November 20th, 2008
by
Liz Henry
Paula R. Stiles has a great article up at Fantasy Magazine, Diversity in Speculative Fiction. I love what she has to say about judgments of literary quality.
It’s not just about shiny, phallic rocket ships populated by deep-in-the-closet Aryan brethren conquering the Final Frontier, people. It’s about different futures, alternate realities, dangerous fantasies. You’d think such places, where dragons dwell, would be heavily populated with equally unusual people, but nope. Looks like everybody important there is white, male, anglophone and straight. Not to mention perfectly healthy physically and mentally.
Excuse me, but how is that “speculative”?
Stiles goes into great detail reviewing Cosmos Latinos. Here’s an excerpt from her description of Gorodischer’s “The Violet’s Embryos”:
The editors make no bones about the male-dominated nature of Spanish-language spec-fic. Some of the stories even turn on the strong patriarchal reality of Latin American culture, with all its attendant misogyny and homophobia. In “The Violet’s Embryos” (1973) by Angélica Gorodischer, the author takes a similar but opposite tack to Joanna Russ’ “When It Changed”. A spaceship comes to rescue a group of seven stranded cosmonauts on a barren planet. Instead, the crew find a paradise. The previous crew have discovered violet patches that give them whatever they can imagine being, though none of it can leave the planet (why they never rescued themselves).
Her descriptions of Dark Matter: Reading the Bones will have you wanting to go read it right away if you haven’t already! I’m going to have to go clean the other half of my office just to find my copy of the book to read Charles Saunders’ story in there,
Saunders’ tale comes from his series (mostly showcased in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress anthology series) about Dossouye, a former Dahomey Amazon-turned-freebooter and Woman-without-a-Name heroine. Dossouye remains more unique in heroic fantasy than she perhaps should be–a black female Conan in a fantasy version of early modern Africa.
Go on over to Fantasy Magazine, read the whole article, and comment over there – I thought the point about time travel stories in both anthologies was great – “… they both involve small groups sending people backward or forward in time to cause or prevent change that will improve their ethnic group’s position in their present time.”
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- More blogging by
Liz Henry at
http://liz-henry.blogspot.com
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Filed under Books & Literature | Comment (1)
It’s a curious about causing change vs. preventing, which I see as quite different.
I’ve often noted a strong conservative tendency in both time travel and alternate history stories. Time travel often has a theme of that whatever happened was the way it was supposed to, and tinkering with it will just bring about ruin. Alternate history postulates change, but the change is usually about keeping old traditions forward in time.