Date: Wed, 8 Sep 1999 00:28:55 -0400 From: "Janice E. Dawley" Subject: [*FSF-L*] BDG: The Slave and the Free To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU After a long holiday weekend it is now time to discuss *The Slave and the Free*. What did you think? Of the treatment of feminist issues? Of the differences between the two books? What about the characters? I first read these two books several years ago and was profoundly affected by their mix of sophisticated world-building, wordcraft, characterization and moral seriousness. Now, reading them a second time for this discussion, I notice more of an ironic detachment that lends authenticity to each character's viewpoint -- none is clearly the author's mouthpiece. Are the Riding Women a utopian society? What do you think about the depictions of man/fem relations in the first book? Is Charnas being too harsh -- or not harsh enough? (Though it seems somehow shameful to admit it, Eykar Bek is one of my favorite fictional characters, particularly as he develops in the later books.) What do you think of the changes Alldera undergoes over the course of the two books? I am nearly falling out of my chair with weariness, so I'm hoping this sketchy introduction can spur discussion of these very interesting books! ----- Janice E. Dawley.....Burlington, VT http://homepages.together.net/~jdawley/ Listening to: The *Velvet Goldmine* Soundtrack "...the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected; the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other." Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 9 Sep 1999 16:41:41 -0700 From: Margaret McBride Subject: [*FSF-L*] BDG-Slave & Free To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU What I remembered about these books was that the characters were not divided into bad/good (and that is still my reaction upon rereading). Even the male characters that we see much of have explanations for their behavior which make them seem human and non-villainous (the boys are raped when young too, etc.) The women in the fem pits, free fem camps, and riding women tents are all human with good traits/bad traits for all of them. I like the way Charnas gives little bits of history for individual characters which give me some sense of motivation. I like the fact that the characters argue especially about what I call moral issues--how do we resolve differences, how do we treat others, etc. I'm not quite sure how you're using the term "ironic detachment," Janice. Please explain more. I agree that no one character seems like an author "mouthpiece" although in some ways how the main character changes allows Charnas to suggest some authorial opinion (particularly some of the self-doubt she has in the 3rd book.) I have 2 questions for everyone: 1. What do you think about the way children are raised in the books (especially the girls)? What the Fem slaves do makes sense to me--although obviously horrific. It has echoes of African-American, Native American, etc. parents teaching their children to be meek/keep quiet, etc. around whites. Often keeping the children safe from physical harm got/gets precedent over keeping them from a psychological negation. I imagine parents often made a game of it (see how you can fool those dumb whites, etc.) which isn't suggested much in the book. However my real question is about the way the Riding Women treat the girls. Charnas does suggest a philosophy of survival of the fittest (the way the women treat the grain silos and the predators who will steal from them), but I'm still bothered by how the girl-groups fit into the larger story. How does the separation of the girls fit into their philosophy/societal make-up? What comments do you think Charnas had in mind with regard to allusions to our world? 2. Has anyone ever taught these books or been in a class/reading group where these were focus of discussion? I am particularly interested in classes that are mixed sex. I have taught Gate to Women's Country and Native Tongue on the college level and each time some students (both male & female) have so much trouble with what they consider to be male hatred that they can't read/react positively to some of the issues. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 10 Sep 1999 11:06:09 -0700 From: Joyce Jones Subject: [*FSF-L*] BDG Slave and Free To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU The Holdfast series offers the best of feminist writing. First of all there's the captivating story of Alldera and company and their adventures, everyone has a full personality. As Margaret mentioned, these are complex people: soft and strong, loving and obnoxious, spiritual and materialistic all within the same person. Setteo and Daya are just fascinating characters. Both damaged, both seeing life through their own very individual perspectives. I was intrigued by the whole concept of the purposeful remaking of society. Holdfast came about after previous generations had destroyed their earth, secreted themselves, picked some scapegoats and tried to make a new society that wouldn't end in destruction. In their fear and failure to look at the causes of the previous destruction, they set their new society on a doomed course. Over the 4 books the women have to find a course that allows for growth while fighting always the hatred felt for their old tormentors. Hatred is no basis for healthy creation, but there was so much to hate. I thought it was interesting that the first book concentrated on the horrors of the men's society, but in the future books, just when you might be tempted to agree with some of the less militant newly free, a new example of their former owners' malevolence is dropped into the story to remind us just what the women are dealing with in trying to redefine civilization. As the mother of one male and soon to be grandmother of another, I just kept thinking "What are you going to do?" How do you build a society in which neither men nor women are beasts? I was fascinated by each individual society: the Holdfast-- hierarchical, age-sex based; the fem's almost inhuman toughness; the Riding Women, what a vision of freedom and bickering, consensus, tradition, and community; Elnoa and the tea camp; the glimpse of Salalli's "utopian" society mixing men and women; the slave men and their Bear religion. The details seemed to fit so well together in all of these, making the world seem real. I could see using this series in all kinds of classes: sociology, anthropology, geography, philosophy, literature and women's studies, of course. You could have a whole Charnas curriculum and learn everything you'd need by branching out from it, even architecture (as in the building of Sorrel's cairn). If we played the old game of what books would you take if stranded on a desert island, this series would have to be in my steamer trunk. Joyce ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 11 Sep 1999 11:52:20 -0700 From: Joyce Jones Subject: [*FSF-L*] BDG Slave and Free To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Margaret writes: "What do you think about the way children are raised in the books (especially the girls...my real question is about the way the Riding Women treat the girls. Charnas does suggest a philosophy of survival of the fittest (the way the women treat the grain silos and the predators who will steal from them), but I'm still bothered by how the girl-groups fit into the larger story. How does the separation of the girls fit into their philosophy/societal make-up?" One feature among so many others I love about this series is that it considers various methods of child rearing. I was horrified at life in the milkerey with the routine silencing of babies, but as you say, such strict training was necessary. Even worse was the child pit where food was dumped and only the strong survived. Worst of all was the fact that the matrons of the pits killed intractable children. Life was almost unbelievably hard for those fems from birth to death, an easier childhood would have, probably, meant an earlier death at the hands of men and/or rovers (and weren't they a fascinating lot while we're talking about people becoming almost inhuman.) The Riding Women also practiced a type of survival of the fittest with their children but segregating them to free roaming bands. Didn't you love the fact that they learned to dance among and jump over horses? How else could they become almost a mixture of horse and women than by running free like and with horses? It was emphasized in the last book _The Conqueror's Child_ wasn't it that if these girls didn't survive childhood it was because of accident or illness. These children protected and loved each other. It was unknown for them to reject one of their age mates. I guess this sort of upbringing would have made them as fierce and intuitive and social as they were meant to be as adults. They learned, I would guess, that actions had consequences, some consequences were deadly, and luck played a part in survival. They learned, I guess, to be intelligent animals so that mating with horses would seem natural. There was room for all kinds of "womanly" work and emotions, but until the last book, there didn't seem to be an opportunity for "maternal" love toward young children. The fems couldn't afford to show it, as for the riding women, I don't know. I guess they based their mothering on horses. Don't horses keep the foals with the dams until they're old enough to care for themselves, then they do. As is explained in Conqueror's Child, among the Riding Women the child joins the childpack from the age of 6 until menarche "in order to wash out the unfit and keep the Motherlines strong." I loved the share mother concept. Imagine the bond between women who share a child. Alldera, Sheel, Nenisi, as different and incompatible as they might have felt themselves to be, had to join into a family to share the child. And how lucky for the child to have such diversity to be able to choose the right mother for the right need: bloodmother, raidmother, and what's the one for the mother closest to the child's heart? Is it soulmother? Considering what's going on today, it doesn't sound like such a bad way to raise a new generation. Joyce ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 12 Sep 1999 09:23:02 -0700 From: Joyce Jones Subject: [*FSF-L*] BDG Slave and Free To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Two of my favorite scenes of all time are in this series. The first is the birth scene from Motherlines. I always complain that books chronicle all parts of people's lives but seldom describe birth. "The comfortable doze in which Alldera had floated for so long dissolved at last. She found herself in a warm, dim place walled and roofed with some pale, translucent material. All around her were activity, voices murmuring, laughter. Something soft cushioned her back. She could see sharp blue sky through an opening off to one side. What's happening, where am I, what dangers threaten? A contraction twisted her belly. She cried out at the familiar pain. People closed around her, patting her, whispering encouragement, holding her hands firmly. Her feet were gripped and braced against the backs of people seated on the heap of bedding. Someone at her side said briskly, 'Breathe. Remember. You know how to make your breathing work for you.' She did remember, though she could not now tell whether this was knowledge learned in the secret world of Holdfast fems or in her long dreaming here. There was a way to use the rhythm of respiration to mobilize the body so that it worked not against its own strengths but with them. Fear vanished. She felt full of power, as if she could burst the cub out of her body with one great thrust. It surprised her to find that time was needed, and pain. The voices of the others joined in a throaty singing. Their song took its rhythm from her breathing and reinforced it. She surged over the pain on their music. The words, which were beyond the tight center of her attention, must have included humor. Rills of laughter erupted and were carried in the song. She poured with sweat. After the first huge passage of the head she felt the cub's shape, limb and shoulder, work its way out of her. Always before she had been too frightened to feel anything but pain. A person with long, shining black hair was crouching between Alldera's legs. She put out her hands and something dropped into them. Another leaned in and carefully pinched the last of the blood down the cord. Alldera was astonished at the simplicity of what they did, their calm. The black-haired person bent and sucked the plugs of mucus from the tiny mouth and nose of the raw, squirming bundle in her hands. People came and put their faces against Alldera's streaming face. Hands massaged her body. In that lilting ripple of speech that she found she understood easily now, several said that she had done well. She could not gather strength to reach out to any of them or answer in words, but she thought fiercely each time one of them approached her, I love you forever for this. At that moment she felt capable of it. If she had not been a fem, trained for her life's sake to hide feelings, she would have wept. The cub, washed and dried, was placed against her in the crook of her arm. It was a wrinkled, splotchy-looking female, unfocused in every wandering movement and every shapeless murmur from its wet little mouth. On its angular head was a crop of moisture-darkened hair... Odd, this was the creature she had planned to kill. She was glad now not to have done it. Someone relieved her of the warm, soft, wriggling weight. 'Here it comes,' someone else said cheerfully. Alldera thought in alarm, Mother Moon, not another - were there two, and I didn't know? But it was only the afterbirth, and she wanted to laugh." There are so many real aspects of this birth, I have to think Charnas either has had good births herself, or talked to midwives before writing it. The feeling of power, the singing in rhythm with her breathing, the self regulation of her breathing, the firm pressure and massage, the humor, the hard work, the intense feelings of love she had for her helpers, the fact that mucus was involved and a placenta, and that she thought briefly that the placenta might be a second baby all make this a very real scene and a great birth story. My next favorite scene is the death scene in Conqueror's Child: "___ uttered a series of gasps and a low cry, and Alldera hurried back to sit with her and stroke the backs of her hot, dry hands to keep her from tearing at her dressings. 'Just rest,' she murmured in the fem's ear. 'Get a leg over the pain and ride it quiet. You must be strong and rested for our journey. We'll go to the plains and ride all the day, the way we used to do. I have a black mare picked out for you, the fastest, the prettiest ever. But first you have to rest' The fem died in the pit of night. When it was over, Alldera went to the window and said a prayer to Moon-woman, although the moon was obscured by fresh banks of storm cloud and only in its first quarter. She prayed anyway... just in case it might do some good." Just wonderful! "Get a leg over the pain and ride it quiet." What a perfect line. Women know how to do this, and if we don't we need to learn. Pain is a part of life and Charnas's women know how to work through it. Alldera is far more practical than spiritual, but she sees spiritual possibilities. Birth and death are the two of the most spiritual life events, and Charnas writes them very believably. Joyce ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 13 Sep 1999 11:03:59 -0700 From: Joyce Jones Subject: [*FSF-L*] BDG Slave and Free To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU I have testing in Advanced Cardiac Life Support this Saturday and have had such a difficult time studying for it. The date has been set for months, but I so hate studying anything about cardiac problems that I've put it off. Over the past week I've dipped into it as gently as possible, rereading old notes, listening to a funny tape, glancing at the book. Yesterday as I was drying off after a shower and going over ventricular tachycardia (I have the algorithms taped to my bathroom mirror) it all started coming back to me. I thought, "I'm finally beginning to open to this again, like the daughters of the Riding Women learning to open themselves to be mounted by horses. Well, actually mounted wasn't the word I used there in the privacy of my bathroom. So add cardiac life support to areas of study enhanced by reading the Holdfast Chronicles. By the way, where is everyone? Is it that school started and no one has time to discuss these wonderful books. Pity, I think they're among the best we've read. Joyce ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 14 Sep 1999 01:12:25 -0400 From: "Janice E. Dawley" Subject: [*FSF-L*] BDG: The Slave and the Free To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Margaret McBride wrote: >I'm not quite sure how you're using the term "ironic detachment," >Janice. Please explain more. I'm not sure I used the right words to describe my impression, actually. Perhaps the irony and the detachment are two different things. The irony is in the Holdfast males' conviction that by keeping the fems in abject servitude they are controlling the forces that led to the collapse of their world, when it seems obvious to us that this sort of institutionalized scapegoating, given the available technology, would put them on an express train to Wasting II. These men are wrong, wrong, wrong, but in a way that is not at all unfamiliar in the real world -- there is a sort of bitter humor in it, particularly at times like the dreaming, when the boys chant the conveniently rhyming names of the unmen and the beast names of the fems. What a horrifying yet ridiculous ritual! The detachment is harder to pin down. I guess it is the sense that each character and each social situation is being unsentimentally investigated, the bad as well as the good. This last week I received the September issue of the *The New York Review of Science Fiction*, which includes half of an interview with Charnas. I had an aha! moment when I read the