Review of The Feminine Future: Early Science Fiction by Women Writers ed. by Mike Ashley

Regardless of preferred genre, most readers know the names Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, and H. Rider Haggard.  On the strength of Jekyll and Hyde, Captain Nemo, the lost worlds of Africa, and Martians attacking Earth, they are considered pioneers, and by default, stanchions of science fiction and fantasy of the late 19th century.  And all are men.  Who were the women writing speculative fiction at the time?   Unless the reader is a connoisseur of 19th and early 20th century genre, their answer is probably like mine: don’t know even if there were women writing spec fic.  Having just finished editor Mike Ashley’s The Feminine Future: Early Science Fiction by Women Writers (2015, Dover Publications), I have been educated: there were women writing in that period, and not just writing, but producing stories of similar, groundbreaking quality as Verne, Wells, Stevenson, Haggard, and the rest.

The Feminine Future anthologizes fourteen short stories published between 1876 and 1930 by women writers.  Having read this byline, my initial concern was that Ashley had little material to work with, and therefore selected stories with only the thinnest of connections to sf.  My concerns were very misplaced. The stories selected are undeniably genre.  The speculative elements not minor or incidental, they occupy fundamental positions or are the foundations upon which the stories are built.  Whether it be robots or alternate history, shifts in time or social experiments, each possesses a recognizable trope or element still in use today, including some that are arguably their first appearance in print.

Review of Four Ways to Forgiveness by Ursula Le Guin

The 1990s are a somewhat intriguing period in the career of Ursula Le Guin.  Publishing only one at the outset (Tehanu in 1990), the decade would end without another novel hitting the shelves.  She was far from idle, however.  Publishing almost fifty short stories and a handful of collections, Le Guin remained hard at work through her seventh decade.  (She is currently in her ninth and still writing.)  With Tehanu as the opening salvo, the vanguard of her efforts in this time was to revise and consolidate her worldview regarding gender, family, society, and sexuality, amongst other common themes.  Putting all these ideas in one pot is her collection Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995). 

Four Ways to Forgiveness contains “Betrayals,” “Forgiveness Day,” “A Man of the People,” and “A Woman's Liberation”—all novellas published separately between 1994 and 1995.  Three told from the perspective of women and one a man, all four involve the neighboring planets of Yeowe and Werel, and are set in Le Guin’s ongoing Hainish series—marginally, as with all the other related stories.  Bound together by a handful of strong threads, slavery, rural life, culture, social revolution, race, gender, and the meaning of sexuality form the ideological foundation upon which the four stories are built.

Review of "Tehanu" by Ursula Le Guin

Ursula Le Guin, upset at herself for the lack of feminist representation, decided to revisit her beloved Earthsea setting and write a new tale after 25 years away from the trilogy.  Tehanu the result, readers who loved the first three books should approach this, the fourth, with an open mind.  Feminism, particularly family values and inner strength, comprises the strongest subject matter of the novel, making for a read that requires an emotional understanding of character interaction, male and female alike, the excitement and entertainment moved to the background.

Tehanu opens with Tenar (of The Tombs of Atuan fame), now in middle-age and living a domestic life on the isle of Gont.  Children grown, her life takes a new direction upon the death of her husband and the discovery of an abused child left for dead in a fire outside her village.  Taking the child, named Tehanu, under her wing, Tenar decides to visit her old friend Ogion.  After a long walk over the mountain, the pair find they are needed for more than just social reasons at the old hermit’s home.  While caring for Ogion and his home in his final days, a special visitor arrives in a fashion that resolves one point of ambiguity from The Farthest Shore.  The visitor likewise in need of care, a new round of concerns—far different than those of her domestic life—arise, throwing Tenar’s life into a turmoil she thought she’d left behind. 

The first three books of Earthsea, while containing a variety of moral and personal themes, featured elements of the fantastic in parallel.  Dragons, magic, spells, Old Powers, and the like all played differing roles in the development of of Ged, Tenar, and Arren.  Tehanu, however, is entirely different.  The novel realist save three moments of the fantastic, Le Guin shifts the focus of the narrative drastically in the direction of group interaction, in particular the intra-development of her protagonists.  The lessons the characters learn prove that humans never stop growing older and wiser.  Tenar, for example, must come to terms with the fears and limitations imposed by her previous choices in life as well as position in society.  Tehanu, due to her abuse as a child and subsequent deformation, likewise faces a host of discrimination that must be overcome if she is to find harmony within herself.  The strength and support they gain from within and each other is the message of the novel.

