From LISTSERV@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Tue Oct 19 13:30:11 1999 Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 11:10:04 -0500 From: "L-Soft list server at University of Illinois at Chicago (1.8c)" To: Laura Quilter Subject: File: "FEMINISTSF-LIT LOG9909D" ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 07:51:00 EDT Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Phoebe Wray Subject: Slave and Free MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit A new press release from Amnesty Int'l about crimes against women in Pakistan (*honour crimes*) reads like something out of Walk to the End of the World. I'll send it along to anyone interested... best phoebe Phoebe Wray zozie@aol.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 10:19:59 -0700 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: Slave and Free Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >A new press release from Amnesty Int'l about crimes against women in Pakistan >(*honour crimes*) reads like something out of Walk to the End of the World. > >I'll send it along to anyone interested... Phoebe, I had the same thought myself; observing the back-pedaling of Pakistan and Afghanistan into barbarism is eerily like watching people wilfully descend into Holdfast madness, and it's and horrible to behold. I have also read from time to time about how homosexual behavior among men is tolerated in some Islamic societies to a greater degree than in the West -- which suggests the masculine side of the Holdfast equation as well. It's also possible, though, that this is a reflection of the fact that much descriptive writing about Arab societies has been done by Westerners either eager to show how "immoral" Islam is (vs. Christianity -- it is to laugh, but they meant it) or to suggest the delights of societies with more accepting attitudes toward homosexuality (written by Arab-enchanted English travellers, some of them homosexual or bisexual themselves and acting on their homoerotic tastes more freely and safely away from England than they could at home). This reading was done years ago (while researching nomadic, pastorlist societies for MOTHERLINES, in fact), so names don't immediately spring to mind -- maybe the Thessiger brother who traveled (as opposed to the one who acted in horror movies here), some of Richard Burton's writing, and T.E. Lawrence (though I'm not sure he actually addresses the subject in SEVEN PILLARS). Suzy Charnas ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 10:46:00 -0700 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: Slave and Free Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Since discussion has dried up here on the list, I thought I might take this opportunity to respond, as author, to some of the comments made here on WALK and MOTHERLINES, and maybe ask some questions myself. On the raising of children in the cultures shown: I actually drew on a model I had observed in action in Nigeria, but pushed to an extreme (like most of what's in these books!), and that was the multi-family compound in which a brood of kids made (ideally) by one husband on a clutch of wives pretty much led its own life, the older kids in charge of the younger ones, while the mothers were out in the fields working (pretty much all the time, while the men sat around in the shade drinking palm wine, boasting, and playing that game with the polished seeds in the egg-carton game board). There are also gangs of kids -- AIDS orphans, rejects of various kinds, or just poor kids whose parents can't feed them -- operating with no adult supervision at all in various third-world cities, under very grim conditions, but many survive (see the kit-pits in WALK). So while it's not my idea of an optimal situation, I do think it's a possible one, and I adapted it in part to keep the raising of kids from becoming the foreground material of both novels. In stories like WALK, about gender re- lations, no matter what you come up with people start asking right away, "Yes, but what about the children?" A legitimate question, but also one that serves to short-circuit and essentially close consideration of what the adults are doing among themselves, or trying to do, so I wanted to tuck the kids out of the way, as it were, until my Holdfast adults had worked their way to a point of change where they could turn their attention to this themselves, without just jumping over their own concerns. In MOTHERLINES, I again adapted the way some of the nomadic groups I had read about (some Amerinds, some others) lived their hard lives with the kids as a kind of sub-class which everybody in the camp feeds but which is otherwise often self-regulating because the adults are fully occupied assuring basic food and shelter. It seemed to me to be more realistic as well as more effective fictionally for the Free Fems to be able to do something different from what they knew with their own kids if they had observed a living, work- ing model (among the Riding Women) than if they just found descriptions of another way to do things in old books etc. Though it might have been inter- esting to watch them try to reconstruct child-raising from legends and fairy tales -- no, that's a whole book in itself, isn't it? And it was for me a sign of the (comparative) "alienness" of the Riding Women, the extent of their raprochement with "Nature," that they could choose to expose their daughters so freely to, well, the forces of natural selec- tion. The society's foundation in "scientific" (in quotes because of course the horse-mating was a speculative and imaginative take-off on early cloning experiments with frogs etc.) manipulation of genetic material suggested to me a believable bias among the Women toward a more "rationalistic" treat- ment of children than we are accustomed to, and the exigencies of descent by cloning and the inevitable degradation through blurred copying, mutation, etc., gave them iron-hard reasons for needing to keep only the healthy kids. Not "nice," but one of the most important and most ignored elements of liv- ing successfully in harsh environments without "advanced" technology is the need to knuckle under to necessity (and then justify what you do with ideo- logy, of course). Luckily by the time I got around to the last book and the need to deal closely with the questions of child-rearing, I was (and am) a grandma two times over, so I had plenty of opportunity to refresh my memory about the realities. Well, this is long, so let me stop here. There have been other comments I'd like to respond to, but if nobody minds my horning in here like this, I'll come back to them shortly. Suzy Charnas ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 12:51:35 EDT Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Phoebe Wray Subject: Re: Slave and Free MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 9/22/99 4:19:28 PM, Suzy Charnas wrote: <> Absolutely... I was just stunned with the sychronicity of it, I guess, since we've been discussing your scary, thought-provoking work of late. Re Islam and male homosexuality -- I remember thinking years ago when I was enamored of Richard Burton's adventures that he had some homoerotic ones, although he never came out (plainly or otherwise). Did you ever read about his wife Isabel? Now there was one strange lady. She tracked him all over -- including the Middle East -- and basically trapped him into the marriage. Pakistan's suppression, subjugation and murder of women, wholesale as it is, is very like Holdfast. I guess many Pakistani men would be happy there. I wonder if any men in that country are assisting the women? phoebe ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 13:38:16 -0500 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Todd Mason Subject: Re: Slave and Free: Wray Comments: cc: "FEMINISTSF@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" You know that some are, and some do in some situations and not in others (not every man is going to be so stupid [hint: not much of a fan of absolute cultural relativism here] as to kill his sister for dishonor any more than every mother is so stupid as to let her daughter's genitals be mutilated). Though the juxtaposition of this afternoon's NPR programming is amusing in this context (the newsbreak highlighted UNICEF's report of Eastern European movement toward corporatism leading to worse health for everyone, and job discrimination against women, and TALK OF THE NATION's first hour featuring Susan Faludi and others speaking of the crisis for men essentially of self-image...the sickness of the notion that to be a man is to be the breadwinner, the dominator of the family, defined by his ability to supervise the lesser creatures of the family--Faludi's book is called STIFFED). -----Original Message----- From: Phoebe Wray [mailto:Zozie@AOL.COM] Sent: Wednesday, September 22, 1999 12:52 PM Pakistan's suppression, subjugation and murder of women, wholesale as it is, is very like Holdfast. I guess many Pakistani men would be happy there. I wonder if any men in that country are assisting the women? phoebe ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 13:44:35 -0500 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Todd Mason Subject: Re: Slave and Free: Wray Comments: cc: "FEMINISTSF@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Hmm. Considering how much cultural pressure toward mutilation there is in some of the world, a better way to put that is "so heartless or overwhelmed as to seek out mutilation for their daughters." -----Original Message----- From: Todd Mason Sent: Wednesday, September 22, 1999 2:38 PM To: 'Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC' Cc: 'FEMINISTSF@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU' Subject: RE: [*FSF-L*] Slave and Free: Wray You know that some are, and some do in some situations and not in others (not every man is going to be so stupid [hint: not much of a fan of absolute cultural relativism here] as to kill his sister for dishonor any more than every mother is so stupid as to let her daughter's genitals be mutilated). Though the juxtaposition of this afternoon's NPR programming is amusing in this context (the newsbreak highlighted UNICEF's report of Eastern European movement toward corporatism leading to worse health for everyone, and job discrimination against women, and TALK OF THE NATION's first hour featuring Susan Faludi and others speaking of the crisis for men essentially of self-image...the sickness of the notion that to be a man is to be the breadwinner, the dominator of the family, defined by his ability to supervise the lesser creatures of the family--Faludi's book is called STIFFED). -----Original Message----- From: Phoebe Wray [mailto:Zozie@AOL.COM] Sent: Wednesday, September 22, 1999 12:52 PM Pakistan's suppression, subjugation and murder of women, wholesale as it is, is very like Holdfast. I guess many Pakistani men would be happy there. I wonder if any men in that country are assisting the women? phoebe ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 11:48:41 -0700 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: Slave and Free Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >Re Islam and male homosexuality -- I remember thinking years ago when I was >enamored of Richard Burton's adventures that he had some homoerotic ones, >although he never came out (plainly or otherwise). Did you ever read about >his wife Isabel? Now there was one strange lady. She tracked him all over >-- including the Middle East -- and basically trapped him into the marriage. Everybody knows the English are strange. >Pakistan's suppression, subjugation and murder of women, wholesale as it is, >is very like Holdfast. I guess many Pakistani men would be happy there. I >wonder if any men in that country are assisting the women? Probably, but in desperate secrecy out of fear for their own lives and the lives and futures of their children, and we won't hear anything about it until long after things change back again, if they do in our lifetime. What would it take, do you think, for the UN to move troops in as they've done in East Timor? It will never happen, of course, because Pakistan is a US client State whom we support because -- God, it's so disgusting and stupid! -- because India has a history of attempting social engineering (like birth control by sterilization) that we identified ages ago with *gasp* Communism, so we backed the other and far worse State derived from British India and are deeply implicated in the whole backward Muslim thing going on in that part of the world on account of it. Suzy ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 08:50:32 PDT Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Daniel Krashin Subject: OT Pakistan, was Slave and Free Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed >Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 11:48:41 -0700 >From: SMCharnas >Subject: Re: Slave and Free [about Pakistan] >What would it take, do you think, for the UN to move troops in as they've >done in East Timor? It will never happen, of course, because Pakistan is a >US client State whom we support because -- God, it's so disgusting and >stupid! -- because India has a history of attempting social engineering >(like birth control by sterilization) that we >identified ages ago with >*gasp* Communism, so we backed the other and far worse State derived from >British India and are deeply implicated in the whole backward Muslim thing >going on in that part of the world on account of it. OK, hands up, everybody who wants to send their sons and daughters into a hostile far-away country to try to keep the men from killing their own wives and daughters and generally acting bestially. Oh, by the way, they're Muslims, and they have the Bomb. Somebody? Anybody? Come on, come on... Also, I think you underestimate the importance of the geopolitical Great Game that drove US policy in that region during the cold war -- the Indians flirted with neutrality/socialism, while the Pakistanis gave the U.S. a relatively free hand, and also a way to beat up on the Russians in *their* mad imperial venture in Afghanistan. In all of this, family planning policies don't count for much IMO. (Uh oh, I'm starting to sound a little like Steve Stirling...) Danny ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 10:00:44 -0700 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: OT Pakistan, was Slave and Free Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Danny wrote: >I think you underestimate the importance of the geopolitical >Great Game that drove US policy in that region during the cold >war -- the Indians flirted with neutrality/socialism, while the >Pakistanis gave the U.S. a relatively free hand, and also a way >to beat up on the Russians in *their* mad imperial venture in >Afghanistan. In all of this, family planning policies don't >count for much IMO. > >(Uh oh, I'm starting to sound a little like Steve Stirling...) > Sorry, I didn't mean to divert discussion to a brush fire about this matter, and I'm saying no more about it here. There is much too much to say, and this isn't the place; apologies for going off-topic. Suzy Charnas ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 11:09:06 -0500 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Jocelyn & Sheryl Denton-LeSage Subject: Re: Slave and Free MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I could be wrong, but it seems to me that Rafael Patai (not an Arab or a Muslim, himself, mind you), in his book The Arab Mind, suggested that a higher tolerance of both male and female homosexual relationships may occur in some Islamic or Arab societies because same-sex relationships cannot result in the birth of children, and therefore can't possibly affect "real" families. The assumption, of course, is that same-sex relationships will be conducted alongside sanctioned heterosexual ones, and that the people involved will still be "doing their duty" by marrying and having children. Any same-sex liaisons might be thought of as just especially intense friendships. However, I have recently glanced through a book which sets out to explain Islam to non-Muslims, and the author of that book explicitly condemns any kind of same-sex involvement. I'm sure there are broad cultural differences, depending on where you look and who you ask.... Sheryl -----Original Message----- SMCharnas wrote: or to suggest the delights of societies >with more accepting attitudes toward homosexuality (written by Arab-enchanted >English travellers, some of them homosexual or bisexual themselves and acting >on their homoerotic tastes more freely and safely away from England than they >could at home). This reading was done years ago (while researching nomadic, >pastorlist societies for MOTHERLINES, in fact), so names don't immediately >spring to mind -- maybe the Thessiger brother who traveled (as opposed to >the one who acted in horror movies here), some of Richard Burton's writing, >and T.E. Lawrence (though I'm not sure he actually addresses the subject in >SEVEN PILLARS). > >Suzy Charnas ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 11:22:31 -0500 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Jocelyn & Sheryl Denton-LeSage Subject: Re: OT Pakistan, was Slave and Free MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit All right then, a slightly different off-topic question--does anybody know when Mr. Stirling plans to publish the third book in the Nantucket series? I've read the first two and the suspense is killing me! -----Original Message----- From: SMCharnas To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Date: Thursday, September 23, 1999 11:06 AM Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] OT Pakistan, was Slave and Free >Danny wrote: > >>I think you underestimate the importance of the geopolitical >>Great Game that drove US policy in that region during the cold >>war -- the Indians flirted with neutrality/socialism, while the >>Pakistanis gave the U.S. a relatively free hand, and also a way >>to beat up on the Russians in *their* mad imperial venture in >>Afghanistan. In all of this, family planning policies don't >>count for much IMO. >> >>(Uh oh, I'm starting to sound a little like Steve Stirling...) >> > >Sorry, I didn't mean to divert discussion to a brush fire about this >matter, and I'm saying no more about it here. There is much too much >to say, and this isn't the place; apologies for going off-topic. > >Suzy Charnas ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 11:47:41 -0500 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Todd Mason Subject: Re: OT Pakistan, was Slave and Free: Krashin et alles MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" And this doesn't take into account the enemy-of-my-enemy realpolitik that goes on in Southern Asia...China cuddles up with Pakistan out of mutual distrust of India...India and Russia/USSR tentatively play to make the PRC nervous...several decades of this has been going on, after all...and I'd say the US, as much as anyone made any kind of statement, was relatively pro India in the Bangladesh war of independence. The problem with the UN invading Pakistan, much less the US, is where do we stop? The abuse of women, and of men and children, is not exactly unique to Pakistan nor even P and the thugs in Afghanistan. Chinese infant girls abandoned on the hillsides, Thai and other nations' sex industries, enslavement in Somalia, genocide in southern Africa and eastern Europe, US rates of sexual violence (and other nations', some where such things are less likely to be reported, too many where it would not be seen to be a crime or, as among the lunatics in Pakistan, where the crime is seen to be against the family rather than the unlucky survivor)...where would the blue helmets stop, and can they be effective? At least East Timor is a small province where Everyone Official agreed if the vote went for secession, ET would secede...but the thug elements in Indonesia choose to see this as a threat. It's not that Nothing can be done...it's just that there's so much to be done, and all of it really needs doing Now. -----Original Message----- From: Daniel Krashin [mailto:dkrashin@HOTMAIL.COM] Sent: Thursday, September 23, 1999 11:51 AM Also, I think you underestimate the importance of the geopolitical Great Game that drove US policy in that region during the cold war -- the Indians flirted with neutrality/socialism, while the Pakistanis gave the U.S. a relatively free hand, and also a way to beat up on the Russians in *their* mad imperial venture in Afghanistan. In all of this, family planning policies don't count for much IMO. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 13:07:19 -0700 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: Slave and Free Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" On the reviews posted by Petra: The Strange Worlds review of WALK goes for the "the message is that men are evil" and "radical agenda" line. This just makes me shake my head and wish I'd done a better job in this book. To me, the struggle of some of the male characters just to be decent (Captain Kelmz, Eykar, and many of the men they meet along the way) automatically counters the "men are intrinsically evil" idea. This isn't a book about women and Orcs but about psychologically de- formed people, men and women. An example of how for many readers just *rais- ing the question* is seen as propogating a message or agenda, because the question itself is forbidden -- the only acceptable answer is already "known" and must not be challenged. But the reviewer ends up recommending the book -- this reader recoils from the raising of the question, but can't resist the stimulation of exploring it. This refers back, by the way, to Margaret's question about teaching this work in classes: the recoil-response is bound to arise, and must be very hard to deal with. As long as it continues to occur, I guess the books are still "radical," which pisses me off, frankly. I was sure (when I be- gan) that by this time, thanks to the continuing dialog among all kinds of books on all this stuff, that these ideas and themes would be integrated into the genre discourse at least (I do not mean accepted, by the way). It's twenty five years after WALK was published, for Pete's sake! This book at least should be old hat by now, and the recoil response -- "What! What! Aagh, man-hater, man-hater, kill kill kill!" -- should be rare. Alas, I suspect it is not so. On the review of all the books at Emerald City: (spoiler for CONQUEROR'S CHILD) About the women of the Pool Towns being black -- I was determined that the Free fems' new version of the Holdfast was *not* going to be all white, as it would have to be given the racial cleansing that had been part of the establishment of the Old Holdfast of the men. That would have been ceding a vast victory to the enemy, at least in the short run. I read many years ago that given enough generations, presumably millions of years worth, a white population would eventually produce roughly the same racial variations we see today -- is that still accepted theory, anybody know? But the Free Fems could not possibly forsee that, nor would many readers, so -- if you want an example of authorial agenda, here one is! Also, why make it easier for fictional characters, when we know life just makes if harder and harder for real people (or we make it harder and harder for ourselves and each other)? One way of making a more effective fictional simulation of reality is to find ways to suggest the complexity of reality, which we all know is just one damned thing after another. So the Pool Towns women are black, and the fems have more internalized ickyness from the old ways to struggle with than the misogyny of sexism. Joyce Jones mentioned her appreciation of the birth scenes; I've never borne a child myself, but I love doing research, and I'm a good thief (but maybe that's saying the same thing . . . ). On Joyce's comment regarding the way in later books, examples of the Old Holdfast men's inhumanity toward women popped up now and then to remind readers of the malevolence of the regime the fems are trying to replace -- this was an authorial process of constant reevaluation and judgment-calls. The behavior of the fems (and the Riding Women) in the later books just wouldn't make any sense without the reader being reminded (or finding out) what their experience had been. Yet I didn't want to derail those books into a droning catalog of horrors, either -- particularly CHILD, where the pulse-beat is rising toward the exhilaration of new ways, new possibilities. I spent a lot of time considering how much I had to *show* of men trained in misogyny being beastly to women (and to each other), and how much could only tell, and have it do the work it had to do. Salalli's society of the Pool Towns, by the way, is meant as a rough approximation of our own "traditional" values -- nuclear families with one parent of either sex, homosexuality extant but disapproved of, etc. It didn't need a lot of exploration, being so familiar, assuming I got the signs of it clear enough to clue readers in. It was interesting to see, by the way, how little in the way of detail can suggest an entire society and its mores -- that's what you learn writing books as thick with folk as these are, as there is no room for expansiveness; an exigency of form. Margaret McBride commented on the way characters argue about moral issues; I worried that there was too much of this in the books, but I tend not to believe in fictional societies, particularly revolutionary or transitional ones, in which answers are too easily accepted. Argument is one way that characters "prove" their "reality" -- just as real people demonstrate their individual sense of right and wrong and the lessons of their individual experience by arguing with each other. I also had the example of the way decisions are taken in modern day Pueblo villages, which run by consensus (I lifted this for the Riding Women first, and then the Free adapted it from them); which makes for slow going, but better social cohesion in the long run. Anybody here read Molly Gloss' THE DAZZLE OF DAY? That book is full of the endless argument and rumination of a small society trying to figure out how to do right (it's Quakers in space, but with attention to the actual running of such a group by the members, beautifully written). Suzy Charnas ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 13:07:06 -0700 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: Slave and Free Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" A further reply to comments about the Holdfast books, particularly WALK and MOTHERLINES: several people remarked on the way the story pre- sents an idea and then later on turns it inside out, or looks at it from another point of view that forces the reader to re-evaluate it in the light of further knowledge or a changed perspective. One of the pleasures of being a really *slow* writer is that in taking several years to do a book, you get to reflect in the work certain changes over time in your own think- ing, including changes that come out of doing the writing work itself. It really is true that if you give a character and idea and let her run with it, he will take you to places you would never have gone on your own (eg the way the men work out their ideology in WALK, and Nenisi on the social uses of promiscuity in MOTHERLINES). And then you leave her in the story with attitudes intact (at least til you come around again and knock him silly later on) and go on to have another character take you elsewhere, and (ideally) you get a surface complexity of very satisfying richness (or, for readers who prefer more action and directness, annoying confusion that makes them throw the book across the room). This goes even further when you get to write your four books, in this case, over a period of 20 years; I think that I've had a particular advantage here, in that I've not had to work to deadlines or other commercial requirements to nearly the same degree as many of my colleagues (historically I've earned enough with my work to run my career, but I "live" by sharing my husband's earnings as a lawyer). I ruminate sometimes about the trade-off of being on the one hand released from the stricter exigencies of the market vs. be- ing freed as well from the market correctives to self-indulgence, diversion and sheer lazyness. If I'd had to feed myself on my earnings, all my books would have been very different: shorter, faster, leaner, thinner (which is not the same thing), and lots more of them published, or else I'd have starved. Or maybe they'd have been immensely fat, from lack of time to edit and editorial demand for big, fat books. Economics have such a powerful influence . . . Suzy Charnas ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 