following: "People don't really understand what an adventure [*Walk to the End of the World*] was for me as a writer. I'm not sure I understood it myself at the time. This was my first novel; I didn't have that much awareness of my own mind during the writing process. I was too riveted by the challenges of the process: 'How can things have gotten this terrible socially? I've got these people, how would they interact with each other, what would they have learned to believe? This is how it works and this is where it is going. Now they smash everything up, good!' It was like playing with toy soldiers, almost. I didn't have such a deep investment in the characters then. It was more like reading somebody else's book and getting really into it and enjoying it, rather than getting worked up about the situation while I was writing. With *Motherlines* I felt like Lewis and Clark exploring the American West, living among people with a whole different take on the world." Her comments fit exactly my sense of the tone of the books, almost a stance of "participant observation", as they call it in anthropology. I admire it while also enjoying how it leaves room for the later books to delve deeper into some of the characters and the emotional repercussions of events. >my real question is about the way the Riding Women treat the girls. >Charnas does suggest a philosophy of survival of the fittest (the way the >women treat the grain silos and the predators who will steal from them), >but I'm still bothered by how the girl-groups fit into the larger story. >How does the separation of the girls fit into their philosophy/societal >make-up? What comments do you think Charnas had in mind with >regard to allusions to our world? The segregation of the children into both the kit pits and the childpack was one element of the books that seemed unworkable to me. I have a hard time believing that children divided from adults at age six or younger would survive, let alone grow up to fit into the existing adult society. But we get so little detail of how these child communities actually function; perhaps with further investigation it would make more sense. I too wondered how they fit in conceptually to the worlds of the Holdfast fems and the Riding Women. It can't be an accident that these otherwise wildly divergent groups of women take much the same hands off approach to child-rearing. Is it simply because resources are so scarce? Or simply to show how the difference is all in the context? The girls of the childpack roam free and presumably have enough to eat, while the young fems are trapped and hungry. ...I'm still puzzled by this. I agree with Joyce that the proximity of the childpack to the horse herds might encourage them to bond more thoroughly than if the experience were mediated by adults. Maybe part of the message is that being "protected" by adults might not be such a good thing anyway? Looking forward to more discussion. Thanks for your messages, Margaret and Joyce -- I've really enjoyed them. Anyone else care to chime in? ----- Janice E. Dawley.....Burlington, VT http://homepages.together.net/~jdawley/ Listening to: The *Velvet Goldmine* Soundtrack "...the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected; the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other." Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 14 Sep 1999 13:48:15 -0700 From: Joyce Jones Subject: [*FSF-L*] Charnas sites To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Here's results of a search for interviews/reviews of Charnas. http://www-prodigy.lycos.com/wguide/wire/wire_166762395_85126_3_1.html Joyce ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 15 Sep 1999 14:13:09 0100 From: Petra Mayerhofer Subject: [*FSF-L*] BDG: The Slave and the Free (Online sources) To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU The list is really quiet at the moment. Unfortunately I am also very busy right now because of a review meeting next week. But I wanted to post the online references on Suzy Charnas and the Holdfast books which I have. There might be more at the Lycos page that was posted already. I hope I find time to comment the books and the reviews in the next days. Reviews: ------------ Strange Words Review of WttEotW http://www.strangewords.com/archive/walkto.html Quote: 'Walk to the End of the World is about questing for Self Knowledge and the hard truths that may be discovered along the way. Each of the principle characters is pursuing personal revelation and each finds it. However, in all cases the cost is far more than they ever would have imagined or been willing to pay. The serial reinforcement of this lesson serves to prepare the ground for Charnas' most basic hard truth. Holdfast's all male culture is one in which all relationships are reduced to their most basic, brute levels. Charnas proposes that such savagery is intrinsic to men and thus all male relationships. The take home message is that women can escape brutalization by men only when avoiding men entirely. Walk to the End of the World is unmistakably science fiction with an agenda. Charnas extrapolates to their logical extremes radical feminist perceptions of the worst, the most misogynistic attitudes. Her message about the inevitable nature of male-female interaction is unmistakable and the novel's structure conveys it powerfully. The interactions are archetypal and the vision often grim, but I couldn't stop turning the pages. I recommend it to the open-minded who seek some relief from the dominant chords of science fiction.' Emerald City Review of all 4 Holdfast books (including spoilers for _The Furies_ and _The Conquerer's Child_): http://www.emcit.com/emcit047.htm#Herstory Quotes: 'Probably the place to start is to admit that yes, this is another post-disaster novel. David Brin gets very angry about the fact that feminist SF almost always starts with the destruction of the known world and he attributes this to some sort of collective revenge fantasy amongst feminists. A more likely reason is that many feminists believe that it will not be possible to construct a feminist society from one in which men are currently in charge. That again is a debatable claim. You could, for example, employ extreme violence, but that would just be sinking to the level of the opposition. You could espouse separatism instead, but the men would probably resist that.' 'What Suzy has done here is create a society that is every Rad Fem's dream. No men, no need for men, even an opportunity to get even with the bastards every now and again. And a social structure that every liberal American could approve of. Were this a Joanna Russ book, the story would probably end there. But Suzy is made of sterner stuff. She is not afraid to examine this "perfect" society and find it wanting.' 'It is at the Free Fem camp that we first meet the character who is to become the greatest villain of the series. Daya [...] Many readers, I suspect, will see Daya's role as a villain simply as a case of jealous revenge upon the beautiful, but Suzy is never that crude. Daya's "crime", the reason for her evil, has nothing to do with her looks, or her liking for sex with men. It is because she knows no other life but the pleasing of others. Briefly, amongst the Riding Women, she has a taste of freedom and courage, but away from them she immediately reverts to her suspicious, servile lifestyle and her habit of intrigue. What Daya represents is the traditional role of women in a male- dominated society. She is the schemer, the power behind the throne, the woman who, although clever, cannot act on her own because it is not seemly for a woman to do so. Because she sees her life solely in terms of her relationship to others, she can never be free. It is no accident either that she is an expert story teller. Daya lives in a world of fantasy, convincing herself that all is well, and that others are brave, because she doesn't have the courage to come forward herself. This is what Suzy is telling us is wrong with women's lives. This is what we must reject in order to be free.' 'I've read better books than these, literary wise, but I don't think I've ever read any more thoughtful books. Suzy has taken one of the defining political questions of our times and has turned it into a tale that is both entertaining and insightful. And she never stops digging, never stops turning the searchlight on our complacency. You see, the women that Servan brought back from the wilds are black. Their welcome in Holdfast is uncertain. No matter how much we grow, we always have something new to learn.' Review of _The Furies_ by Randall Byers, originally published in The New York Review of Science Fiction, Issue 76 http://weber.u.washington.edu/~rbyers/furies.html Review of _The Furies_ by Lee Anne Phillips http://home.cybergrrl.com/review/gb0796.html#Furies (Short) review of _The Furies_ http://www.ansible.demon.co.uk/writing/sfxrev95.html#furies Science Fiction Weekly Review of _The Conquerer's Child_ by Tamara Hladik http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue111/books.html#cc Once there was a review of _The Furies_ by Gwyneth Jones but today I could get no connection to the site. I try again in the next days. Interviews: --------------- InternetBookstore (UK) interview from 1996 titled 'Vampires and Amazons' http://www.bookshop.co.uk/aut/autint.asp?author=70419 (takes a very, very long time to load) Quote: 'Q:So what are you working on now? A: The book that follows THE FURIES and ends that cycle of novels. It began, quite by accident, about thirty years ago, when I started recasting the story-in-my-head-forever in SF form, for a change. This became my first book, WALK TO THE END OF THE WORLD, which was supposed to conclude with a smug little sentence under "the end," as follows: "This book is not the first volume of a trilogy." The whole genre was much afflicted at that time by the first throes of trilogyitis, which I thought contemptible (that is, stretching and padding a story so as to reach the requisite, Tolkienesque, three- book length). Had I but known, as they say, I could have put in a notice instead as to what it was the first volume of (unknown to me at the time): a tetralogy, WALK TO THE END OF THE WORLD, MOTHERLINES, THE FURIES, and Volume Four. ' I sometimes have a hideous suspicion that when I am dead and gone (if not before) these books will vanish from sight and I will be remembered, if I am remembered, for my vampires and werewolves and such, much as Conan Doyle is remembered not for THE WHITE COMPANY, his serious historical novel, but for Sherlock Holmes. [...] Not that I'd mind having people go on reading "Boobs" and TAPESTRY and "Beauty and the Opera" and so on into the next century; they're good works and I'm proud of them. But the cycle of books begun with WALK looks, through sheer staying power as an activity through my entire career (so far anyway), like a life-work; and you do want your life work to have some legs, too. Q: Taken all together, the books begun with WALK TO THE END OF THE WORLD seem to form a sort of futuristic epic. A: I think of them that way sometimes, although they were never planned as such. That is, WALK TO THE END OF THE WORLD was an out-growth of the consciousness-raising work of sixties feminism: I was writing a standard sort of quest novel, young man in search of his father with allies and enemies in his little band, when I was forced by a discussion in my women's group to notice that there were no women in this story (not even the obligatory "girl" companion to be romanced and rescued and to turn her ankle at the right time) - except in the background, as despised slaves. Misogyny itself then became the heart of the story: men's age-old fear and loathing of women, and how that deforms the society created and ruled by men and their hierarchies into something that works badly for everybody and is essentially unsta' Unfortunately the connection was interrupted at this point and I was not successful in reloading (I don't know whether the problem lies on my side or on that of the internet bookstore). An Amazon.com interview (undated, but probably from 1996/7) with Suzy Charnas at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/show-interview/c-s- harnasuzymckee/002-9190912-0243067 (I think the generic format of Amazon interviews does not lead to very interesting interviews) Chat with Suzy McKee Charnas on 17 July, 1997 at Omni Visions moderated by Edward Bryant http://www.omnimag.com/archives/chats/ov071797.html Quote: '[...] but at the moment I am completely drowned in the final volume of the series of novels that began with "WALK TO THE END OF THE WORLD." There's this THING that happens when you unwittingly commit yourself to what turns out to be a futuristic, feminist, epic which you only meant to be one adventure SF novel. Toward the end of the process, particularly when it has taken over 25 years, you find yourself dealing with a veritable army of characters most of whom have matured and changed thru the three previous books in real time, like real people.' Essays by Suzy Charnas: -------------------------------------- The Beast's Embrace http://www.autopen.com/beast.embrace.shtml Designing the Undead or What Model is Your Vampire? http://www.autopen.com/model.vampire.shtml Charnas' Websites: ---------------------------- Short autobiography written by Charnas at Internet Bookstore website at http://www.bookshop.co.uk/aut/autbio.asp?author=70419 Reader's Corner tribute site at http://www.autopen.com/suzy.mc.shtml summarizes news about Charnas' books, apparently last updated around the time _The Ruby Tear_ was published (in 1997). Alpha Ralpha Boulevard tribute site at http://www.catch22.com/SF/ARB/SFC/Charnas,Suzy.php3 offers (very) short biography and a bibliography, some links, not all up-to-date. Petra Petra Mayerhofer mailto:mayerhofer@usf.uni-kassel.de -- BDG website http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Comet/1304/ ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 15 Sep 1999 07:34:25 PDT From: Daniel Krashin Subject: [*FSF-L*] BDG: The Slave and the Free To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU >Date: Tue, 14 Sep 1999 01:12:25 -0400 >From: "Janice E. Dawley" >Subject: BDG: The Slave and the Free >These [Holdfast] men are wrong, wrong, wrong, but in a way that >is not at all unfamiliar in the real world -- there is a sort of bitter >humor in it, particularly at times like the dreaming, when the boys chant >the conveniently rhyming names of the unmen and the beast names of the >fems. What a horrifying yet ridiculous ritual! I liked that too, but I thought the broadness of the satire kind of worked against the seriousness of the rest of the story. I think Ms. Charnas used, very skilfully, a time-honored SFnal technique for making one's morally ambiguous protagonists seem more sympathetic: she contrasted the male protagonists (who were pretty vicious) with even *more* vicious antagonists -- the Seniors in general, and then the "evil genius" character at the end (can't remember his name), who is nearly psychotic. (For a less skillful use of the same technique, see any of Susan Matthew's torturer novels). And there were a couple male characters who were actually pretty benign, for their time and place: Eykar Bek, and that military guy who gets killed (can't remember his name either). Their POVs were actually more pleasant for me than Alldera's POV, which was shot through with such fear and rage. Danny ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 15 Sep 1999 11:12:10 -0400 From: Joan Bowman Subject: [*FSF-L*] BDG: The Slave and the Free To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU This is the first Charnas I've read. Having picked up the original paperback version of "Motherlines" in a used bookstore it took most of a year to get past the cover art and start reading. Once I did I was mesmerized. The underlying concepts seem to emerge more easily from these books than from any others I've read. I don't recommend reading them out of order, though, because after being a part of the women's societies in "Motherlines," for all their good and bad, it was so difficult to go back through "Walk to the End of the World." Initially it was hard to adapt to the lack of women characters and also to the men's society. Their culture so defied logic that at times it was hard to keep reading. The more I found out about them the worse it got. At the same time, it was easy to see where they came from and how these beliefs could develop. That must be what kept me reading. About halfway through "Walk to the End of the World" I began to understand better why some women scientists would have developed the horse mating ability demonstrated in "Motherlines." One of the things I love most about Charnas' writing is her ability to present me with information I can form a strong, seemingly well-informed opinion about, and then give me information that completely changes my point of view. (I just finished reading "The Furies" so I'm having trouble thinking of examples from the earlier two books.) I can't wait to read "Conqueror's Child." Joan ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 15 Sep 1999 12:03:17 EDT From: Phoebe Wray Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] BDG: The Slave and the Free To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU I agree with some earlier postings about the ambivalence I feel about the feral packs of kids in Motherlines. I'll admit to an wish to have had such an experience; an urge to go feral still surging in me now and then. I did find it uncomfortable. I guess because I thought the women would want to teach their young. The packs were brutal, but free. Imagine that sort of freedom. A constant bacchanal! Then, when the child is caught and brought inside one paragraph caroomed off the page at me and helped me to understand: *The tricky part of the ritual bath was coming; apparently all the youngsters fought against the discomforts of having their hair washed and untangled. Nenisi said that this was good: in her struggles to avoid her mothers' attentions a child learned that though they overpowered her, they did not harm her; she could trust them. *I think she's going to give us a good fight,* Shayeen predicted approvingly.