25 May 2005

Ransacking and Unpicking
by Liz Williams, Guest Editor

Liz Williams is the daughter of a conjuror and a Gothic novelist, and currently lives in Brighton, England. She has a PhD in philosophy of science from Cambridge and her anti-career ranges from reading tarot cards on Brighton pier to teaching in Central Asia. Her novel The Ghost Sister was published by Bantam in July 2001. Further novels include Empire of Bones, The Poison Master and Nine Layers of Sky. Her novel Banner of Souls--now out in the USA with Bantam and the UK with Tor Macmillan--has gained her a third nomination for the Philip K Dick Award.

Liz has had over 40 short stories published in Asimov's, Interzone, Realms of Fantasy and The Third Alternative.

You could make a claim that it all started here. The literature of the fantastic, with its faery kingdoms and rocket ships, its vampires and elves and green children who come from other worlds and disappear again, or fade and die at daybreak. These islands, this Albion.

Shelley was a Brit, after all (Mary, of course). It might have taken a wet trip to Italy--possibly under the sooty shadow of a volcanic eruption far away, that came down as rain in Europe and meant nothing more to Mary than a spoilt holiday with no choice but to sit indoors and write (a properly Sfnal, apocalyptic gestation for the sombre birth of a bloody genre). But Mary Shelley went home, to white cliffs and green fields, and a city that even today is known as the Smoke. And Mary had daughters--not of the flesh, but of the mind.

Joan Aiken and L M Boston. Tanith Lee and Gwyneth Jones. Karen Traviss and Nicola Griffith. Justina Robson and Doris Lessing. Susanna Clarke and Angela Carter. Women who take the homespun stories and ransack them, unpick them with glee and weave them into something Pythonesquely completely different. Women who take the substance of the world, travelling far in the redoubtable spirit of Victorian voyagers, and work it into future visions. Jones has lived in South East Asia, Lessing was Persian-born and moved to Africa.

And let's not forget young women--the British tradition has had a long history of women writers of Young Adult fiction: Mary Louisa Molesworth, Juliana Horatio Ewing, Mary de Morgan and Edith Nesbit, Susan Cooper and Diana Wynne Jones.

History never really belongs to women--we can't win, if we write it, we're marginal anyway so we might as well mess about with it. Clarke, in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, reinvents the Napoleonic period. Mary Gentle does all manner of terrible and wonderful things to English history--The Architecture of Desire, Ash--and her fantasy-with-a-twist passes on down the line to people like Steph Swainston. Sarah Singleton, along with Gwyneth Jones, draws on modern counterculture to regenerate ancient myths. Cherith Baldry joins Mary Stewart in putting a spin on Arthurian myths, and creates new ones in futuristic Venice.

In short fiction, writers like Sue Thomason and Sandra Unerman draw on local history and local knowledge to create hedge-witch weirdness, stories of heraldic beasts and magical abortionists. Incomers like American-born Leigh Kennedy bring a fresh eye to an old culture. Short story magazines like Scheherazade, run by the Counihan sisters, regularly feature local female talent. And in publishing, Storm Constantine's Immanion Press continues to focus on work by contemporary female (and male!) authors.

Women are active in the British Science Fiction Association and the British Fantasy Society. They run cons. Critics such as Farah Mendlesohn and Roz Kaveney serve as our arbiters. The chair and secretary of the Milford SF Writers' workshop are women. We're all over these islands, doing all sorts of things: subverting, twisting, changing. Writing. That's what we've been doing for hundreds of years. Why stop now?