Subject: File: "FEMINISTSF-LIT LOG0202B" ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 8 Feb 2002 19:12:51 -0500 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Terri Wakefield Subject: Re: BDG Progress Report #3 Comments: To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC In-Reply-To: Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Hi I just want to remind anyone who hasn't voted yet, tomorrow is the last day to vote. I will accept votes until midnight, EST tomorrow night. The votes are close, and there are a lot of good books to chose from, so send you votes if you haven't already. Regards Terri > Please send your votes for your FOUR (4) choices, in order, for the > next BDG group read to me at...... > > not to the list!! > > You should receive a reply from me within 24 hours that I have received > your votes. If you do not receive a confirmation from me, please let me > know. We don't want anyone's votes to be lost in cyber space! :o) > > The voting period is from now until midnight, Feb. 9th, EST > The winners will be announced by Tues. Feb. 12th. > > Everyone please vote. Last selection period was so close it wasn't > apparent until the very last moment which nominations were the > winners! > > From snowy and icy Maine > > Terri Wakefield > > > As of now, the nominees (a total of 12) are as follows: > > Elgin, Suzette Haden: NATIVE TONGUE. Feminist Press; > ISBN: 1558612467, $14.95, 320 pages (© 1984). > > Gloss, Molly: WILD LIFE. Houghton Mifflin; > ISBN: 0618131574, $13.00, 255 pages (© 2000). > > Hartman, Keith: GUMSHOE GORILLA. Meisha Merlin; > ISBN: 189206524X, $16.00, 400 pages (© 2001). > > Jakober, Marie: THE BLACK CHALICE. Ace Books; > ISBN: 0441008968, $15.00, 480 pages (© 2000). > > Kerr, Peg: THE WILD SWANS. Aspect; > ISBN: 0446608475, $6.99, 450 pages (© 1999). > > Le Guin, Ursula K: THE DISPOSSESSED. Harper; > ISBN: 0061054887, $7.99, 400 pages (© 1974). > > Murphy, Pat: THE FALLING WOMAN. Tor (Orb edition); > ISBN: 0312854064, $11.95, 287 pages (© 1986). > > Park, Severna: THE ANNUNCIATE. Eos; > ISBN: 0380805022, $6.99, 294 pages (© 1999). > > Piercy, Marge: WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME. Fawcett Crest; > ISBN: 0449210820, $6.99, 381 pages (© 1976). > > Smith, Deborah: ALICE AT HEART. Belle Books; > ISBN: 0967303524, $14.95, 320 pages (© 2000). > > Tepper, Sheri S: THE GATE TO WOMEN'S COUNTRY. > Spectra; ISBN: 0553280643, $6.99, 315 pages (© 1988). > > Wren, M.K.: A GIFT UPON THE SHORE. Lightning Source; > ISBN: 0595143415, $19.95, 388 pages (© 1990). > > As always, more information is available at > http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Comet/1304/bdg_nom_0201.htm > > Thanks for a great series of nominations! Now let's vote! > > -- Janice, for the BDG volunteers ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 9 Feb 2002 15:54:19 -0500 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Dave Belden Subject: Re: Illicit Passage Comments: To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC In-Reply-To: <8B3A7A2CD342D2118E1E00104B0D44ADB5DBE3@mail.prescott.edu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit I am truly grateful to the listserve for getting me to read this novel. The first fifty or more pages were hard going, and if I had picked it up in a bookstore, with its serious cover that says 'boring artsy novel', and tried the first few pages, I would never have bought it. As it was, I thought it one of the most enjoyable and intelligent sf novels I have read. Terrific humor, complex politics. I did find the different voices and the documentary style hard to sort out at first, but once I was into it, I really appreciated that she presented each voice more or less sympathetically. Here we are in this absurd caricature of a dysfunctional society, and yet the individuals are all believable - with a partial exception to be made for Annette. Susan wrote: > What I liked best about this book was that it allowed for different > kinds of activism, without making one better than the other, and pointing > out the flaws of all. I don't agree that she made out each form of activism to be equal. I think she came down against revolutionary politics, even while being sympathetic to its origins. She favored Gillie's kind of reformism, but what kind is that? I found myself asking all the way through what the author's politics were. 1) She certainly understands political/social complexity, and presents it in 250 pages with a breadth and depth that I think only a novel can really do. She sees there is class oppression, but individuals in the upper class can be sympathetic. There are some beautiful places where she describes how well-meaning people can be brought into oppressive roles - especially Bruno on life in the Space Corps (218-19). And the portrait of Mrs. St John Sightly was very believable to me - her initial ignorance of the inhuman consequences of her own lifestyle, whether willful ignorance or not, and the way she finally becomes a human being of heart and substance, when pushed by enough tragedy: I bought that completely - but not just as a portrait of one woman. I think Nunn meant it also as a statement of faith in human nature, and in the possibility that people in positions of power can come down off their high horse. Though it was clear that Mrs. StJ S discovered her own and her daughter's oppression partly because they were women, still women were not the only upper class people who were redeemable in the book. Some men were too. Apart of course from Bruno, who was also victimized, there were the interesting cases of Dorman (the evil security chief who turns out to be quite sympathetic towards recruiting Nowts and breaking down rigid class barriers), Doll (the scientist, who is persuadable likewise if the scientifically gathered facts are clear) and Parkes (who has a heart). The term evil is reserved more for Gravement and Rosenberry: but not the upper class as a whole. 