* I also agree that these books are best read in order. I started the Furies before I'd read the others and couldn't get into it. Then was told I was starting in the middle. Loved all of them once I read them in sequence. Great story-telling and lots to think about. best, phoebe Phoebe Wray zozie@aol.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 15 Sep 1999 09:55:45 -0700 From: Jessie Stickgold-Sarah Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] BDG: The Slave and the Free To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU I was most struck by the way each book in this series (read the first two in the trade pb, then grabbed the next two from the library) broadens the scope of the "world". The first book begins inside the heads of the men in the Holdfast; the second shows us not one but *two* ways in which women are living without men. Don't want to give away the plots of the next books, but they each take another step back, making us re-examine our previous view of the society. I loved this. (And I suspect it's the reason why you can't read the books in the wrong order: they feel claustrophobic.) I had to laugh at the comment: >> David Brin gets very angry about the fact that feminist SF almost always starts with the destruction of the known world and he attributes this to some sort of collective revenge fantasy amongst feminists. >> We'll leave aside the confusion between "feminist SF" and "feminist utopian/dystopian SF". David Brin wrote a novel called _Glory Season_, which posits a woman-ruled, parthenogenesis-based society in which men are kept around to serve the same function as Charnas's horses. It's not a very daring book, IMHO, and though I wanted to like it, I felt that it set up this female-centered society purely to show its flaws and weaknesses. (I don't think that was explicitly intended; but I do think that was the result.) The Riding Women were a tremendous relief to me, because they broke through the logic that Brin set up ("in species which use parthenogenesis, male genetic material (?) is necessary to trigger conception, THEREFORE my society must include men") and created something wholly different. *That* is what science fiction is for. jessie ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 16 Sep 1999 08:13:38 PDT From: Daniel Krashin Subject: [*FSF-L*] BDG: The Slave and the Free To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU >Date: Wed, 15 Sep 1999 09:55:45 -0700 >From: Jessie Stickgold-Sarah >Subject: Re: BDG: The Slave and the Free >[...]David Brin wrote a novel called _Glory Season_, >which posits a woman-ruled, parthenogenesis-based society in which men are >kept around to serve the same function as Charnas's horses. Actually, they are also kept around so that their distinctively male capacity for anger and violence will be available to defend the colony from invaders. This assumption (which goes unquestioned throughout the book) makes the book less interesting for feminist SF fans, IMHO. >It's not a very >daring book, IMHO, and though I wanted to like it, I felt that it set up >this female-centered society purely to show its flaws and weaknesses. Yeah. Although one of that society's big problems was the domination of powerful clone-families and the oppression of the non-clone women. That couldn't be a problem in the world of _Motherlines_. Also, the women of _Glory Season_ had cities and science and technological progress, which the _Motherlines_ didn't. Danny ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 16 Sep 1999 12:06:31 -0700 From: Jessie Stickgold-Sarah Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] BDG: The Slave and the Free To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU I wrote: >>[...]David Brin wrote a novel called _Glory Season_, >>which posits a woman-ruled, parthenogenesis-based society in which men are >>kept around to serve the same function as Charnas's horses. And Daniel Krashin accurately commented that: >Actually, they are also kept around so that their distinctively male >capacity for anger and violence will be available to defend the >colony from invaders. >This assumption (which goes unquestioned throughout the book) >makes the book less interesting for feminist SF fans, IMHO. I should have been more clear. In the afterword to the edition I read, Brin wrote that he did some research on existing parthenogenic species and found that there was still a required male function; and that this meant that he could not write an all-female parthenogenic society, because it would be scientifically inaccurate. The rest of the book evolved from there, as books always do, in many different directions. My comment was meant to point out that the initial restrictions of scientific fact (and as an engineer, I have a lot of sympathy for people who can't bring themselves to be inaccurate; it's one of my obsessions as well) were only as restrictive as the author's invention. Charnas's work is also stronger because throughout the series every assumption is broken down, exposed, turned inside out. Some characters handle it well; others don't, or can't. It seems to me (for instance) that some parts of the Riding Women's culture couldn't survive as a two-sexed culture, however benevolent. All the fems who learn how they reproduce are disgusted. And indeed, if penetrative sex has been an abusive experience, I imagine a horse would seem like your worse nightmare. Conversely, if it's a personal, romantic, emotionally-involved experience, it would seem wrong to have the same experience with a horse who might be culled at the end of the year. (Not to mention the culture clash between the clones and the non-clones...) As I read it, the Riding Women had a unique relationship with their horses that was unrelated to their romantic love among themselves, and that was why they were able to be comfortable with it. jessie ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 16 Sep 1999 21:20:07 EDT From: Phoebe Wray Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] BDG: The Slave and the Free To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU In a message dated 9/16/99 7:02:22 PM, Jesse wrote: << As I read it, the Riding Women had a unique relationship with their horses that was unrelated to their romantic love among themselves, and that was why they were able to be comfortable with it.>> Which is also why the feral kids hanging out with the horses makes sense. They bond. Someone earlier mentioned this, and Jesse's comment adds to the connection. phoebe ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 17 Sep 1999 02:21:09 GMT From: Marianne Reddin Aldrich Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] BDG: The Slave and the Free To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU From: Jessie Stickgold-Star >I should have been more clear. In the afterword to the edition I read, Brin >wrote that he did some research on existing parthenogenic species and found >that there was still a required male function; and that this meant that he >could not write an all-female parthenogenic society, because it would be >scientifically inaccurate. Er. There are, indeed female-only species without a required male function. Granted, the only ones of which I am personally aware are a few (of 1000s) salamander species we discussed in Herpetology last year, but they do exist. Of course, salamanders are also often capable of growing back limbs that break off, so they are hardly a 'typical' species. Just wanted to point out that he was not only limited by invention, but by insufficient research.... I seem to recall that I enjoyed _Glory Season_ however. Hmm. Marianne ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 16 Sep 1999 22:31:02 -0400 From: "Janice E. Dawley" Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] BDG: The Slave and the Free To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU At 12:06 PM 9/16/99 -0700, Jessie Stickgold-Sarah wrote: >It seems to me (for instance) that some parts of the Riding Women's >culture couldn't survive as a two-sexed culture, however benevolent. >All the fems who learn how they reproduce are disgusted. And indeed, >if penetrative sex has been an abusive experience, I imagine a horse >would seem like your worse nightmare. Conversely, if it's a personal, >romantic, emotionally-involved experience, it would seem wrong to >have the same experience with a horse who might be culled at the >end of the year. As I read it, the Riding Women had a unique relationship >with their horses that was unrelated to their romantic love among >themselves, and that was why they were able to be comfortable with it. Isn't it a lot more complicated than this? Sexual intercourse can have more than one meaning, depending on the context. To me, doing it with a man in private seems profoundly different from being mounted by a horse in a public ritual for the express purpose of conceiving a child. The fems confuse the two because they have no experience with the horse matings and can only extrapolate from their unpleasant memories of rape in the Holdfast. Presumably if one grew up with knowledge of both realities one would be able to make the distinction easily. Alldera and Daya both experience a similar confusion when they first witness the cullings. They can only see the killing as brutality and betrayal, while the women look at it as an element of their bond with the horses and of the larger cycle of life and death. Both positions have their points -- I especially liked how Charnas complicated the situation further by pointing out that Daya's horse had been captured and tamed by Alldera, not the Women -- but in the end it seemed to me that neither Alldera nor Daya was qualified to evaluate the Women's morality in this case. A great example of culture clash. ----- Janice E. Dawley.....Burlington, VT http://homepages.together.net/~jdawley/ Listening to: The *Velvet Goldmine* Soundtrack "...the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected; the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other." Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 07:51:00 EDT From: Phoebe Wray Subject: [*FSF-L*] Slave and Free To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU A new press release from Amnesty Int'l about crimes against women in Pakistan (*honour crimes*) reads like something out of Walk to the End of the World. I'll send it along to anyone interested... best phoebe Phoebe Wray zozie@aol.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 10:19:59 -0700 From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] Slave and Free To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU >A new press release from Amnesty Int'l about crimes against women in Pakistan >(*honour crimes*) reads like something out of Walk to the End of the World. > >I'll send it along to anyone interested... Phoebe, I had the same thought myself; observing the back-pedaling of Pakistan and Afghanistan into barbarism is eerily like watching people wilfully descend into Holdfast madness, and it's horrible to behold. I have also read from time to time about how homosexual behavior among men is tolerated in some Islamic societies to a greater degree than in the West -- which suggests the masculine side of the Holdfast equation as well. It's also possible, though, that this is a reflection of the fact that much descriptive writing about Arab societies has been done by Westerners either eager to show how "immoral" Islam is (vs. Christianity -- it is to laugh, but they meant it) or to suggest the delights of societies with more accepting attitudes toward homosexuality (written by Arab-enchanted English travellers, some of them homosexual or bisexual themselves and acting on their homoerotic tastes more freely and safely away from England than they could at home). This reading was done years ago (while researching nomadic, pastoralist societies for MOTHERLINES, in fact), so names don't immediately spring to mind -- maybe the Thessiger brother who traveled (as opposed to the one who acted in horror movies here), some of Richard Burton's writing, and T.E. Lawrence (though I'm not sure he actually addresses the subject in SEVEN PILLARS). Suzy Charnas ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 10:46:00 -0700 From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] Slave and Free To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Since discussion has dried up here on the list, I thought I might take this opportunity to respond, as author, to some of the comments made here on WALK and MOTHERLINES, and maybe ask some questions myself. On the raising of children in the cultures shown: I actually drew on a model I had observed in action in Nigeria, but pushed to an extreme (like most of what's in these books!), and that was the multi-family compound in which a brood of kids made (ideally) by one husband on a clutch of wives pretty much led its own life, the older kids in charge of the younger ones, while the mothers were out in the fields working (pretty much all the time, while the men sat around in the shade drinking palm wine, boasting, and playing that game with the polished seeds in the egg-carton game board). There are also gangs of kids -- AIDS orphans, rejects of various kinds, or just poor kids whose parents can't feed them -- operating with no adult supervision at all in various third-world cities, under very grim conditions, but many survive (see the kit-pits in WALK). So while it's not my idea of an optimal situation, I do think it's a possible one, and I adapted it in part to keep the raising of kids from becoming the foreground material of both novels. In stories like WALK, about gender re- lations, no matter what you come up with people start asking right away, "Yes, but what about the children?" A legitimate question, but also one that serves to short-circuit and essentially close consideration of what the adults are doing among themselves, or trying to do, so I wanted to tuck the kids out of the way, as it were, until my Holdfast adults had worked their way to a point of change where they could turn their attention to this themselves, without just jumping over their own concerns. In MOTHERLINES, I again adapted the way some of the nomadic groups I had read about (some Amerinds, some others) lived their hard lives with the kids as a kind of sub-class which everybody in the camp feeds but which is otherwise often self-regulating because the adults are fully occupied assuring basic food and shelter. It seemed to me to be more realistic as well as more effective fictionally for the Free Fems to be able to do something different from what they knew with their own kids if they had observed a living, work- ing model (among the Riding Women) than if they just found descriptions of another way to do things in old books etc. Though it might have been inter- esting to watch them try to reconstruct child-raising from legends and fairy tales -- no, that's a whole book in itself, isn't it? And it was for me a sign of the (comparative) "alienness" of the Riding Women, the extent of their rapprochement with "Nature," that they could choose to expose their daughters so freely to, well, the forces of natural selec- tion. The society's foundation in "scientific" (in quotes because of course the horse-mating was a speculative and imaginative take-off on early cloning experiments with frogs etc.) manipulation of genetic material suggested to me a believable bias among the Women toward a more "rationalistic" treat- ment of children than we are accustomed to, and the exigencies of descent by cloning and the inevitable degradation through blurred copying, mutation, etc., gave them iron-hard reasons for needing to keep only the healthy kids. Not "nice," but one of the most important and most ignored elements of liv- ing successfully in harsh environments without "advanced" technology is the need to knuckle under to necessity (and then justify what you do with ideo- logy, of course). Luckily by the time I got around to the last book and the need to deal closely with the questions of child-rearing, I was (and am) a grandma two times over, so I had plenty of opportunity to refresh my memory about the realities. Well, this is long, so let me stop here. There have been other comments I'd like to respond to, but if nobody minds my horning in here like this, I'll come back to them shortly. Suzy Charnas ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 12:51:35 EDT From: Phoebe Wray Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] Slave and Free To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU In a message dated 9/22/99 4:19:28 PM, Suzy Charnas wrote: <> Absolutely... I was just stunned with the sychronicity of it, I guess, since we've been discussing your scary, thought-provoking work of late. Re Islam and male homosexuality -- I remember thinking years ago when I was enamored of Richard Burton's adventures that he had some homoerotic ones, although he never came out (plainly or otherwise). Did you ever read about his wife Isabel? Now there was one strange lady. She tracked him all over -- including the Middle East -- and basically trapped him into the marriage. Pakistan's suppression, subjugation and murder of women, wholesale as it is, is very like Holdfast. I guess many Pakistani men would be happy there. I wonder if any men in that country are assisting the women? phoebe ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 13:38:16 -0500 From: Todd Mason Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] Slave and Free: Wray To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU You know that some are, and some do in some situations and not in others (not every man is going to be so stupid [hint: not much of a fan of absolute cultural relativism here] as to kill his sister for dishonor any more than every mother is so stupid as to let her daughter's genitals be mutilated). Though the juxtaposition of this afternoon's NPR programming is amusing in this context (the newsbreak highlighted UNICEF's report of Eastern European movement toward corporatism leading to worse health for everyone, and