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July 2010 Aqueduct Press Educates and Delights in Two Nonfiction Books on Feminist SFBy Nancy Jane Moore
Nancy Jane Moore’s most recent fiction project is a series of fifty flash fictions Nancy Jane Moore Flash-Fiction published on the online writers’ cooperative Book View Café. Her collection Conscientious Inconsistencies is available from PS Publishing and her novella Changeling is published by Aqueduct Press. She has organized countless rapid-fire readings for Broad Universe. What matters most to me in life — more than even sex or chocolate — is coming across a new idea, or a new perspective on an old idea. While I want this from everything I do — training in Aikido or talking with friends or even watching TV — one reason I read a lot is because the written word is particularly suited to dealing with complicated thinking. I read serious fiction with this goal in mind, but I even like to find good ideas in my comfort reading (John D. MacDonald was very good at sticking philosophical observations in the Travis McGee books, for example), and my quest for complex new perspectives is the main reason I read nonfiction. Aqueduct Press books rarely fail to provide me with the ideas I crave. Their motto is “bringing challenging feminist science fiction to the demanding reader,” but they also provide challenging nonfiction on feminist and science fiction related topics. Their two most recent books — The Secret Feminist Cabal, Helen Merrick’s look at feminisms in the cultural history of science fiction, and Imagination/Space, a collection of essays and talks by Gwyneth Jones — gave me so much to work with that I felt overwhelmed by all the ideas I want to study, consider, and integrate into my own thinking. I was particularly drawn to the chapter in Merrick’s book entitled Another Science ‘Fiction’? Feminist Stories of Science (pp. 224-261), which provided me with new insights on how science and technology interact with both feminism and science fiction. Her ideas take us a long way from the basic complaint about the dearth of women scientists in both fiction and the labs; instead she ponders such things as how critical studies of feminist science fiction can help heal the sizeable gap between the humanities and the sciences. Finding a “depth and range of possible intersections between feminism, sf, and science studies,” Merrick goes on to observe: “Feminists should listen for and take seriously the stories about science told in feminist sf texts, which envisage social, cultural, and discursive formations that allow new narratives of gender, feminisms, and the sciences” (p. 260). Merrick’s book is an academic treatise that discusses a broad array of cultural issues related to science fiction and feminism, including a history of women within fandom, the strong emergence of feminist science fiction in the 1970s, and the way feminist science fiction is often ignored by feminist scholars. It goes far with its theories, but is tied together by a theme. The Jones book, on the other hand, is more eclectic, a collection of pieces that range from thoughtful analyses of books and writers to discussions of her own writing to political observations. But feminist ideas — sometimes uncomfortable ones — are woven throughout. Take this quote from a discussion of Geoff Ryman’s work in the piece, entitled (Re) Reading for a Chapter on Feminist SF: An Annotated Book List: “The trouble with celebrating feminine culture is that it’s impossible to do so without also celebrating male supremacy. Male supremacy is the condition of feminine culture’s existence. Discuss.” (p. 136) Earlier, in the piece entitled Shora Revisited — which is adapted from blog posts — she comes at the idea from another angle. In the 1990s, she says, even the people who saw themselves as progressives, as feminists, did not want to change the foundation of things. “They didn’t want the violence to be real or the truths to be inconvenient. They wanted feel-good science fiction, as before, just with women in the starring roles and essentially feminine values celebrated.” (p. 60) She goes on to observe: “You can’t have the goals of feminism if you want to keep the Great Divide. And we, we in the editorial and every other sense: everyone, including myself, we do not want to lose the Great Divide.” (p. 61) I’ve actually been thinking about that last one for a couple of years — I read the original blog post — and I think I disagree, at least a little. I personally am very tired of the Great Divide between men and women. But I suspect Jones is right that most people don’t really want to give it up, and I recognize myself more than I’d like when she talks of people who’d rather not confront the inconvenient truths. Regardless of whether Jones is discussing cyborgs (Haraway’s Cyborgs [Mostly] at the Movies, p. 90), rocket ships (The Icons of Science Fiction, p. 28), or vampires (A Short History of Vampires, p. 126), she leaves you with layers of perspective to take into your fiction reading. Perhaps the most intriguing point about the two books — and the reason why I wanted to consider the two of them in one review — is the intersection between Merrick’s last chapter, Beyond Gender (pp. 262-292), and the ideas on gender found throughout Jones’s book. It should not come as a surprise that Merrick discusses Jones’s work — particularly her novel Life, also published by Aqueduct, in which genetic change is likely to push us in to a society that lacks the Great Divide — in that chapter on taking feminism “beyond or outside the terms of the sex/gender system.” (p. 286) Following on a discussion of criteria for the Tiptree Award, Merrick observes, “From my own perspective, Life was a more radical book by far, both in terms of its feminism and what it did with gender, than either of the two books awarded the Tiptree that year [2004].” (p. 286) She then goes on to explain Jones’s ideas on the Great Divide. Both Merrick and Jones provide challenging feminist thought for demanding readers of science fiction. But be forewarned: Once you start considering the ideas in these two books, you may find yourself spoiled for “feel-good science fiction,” even with women in the starring roles. The truth is, despite all the talk about post feminism and retiring feminist science fiction “to the agenda farm,” feminist ideas in both theory and fiction have grown into something far more complex than equal pay for equal work or even reproductive freedom. And they are no longer important only to women; as we begin moving beyond gender, society will change. Feminist science fiction, along with thoughtful critiques such as those by Merrick and Jones, provides us with some guideposts for that change. |