Day 25
Day 25 – Any five books from your “to be read” stack
Ah. Heh. Interesting question.
Five, you say? Hmm.
A while ago I copied a friend, who’d got all of her books in a stack and taken a photo of them. Wish I could find my photo… my stack was taller than me (I’m 172cm), and I realised afterwards it didn’t actually have all of my books in it.
Now, the situation is not so bad at the moment. Since coming home from our epic adventure overseas, we have been massively decluttering our house, and for me that has meant clearing out both books I have no intention of ever reading again OR lending to people, and losing the books that I have no intention of actually picking up. While this sounds somewhat sacrilegious, it has been immensely freeing. As well, I have basically been on a book-buying ban in anticipation of Aussiecon4 (eee getting so close!). So I have been actually reading some of the books on my TBR pile, and – wait for it – reading books from the library rather than buying them. Incredible.
All of this is a long, torturous way around to saying: most of my TBR pile is getting old. I still want to read them, they’ve just been waiting a fairly long time, mostly. They’re essentially split between sf&f (mostly sf these days) and history.
Five that I’m really looking forward to are:
Silver Screen, Justina Robson. Part of my reading in anticipation of Natcon50, that I’m really hoping to make it to.
Liberty, Lucy Moore. The women involved in the French Revolution.
The Stone Key, Isobelle Carmody. This one has been sitting there since my last Swancon, I think. I feel like I ought to re-read the other Obernewtyns before I read this, but… I’m not sure I can face that.
Northwind, Gwyneth Jones. I don’t think I’ve ever read a Jones novel. I also have Escape Plans sitting here.
Dirk Bogarde, John Coldstream. My mum gave me this bio… oh, too many Christmases ago now. I was a very, very big fan of Bogarde when I was younger (and would be still, I think, if I’d seen any of his movies recently). I happened on the very end of A Tale of Two Cities on the tv, one afternoon at about the age of 16, and was immediately in tears because they were about to chop his head off. Noooo! Apparently he was a very, very interesting man. But the sheer size of this tome is a bit offputting.
Day 24
Day 24 – Best quote from a novel
“It is a truth universally acknowledged…”
Nah, who am I kidding? Again with the really bad memory thing. I can quote movies, but I don’t think I can quote books. Except kids’ books:
“But not the hippopotamus!… but not the aardvark.”
“There’s a hippo on my roof eating cake!”
“But where is the green sheep?”
“I will not eat them, Sam I am, I do not like green eggs and ham!”
Day 23
Day 23 – Most annoying character ever
Tess Durbeyfield (of the Durbevilles).
Grow a SPINE.
This is, of course Thomas Hardy’s fault. He who couldn’t bear the idea of representing an illegitimate pregnancy to the point that the book skips from “is Alec seducing her?” to “how the hell does she have a baby now?!” in the space of a page break.
Argh.
Day 22
Day 22 – Favorite non-sexual relationship
You know, I think I have to say Polgara and Belgarath here. Annoying as their banter gets, it’s still really quite funny and entertaining. And who wouldn’t get thoroughly pissed off with their father over 5000 or so years? Especially if you started off angry. Plus, I’ve just re-read the Belgariad, and it’s still fresh in my mind. The one thing that bugged me was the assumption that basically Polgara always gets her way. I think this is tempered in her eponymous book, where you get to see the sacrifices she made along the way and more clearly her relationship with all of her family.
Other favourites include Jane and Lizzie, Silk and Barak, Leaf and Arthur… and lots more that I can’t remember.
Day 21
Day 21 – Favorite romantic/sexual relationship
The tragic in me is torn between Aragon and Arwen, Owen and Hazel (Simon Green’s Deathstalker series), and…
The sentimental in me is drawn to Lizzie and Darcy.
The realist in me drowns out all the rest for Benedick and Beatrice. I studied Much Ado in year 10, I think, and to discover that the acerbic, outspoken woman could get with the witty, smart-mouthed dude was an awesome thing.
