Currently reading a book I picked up in Ocean City last year (for $1.79); it's Women of Wonder, a 1974 anthology of "science fiction stories by women about women" edited by Pamela Sargent....
Okay... if you notice things like timestamps, you'll see how long it took me to slog through this collection. I will say it was worth every penny I paid for it, but that's because a) it was purchased with $9-worth of other books and a $10.00 off coupon, and b) my dad actually paid (Maryland taxes - tell me again why it's called the 'Free State'?). But, I persevered because you all deserve fair warning, and ... I really didn't have time for much reading. Plenty of time for the iPod and super-quiet no-gas push mower, though.
Anyway... my grouchy, grumpy, partially inebriated review:
Judith Merril:
That Only a Mother - 1948: This is a classic, and I understand that (and why)... but holy cow, what a morass of dated attitudes and mannerisms. It has an underlying creepiness and horror that stems from the atomic bombing of Japan being so fresh in everyone's mind, and the correspondence format of most of the story reads like my grandfather's wartime documents. Good for authenticity, but in a way it is like reading alternate history... or rather like a history that just didn't happen that way.
Katherine MacLean:
Contagion - 1950: As far as dated gender roles are concerned, this one really takes the cake. Humans colonize the galaxy, and every ship and colony is populated with straight, W.A.S.P. married couples. The story itself wasn't that bad... and I guess they did let the women save the day... but it took an obvious twist ending, tried to wring extra drama out of the crew's reaction to their fate, and sort of neutered itself by implying that all of the work and worry the crew went through solving their mystery was moot from the start. Meh.
Marion Zimmer Bradley:
The Wind People - 1958: I figured the eight year jump and the big name author would equal a good story. I figured wrong. The prose was overwrought and melodramatic; the scenario was a stretch even by the standards of internal logic, giving us a weird combination of self-inflicted misogyny and uncomfortable assumptions (by the time they get explained, it's hard to care any more); and the ending left me wondering what all the fuss and bother had been about. You don't get to see the aliens, and all of the conflict is basically internal to one character (though it projects on everyone and everything else), and I *think* everyone dies at the end - well, the humans, anyway - so there's no net "there" there. It's not that she doesn't tell the story, it's just that by the time you wrestle it out of all of the angsty poetry of the text, it feels like something of a betrayal that you had to work so hard.
Anne McCaffrey:
The Ship Who Sang - 1961: This was easily my favorite story of the bunch; not saying much, I know, but it's a really cool idea, and I love the description of Helva and of the world she lives in. It felt a bit crushed into the short story format, and I'd rather not go into the uncomfortable comparisons with the set-up "brawny guy" being utterly taken care of in every way by the "brainy woman who can do everything"... mostly because in real life, I'm not that brawny, but my wife actually seems able to do everything Helva does except achieve spaceflight.
Sonya Dorman:
When I Was Miss Dow - 1966: This one was interesting, but felt under-developed. The sexual politics were a little more interesting, if only because we were provided with the POV of a shape-shifter, whose species was necessarily genderless. It would have been a better exploration if it hadn't spent so much time luxuriating in the fact that the main character was in the form of a hot babe, and banging her nerdy old boss. Hooray for him; hooray for the over-stimulated shape-shifting alien; poor us.
Kit Reed:
The Food Farm - 1966: I consider myself to be a somewhat bright individual, but this one left me scratching my head. Obviously, the theme is body image, and ... well, a guy who REALLY digs fat chicks. Sorry. There was no way to look at this one that didn't boil down to that. The whole tale revolves around an obese woman whose family forces her into a weight loss center. She resists their choice of body style in vain, only to learn that her heart's desire, a crooner (I pictured Tom Jones) with an obsession for Big Women, thinks she's too thin. So she and another inmate take over and turn the "fat farm" into a weight GAIN center in order to provide Tommy with fat women. It was pretty gross.
Kate Wilhelm:
Baby, You Were Great - 1967: Alright, this was a little better; it explored the predatory nature of exploitive entertainment and emotional telepathy. The theme is certainly still relevant today, even if the caricature of the evil producer is a bit simplistic and the idea of empathy has been done to death since the Year of Flower Power. And as you might guess from the title, the attempts to capture hip, rat-pack slang will have you checking your wardrobe for polyester.
Carol Emshwiller:
Sex and/or Mr. Morrison - 1967: Gah! More fat fetish squick fic. Blech!
Ursula K. Le Guin:
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow - 1971: A story from her Hainish universe; I think I had actually seen this one before. I'm not terribly familiar with all of her work, but I have read much more interesting stories by her in other collections, and this wasn't nearly as elegant or well-constructed as her other stuff. I won't blame the characters for being unlikeable, since that was clearly explained in the beginning (the crew was selected for mental instability); I just wish the denouement hadn't felt so tacked on in a burst of time-dilated exposition.
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro:
False Dawn - 1972: As post-apocalyptic dystopian adventures go, this one felt extremely thin and fragmentary to me. You don't get to see the beginning... you never really do, do you? ... and it ends in an unlikely place after an unnecessary event. I suppose the intervening 36 years have explored this thematic territory more completely, so I'll have to imagine that the setting and the near-rape would have been somewhat revolutionary when originally published.
Joanna Russ:
Noboby's Home - 1972: This one was a set piece about non-traditional family units and instantaneous teleportation. I guess it fits with the time-frame... the free love era and all. Unfortunately, there wasn't much story to tell, and it was still hard to keep track of what was supposed to be going on.
Vonda N. McIntyre:
Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand - 1973: Except for the ending, which I either didn't get or didn't connect with, I thought this was pretty good. It was an interesting world, and I would have like to find out more about it. The magic was nothing new, but I liked the way it unfolded.
At the beginning of the collection, there is a lxiv page dissertation by the editor on Women in Science Fiction. If you want to read it, I'll gladly swap this book for one that you didn't enjoy. See, I bought it out of a sense of that man-guilt; I have that Robert Silverburg collection on our shelves, and I wanted to make some kind of amends for enjoying those stories so thoroughly, even though they severely lack any pretense to include female authors. But if you want to prove something about the quality of feminine or feminist fiction, "Women of Wonder" is NOT the case you want to build.
Meanwhile, I have just checked out Elizabeth Bear's
Whiskey and Water on the strength of my affection for
Tideline. And, hey, I think she might be a woman!