From: Foundation. The international review of science fiction, 30 (82) 2001, pp52-56.

No-one who was there will ever forget the wild, lamington-fueled book launch of Women of Other Worlds at WorldCon in Melbourne, August 1999. Editors Helen Merrick and Tess Williams gave their jazzy promotional spiel to a room packed to the corridor with expectant conventioneers. Then the frenzy began: wild scenes of do-it-yourself lamington creation in bowls of chocolate icing, shredded coconut and slabs of white cake. At the same time, at the other end of the room, there was an equally mad book-buying frenzy. Delighted authors gladly signed their pieces. It was book-launch nirvana.

What was it about Women of Other Worlds that aroused such excitement? It can’t just have been lamingtons and champagne that went to the heads of the audience. They were high on the heady conjunction of SF and women’s writing. This must be the way the old world order ends, with chocolate icing and the promise of ideologically labile fruit crisp.

Women of other Worlds is an anthology of the kind that publishers usually dislike, with its mix of fiction and non-fiction, memoir, literary criticism, poems, a fruit-crisp recipe of a certain political persuasion, and more. What linked everything together was material drawn from or inspired by the legendary WisCon20, May 1996. the same convention Justine Larbalastier also celebrates in the previous article in this volume. Judith Merrill and Ursula K Le Guin were Guests of Honour. A posse of some 10 Australian science fiction writers make the trek across to Madison, and came back exhilarated at the energy of the event. ‘WisCon20 will be like Woodstock’, said co-ordinator Jeanne Gomoll. ‘As the years roll by, more and more people will claim to have been there’. Justine Labalastier and I were there, truly, and now I know, from reading her article, why Justine was too exhausted to speak on a panel I convened. At the time I was downright unsympathetic, as we Australians must be tough with ourselves about jet-lag. Now I know Justine was also exhausted from trying to keep up with Judith Merrill.

Women of Other Worlds includes pieces inspired by the events of 1996, together with reprint pieces from earlier, often small-press publications otherwise hard to find. I’d like to tease out some of the issues the anthology has raised for me.

First, I’d like to reflect on the relations of science fiction to politics. In the June 2000 editorial comment in Fantasy and Science Fiction, Gordon van Gelder writes on genre fiction and US politics. In light-hearted comment, he says: ‘In popular fiction and in film, the horror genre thrives when Republicans are in the White House, while mysteries thrive when Democrats are in office’. He is interested in why genres move in and out of popularity with a seemingly fickle reading public. He concludes: ‘Sf’s popularity seems to be linked more strongly to the technology of the times than it is to politics’. As I thought about his comments, as an Australian who votes neither Democrat nor Republican, I wondered if Gordon van Gelder might be looking for politics in some of the wrong places. Forget Democrats and Republicans. What about a more universal branch of politics, the politics of gender and race? I think this is where Women of Other Worlds hit the populist nerve, at least at that one place and time at WorldCon in Melbourne in 1999.

Science fiction is no more or less political than other forms of fiction. In feminist SF, the political message is upfront, explicit in the writing, the reader knows what’s what, and may respond accordingly. If a political message is not made explicit, it remains implicit in the writing: attitudes towards unions, democracy, colonisation, family, kings, queens and know-all mages, and so on. The writers women don’t read will have, in addition, deficient characterisation of female characters, action that takes place wholly within male realms, and so on.

My own brand of feminism would be characterised as a totally inoffensive, mildly liberal-humanist variety. I start from the premise that women suffer from systematic gender-biased social oppression, oppression which has been lightened, in some places, some times, with equality of access to law, to work, to healthcare, and to education.

In his review of Women of Other Worlds in Foundation, 78, Chris Lawson starts with the comment : ‘I don’t like feminist writing’. (He then indicates he did like some feminist writing, so he’s not totally beyond redemption.) What was it about Women of Other Worlds that polarised its audience? On the one hand, there was the book-buying frenzy of excited readers. On the other hand, there is another comment by Chris Lawson: ‘I pick it up and feel the weight. It fills me with dread. I am Frodo at the gates of Mordor.’

This is curious. The book weighs much the same as its companion volume, newly published (April, 2001) by the same publisher, the University of Western Australia Press, Earth is but a Star, an anthology on the theme of far future fictions, edited by Damien Broderick. I wonder will Chris (Frodo) Lawson be reviewing this book for Foundation, and if so, I expect a comparison between the two books in terms of avoirdupois, as well as an explanation of its critical relevance.

Justine Labalastier writes: ‘for me, science fiction is not just a genre exclusively made up of written texts, but a community or a series of communities … The Futurians were a community, and so was the broader grouping of writers and editors in New York city.’ So are the writers represented in Women of other Worlds. Now we have email, we don’t have to live in New York City to be part of a stimulating scene. There are feminist science fictions and there are feminist communities, and I think this is where some of the issues lie. The book can be regarded as the production of a certain feminist community. Or it can be reviewed in terms of the writers and the texts they write. By saying ‘I dislike feminist writing’ Lawson was saying something he wouldn’t say about other writing communities, I suspect. I doubt he’d say ‘I dislike the writing of the Futurians’ in blanket condemnation.

