Dead in Suburbia

The pinnacle of critical and general acceptance of feminist science fiction came in 1972. It was also the highest point for ideologically hardcore feminist works of fiction. That was the year the Dangerous Visions anthology appeared on the shelves, edited by the eternally controversial bad boy of the genre, Harlan Ellison. The stories in Dangerous Visions were some of the most brilliant ever written and certainly the most provocative up to that time. But work singled out for recognition by the SFWA, and crowned best in the volume by merit of a Nebula Award, was Joanna Russ's When It Changed.

Russ had always been the ultimate literary gender rebel in science fiction. Her series character, Aiyx, was a woman who chose the life of an outcast adventurer, abandoning both husband and child to fufill her own questionable destiny. Alyx went further than any of the heroines that were her contempories in both her attitudes toward traditional feminity (she was contemptous both of the values themselves and the people who held them) and because she was, living as a thief, just a trifle amoral.

But, with When It Changed and the novel it begat, The Female Man (1975), Russ gave feminist science fiction its most ideologically radical work. On the p1anet called Whileaway, all the men have died of a gender-specific plague several generations before the story's opening. The women marry, have sexual relationship, and reproduce through parthenogenisis. At the opening of When It Changed, a band of male spacers have arrived reestablish contact with the planet. For these men it's a dream come true, a planet of women for them to romp through and initiate into the rituals of heterosexual bliss.

But instead of greeting the men with enthusiasm as the conquering heroes they perceive themselves to be, the Whileawayans, who have no records of masculinity (they lost them in the chaos of that plague), and have never seen so much as an image of a male, perceive these newcomers as a not entirely welcome alien species. Russ has taken women to the utmost extreme from our two-sex reality and found them to happy and well-adjusted.

In the same way that Le Guin's Left Hand Of Darkness, which pioneered a whole new perception of sexuality, is now considered to be a humanist, rather than a feminist, work, so are When it Changed and The Female Man now regarded in many scholarly quarters as being not feminist works, but lesbian separatist works as more and more critics, historians and scholars have begun to redefine the relationship between feminist and purely lesbian fiction.

Between the publication of When It Changed and the arrival on the bookshelves of the novel it inspired, The Female Man, there was another gender-polarity novel published by one of those rare feminism writers who could equal both the ideology and unleashed brilliance of Joanna Russ: Suzy McKee Charnas.

Walk to the End of the World is a masterpierce of mood and intensity, a post-holocaust world in which men have p1aced all the blame for their situation on women (i.e., the destruction of civilization, the ever present threat of crop failures due to residual radiation, etc.) and live in a homo-adulatory and acutely mysognistic society.

The women are regared as being so filthy and evil that they aren't even acceptable sex objects; sexual contact between male and female is limited largely to brief liaisons required by law and custom to perpetuate the species and love is limited to the feelings of one man for another. In other words women are the degraded slaves and property of men. Walk is the story of the 'fem' Aldera who has secretly been sent to discover whether the legendary Free Fems really exist, for the leader of the female underground fear that the ultimate confrontation between male and female is coming, brought on by crop failures and serious food shortages.

Walk is also the story of Aldera's two masters, one a sensitive but largely ineffectual young man, Eyekar Bek, who sees tentatively beyond his culture; and his savagely opportunistic lover Servan to D'Layo. Unaware of her secret mission, they are taking Aldera to the edge of their world very near where she hopes to find the Free Fems. The book concludes as their society disintegrates in the throes of sexual genocide. Bec allows Aldera to escape and she plunges into the wilderness beyond the limits of known civilization.

The Sequel, Motherlines, published in 1979, lacked much of the intensity of Walk, but went deeply into the pros and cons of the female psyche – and to some degree found it lacking. In Motherlines Aldera is no longer a woman in a world of men but a woman in a world exclusively comprised of women.

Her Free Fems are a disappointment, a superstious, desperate and dirty bunch. But on the plains which Aldera has reached in her flight, there ia a second race of women: the genetically altered 'riding women' who mate with stallions to trigger parthogenetic reproduction. At the end Aldera chooses to go to back to her homeland to see whether anyone has survived terrible genocide. The long awaited third volume has never come out.

In the year 1973, between the publication of When It Changed and Walk to the End of the World, another post-holocaust tale marched into the ranks of feminist classics. Unlike the two works from Russ and Charnas, Of Mist and Grass and Sand was not about the polarization of men and women. In this story from the pen of Vonda McIntyre, a strong female healer brought both enlighenment and a peculiar but effective brand of medicine to a band of primitive patriarchal tribespeople. It won a Nebula Award in 1973.

The main ideological breakthroughs were pretty much over by the mid to late 70s. In 1976 there was Dragonsong by McCaffrey, her most self-consciously feminist novel, about Mennoly who wants to be a harper in a world where ouly men wrote songs. In 1979 there was Motherlines from Charnas.

Between 1975 and 1979 five outstanding feminist anthologies saw print Women of Wonder (1975), Aurora: Beyond Equality (1976), More Women of Wonder (1976), New Women of Wonder (1978) and Amazons (1979).