2) I think the book argued against revolutionary politics, while being totally sympathetic to how it comes about, and, in a sense, sympathetic to how true its analysis is. Leeanne was right, there was systematic class oppression. But what Gillie is totally against is the idea of using frontal revolutionary tactics. She tells Leeanne that if she uses the force of the mob it will just give the military and police the excuse to destroy them all. Leeanne is given the final word in the book, and what she reports is Gillie telling her that "all my cavalry charges would be blood-spattered and brutish whereas they needed to be subtler than gossamer in order to work." 3) Are there other forms of activism in the book, other than Gillie's and Leeanne's? There's the dryly intellectual/political and very male 'Examiner' group at the end - which is totally rubbished by Gillie's ma as lacking all human interest and heart, and by Nunn, I assumed, as typical of what happens when the men come home: the book has all been about what oppressed women get up to when the men leave, and the women are full of life, heart, joy, sex, anger - whereas these left wing men are all dry, on head trips. Their activism is completely panned. 4) Then there's Parke's reformism-from-above, which is totally ineffective against the power of the Gravement/Rosenberry axis of evil... until everything changes with the end of the war. 5) But why does it change? Why does Gillie's out-of-left-field winning of the war by computer sleight of hand lead to the whole society opening up, so that while it is still unequal it becomes much more like Australia or America today - a place with much more equality of opportunity than before? In this, the whole story is like a compressed version of the history of the West in the last four hundred years. It starts with rigidly defined caste, as bad or worse than pre-revolutionary France; and ends with the revolutionaries co-opted into positions of power and consumerism rampant, high tech industry, the daughters of yesterday's criminals and factory workers as today's smart high tech workers. For a novel in such an exaggeratedly grim setting, it is extraordinarily hopeful: the sun literally shines through at the end. But what is it that creates the happy ending? (happy compared to the total defeat, genocide etc. that was on the cards). It seems to me that she says it's two things: a) Gillie herself - the rising up of a female kind of life force from within the pits of society: someone who is so damn smart she can outsmart everyone else, and who isn't alone either, as she brings her 'girls' with her, on whom the Spid bureaucracy soon comes to rely, while her best friend leads riots. And b) the fact that the ruling class itself is smart and humane enough to see the writing on the wall and to co-opt the bearers of this life-force rather than try to destroy them. Willing is an enlightened despot. Parkes looks like he's going to be the new President at the end - his ineffective humanitarianism finally vindicated. By recognizing the smarts and humanity and thereby the legitimate grievances of the Nowt women, the Spids themselves are changed. Is this not what has happened and is happening (unfinished) in modern industrial societies? 6) Gillie is a saint. A larger-than-life role model of virtually superhuman power. I guess it bothered me that we had to be saved by the computer whiz. It's a cliché of too many modern movies, and it's possible because so few of us understand computers that well, and so the computer whiz looks believable: like in recent heist movies, the person who touches six buttons and the impregnable security system is deactivated... But it delighted me that Gillie was turned on to computers by a priest, because I had felt all along that Nunn was presenting her as one does present a saint: someone too holy, too different to be seen at first hand, or from inside their own head; instead we just get the tales of the saint, patched together much later, each showing a different side, trying to puzzle the person out. The multiple documents are like the four Gospels and the Epistles. To write about Gillie like this is to give her mystery, a cloak. And typical that the person who understands her least is from her own family. The priest (page 188) tells Gillie the computer is "like a window through which you can see all of God's amazing universe." When she gets into the networks as a pre-teen, she says, "More I gasped. More! I thought I could shake to the very margins of experience it was the best pleasure yet it was pure it was ineffable religious wonderful, it was...love." If this isn't the mystic talking, St Theresa in ecstasy, what is? But it's a 'non-religious' sex- and life-affirming ecstasy, neo-pagan in that way: William Blake, or Starhawk (see her terrific sf novel The Fifth