Native Tongue (54 page)
Authors: Susan Squier Suzette Haden Elgin
Squier, Susan. “From Omega to Mr. Adam: The Importance of Literature for Feminist Science Studies.”
Science, Technology, & Human Values
24.1 (1999): 132–158.
Taormina, Agatha. “Womanspeak.”
Fantasy Review
November 1984: 31.
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SUZETTE HADEN ELGIN was born in Missouri in 1936. Her undergraduate work was at the University of Chicago and Chico State University; she completed her linguistics Ph.D. at the University of California San Diego in 1973, and then taught in the Linguistics Department at San Diego State University. She published her first novel,
The Communipaths
, in 1970. She is a linguist, writer, artist, songwriter, poet, business-person, housewife, and grandmother of twelve. Her best known books are the
Native Tongue
and Ozark science fiction trilogies and her non-fiction
Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense
series. Her most recent books are
Peacetalk 101, The Science Fiction Poetry Handbook
, and her debut book of sci-fi poetry,
Twenty-One Novel Poems
. Her most recent sci-fi short stories are “Honor Is Golden” (Analog, May 2004), “We Have Always Spoken Panglish” (
SciFi.com
, October 2004, and at her SFWA website), and “Death and Taxes,” (Challenging Destiny, January 2008). Her awards include the Academy of American Poets Award (University of Chicago, 1955); a Eugene Saxton Memorial Trust poetry fellowship, 1957-58; and the Short Poem Rhysling Award (tie), 1988.
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ALSO AVAILABLE FROM THE FEMINIST PRESS
Suzette Haden Elgin
ISBN: 9781558614031
An instant cult classic upon first publication, Suzette Haden Elgin’s
Native Tongue
trilogy has earned wide critical acclaim, shocking and captivating a loyal readership among science fiction and women’s literature audiences alike.
Sequel to the enormously popular
Native Tongue, The Judas Rose
continues Elgin’s gripping vision of a frightening, male-dominated world where the women of Earth are virtually enslaved. Once again, this group of women—and the nonviolent yet transformative power of language—is called upon to challenge Earth’s violent, patriarchal order. Their revolutionary tool is Laadan—a secret women’s language created to free them from men’s control and make resistance possible for all women.
In
The Judas Rose
, the time has come to take Laadan from underground and spread its revolutionary power to women everywhere—in part, through a group of nuns inside the Roman Catholic Church. But when a handful of horrified priests uncover the women’s sabotage they move to stamp it out with an undercover female agent of their own.
“Suzette Haden Elgin’s
Native Tongue
trilogy, a classic text of angry feminism, is also an exemplary experiment in speculative fiction, deftly and implacably pursuing both a scientific hypothesis and an ideological hypothesis through all their social, moral, and emotional implications.”
—
Ursula K. Le Guin
“Less well known than the
The Handmaid’s Tale
but just as apocalyptic in their vision . . .
Native Tongue
along with its sequel
The Judas Rose
. . . record female tribulations in a world where . . . women have no public rights at all. Elgin’s heroines do, however, have one set of weapons—words of their own.”
—
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar,
New York Times Book Review
Suzette Haden Elgin
ISBN: 9781558614048
In
Earthsong
, the trilogy’s long-awaited finale, the interplanetary Consortium has decided to abandon the incorrigibly violent Earth to economic and ecological disaster. As the Consortium prepares to euthanize the diseased planet, the women of the Lines are offered one last chance to change the men’s destructive behavior and cancel the planet’s annihilation.
“I urge [the
Native Tongue
trilogy] upon you. . . . Elgin has carried current [views] on women to their ‘logical’ conclusion. . . . She takes up everything from religion to sex. Above all, she understands that until women find the words and syntax for what they need to say, they will never say it, nor will the world hear it.”
—
Carolyn Heilbrun,
Women’s Review of Books
Katharine Burdekin
ISBN: 9780935312560
Women are breeders, kept as cattle, while men in this post-Hitlerian world are embittered automatons, fearful of all feelings, having abolished all history, education, creativity, books, and art. The plot centers on a “misfit” who asks, “How could this have happened?”
“A powerful, haunting vision of the inner and outer worlds of male violence.”
—
Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of
Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume 1, 1884-1933
“
Swastika Night
goes beyond the specifics of Nazi ideology to a nightmare world in which men are valued for their brutality and violence and women are regarded only as degraded breeders. The real nightmare is how closely these underlying views conform to conventional contemporary notions of masculinity and femininity. Thanks to the Feminist Press for bringing us this brilliant, chilling dystopia, written under a male pseudonym and demonstrating once more that Anonymous was a woman.”
—
Ann J. Lane, author of
To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Naomi Mitchison
ISBN: 9781558610965
Like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s
Herland, Solution Three
presents a future society in which reproductive control and homosexuality shape a more equitable life for all, eradicating aggression and racism, curbing overpopulation, and providing a dependable food supply. But there are those who are rebelling in this peaceful world: Miryam, a geneticist, secretly married, is rearing her own children; Lilac, a surrogate mother chosen to carry a Clone baby, is delaying her son’s seizure for social conditioning; and even the carefully conditioned Clones are behaving unexpectedly. This novel asks the courageous question: What is the cost to women of new models of reproducing life, regardless of the intentions behind the goal?
“One of the great subversive thinkers and peaceable transgressors of the twentieth century, Naomi Mitchison combines scientific understanding with humane social conscience in a fascinating visionary novel. We are just catching up to this wise, complex, lucid mind that has for ninety-seven years been a generation or two ahead of her time. A thought-experiment in the psychology and ethics of tampering with gender and genetics,
Solution Three
could have been written yesterday, and will certainly be read tomorrow.”
—
Ursula K. Le Guin
“Spoofing, irreverent, subversive in every direction,
Solution Three
is a must read for all who are interested in compassionate spaces opened by provocative re-examination of sexualities.”
—
Jill Benton, associate professor of English, Pitzer College and author of
Naomi Mitchison: A Biography
The End of This Day’s Business
Katharine Burdekin
ISBN: 9781558610095
In a world ruled by women, men live alone and rear boys in a cheerful atmosphere of sports, physical labor, and healthy sexuality, but without the consciousness of anxiety of knowledge of history claimed by women.
The plot of the novel, described by
Choice
as “a forgotten masterpiece,” turns on the desire of a woman to teach her son about the past. Risking both their lives, she tells the story of the rise of fascism and the subsequent world transformation as life-loving women took over from death-loving men.