Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an American editor, writer, and lecturer whose short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” about a woman’s descent into madness, is often revisited in college literature classes. She was a single mother who supported herself by writing — no small accomplishment today, let alone at the time she was doing so, the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Herland is often treated as though it stands alone, but it’s actually the middle volume of a trilogy, preceded by Moving the Mountain in 1911 and followed by With Her in Ourland in 1916. The work was originally published as a serial in a magazine called The Forerunner that Gilman edited; it did not appear as a complete book until 1979, when Pantheon Books published it.
Herland is a utopian novel, in which three men, Vandyk (the narrator), Terry, and Jeff stumble across a civilization where the women reproduce asexually and there are no men. This turns out to lead not to a perfect civilization, but certainly one that seems more appealing than the one Gilman found herself in. Gilman uses the book as a device with which to explore constructed ideas of gender. It is an appealing society in many others; in others, it’s a bit cold and calculating. Girls who are overly rebellious or mouthy, for example, will not be allowed to reproduce.
One of the things that’s refreshing about the book is that it’s not written as though the lack of males is a deficit that warps society. Instead, it’s simply the way things are, and the Herlanders seem capable of getting along quite well without it.
Gilman was one of the important suffrage speakers of her time and a bit of a polymath. If you want to go further into her writing, I suggest a piece of nonfiction, her work on economics, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, which originally appeared in 1898.
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End of the Year Reading Recommendations
Now available on Smashwords, "All the Pretty Little Mermaids," which originally appeared in Asimov's. You set the price! If you enjoy it, please leave a review.I spent a good chunk of my summer reading through a multi-volume fantasy series for the sake of completeness. The series will remain nameless, because I can’t in good conscience recommend it, but it did impact the amount of other reading I did. Most of these are particular to 2014, but not all.
Daniel Abraham came out with the most recent of his Dagger and Coin series, The Widow’s House, and it was just as enjoyable as the first three. Abraham has a gift for flawed characters that you care deeply about, whose dilemmas rack the reader to the heart even when they’re doing despicable things.
Carol Berg’s Dust and Light. Carol consistently hits it out of the ballpark when it comes to epic fantasy, and this start to a trilogy is no exception. If you like Sanderson, Martin, or Bujold’s fantasy, you will like Carol Berg.
The Hole Behind Midnight by Clinton Boomer is terrific urban fantasy with a highly original protagonist. Think of a mash-up of Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files with the Tyrion Lannister sections of Game of Thrones and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and you’re in the general vicinity.
M.L. Brennan manages urban fantasy outside the tired norm with Iron Night, the latest in her Generation V series. I will admit, her kitsune character has me totally captivated, but the vampires manage not to be cliche, and protagonist Fortitude Scott is wonderful, reminding me of Rob Thurman’s engaging Caliban series.
Stephen Brust and Skyler White’s The Incrementalists is urban fantasy taken in a different direction, with an ancient society intent on nudging humanity along in the right directions.
Harry Connolly’s Twenty Palaces series is still more urban fantasy. There’s only four of them, and I wish it were twenty-four. I really enjoy the flavor and wonderful, terrible magic that fills this books. Great stuff.
Caren Gussoff’s The Birthday Problem. Seattle and a plague of madness-inducing nanobots? Sign me up. This is a terrific short novel that should be kept in mind for award ballots.
M.C.A. Hogarth’s The Mindhealer’s Series, Mindtouch and Mindline, were lovely, charming reads about a friendship between two disparate but equally compassionate healers. Looking forward to more in this series. Also recommended: Even the Wingless (looking forward to that serial as well.)
Kameron Hurley’s The Mirror Empire, the first volume of the Worldbreaker Saga. Beautiful fantasy with all sorts of wonderful world-building detail and absolutely gripping characters. Highly recommended, and another to keep in mind for award ballots.
Elliott Kay’s Poor Man’s Fight and Rich Man’s War. I love books with an economic underpinning to them, and this far future military SF delivers wonderfully. Sometimes the villain is almost a little too cartoony, but if you take it as space opera, it’s pretty wonderful.