Sacred Thing - an easier read but not as wise a novel as this one). Leeanne echoes this in her final words of the book: "In her view you had to feel the future, she wanted to be in love with it..." The cavalry charges have to be gossamer in order to work; the revolutionary has to be in love with the future, in ecstasy, in emotional connection. And enough members of the ruling class will respond; the evil guys will be beaten; society will open up; the future and its technology are worth being in love with. My God, this woman sounds like a neo-pagan Unitarian social democrat from Silicon Valley! I'm in love. > I loved the sex scene with the chocolate dildos and crotchless > panties!! all that sneaking about, I thought it would be some huge > political maneuver, but no! Totally agree. Such humor in the book. One of my favorite laugh-aloud places was where Gillie's ma complains that they haven't had any fish, and how selfish people become as soon as there's a bit extra, and then she's glad that the people who have fish aren't coming down to eat her bacon! All through the book, Nunn has the voice of the lower class women so perfectly. Being raised in England and knowing a good few Aussies, I found it very nuanced and right on, and written with love as well as a sharp eye. And many thanks to Julieanne for explaining about Aussie novels: I have seen a few Oz movies that are like this book in humor and wackiness. I didn't know you could make such a wide generalization as that "Oz heroes are most often presented as rogues, working-class rebels - somewhat shady characters, or anti-heroes with more personal self-interest than grand visionaries on a mission to save the world from itself. In this respect, Gillie fits the stereotype, except that she is a woman." But with the last point, I disagree, she is on a grand mission, it just isn't one we are too familiar with. It's not just selfish; it is about saving and reforming the whole society, making it safe for ecstasy, life, love and having a good time for everyone. Not just for herself. The thing that totally gets Annette's goat is that Gillie and her friends lived like that all along, even in the absolute worst of conditions she was joking and living it up: in that sense it was just like Christ saying the Kingdom of Heaven is here now, not in the future, you can live it where you are. And when she's gone, the others find it hard to live it, even in better times. > but after her death, Leeanne and the others cannot agree and Leeanne > takes another route. I like that her "compromise" may also be a realistic > way to continue her activism in new circumstances, even though it may look > like a sell-out to others. I agree. It's hard for the left to see that most of today's society would look like an absolute bloody utopia to slow-dying factory workers of 150 years ago. One can argue that by co-opting the Leeannes, by reforming itself, capitalism has delivered more for the working person than any other system: and I think that is the view Nunn embraces. So Leeanne is not, by her lights, necessarily selling out. > The thing that finally really bugged me was Annie. I can't see any > real REASON for her to be as conformist as she is. I really like that Nunn tried to get inside the head of a determined, unreformable right wing conformist. But I don't think it entirely worked, either. She is the only person who fell into caricature, for me. I agree, she was too stupid. But then sibling rivalry can make the best of us a little stupid: in Sulloway's brilliant 'Born to Rebel' he shows that most revolutionaries are low in birth order, and that low birth order correlates more with a revolutionary mindset (political or scientific revolutions) than any other factor. Typically first borns only become rebels in special circumstances like Gillie's, where her father was brutal. Gillie is, I think the first born? Anyway, she's taken the rebel slot in the family, so Annette is 100% given to the Dudley do-right role which is usually taken by the first born... > Finally, I thought it a bit weird that Nunn could paint > the classism of this culture so well and yet race was a non-issue. This interested me too. Race is such a complicating thing. In some cultural situations it virtually becomes a way of tattooing class on our very flesh; so that whereas all groups of the poor and oppressed are despised by their oppressors at first, it's easier in an expanding economy for the ones who look most like the oppressors to move up and join them - to persuade the oppressors that they are as human, and as fully deserving of inclusion in every way. As Mrs. St J S did towards her cleaning lady. It simplified Nunn's optimistic philosophy to leave out race. Personally, I think the same thing will happen with race in every expanding economy, is happening in the US with the large black middle class, but it's slow, maybe won't ever be complete until we are all intermarried and brown skinned. Come to think of it, what race or color are the folks on Anastasia Union? They could all be mixed race. The year 2100 (in which the novel is set) isn't quite time enough - but according to projections that I have seen of current intermarriage rates the majority race in America by 2050 will not be white, but white/Asian/Hispanic/African. Race may disappear fairly soon in historical terms (whether 100 years or 1000), but class will go on