The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (2 page)

“The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew” © 2009 by Catherynne M. Valente. Originally appeared in
Clarkesworld Magazine.
Reprinted by permission
of the author.

INTRODUCTION

Such pleasure in selection!

The anthologist more than any other knows

the universe is multiple.

—Sofia Samatar, “Snowbound in Hamadan”

I would like to say that women writing science fiction belong to an unarguably long history. Say: Margaret Cavendish, Mary Shelley, Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Merchant, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain – and more. Women fascinated by science and the
stars are attested throughout human civilization. Hypatia of Alexandria (350/370 to 415 CE), philosophist, astronomer, mathematician. Mariam Al-Ijliya (tenth-century CE), who designed and constructed innovative astrolabes. Mary Anning (1799 to 1847 CE), excavating dinosaur bones on the Dorset coast.

Women do belong to these histories. The difficult word is “unarguably”. Perennial arguments question
how long women have been writing science fiction compared to men, whether their science fiction is truly science fiction, what the definition of science fiction is – to the exclusion of sciences like biology, sociology or linguistics, to the exclusion of non-Western narrative approaches used by women who are not white or not Western. To the exclusion, too, of a wider understanding of gender
around the world. Sometimes these arguments are men yelling at clouds. Sometimes they are publishers not buying science fiction books by women, or lists of classic science fiction that are almost entirely by men.

This is not a book of classic science fiction by women.

The universe of science fiction is multiple: I could have collected stories from an entire century – or more – or I could have
condensed my scope. And then, in any breadth of time, which stories to collect? There are so many.

Science fiction is always changing: at its best, it is always exciting, always saying something new. To say that the best science fiction of recent years is pushing the genre into new places is not a new statement – but I am incredibly excited by what the science fiction of recent years is doing.
More than before, writers from around the world and of many backgrounds – gender, sexuality, ethnicity – are being published in English, in original and in translation. Their voices are changing science fiction, taking it into more futures and looking at our present and past in more ways. If science fiction is defined as looking at as many worlds as possible, it is an excellent time to be a reader.

I wanted to take a snapshot of this.

The stories in
The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women
are all (bar one) from the last twenty years. Some of the writers have been working in the science fiction field for far longer than that – writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, Karen Joy Fowler, Élisabeth Vonarburg, Angélica Gorodischer, Nancy Kress. Many started publishing quite recently – Zen Cho, Karin Tidbeck,
Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Sofia Samatar. Their approaches to science fiction are varied. Their stories are consistent in one quality: they all excite me.

This is not a solution.

It is a snapshot, a collection of stories by women working in science fiction today. I hope it brings these writers to new readers. It cannot deal a one-hit kill to sexism in the science fiction industry. It cannot solve
another problem – the tendency to forget the contributions of women from earlier decades; although some of its contents deal very directly with the past: Karen Joy Fowler writing about Mary Anning’s life and discoveries, Sofia Samatar writing about Henrietta Swan Leavitt and the other women employed as human computers by Harvard College Observatory in the 1870s, Tori Truslow’s re-imagining of the
Moon to examine the erasure of women’s poetic scholarship. They look at history, they remember it, but they are no replacement for it.
They are an addition – as is this anthology.

It is also important to note that the conversation about gender is more complex than just men and women. Non-binary gender exists around the world and always has done, which tends to be forgotten. An anthology such
as
The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women
is, by elevating the work of women, limiting itself to them (although the complexity of gender identity means that some writers in this anthology are not binary-gendered). It can only be one part of what needs to be a much wider conversation.

What is this book?

A contribution to the conversation about writing and gender that has gone on for centuries.
A collection of thirty-three excellent science fiction stories by women. Look: Sedoretu on the planet O. A train journey to the Moon. Alternate universes. Postapocalypses. An exomoon that stops birds from singing. Living spaceships born in gas giants. Cartographic wasps. Callowhales on Venus. Constellations.

Look at what women have written. Enjoy.