Meilan Miranda’s Son in Sorrow is the engaging second volume of her An Intimate History of the Greater Kingdom. There’s a level of intrigue and sexuality to these books that reminds one of Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel books, with equally deft prose and dialogue.
Linda Nagata’s The Red: First Light was terrific military SF/political thriller with lots of engaging detail and a solid dash of cyberpunk. Good stuff, highly recommended.
Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers is lovely, and significantly better (imo) than the HBO series. It has a wonderful poetry to it that i will match against any lit fic by Paul Auster or T.C. Boyle.
Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria was beautiful, reminding me at times of LeGuin’s Earthsea books. Samatar is burning up the charts lately with awards, and this was no exception.
Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy is tremendous. Often unsettling, eerie, and always striking, like playing a massive multi-player game where no one else is logged on. Highly recommended, also award ballot material. Wayne read these while we were in Costa Rica and liked them just as much
I also reviewed Jo Walton’s My Real Children and What Makes This Book So Great for CSZ, and really enjoyed the heck out of both, though I know I’ll come back to the second much more than the first. As an inveterate re-reader, it’s highly satisfying to read someone else’s account and analysis of the practice, and I emerged from the book with both a to-read and a to-reread list. WMTBSG is highly, highly recommended for fellow genre re-readers.
Andy Weir’s The Martian was engaging as heck because of its protagonist, who is one of the most likable main characters I have ever encountered. A man is trapped on Mars – will he escape? It’s been done before, but rarely so well.
I greatly enjoyed the first of Django Wexler’s flintlock fantasy, , and the second, The Shadow Throne, was equally enjoyable. Engaging POVs that remain tightly controlled and well-plotted.
Ammonite is beautifully real, and a good example of the heights speculative fiction can reach.Ammonite, by Nicola Griffith, is subtle and beautiful and a terrific piece of speculative fiction. An anthropologist, Marghe Taishan, arrives on the planet GP, there to test a vaccine against the deadly virus that has killed all but a few of the original colonists. She finds that the survivors, all women, have developed the ability to give birth without men.
The book won both a Lambda and Tiptree Award, and it’s easy to see why. A dynamite protagonist interacting with intriguing and beautifully three-dimensional characters. The world is fabulously drawn, evocative, and both the anthropological and physical science are accurate and carefully thought out.
Ammonite was Griffith’s debut novel. I’d also recommend her most recent, the absolutely amazing Hild, a retelling of the life of historical figure, Saint Hild of Whitby. Come to think of it, nothing I’ve read by her has been shabby, including Slow River, a near-future thriller that is also beautifully told and engaging.
I had the luck to sit in on a class Griffith taught for Clarion West a couple of years ago. She is a consummate, careful wordsmith. The word “luminous” keeps appearing in reviews of her work, and that’s because it’s so beautifully crafted that it seems to glow from within.
The first three paragraphs of a piece set up so much. Here’s the first three of Ammonite, to give you a taste:
Marghe’s suit was still open at neck and wrist, and the helmet rested in the crook of her left arm. An ID flash was sealed to her should” “Marguerite Angelica Taishan, SEC.” The suit was wrinkled and smelled of just-unrolled plastic, and she felt heavy and awkward, even in the two-thirds gravity of orbital station Estrade.
She stood by the airlock at the inside end of A Section. THe door was already open. Waiting. She rested the fingertips of her right hand on the smooth ceramic of the raised hatch frame; it was cool, shocking after two days of the close human heat of A Section.
The sill of the airlock reached her knees; easy enough to step over. No great barrier. The lock chamber itself was two strides across. THe dar door was still closed, sealed to another sill, like this one. Four steps from here to B Section. Four steps. She had recontracted with SEC, endured six months of retraining on Earth, traveled eighteen months aboard the Terragin, and spent the last two days on the Estrade bumping elbows with the three-member crew, all to take those four steps.