13:07:12 -0700 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: Slave and Free Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Another authorial response -- I thought I deal with these this morning as a group, before going out to get signatures on a petition about permit parking on our block (just a glimpse into the intensely creative life of The Author) Daniel remarked on the satire of WALK being maybe a little too broad for the serious intent of the book as a whole: this book did begin as an intentional, not to say gleeful, satire of the whole Nixonian ethos of the time. I meant to shove the descendants of that crew of rats in Washington (not the present crew of rats in Washington) into a world where they would have no choice but to live by the inverse of their most cherished values (drugs are bad, individual effort is prime and group action is bad, homosexuality is bad, etc.) of their ancestors. It was only as I got into things that I recognized the subtext about sexism, and it could well be that I never got the meld of these two approaches exactly balanced in the final draft. If you see seams there, it's the incompletely covered evidence of this change of approach. As for making "morally ambiguous protagonists seem more sympathetic" by shoving them in among much more horrible ones, yep, that works; but if you just stay with your morally ambiguous people long enough to get to the level of their fears and doubts and longings, they do half the work for you by humanizing themselves right there on the page. And I'm glad you like Eykar (you too, Janice); I'm very fond of him myself, though you might not know it considering all the hell I put the poor bastard through. Now that I think of it, he and Servan are the mirror pair, found in so much fiction especially adventure and buddy stories, to the female pairing of Virgin and Whore, ie the Man of Action and the Man of Thought. Like many authors, I favor the Man of Thought -- he is more reachable, more malleable through my chosen instruments (words and concepts) than the other. So Eykar changes over the course of the tale; Servan just gets older (yes, I am sorry for Servan, at the same time that I loathe him). Janice asks if the Riding Women's society is a Utopia: for me, no. It's a bit too "primitive", in Margaret Mead's sense of an advanced society being one that offers more life choices to individual members while a primitive one is more limited and rigid about the roles open to its members. The Riding Women themselves don't mind, being clones who accept the clones'-eye view that you are, properly, an exemplar of your line, whatever that entails; but I, in the abstract, I would mind very much and in fact find that idea vaguely repugnant. But there are aspects of Grassland society which I admire very much, most of them taken from various Amerindian groups in their pre-conquest forms. Suzy Charnas ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 22:01:33 -0700 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Keith Subject: Re: Slave and Free In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Prehaps I shouldn't comment, because I haven't read the last book, The Conquerer's Child and only read The Furies once several years ago. However, since Walk to the End of the World and Motherlines are two of my all-time favorite science fiction books, and two that I re-read periodically with undimished enthusiasm, I'll go ahead... What I particularly like about these two were the feeling of contained inevitability, a sort of artistic *rightness* in both books, even given how very different the two worlds described were. I especially loved the surrealistic, but underlying realism, of Walk, the way all the hatreds of the day were drawn out into straight lines, with inevitable geometric intersections. To put it non-metaphorically, Eykar Bec's father's atrocities were as much a predictible consequence of his society's denial of any humanity to women as monopoly is of unrestricted capitalism. They don't have to happen, but all the conditions are there. (The puns in _Walk_ were great, too...) Motherlines, in integrating Alderra's story and her memories, and the culture of the Free Fems, had an even harder task - how to carry over the simplistic ideology of a very bigoted (the word seem inadequate) society into a much more complex one. Again, this story had its own internal truth. Alderra and the Free Fems remained true to their past and their world, and were allowed to co-exist, without pinching, prodding, uplifting or reshaping, until the new world changed them as slowly as it must. I also loved the way so many questions in Motherlines were left open-ended: the sharu, horse-culling, the rejection by the riding women, so wise in many things, of innovations brought by former Holdfast women. Even though it was by far the more hopeful of the two, this was one of the least "Disneyed" novels I've ever read. I thought that The Furies did not have this kind of autonomy. I kept waiting to see how the first two - thesis and antithesis, if you will, would produce the synthesis. But in the U.S., after a decade in which wrongs could be named out loud, and in which it was inconceivable we could go back, we did go back. Since even being able to speak about the wrongs done to women seemed to me what made _Walk_ possible, and to speak about alternaties to those wrongs made Motherlines possible, there just seemed to be no place for these books to go in the eighties and nineties. I read the Vampire Tapestry and Dorothea Dreams, and although I was disappointed that these were not the long awaited Third Book, they seemed to be what the author wanted to write at the time. They matched those exhausted, confused and concialtory times and were enjoyable books in their own right. The Furies had more of a feeling of being written because of demand, rather than inclination. It seemd to me that no resolution at all had occurred in the outside world, and none was reflected in the internal world of this novel that was not imposed. This is an overlong post already, I'm afraid. But I do have to make one more comment, in response to Ms. Charanas's : >I ruminate sometimes about the trade-off of being on the one hand >released from the stricter exigencies of the market vs. being freed as >well from the market correctives to self-indulgence, diversion and sheer >lazyness. The only valid duties of government are providing for children and supporting artists :-) ! Kathleen ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 24 Sep 1999 11:33:02 -0500 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Robin Reid Subject: Asimov Writing Contest/for College Students Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" This info came across on my Iafa listserv--those of you who write sf/f and are college students should consider submitting! Robin >Rick Wilber passed me the complete information. Note his contact info at the >bottom; he says he'd be pleased to send fliers, suitable for posting (or >framing), to anyone who asks. He also gives permission for us to disseminate >this email as widely as possible. -- Andy > > >THE ISAAC ASIMOV AWARD > > >The Isaac Asimov Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and >Fantasy Writing has been established by Asimov's science fiction magazine and >the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts with the support >of the School of Mass Communications at the University of South Florida. The >award honors the legacy of one of science fiction's most distinguished >authors through an award aimed at undergraduate writers. > >The $500 award will go to the best unpublished and unsold science fiction or >fantasy short story submitted by a full-time undergraduate college student. >The winner will be invited to the IAFA annual Conference on the Fantastic in >mid-March in Fort Lauderdale, FL, and the winning story will be considered >for publication in either Asimov's science fiction magazine or in the on-line >version of the magazine. > >In general, the winner of the Asimov award will be the story that best meets >the expectations of Asimov's editors. Those stories typically are "character >oriented"; i.e., the characters, rather than the science, provide the main >focus for the reader's interest. Serious, thoughtful, yet accessible fiction >will have the best chance of success. The editors do enjoy humorous stories, >but pun endings have little chance of success, and the editors are not >interested in sword & sorcery, elves, trolls, or dragons. They are not >interested in explicit sex or violence, either. Generally, bear in mind that >all fiction is written to examine or illuminate some aspect of human >existence, but that in science fiction the backdrop against which events >occur is the size of the universe. > >Deadline for entries for this year's contest is December 15, 1999. The >contest is open to all full-time undergraduates at accredited colleges and >universities. The award is not limited to unpublished authors, but all >submissions must be previously unpublished and unsold, and they should be >from 1,000 to 10,000 words long. Writers may submit an unlimited number of >stories, but each manuscript must include the writer's name, address, phone >number, and the name of the university the writer attends. > > >There is a $10 entry fee, with up to three stories accepted for each fee >paid. Checks should be made out to the Asimov Award. > > Your manuscript should be neatly typed, double-spaced on one side of the >sheet of paper, with adequate margins. Mail it flat in a 9" X 12" envelope. > >Make sure the cover sheet of the manuscript has on it your name, address, >phone