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The book club has finished reading The Future is Female (Volume 1), and started on Volume 2. I thought I'd write up a bit of a retrospective on the stories from the first volume, and some of my thoughts and reactions.
Overarching thoughts
I think reading short stories in a book club is one of the best decisions I've made.
So, this was a great decision, and I am really happy I've been reading these stories with people. I've learned a ton, and it has really deepened my appreciation of the writing, and even some stories that I was kind of meh on coming to the meeting, I left the meeting with a much deeper appreciation of.
These are the ones that stuck out to me because I really came away from both my own reading and the group discussion wanting to read more by the authors who wrote them. I'll say a bit more about each of them and what I liked, and then I'll talk about some of the other work in the volume.
The Black God's Kiss is an immediately compelling story (though I did spend much of the read wondering what this sword-and-sorcery story was doing in a sci-fi volume (not that I am trying to gate-keep, I just wanted to understand the choice). Part of my theory is that this Moore story was picked because of Moore's influence on Russ and on the Alyx stories in particular). The end of this story is not merely unsatisfying, but angering. Other than ending on that sour note, though, the prose is gripping and excellent, the characterization draws you in, and the worldbuilding and surreality of the magic/otherworldly spaces are so intriguing. Loving this story so much even in spite of its ending, it was no surprise I liked the later Joanna Russ story so much.
Created He Them was bleak horror, and so chilling and unsettling. Set in a the wake of nuclear conflict and dealing with severely constrained resources, Alice Eleanor Jones looks at a scene of domestic horror driven by a patriotic duty to reproduce. With subtle but highly effective hints to construct the world outside the scenes we see, and unflinching view of the horrors the protagonist faces, this story was deeply unpleasant but doing everything it sets out to do so well.
Among the stories on my highlight list, Pelt is the one that left me with the most questions. It feels Emshwiller has more of a world in mind beyond what we see here, but our access to it is limited. The perspective character is a dog accompanying a fur-poacher to a planet, and I thought the non-human narrator was done very effectively. Part of why I don't have all the answers that I want is that the protagonist and I were interested in different things, and she never went off to investigate some of the ones I was curious about. The story is richly described and thought-provoking, but I'd have the hardest time saying what this one was up to.
Baby, You Were Great felt almost prescient. It is about a woman whose experiences get recorded and re-broadcast for entertainment purposes, from the perspective of the scientist who developed the technology (and to a lesser extent the businessman who markets it). I'm very excited that I am about to read another Wilhelm story for our next meeting. I learned from other bookclub members that this is a story that gets anthologized a fair amount, and that is no surprise. It's poignant, heartbreaking, makes really good choices about where to center the narrative point-of-view (another great point raised during the book club discussion; thanks Marissa!), and of all the stories in the volume, most felt like it had captured something prophetic about the future. The premise is just a rock-solid identification of the coming wave of celebrity culture, 24 hour cable, reality TV, and general content-ification of life, and how the false promises of celebrity consume and destroy the people who get pulled into the spotlight (and how complicit the spectators are). I was watching a season of Love is Blind as I read this, so the accusations of the story felt pointed and accurate.
Joanna Russ's The Barbarian was the second time I was reading a story in the volume and wondered if maybe it was supposed to be in a fantasy anthology instead; the first being discussed above. Except this time, distinctively sci-fi elements showed up as the story progressed. Suddenly we were in a world with sword fights at taverns and people handing out quests to assassins and thieves, but also high tech machinery. The protagonist Alyx is highly reminiscent of Jirel of Joiry from Moore's stories. The story had so much of what was appealing about Moore's tale, but with the kind of added complexity and detail that the stories had been developing in general over the course of the volume from the 1930s to the 1960s. I am currently partway through a year of not buying any new books, but I immediately had put Joanna Russ on my list of authors to acquire more from when I am buying books again. And I just learned that LOA has a Joanna Russ collection out, so good thing I am waiting.
Last, I've read a lot of Le Guin before, but I'd never read her short stories. A cautionary tale about cloning, Ninelives was interesting because the story itself was compelling on my first read, and I am always on the lookout for the Taoist themes in her work, so I spotted some of those right away, but this was a great example of how intricate and detailed of things there were going on in the text, which I was missing on my own read that came out in the discussion. Points about how and when the non-clone characters were speaking Argentine or Welsh, and how that was supporting broader themes. Teasing out points about the biological similarity of the clones versus the very different upbringing they received to defuse overly simplistic readings of the text. The role of capitalist exploitation and connections to themes from Dispossessed. It's fitting that a text celebrating diversity in perspective gained so much by talking through it with other people who brought different perspectives to it.
