Reading for a Sunday

When I publish a book, I can never be confident about any predictions I might hazard for its reception and sales. It's all guess work. Naturally I recognized, only a few chapters into my first of several reads of the ms, that Deb Taber's Necessary Ill was playing with fire. And by the time I'd finished that first read, I characterized it, in my own mind, as what used to be called "dangerous" fiction (which is how most of my own short fiction was characterized in the 90s). "Dangerous fiction," in case the term is new to you, raises uncomfortable questions about moral issues and assumptions (in the broadest sense of "moral") and makes it difficult to answer those questions in any comfortable way. Since Deb's reading on Tuesday, Library Journal has published a starred review of the novel, John Scalzi has featured the book on his blog, Whatever, and Paul di Filippo has reviewed the book at Locus Online. (Earlier, Liz Bourke reviewed the book for Tor.com: Killing and Ethics: Deb Taber’s Necessary Ill.) Here's the conclusion to Library Journal's review:

Taber's debut novel presents an all-too-credible dystopic future world and, in Jin, a complex character whose mind approaches the world and its priorities in a very different way. The characterization of truly genderless individuals—not androgynes or hermaphrodites—and the portrayal of an approach to the world that is both ruthless and compassionate make this an excellent candidate for book discussion groups and provide strong evidence for the availability of significant genre literature. Highly recommended.

Some of the comments at Whatever were, shall we say, precipitate, given that their authors hadn't yet read the book themselves.  I'll leave you to check out the other links yourself.

A few more links of interest:

--John H. Stevens makes a compelling argument for the vitality of short fiction: Signs of Life in Recent Short Fantastika from Elizabeth Hand, Kiiri Ibura Salaam, and Karin Tidbeck.

--At the Mumpsimus, Matt Cheney reports on a discussion of the 2013 VIDA count at the AWP: VIDA at AWP.

--Maria Tatar takes up the issue Elizabeth Hand recently addressed in the Boston Review, for the New Yorker: Sleeping Beauties vs. Gonzo Girls.Tatar, though, sees the gritty protagonists Hand examines as tricksters.

The female trickster has a long and distinguished lineage. For centuries, these heroines made use of veiled speech and disguise as they prowled around the margins of their worlds. There is Scheherazade, who rescues herself through storytelling, using the civilizing energy of narrative to end King Shahryar’s serial marriages and slayings. Then, there’s the younger and meeker Gretel, who sees her “moment in history,” as Anne Sexton tells it, and shoves the cannibalistic witch into the oven. In the end, she and Hansel are able to return home on the back of a duck, thanks to the poetry in her spells. Like the mythical Hermes, the two children become liars and thieves who traffic in enchantments.

--At the Nation, Michelle Dean takes up the cultural politics (and economics) of crowdsource funding: 'Veronica Mars', Amanda Palmer, 'The Atlantic' and the Depressing Economics of Cultural Production: Oh My!

Throwing flaming bottles into the chinks of the masculine world machine

Yesterday, Salon.com reprinted from the Boston Review a lengthy, interesting review essay by Elizabeth Hand titled Femininjas: Women in fiction fight back. Referencing Tiptree's "The Women Men Don't See," Hand writes:

What women do in the books mentioned here doesn’t consist of survival so much as sabotage. They throw bricks and rocks and flaming bottles into the chinks of the masculine world machine, then pick up a gun and fire into the turning gears. If rape and other sexual violence, religious servitude, and the politically determined inaccessibility of contraception can be seen as acts of war, stories like these may not just be a means of escapism. In the mind’s eye, they might be weapons, to be picked up, opened, and deployed.

She remarks, "One would think the critics had never seen a woman in pants before, let alone one who can hold her own against the patriarchy. And perhaps they never have, in which case introductions are a couple thousand years overdue..."

She's absolutely right that women retaliating with violence is an old theme. What that last paragraph of her essay, quoted above, does, though, is suggest some sort of approaching critical mass. Medea, after all, symbolized male fears of what a woman betrayed might have it in her to do. Full on attack of "the masculine world machine" suggests something else entirely.

Why Is That So Hard?

One of the hot sf novels of the season, Neal Stephenson's Anathem, has been getting feminist scrutiny from Nic at Eve's Alexandria, who found the novel "heavy-going," and from Liz Henry at the Feminist SF blog, who writes "I love the book, I think it’s fabulous, I wallowed in it and couldn’t stop reading it" but was constantly jolted out of her enjoyment by the book's "unnecessary sexism." After looking at specific instances of this, Liz writes:

A general complaint, not directed in particular at Stephenson. I don’t ask that every book be all things. But this book tries to be so much, and it fails so notably at this thing which to me seems so simple. Just make women characters as human as the male characters. Why is that so hard? How can anyone so smart and cool write something that fails to do that simple thing? Why do we as female readers and geeks so often get left behind and disappointed in this way by male writers? I am haunted by these questions in general while reading science fiction. Men, and heterosexual ones who claim to love and appreciate women and who in their daily lives surely do just that, fail to be able to write STORIES where women have full human agency and are important in any way other than romantic symbols or sadly cardboard sops to “strong female hero”.

Yeah. What you said, Liz.

Both are insightful, incisive reviews worth checking out.