number and the university you attend. Your name should not be on the >manuscript itself. > >The editors reserve the right to double-check your university status. For >this year's contest, you must have been a full-time undergraduate during the >fall 1998; spring 1999; summer 1999; or fall 1999 semesters (or quarters) of >your university or college. > >Story submissions should have been written during your time as a student. >However, if you attended college full-time during a qualifying semester and >then graduated, went to part-time status or quit entirely for a time, you are >still eligible. > >Manuscripts cannot be returned, so do not include a self-addressed stamped >envelope, and make sure you keep a copy of the story for your files. > >The winner will be determined by the editors of Asimov's magazine and the >award administrator. Submissions should be sent to: > > >Asimov Award >School of Mass Communications >4202 E. Fowler >Tampa, Fla. 33620 > >If you have any questions, call Awards Administrator Rick Wilber at (813) >974-6792, or send email to RWilber1@aol.com. > >Stories by previous Asimov Award winners are available at the Asimov?s >Science Fiction homepage at: http://www.asimovs.com. > >Andy Duncan >Department of English >Box 870244 >103 Morgan Hall >University of Alabama >Tuscaloosa, AL 35487 >www.angelfire.com/al/andyduncan > > ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 24 Sep 1999 11:56:18 -0500 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Todd Mason Subject: FW: [Fwd: Marion Zimmer Bradley hospitalized] Comments: cc: Multiple recipients of list SF-LIT MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" One of those times one would prefer a hoax... -----Original Message----- From: Susan H. Simko [mailto:shsimko@MAIL.DUKE.EDU] Sent: Friday, September 24, 1999 12:42 PM To: SCIENCEFICTION-L@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU Subject: [Fwd: Marion Zimmer Bradley hospitalized] > From: BDaverin@grin.net (Brenda Daverin) > Subject: News of MZB > > According to a mailing list I'm on, Marion Zimmer Bradley has had a > massive heart attack, and is currently at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley, > CA. She is last reported as being unconscious. > > Diana Paxson has requested that "energy be sent to her higher self to be > used as the need be." To translate into more conventional language, if > you're going to pray for her, pray she finds the strength to do what she > needs to do, one way or the other. > > (And would someome be so kind as to make sure this gets to the other > places this is appropriate on Usenet if it hasn't yet? I'm taking time I > don't have to post this.) ***** To leave the ScienceFiction-L list, send the message SIGNOFF SCIENCEFICTION-L to the server: listserv@listserv.indiana.edu. Questions to: mlperkin@indiana.edu or shsimko@mail.duke.edu ***** ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 24 Sep 1999 10:01:34 -0700 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Jessie Stickgold-Sarah Subject: Re: Slave and Free In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed At 10:01 PM 9/23/99 -0700, Keith wrote: >Alderra and the Free Fems remained true to their past and their >world, and were allowed to co-exist, without pinching, prodding, uplifting >or reshaping, until the new world changed them as slowly as it must. Although I'm not sure this is what Keith meant, it reminded me of one of my favorite facets of these books, namely the endless discussion. I think this is something that's lacking in a lot of quasi-utopian visions: the idea that to get an even-handed society you have to let everyone have their say. And that's hard to do! In college I lived in a house of about twenty people which governed by consensus, more or less (a little veto power, a little moral suasion, a few requirements, the endless wrangle over house chores; I used to call it government by casserole), and it was agony. If only we had had the Conors, who were always right...but periodically someone would suggest a different way of governing ourselves--as one person pointed out, if we all *agreed* to use majority rule, we could--and we never changed. I love to see that in fiction. Motherlines shows us that, and The Conquerer's Child talks about it very explicitly, recognizing the failings and the necessity all at once. jessie ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 24 Sep 1999 16:26:37 -0400 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: "Janice E. Dawley" Subject: BDG: Slave and Free -- Satire Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" On Thu, 23 Sep 1999 at 13:07:12 -0700, Suzy McKee Charnas wrote: >Daniel remarked on the satire of WALK being maybe a little too broad for the >serious intent of the book as a whole: this book did begin as an intentional, >not to say gleeful, satire of the whole Nixonian ethos of the time. For a film satire of government and the military it's hard to beat Kubrick's *Dr. Strangelove*. I watched it for the second time recently and thought it made a great companion piece to the Holdfast books. One could easily read Strangelove's vision of the mineshaft society, complete with several nubile breeding women for every man, as a version of the Refuge... ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 24 Sep 1999 15:45:10 -0500 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Todd Mason Subject: Re: BDG: DR STRANGELOVE: Dawley MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Peripheral to this appreciation is the recent death of George C. Scott, whose favorite film among those he worked in this was, and Kubrick, who wrote the film with novelist Peter George and satirist Terry Southern (not a feminist hero on balance). -----Original Message----- From: Janice E. Dawley [mailto:jdawley@TOGETHER.NET] For a film satire of government and the military it's hard to beat Kubrick's *Dr. Strangelove*. I watched it for the second time recently and thought it made a great companion piece to the Holdfast books. One could easily read Strangelove's vision of the mineshaft society, complete with several nubile breeding women for every man, as a version of the Refuge... ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 24 Sep 1999 16:48:07 -0700 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Laura Quilter Subject: Fwd: MZB in hopsital (fwd) Comments: To: feministsf@uic.edu, -Fem-SF list , feministsf-lit@uic.edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII just got this from another list: >----------------------------------------------------------------------------- >Hi All, > I just arrived home and had a message on my machine that Marion Zimmer >Bradley had a massive heart attack today and is unconscious in Alta Bates >hospital in Berkeley, Ca. Diana Paxson is asking that energy be sent to her >higher self to be used as the need be. I don't have the COG address, could >someone put this message out on the COG board and whatever science fiction or >other interested groups who should know. For those who don't know, Marion is >the author of MISTS OF AVALON and the DARKOVER series and many other science >fiction and non-science fiction novels, some of which brought people to the >pagan practices. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 24 Sep 1999 23:36:44 -0500 Reply-To: mcg.home@worldnet.att.net Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Charles or Rose Organization: Home Office Subject: FWD: MZB health problems MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Marion Zimmer Bradley had a massive heart attack today and is unconscious in >Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley, Ca. Diana Paxson is asking that energy be >sent to her higher self to be used as the need be. Could someone put this >message out on the lists, and whatever >science fiction or other interested groups who should know. ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 25 Sep 1999 12:58:52 -0500 Reply-To: mcg.home@worldnet.att.net Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Charles or Rose Organization: Home Office Subject: Re: Marion Zimmer Bradley Comments: To: crone digest MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Greetings, I have found a web site with the report of Ms. Zimmer's heart attack. You can go to... http://www.mzbfm.com/news.htm There, also, you can go to her personal web site. It isn't a hoax and on the "news" page there is a form that you can send to send her well wishes and healing thoughts. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 26 Sep 1999 11:27:15 -0700 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: Slave and Free Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Kathleen wrote: >What I particularly like about these two were the feeling of contained >inevitability, a sort of artistic *rightness* in both books, That's the payoff for honest extrapolation, so many thanks for the compli- ment. >atrocities were as much a predictible consequence of his society's denial >of any humanity to women as monopoly is of unrestricted capitalism. They >don't have to happen, but all the conditions are there. (The puns in >_Walk_ were great, too...) Maybe part of successful extrapolation is play, and if I've had the fun of it, it would be mean of me not to pass it along. Somebody ought to do a paper on word-play in SF -- there's a *lot* of it, and it tends to be good stuff (in the naming of things and people and processes and places); we use it as a sort of shorthand, to pack in big chains of meaning into very small labels thick with inference, and it may be one of the character- istics of SF that makes it hard for some readers of general fiction to get into. >the sharu, horse-culling, the rejection by the riding women, so wise in >many things, of innovations brought by former Holdfast women. One of the things that struck me in researching pastoralist and other rural societies was their deep conservatism, and I wanted to portray a conservat- ism based not so much in the Women's clone-reproduction (a facile SF assumption, I think) as in the caution of subsistence societies about changing what they know works for something they are promised will work better. A reminder, too, that this well-founded scepticism about new ways is with us still in many parts of the world, and is by no means irrational or stupid, either. >I thought that The Furies did not have this kind of autonomy. I kept >waiting to see how the first two - thesis and antithesis, if you will, >would produce the synthesis. But in the U.S., after a decade in which >wrongs could be named out loud, and in which it was inconceivable we could >go back, we did go back. Since even being able to speak about the wrongs >done to women seemed to me what made _Walk_ possible, and to speak about >alternaties to those wrongs made Motherlines possible, there just seemed >to be no place for these books to go in the eighties and nineties. Precisely. That was why I took such a long time-out of the Holdfast. When I began again, in the early nineties, I had it in mind to write CHILD -- the emergence onto new ground -- but it wasn't time yet. After a period of mulish denial, I gave in and wrote the book that had to happen before the characters could get to that place -- the war book, the anger book, THE FURIES. We were, and are, at war over all this, in more or less subtle ways, and I found that for me this was the only way to even try to get to the breathing space of CHILD. >The Furies had more of a feeling of being written because of >demand, rather than inclination. It seemd to me that no resolution at all >had occurred in the outside world, and none was reflected in the internal >world of this novel that was not imposed. I agree, no resolution has occurred, and for years I'd told people that I couldn't do the last book(s) because I am of my culture and my culture hasn't solved the problem yet. But in fact there *was* no demand (except an occasional wistful inquiry from a reader of the first two books); unless you mean an internal demand, on the author's part, that the damned story be *finished,* f'chris' sake. After about 1983, publishers didn't ask much about the next book in this series, let alone "demand" it. I had no assur- ance that THE FURIES would be publishable in the reactionary climate of the past two decades. I wrote it, finally, because it was the only way I could see to get to where I wanted to go, which was to a place where constructive things might begin to happen again. >The only valid duties of government are providing for children and >supporting artists :-) ! Great -- but don't hold your breath. Suzy Charnas ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 26 Sep 1999 11:27:06 -0700 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: BDG: Slave and Free -- Satire Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Yup. You must understand that one of the wellsprings of WALK was a little item in the newspaper about how of all the "top govt officials" notified (sometime in the early 70's) that a place was reserved for them in an underground city at D.C. in case of nuclear attack, only Justice William O. Douglas declined to be included -- upon hearing that he would be required to abandon his wife and family and go "survive" with a lot of other powerful men (and their youthful female secretaries and aides, I assume). I didn't make up the basic premise, and neither did Kubrick: it's for real. (There are a other examples of this in literature -- out- rages or astonishments that readers take for the product of the author's imagination and praise her for, but if you dig a bit deeper you find that the author was only reporting some little known reality. I keep stumbling on these things and then forgetting them because it's so hard to accept them -- has anyone another example to offer? I just *know* I've had that parti- cular frisson of delighted horror at such a discovery a number of times, but the matter of it becomes as elusive as a dream later on; another way of say- ing that memory cells really do croak as you get older . . .). This Big-Boy Bunker still exists, by the way, in readyness for when the Big Boys themselves make the Final Fatal Error (fatal to all of us, not to them of course). An items about the place surfaces every ten years or so in the print media. It's supposed to be someplace in (that is, under) or near Arlington, and at last sighting was described, as I recall, as "the vertical city." Janice Dawley wrote: >For a film satire of government and the military it's hard to beat >Kubrick's *Dr. Strangelove*. I watched it for the second time recently and >thought it made a great companion piece to the Holdfast books. One could >easily read Strangelove's vision of the mineshaft society, complete with >several nubile breeding women for every man, as a version of the Refuge... ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 26 Sep 1999 11:27:10 -0700 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: Slave and Free Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Jessie Stickgold wrote: >Although I'm not sure this is what Keith meant, it reminded me of one of my >favorite facets of these books, namely the endless discussion. I think this >is something that's lacking in a lot of quasi-utopian visions: the idea >that to get an even-handed society you have to let everyone have their say. I remember reading one of Marge Piercy's books about the sixties which had a small radical community like this, and I thought all the machinations of the members about who was to wind up sleeping with whom *every night* (since this was a "free love" commune) sounded ugly, horrific, and exhausting. I came up with the Conors so that important matters could maybe be decided soon enough not to park the action in a Sargasso of dissent and complaint for chapters at a time. I used to live near a food co-op in the North Valley here, and worked at the cash register a couple of times a week. I didn't attend many of the policy meetings, though; too slow for me. >government by casserole), and it was agony. If only we had >had the Conors, who were always right...but periodically someone would >suggest a different way of governing ourselves--as one person pointed out, >if we all *agreed* to use majority rule, we could--and we never changed. I >love to see that in fiction. Motherlines shows us that, and The Conquerer's >Child talks about it very explicitly, recognizing the failings and the >necessity all at once. > >jessie ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 26 Sep 1999 14:13:31 -0500 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Robin Reid Subject: Re: Life is always stranger than fiction (was satire) In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Suzy Charnas wrote: >Yup. You must understand that one of the wellsprings of WALK was a >little item in the newspaper about how of all the "top govt officials" >notified (sometime in the early 70's) that a place was reserved for them >in an underground city at D.C. in case of nuclear attack... My wild and crazy memory is of FEMA (and this was way before X-Files movie claimed they were the SECRET government that would take us over) putting out reports during the early eighties. Under Reagan (first term), who soon was being referred to as "Raygun" in my circles, the concept of a "winnable nuclear war" was being promoted to the American population, and FEMA put out reports on what people should. I recall one of the strategies was to dig a hole in your back yard, and have plywood with dirt over it, so you could duck down (those of you who were DUMB enough not to have built bomb shelters in the fifties). The instructions were clear: take your credit cards but NOT your pets. "Winnable nuclear war" hinged on just how many top government men could survive, I think, and how quickly basic services could be restored. FEMA also put out refugee plans, telling people in larger urban areas which might be targets where to go. I was living in Bellingham Washington at the time (small city, 40,000 or so), and people living in Seattle (million or two, if you could the suburbs) which was presumably a major target (west coast, lots of military installations, shipping, etc) were told that a large percentage of them (a quarter? a third) should DRIVE to Bellingham. Now you have to know the geography: I-5 or something goes north, but it becomes a two-lane highway pretty darn quickly, and the thought of that 250,000 or so driving north was immensely bizarre. (People without cars were presumably worthless to society and could therefore be sacrified, I assume!). Plus, all the farmers' reaction was that they'd shoot any blasted city folk who set foot on their land. Who knows what the ones who made it north were supposed to do. The whole scenario also seemed to ignore the CONCEPT of nuclear fallout. All this is etched in my mind--it was reported in the newspapers. A bunch of us preparing for graduate comprehensive exams used to read the articles and morbidly figure that, heck, if the bomb hit, at least we wouldn't have to take our comps! It was also one of the last influences to shove me over into the ever-loving radical feminist position I now occupy.....holding the gut-level perception that the guys running it all are STUPID. very little of what