job discrimination against women, and TALK OF THE NATION's first hour featuring Susan Faludi and others speaking of the crisis for men essentially of self-image...the sickness of the notion that to be a man is to be the breadwinner, the dominator of the family, defined by his ability to supervise the lesser creatures of the family--Faludi's book is called STIFFED). -----Original Message----- From: Phoebe Wray [mailto:Zozie@AOL.COM] Sent: Wednesday, September 22, 1999 12:52 PM Pakistan's suppression, subjugation and murder of women, wholesale as it is, is very like Holdfast. I guess many Pakistani men would be happy there. I wonder if any men in that country are assisting the women? phoebe ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 13:44:35 -0500 From: Todd Mason Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] Slave and Free: Wray To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Hmm. Considering how much cultural pressure toward mutilation there is in some of the world, a better way to put that is "so heartless or overwhelmed as to seek out mutilation for their daughters." -----Original Message----- From: Todd Mason Sent: Wednesday, September 22, 1999 2:38 PM To: 'Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC' Cc: 'FEMINISTSF@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU' Subject: RE: [*FSF-L*] Slave and Free: Wray You know that some are, and some do in some situations and not in others (not every man is going to be so stupid [hint: not much of a fan of absolute cultural relativism here] as to kill his sister for dishonor any more than every mother is so stupid as to let her daughter's genitals be mutilated). Though the juxtaposition of this afternoon's NPR programming is amusing in this context (the newsbreak highlighted UNICEF's report of Eastern European movement toward corporatism leading to worse health for everyone, and job discrimination against women, and TALK OF THE NATION's first hour featuring Susan Faludi and others speaking of the crisis for men essentially of self-image...the sickness of the notion that to be a man is to be the breadwinner, the dominator of the family, defined by his ability to supervise the lesser creatures of the family--Faludi's book is called STIFFED). -----Original Message----- From: Phoebe Wray [mailto:Zozie@AOL.COM] Sent: Wednesday, September 22, 1999 12:52 PM Pakistan's suppression, subjugation and murder of women, wholesale as it is, is very like Holdfast. I guess many Pakistani men would be happy there. I wonder if any men in that country are assisting the women? phoebe ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 13:07:06 -0700 From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] Slave and Free To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU A further reply to comments about the Holdfast books, particularly WALK and MOTHERLINES: several people remarked on the way the story pre- sents an idea and then later on turns it inside out, or looks at it from another point of view that forces the reader to re-evaluate it in the light of further knowledge or a changed perspective. One of the pleasures of being a really *slow* writer is that in taking several years to do a book, you get to reflect in the work certain changes over time in your own think- ing, including changes that come out of doing the writing work itself. It really is true that if you give a character and idea and let her run with it, he will take you to places you would never have gone on your own (eg the way the men work out their ideology in WALK, and Nenisi on the social uses of promiscuity in MOTHERLINES). And then you leave her in the story with attitudes intact (at least til you come around again and knock him silly later on) and go on to have another character take you elsewhere, and (ideally) you get a surface complexity of very satisfying richness (or, for readers who prefer more action and directness, annoying confusion that makes them throw the book across the room). This goes even further when you get to write your four books, in this case, over a period of 20 years; I think that I've had a particular advantage here, in that I've not had to work to deadlines or other commercial requirements to nearly the same degree as many of my colleagues (historically I've earned enough with my work to run my career, but I "live" by sharing my husband's earnings as a lawyer). I ruminate sometimes about the trade-off of being on the one hand released from the stricter exigencies of the market vs. be- ing freed as well from the market correctives to self-indulgence, diversion and sheer laziness. If I'd had to feed myself on my earnings, all my books would have been very different: shorter, faster, leaner, thinner (which is not the same thing), and lots more of them published, or else I'd have starved. Or maybe they'd have been immensely fat, from lack of time to edit and editorial demand for big, fat books. Economics have such a powerful influence . . . Suzy Charnas ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 13:07:12 -0700 From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] Slave and Free To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Another authorial response -- I thought I deal with these this morning as a group, before going out to get signatures on a petition about permit parking on our block (just a glimpse into the intensely creative life of The Author) Daniel remarked on the satire of WALK being maybe a little too broad for the serious intent of the book as a whole: this book did begin as an intentional, not to say gleeful, satire of the whole Nixonian ethos of the time. I meant to shove the descendants of that crew of rats in Washington (not the present crew of rats in Washington) into a world where they would have no choice but to live by the inverse of their most cherished values (drugs are bad, individual effort is prime and group action is bad, homosexuality is bad, etc.) of their ancestors. It was only as I got into things that I recognized the subtext about sexism, and it could well be that I never got the meld of these two approaches exactly balanced in the final draft. If you see seams there, it's the incompletely covered evidence of this change of approach. As for making "morally ambiguous protagonists seem more sympathetic" by shoving them in among much more horrible ones, yep, that works; but if you just stay with your morally ambiguous people long enough to get to the level of their fears and doubts and longings, they do half the work for you by humanizing themselves right there on the page. And I'm glad you like Eykar (you too, Janice); I'm very fond of him myself, though you might not know it considering all the hell I put the poor bastard through. Now that I think of it, he and Servan are the mirror pair, found in so much fiction especially adventure and buddy stories, to the female pairing of Virgin and Whore, ie the Man of Action and the Man of Thought. Like many authors, I favor the Man of Thought -- he is more reachable, more malleable through my chosen instruments (words and concepts) than the other. So Eykar changes over the course of the tale; Servan just gets older (yes, I am sorry for Servan, at the same time that I loathe him). Janice asks if the Riding Women's society is a Utopia: for me, no. It's a bit too "primitive", in Margaret Mead's sense of an advanced society being one that offers more life choices to individual members while a primitive one is more limited and rigid about the roles open to its members. The Riding Women themselves don't mind, being clones who accept the clones'-eye view that you are, properly, an exemplar of your line, whatever that entails; but I, in the abstract, I would mind very much and in fact find that idea vaguely repugnant. But there are aspects of Grassland society which I admire very much, most of them taken from various Amerindian groups in their pre-conquest forms. Suzy Charnas ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 13:07:19 -0700 From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] Slave and Free To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU On the reviews posted by Petra: The Strange Worlds review of WALK goes for the "the message is that men are evil" and "radical agenda" line. This just makes me shake my head and wish I'd done a better job in this book. To me, the struggle of some of the male characters just to be decent (Captain Kelmz, Eykar, and many of the men they meet along the way) automatically counters the "men are intrinsically evil" idea. This isn't a book about women and Orcs but about psychologically de- formed people, men and women. An example of how for many readers just *rais- ing the question* is seen as propogating a message or agenda, because the question itself is forbidden -- the only acceptable answer is already "known" and must not be challenged. But the reviewer ends up recommending the book -- this reader recoils from the raising of the question, but can't resist the stimulation of exploring it. This refers back, by the way, to Margaret's question about teaching this work in classes: the recoil-response is bound to arise, and must be very hard to deal with. As long as it continues to occur, I guess the books are still "radical," which pisses me off, frankly. I was sure (when I be- gan) that by this time, thanks to the continuing dialog among all kinds of books on all this stuff, that these ideas and themes would be integrated into the genre discourse at least (I do not mean accepted, by the way). It's twenty five years after WALK was published, for Pete's sake! This book at least should be old hat by now, and the recoil response -- "What! What! Aagh, man-hater, man-hater, kill kill kill!" -- should be rare. Alas, I suspect it is not so. On the review of all the books at Emerald City: (spoiler for CONQUEROR'S CHILD) About the women of the Pool Towns being black -- I was determined that the Free fems' new version of the Holdfast was *not* going to be all white, as it would have to be given the racial cleansing that had been part of the establishment of the Old Holdfast of the men. That would have been ceding a vast victory to the enemy, at least in the short run. I read many years ago that given enough generations, presumably millions of years worth, a white population would eventually produce roughly the same racial variations we see today -- is that still accepted theory, anybody know? But the Free Fems could not possibly foresee that, nor would many readers, so -- if you want an example of authorial agenda, here one is! Also, why make it easier for fictional characters, when we know life just makes if harder and harder for real people (or we make it harder and harder for ourselves and each other)? One way of making a more effective fictional simulation of reality is to find ways to suggest the complexity of reality, which we all know is just one damned thing after another. So the Pool Towns women are black, and the fems have more internalized ickyness from the old ways to struggle with than the misogyny of sexism. Joyce Jones mentioned her appreciation of the birth scenes; I've never borne a child myself, but I love doing research, and I'm a good thief (but maybe that's saying the same thing . . . ). On Joyce's comment regarding the way in later books, examples of the Old Holdfast men's inhumanity toward women popped up now and then to remind readers of the malevolence of the regime the fems are trying to replace -- this was an authorial process of constant reevaluation and judgment-calls. The behavior of the fems (and the Riding Women) in the later books just wouldn't make any sense without the reader being reminded (or finding out) what their experience had been. Yet I didn't want to derail those books into a droning catalog of horrors, either -- particularly CHILD, where the pulse-beat is rising toward the exhilaration of new ways, new possibilities. I spent a lot of time considering how much I had to *show* of men trained in misogyny being beastly to women (and to each other), and how much could only tell, and have it do the work it had to do. Salalli's society of the Pool Towns, by the way, is meant as a rough approximation of our own "traditional" values -- nuclear families with one parent of either sex, homosexuality extant but disapproved of, etc. It didn't need a lot of exploration, being so familiar, assuming I got the signs of it clear enough to clue readers in. It was interesting to see, by the way, how little in the way of detail can suggest an entire society and its mores -- that's what you learn writing books as thick with folk as these are, as there is no room for expansiveness; an exigency of form. Margaret McBride commented on the way characters argue about moral issues; I worried that there was too much of this in the books, but I tend not to believe in fictional societies, particularly revolutionary or transitional ones, in which answers are too easily accepted. Argument is one way that characters "prove" their "reality" -- just as real people demonstrate their individual sense of right and wrong and the lessons of their individual experience by arguing with each other. I also had the example of the way decisions are taken in modern day Pueblo villages, which run by consensus (I lifted this for the Riding Women first, and then the Free adapted it from them); which makes for slow going, but better social cohesion in the long run. Anybody here read Molly Gloss' THE DAZZLE OF DAY? That book is full of the endless argument and rumination of a small society trying to figure out how to do right (it's Quakers in space, but with attention to the actual running of such a group by the members, beautifully written). Suzy Charnas ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 22:01:33 -0700 From: Keith Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] Slave and Free To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Perhaps I shouldn't comment, because I haven't read the last book, The Conqueror's Child and only read The Furies once several years ago. However, since Walk to the End of the World and Motherlines are two of my all-time favorite science fiction books, and two that I re-read periodically with undiminished enthusiasm, I'll go ahead... What I particularly like about these two were the feeling of contained inevitability, a sort of artistic *rightness* in both books, even given how very different the two worlds described were. I especially loved the surrealistic, but underlying realism, of Walk, the way all the hatreds of the day were drawn out into straight lines, with inevitable geometric intersections. To put it non-metaphorically, Eykar Bec's father's atrocities were as much a predictable consequence of his society's denial of any humanity to women as monopoly is of unrestricted capitalism. They don't have to happen, but all the conditions are there. (The puns in _Walk_ were great, too...) Motherlines, in integrating Alderra's story and her memories, and the culture of the Free Fems, had an even harder task - how to carry over the simplistic ideology of a very bigoted (the word seem inadequate) society into a much more complex one. Again, this story had its own internal truth. Alderra and the Free Fems remained true to their past and their world, and were allowed to co-exist, without pinching, prodding, uplifting or reshaping, until the new world changed them as slowly as it must. I also loved the way so many questions in Motherlines were left open-ended: the sharu, horse-culling, the rejection by the riding women, so wise in many things, of innovations brought by former Holdfast women. Even though it was by far the more hopeful of the two, this was one of the least "Disneyed" novels I've ever read. I thought that The Furies did not have this kind of autonomy. I kept waiting to see how the first two - thesis and antithesis, if you will, would produce the synthesis. But in the U.S., after a decade in which wrongs could be named out loud, and in which it was inconceivable we could go back, we did go back. Since even being able to speak about the wrongs done to women seemed to me what made _Walk_ possible, and to speak about alternatives to those wrongs made Motherlines possible, there just seemed to be no place for these books to go in the eighties and nineties. I read the Vampire Tapestry and Dorothea Dreams, and although I was disappointed that these were not the long awaited Third Book, they seemed to be what the author wanted to write at the time. They matched those exhausted, confused and conciliatory times and were enjoyable books in their own right. The Furies had more of a feeling of being written because of demand, rather than inclination. It seemed to me that no resolution at all had occurred in the outside world, and none was reflected in the internal world of this novel that was not imposed. This is an overlong post already, I'm afraid. But I do have to make one more comment, in response to Ms. Charnas's : >I ruminate sometimes about the trade-off of being on the one hand >released from the stricter exigencies of the market vs. being freed as >well from the market correctives to self-indulgence, diversion and sheer >laziness. The only valid duties of government are providing for children and supporting artists :-) ! Kathleen ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 24 Sep 1999 10:01:34 -0700 From: Jessie Stickgold-Sarah Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] Slave and Free To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU At 10:01 PM 9/23/99 -0700, Keith wrote: >Alderra and the Free Fems remained true to their past and their >world, and were allowed to co-exist, without pinching, prodding, uplifting >or reshaping, until the new world changed them as slowly as it must. Although I'm not sure this is what Keith meant, it reminded me of one of my favorite facets of these books, namely the endless discussion. I think this is something that's lacking in a lot of quasi-utopian visions: the idea that to get an even-handed society you have to let everyone have their say. And that's hard to do! In college I lived in a house of about twenty people which governed by consensus, more or less (a little veto power, a little moral suasion, a few requirements, the endless wrangle over house chores; I used to call it government by casserole), and it was agony. If only we had had the Conors, who were always right...but periodically someone would suggest a different way of governing ourselves--as one person pointed out, if we all *agreed* to use majority rule, we could--and we never changed. I love to see that in fiction. Motherlines shows us that, and The Conqueror's Child talks about it very explicitly, recognizing the failings and the necessity all at once. jessie ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 24 Sep 1999 16:26:37 -0400 From: "Janice E. Dawley" Subject: [*FSF-L*] BDG: Slave and Free -- Satire To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU On Thu, 23 Sep 1999 at 13:07:12 -0700, Suzy McKee Charnas wrote: >Daniel remarked on the satire of WALK being maybe a little too broad for the >serious intent of the book as a whole: this book did begin as an intentional, >not to say gleeful, satire of the whole Nixonian ethos of the time. For a film satire of government and the military it's hard to beat Kubrick's *Dr. Strangelove*. I watched it for the second time recently and thought it made a great companion piece to the Holdfast books. One could easily read Strangelove's vision of the mineshaft society, complete with several nubile breeding women for every man, as a version of the Refuge... ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 26 Sep 1999 11:27:06 -0700 From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] BDG: Slave and Free -- Satire To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Yup. You must understand that one of the wellsprings of WALK was a little item in the newspaper about how of all the "top govt officials" notified (sometime in the early 70's) that a place was reserved for them in an underground city at D.C. in case of nuclear attack, only Justice William O. Douglas declined to be included -- upon hearing that he would be required to abandon his wife and family and go "survive" with a lot of other powerful men (and their youthful female secretaries and aides, I assume). I didn't make up the basic premise, and neither did Kubrick: it's for real. (There are a other examples of this in literature -- out- rages or astonishments that readers take for the product of the author's imagination and praise her for, but if you dig a bit deeper you find that the author was only reporting some little known reality. I keep stumbling on these things and then forgetting them because it's so hard to accept them -- has anyone another example to offer? I just *know* I've had that parti- cular frisson of delighted horror at such a discovery a number of times, but the matter of it becomes as elusive as a dream later on; another way of say- ing that memory cells really do croak as you get older . . .). This Big-Boy Bunker still exists, by the way, in readiness for when the Big Boys themselves make the Final Fatal Error (fatal to all of us, not to them of course). An items about the place surfaces every ten years or so in the print media. It's supposed to be someplace in (that is, under) or near Arlington, and at last sighting was described, as I recall, as "the vertical city." Janice Dawley wrote: >For a film satire of government and the military it's hard to beat >Kubrick's *Dr. Strangelove*. I watched it for the second time recently and >thought it made a great companion piece to the Holdfast books. One could >easily read Strangelove's vision of the mineshaft society, complete with >several nubile breeding women for every man, as a version of the Refuge... ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 26 Sep 1999 11:27:10 -0700 From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] Slave and Free To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Jessie Stickgold wrote: >Although I'm not sure this is what Keith meant, it reminded me of one of my >favorite facets of these books, namely the endless discussion. I think this >is something that's lacking in a lot of quasi-utopian visions: the idea >that to get an even-handed society you have to let everyone have their say. I remember reading one of Marge Piercy's books about the sixties which had a small radical community like this, and I thought all the machinations of the members about who was to wind up sleeping with whom *every night* (since this was a "free love" commune) sounded ugly, horrific, and exhausting. I came up with the Conors so that important matters could maybe be decided soon enough not to park the action in a Sargasso of dissent and complaint for chapters at a time. I used to live near a food co-op in the North Valley here, and worked at the cash register a couple of times a week. I didn't attend many of the policy meetings, though; too slow for me. >government by casserole), and it was agony. If only we had >had the Conors, who were always right...but periodically someone would >suggest a different way of governing ourselves--as one person pointed out, >if we all *agreed* to use majority rule, we could--and we never changed. I >love to see that in fiction. Motherlines shows us that, and The Conqueror's >Child talks about it very explicitly, recognizing the failings and the >necessity all at once. > >jessie ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 26 Sep 1999 11:27:15 -0700 From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] Slave and Free To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Kathleen wrote: >What I particularly like about these two were the feeling of contained >inevitability, a sort of artistic *rightness* in both books, That's the payoff for honest extrapolation, so many thanks for the compliment. >atrocities were as much a predictable consequence of his society's denial >of any humanity to women as monopoly is of unrestricted capitalism. They >don't have to happen, but all the conditions are there. (The puns in >_Walk_ were great, too...) Maybe part of successful extrapolation is play, and if I've had the fun of it, it would be mean of me not to pass it along. Somebody ought to do a paper on word-play in SF -- there's a *lot* of it, and it tends to be good stuff (in the naming of things and people and processes and places); we use it as a sort of shorthand, to pack in big chains of meaning into very small labels thick with inference, and it may be one of the character- istics of SF that makes it hard for some readers of general fiction to get into. >the sharu, horse-culling, the rejection by the riding women, so wise in >many things, of innovations brought by former Holdfast women. One of the things that struck me in researching pastoralist and other rural societies was their deep conservatism, and I wanted to portray a conservat- ism based not so much in the Women's clone-reproduction (a facile SF assumption, I think) as in the caution of subsistence societies about changing what they know works for something they are promised will work better. A reminder, too, that this well-founded scepticism about new ways is with us still in many parts of the world, and is by no means irrational or stupid, either. >I thought that The Furies did not have this kind of autonomy. I kept >waiting to see how the first two - thesis and antithesis, if you will, >would produce the synthesis. But in the U.S., after a decade in which >wrongs could be named out loud, and in which it was inconceivable we could >go back, we did go back. Since even being able to speak about the wrongs >done to women seemed to me what made _Walk_ possible, and to speak about >alternatives to those wrongs made Motherlines possible, there just seemed >to be no place for these books to go in the eighties and nineties. Precisely. That was why I took such a long time-out of the Holdfast. When I began again, in the early nineties, I had it in mind to write CHILD -- the emergence onto new ground -- but it wasn't time yet. After a period of mulish denial, I gave in and wrote the book that had to happen before the characters could get to that place -- the war book, the anger book, THE FURIES. We were, and are, at war over all this, in more or less subtle ways, and I found that for me this was the only way to even try to get to the breathing space of CHILD. >The Furies had more of a feeling of being written because of >demand, rather than inclination. It seemed to me that no resolution at all >had occurred in the outside world, and none was reflected in the internal >world of this novel that was not imposed. I agree, no resolution has occurred, and for years I'd told people that I couldn't do the last book(s) because I am of my culture and my culture hasn't solved the problem yet. But in fact there *was* no demand (except an occasional wistful inquiry from a reader of the first two books); unless you mean an internal demand, on the author's part, that the damned story be *finished,* f'chris' sake. After about 1983, publishers didn't ask much about the next book in this series, let alone "demand" it. I had no assur- ance that THE FURIES would be publishable in the reactionary climate of the past two decades. I wrote it, finally, because it was the only way I could see to get to where I wanted to go, which was to a place where constructive things might begin to happen again. >The only valid duties of government are providing for children and >supporting artists :-) ! Great -- but don't hold your breath. Suzy Charnas ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1999 21:37:37 EST From: Bree To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU After reading Margaret Atwood's Cats Eye recently, i was left thinking about her comment "you can have a men's novel with no women in it except possibly the landlady or the horse, but you cant have a women's novel with no men in it". I began to consider the veracity/implications of this comment on its own terms, as well as starting to consider how men are represented in other novels. Please send me any thoughts you have on the above Bree ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1999 11:38:04 -0500 From: Robin Reid Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] men in women's stories To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU BREE: >After reading Margaret Atwood's Cats Eye recently, i was left thinking about >her comment "you can have a men's novel with no women in it except possibly >the landlady or the horse, but you cant have a women's novel with no men in it". I think she's right...thinking of the seventies feminist utopias, men are present in all timelines except Whileaway......Le Guin's LEFT HAND has Genly Ai, a human male, visiting Gethen (where nobody is biologically male or female all the time); Piercy's WOMAN ON THE EDGE where there are lots of male characters; other feminist utopias always have "men" present in some way (sometimes as visitors from outside, as Gilman does in HERLAND and Tiptree does in HOUSTON HOUSTON.... sometimes as part of society--Tepper's GATE and oh some others whose names are escaping me). Our campus is for the first time having several all women cast plays, but apparently, from the plot synopses given in the newspaper, the woman spent a lot of time talking about the men in their lives... Life under patriarchy? Difficulty of finding a woman only space that is only about women? Robin ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1999 10:56:30 -0700 From: SMCharnas To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU >After reading Margaret Atwood's Cats Eye recently, i was left thinking about >her comment "you can have a men's novel with no women in it except possibly >the landlady or the horse, but you cant have a women's novel with no men in it". So she's never read AMMONITE or MOTHERLINES; surprise, surprise. Unless by "women's novel" she means what the pub. trade means, which is family stories about generations of matriarchs and patriarchs, in which case it's a case of the type of book being self-defined to include men and women be- cause it centers on traditional family/clan structure and function. As for men's books with no women: consider a movie called THE RED TENT. It's an oldie (Peter Finch is in it, and he's been dead for years), and it's clearly a filmed stage-play (NOBODY nowadays makes a movie of a trial taking place in the living room/mind of an insomniac General look- ing back on the defining mess he made in his life, complete with dead folks sitting in to offer opinions and verdicts), and it is most distinctly a *men's* movie, about an ill-fated Arctic expedition and how other men rush to try rescue them. It's really about leadership issues in male groups essay- ing dangerous tasks, and the one female role in it is an irritating add- on they would have done much better without (and had a shorter, punchier film that doesn't insult and dismiss women by making one lacquered mannequin stand for us all in a cast of variegated, if similarly symbolic, men). Seems to me that a realistic story of women "without men in it" is pretty unlikely (I can't think of one) as long as the real world that women readers and authors have to live in is ruled and shaped by guys trying to grab, as Joanna Russ put it, all "the good stuff" for themselves. Hell, even MOTHER- LINES "has men in it" in the sense that the Riding Women are warriors large- ley to defend their society from the men across the mountains, and the Free Fems are deformed by lives of slavery to male masters. So AMMONITE is the only unassailable example I can think of right off the bat, even in SF. Suzy Charnas ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1999 14:17:02 -0400 From: Allen Briggs Subject: [*FSF-L*] absence of men To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU > So AMMONITE is the > only unassailable example I can think of right off the bat, even in SF. I started to come up with AMMONITE, too, but it occurs to me that men play a huge role in that novel by their absence. The world is defined in many ways by the lack of men. I think Atwood's point was that the stereotypical "men's adventure" or, perhaps, "western" novel has no women to speak of, but it's not noted or, noteworthy because of that, and the author doesn't have to explain or excuse it. Perhaps the feminist novel (SF or otherwise) is comparable to the early SF where it has to explain or excuse itself as a kind of jumping-off point. I.e., ERB's Barsoom stories started with the narrator talking about his uncle John Carter... Modern authors jump right in. -allen ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1999 12:38:01 -0700 From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] absence of men To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU >> So AMMONITE is the >> only unassailable example I can think of right off the bat, even in SF. > >I started to come up with AMMONITE, too, but it occurs to me that men >play a huge role in that novel by their absence. The world is defined >in many ways by the lack of men. Well, I'd take issue with that. If you mean any book without males still contains men by inference, then a book about men with no female characters still contains women by the inferential existence of the characters' mothers (unless they are clones all the way down or something). As long as humans are (mainly) a two-sex society, the presence of one sex infers the exist- ence of the other (unless explicitly denied). I think your description of a female world as inferring the male one it was made in response to gets us into definitions that are self-defeating, and I don't think this was what Atwood's comment means. I think she's talking about *actual characters*, male or female. AMMONITE contains, as I recall, no male characters, even in flashbacks (am I right about this?), while in MOTHERLINES Fems remember men they've re- lated to one way or another (and some Riding Women remember killing men or finding them dead on the borders). So even though no men are physically present, MOTHERLINES *could* be read as "containing" male characters even though in a distanced, tangential, way. >I think Atwood's point was that the stereotypical "men's adventure" or, >perhaps, "western" novel has no women to speak of, but it's not noted or, >noteworthy because of that, and the author doesn't have to explain or >excuse it. That's for sure. It's a given that the world of action is peopled by men. Suzy Charnas ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1999 15:21:28 -0400 From: Allen Briggs Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] absence of men To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU > >I started to come up with AMMONITE, too, but it occurs to me that men > >play a huge role in that novel by their absence. The world is defined > >in many ways by the lack of men. > > Well, I'd take issue with that. If you mean any book without males still > contains men by inference Not really. I'm sorry I wasn't more clear. I mean that even AMMONITE expends a fair bit of energy explaining why there are no males on the planet and the main character spends a good bit of time thinking about men hovering, literally, over the planet. I feel guilty because I haven't read MOTHERLINES yet. From your description, though, it is more what I think Atwood was looking and speaking about. It's quite possible that we have different ideas of what Atwood meant. > That's for sure. It's a given that the world of action is peopled by men. Heh. Depends on what you mean by "action." The Tiptree crowd seems pretty active. ;-) -allen ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1999 14:47:38 -0500 From: Todd Mason Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] absence of men To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Also, as usual, stereotyping is misleading--at least westerns have tended toward sexual integration (among other kinds) over the last half-century...certainly the best western novelists (and rarer short-story writers) of the last decades have been much less likely to create all-male worlds than their predecessors or lessers might have (many of the best, from Dorothy Hughes through Lee Hoffman to Carol Emshwiller, have been women; others, such as Ed Gorman