Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 by Damien Broderick, Paul di Filippo Read Free Book Online

science fiction by women, Women of Wonder (1975), and two sequels, novelist and critic Pamela Sargent observed that women sf writers during the ’70s, like the feminist sisterhood, were
     
coming to consider themselves a group. This is not to say that they shared the same views, were equally doctrinaire in their feminism, or similar in their writing. But there was a growing sense that science fiction was a form in which the issues raised by feminism could be explored, in which writers could look beyond their own culture and create imaginative new possibilities.
     
    She added:
     
At the core of both feminism and science fiction—at least what ideally should be at the core of both—is a questioning of why things are as they are and how they might be different. Science fiction, with more women writing it, had a chance to become what it had claim to be all along—a literature that embraces new possibilities. [1]
     
    Alongside the many excellent writers she showcases in her anthologies, Sargent exemplifies this prospectus in her own novels. These range from one of the first novels exploring the consequences of human cloning, Cloned Lives (1976), to a formidable trilogy about terraforming Venus, and other serious, thoughtful, lucid work. In The Shore of Women (1986), Sargent constructs a post-apocalyptic world where today’s smug certainties have been undone by global nuclear war and a consequent “nuclear winter.”
    Hundreds or perhaps thousands of years later, matriarchal and apparently worldwide urban utopias—walled enclaves protected by force fields—maintain a stationary technological civilization, in the midst of a vast wilderness sparsely populated by bands of hunter-gatherer men scratching a stone age living. These mini-clans get along grudgingly with each other in prickly territoriality, united by a “holy speech” used in the many hi-tech shrines scattered by women across the landscape. Here worshipful and (by default, in everyday life) homosexual men drop by to commune in wired dream with the Lady, and Her several virtual aspects, enjoying imaginary coition with very real consequences, as their semen is milked away mechanically and used to inseminate the Mothers of the World safely within their lesbian redoubts. Girl children are retained by the enclaves, boys shoved out at 5 or 6 after mindwashing and placed in the custody of men. If any bands get the itch to join into larger settlements, risking the reinvention of agriculture, the wheel and metal-working, golden flying globes are dispatched from the nearest city to slaughter the brutes and raze their habitats to the ground.
    Inevitably, since this is a novel written for today’s readers, it takes a Romeo and Juliet turn, although one with more fear and loathing and remorseless slaughter than Shakespeare managed after Titus Andronicus . A young woman, accused of complicity in a near-murder done by her mother, is exiled with her into the outer grimness. While her mother dies almost immediately at the hands of male ruffians, Birana survives, sheltered by wise Wanderer. In the guise of a beardless youth, she meets Arvil, a young man of about her own age. Their growing relationship and even intimacy is thwarted by Birana’s bigoted, heterophobic upbringing.
    But this social order is no mere inversion of our own traditionally homophobic rejection and stigmatization of gays and lesbians. In Sargent’s future, men are repeatedly conditioned to worship the ideal feminine, and to crave the orgasmic satisfactions of vaginal sex. So while Birana is revolted by the prospect of physical intimacy with a male, Arvil must fight his own impulses.
    Meanwhile, Birana’s peer and former object of desire, Laissa, has problems with her own mother, who retains an unhealthy affection for her infant son Button, trying to forestall his exile into barbarity. By a curious coincidence, Arvil is Button’s older brother, and Laissa’s twin—and the physical resemblance does not