Amazons, an original anthology from DAW was the last overtly feminist work to receive a major award. Released in November 1979, it took the Wor1d Fantasy Award in 1980 for best anthology. It was so well accepted, in fact, that the editor, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, proved to be more controversial than than the anthology. An outspoken feminist ideologue, with two successive (Windhaven and Naginata) devoted to the subject of warrior women and a critically acclaimed ideologically hardcore trilogy about the Japanese warrior woman, Tomoe Gozen, Salmonson was revealed be a transsexual.

The feminist literary community, which has years been touting the fact that women could write well-rounded female characters, men could not, was definitely set on its ear by this fact.

By the time that Amazons won its awards, the main thrusts of feminist fiction were no longer being made in science fiction, but had shifted to the realm of fantasy. These books were relatively mild works (compared to Russ, Charnas, and McIntyre) by writers entering at the waning of the movement: Phyllis Anne Karr, Barbara Hambley, Jo Clayton. The female protagonist was laready becoming widely accepted and adopted by writers, both male and female (Busby, Offutt, Martin and Tuttle, Green, Shwartz, et al).

No longer did the mere presence of a strong woman on center stage make a feminist statement in and of itself. The impact of these figures was becoming diluted by the enormous deluge of female warriors, sorceresses and space pilots. Other aspects of these works became of more critical importance in determining whether a work of fiction is indeed feminist or not.

The major works of Elizabeth Lynn, a feminist in her personal life, such as her Chronicles of Tornor trilogy were feminist only in passing. The first book had a pair of young men as the central figures and a pair of lesbian warriors as secondary leads. The trilogy, however, was far more concerned with the introspective exploration of zen and the phenomenon of violence than with the nature of female experience or thought.

The fantasies of Barbara Hambly were more caught up in egalitarian societies, where her women could be wife and mother or sword-wielding adventurer with equal acceptance – with one interesting exception: The Ladies of Mandrigyn. The women of Mandrigyn, whose men have been taken away by a sorcerer, have sought in vain to hire mercenaires to free their husbands, sons and lovers.

Finally they kidnap a mercenary captain and force him to teach them to fight. But they are not fighting for their freedom, or any feminist concerns: They are fighting to regain the soft life they had before their men were taken away. But by rescuing their men in this way, they to forever lose the lifestyle they were fighting for. The book never suggests that these changes are superior to their previous way of life, as the major feminist literati of the past ten years would have – merely that chang begets change and, in a zen fashion, that change can never be truly reversed. And most importantly, that even desired changes bring with them undesired changes, and are therefore a mixed blessing.

Frostflower and Thorn, Phyllis Anne Karr's sensitive probing into the feelings of nurturant and non-nurturant women (the natural mother who doesn't want the child, the sworn virgn who barters for the child, and barren wife whose husband tries to steal the child) adds an intriguing feminist perspective to an old form of fiction: the heroic fantasy.

Jo Clayton's Duel of Sorcery trilogy is essentially a retelling of the Persephone legend recounting the trial of a sensitive young, psychically talented girl, Serroi, who has been reared by a powerful castrated sorcerer-avatar of the God of Darkness. He has raised up his own patriarchal cult and turned it loose against the followers of a nurturant goddess-avatar.

Serroi is thrust between the forces of the goddess and the god with the power to decide the outcome. Clayton manages to maintain the thrust of her metaphor (male/female, nurturant/non-nurturant, goddess/god) while richly characterizing the good and bad folks of both sexes with equal perception.

None of these last three novels and novelists are as hard-edged as the feminists of the early to me 1970s; there seems to be no driving ideology to extol, to prove, to try in literary battle against the oppressors of the patriarchy. In both the Duel of Sorcery and the Ladies of Mandrgyn the result of the changes is not promise of a feminist utopia but the hope of egalitarianism.

Men are not the enemy; they are not viewed in the gender polarity, separate species way (as they were in the previously mentioned works of Charans and Russ); the enemy is the fascistic, masculinist beliefs of a group of men AND women. The voices of the authors are far less strident. More centered, more aware of the fact that there are and can be excesses on both sides.

To whatever degree that the writing of Karr, Hambly and Clayton can be considered feminist, they can also be considered egalitarian. Feminism has moved back toward the center, back to its roots in humanism. The feminists of the 1970s would probably not have considered Karr, Hambly and Clayton to be ideologically pure. Karr's Frostflower, Hambly's Minalde, even to some degree Clayton's Serroi, are what Russ once scornfully called "gentle intuitive little heroines".

But they are an iron fist a velvet glove, as strong as the warrior women who are their companions in adventure and adversity. Egalitarianism has overtaken feminism (to a greater or lesser degree depending on which of the three authors you're looking at) and while feminism may not be entirely deceased, it is definitely different from anything it has been before. To paraphase Walt Kelly, "We feminists have found the egalitarians and they are us."

GODWAR CENTRAL

Dead in Suburbia