawn out of the hat as Guest of Honor, to much acclaim. I'll be writing more about that experience for Nic Farey's fanzine, BEAM, when I get back from my next big adventure, which is a trip to Micronesia. I see I've already written about the medical considerations of this trip in "Interim."

The trip itself will include a day in Pohnpei, where we will visit the mysterious stone city of Nan Madol -- the Venice of the Pacific, the Reef of Heaven. This is a place I've wanted to visit since I first heard about it many years ago (and a place that my friend Stacy Scott has visited, when she lived on the island with her father in the '70s), and now the bucket list is finally being checked off. Pretty cool!

Then it's off to Yap Island in the Federated Islands of Micronesia, where my family lived for four years in the sixties and where I've returned with various parts of the family twice before -- in 1998 and 2002. This time I'm traveling with my brother and his family. It'll be great to see our old friend Thinnifel and his wife. Thinnifel has promised to have some of the sweet little bananas I love so much waiting for me. I just hope my defrosting frozen shoulder won't prevent me from snorkeling.

In general I'm anxious that I won't have the stamina to enjoy the trip. I'll be taking 100 mgs of chemo every night. This is considered a microdose (it's a third of what I was taking during the main phase of chemo), and therefore it's not supposed to debilitate me. I took my first dose last night and don't feel debilitated yet. We'll see what it does to me over the course of three weeks. Also, I feel weak and easy-to-tire from the year of more intense treatment I've just been through. Of course, I'm also concerned that the cancer is now spreading through my brain and will cause problems while I'm traveling. Still, the hope is that the chemo will keep it in check, and since I'm not dragging the Optune with me, that will be reassuring.

I honestly don't know what I want to do on Yap. Visit old haunts, eat sweet little bananas, listen to Thinnifel's stories, smell the old smells, soak it all in for probably the last time. Maybe I'll sit and contemplate the stone money as I did in elder days.

Just a quick note to let people know that last Friday I had my first infusion of Avastin. I'll be getting these every two weeks going forward. Avastin is an artificial antibody that attacks the blood vessels that supply cancer tumors with sustenance, and thus prevents them from growing and spreading. The tech who started the infusion for me said that the drug is designed to seek out chemical markers for cancer, so it doesn't attack healthy tissue. They said the main side effect is usually elevated blood pressure, although they warn you that all kinda of bleeding problems, including strokes, happen in rare cases. So far, I'm experiencing no problems.

The goal, as briefly discussed with my neuoro-oncologist after I had the MRI done on Tuesday, is to make sure the tiny tumors don't grow while I'm traveling in the next month (first to Corflu outside LA at the end of April, and then to Micronesia for three weeks in May). When I get back from that it sounds like they'll be putting me on another form of chemo too, simultaneous with the Avastin. And of course I've still got the Optune glued to my head. It sounds like I could also try some clinical trials if I wanted to, but I can't say I'm too thrilled by the idea of being a guinea pig right now.

Ah well, friends have been stepping up to divert me from my woes, and next week I'm going out to my sacred place (the Olympic National Forest) with my cancer buddy Kristal for at least a couple of days. It's discouraging that the cancer has already returned, but life's not over yet, I'm actually still in pretty damned good shape, and I can always dream that other treatments will be more effective. Go, Avastin!

She thought that it wasn't David, it wasn't even sex; it was some kind of deeper trouble, not only painful but unbearably, exasperatingly boring, something that would've been a lot better if it had been tragic and easier if it'd been sad.

Something unbearably disillusioning.

And old. Very, very old.

I've been working my way through a couple of different lists of Best/Favorite science fiction by women in Gwyneth Jones' Imagination/Space, mostly recently Tiptree's Up the Walls of the World and McIntyre's Dreamsnake. For Joanna Russ, Jones quite rightly recommends The Female Man, but because the Tiptree and McIntyre were both published in 1978, I chose to re-read The Two of Them, which was also published in 1978 and has long been one of my favorite Russ novels. I've always found it a difficult novel, and it's hard to imagine that I could provide a better reading of it than Jones' "Postscript to A Fairy Tale," which finds in the novel a Cinderella story and a parable of the failure of what's now called second wave feminism to achieve gender equality.

The Two of Them begins with two agents of the Trans-Temporal Agency, Ernst and Irene, arriving on a hollowed out asteroid that houses a neo-Islamic culture where women are treated like ornamental birds in a cage, supposedly for their own protection but really to keep them under control. What Ernst and Irene's mission is, and what the nature of the Trans-Temporal Agency is, is left unclear, but when Ernst and Irene discover the twelve-year-old daughter of the emmisary who greets them and discover that she wants to be a poet but will never be allowed to in this culture (where her aunt Dunya was declared insane for wanting the same thing), we flash back to Irene's adolescence as a bright, awkward, misfit in the USA of 1953. This is pretty clearly an autobiographic element in the story, and I feel that Russ used a similar situation in her Alyx story, "The Second Inquisition." Like the girl Zubeydeh, Irene is unhappy with her options in a culture that is repressive of women like her housewife mother. When a mysterious friend of her mother's named Ernst shows up at the house, Irene is fascinated and soon finds out that he is an agent of a mysterious agency that exists somewhere in an alternative reality. (It seems to me that the agency is not Trans-Temporal so much as Trans-Reality, where Reality conforms to the Many Worlds Hypothesis).

