Readings: Science fiction, with a feminine imprint
The genre of “science fiction” (a poor translation of “ science fiction ,” which actually means “science fiction” or “scientific fiction”) was born as an almost exclusively male domain, perhaps because, until very recently, so were the sciences. So much so that Alice Bradley Sheldon, one of the first major female writers in the genre, signed her works as James Tiptree Jr., hid her identity, and refused to appear in public until her death. Since she was one of the pioneers, it makes sense that Sisters of the Revolution , this anthology of science fiction stories written by women, includes one of the stories that earned her the Nebula Award (in 1977): “The Weakest Link Solution.” It is a frontal critique of the West’s tendency to think in terms of opposing and hierarchical binary categories (good vs. evil; reason vs. emotion; humanity vs. nature; masculine vs. feminine, in which the first concept is positive and the second, clearly negative). In this story, the humanity of the future decides that women are the animal/emotional part of the species and must be eliminated. But turning them into an "endangered species" is collective suicide: without women, there is no possible future for Homo sapiens.
The extinction of humanity is a constant theme in the genre, and women frequently address it in their books. For example, Louise Erdrich, an American of Ojibwe descent, offers a striking, and somewhat ironic and hopeful, take on the theme in A Future Home for the Living God , a novel about a parallel universe to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale , in which the disappearance of humankind isn't entirely bad news.
As Natalia Ortiz Maldonado states in the "Prologue" and editors Ann and Jeff Vandermeer in the "Introduction," Sisters of the Revolution is a catalog of the tools and criteria used by writers like Erdrich and Atwood to address themes of this kind and the traits that differentiate them from writers like Asimov, Philip K. Dick, or H.G. Wells. Perhaps one of these points is the latter's predilection for the "heroic," which is always a tribute to the exceptional individual. Female authors, on the other hand, tend to reject the idea of the hero or heroine or at least introduce significant variations. Among many other cases, in Lois McMasters Bujold's saga about Miles Vorkosigan ( A Dance in Mirrors and Cetaganda are two of the titles), Miles is a hero, yes, but an unexpected one: weak, deformed, disabled, whenever possible, he tries to find peaceful solutions and even alliances with his "enemies" and ends up as a judge, not as a ruler or a military man.
In the Vandermeer collection—translated into a completely Argentine Spanish that includes the use of voseo (instead of "vos" in Spanish)—most of the names come from the United States, but with a variety of origins—Octavia Butler, African-American; Vandana Singh, from an Indian family; Hiromi Goto, of Japanese descent—plus some authors from other countries, such as the Argentine Angélica Gorosdischer or the African Nnedi Okorafor.
In addition to the rejection of binarism as a philosophical basis, one of the constant themes is the critique of total institutions (those that exercise "total" control over their inmates, such as prison or the army). Many of these stories include institutions that Western culture considers sacred, such as the family or motherhood. For example, "The Mothers of Shark Island" by Kit Reed—one of the most controversial stories—describes the mother-child relationship as a "life sentence" for women if they don't secure a living space for themselves. Another institution understood as a prison is marriage. Perhaps the most profound narrative analysis of this in the collection is "The Perfect Wife" by Gorosdischer, whose protagonist escapes this hell into worlds that, for her, are much better than her own, through doors she repeatedly opens. When that escape proves insufficient, she also embraces outright rebellion.
In some stories, this rebellion turns the protagonist into a goddess, for example, in Okorafor's "The Palm Bandit," a tale somewhere between science fiction and fantasy; or it leads her on joyful, secret journeys, like Ursula K. Le Guin's "South," in which a group of women decide to reach the Antarctic Pole. The journey isn't about boasting about being the first (it's a secret journey): they travel because going into the unknown is "coming home." They travel without men; they arrive in 1909, before Amundsen; they return unharmed, and one of them stops along the way, a symbolic act if ever there was one. They don't make their adventure public outside their families so as not to fill "Amundsen with grief": they are aware that men are interested in competing for "first" place.
That story is pure tension and joy, but there are others, like Butler's "Evening and Morning and Night," that look at the situation with bitterness. The premise is familiar: humanity is on the brink of extinction due to a genetic disease, caused, in this case, by a cancer drug. But here, those suffering from the disease are not monsters to be killed—as in series like The Last of Us —but victims who are looked upon with compassion and affection.
Each of these authors in the anthology has their own unique poetics, approach, and style. Some fuse science fiction with other genres: for example, detective fiction, like Angela Carter in "The Fall River Murders," or academic writing and humor, like Eleanor Arnason in "The Five Daughters of Grammar." Read together, the stories open up a rainbow of writing, a broad sample of the infinite paths of the female mind determined to understand and project the future—and, of course, also to protest against it. At the core is the constant denunciation of social hierarchies and, therefore, a challenge to "heroic truth," as the editors affirm. Because where heroes exist, there are also monsters, and only without this absolute opposition can more humane and more egalitarian worlds be built.
Sisters of the Revolution
Various authors
Hekht. Trans.: Various translators.
480 pages, $50,000
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