Dry Ice Factory

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.

Gwyneth Jones writes about this book a number of times in her collection, Imagination/Space. She has a conflicted response to it: "Don't do it! was my cry. Don't claim the moral high ground; the sf guys' club will love you for it; doesn't that tell you anything ...? A woman doing just what she's supposed to do, being gentle and nurturing, looking after our spiritual growth, being moral so we don't have to be ... That's not the revolution. I feel differently now, because these are different times. Best feature: A Door into Ocean works like mainstream sf. Okay, it's about the sixties US under the skin, but the skin is proper, sciffy, rich, and strange sfnal skin." (in "(Re)reading for a Chapter on Feminist SF")

This novel won the John W Campbell Memorial Award for 1986, which is certainly a mainstream SF credential, and it was eventually followed by three more novels comprising the Elysium Chronicles. As The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction describes it: "The planet (in fact a moon) is in this case a water-covered Utopia inhabited solely by parthenogenetic web-footed aquatic female Shorans ... whose pacific culture suffers a savage Invasion at the hands of the male-dominated rigidly-hierarchical culture from the neighbouring planet of Valedon, whose leader is called the Patriarch." Sloncewski is apparently a Quaker, and her pacifist beliefs are definitely explored in this novel. What's interesting is that the Patriarch is light years away from and thus invisible to the planets he rules through an intermediary called the Envoy, and so he works as a kind of metaphor for the Christian God that the Quakers also worship. Perhaps Sloncewski's willingness to explore her conflicted feelings about her religion is part of why the novel feels so personal and honest, despite the way it stacks the moral deck in favor of the Utopian female society.

Like a lot of '70s feminist Utopias (cf Russ' Whileaway, Charnas' Motherlines, or Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time) Slonczewski's matriarchy reflects the political division within the womens movements of the time, with more militant factions, some that are more spiritual, and some that are more separatist, for example. Nobody gets let off easily, and a lot of the novel is taken up with the anguish various characters (including the militarist males) feel about the decisions they make. The deep history of the novel seems to be that the Shorans are descendants of people they call the Primes who thousands of years ago destroyed their civilization with "fire," probably of a nuclear nature. This forced them to change their culture and their science. Now perhaps the Patriarch is interested in resurrecting that old technology for his own purposes, or whatever other weapon technology the descendants of the Primes are capable of creating with the new science.

As Jones implies, what makes A Door into Ocean particularly fascinating is that the women of the ocean moon Shora are advanced genetic scientists, using only organic means to manipulate genes and cells. Slonczewski's background as a microbiologist shines through in the marine ecology she creates on Shora, where all life forms are interdependent and healing is practiced through enzymes and specially-bred lifeforms rather than pharmaceuticals and scalpels. (The split is reminiscent of Sterling's Shaper/Mech stories, I guess.) It's a work of hard science, and a highly original one. The only similar worldbuilding I can think of is in Varley's Eight Worlds stories and Gaia trilogy. Slonczewski goes much deeper, to my mind, creating a fully-imagined world that brought me that vicarious pleasure of exploring the alien that I remember from my adolescent encounters with science fiction. The sexuality in the novel is interesting too, with the one relationship that we see most closely being between one of the merwomen and a male (or malefreak, as the all-female Shorans think of him) from the planet that is invading their world. They are biologically incapable of having reproductive sex (in fact they are basically toxic to each other on that level), but the sex they are able to have is smoking hot.

Despite the painful subject of genocide and resistance, there is a joy to this novel that is a pleasure to behold: a science fiction writer in her prime hitting on all cylinders of imagination and speculation. Great stuff, highly recommended.

Well, that certainly was invigorating! This book-length issue of Lightspeed is the Book of Honor at this year's Potlatch science fiction convention. This issue was originally published as an e-book only, but it was popular enough that with the help of a Kickstarter campaign they were able to publish a printed "limited edition" -- and, because they raised so much money, will be doing special printed editions of similar collections of fantasy stories and horror stories by women. Because that's what this special issue is all about: science fiction as written by women. It was published as part of a reaction to a growing sense amongst some folks in the field that sexism is still alive and all too well, as evidenced by Hugo-nomination lists and unreconstructed male chauvinists in SFWA and the like.

As at least some of you will have noticed, I've mostly been reading older science fiction in recent years, so this was the biggest dose of current science fiction I've read lately aside from getting caught up with Iain Banks' Culture novels last year. One thing that was interesting to me was that these stories didn't seem all that different than the Golden Age stories I've been reading in the Asimov & Greenberg Great SF Stories/Golden Years of Science Fiction collections that cover stories from 1939 to 1964. I guess that's when modern science fiction matured, and maybe the basic tropes and rhetorical approaches haven't changed much since then. The other thing that struck me is how few of these writers I'd heard of, let alone read before. Two of the reprinted stories, Tiptree's great "Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death" and Maureen McHugh's "The Cost to Be Wise," were things I'd read before, and I've read other things by Eleanor Arnason, although not the story reprinted here. I'd heard of Seanan McGuire, N.K. Jemisin, Charlie Jane Anders, Amal El-Mohtar, and Tananarive Due, but that's it amongst the fiction writers. That makes me feel both that I've totally lost track of what's going on in the field (no big surprise), and that's there's plenty of interesting stuff going on.