Really, though, I am quite the most remarkable sucker for a good romance. Where ‘good’ is what I mean when I point at it and say, This is good… to coin a phrase. I actually don’t mind sappy, for example, when it’s done well and the characters are believable outside of the romance. And if there are explosions to liven the rest of the book up.
Living in Galactic Suburbia
When we named our podcast Galactic Suburbia, I quite naturally googled the name. What kept popping up was a book by Lisa Yaszek, from 2008, of that name. She didn’t invent the term; no, that was Our Heroine, Joanna Russ, and I do believe she was using the term in a derogatory way. Yaszek, though, has written this book to reclaim the term, and to point out the subversive, radical, and altogether fascinating things that female writers of ‘galactic suburbia’-type stories were up to, in the roughly two decades following WW2.
Few things about this book to get out of the way first.
1. Although I don’t think it has come out of a thesis, it’s written like a thesis – and I know this because it sounds like mine. There’s lots of “in this chapter I have…”, which in a book actually gets pretty old pretty fast. But as with all writing, if you know the tropes, you can just skip over it.
2. It’s very American. There are a few points at which she mentions things that happened in Britain, but not many. Thing is, though, that she rarely comes out and says that it’s an American book. The reader is left to figure this out themselves from references to the civil rights movement etc that only make sense in an American context. As an Australian reader I found this somewhat alienating and off-putting.
3. She uses ‘woman’ as an adjective. Now, I presume this is because of issues over gender/sex identification, etc, but it still bugs me because ‘woman’ is a noun, not an adjective. Even more than that, I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone described as a ‘man writer’, whereas ‘woman writer’ seems totally de rigeur. Is it just me, or is ‘female writer’ less offensive – when it has to be specified at all, that is?
Anyway, these quibble aside – and I know they’re basically minor – I really enjoyed GS. I’ve been hugely enjoying my exploration of feminist science fiction from the 20th century, and acquainting myself with what I am increasingly identifying as ‘my’ history. But because I’m coming to it all largely through later anthologies, I fall into the very trap Yaszek sets out to rectify: that writers and anthologisers post-second wave feminism, in the 60s and 70s, have mostly discounted the writings of those women active in the 40s and 50s. Now, my 20th century history is so poor in areas like this that I didn’t realise this period is traditionally seen as a nadir of feminism, so I was quite blind to the sorts of history re-visioning that has, often not deliberately, gone on. And it makes me terribly sad that later historians of the field have apparently discounted women who were powerful in the time because they didn’t live up to those later ideals, which seems to be where Russ was coming from.
The book very cleverly places historical context and literary analysis together, over four chapters: Writers, Homemakers, Activists, and Scientists. In each chapter Yaszek uses contemporary events, non-genre writing, ads, etc to set the scene for those topics, and then puts forward case studies of authors who examined those issues in their SF writing.
In Writers, she looks at Judith Merril, Alice Eleanor Jones, and Shirley Jackson as three very different, contemporaries who all experienced significant success in their writing, and how they approached their writing – their influences, how they played with generic expectations and tropes.
The chapter on Homemakers was perhaps my favourite, and it made me realise that I really do like ‘galactic suburbia’ writing when it’s done well. I like imagining everyday life in the future. I adore the truly escapist writing – space ships, explosions, crazy adventures – but considering the impact of technology, or war, or alien contact on the things that I experience everyday? That’s breathtaking. And the other thing that was absorbing about this chapter was the contextualisation. I’ve seen the pictures, I know a bit about postwar America’s attitudes etc; but gosh it made me happy to be a child of the 80s, and an adult of the 00s. I’m allowed into the workplace; I’m welcomed into the workplace (hello, Mr Abbott). Should I choose to have children, I would still be welcomed into the workplace. Nyer nyer nyer. Most bizarre was the suggestion that by being a good housekeeper and mother, American women were being patriotic domestic cold warriors – fighting the good fight against Communism in their homes. I feel that this is one of the big differences between America and Australia; I just don’t see that sort of parliamentary politics being part of our households.