has occurred since then has worked to change my mind As I always tell my writing students, it's impossible to make up ANYTHING weirder than what actually happens... Robin ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 26 Sep 1999 15:39:40 -0700 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Cynthia Gonsalves Subject: MZB News Comments: To: feminist sf list Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed According to the MZB Magazine website , she died yesterday as a result of the heart attack she had on the 21st. One of our foremothers is gone; let's carry on the legacy. Cynthia -- "I had to be a bitch, they wouldn't let me be a Jesuit." -Joan Gant in Matt Ruff's Sewer, Gas, and Electric Sharks Bite!!! http://members.home.net/cynthia1960/ ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 26 Sep 1999 20:01:45 EDT Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: "Demetria M. Shew" Subject: Re: Life is always stranger than fiction (was satire) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 09/26/1999 12:12:14 PM Pacific Daylight Time, Robin_Reid@TAMU-COMMERCE.EDU writes: << .holding the gut-level perception that the guys running it all are STUPID. >> My favorite part was the work they put in making sure they could still collect taxes after the bomb. Madrone ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 26 Sep 1999 17:11:07 -0700 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: MZB News Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >According to the MZB Magazine website , she >died yesterday as a result of the heart attack she had on the 21st. >One of our foremothers is gone; let's carry on the legacy. >Cynthia No fear; there are lots of us now. Suzy Charnas ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 27 Sep 1999 11:55:37 -0700 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: Life is always stranger than fiction (was satire) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Robin wrote: >The whole >scenario also seemed to ignore the CONCEPT of nuclear fallout. >All this (snip) was also one of the last influences to shove me over >into the ever-loving radical feminist position I now occupy.....holding the >gut-level perception that the guys running it all are STUPID. Well, not all; but it's the ones too dumb to imagine the end of the world who open their mouths and blat, blat, blat. Sometimes I think it wasn't the Nixon debacle (plus, to be fair, the miser- able Clinton/GOP mess) that makes people loahte government; it's more a matter of the fully demonstrated inability of any government of ours to face up to and speak sense about the apparently endless, ustoppable, proliferating mess that devotion to neuclear arms and power has gotten us into. I speak as one who lives in a city through which shipments of neuclear waste are to be trucked from Colorado to WIPP, down at Carlsbad. AFAIK, they didn't even consider building a new road through the vast empty plains east of us to get the stuff down there, but must route it through the largest concentration of population in the State, on one of our two most heavily traveled roads. >As I always tell my writing students, it's impossible to make up ANYTHING >weirder than what actually happens... As you say. Would *any* SF author of the Golden Age, male or female, have imagined any government but one of totalitarian ideologues treating its own population with such callous disdain (THUS do I refute the otherwise perfect- ly well-founded charge of being off-topic)? How sad that now SF authors routinely assume the US govt to be just such a batch of corrupt villains. Suzy Charnas ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 27 Sep 1999 12:59:04 -0500 Reply-To: mcg.home@worldnet.att.net Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Charles or Rose Organization: Home Office Subject: Re: Life is always stranger than fiction (was satire) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Robin Reid wrote: > FEMA also put out refugee plans, telling people in > larger urban areas which might be targets where to go At that time ,dh was working for city govt., but doing some federal studies involving this. He found out that "ground zero" for our area was 4 blocks from us. I just told my family, that if anything ever happened, don't even begin to assume that we are alive. Back to lurking. Rose ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 27 Sep 1999 11:46:58 -0700 Reply-To: scandiog@yahoo.com Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Sandy Candioglos Subject: Re: Life is always stranger than fiction (was satire) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I grew up in Seattle in the 70's; I kinda always assumed that we'd probably be lucky enough to go quickly, since it was assumed Boeing would be a major target; all my relatives at the time also lived in Seattle or within a few miles of DC. I read enough post-toasties as a kid to not be sure I'd _want_ to be one of the survivors. I've never forgotten one "J" SF book I read where the younger sister of the main character hid in a "fort" made of their dining room table and a blanket, and as a result, lived to reproduce and help create a "new race" of furry telepaths. I liked the hopeful idea of the new race, but that was just the last few pages; the rest was all struggle, as I recall. Anybody here have any idea what the book was? -Sandy > > FEMA also put out refugee plans, telling people in > > larger urban areas which might be targets where to go > > At that time ,dh was working for city govt., but doing some federal > studies involving this. He found out that "ground zero" for our area > was 4 blocks from us. I just told my family, that if anything ever > happened, don't even begin to assume that we are alive. > Back to lurking. > Rose ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 27 Sep 1999 15:24:43 EDT Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Kathleen Friello Subject: Nalo H reading MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit For those in the NYC area: October 7, at Dixon Place A Night w/ Nalo Hopkinson w/musical accompaniment by DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid Dixon Place is now located at 309 East 26th Street. All readings begin at 8:00 PM, and cost $5. One of a series of NYRSF readings Other listings, address, etc. for Dixon Place at: http://www.dixonplace.org/ ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1999 21:37:37 EST Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Bree Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed After reading Margaret Atwood's Cats Eye recently, i was left thinking about her comment "you can have a men's novel with no women in it except possibly the landlady or the horse, but you cant have a womens novel with no men in it". I began to consider the veracity/implications of this comment on its own terms, as well as starting to consider how men are represented in other novels. Please send me any thoughts you have on the above Bree ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1999 11:38:04 -0500 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Robin Reid Subject: Re: men in women's stories In-Reply-To: <19990928113738.2876.qmail@hotmail.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" BREE: >After reading Margaret Atwood's Cats Eye recently, i was left thinking about >her comment "you can have a men's novel with no women in it except possibly >the landlady or the horse, but you cant have a womens novel with no men in >it". I think she's right...thinking of the seventies feminist utopias, men are present in all timelines except Whileaway......LeGuin's LEFT HAND has Genly Ai, a human male, visiting Gethen (where nobody is biologically male or female all the time); Piercy's WOMAN ON THE EDGE where there are lots of male characters; other feminist utopias always have "men" present in some way (sometimes as visitors from outside, as Gilman does in HERLAND and Tiptree does in HOUSTON HOUSTON.... sometimes as part of society--Tepper's GATE and oh some others whose names are escaping me). Our campus is for the first time having several all women cast plays, but apparently, from the plot synopses given in the newspaper, the woman spent a lot of time talking about the men in their lives... Life under patriarchy? Difficulty of finding a woman only space that is only about women? Robin ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1999 10:56:26 -0700 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: SMCharnas Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >After reading Margaret Atwood's Cats Eye recently, i was left thinking about >her comment "you can have a men's novel with no women in it except possibly >the landlady or the horse, but you cant have a womens novel with no men in >it". I began to consider the veracity/implications of this comment on its >own terms, as well as starting to consider how men are represented in other >novels. > What do you mean by "other novels" -- other than what? Suzy Charnas ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1999 10:56:30 -0700 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: SMCharnas Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >After reading Margaret Atwood's Cats Eye recently, i was left thinking about >her comment "you can have a men's novel with no women in it except possibly >the landlady or the horse, but you cant have a womens novel with no men in >it". So she's never read AMMONITE or MOTHERLINES; surprise, surprise. Unless by "womens novel" she means what the pub. trade means, which is family stories about generations of matriarchs and patriarchs, in