for ever. > I'm going to stop here with one question: Did anyone else think it was > possible that Gillie knew about the plan to kill her and figured out a way > to escape ? With the missing Bruno? Or is that just not her style? Or did I > miss something conclusive as I was skipping around at the end? I too thought that she might well have escaped. Why not? She managed everything so perfectly up til then. She was practically omniscient. Lives of the saints: the magical mystical violent total disappearance (crucifixion and ascension in one). Not one speck of her flesh remained. On the third day, she and Bruno... There were eye witnesses, though, so I guess she really did cop it. Unless she had dressed up one of those robots that Annie said could look like a human at a distance... Angela wrote: > Susan, I'm glad you asked these questions. They lead me to many > more which I have about the plot: I'm impressed by these speculations about the drugs - such ideas did not occur to me. I don't think Leeanne suffered a loss of memory, though: the situation changed, she was offered participation. > I personally think that she and Bruno, with the help of her computer > friends, managed an "illicit passage" off of that "God forsaken lump of > rock," and further were "some other couple" who had been 'given' > the tickets of DeeDee's friends (p. 236). Wow! Good thinking. I missed it. I think you're right. Dave Dave Belden Accord, NY davebelden@earthlink.net web page: www.davidbelden.com ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 10 Feb 2002 15:41:03 -0700 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Susan Hericks Subject: Re: Illicit Passage Comments: To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" I also had no thought about the drug possibilities and am not so sure, but I think Angela is right on the nose about that "other couple" on the outbound ship, especially since it was explained by problems with the computer. Thinking about Annie being drugged during her interviews might help me, but weren't some of her narrative sections reported to Big Barbara on her own?Her personality is maddeningly consistent. I don't want to agree with Angela that Bruno and Gilly were dying, even as they escaped the planet. I think the drug theory is interesting but I would have to see the connections made more specifically in the text. Unfortunately, I start teaching tomorrow and don't have time to re-read! After thinking about it, I have to agree with Dave's comment that Nunn seems to finally prefer Gillie's activism to Leanne's, but I still like the fact that they are not drawn as opposites. Thanks for the post, Dave. I especially appreciated your points about the changes in the upper class spids. I agree that ultimately the book has an optimistic vision of change--although I am still skeptical about the "separate (but equal) domes" issue and the invisibility of race. Susan ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2002 14:39:05 -0500 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: "Janice E. Dawley" Subject: Upcoming BDG Schedule Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed The votes have been cast and counted, and here are the results (drumroll please): THE GATE TO WOMEN'S COUNTRY, by Sheri S. Tepper (4-31 March) THE DISPOSSESSED, by Ursula K. Le Guin (1 April - 5 May) NATIVE TONGUE, by Suzette Haden Elgin (6 May - 2 June) WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME, by Marge Piercy (3-30 June) Reading order was decided based on the nominators' schedules. Happily, there were no conflicts! The main BDG web page will be updated in the next few hours, complete with links to the most recent nominations page and its information. You can access it at http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Comet/1304/ Thanks to everyone for your nominations and your votes. We've got a nice roster of "classics" coming up! ----- Janice E. Dawley.....Burlington, VT http://homepages.together.net/~jdawley/ Listening to: Jory Nash -- One Way Down "I've built my white picket fence around the Now, with a commanding view of the Soon-to-Be." -- The Tick ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 21:21:18 -0800 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Margaret McBride Subject: Re: Illicit Passage Comments: To: feministsf-lit@UIC.EDU MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Angela wrote:>it reminds me of Candace Jane Dorsey's _Black Wine_. > I can see the comparison in terms of the mystery "what the heck is going on" narrative but Black Wine went to my reread sometime list and Illicit Passage didn't. The style in Black Wine was evocative and images stayed with me and I can't say the same for this one. I'm not sure I would have stayed with it if not for the fact that it got favorable Tiptree notice and was for this group. I found the style not only flat but annoying at times. I can intellectually say why I think the author chose to write that way but it's not enjoyable. I'm a big SF reader and usually like the "in medias res" effect of a piece dropping me into the middle of a new place/time and my having to figure out what all the terms are, but I found this one slow going--not quite enough visualization. >What other literary or media texts does it remind you of and how? > This question brings up an idea simmering in my head that no one has mentioned. Do you suppose