Therefore, it should be written clearly that Tehanu is unlike the previous three books in the Cycle.  Readers expecting a story in line with the bildingsroman pattern will be disappointed.  Those who have matured with Le Guin, however, will find a wealth of value in the strong individual and family focus of the new narrative.  Without spoiling the story, drama and tension do exist, but on terms infrequently used in fantasy.  It is fantasy of the bucolic, fantasy of the individual, and most importantly, fantasy of the nuclear group, with the ultimate statement by Le Guin that family is the building block of society.  

Faults, well, there are moments in the story that Le Guin seems to be trying too desperately to make up for what she perceived as a lack of feminist viewpoints in the earlier novels.  The moralizing over-handed or drama melo’, at times the message of a scene is forced, hitting the reader like a hammer rather than a pillow.  Little subtlety to the narrative, thematic material strikes at times perhaps harder than necessary.

In the end, Tehanu is sure to cause a reaction.  Those who loved the original series for its supernatural elements or usage of standard fantasy tropes may be disappointed.  In defiance of fantasy cliché, Le Guin has penned a story with family and women’s issues at its heart, trying to balance the male-centric nature of the earlier three books.  Thus, those who enter the novel without expectation and have an awareness for the manner in which social relationships are paralleled with personal development will feel rewarded.  Due to the novel’s abstraction from the familiar Earthsea setting—story focus unlike anything the archipelago has yet seen—comparisons to other fantasy novels is difficult.  In fact, Le Guin herself thought the book would stand alone, and titled it Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea. However, the premise and purpose proved so fertile that she has since written two additional books, Tales of Earthsea and The Other Wind, rounding out the Cycle at six total.  

(For those who have read the book and the Earthsea Cycle as a whole, you may be interested in reading a paper I wrote on its Daoist tenets and angles on contemporary theory called "Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle: Paralleling Contemporary Theory with an Eye to the Past".  Part I is here and Part II, here.) 

Review of 'The Tombs of Atuan" by Ursula Le Guin

Having successfully penned a young man’s Jungian coming to terms with self in A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula Le Guin set out to write another bildungsroman.  This time a young girl’s coming to terms with herself as a woman in society, The Tombs of Atuan was published three years later in 1971.  Certainly not as strong a feminist statement as later stories of the Earthsea Cycle, Tombs is nevertheless squarely focused on a young woman’s coming of age, filled out with all of the wisdom and insight into religion and culture we’ve come to expect from Le Guin.

The Tombs of Atuan opens with a child being taken from her parents to live at the temple tombs on the Kargish island of Atuan (the Kargish are a white-skinned, war-like culture appearing at the beginning of A Wizard of Earthsea).  Too young to know better, Arha, as she is called by the all-female priesthood, is led through the initiation ceremonies of their archaic religion and raised amongst the decay and ruin of its temples and tombs.  External influence at their remote desert institution non-existent, the dogma of Kargish religion molds and shapes Arha into High Priestess as years of tradition have done her predecessors.  Everything goes smoothly in Arha’s education until a mysterious man—a forbidden man—bearing wisdom acutely opposite to what she’s been taught comes to their temple.  That he also seeks the other half of the Ring of Erreth-Akbe only deepens the intrigue.

Containing significantly less of the magic, spells, and wizards of A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan has its own identity as a fantasy novel in Earthsea.  The story of a young woman’s discovery of freedom, the narrative depends less on the supernatural and more on character interaction toward resolving the issues that arise.  A basic knowledge of ‘true names’, Earthsea cultures, and layout of the islands helps, but it’s not necessary to have read Wizard to appreciate Tombs.  