and, obviously, Charles Portis, have written westerns with women protagonists). -----Original Message----- From: Allen Briggs [mailto:briggs@NINTHWONDER.COM] Sent: Tuesday, September 28, 1999 3:21 PM To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] absence of men > >I started to come up with AMMONITE, too, but it occurs to me that men > >play a huge role in that novel by their absence. The world is defined > >in many ways by the lack of men. > > Well, I'd take issue with that. If you mean any book without males still > contains men by inference Not really. I'm sorry I wasn't more clear. I mean that even AMMONITE expends a fair bit of energy explaining why there are no males on the planet and the main character spends a good bit of time thinking about men hovering, literally, over the planet. I feel guilty because I haven't read MOTHERLINES yet. From your description, though, it is more what I think Atwood was looking and speaking about. It's quite possible that we have different ideas of what Atwood meant. > That's for sure. It's a given that the world of action is peopled by men. Heh. Depends on what you mean by "action." The Tiptree crowd seems pretty active. ;-) -allen ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1999 13:10:33 -0700 From: Jessie Stickgold-Sarah Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] women without men To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU >After reading Margaret Atwood's Cats Eye recently, i was left thinking >about her comment "you can have a men's novel with no women in it except >possibly the landlady or the horse, but you cant have a women's novel with >no men in it". I'd interpret this as recognition of the fact that women are never able/allowed to live their lives without thinking of men, while the reverse certainly isn't true. Some SF has come fairly close (I'd suggest that SF is the only area where this can be done -- since it's so unreal! :) but even so, it's a tiny and difficult segment. Perhaps because the authors who come close are those who want to talk about who women might be without men--and it's hard to talk about that without explaining, or at least showing, how much of the popular concept of "woman" is created in relationship to men. Or to put it another way, it's difficult to describe "only women" without resorting to "women without men" -- for better or worse. I'd be interested in other suggesting for books that do fit this category. jessie ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1999 15:19:37 -0700 From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] absence of men To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU >> >I started to come up with AMMONITE, too, but it occurs to me that men >> >play a huge role in that novel by their absence. The world is defined >> >in many ways by the lack of men. >> >> Well, I'd take issue with that. If you mean any book without males still >> contains men by inference > >Not really. I'm sorry I wasn't more clear. I mean that even AMMONITE >expends a fair bit of energy explaining why there are no males on the >planet and the main character spends a good bit of time thinking about >men hovering, literally, over the planet. Ah; well, it's a while since I've read it, and I'd forgotten that. Point taken. Suzy ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1999 16:37:56 -0400 From: "Janice E. Dawley" Subject: [*FSF-L*] BDG: Slave and Free -- Bek and the Man Problem To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU -- There are spoilers for *The Furies* in this post. -- Looking back at the first message I wrote about *The Slave and the Free*, I am dissatisfied by my comment that it feels somehow shameful to admit that Eykar Bek is one of my favorite fictional characters. Having just finished rereading *The Furies*, I better understand my original hesitation. On the one hand, the Holdfast series is an investigation of the relationships women might have amongst one another in a world free of male oppression. Margaret Atwood's comment about men's and women's stories makes evident how many more of these sorts of investigations we need. And in a way, characters like Eykar Bek seem almost like a distraction from the business at hand. But on the other hand, we are not Riding Women; for the foreseeable future, men are not going away. And I don't like to imagine that in order for women to break free of oppression we will need to become oppressors ourselves. Behavior, not identity, is what ought to judged. But must we make generalizations that may be unfair to particular individuals in order to take any truly effective action? I am struck by how these books toe the line between these two positions. The anger that Alldera and the other Free Fems feel is fully justified, but what ought they to do about it? It's easy to say that genocide is never warranted, even in response to genocide, but I thought Charnas did a great job of showing how emotions that have built up over years of abuse simply cannot be banished for moral reasons. Something must be done about them. One of our oldest means of processing such emotions is to exact "an eye for an eye", and that is precisely what some of the Free Fems wish to do. I have to agree that there are some offenses that may never be forgivable. If I were given the opportunity to kill someone who had killed my loved ones, I would be tempted to do it. But then there are all the more questionable scenarios. What if the culprit is already dead? If they encouraged him in his wrongdoing, is revenge against his friends or peer group warranted? What if they didn't encourage it, but didn't prevent it either? What if they didn't know about his plans, but SHOULD have known and didn't take the trouble? What if they somehow benefited by his actions, even though they had no control over them, and might even have prevented them if they did? These questions hovered in my mind throughout *The Furies*. When the Free Fems return from the Wild, the men they face are for the most part not the same men as the ones they knew. For fems, conditions have changed for the better in the Holdfast (though apparently not through any moral agency on the part of the men -- fems are merely scarcer, more valuable resources), but the Free Fems relate to the men as if everything were the same. They need to "spend their ocean of old poisons," and this batch of men are MOSTLY guilty. Though I winced at the treatment of the prisoners and the use of epithets like "muck", after the impalement of the three fems, I too felt there was something justified about Reprisal Day. It was exactly the younger fems' trust in their kinder, gentler men that led to their deaths. Better then to trust in no man. But... then there is Bek. By most accounts, he is an amazing character. He begins *Walk to the End of the World* filled with the same ridiculous notions and prejudices about fems as the rest of the men. He rapes Alldera in response to her defiance. But then, miraculously, he begins to change! I can't express how affected I was by this section of the book when I first read it. Alldera, angry, despairing and reckless, speaks the truth of her experience to Bek. He listens, questions, and understands. Even in the present day, this almost NEVER happens; in the context of the Holdfast, it is even more remarkable. By the end of the book, when Bek helps Alldera escape from 'Troi, they have forged an undeniable bond. And in *The Furies* they meet again. Now Alldera is the master. A less realistic author may have found a way to affirm their bond, to make everything all right. But not Charnas. Alldera cannot afford to treat Bek like an equal. Her followers will not allow it. And she herself is conflicted. The best she can do is try to keep him alive. And so she addresses him as "muck" and forces him to kiss the ground at her feet. It hurts me to think of it. I want them to meet as equals, but... in the midst of all the badness, what can this one positive relationship mean? As Alldera says, "It's only because of you that I ever hoped we could all do better together. But you're a sport, a freak among your own sex, or maybe just a man so far out ahead of his fellows that your existence is as good as meaningless." (p. 277) Is it meaningless, though, if it motivates Alldera to resist becoming the sort of monster she despises? Perhaps E.M. Forster was naive in *Howards End* when he implied that if we "only connect..." in defiance of entrenched divisions, we will see our way to a better future. Economic and physical equality must be ensured in the public realm as well as the personal. But these books have affirmed for me (though sometimes painfully!) that no positive relationship can ever be meaningless. Thank you, Suzy. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1999 17:39:38 -0700 From: Keith Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] Slave and Free and Eykar Bek To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU On Sun, 26 Sep 1999, SMCharnas wrote: >snip< > One of the things that struck me in researching pastoralist and other rural > societies was their deep conservatism, and I wanted to portray a conservat- > ism based not so much in the Women's clone-reproduction (a facile SF > assumption, I think) as in the caution of subsistence societies about > changing what they know works for something they are promised will work > better. A reminder, too, that this well-founded scepticism about new ways > is with us still in many parts of the world, and is by no means irrational > or stupid, either. I knew I was getting more out of this than I was aware of! This must have become unconsciously at least part of how I thought of agrarian societies from then on, although not with anything near that level of reasoning. But then that's what good books do - yet another reason fiction (and visual art!) should be assigned with any dry fact oriented general course such as history, law, civics, etc. >snip< >> there just seemed >> to be no place for these books to go in the eighties and nineties. > > Precisely. That was why I took such a long time-out of the Holdfast. >snip< Whew! I was very nervous about how my lit-major style would come across to an actual living author. In school, our papers generally assumed all authors were deaf, dead, or capable of writing but not reading and it can be a shock when it's brought home that none of these conditions is true ;). >> The only valid duties of government are providing for children and >> supporting artists :-) ! > > Great -- but don't hold your breath. An attempted parody on the "collecting taxes and supporting defense" line, but it would be soooo nice if it were true. Kathleen (Now off to read The Conqueror's Child - perhaps just a wee bit late) ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1999 18:46:42 -0700 From: Keith Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] BDG: Slave and Free -- Bek and the Man Problem To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Apologies for the misleading subject line in my previous post. I decided not to combine the replies and forgot to change the header. On Wed, 29 Sep 1999, Janice E. Dawley wrote: >> snip very well-reasoned consideration of problems of justice for oppressed<< > But... then there is Bek. By most accounts, he is an amazing character. He > begins *Walk to the End of the World* filled with the same ridiculous > notions and prejudices about fems as the rest of the men. He rapes Alldera > in response to her defiance. But then, miraculously, he begins to change! I > can't express how affected I was by this section of the book when I first > read it. Alldera, angry, despairing and reckless, speaks the truth of her > experience to Bek. He listens, questions, and understands. Even in the > present day, this almost NEVER happens; in the context of the Holdfast, it > is even more remarkable. By the end of the book, when Bek helps Alldera > escape from 'Troi, they have forged an undeniable bond. I was also impressed by the realism in Bek's comment, "I know you almost as well as you know me. But it's worth nothing while I have the power of death over you." and a little further: "Only in dreams can a man be an all-purpose hero. I don't have an extra lifetime to spend helping to heal up the horror between men and fems - or even just between us two." Although he does free Alderra, he is very clear before that that his own mission of justice preempts hers. This is all I would have expected of anyone of his intelligence and perception in that context - no man to whom an idea alien to the whole society in which he has lived will drop the focus of his life in a week or two and adopt the new idea wholeheartedly. > Perhaps E.M. Forster was naive in *Howards End* when he implied that if we > "only connect..." in defiance of entrenched divisions, we will see our way > to a better future. I've probably said this before, but I've always thought the ending of _Passage to India_ was as appropriate to the situation between men and women: as long as inequity exists, it is the controlling factor, in spite of the decency of people on both sides and the sincerity of their desire for friendship. Kathleen ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1999 23:32:31 EDT From: Phoebe Wray Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] BDG: Slave and Free -- Bek and the Man Problem To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU In a message dated 9/29/99 8:35:59 PM, JDawley wrote: <> Thanks for this post... I concur with a lot that you say, and pondered the questions you pondered. Are there things that are truly *unforgivable.* Well, personally, I think there are, and think further that some things *ought not* to be forgiven, that those stand as markers for the future. I felt that in the Holdfast books. There was no way the Free Fems could just forgive and forget, nor should they. And the fact that Charnas didn't take an easy way out was a satisfying way of handling the conundrum. Thanks, too, to Suzy for the comments about your process in writing these books. Very much appreciated and interesting. best wishes, phoebe Phoebe Wray zozie@aol.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1999 18:27:05 0100 From: Petra Mayerhofer Subject: [*FSF-L*] BDG: The Slave and the Free To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU After our review meeting is (successfully) over I find time again to post. I am glad that the BDG discussion on _The Slave and the Free_ is apparently not yet over and I can still add my comments. Let me start saying that I liked the 3 Holdfast books I've read so far very much. I admire especially that we are never offered an easy escape or a romanticized view, unflinching describes it best (Others have said this (better) before). For this discussion I've reread the first 2 books and (for a change) I admired books even more on the second run. I remember that it was not easy for me to relate to _Walk to the End of the World_ (WEW) when I've read it for the first time. I think, the reason for my 'difficulties' with WEW was that it was so different from what I'd expected. The book is _not only_ a feminist dystopia, a criticism of a male-dominated society from the female perspective. It focuses much (more?) on the men - Kelmz, Servan, Eykar - who have a completely different agenda, different problems they are worried about. I read the book because it was recommended as feminist sf, probably because of that focus I had difficulties to connect to this second agenda. I wanted to be more open on rereading but succeeded only partially. I am afraid that I still do not take in big chunks of the book. I hoped for the discussion on the list but so far that other agenda is more or less ignored. I wondered whether I am imagining things. So, it was enlightening for me when Suzy Charnas wrote (on 23 Sep 99): > this book did begin as an intentional, not to say gleeful, satire of > the whole Nixonian ethos of the time. > It was only as I got into things that I recognized the subtext about > sexism, and it could well be that I never got the meld of these two > approaches exactly balanced in the final draft. If you see seams > there, it's the incompletely covered evidence of this change of > approach. For me the books falls into 2 parts. The first part is mostly concerned with the 3 men: Kelmz, Servan, and Eykar. The second (shorter) part focuses on the situation of the women. The 3 men all rebel against the Holdfast society. However, I think that Kelmz and Servan are not appreciated enough (and I like Eykar very much, too). On 23 Sep 99, SMCharnas wrote: > And I'm glad you like Eykar (you too, Janice); I'm very fond of him myself, > Now that I think of it, he and Servan are > the mirror pair, found in so much fiction especially adventure and > buddy stories, to the female pairing of Virgin and Whore, ie the Man > of Action and the Man of Thought. In the Strange Word's Review the 3 men are characterized as 'Honorable Warrior, Magnetic Cad, Sensitive Thinker' I somehow don't like these characterizations of Servan (Honorable Warrior fits Kelmz rather well IMO, what do people think of him?). IMO Eykar is also a Man of Action. After all, he escapes from Endpath, overthrows his father, advises Alldera on how to escape, etc. When we discussed _Wild Seed_ we stressed the importance of surviving. Servan is certainly a survivor, Eykar would never come so far without him, Servan does the dirty work for him (out of a sort of love). Why should surviving be a virtue when A... (name?) does it, and a bad thing when Servan does it? In addition, both times I read the part of the book told from Eykar's perspective I was shocked by how he despises his body, tries to overcome it, punishes it. Servan doesn't. Eykar cannot really enjoy anything (books excepted perhaps), Servan certainly can. That does not mean that I don't think that Servan is one of the bad guys in the book. Servan does not have any scruples, Eykar certainly has, Kelmz, too, but he is set very much in his opinions, not all admirable. What did others think of Servan? Did you perceive him only as bad? Have other list members understood the Holdfast economy? To me it is not completely clear. The juniors