it's possible that Annette's voice is a trick? Somewhere the uncle and Gillie talk about the best way to foil interrogation is by giving tons of details that make you seem to be cooperating but in actuality you're throwing the cops off. What I'm referring to with Angela's question and my point is the very end of Handmaid's Tale and maybe even the way the footnotes work in Gentle's first Ash book. Handmaid's Tale has an afterword that puts a twist on everything else. In Illicit Passage the Publisher's Note says Gillian's last volume of the History of the War has finally been published and that Annette has left Anastasia and her editing work has been invaluable. Are we really to presume that Annette has been so out of touch, that she didn't know what was going on and so thoroughly disapproved? My other minor support is how much difficulty I had at the beginning when Annette was supposedly talking to Gillian's computer but we could suppose that she knew others perhaps hostile would eventually read it. Would she go on about her erotic reactions to the chief interrogator when she could guess that others would read her words unless she had ulterior motives? I maybe am just too optimistic and want to hope that Annette is not as totally negative as she seems to be. I don't like the book enough to reread right now looking for other clues, but maybe I will keep it and come back to it later to see if reading it after knowing the whole story will give me other clues to Annette. Notice that Leeanne quotes Gilly as suggesting that a book needs to be written (on the page right before the Publisher's Note). Also the Note says that the Security Forces tried to ban the book--surely that would not be the same as the negative picture we get of Gilly in Annette's words to the interrogators? > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2002 11:30:54 -0500 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Dave Belden Subject: Re: Illicit Passage Comments: To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.20020212212116.006d9714@oregon.uoregon.edu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Margaret wrote: > > This question brings up an idea simmering in my head that no one has mentioned. Do you suppose it's possible that Annette's voice is a trick? Wheels within wheels. I couldn't make any sense of that Publishers Note at the end, but I believe your theory may be right on. Annette's whole voice may be a blind. It makes sense. I'm not used to having my brain challenged so much! Dave ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2002 14:25:05 -0700 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Susan Hericks Subject: Re: Illicit Passage Comments: To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Margaret wrote: > > This question brings up an idea simmering in my head that no one has mentioned. Do you suppose it's possible that Annette's voice is a trick? Wow! Are you saying that Annie was a collaborator of Gillie's and made all this conformist stuff up? Or what? Susan ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2002 17:44:03 -0800 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Margaret McBride Subject: Re: Illicit Passage Comments: To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC In-Reply-To: <8B3A7A2CD342D2118E1E00104B0D44ADB5DBF2@mail.prescott.edu> MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii A >Susan wrote:>Wow! Are you saying that Annie was a collaborator of Gillie's and made all >this conformist stuff up? Or what? >Well, I'm wondering. I had my doubts as I was reading because she seemed too unpleasant and down on her sister and I couldn't believe she would talk about her erotic reaction/infatuation to the interrogator on something she thought he might see unless she had ulterior motives of making herself seem like a dope. But I thought I was being naive, too optimistic, wanting characters to be pleasant, etc. But then I can't figure out what the point is about her on the Publisher's Note at the end except to see it as a reversal. Does anyone see points in her monologues or description of her that would make this reading at all possible? ************************************ Margaret McBride, University of Oregon ************************************ ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2002 15:36:50 -0500 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: Illicit Passage -- Speech by Alice Nunn Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Angela Barclay has been having some computer-related difficulties, so I'm posting this for her. She's been in touch with Alice Nunn, who shared the following text of her speech to a symposium called "Antipodean Utopias" at the University of Tasmania. There are no answers to our plot questions, but there's great background on the book as well as some entertaining thoughts about the problem of "future past". --------------- SPEECH TO ANTIPODEAN UTOPIAS 7 December 2001 by Alice Nunn I didn't originally intend to write a science fiction novel. It came about because my father used to tell us funny stories about life in the army in the Second World War. From him, I was led to believe that war was a large complicated and amusing game. My mother on the other hand spent the war in Hull, a large English east-coast port. Her story of the war was only three words long. We were bombed. So I gained the impression that