The Activists chapter was fascinating because for all my bluster that SF can be a magnificent way of exploring contemporary issues in a sophisticated way, I forget that sort of connection especially when I read older stories. To be shown ways in which authors interacted with the two most pressing postwar American issues – the threat of nuclear war and the civil rights movement – was uplifting, and exciting, and suggests ways in which modern writers can do the same. I know there are writers interacting with climate change etc now, but… I guess I hope they continue to do so. Yaszek certainly suggests that such writing can be powerful for change.
Finally, the last chapter is on Scientists, looking at both the ways in which female scientists were presented in mainstream media and science fiction, and at the women who wrote scientific books and columns. Did you know that there was a programme called WISE – Women in Space Early? Me neither. But how cool is that?? (It was run by a man named Lovelace!) Pity it got canned awfully quickly. Did you know that women wrote a lot of science books, especially natural history, for young readers? And wrote science columns for the SF magazines? Yeh. Sad, isn’t it? Anyway – great chapter, exploring those representations, the options available in reality and what authors could imagine.
The book finishes by looking at how these progenitors (progenitrices?) have influenced the field today. She points out a few men who have started incorporating galactic suburbia into their writing, and how gay&lesbian writing has also coopted some aspects. I wonder if we could have a revival of galactic suburbia? We’ve got space opera, and steampunk, and mannerpunk, and the new weird… maybe there’s room for sophisticated domestic SF, too. That would be nice.
As I said above, one of the things reading these sorts of histories makes me realise is that I am so glad I live today. And I actually really hope that my goddaughter and my pseudo-nieces think exactly the same thing, when they compare the world of their birth with the world of their adulthood.
Day 20
Day 20 – Favorite kiss
I can’t answer this one. My memory fails me.
This meme is really reminding me of just how bad my memory is. (Ha.) I mean, I remember going all gooey over Sorry and Meg kissing in The Changeover, and I was all FINALLY when Lizzie and Darcy got it on… did Hazel and Owen ever actually kiss? I don’t recall. But… yeh. I like teh kissing, but for whatever reason it doesn’t tend to stick in my head.
Day 19
Day 19 – Favorite book cover
I don’t own of them, but the new Penguin covers have me pining for more shelves and the money to buy all of them, just because they look so pretty together.
I’ve also been trying to upload an image of Feminist Philosophy and Science Fiction, but on that task I have FAILED.
Day 18
Day 18 – Favorite beginning scene in a book
Another impossible question for me to answer, because I really don’t tend to pay that much attention to opening scenes. That is, obviously they’re important, because a bad scene will put me right off. But I still have a niggling sense that starting a book means finishing it, so I probably give books more leeway than perhaps I ought. Pawn of Prophecy, the first book of the Belgariad, starts off in a seriously boring way, but I still kept reading… several times.
That said, when you realise that Jane Austen is actually writing from an ironic point of view, the classic “It is a truth universally acknowledged…” sets the scene of Pride and Prejudice brilliantly. Especially in light of Mrs Bennett. And Tansy Rayner Roberts’ opening scene of Power and Majesty – a young girl waking up to see naked men falling out of the sky – is certainly an attention-grabber.
Day 17
Day 17 – Favorite story or collection of stories (short stories, novellas, novelettes, etc.)
New Space Opera 1, edited by Jonathan Strahan and Gardner Dozois, 2007
Discovering that there was a name for my favourite sort of sf was a major revelation. It turns out I adore good space opera. You get social drama and galaxy-spanning adventures and, usually, some awesome explosions. Winner! NSO brings together a whole bunch of very awesome writers with quite different takes on the genre, and it creates a rather heady mix of galactic civilisations, marvelous characters, and twisty crunchy plots.
Daughters of Earth, edited by Justine Larbalestier.
A collection of women’s science fiction from the twentieth century, basically one a decade from the 1920s, accompanied by a critical essay examining it in the context of its times and its impact on the field as a whole. It’s marvellous and introduced me to amazing stories, more writers I need to read, and incredibly interesting ways of thinking about science fiction as a field.
Randomly Yours, Alex 