charlotte perkins gilman

Last week, I pointed to one of the foremothers of science fiction, Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, and her work The Blazing World. Herland comes several centuries later (in fact, it’ll be exactly a century old in 2015) but it’s just as important a landmark in this often murky territory.

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.

You can find Herland online in its entirety at Project Gutenberg, along with much of Gilman’s other work.

#sfwapro

It’s Women’s History Month, and while I don’t usually pay much attention to that sort of thing, it’s a topic that’s certainly worthy. I didn’t know a lot about the women’s suffrage movement in America until I was hired to teach an Intro to Women’s Studies class at Towson State University one year, having seen a flyer up at JHU where I was in grad school at the time. I frantically crammed a whole lot of reading in that summer, prepping to teach a class that covered what seemed to be everything: linguistics, biology, anthropology, literature, and more than anything else, history, history, history.

And in it I met one of the great loves of my life: a movement whose history continues to fascinate and inspire me, the American suffrage movement and the fascinating characters that moved it forward: Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Victoria Woodhull…and more, a cast of hundreds in a period that was turbulent and changeable and crammed full of social movements, including abolition, free love, spiritualism, temperance, women’s suffrage and a myriad others.

A major joy of my new Kindle is finding free books. I figured other people might appreciate some of the finds (and might share some of their own – bonus!).

So here’s a slew of classic science fiction novels, available free online on Project Gutenberg. (Kindle users, it’s so so easy to mail files onto your Kindle, although it’s not free when you’re moving books on there, but costs a .15 per MB, with a book running 2-4 MB, depending.)

1. Flatland by Edwin Abbot. The story of life in two dimensions, written in 1884 by an English schoolmaster, it originally boasted “A Square” as author.
2. A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. One of the great pulp writers, Burroughs’ work is well represented on Project Gutenberg, and provides a taste of old school sf at its best. including the Mars, Pellucidar, and Tarzan series.
3. R.U.R. by Karel Capek. This Czechoslovakian play first was staged in 1921. It deals with the rise of the robots, and their final rebellion against the humans.
4. Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Written by one of the early suffrage leaders, Gilman posits a society without men, and in the tradition of such utopian fiction, explains it at length.
5. Deathworld by Harry Harrison. The first of the Deathworld series, this deals with gambler Jason dinAlt and his visit to the deadliest planet in the universe.
6. Beyond Lies the Wub by Philip K. Dick. No one can be a science fiction fan without at least a little Philip K. Dick in their reading background (in my opinion). Prolific, full of wild imagination, and talented, he produced novels and short stories that are a major influence on the field. Others to read by Dick: Valis, Ubik), Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, and (always) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (which inspired the movie Bladerunner). I’m happy to see so many P.K. Dick novels available on the Kindle, but I miss Eye in the Sky and The Man in the High Castle.
7. Time Traders by Andre Norton. Norton brought countless readers to f&sf through her YA novels. Time Traders is the first of a series and follows sharp-jawed, keen-eyed Ross Murdock in his quest for lost alien technology.
8. Galaxy Primes by E.E. Smith. Another of the Golden Age writers, Smith does space opera like no one else. Here two men and two men are lost in space and must somehow chart their way back to their home planet, Earth.
9. Invisible Man by H.G. Wells. There’s a lot of Wells to pick from, but this is one of my favorites, and certainly has inspired plenty of other works, both books and movies. I’ll note that you should read Ralph Ellison’s version first – while not strictly sf, it’s surreal and enlightening and a great take on the idea.

And the tenth? I’m leaving it up to you to supply, dear readers – what would you suggest, what have you found online that delighted or amazed you?

(Coming tomorrow: story prompt!!)

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