Posted on

Book Review: The Birth Machine, Elizabeth Baines (1983)

(Hannah Firmin’s cover for the 1983 edition)

4.25/5 (Very Good)

“Ladies and Gentleman: The age of the machine” (11).

I continue my loose sequence of reviews on medical science fiction with Elizabeth Baines’ evocative fable The Birth Machine (1983) (see notes). Pushing against notions that pregnancy is “medical: illness” (51), the narrative follows a nightmarish tact as an unsuspecting woman is linked up to a nebulously described machine and drugged. Beset by dehumanizing (and often patriarchal) forces, Zelda, without the help of others, comes to terms Continue reading “Book Review: The Birth Machine, Elizabeth Baines (1983)”

Posted on

Updates: Recent Science Fiction Acquisitions No. CLVII (Sturgeon + Sheckley + Scortia + Mannes)

I can’t pass up a Sheckley collection!

Nor can I pass up a rather unknown “discovered manuscript” type 1960s feminist dystopia by Marya Mannes.  She wrote for Vogue and The New Yorker over her career….

Nor can I pass up a Sturgeon collection (perhaps I will appreciate his more radical SF short stories?)….

And finally, a best of collection by an author who might not be worth exploring, but, sometimes short stories give a better impression of an author’s capabilities than a novel-length work.

As always, thoughts/observations/comments are welcome!

1. They, Marya Mannes (1968)

they

(Stanley Zuckerberg’s cover for the 1970 edition) Continue reading “Updates: Recent Science Fiction Acquisitions No. CLVII (Sturgeon + Sheckley + Scortia + Mannes)”

Posted on

Book Review: Walk to the End of the World, Suzy McKee Charnas (1974)

(Gene Szafran’s atrocious cover for the 1974 edition)

5/5 (Masterpiece)

“The men heard, and they rejoiced to find an enemy they could conquer at last.  One night, as planned, they pulled all the women from sleep, herded them together, and harangued them, saying, remember, you caused the Wasting” (3).

Suzy McKee Charnas’ Walk to the End of the World (1974) is the first of four novels in The Holdfast Chronicles sequence (1974-1999) that charts the slow forces of change in a post-apocalyptical future where women (“fems”) are chattel.  Kate Macdonald, in her wonderful review of Ammonite (1993) characterized Nicola Griffith’s novel as “instantly […] feminist: not stealth, or muted, or sub-conscious.”  Walk to the End of the World falls squarely, and powerfully into this category.  Told with intensity and vigor, Charnas brands the reader with her vision, a searing and festering landscape where white men have either exterminated the remaining “unmen” (the “Dirties”) or subjugated them (the “fems”) after a manmade cataclysm.  Complex societal institutions maintain control Continue reading “Book Review: Walk to the End of the World, Suzy McKee Charnas (1974)”

Posted on

Book Review: Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Naomi Mitchison (1962)

(Vincent Di Fate’s cover for the 1973 edition)

4.5/5 (Very Good)

Naomi Mitchison’s first science fiction novel, Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962), is a brilliant episodic rumination on the nature of non-violent interaction with alien species that challenge (and transform) conceptions of ourselves and others.  Although R. S. Lonati’s cover for the 1964 Four Square edition suggests a pulp adventure—replete with flashy spaceships, explosions, and traditional adventure—Memoirs is cut from an altogether different cloth.

The first sentence of the novel narrows in on Mitchison’s central themes:

“I think about my friends and the fathers of my children.  I think about my children, and I think less about my four dear normals than I think about Viola.  And I think about Ariel.  And the other.  I wonder sometimes how old  would be if I counted the years of time blackout during exploration (5).”

Continue reading “Book Review: Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Naomi Mitchison (1962)”

Posted on

Book Review: Xenogenesis, Miriam Allen deFord (1969)

(Richard Powers’ cover for the 1969 edition — there is some speculation that it might be a collaboration with Leo and Diane Dillon)

3.5/5 (Collated rating: Good)

Miriam Allen deFord—one of the more prolific SF short story authors of the 50s-70s whose works appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, If, Fantastic Universe, Galaxy, Worlds of Tomorrow, etc—deserves a Gollancz Masterworks volume.  But, as Ian Sales has pointed out so forcefully in his recent article (here), despite the number of prolific women SF authors in the 50s-70s they were rarely republished and are perhaps the least read group of SF authors for modern audiences.  There are some exceptions but few readers can name a women author pre-Ursula Le Guin.  deFord’s shorts were collected in only two volumes, Xenogenesis (1969) and Elsewhere, Elsewhen, Elsehow (1971) and both print runs were limited to the first year of publication.

Informed by her feminist activism (she was an important campaigner for birth control) and her earlier career in the newspapers, deFord’s stories tackle themes such as overpopulation, racism, colonialism, gender issues, sexism, and alienation.  Her works range from deceptively simple allegories to future histories vast in scope and complexity (for short stories).  Her female characters are almost all individualistic, resourceful, and highly educated–they often struggle against increasingly regimented/mechanized/homogenized societies in order to raise families in addition to their careers.  In short, deFord advocates forcefully the right to self-determination Continue reading “Book Review: Xenogenesis, Miriam Allen deFord (1969)”

Posted on

Book Review: At the Seventh Level, Suzette Haden Elgin (1972)

(George Barr’s cover for the 1972 edition)

3/5 (Average)

At the Seventh Level (1972) is part of a loose sequence of novels that feature Trigalactic Intelligence Service agent Coyote Jones and his voyages to various worlds. Although this sequence ostensibly has the trappings of SF space opera, Suzette Haden Elgin subverts the genre conventions so that the premise functions as a polemical feminist text with satirical underpinnings.  At the Seventh Level is an important installment in a long line of “women as slaves trapped in vast repressive patriarchy propped up by appeals to tradition and brute force” type novels which, some might argue, culminated in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985).  It is important to note that there were many novels on similar themes before Atwood’s acknowledged masterpiece hit Continue reading “Book Review: At the Seventh Level, Suzette Haden Elgin (1972)”

Posted on

Book Review: The Mile-Long Spaceship (variant title: Andover and the Android), Kate Wilhelm (1963)

(Richard Powers’ cover for the 1963 edition)

3/5 (collated rating: Average)

Kate Wilhelm, famous for her Hugo-winning masterwork Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976), started her writing career with more modest works.  The Mile-Long Spaceship (1963) collects some of her earliest short stories from the late 50s and a few written for the collection in the early 60s — Clone, her first novel, co-written with Theodore L. Thomas would come out in 1965.  However, her best sci-fi was published in the late 60s to the mid-70s.  Before then her work tended to be straight-forward with an occasional interesting idea or poignant scene but generally unremarkable….

Three stories are worth reading in this collection: an early work of feminist science  Continue reading “Book Review: The Mile-Long Spaceship (variant title: Andover and the Android), Kate Wilhelm (1963)”