which case it's a case of the type of book being self-defined to include men and women be- cause it centers on traditional family/clan structure and function. As for mens books with no women: consider a movie called THE RED TENT. It's an oldie (Peter Finch is in it, and he's been dead for years), and it's clearly a filmed stage-play (NOBODY nowadays makes a movie of a trial taking place in the living room/mind of an insomniac General look- ing back on the defining mess he made in his life, complete with dead folks sitting in to offer opinions and verdicts), and it is most distinctly a *men's* movie, about an ill-fated Arctic expedition and how other men rush to try rescue them. It's really about leadership issues in male groups essay- ing dangerous tasks, and the one female role in it is an irritating add- on they would have done much better without (and had a shorter, punchier film that doesn't insult and dismiss women by making one laquered maniquin stand for us all in a cast of variegated, if similarly symbolic, men). Seems to me that a realistic story of women "without men in it" is pretty unlikely (I can't think of one) as long as the real world that women readers and authors have to live in is ruled and shaped by guys trying to grab, as Joanna Russ put it, all "the good stuff" for themselves. Hell, even MOTHER- LINES "has men in it" in the sense that the Riding Women are warriors large- ley to defend their society from the men across the mountains, and the Free Fems are deformed by lives of slavery to male masters. So AMMONITE is the only unassailable example I can think of right off the bat, even in SF. Suzy Charnas ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1999 14:17:02 -0400 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Allen Briggs Subject: absence of men Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii > So AMMONITE is the > only unassailable example I can think of right off the bat, even in SF. I started to come up with AMMONITE, too, but it occurs to me that men play a huge role in that novel by their absence. The world is defined in many ways by the lack of men. I think Atwood's point was that the stereotypical "men's adventure" or, perhaps, "western" novel has no women to speak of, but it's not noted or, noteworthy because of that, and the author doesn't have to explain or excuse it. Perhaps the feminist novel (SF or otherwise) is comparable to the early SF where it has to explain or excuse itself as a kind of jumping-off point. I.e., ERB's Barsoom stories started with the narrator talking about his uncle John Carter... Modern authors jump right in. -allen ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1999 12:38:01 -0700 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: absence of men Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >> So AMMONITE is the >> only unassailable example I can think of right off the bat, even in SF. > >I started to come up with AMMONITE, too, but it occurs to me that men >play a huge role in that novel by their absence. The world is defined >in many ways by the lack of men. Well, I'd take issue with that. If you mean any book without males still contains men by inference, then a book about men with no female characters still contains women by the inferential existence of the characters' mothers (unless they are clones all the way down or something). As long as humans are (mainly) a two-sex society, the presence of one sex infers the exist- ence of the other (unless explicitly denied). I think your description of a female world as inferring the male one it was made in response to gets us into definitions that are self-defeating, and I don't think this was what Atwood's comment means. I think she's talking about *actual characters*, male or female. AMMONITE contains, as I recall, no male characters, even in flashbacks (am I right about this?), while in MOTHERLINES Fems remember men they've re- lated to one way or another (and some Riding Women remember killing men or finding them dead on the borders). So even though no men are physically present, MOTHERLINES *could* be read as "containing" male characters even though in a distanced, tangential, way. >I think Atwood's point was that the stereotypical "men's adventure" or, >perhaps, "western" novel has no women to speak of, but it's not noted or, >noteworthy because of that, and the author doesn't have to explain or >excuse it. That's for sure. It's a given that the world of action is peopled by men. Suzy Charnas ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1999 15:21:28 -0400 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Allen Briggs Subject: Re: absence of men Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii > >I started to come up with AMMONITE, too, but it occurs to me that men > >play a huge role in that novel by their absence. The world is defined > >in many ways by the lack of men. > > Well, I'd take issue with that. If you mean any book without males still > contains men by inference Not really. I'm sorry I wasn't more clear. I mean that even AMMONITE expends a fair bit of energy explaining why there are no males on the planet and the main character spends a good bit of time thinking about men hovering, literally, over the planet. I feel guilty because I haven't read MOTHERLINES yet. From your description, though, it is more what I think Atwood was looking and speaking about. It's quite possible that we have different ideas of what Atwood meant. > That's for sure. It's a given that the world of action is peopled by men. Heh. Depends on what you mean by "action." The Tiptree crowd seems pretty active. ;-) -allen ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1999 14:47:38 -0500 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Todd Mason Subject: Re: absence of men MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Also, as usual, stereotyping is misleading--at least westerns have tended toward sexual integration (among other kinds) over the last half-century...certainly the best western novelists (and rarer short-story writers) of the last decades have been much less likely to create all-male worlds than their predecessors or lessers might have (many of the best, from Dorothy Hughes through Lee Hoffman to Carol Emshwiller, have been women; others, such as Ed Gorman and, obviously, Charles Portis, have written westerns with women protagonists). -----Original Message----- From: Allen Briggs [mailto:briggs@NINTHWONDER.COM] Sent: Tuesday, September 28, 1999 3:21 PM To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] absence of men > >I started to come up with AMMONITE, too, but it occurs to me that men > >play a huge role in that novel by their absence. The world is defined > >in many ways by the lack of men. > > Well, I'd take issue with that. If you mean any book without males still > contains men by inference Not really. I'm sorry I wasn't more clear. I mean that even AMMONITE expends a fair bit of energy explaining why there are no males on the planet and the main character spends a good bit of time thinking about men hovering, literally, over the planet. I feel guilty because I haven't read MOTHERLINES yet. From your description, though, it is more what I think Atwood was looking and speaking about. It's quite possible that we have different ideas of what Atwood meant. > That's for sure. It's a given that the world of action is peopled by men. Heh. Depends on what you mean by "action." The Tiptree crowd seems pretty active. ;-) -allen ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1999 13:10:33 -0700 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Jessie Stickgold-Sarah Subject: Re: women without men In-Reply-To: <19990928113738.2876.qmail@hotmail.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed >After reading Margaret Atwood's Cats Eye recently, i was left thinking >about her comment "you can have a men's novel with no women in it except >possibly the landlady or the horse, but you cant have a womens novel with >no men in it". I'd interpret this as recognition of the fact that women are never able/allowed to live their lives without thinking of men, while the reverse certainly isn't true. Some SF has come fairly close (I'd suggest that SF is the only area where this can be done -- since it's so unreal! :) but even so, it's a tiny and difficult segment. Perhaps because the authors who come close are those who want to talk about who women might be without men--and it's hard to talk about that without explaining, or at least showing, how much of the popular concept of "woman" is created in relationship to men. Or to put it another way, it's difficult to describe "only women" without resorting to "women without men" -- for better or worse. I'd be interested in other suggesting for books that do fit this catagory. jessie ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1999 15:19:37 -0700 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: absence of men Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >> >I started to come up with AMMONITE, too, but it occurs to me that men >> >play a huge role in that novel by their absence. The world is defined >> >in many ways by the lack of men. >> >> Well, I'd take issue with that. If you mean any book without males still >> contains men by inference > >Not really. I'm sorry I wasn't more clear. I mean that even AMMONITE >expends a fair bit of energy explaining why there are no males on the >planet and the main character spends a good bit of time thinking about >men hovering, literally, over the planet. Ah; well, it's a while since I've read it, and I'd forgotten that. Point taken. Suzy