Janet Russ, The Female Man (1975; 1970)

I approached Joanna Russ's The Female Man with some trepidation.

I had hoped that the reputation the work has earned as a cornerstone of feminist science fiction since its publication in 1975 (written 1970) would find expression in a subtlety of argument that transcended the bludgeon and bluster of the politics of gender of forty years ago.

Sadly, it does not.

Let's be clear about this. If we are asking 'does this work have an historic significance?' then the answer in my opinion is yes, it does. However, if we are asking 'does this novel have any merit as a work of science fiction, and is it still worth reading?' then I would have to answer 'a scant amount', and 'frankly, no' respectively.

Although incoherently presented, the four fictive worlds which overlap in The Female Man through the persons of Joanna, Jeannine, Janet and Jael invite productive reflection on the part of the reader with regard to their relation to the author, whom they may be interpreted as being facets of. Whilst such a reading effectively elevates Russ to the status of an Everywoman figure, which was doubtless not her intention, the trope allows for the consideration of possible futures and alternate histories of the female subject which are thoughtful and engaging.

However, it is easy for the reader to be sympathetic to the novel's concepts when considering them outside of the textual contexts within which they are presented. The Female Man wavers stylistically between the hectoring, the overwrought, the juvenile, and the unreadable. When the narrator observes 'This is the lecture. If you don't like it, you can skip to the next chapter' (loc. 466) I suspect that I could not have been the only reader to have concluded that not just the chapter in question but rather the entire novel reads like a testy diatribe against The Evil That Men Do and were left 'numb, numb with boredom' (loc. 2610-11) while struggling through it.

The Female Man is a curio you may wish to dip into for any number of reasons, but it really isn't something you need to take the time to read or study, and is a dubious addition to the SF Masterworks series.

Do not get glum when you are no longer understood, little book. Do not curse your fate. Do not reach up from readers' laps and punch the readers' noses. Rejoice, little book! For on that day, we will be free. (Lo. 3154-56)

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Gene Wolfe, Peace (1975) FMW 28

"The familiar corridor, on which lay all the great rooms of my life, was gone" (p. 244)

Ostensibly the chronologically asynchronous memoirs of Alden Dennis Weer, Peace is a meditation on fabulation. Through the narrator's examination of his own life and the contingent tales and anecdotes that he and other characters relay, the reader comes to reflect on the ways in which their own lives are stories, imperfectly told, incompletely remembered, and perhaps like Gold the antiquarian bookseller's artifacts, forgeries.

Like memory itself, the book is incomplete. For example, the reader concludes the relatively short work knowing a good deal about Weer's childhood and middle age, but cannot say with any precision how it came about that the forty year old engineer became the rich fifty year old entrepreneur of an orange juice analogue made out of potatoes. Weer not only remembers, but appears to relive his past, seemingly without changing it, although the recurrent trope of revenance, the ghost that returns, stalks the work and is significant symbolically. The work does have an historical present of sorts, with the narrator wandering from room to room of a house which is familiar to him within which he continues to write his memoirs (which are contiguous with the book the reader holds in their hands) and which he appears to have had built, although ultimately this construction is perhaps no more than the prison house of memory.

The narrator is a sense a 'hungry ghost' archetype, haunting his own life but destined never to enjoy the book's titular repose, and spectral forms figure widely in the work. Weer revisits but never lives again fully within his own experiences, and through his drifting from recollection to recollection Wolfe conveys an arresting sense of how memory can precipitate strong emotions and near-experiential, almost hallucinatory sensations, but nevertheless cannot temporally return to the event in question to live through it again, either to savour the experience anew or amend its outcome.

Peace is a work which invites its decipherer to read more into it than it is perhaps trying to say. Our lives are stories, but unlike Alden Dennis Weer's they will end. Life is, like the cover of this Fantasy Masterworks edition, arborescent. It can only grow upwards and outwards, and to torture the boughs of experience by binding them together or attempting to influence their development is not only an exercise in frustration but in a sense an aberration, a denial of the fact that the past cannot be fixed, and a failure to acknowledge that the future can be shaped by our actions in the present. Even if we can no longer accurately discern it, our pasts remain immovable as the notes Weer frequently encounters within the work which he wishes to take up, only to find that they are nailed to the furniture.

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