I'm not sure that I have a lot to say about specific stories. I didn't think there were any great stories amongst the new ones, but I thought all of them were good. Maybe I should give a particular shout-out to K.C. Norton for "Canth," which combines pirates, coelacanths, sentient ships, and cryptozoology. What I really liked about this as a collection is that it was all over the place in terms of subject-matter and style. It's bristling with ideas and narrative energies. I also really enjoyed the section in which the writers reflected on what they were trying to do in their stories. For me probably the least interesting section was the "Personal Essays," which I thought got a little bit samey after a while. On the other hand, even those were interesting for revealing how many scientists still want to try their hand at science fiction and for creating an unofficial list of influential writers. Le Guin scores highest on that front, probably to no one's surprise, but what did surprise me was how beloved Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time is (I was not impressed when I read it in high school) and especially the number of times Naomi Mitchison's Memoirs of a Spacewoman was mentioned. I really liked that book when I read it a number of years ago, and I'm pleased that it has been so influential.

Perhaps the greatest tribute you can give a book is that it makes you want to read a bunch of other things. I really should read the whole novel that "The Cost to Be Wise" was excerpted from. I was very happy to learn that Nisi Shawl's Belgian Congo steampunk novel is finally being published by Tor this year, and I'll definitely be reading that. And I just took Memoirs of a Spacewoman off the shelf for another read. Feminism is alive and well in science fiction, and we are all better for it. I look forward to the discussion at Potlatch.

It took me at least two years to read this book, partly because it's a collection of short pieces, so it was very easy to dip in now and then rather than just plow through it. I first became aware of it when I read the review in Sandra Bond's fanzine, Quasiquote. The publication of this book in 2007 by Liverpool University Press fulfilled a long time wish of mine that all of Russ' review columns from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction be collected. (David Hartwell used to talk about publishing such a collection.) I'm not sure this book actually collects all of her F&SF reviews, but it certainly has all the ones I remember reading in the back issues of the magazine I sporadically picked up back in the late-'70s and early '80s. There are also reviews from other sources, along with a section of essays and a short section of letters, mostly letters to the editor of various feminist magazines.

I believe I've said here before that Russ is the writer I've most tried to emulate in my own writing, on a style level. There's no way I could really write like her, however, because she's a far different personality. I found myself arguing with her judgementiveness in a lot of these pieces, but that's part of what makes her such a lively read. She's opinionated, she's often angry, she's frequently contemptuous, and she expresses herself very, very clearly and passionately. Even when I'm frustrated by her opinions, her way with words and ideas is a joy to behold. Part of what I've always loved about her style is the sarcastic, bitter sense of humor, which is very much on display in this collection. The phrase "rapier wit" comes to mind. I'm glad it was never aimed at me.

Because it's a hodgepodge collection, the book as a whole doesn't have the cumulative impact of some of her more focused non-fiction collections such as To Write Like a Woman or Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts. But Russ is an important enough writer that she deserves to have even her grocery lists and recipes collected, and it's wonderful to have all these bits and pieces to wander through. I'm glad she's still remembered enough to be honored with such a collection as well.

Interesting list at the House of Mirth and Movies of a 100 films focused on women. I've only seen 28 of these, but the selections seem very good to me. The blogger, who is only identified as mrsemmapeel, writes:

I’m still not sure what I qualify an “essential” film about women, I hope my list presents a huge cross-section of different kinds of women and experiences, but at the very least I’m looking for films that have at least one female protagonist, which rules out a lot of films that may have interesting or strong female supporting characters and roles unfortunately. I’m also not attempting to paint only a positive portrait of womanhood, I think many of these film reveal many imperfect, even downright cruel women… but that is part of a reality.

This list got me thinking about the Bechdel Test again, although it doesn't seem to be any part of the equation here.

A couple of recent posts on feminist blogs alerted me to something that one of them was calling the Bechdel Test, although there seems to be some disagreement on the name of the thing. It comes from a comic strip called "The Rule" from Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For. As stated in the strip, the rule/test is a movie that:

1) has at least two women in it
2) who talk to each other
3) about something other than men.

This is a pretty interesting way to look at movies. In the strip, one of the jokes is that Alien qualifies, because "the two women in it talk to each other about the monster." A movie that doesn't qualify is Hellboy 2, which Denys and I saw last night. Thinking about other movies I've seen recently, Tell No One qualifies, but what about Shall We Dance? I'm not sure that Ginger Rogers ever talks to the other women in the movie, let alone about something other than Fred Astaire. The Fall would qualify, as long as you count the conversations the little girl has with the nurse or with her mother.

One thing that this test gets at is a way of pointing at "dick flicks" (as opposed to "chick flicks"). A lot of action or adventure films, like Hellboy 2, do not satisfy the conditions, and they might be thought of as movies aimed at boys. As someone in one of the other threads pointed out, the LOTR movies don't cut it, because the women (e.g., Arwen, Galadriel, and Eowyn) don't talk to other women. Movies like Iron Man (and like Hellboy) pretty much only have one woman in them to begin with. Then again, Shall We Dance is hardly what I would think of as a dick flick.

It's also interesting to try to figure out if there are movies that satisfy the rule but aren't particularly woman-oriented. I suppose The Fall would be an example. Also the 1939 Wizard of Oz, where Dorothy's conversations with the Good and Bad Witches (and with her aunt, and between the aunt and Miss Gulch) would seem to qualify. Of course, these are both fantasy films with girl protagonists, so maybe they really are woman-oriented. I haven't yet come up with a good example of a dick flick that satisfies the Bechdel Test. Well, maybe Alien, as she pointed out herself.