Friday 28 April 2017

Recommend: Kick-ass women from history

For this week's "Recommend" post we’re asking you to tell us your favorite kick-ass women from history. Understand that brief however you like (there’s a range of interpretations below), and tell us about these figures—why they’re “kick-ass,” why they mean something to you, a story from their lives… inspire us. To get us going, we asked a few authors, editors and other friends of TFF for their suggestions:

Maria Grech Ganado (profile; interview)

A German abbess of a Benedictine monastery, medieval mystic, philosopher, writer, poet, hagiographer, scientific natural historian. And, before the term was invented, a feminist. Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) established for herself a female identity never recorded before in her exclusively patriarchal historical context—the Church.

Preaching was forbidden women, but Pope Eugene III requested she travel widely to preach the visionary theology she wrote 3 volumes of, was consulted by both religious and social personages, invented a new language, composed the first musical morality play, Ordo Virtutum. Her liturgical chants still enchant many, including me, and her natural medicine influenced that of the New Movement.

Woman may be made from man, but no man can be made without a woman’—Hildegard’s writing exalts woman and God’s creation of beauty, recommends beer to give her nuns rosy cheeks. She refers openly to the joys of sex, scorning concepts of woman’s ‘uncleanness’. She challenged authority, obviously male, and got her way. I suspect her insistence that she was an unlearned member of the weaker sex was tactical rather than humble, crucial at the time to ensure her power. A woman after my own heart.

Regina de Búrca (twitter; TFF)

Sometimes when life, neoliberalism and/or bigotry brings me down, I like to remind myself of my kick-ass female ancestors to help me feel stronger. As with all family trees, some ancestors are more colourful than others, and I have to say I'm pretty proud to have the blood of Granuaile, the Pirate Queen of Connacht, Ireland, running through my veins. Born around 1530, legend has it that as a child she cut off all her hair to disguise herself as a boy so she could join her father on a trading mission. He had refused to take her as at that time it was considered bad luck to have women on board ships. This is the source of her name Gráinne Mhaol (or bald Gráinne), anglicised as Granuaile.

Salic Law forbade women to become leaders, however this did not deter Granuaile from becoming chieftain of the O’Malley clan, leading an army of 200 men and being captain of a fleet of ships. Famous for leading an army against the English, by 1593, she had a catalogue of treasonous activities levelled against her by the English Court. This didn’t stop her from travelling to Greenwich Palace to negotiate successfully with Queen Elizabeth I for the release of her two sons and half-brother.

For me, Granuaile personifies tearing down limitations imposed by gender and societal expectations, and her memory inspires me never to take no for an answer.

Djibril al-Ayad (TFF)

My candidate for kick-ass woman from history is, Malahayati (sometimes also known in Indonesian as Keumalahayati), the late sixteenth-century Sumatran admiral and stateswoman under the Sultan of Aceh. After graduating from Islamic and then military schools, and a successful career as a naval commander leading to her appointment as first admiral of the growing Aceh navy, the historical record recounts several major naval victories under her command, including over the Dutch colonial and piratical expeditions in 1599 and 1601, but it is telling that as well as a formidable commander, she was trusted with international diplomacy and financial negotiation as well, including a trade agreement with Elizabeth I of England (who joined the Dutch in choosing to treaty rather than attempt war against the well-defended Aceh Sultanate). Legend also has it that Malahayati, herself the widow of a naval commander, in the 1580s had recruited a force of between 1,000 and 2,000 war widows to serve in her navy, driven by vengeance against the Portuguese conquerors of Malacca, on the reasoning that these widows would be a highly motivated military force. So maybe I cheated, there are actually 2,000 kick-ass women from history in my story!

Omi Wilde (story; story)

Hide Hyodo photograph, [ca. 1935].
City of Richmond Archives and
Richmond Retired Teachers Association,
photograph # 2014 6 5.
One of my favourite kickass women from history, Hide Hyodo Shimizu, was born in Vancouver—the same town I was!—in 1908, just one year after white-Canadians targeted Japanese-Canadians in violent race riots, and throughout her lifetime she battled oppression and prejudice. At eighteen she became the first Japanese-Canadian to hold a teacher’s certificate. In her twenties she was part of a Japanese-Canadian delegation that petitioned the Canadian government for voting rights, which they were denied. Three years later, the start of World War II increased government-sanctioned oppression to even more shameful levels, including forcing Japanese-Canadians to register with the police and the Canadian government’s theft of Japanese-Canadian citizens’ homes and belongings. After the majority of Japanese-Canadians were forcibly removed from their homes along the BC coast, Hide continued to work as a public school teacher but dedicated her weekends and evenings to providing an education to the children imprisoned in the internment camp in Hastings Park, Vancouver—all while unpaid, preparing for her own imprisonment, and working around a restrictive curfew. Later, when she and the majority of Japanese-Canadians had been further removed to internment camps in Interior BC, she traveled from camp to camp planning primary school curriculum and training highschool students to teach the younger children. After the war, still prohibited from returning home to coastal BC, Hide settled in Ontario and continued to be a dynamic activist and educator. In the 1980’s and 90’s she was honoured in many ways, including being awarded the Order of Canada, but I think she’d be most pleased by the multiple scholarships named for her. To explore and learn more about Hide and Nikkei history, the website nikkeistories.com is an awesome resource.