GIRL HOURS

Sofia Samatar

For Henrietta Swan Leavitt

Notes

In the 1870s, the Harvard College Observatory began to employ young women as human computers to record and analyze data. One of them, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, discovered a way to measure stellar distances using the pulsing of variable stars.

Quotations are from George Johnson’s
Miss Leavitt’s Stars: The Untold Story of the Woman Who
Discovered How to Measure the Universe
(W. W. Norton, 2005).

Harlow Shapley, director of the observatory, reckoned the difficulty of astronomical projects in “girl hours” – the number of hours a human computer would take to obtain the data. The most challenging projects were measured in “kilo-girl-hours.”

Conclusion

You were not the only deaf woman there.

Annie Cannon, too, was hard of hearing.

On the day of your death she wrote:
Rainy day pouring at night
.

Oh bright rain, brave clouds, oh stars,

oh stars.

Two thousand four hundred fires

and uncharted, unstudied,

the hours, the hours, the hours.

Body

The body is a computer.

The body has two eyes. For the body, the process of triangulation is automatic. The body can see the red steeple of the church beyond the trees. Blackbirds
unfold as they grow nearer, like messages.

The body never intended to be a secret.

The body was called a shining cloud, and then a galaxy. The body comforted mariners, spilt milk in the southern sky. The body was thought to be only 30,000 light years away.

The body is untrustworthy. It falls ill.

The thought of uncompleted work, particularly of the Standard Magnitudes, is one I have had to
avoid as much as possible, as it has had a bad effect nervously
.

The body sits at a desk. A high collar, faint stripes in the white blouse. In this rare photograph, the body is framed in light. The gaze is turned down, the hand poised to make a mark. The body says: “Take photographs, write poems. I will go on with my work.”

The body is not always the same, the body varies in brightness, its
true brightness may be ascertained from the rhythm of its pulsing, the body is more remote than we imagined, it eats, it walks, it traverses with terrible slowness the distance between Wisconsin and Massachusetts, the body is stubborn, snowbound, the body has disappeared, the body has left the country, the body has traveled to Europe and will not say if it went there alone, the body is generous, dedicated,
seated again, reserved, exacting,

brushed and buttoned, smelling of healthy soap,
and not allowed to touch the telescope.

The body gives time away with both hands.

The body, when working, does not know that time has passed.

The body died in 1921.

The body’s edges are so far from one another that it is hardly a body at all. We gather the stars, and we call them a body. Cygnus. The Swan.

Introduction

Twelve o’clock.

My husband and children asleep.

To chart one more star, to go on working:

this is a way of keeping faith.

Draw me a map.

Show me how to read music.

Teach me to rise without standing,
to hold the galaxy’s calipers

with the earth at one gleaming tip,
to live vastly and with precision,
to travel

where distance is no longer measured in miles but in lifetimes,
in epochs, in breaths, in light years, in girl hours.

EXCERPT FROM A LETTER BY A SOCIAL-REALIST ASWANG

Kristin Mandigma

I apologize for this late reply. Our mail service has been erratic recently due to a spate of troublesome security-related issues. I don’t think I need to elaborate. You must have read the latest reports. These government spooks are hopelessly incompetent but they (very) occasionally evince flashes of human-like logic. I expect
it will only take them a matter of time before they figure it out, with or without their torturous diagrams, at which point I may have to seriously consider the advisability of having one of our supporters open
another
German bank account. As a diversion, if nothing else, and I have had nothing entertaining to watch on cable television (which I believe has also been bugged because it persists
in showing me nothing but Disney) for a while. Just between the two of us – I do believe that if fatuous, single-minded politicians were not an irrevocable fact of life, like having to use the toilet, we would have to invent them.