war for women wasn't nearly as much fun as it was for men. Or maybe it was just because women didn't have the right sense of humour to appreciate it properly. As I grew older, and developed my own sense of humour, I decided that the concept of women in a bombshelter offered a metaphor for a lot of issues I was interested in. I wanted to write about war and victims. But in my story the women were not only going to have fun, they were also going to win. That's how it came to be science fiction. By the time I came to write it, I had moved to Australia. Which generates a rather obvious idea. You have a major power who sets up a colony a long way from the metropolis. People travel great distances to get there. You take possession of the land, discover some minerals and some sources of energy like uranium. I did toy with the idea of putting in a few sheep but its hard enough getting a publisher for science fiction without having sheep in space. Then you have the colonial types. Everyone whose anyone refers to the metropolis as Home with a capital H and the people who are anyone are of course the career public servants who come out to rule. Everyone who's no-one -- those bedraggled native-born working class, descendants of convicts and other undesirables -- are the ones who come out to be ruled and don't amount to anything and have no voice in the running of the place. Moving right along, the next thing you need is a war, preferably a war to end all wars. As one of my characters, the radical union-leader Leeanne, says about war -- it's "always good for a lot more corpses among the working class." So a hundred years from now, we have such a war. And we have such an oppressed underclass. We have such a colony. The physical location is Anastasia Union -- a city located under one large climate controlled dome with several smaller domes housing the various functions of the city. The reason the city is there is a substance called urofor -- a source of energy which is both highly valuable and highly dangerous. One passage in the book describes an old propaganda documentary, taken in the early days of the settlement of the colony. A journalist talks first of all the wonders of Hightowers, the residential dome for public service officers and describes the attractive amenities for contract workers there. Then the journalist describes New Town, the dome which was about to be turned into hostels for convicts. He says that those in power had asked the question what was likely to be the biggest shortage in the colony. The answer was general labour, raw unskilled manpower. And as a result it had been decided to bring out what were called "a better class of convict". From this better class of convict would come cleaners for domestic work in Hightowers, and workers for industry thus making life for everyone else in the colony very relaxed and comfortable. And of course it goes without saying that the convicts wouldn't be required to work in the mines. No no, that will be done by volunteers who will be highly paid, etcetera etcetera. Some generations later, at the time the novel is set, New Town where the descendants of these convicts are still housed is a veritable slum. These descendants are called Nowts. Rhyming with louts. Where would we be without such terms, Mick, Chink, Boong, Wop, Eytie. Such words are essential in social name-calling that demean and classify the lesser and powerless part of the population. To keep them even more powerless the Nowts are tightly controlled, requiring passes to move from dome to dome. However it is clear at the time we have arrived at in the city's history that although Nowts cannot pass freely from one dome to another in theory, practice is another thing entirely. My heroine Gillie is not into rabble rousing the masses like Leeanne. She has a completely different agenda. It becomes fairly clear early on that Gillie and Leeanne go pretty much wherever they like and do pretty much what ever they fancy and no-one in charge can quite put the finger on what's going on. Nowts after all are supposed to be subhuman and unintelligent and Gillie is quite happy to let everyone in charge keep thinking so. But the fact is that she built her own computer at the age of 12, and ever since has been happily engaged in subverting what ever part of the system she can get her hands on. Even some of those in authority have given up pretending that their computer security is failsafe. [Reading omitted] The only story my Mother ever told me about her life in Hull during the 2nd World War is that one day someone in authority decided that a change from the bomb shelter was as good as a rest and the whole school where she was teaching was taken by bus and left in a field. With no books, no paper, no writing implements, no chairs, no shelter. There are only so many learning possibilities for a group of city kids in a field and I gather that these were exhausted rather quickly. My mother isn't usually one to question authority but I suspect, from her way of telling this story, that for once it may have entered her head that the war was being run by idiots. This disillusionment is also starting to permeate the substrata of New Town. Here is one character Eileen who is clearly starting to question the established hierarchy. She is talking about the woman she used to clean for. [Reading omitted] Not only was there no heating in New Town