serve hoping to become seniors with all the attached privileges someday. Apparently some seniors are richer than others. How does this come about? And what's the exact difference between dark dreaming and the organized drug rituals? My experience with non-alcoholic drugs is nil, perhaps that's why I did not completely understand it. On 23 Sep 99, SMCharnas wrote: > The Strange Worlds review of WALK goes for the "the message is that > men are evil" and "radical agenda" line. This just makes me shake my > head and wish I'd done a better job in this book. For me that review was an example of how differently books can be interpreted. I wonder from what parts of the book the reviewer derived that message. It eludes me. Petra Petra Mayerhofer mailto:mayerhofer@usf.uni-kassel.de -- BDG website http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Comet/1304/ ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1999 13:35:43 -0700 From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] women without men To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Jessie wrote: >the fact that women are never >able/allowed to live their lives without thinking of men, while the reverse >certainly isn't true. Some SF has come fairly close (I'd suggest that SF is >the only area where this can be done -- since it's so unreal! :) Exactly -- this is the great value of SF not only to feminists/women but to any group subordinated to the dominant group -- a value that it's hard even to perceive, let alone exploit and exploit well. >it's a tiny and difficult segment. Perhaps because the authors who come >close are those who want to talk about who women might be without men--and >it's hard to talk about that without explaining, or at least showing, how >much of the popular concept of "woman" is created in relationship to men. >Or to put it another way, it's difficult to describe "only women" without >resorting to "women without men" -- for better or worse. I'd be interested >in other suggesting for books that do fit this catagory. You know, the inference here is that the concept of "men" is popularly conceived of as created without necessary reference to women, and I think that is true -- but it's also a damned lie, a lie that masculinist culture has fabricated to separate and exalt itself above women. One of the things feminist fiction of all kinds addresses -- by intention or inadvert- antly -- is the enormous degree to which men *are* defined and in fact de- fine themselves in relation to women. In our focus on trying to get past the false social construction that women are defined exclusively by their relationships to men, we sometimes neglect to work the other half of the equation: getting past the false social construction that men are de- fined without significant relationship to women. It happens automatically, really -- we accept the masculine insistence that men are not significant- ly related to women (except by dominating sexuality, which is not a rela- tionship so much as a style of politics) when we create male characters. I did this in WALK: Eykar scarcely thinks of his mother but pursues his father come hell or high water. Kelmz barely considers that he a mother, let alone sisters, daughters, etc. This attitude is built into the cul- ture, of course, but still -- the only one of the bunch of them who con- siders any variety of relationship with "fems" is Servan (at least until Eykar is reached by Alldera), and that's because he's a natural rebel and an outcast anyway, and being outrageous is a point of pride with him. Even by the end, in CHILD, the men are still not thinking of themselves as de- fined in any way by relations with women, except in the brute politics of slavery which are subject to political change. Maybe because they must first redefine their view of themselves as men with other men . . . beyond the rigid hierarchies of the Old Holdfast. I can now see a couple of things I wish I'd done about this . . . except it would have made another book! Suzy ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1999 13:35:51 -0700 From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] BDG: Slave and Free -- Bek and the Man Problem To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Janice wrote: >-- There are spoilers for *The Furies* in this post. -- >Alldera, angry, despairing and reckless, speaks the truth of her >experience to Bek. He listens, questions, and understands. Even in the >present day, this almost NEVER happens; It happens often in our fiction, but usually among male characters from dis- parate backgrounds -- one up, one down -- thrown together under grueling circumstances. Many "buddy" pictures fit, in a watered-down form, but the clearest example I can think of is that old movie with Sydney Poitier and Tony Curtis as fugitives chained together as they run -- THE DEFIANT ONES. >Alldera says, "It's only because of you that I ever hoped we could all do >better together. But you're a sport, a freak among your own sex, or maybe >just a man so far out ahead of his fellows that your existence is as good >as meaningless." (p. 277) Is it meaningless, though, if it motivates >Alldera to resist becoming the sort of monster she despises? His existence is crucial, but she's justified, in the light of her exper- ience, in doubting that his apparently anomalous humanity can be trusted as an indicator of the capacity of the other men to change. She's speaking still in the raw space of the war, which brought out the worst in men in- furiated (and terrified) by armed opposition from people they had always abused and despised, so it's not a calm, rational assessment. >these books have affirmed for me >(though sometimes painfully!) that no positive relationship can ever be >meaningless. Thank you, Suzy. The gratitude is all mine, believe me -- for readers patient, alert, and committed enough to stay a tough course through some hard, painful stories. A lot of readers can't, won't, and have told me so. Suzy ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1999 13:35:57 -0700 From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] Slave and Free and Eykar Bek To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Kathleen wrote: >>> there just seemed >>> to be no place for these books to go in the eighties and nineties. >> >> Precisely. That was why I took such a long time-out of the Holdfast. > >Whew! I was very nervous about how my lit-major style would come across to >an actual living author. In school, our papers generally assumed all >authors were deaf, dead, or capable of writing but not reading and it can >be a shock when it's brought home that none of these conditions is true ;). So, vot makes you tink I'm alife, dollink? The net could be channeling me . . . hmm. Story, anyone? Nah, it's undoubtedly already been done. I wish more authors would get into this kind of discussion with lit. academics of all levels; it would be good for everybody. Suzy ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1999 13:36:00 -0700 From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] BDG: Slave and Free -- Bek and the Man Problem To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Kathleen wrote: >I've probably said this before, but I've always thought the ending of >_Passage to India_ was as appropriate to the situation between men and >women: as long as inequity exists, it is the controlling factor, in spite >of the decency of people on both sides and the sincerity of their desire >for friendship. I think there's a lot of art -- fiction, scripts -- making this point (about institutionalized inequity, not personal ones of course) very clearly on the subject of race relations in America (I like the way you put it, by the way). A TV show worth watching, because it proposes a pair of women whose friendship *does* escape this control, is "One of the These Days," about a black woman lawyer and her white working class best friend. Also the recent film THE GREAT DIVIDE, with Steve Martin and Danny Glover, and even, more clumsily, BULLWORTH. I sometimes see this conflict (between egalitarian and generous ideals and iniquitous realities), specifically in regard to race, as the backbone (acknowledged or not) of America's national dis- course. suzy ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1999 13:36:04 -0700 From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] BDG: Slave and Free -- Bek and the Man Problem To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Phoebe wrote: >There was no way the Free Fems could just >forgive and forget, nor should they. And the fact that Charnas didn't take >an easy way out was a satisfying way of handling the conundrum. All it takes is authorial willingness to step back out of the way and let the characters hammer out an answer for themselves, instead of deciding an an- swer for them and then forcing them to conform to it. This is only a problem for authors whose characters never have enough life in them to move without authorial puppetry; or authors who can't stand the answers "autonomous" characters come up with. >Thanks, too, to Suzy for the comments about your process in writing these >books. Very much appreciated and interesting. Aw, c'mon -- this is the only fun we get, after the book is published! Besides, it only hurts authors and their interests when people see them through a veil of mystery and distortion. I like to throw a little light on the scene when I can (and please, people, tell me to shut up if you think I'm yakking too much here). Suzy ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1999 14:52:27 -0500 From: Todd Mason Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] : ANY DAY NOW & GRAND CANYON was: BDG: Slave and Free -- Bek and the Man Problem: Kathleen To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU You're referring, I believe, to ANY DAY NOW, the often quite good (shockingly good for a Spelling production) dramatic series on the Lifetime cable channel in the US (Saturdays 11pm ET/Sundays 10pm ET); on Global (Saturdays 9pm ET) in Canada. Likewise, the film you're referring to is, I think, GRAND CANYON, starring Glover, Martin, and Mary McDonnell, Alfre Woodard, and Kevin Kline. Having all these references on hand is a good thing... -----Original Message----- From: SMCharnas [mailto:suzych@SOCRATES.NMIA.COM] Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] BDG: Slave and Free -- Bek and the Man Problem A TV show worth watching, because it proposes a pair of women whose friendship *does* escape this control, is "One of the These Days," about a black woman lawyer and her white working class best friend. Also the recent film THE GREAT DIVIDE, with Steve Martin and Danny Glover, and even, more clumsily, BULLWORTH. I sometimes see this conflict (between egalitarian and generous ideals and inequitous realities), specifically in regard to race, as the backbone (acknowledged or not) of America's national dis- course. suzy ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1999 17:16:01 EDT From: Phoebe Wray Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] women without men To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU In a message dated 9/30/99 7:37:00 PM, Suzy wrote: <> So -- are you workin' on it???? phoebe ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1999 17:28:19 -0400 From: Frances Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] women without men: probably OT To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU This may be a tad off topic (I do apologize if it's too far off base!) but I've had that odd niggle at the back of my mind as to where I had read fiction taking place in worlds without men. It suddenly dawned on me: all the way back to childhood, the "girls' boarding school" genre. Not 100% man-free, admittedly, but about as close as it could have come in the "real" world at that time (though I suppose an excellent case could be made for treating the genre as fantasy). A couple of other titles that have come to mind: Dorothy Sayers's "Gaudy Night" and Josephine Tey's "Miss Pym Disposes". Very much women running their own world, despite male incursions. Frances ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1999 18:53:19 -0700 From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] : ANY DAY NOW & GRAND CANYON was: BDG: Slave and Free -- Bek and the Man Problem: Kathleen To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU >You're referring, I believe, to ANY DAY NOW, the often quite good >(shockingly good for a Spelling production) dramatic series on the Lifetime >cable channel in the US (Saturdays 11pm ET/Sundays 10pm ET); on Global >(Saturdays 9pm ET) in Canada. > >Likewise, the film you're referring to is, I think, GRAND CANYON, starring >Glover, Martin, and Mary McDonnell, Alfre Woodard, and Kevin Kline. > >Having all these references on hand is a good thing... HA HA HA HA HA -- ! Bring on the Alzheimers' meds! Thanks, of course you are right and I am -- browning out, or something. Actually, I kind of prefer GREAT DIVIDE to GRAND CANYON, so I guess some part of my mind just said, "Make it so," and hey, presto -- Suzy ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1999 23:58:44 -0700 From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] women without men To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU >In a message dated 9/30/99 7:37:00 PM, Suzy wrote: > ><with other men . . . beyond the rigid heirarchies of the Old Holdfast. I >can now see a couple of things I wish I'd done about this . . . except it >would have made another book!>> > >So -- are you workin' on it???? NO! NO! A THOUSAND TIMES, NO! Listen, I've been trekking through various hells with these people since about 1970, I'm sixty years old, and I want to write about FLUFFY BUNNIES for a while. Isn't it bad enough that Volume Three went and turned itself into Volume Three and Volume Four? Now you want VOLUME FIVE? Have you no decency, miss? Have you no decency? Jeez! Seriously, now: the moment for doing the kind of thing I was talking about has passed. It would have been some further exploration of the more subtle aspects of the men's internal changes in attitude toward women, femaleness, their own outdated "values" and the crimes and brutality committed in their light, and the development of the men's culture through self-destruction, defeat, and attempts at revitalization. What you got of this was glimpses intended to set the reader's mind to filling in the gaps, so that the focus wouldn't shift from the fems and the Riding Women to the people who usually get all the attention anyway, ie, the men. So that story is pretty much told as a sort of shadow tale of the Fems' story in the four books currently extant, and since I seem to be constitutionally incapable of ever doing the same thing twice in my work, it's very unlikely that I'll ever go back and retell it from another angle. Which is not to say that I would never -- not ever, not for the next fifteen or twenty years if I stay an active writer that long -- go *forwards* in that same world, but it would be far forward, I think, to a whole new situa- tion and the fun of figuring out how we got there from here. BUT on the other hand, that's a way of damming up readers' imaginative ideas of what the Holdfast's future might be, which I hesitate to do. And such a book would also be a *huge* amount of work. Fluffy bunnies are easy. Which would *you* choose? Actually, I'm at work on a book about my very odd dad, who was essentially an intellectual/artist/street bum who lived my husband and me for the last twenty years of his life and was, I think, a *real* New York bohemian, not the fake kind. Might be publishable, might not. Interesting to work on, though, and light-years away from the Holdfast. Suzy ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1999 23:58:51 -0700 From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] women without men: probably OT To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Frances wrote: >fiction taking place in worlds without men. It suddenly dawned on me: all >the way back to childhood, the "girls' boarding school" genre. Not 100% >man-free, admittedly, but about as close as it could have come in the "real" >world at that time (though I suppose an excellent case could be made for >treating the genre as fantasy). > >A couple of other titles that have come to mind: Dorothy Sayers's "Gaudy >Night" and Josephine Tey's "Miss Pym Disposes". Very much women running >their own world, despite male incursions. Also the weird little genre of nun-stories, as in THE NUN'S STORY, IN THIS HOUSE OF BREDE, and more recently a number of mystery tales with nun-detect- ives. Really (come on, some of you have read these -- ). I can't recall any recent girls' school stories, though, but then girls' schools vanished for a while (and are only now making a come-back, at least in enlightened (and crazy) places like California, if there *are* any places like California. I think these books provided a sanity-reinforcing counterbalance to all the bullshit female-dominated hive societies being written about in SF at the time; though come to think of it, how many of these monstrosities *were* there, actually? Everybody always mentions "Consider her Ways," and "Virgin Planet" (that was Anderson, right?), and there's a book called RESURRECTION DAYS but it's a spoof of the form. I get the feeling sometimes that a very small handful of standardly misogynistic books and stories are taken to typify all SF in a way that's not really accurate. Yes, most of the SF that I read as a kid was inherently sexist in a casual, unexamined way, just like everything else in literature and society at the time (the men went off on adventures, the women programmed the nuclear kitchen and got rescued from monsters). But the truly pathological stuff -- Edmund Cooper's horrible woman-hating tales, and nasty, salivating stories about smart women getting fertilized by orchids ("take that, you frigid bitch!" more or less) etc. -- came later, around the time of feminist stirrings in the overculture -- the late sixties, that is. Does that sound like reality to anybody (asks the woman who some- how translated GRAND