Some other thoughts about the volume:
The Miracle of the Lily by Clare Winger Harris is the story that had some of the most interesting discussion to come out of it but is not very high on my list of stories to re-read. It's sort of emblematic, in a way of the best features of the early half of the volume: apart from a few stand out pieces: some very interesting ideas but often the science is distractingly disconnected from how we understand things now, and the prose is often a bit underwhelming. Much of this worked out really well for book club, because we could talk about the pieces and get a lot out of the discussion, but not a piece I'd want to sit down with again and read through again.
Space Episode by Lesli Perri is the piece that I misjudged the most from my read versus where I came out afterwards. I came away from my read feeling like it was a story where basically very little happened, but there was a crisis on a ship and the woman sacrificed herself to save the day. The discussion and analysis with the group revealed so much more being done in this story, and so much careful thoughtful work being done to establish various elements that I came away from the discussion with a drastically revised view of the story.
The only pieces I put below the line, really, on whether it was worth it to read once are The Conquest of Gola and Another Rib, the former was a very simple trope inversion story, and neither the prose nor the alien biology were enough to make up for that. The most interesting feature it had was that the first wave of human explorers were commercial rather than military, and attempted economic conquest prior to military conquest, but that thread wasn't explored in any interesting way either. The latter seemed like a defensible inclusion in terms of "this is reflective of some of what was being published at the time" but it was a Marion Zimmer Bradley/John Wells piece that manages to spend a lot of time on themes of gender essentialism, gay panic, and adults having sex with extraordinarily young women.
Overarching thoughts
I think reading short stories in a book club is one of the best decisions I've made.
- Reading four stories at a time gives you a lot to talk about each meeting, and you can balance each story's share of the discussion a bit, in case one story or another isn't prompting much from people.
- You get some built in discussion prompts from the juxtapositions of the pieces you read (strengthened or weakened by the curation of the anthology, obviously, but no matter what, you have immediate shared context for thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of the story at hand).
- No matter how much you dislike a given story, it is short. Sometimes they might feel long, but you will be done with it, and have three other stories to talk about and think about that week.
- It is really, really great to be going through these stories and hearing what other people are seeing in them, getting out of them, and noticing about them. The stories are so rich and have so much going on, and I would be missing so much of it if I weren't talking about them with other people.
So, this was a great decision, and I am really happy I've been reading these stories with people. I've learned a ton, and it has really deepened my appreciation of the writing, and even some stories that I was kind of meh on coming to the meeting, I left the meeting with a much deeper appreciation of.
Story Highlights
Some of the most impactful stories in the volume for me were:
- The Black God's Kiss (1934) - C.L. Moore
- Created He Them (1955) - Alice Eleanor Jones
- Pelt (1958) - Carol Emshwiller
- Baby, You Were Great (1967) - Kate Wilhelm
- The Barbarian (1968) - Joanna Russ
- Ninelives (1969) - Ursula K. Le Guin
These are the ones that stuck out to me because I really came away from both my own reading and the group discussion wanting to read more by the authors who wrote them. I'll say a bit more about each of them and what I liked, and then I'll talk about some of the other work in the volume.
The Black God's Kiss is an immediately compelling story (though I did spend much of the read wondering what this sword-and-sorcery story was doing in a sci-fi volume (not that I am trying to gate-keep, I just wanted to understand the choice). Part of my theory is that this Moore story was picked because of Moore's influence on Russ and on the Alyx stories in particular). The end of this story is not merely unsatisfying, but angering. Other than ending on that sour note, though, the prose is gripping and excellent, the characterization draws you in, and the worldbuilding and surreality of the magic/otherworldly spaces are so intriguing. Loving this story so much even in spite of its ending, it was no surprise I liked the later Joanna Russ story so much.
Created He Them was bleak horror, and so chilling and unsettling. Set in a the wake of nuclear conflict and dealing with severely constrained resources, Alice Eleanor Jones looks at a scene of domestic horror driven by a patriotic duty to reproduce. With subtle but highly effective hints to construct the world outside the scenes we see, and unflinching view of the horrors the protagonist faces, this story was deeply unpleasant but doing everything it sets out to do so well.