Now, to your letter. I confess to having read it with some consternation. I am well acquainted with your penchant for morbid humor, and yet the suggestion that I might
write a short “piece” for a speculative fiction magazine struck me as more perverse than usual. What on earth is speculative fiction anyway? I believe you are referring to one of those ridiculous publications which traffic in sensationalizing the human imagination while actually claiming to enrich it by virtue of setting it loose from the moorings of elitist literary fiction? Or whatever? And
for elitist substitute “realist,” I suppose. You argue that speculative fiction is merely a convenient “ideologically neutral” term to describe a
certain grouping of popular genre fiction, but then follow it up with a defensive polemic on its revolutionary significance with regard to encapsulating the “popular” Filipino experience. To which I ask: As opposed to what?

I believe, Comrade, that
you are conflating ideology with bourgeois hair-splitting. When it comes down to it, how is this novel you sent along with your letter, this novel about an interstellar war between monster cockroaches and alienated capitalist soldiers, supposed to be a valid form of social commentary? I do not care if the main character is a Filipino infantryman. I assume he is capitalist, too. Furthermore, since
he is far too busy killing cockroaches on godforsaken planets in a spaceship (which is definitely not a respectable proletarian occupation), his insights into the future of Marxist revolution in the Philippines must be suspect at best. And this Robert Heinlein fellow you mention, I assume, is another imperialist Westerner? I thought so. Comrade, I must admit to being troubled by your choice of reading
fare these days. And do not think you can fob me off with claims that your favorite novel at the moment is written by a socialist author. I do not trust socialists. The only socialists I know are white-collar fascist trolls who watch too many Sylvester Stallone movies. Sellouts, the lot of them. Do not get me started on the kapre, they are all closet theists. An inevitable by-product of all that
repulsive tobacco, I should say.

With regard to your question about how I perceive myself as an “Other,” let me make it clear that I am as fantastic to myself as rice. I do not waste time sitting around brooding about my mythic status and why the notion that I have lived for 500 years ought to send me into a paroxysm of metaphysical Angst for the benefit of self-indulgent, overprivileged, cultural
hegemonists who fancy themselves writers. So there are times in the month when half of me flies off to – as you put it so charmingly – eat babies. Well, I ask you, so what? For your information, I only eat babies whose parents are far too entrenched in the oppressive capitalist superstructure to expect them to be redeemed as good dialectical materialists. It is a legitimate form of population
control, I dare say.

I think the real issue here is not my dietary habits but whether or not my being an aswang makes me any less of a Filipino and a
communist. I think that being an aswang is a category of social difference – imposed by an external utilitarian authority – like sexuality and income bracket. Nobody conceives of being gay just as a literary trope, do they? To put it in another
way: I do not conceive of my biological constitution as a significant marker of my identity. Men, women, gays, aswang, talk-show hosts, politicians, even these speculative fiction non-idealists you speak of – we are all subject to the evils of capitalism, class struggle, the eschatological workings of history, and the inevitability of socialist relations. In this scheme of things, whether or not one
eats dried fish or (imperialist) babies for sustenance should be somewhat irrelevant.

I would also like to address in more depth your rather confused contention that the intellectual enlightenment of the Filipino masses lies not in “contemporary” (I presume you meant to say “outdated” but were too busy contradicting yourself) realistic literature, but in a new artistic imaginative “paradigm”
(again, this unseemly bourgeois terminology!). As I have said, I would emphatically beg to differ. Being an aswang – not just the commodified subject, but the fetishistic object of this new literature you speak of – has not enlightened me in any way about the true nature of society, about modes of production, about historical progress. I am a nationalist not because I am an aswang, but despite of
it. You only have to consider the example of those notorious Transylvanian vampires. No one would ever call them patriots, except insofar as they speak like Bela Lugosi.

Before I end this letter, I must add another caveat: my first reaction upon meeting Jose Rizal in Paris during the International Exposition was not to eat him, as malicious rumors would have you believe. In fact, we spoke cordially
and had an extended conversation about Hegel in a cafe. I do think that he is just another overrated ilustrado poseur – brilliant, of course, but with a dangerous touch of the Trotskyite utopian about him. I prefer Bonifacio, for obvious reasons.