Pleasures of Reading, 2021
by Ritch Calvin
When I was young, I was told to find something that I like to do and pursue that as a career goal. Well, I liked to read. A lot. My mother was a librarian, and with her help, I was able to read far more than contained in our local library. And so, I thought, this could be a career: I could teach literature. But the fact is, I get to do very little pleasure-reading now. Most of what I read is for class and for grading. However, some of what I read is for research and for writing. And then, I do get to read for pleasure.
This year, I’ve had two major projects, both of which entailed a great deal of reading.
The first major project that I have undertaken is a study of the work of C. J. Cherryh. I have been reading Cherryh’s work since the late 1970s. I know, a while. However, when I decided to undertake a comprehensive examination of Cherryh’s work, it was no small task. After all, she has published (depending on how you count them) 83 novels and 82 short stories. A daunting task, to say the least.
So far this year, I have been focused on the novels set in the Company Wars series and the Unionside series (Alliance-Union and Hinder Stars are up next). That is to say, the novels set nearest to Earth, in the expansion outward from Earth. These series include Downbelow Station, Merchanter’s Luck, Cyteen, and Forty Thousand in Gehenna.
And while I had read each and every one of these books as they came out, reading them for pleasure and reading them for analysis are different processes and experiences. Not to say that someone reading for pleasure cannot and does not also engage in analysis. But for me, the experience was different when I was looking for themes, looking for connections, and looking for contemporary issues.
Many, many years ago, I wrote my Master’s Thesis on, in part, a story by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. In “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” Borges makes the point that writing and reading are complex processes, ones that go beyond the marks on the page. Reading the Quixote in the 21st Century is a different experience—and produces different meaning—than reading it in 17th Century.
I found the same to be true of reading these novels by Cherryh. When I read them in the 1980s, I was a different person, and I was reading them in different political, cultural, and economic times. Similarly, and more to Borges’s point, Cherryh was writing them at a particular moment in history, and if, say, Downbelow Station (1981) were written today (2021), it would be a different text.
I still enjoy reading Cherryh’s work. I still enjoy (many) of the characters. And I understand why Downbelow Station and Cyteen were such popular books and so successful. Cherryh was, on the one hand, pushing the boundaries of classic-era SF. For one, her cast of characters looked different with women in prominent roles and some ethnic diversity. For another, the characters and plots were not simplistic good and evil. Signy Mallory and Ariane Emory, as two examples, are complex characters. In addition to that, it seems to me that the social and economic politics in the novels fitted well with the time in which they were written. Reading them in 2021, for me, was different from what it was in the 1980s. I am still quite pleased to revisit them, though.
For the second project, I scheduled and taught a class in Queer Science Fiction. I made several decisions about content. For one, I would include just a few of the classic queer texts. I want students to know that the queer SF of today does not come out of the blue, and I want them to know that there is a history here.
To select a few classic queer texts, I read through some of the early queer anthologies, beginning with Worlds Apart: An Anthology of Lesbian and Gay Science Fiction, edited by Camila Decarnin, Eric Garber, and Lyn Paleo (1986). This early collection contains works by Delany, Tiptree, Bradley, Varley, and Russ. Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction, edited by Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel (1998). This anthology contains pieces by a number of writers familiar to Aqueduct, including Timmi Duchamp, Rebecca Ore, Élisabeth Vonarburg, and Ellen Klages. Richard Labonté and Lawrence Schimel’s The Future Is Queer (2006) contains works by Duchamp, Candas Jane Dorsey, Neil Gaiman, and Hiromi Goto. Finally, for researching the early queer works, I read Time Well Bent: Queer Alternative Histories, edited by Connie Wilkins (2009). This anthology features a number of writers who would become active in the field, including Steve Berman, Adele Gardiner, and Catherine Lundoff. One of the fascinating and compelling things about re-reading these stories is to see what we understood as queer SF, to see what pushed at the boundaries of genre fiction. In addition, the Wilkins anthology marked a sort of liminal text. It features a new set a writers and a new press. Lethe Press would become a major player in publishing queer SF (and fantasy and horror).
However, the second decision was that I wanted the bulk of the course to be contemporary queer SF, by which I meant post-2010. To that end, I read through many of the excellent post-2010 anthologies—and there are (relatively speaking) a LOT of them. Lethe Press began the anthology series, Heiresses of Russ in 2011, with different editor each year (to be fair, they are not billed as “queer” but as “lesbian”). The first volume contains stories by none other than Tanith Lee, Ellen Kushner, Jewelle Gomez, and N. K. Jemisin. While the final volume (2016) contains a piece by Melissa Scott, the remainder is made up of pieces by newcomers, by many of the figures who would be instrumental in developing queer science fiction, including Benjanun Sriduangkaew, A. Merc Rustad, Alice Sola Kim, and others.
Lethe Press also published the Transcendent series of anthologies. It ran from 2016-2019, with K. M. Szpara editing the first and Bogi Takács editing the final three. These four books are a treasure trove, a delight. I’m so disappointed that the series seems to have ended (at least, according to the Lethe website, the series has been “retired”). As with the earlier collections, it was fascinating to read these newer anthologies (and many others besides the ones I’ve named here) to see where the field is at this political, social, and cultural moment in time. For one, the sheer number of queer SF stories is remarkable. For another, the breadth of representation has expanded. Authors and characters embody (and sometimes are not bodied) a wider range of personal, ethnic, racial, gender, ability, and sexual identities. Even more—and perhaps most—important is to see the ways in which the stories in these collections have pushed the boundaries of SF. The changes are fantastic. I would argue that these stories have fundamentally changed the genre. In the wake of these stories, SF cannot be what it was before. Further, we cannot read, think about, and enjoy SF unchanged by what is in these books.
Sometimes, I’m incredibly lucky and my work compels me to read a lot. Who could ask for more?
Ritch Calvin is an associate professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at SUNY Stony Brook. In 2016, he published Feminist Epistemology and Feminist Science Fiction: Four Modes (Palgrave). He edited Judith Merril's The Merril Theory of Lit'ry Criticism, which Aqueduct published in its Heirloom Book series in 2016. His latest book, Queering SF: Readings, is forthcoming from Aqueduct in 2022.
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