What was the message of Women of Other Worlds, if indeed an edited anthology of some 32 varied contributions can be characterised as having one message? The transition is from women’s writing, with some male contributors, to feminist writing, to whatever it was that sent Chris Lawson stratospheric. The political message irritates him because it is labelled ‘feminist’, though equally it could be labelled humanist.

If feminism is interpreted as the politics of envy, then it will, rightly, irritate. Women seeing men, and other feminists, as the enemy, may serve a polemical purpose, but it also seethes rather than soothes. Turn it around, and talk about gender and gender inequalities, and part of the anti-feminist anger dissipates. The question becomes more one of asking how it is possible in the current world to create a culture of tolerance. Labelling others as the enemy is a noose that tightens, as nearly all others become the enemy, and no-one is feminist enough, just as in wars of religion no-one is devout enough.

If I say that the feminist project is about creating a culture of tolerance, then I am in good company. In Women of Other Worlds, this is the concluding message of Ursula K LE Guin’s Guest of Honour speech, with the call for ‘the next generation raising its own daughters and sons to seek justice, seek equality, seek freedom. Right now right here, on earth.’

Thinking about the politics of gender, and thinking them through in the magical way a novel or short story allows, is a vibrant part of this process.

I’m not going to review Women of Other Worlds, which would be somewhat unethical of me, as I am a contributor. I want to use it as an aid for meditation on politics and science fiction. One current issue in the academic field of Futures Studies is talk of a ‘global ethics’. What this may mean, in practice, is a UNESCO committee that tries to get some kind of cross-cultural, multi-nation agreement on global ethical behaviour for the best outcome for humanity, whatever. The task is impossible, at the level of global ethical governance. Not to say that it’s not worth the try, but what has resulted so far is so many words on paper, so much hot air.

Enter science fiction, and the power of story to have fun with serious problems, not solve them, but formulate them in a way that gives pause for thought. From Women of Other Worlds, I’d like to consider the short piece by Eleanor Arnason, ‘The small black box of morality’. It’s a story about why we’ve had problems creating a culture of tolerance, except that’s too ponderous a way of putting it. The story takes the form of a creation myth from another place, not quite ours. The Goddess has created the world, and found it good, but not yet good enough. Her plant and animal creations are happy, but lack the capacity for judgment. They can’t tell right from wrong. The Goddess decides her world needs morality.

The Goddess is as capricious as any god, handing out morality as if it were an apple. The first humans are the only takers, and they are none too enthusiastic. First Man didn’t want it. But First Woman decided it was worth a try. Since she was bigger than the man, she took the larger slice.

Now taking the larger slice is bad manners, and worse. First Woman soon realised what she has done. She urged First Man to eat, for both sexes must be able to tell right from wrong. She knew she has done wrong in being greedy and taking the larger half, and she must learn to live with her moral failure - as he must, with his lesser share – in a world which needs the commitment of both for survival.

Where books like Women of Other Worlds are important, interesting, and, yes, different, in the science fiction field is that the writers are dealing in different ways with the stuff thrown up by cultural revolution, with new ways of seeing self and other, with the boundaries between self and non-self. It is tied up with the rest of today’s revolutions, with revolutions from below, from above, with revolutions of technology, revolutions of capital in globalisation.

In her essay, ‘Better to have loved’, Judith Merrill wrote: “My life has been almost a history of alternative/subversive ‘movements’ ”. Where Ursula K. Le Guin spoke as one of the ‘envoys from Senectetus’, or ‘the mobile from Geriatrica’, Judith Merrill’s mobility at WisCon20 came machine-assisted. She whizzed round in a contraption too hi-tech for a motorised wheel chair, more a scaled down cross between a Ferrari and a scooter. We could see how ill she was, yet at the same time how thoroughly she was determined to enjoy herself. Her generosity of spirit shines through her memoir, as she reflects on her life without regrets, apologies, or bitterness. She wrote ‘for the younger people out there, trying to figure out, before it’s entirely too late, where the hell we are going, and (maybe) where we’d like to go instead.’ (As good a summary of the futures studies project as any.) As she recalled a life of political engagement in and out of SF, she got into quite a few tangles ( as we all do) trying to work out ‘What kind of feminist am I, anyhow?”

The language of SF, the possibilities in fantastic imagined futures and alternative scenarios of the present, help break down the boundaries and restrictions of everyday realities. The ideas presented in Women of Other Worlds help create the possibility of another space. In speculating about alternatives, they reflect on how it is possible to create a culture of tolerance. It is not a even remotely a co-incidence that the pieces are related to the WisCon20 convention. Rather, the events at a particular meeting of one of the many science fiction communities at Madison in 1996 made this conjunction of pieces possible, and created the momentum that led to the most amazing book launch ever.

© Rosaleen Love 2001