Back in the neo-Islamic asteroid, we find out that Ernst recruited Irene into the agency, rescuing her from the limited future she was facing in her home reality, and that they have been lovers and colleagues in the agency for many years since then. They have a very close, loving relationship, and when Irene decides that she wants to rescue Zubeydeh by recruiting her as Ernst recruited Irene, Ernst is willing. But as Irene mulls the situation, she realizes that rescuing Zubeydeh doesn't accomplish much. What about Zubeydeh's pill-popping housewife mother, who seems to prefer her cage to freedom, or her mad aunt, or Irene's own mother left behind in the home timeline, or her disabled best friend Chloe, who is so socially isolated that she lives vicariously through operas that Irene dismisses as heartless stories about women trapped and killed by social rules while men (especially the morally-ambivalent baritones) are free to have fun while they suffer.

The Two of Them is difficult partly because it's so conflicted. Irene is consumed by guilt for her failures and limitations. She wants women to be as free as men, but she can see that women are often their own worst enemies and complicit in their own oppression. The novel is also self-aware of its own contradictions. This self-awareness starts out as awareness that all stories are artificial, as Irene dissects the cliches of operas and the neo-Islamic poetic fables on TV on the asteroid. Trashy romances that Zubeydeh consumes with a passion and wants to eventually write herself. The fact that Irene and Ernst are moving between probabilities also emphasizes that in some ways they are choosing which story they want to inhabit, which in turn underlines the fact that the one we're reading about is just as arbitrary and full of plot holes as any of the others. Russ takes glee in mocking her own story, in fact, and examining the ways in which it doesn't make sense. Eventually a shocking death occurs, and the novel seems to start unraveling before our eyes, as Irene tries to fix it by imagining that it is a comedy instead of a tragedy.

Yet the nightmare of history won't allow Irene wake up in a comedy. Irene has to face the reality that the oppression of women is deeply engrained in the world and is always working against her, constraining her choices. Ironically, once she cuts herself loose from the agency, which she comes to see as a conspiracy against women, granting freedom to a select few such as herself while abandoning the rest throughout the multiverse, she loses all power of self-determination.

I've always found the end of the novel hair-raising, as Irene dreams of a dream of the mad aunt Dunya, about a valley of dry bones: "Innumerable skeletons are spread from wall to wall, and piled up immeasurably into the half-grey, half-lost rocky ceiling so far from any open love or light, are skeletons lying as they fell long ago in aeons-old attitudes of terror or flight, bones intermingled with bones, heaps of bones choking the dry watercourse and stretching back between the valley walls, a dry, silent carpeting as far as the eye can see." These are pretty clearly the bones of all the women who have died in servitude to men, and nothing in that valley has changed for a very long time. This is an expression of hopelessness and fear that true gender equality can never be achieved in the face of the long history of inequality.

But then, magically, a voice begins to whisper, "Shall these bones live!" and creates a breeze that begins to rustle through the bones, promising new life. I never really understood this ending until a couple of years ago when I discovered that it's a reference to a passage from Ezekiel, where Ezekiel has a vision of a valley of dry bones and then hears the voice of God, '“Son of man, these bones are the people of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off.’ Therefore prophesy and say to them: ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: My people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel."'

I'm still not sure what Russ intends with this reference. I don't think she believes gender equality will be wrought miraculously by a supernatural being. It seems more likely that the miracle will be caused by books like The Two of Them, in which women are given a voice, even if only a bare whisper. Of course, while Russ kept writing for a short while after this book was published, she all too soon fell silent herself. But of course Russ was a Jew and would have been well aware that throughout history the people of Israel have never long been free of oppression, enslavement and exile. There's a deep sense of pessimism in this book, for all the agile acrobatics and humor of the narrative. One thing I noticed this time through is that Irene is furious the whole time, but she is also aware that her anger causes her to make strategic and tactical mistakes. Looming over all of this is the question of whether sympathetic men -- such as Ernst -- can be allies in the project of equality, or whether we are doomed by our culture to keep replicating the same power relationships that our culture has stabilized for thousands of years. It's a powerful meditation, if ultimately a gloomy one.

I think it's worth noting that I have taken my last dose of chemo, hopefully for the rest of my life. My brain surgery was on December 10, 2016, so it has been over a year of treatment that knocked the crap out of me. Surgery, radiation+chemo, then twelve months of chemo. The chemo was on a 28 day cycle, so more of a lunar month, really. I should look into whether it really is some kind of witchcraft.

Anyway, I'll continue to use the Optune for the time being, but it doesn't make me feel like crap. The pattern of the chemo in the past few months was that I'd take it for five days, and then the nausea would kick in after the last dose, sometimes a couple days after. My neuro-oncologist said that this was a normal development as the body got more saturated with the chemo over time. This round I started feeling nauseated enough after my third dose that I began taking extra anti-nausea medication during the day. (Usually I just took the anti-nausea meds right before I took the chemo and went to bed.) Based on my last two rounds, I have five or so days of nausea ahead of me, and then I hope I can stop taking so many damned pills and start the recovery process. My previous neuro-oncologist said it could take a few months for me to get back to my status quo ante. I'm hoping I have a head start, but we shall see.

In the meantime, hallelujah, and get thee behind me, chemo! You will not be missed.

I'm one of Sarah Gulde's TAFF nominators, and because the voting deadline is coming right up, we are taking the unusual step of posting the PDF of the new issue of Chunga (#25) before we've mailed out the paper copies. If you haven't made up your mind about who to vote for yet, please download the PDF of the new issue, read Sarah's delightful article about the Nerd Camps she's organizing in Portland and then read my endorsement in Tanglewood. Then download the ballot using the link on this page and vote! Instructions for how to vote online can be found on the ballot. Pay close attention to the eligibility requirements, because not everybody can vote for TAFF. Good luck, Sarah!