Among the stories on my highlight list, Pelt is the one that left me with the most questions. It feels Emshwiller has more of a world in mind beyond what we see here, but our access to it is limited. The perspective character is a dog accompanying a fur-poacher to a planet, and I thought the non-human narrator was done very effectively. Part of why I don't have all the answers that I want is that the protagonist and I were interested in different things, and she never went off to investigate some of the ones I was curious about. The story is richly described and thought-provoking, but I'd have the hardest time saying what this one was up to.
Baby, You Were Great felt almost prescient. It is about a woman whose experiences get recorded and re-broadcast for entertainment purposes, from the perspective of the scientist who developed the technology (and to a lesser extent the businessman who markets it). I'm very excited that I am about to read another Wilhelm story for our next meeting. I learned from other bookclub members that this is a story that gets anthologized a fair amount, and that is no surprise. It's poignant, heartbreaking, makes really good choices about where to center the narrative point-of-view (another great point raised during the book club discussion; thanks Marissa!), and of all the stories in the volume, most felt like it had captured something prophetic about the future. The premise is just a rock-solid identification of the coming wave of celebrity culture, 24 hour cable, reality TV, and general content-ification of life, and how the false promises of celebrity consume and destroy the people who get pulled into the spotlight (and how complicit the spectators are). I was watching a season of Love is Blind as I read this, so the accusations of the story felt pointed and accurate.
Joanna Russ's The Barbarian was the second time I was reading a story in the volume and wondered if maybe it was supposed to be in a fantasy anthology instead; the first being discussed above. Except this time, distinctively sci-fi elements showed up as the story progressed. Suddenly we were in a world with sword fights at taverns and people handing out quests to assassins and thieves, but also high tech machinery. The protagonist Alyx is highly reminiscent of Jirel of Joiry from Moore's stories. The story had so much of what was appealing about Moore's tale, but with the kind of added complexity and detail that the stories had been developing in general over the course of the volume from the 1930s to the 1960s. I am currently partway through a year of not buying any new books, but I immediately had put Joanna Russ on my list of authors to acquire more from when I am buying books again. And I just learned that LOA has a Joanna Russ collection out, so good thing I am waiting.
Last, I've read a lot of Le Guin before, but I'd never read her short stories. A cautionary tale about cloning, Ninelives was interesting because the story itself was compelling on my first read, and I am always on the lookout for the Taoist themes in her work, so I spotted some of those right away, but this was a great example of how intricate and detailed of things there were going on in the text, which I was missing on my own read that came out in the discussion. Points about how and when the non-clone characters were speaking Argentine or Welsh, and how that was supporting broader themes. Teasing out points about the biological similarity of the clones versus the very different upbringing they received to defuse overly simplistic readings of the text. The role of capitalist exploitation and connections to themes from Dispossessed. It's fitting that a text celebrating diversity in perspective gained so much by talking through it with other people who brought different perspectives to it.
Some other thoughts about the volume:
The Miracle of the Lily by Clare Winger Harris is the story that had some of the most interesting discussion to come out of it but is not very high on my list of stories to re-read. It's sort of emblematic, in a way of the best features of the early half of the volume: apart from a few stand out pieces: some very interesting ideas but often the science is distractingly disconnected from how we understand things now, and the prose is often a bit underwhelming. Much of this worked out really well for book club, because we could talk about the pieces and get a lot out of the discussion, but not a piece I'd want to sit down with again and read through again.
Space Episode by Lesli Perri is the piece that I misjudged the most from my read versus where I came out afterwards. I came away from my read feeling like it was a story where basically very little happened, but there was a crisis on a ship and the woman sacrificed herself to save the day. The discussion and analysis with the group revealed so much more being done in this story, and so much careful thoughtful work being done to establish various elements that I came away from the discussion with a drastically revised view of the story.
The only pieces I put below the line, really, on whether it was worth it to read once are The Conquest of Gola and Another Rib, the former was a very simple trope inversion story, and neither the prose nor the alien biology were enough to make up for that. The most interesting feature it had was that the first wave of human explorers were commercial rather than military, and attempted economic conquest prior to military conquest, but that thread wasn't explored in any interesting way either. The latter seemed like a defensible inclusion in terms of "this is reflective of some of what was being published at the time" but it was a Marion Zimmer Bradley/John Wells piece that manages to spend a lot of time on themes of gender essentialism, gay panic, and adults having sex with extraordinarily young women.