A great literary device as well as wonderfully described set piece, the pitch-black labyrinth which Arha explores beneath the temples is one of the most intriguing aspects of Tombs.  (Vital enough, Le Guin even includes a map of the maze-like tunnels.)  No stronger symbolism could be attached to the blinded manner in which the young ladies of the temples are led through knowledge regarding adolescence, sexuality, and men in general.  Without spoiling matters, Arha’s exploration of the labyrinth and her experiences walking the dark corridors make for great literature.  But how she unlocks the potential she finds there is the reason the book won the Newberry Honor Award. 

In the end, The Tombs of Atuan is Le Guin in full form, though she would later admit not having thought the entirety of Arha’s situation through.  (A certain channeling of masculinity stains what is otherwise a narrative of feminine discovery.)  Readers should expect a coming-of-age story, but one wholly different than Ged’s.  Elements of the supernatural do exist, but Le Guin uses them subtly, sending the characters out on stage for dialogue rather than magical pyrotechnics.  Like Wizard, Tombs is stuck somewhere between YA and adult, and can therefore be appreciated by both.  

(For those who have read the book and the Earthsea Cycle as a whole, you may be interested in reading a paper I wrote on its Daoist tenets and angles on contemporary theory called "Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle: Paralleling Contemporary Theory with an Eye to the Past".  Part I is here and Part II, here.)

Review of "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions" by Edwin Abbott

The first time a person sees a sample of pond water through a microscope is an eye-opening experience.  The life teeming there is mind-boggling—literally a whole new world suddenly making itself available to the mind’s eye.  Edwin Abbot’s 1884 Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions intends the same revelatory experience for readers.  An open mind the only tool needed to understand his import, no microscope or scientific knowledge is necessary.  Fantasy in the most abstract sense, Flatland put satirical geometric fantasy on the map.  The only entry thus far, its uniqueness is indeed special.  

Through the eyes of Square and his native Flatland, Abbot depicts life in a two-dimensional world.  Existence reduced to geometric shape, the more symmetrical angles a person has, the more intelligent they are considered, and as a result, treated.  The educated of Flatland are squares, pentagons, octagons or such, while soldiers are isosceles triangles who use their acute angle for attack.  Leaders possess enough sides to be considered circles, while women are only a line and have to shout everywhere they go so people can avoid being punctured by one of their two ends.  His job good and children’s futures bright (they are pentagons), everything is going smoothly in Square’s life.  But things suddenly take a turn when a presence appears that announces itself as coming from another dimension—a third dimension.  Square’s adventures begin.

Though the tone may seem laughable, Abbot strikes a number of serious social chords in Flatland.  All is satirical allegory.  As can be seen in his literal shaping of women, their position in society is wholly different than the men’s.  Freedoms greatly limited, they must announce their presence everywhere and are instructed to spend as much time in the home as possible due to the danger they are thought to represent. While feminism is soup du jour in today’s university journals and print media, the inclusion of such a theme was still radical in 1884.  That persons are discriminated against based on appearance was also a relatively minor discussion point amongst the intelligentsia of Abbot’s day. However, a sub-story of Flatland tells of the leadership’s quelling of a color movement because the result would have meant that no one could tell how many angles a person had, and subsequently which level of society and etiquette would be needed.  This situation remaining analogous to society today to a degree, Abbot’s novel, while seeming absurd on the surface, reveals itself as serious commentary despite the fun of the premise.

As would be natural to a story featuring visitors from other dimensions, there is also a strong religious message in Flatland.  Like Paul’s miraculous experience on the road to Damascus, another of Abbot’s aims—perhaps his greatest—was to remind, or make readers aware of, the eternal possibility of realities beyond that perceivable to mankind.  By using the scientific language of the day being used to speak against the existence of the Christian god, he hoped to prove that the door was still open: science, particularly math and physics, could be wonderful tools to present the supernatural, as well.

In the end, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is a highly enjoyable read that forces the reader to alter their perspective on reality in a fun, interesting, and possibly even life changing fashion.  Flatland is truly a world enjoyable to envision.  Coming from a 2D land, Square’s adventures in 1D and 3D take on levels of poignancy surprising for a premise so simple.  Ignoring the commentary on feminism, religion, and civil rights and Flatland is still readily lovable for its simple twist on reality and the curiosity of how a fantasy with geometric parameters might shape up (sorry, couldn’t resist).