by this stage but there was very little food and practically no entertainment. As often happens in such times, it is the lack of entertainment that is most felt. [Reading omitted] I won't tell you any more of the story. You know how it goes anyway. By the end of the war you just know the city will get fed up with being a colony, and realise it doesn't need 'Home' any more, because home is right there where they stand and not back in some far away metropolis. And I've already told you the twist, that the women emerge as victors. But I have to comment on the astonishing progress in technology in the ten years since this book was published. I wrote this novel over about 3 years from 1988-1990 on an Amstrad 8256, my first computer. Some of you will have personal organisers or even mobile phones with more memory than an Amstrad of that era. But it didn't take all that much foresight to realise that computers were going to be big and any one with access to computers could access all sorts of knowledge. And with knowledge comes power. But, I had never heard the word 'hacker' in the late 80s, I don't think it was even invented. Was there an internet then? I certainly had never heard of it if there was. The whole book is set out as if it were a series of emails. We didn't have emails then. I don't think we even had faxes. Reading it again, ten years later, I am forcibly struck by how the world has moved on. It's a bit like wondering what to do with George Orwell's 1984 when its 1985 already? Some things of course never change. Gillie explains to Leeanne about working in the public service: "It's going to be worth it in the end and listen, it's fun! Everything they do is knowable. Every piece of information is *committed to disk* somewhere..." (notice that 'committed to disk' -- that's Amstrad talk). ..."there's nothing that can't be accessed. There are no secrets! ... that's why it's so important. ... you and your union and your speeches are just dancing on the surface of things. But I'm the one with my finger on the switch because the opportunities for buggering up the system are almost endless." But some of the book is laughably out of date. This is from Gillie's young sister Annette. Remember the novel is supposed to be set 100 years from now: "Sister Boddy told us that we were very lucky *getting an education that introduced us to computers*, as the government was now employing girls like us to work with computers at a basic level and so we should all learn the techniques involved so that we could compete for that sort of job when we left school. [...] Shortly after that they took the *school computer* away." Well how would I know that by now every classroom would be bulging under the weight of computers. We only had one computer in the government department I was working in when I was writing this -- we had to book to use it. How could I foresee that ten years later every kid in primary school would know more about computers than I do, and at the end of every computer Help Line would be a 14 year old adolescent with an attitude problem. In the novel, Gillie talks to her computer. Now I can tell you a thing or two about voice programs. In about 1988 I came down with a bad case of Repetitive Strain Injury from surprise surprise struggling to key in reports on the office computer as fast as possible before it was someone else's turn. As a result I couldn't write for a while and the Rehabilitation service bought me a voice program which I was supposed to be able to talk into. It recognised 40 different sounds. I don't know what sounds they were, we never found out. It was the first time too that I'd ever met computer nerds. There were two of them employed by Rehab and I believe they spent days if not weeks playing with my new voice program which we never got to work. I now use a Dragon program which I bought a year or so ago and it works reasonably well, although I can't get it to tell the difference between thesis and faeces no matter how many times I train it. Again everything has moved forward so much in ten years and it was a leap of faith on my part to have my characters talking to computers in this novel. Unfortunately, because of the strides forward in technology, a great deal of the point of setting the story in space is lost. It turns out that it didn't really have to be science fiction at all, because ten years later and here we are. It's just a modern day story where the powerful and oppressive and occasionally evil are reduced to impotence by an intelligent and dedicated hacker in their midst. There are plenty of cities at war here on earth that I could have used. Even now women are cowering in caves in Afghanistan. As they have cowered in cellars in Bosnia. As they will continue to cower as victims in bomb shelters when ever the world goes to war above them. But here's the point we have come to now. All those billion dollar, state of the art, computer-reliant fighter planes with their smart bombs all wired up with infinitely complex information roaring over head, you couldn't hack into them! Could you. So I don't suppose that the pilots -- those men who are blithely flying them -- ever wonder if below, among the oppressed and wounded and wretched of the earth there may be a bomb shelter where a young woman is not cowering, instead she is sitting in the corner quietly talking to her computer. Be afraid. Be very afraid.