CANYON into GREAT DIVIDE without blinking an eye)? Suzy ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 1 Oct 1999 16:24:31 -0400 From: "Janice E. Dawley" Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] BDG: Slave and Free -- Bek and the Man Problem To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU I wrote: >>Alldera, angry, despairing and reckless, speaks the truth of her >>experience to Bek. He listens, questions, and understands. Even in the >>present day, this almost NEVER happens; And Suzy McKee Charnas replied: >It happens often in our fiction, but usually among male characters from dis- >parate backgrounds -- one up, one down -- thrown together under grueling >circumstances. Many "buddy" pictures fit, in a watered-down form, but the >clearest example I can think of is that old movie with Sydney Poitier and >Tony Curtis as fugitives chained together as they run -- THE DEFIANT ONES. Yes. I was thinking specifically of women and men when I said this. When I talk about feminism with most men I get one of two reactions: 1) they are hostile in one form or another; 2) they act as if they already understand what I am getting at when it's obvious that their understanding is superficial at best; if I persist this often metamorphoses into 1). Men like Bek, who are willing to see the truth, even when spoken in anger, are extremely rare (at least in my experience). >The gratitude is all mine, believe me -- for readers patient, alert, and >committed enough to stay a tough course through some hard, painful stories. >A lot of readers can't, won't, and have told me so. Sadly true. Though I have been surprised at the success of a recent project: reading the books aloud to my friend Orson. Not only is he enjoying the tale, I am experiencing a new dimension of the texts by speaking the words. It's been very interesting. Janice E. Dawley ............. Burlington, VT http://homepages.together.net/~jdawley/ Listening to: Moby -- Play "Reality is nothing but a collective hunch." - Lily Tomlin ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 1 Oct 1999 23:52:22 -0700 From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] BDG: The Slave and the Free To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Petra wrote: >Have other list members understood the Holdfast economy? To me it is not >completely clear. The juniors serve hoping to become seniors with all the >attached privileges someday. Apparently some seniors are richer than >others. How does this come about? Through corruption. That's one of the Juniors' major complaints: they *know* that the system is not only rigged against them, but on top of that powerful Seniors manipulate it to further their own wealth and influence beyond what they are entitled to by virtue of mere seniority. In other words, same as it ever was, except much of the wealth transfer goes via exchanges of access to scarce goods, and favors and favorites, since this is a cash-poor economy. I never worked this out in detail because I figured that we are all so familiar (alas) with how easily *any* system of politics and economy is corrupted that readers could easily fill in the blanks for themselves. The powerful *always* find means to accrete more power around themselves at the expense of the less powerful, at least so far as I know. >And what's the exact difference between dark dreaming and the organized >drug rituals? My experience with non-alcoholic drugs is nil, perhaps that's >why I did not completely understand it. I'm a non-druggie myself, Petra, but I worked for a while in a drug-treatment program for High School kids back east, around the time of the LSD scares in the sixties. I drew on that experience, assuming a somewhat more sophisti- cated drug had developed, with more "steerable" results. The Dreamings org- anized by the State are directed, through the early conditioning of boys, to provide visions conforming with the State myths of religion and history, and the State's models of virtuous (literally) behavior. It's a means of mind- control and imposed pseudo-solidarity, in that it's a group endeavor so that nobody can go off on independent vision-jags of his own, or anyway that's the theory. DarkDreaming is taking this drug (which includes factors to increase suggest- bility, of course) in private, or semi-private, with a "facilitator" whose job is to guide you *out* of the normal repertoire of State sanctioned visions and into private pathways that may lead anywhere -- specifically, to discovery of your true inclinations, tastes, beliefs, and needs, all the real stuff that is rigorously rammed down in favor of the "official" ones that are supposed to be proper to men. It's an attempted escape from the ferocious repression of the Holdfast hierarchy, and as such is seen as dangerous and criminal, and indication of a flawed character contaminated in some way with "anarchic" or rebellious "female" traits. Does that clarify the situation a little? You should know that when I began writing WALK I had a *much* more complex drug-based religion as a kind of social centerpiece, but realizing that it was a) too complicated to under- stand and b) rather boring, I shrunk it as more interesting emphases emerged during the writing, and it's possible that in that process I lost some detail needed to keep the distinction you ask about in focus. Suzy Charnas ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 1 Oct 1999 23:52:30 -0700 From: SMCharnas To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Petra wrote: >The 3 men all rebel against the Holdfast society. However, I think that Kelmz >and Servan are not appreciated enough (and I like Eykar very much, too). When my half-brother, a computer-chip-salesman and ex-air force, read WALK, he remarked wistfully on Kelmz' death and wondered if I could possibly bring the Captain back later. I did consider it, in THE FURIES, but already had my hands so full of unruly characters that I decided against it. In fact -- wow -- I'm just seeing this -- I do believe Kelmz mutated into the character of Setteo! Hot damn! Anybody else see this? The link is the fascination with animals as magical. >In the Strange Word's Review the 3 men are characterized as 'Honorable >Warrior, Magnetic Cad, Sensitive Thinker' > >I somehow don't like these characterizations of Servan (Honorable Warrior >fits Kelmz rather well IMO, what do people think of him?). IMO Eykar is also >a Man of Action. After all, he escapes from Endpath, overthrows his father, >advises Alldera on how to escape, etc. I'd say he's a Man of Thought only by comparison to Servan, who is your basic gimme-guy. Servan does things "because I can" and worries about the implica- tions later. Not that he's stupid, but a lot of his manipulative clever- ness revolves around getting himself out of dangerous situations that he has blithely waltzed into on impulse. I sometimes think of him as the Trickster of some Indian cultures (US) -- Coyote, Raven, others. Part of his story is about the negative pole of that kind of behavior/character, particularly when you are not a kid any more (in CHILD) -- it gets to be a lot less appealing and a lot more destructive to others. Eykar worries everything to death, before and after it happens, and acts because he must and with forethought, and has a thing for books that Servan could never understand or, literally, sit still for. So while the labels from that review are not adequate to the characters, I don't think they're too far off as rough indicators. >When we discussed _Wild Seed_ we stressed the importance of surviving. >Servan is certainly a survivor, Eykar would never come so far without him, >Servan does the dirty work for him (out of a sort of love). Why should >surviving be a virtue when A... (name?) does it, and a bad thing when Servan >does it? Good question; maybe because Alldera uses her survival to try to improve survival chances of others, while Servan only considers himself (mostly). But if you judge by *results,* which one of these two causes the most may- hem? I don't know the answer. >In addition, both times I read the part of the book told from Eykar's >perspective I was shocked by how he despises his body, tries to overcome >it, punishes it. I was after the interior experience of a certain kind of ascetic male, the sort who fills many slots in various Christian hierarchies, for ex- ample; people who can hardly wait to get out of this crazy, demanding flesh and off this lunatic, tragic planet, so they often wind up in religion, straining madly upward and outward but without the spaceship, as it were. People who take themselves very, very seriously, and thereby make their own (and other people's) lives hell. It's a kind of adolescent angst that intellectual boys may never outgrow. Eykar does, because I force him, I pound on him until he *must* move beyond it. I wanted to see what it might take. Took a *lot*. >What did others think of Servan? Did you perceive him only as bad? Oh, I love his spirit, his sarcastic optimism, his energy and imagination, his knowingness and willingness to look beyond what he's been taught -- don't we all admire a rebel, at least a little? But when he's a shit, he's a worse shit than most because he's smart enough to know (or anyway sus- pect) better. I'm glad to hear that some readers find him attractive as well as awful, because to be able to be convincing as a leader there have to be attractive aspects to him *that are true,* not assumed. I don't think men follow leaders who are totally repulsive -- why would they? And I wanted it to be clear that Eykar's solution, in CHILD, *costs* -- it hurts and it costs, because for men to give up that style of casually brutal machismo and cunning would be painful, don't you think? It *looks so good,* and it has the energy of simplicity (me for myself alone) and beauty, or who would follow? Suzy ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 1 Oct 1999 23:52:41 -0700 From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] BDG: Slave and Free -- Bek and the Man Problem To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Janice wrote: >I have been surprised at the success of a recent >project: reading the books aloud to my friend Orson. Not only is he >enjoying the tale, I am experiencing a new dimension of the texts by >speaking the words. It's been very interesting. It's also a sensual pleasure. I read my own work aloud to an empty room before it goes to my editor first because there are always errors of style and pacing and repetition etc. that can *only* be caught by ear, and I can only do this work if the book is absolutely as good as I can get it to be at the time it's completed -- even down to the smallest things -- be- cause then later on I *never* have to be embarrassed by slapdash work or evidence of haste when I re-read my own work, or someone else criticizes it (this includes, sometimes letting by a passage that I know isn't quite right, but I also know I don't know how to set it righter but the story requires that this bit not be left out). But secondly, with most of my work, there's a real reward in *hearing* the text, all of it, unroll by voice (so much so that I resent it a bit when I catch a glitch during reading, because it interrupts the roll of the sound -- that's why the method exposes errors so clearly). But I'm also the kind of reader who could only do certain "big books" on tape, like the great Russians, and the Bible from end to end, so maybe it's all just a quirk. Best recent discovery via tape, Byatt's POSSESSION, which turned me off on paper, is utterly luscious by ear. By not reading aloud socially any more I think we're losing a whole dimension of fiction; too bad. Suzy Charnas ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 2 Oct 1999 18:36:10 EST From: Bree Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] Further to representation of men To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Suzy and other list subscribers, I think what i meant by "other novels" was an attempt to view the representation of men made by various other female authors in relation to gender, the body, and characterisation. For example Adrienne Rich evokes a vision she specifically genders female:- Vision begins to happen in such a life as if a women quietly walked away from the argument and jargon in a room and sitting in the kitchen, began turning in her lap bits of yarn, calico and velvet scraps putting the tenets of a life together with no mere will to mastery, only care for the man-lived, unending forms in which she finds herself. I think its this sort of "pulling together" in an ordinary world that Adrienne Rich talks about in "Transcendental Etude" which has accorded the status of "vision". Is this so?? Should it be?? As you can see my original thoughts have taken a slight tangent yet i think the comments made by Atwood have been addressed by many great authors (V.Woolf, A.Carter, T.Morrison). Her comments urged me to go back and analyse the representation of men within these novels more thoroughly then i had done before and in turn had wondered if others had looked at the same issues in their readings. Thank you for your comments.... im hoping that more can be discussed on this issue as i am very interested in its development throughout feminist science fiction. Regards, Bree >From: SMCharnas >To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU >Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1999 10:56:26 -0700 > >>After reading Margaret Atwood's Cats Eye recently, i was left thinking about >>her comment "you can have a men's novel with no women in it except possibly >>the landlady or the horse, but you cant have a womens novel with no men in >>it". I began to consider the veracity/implications of this comment on its >>own terms, as well as starting to consider how men are represented in other >>novels. > >What do you mean by "other novels" -- other than what? > >Suzy Charnas ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 2 Oct 1999 22:47:07 +1000 From: Julieanne Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] Further to representation of men To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU At 18:36 2/10/99 EST, Bree wrote: > >I think what i meant by "other novels" was an attempt to view the >representation of men made by various other female authors in relation to >gender, the body, and characterisation. > >I think its this sort of "pulling together" in an ordinary world that >Adrienne Rich talks about in "Transcendental Etude" which has accorded the >status of "vision". Is this so?? Should it be?? > >As you can see my original thoughts have taken a slight tangent yet i think >the comments made by Atwood have been addressed by many great authors >(V.Woolf, A.Carter, T.Morrison). Her comments urged me to go back and >analyse the representation of men within these novels more thoroughly then i >had done before and in turn had wondered if others had looked at the same >issues in their readings. Bree - I remember thinking of these issues, when watching films. Many popular films, which feature women as main characters, still focus heavily on male characters, (or particular male influence on their lives) - even when the male characters have little, or no, actual presence in the film. I may be remembering the wrong author, but I think it was Virginia Woolf who wrote one of her women characters saying to her husband, that the reason women knew far more about men, than men did women - is for the same reason African slaves knew more about their white masters, than the reverse. Like the slaves, women's lives depended on it, and they were defined by their relationship to their oppressor. One of the things I love most about feminist sci-fi is its exploration of 'worlds' which question, redefine, or even remove that definition. In WALK and throughout the books, the women are constantly having to redefine their 'visions' of what it means to be women who are undefined by their relationship to men. This is a relatively new concept to women as a whole, and in feminist sci-fi (and feminist art) its still in its 'infancy', so to speak. Julieanne ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 2 Oct 1999 12:20:21 -0700 From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] Further to representation of men To: FEMINISTSF-LIT@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU >One of the things I love most about feminist sci-fi is its exploration of >'worlds' which question, redefine, or even remove that definition. In WALK >and throughout the books, the women are constantly having to redefine their >'visions' of what it means to be women who are undefined by their >relationship to men. This is a relatively new concept to women as a whole, > >Julieanne I hadn't thought about it in those terms, but yes, I agree; and it seems to me that what Eykar is demanding throughout the last two books is that the men redefine what it means to be a man undefined by their relationship to women: to get themselves sorted out first without dragging women in as the bedrock of definition ("Well, whatever I am I'm not THAT"), the unwilling Other, enemy, and prize. Only then can they be accepted back into society as human beings on a level with the rest of the New Holdfast, maybe. Only I'm not at all sure it's *possible*, if it's true that every child of whatever gender initially defines itself as NOT MOM, if you see what I mean -- the formation of ego-awareness being grounded in distancing the female from the get-go (I/ME = NOT-MOM). So what may be possible is simply a practical requirement, by men of men, that the inevitable Other be treated as existing on a level of parity rather than equality: I/Me = not-mom AND not-better-than-mom, not-worse-than-mom. It's almost impossible to *say*, let alone think through! To turn to easier matters -- I've been enjoying this discussion of my work so much that I would suggest offering Eleanor Arnason the opportunity to join or at least listen in on the upcoming discussion of A WOMAN OF THE IRON PEOPLE (that is slated next, isn't it?). She may decline if asked, but I'd sure hate for her to miss the opportunity if she *would* like to join. Thoughts? Suzy Charnas