Your turn! Please give us your recommendations of kick-ass women from history in the comments.

Tuesday 25 April 2017

Lori Selke's Earworm of the Month

Our friend and erstwhile guest editor Lori Selke has a new column/newsletter, the “Earworm of the Month Club,” based on a similar column Lori used to write for SF Weekly, but now written with complete editorial freedom and more space to rant. You can subscribe to the Earworm of the Month Club by going to Tinyletter and entering your email. It'll be sent to you once a month (at most), and your address won't be used for any other purpose.


If you’d like to support Lori or thank her for these posts, you can tip her the price of a cup of coffee (or anything else) at ko-fi.com/lselke.

Monday 17 April 2017

Recommend: Optimistic SF

This time, we're asking for recommendations of optimistic science fiction. Please leave your suggestions in the comments below. First, a few ideas from editors, authors, reviewers and other friends:

Tracie Welser (author page)

A common enough complaint about science fiction is that much of recent writing in the genre is dystopian or deeply pessimistic. Gone are the golden age stories about exploration and hope, to which I say "good riddance," as much of the sense of wonder and speculation of those years drew heavily on imperialist themes and angles of approach to "others." It seems inevitable that trends such as social suppression of dissent, growing divide between economic classes, environmental degradation and rapidly changes in technology produce distinctly dark responses from science fiction writers. Lauren Buekes' Moxieland comes to mind. In the early aughts, this complaint seemed louder than usual (just search for "positive science fiction" to take a peek at posts from Time and others decrying the grimness of SFF books and film). There were even suggestions that negative stories stifle scientific innovation, rather than inspire.

I, for one, think dystopian narratives while not inherently hopeful are backdrops for hope, where solidarity and struggle are elevated. The popularity of dystopia themes in young adult fiction (ie, Hunger Games) is not so surprising, as the sub-genre is inclined to take risks and whack fascism firmly on the nose, a sensibility enjoyed by young readers and adults alike. Similarly, seemingly hopeless stories, of shattered civilization and economic despair (Oryx and Crake, The Wind-up Girl) offers some kernels of resistance and revolution. Attempts at overtly positive science fiction in the recent past are harder to come by.

Two that come to mind are METAtropolis edited by John Scalzi. A series of shared world stories by different authors, the collection posits some realistic (read: gritty) futurism but with hopeful notes about urban community. The second is the anthology Hieroglyph, which includes the notable, playful story by Charlie Jane Anders titled "The Day it All Ended." The history of the Hieroglyph Project itself is fairly interesting, a deliberate effort to create and publish more positive visions of science fictional future.

Maureen Kincaid Speller (Paper Knife)

The world is not an optimistic place right now; it’s been a long time since science fiction felt optimistic, to the point where the issues explored over the last twenty or thirty years in fiction have become commonplace in daily life. In common with many, I fear for the future and often find it hard to read sf these days because the brain can only stand so much dystopia. It was a genuine pleasure, then, to read Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station recently and to feel that perhaps not all has been lost. Tidhar’s fiction doesn’t offer much in the way of solutions but there is the promise nonetheless that life will continue, and not necessarily a bad life either. The people (and I use this term in the broadest sense) who gather around the Central Station to sell food, tend bar, collect books, solve problems, look out for one another, fall in love, practise their religions, aren’t so far removed from the people I know. It is both encouraging and comforting to know that at least one writer believes in the persistence of ordinary daily life, no matter what.

Don Riggs (faculty page; alumnus page)

When I was in the 8th grade, I first learned about the Big Bang theory—the actual theory, not the television sitcom. The ultimate implication of the universe starting off with a bang and an unceasing expansion is entropy, which is the tapering off of the energy of the universe until the Heat Death of the Universe happens. I was thoroughly depressed by this, and so, when our next theory was presented, the Oscillating Universe, where the universe expands as far as it goes until it then is sucked back into another primordial point of all matter, which will again explode in another Big Bang, I decided that was the theory I wished to embrace. “Utriusque Cosmi,” a short story by Robert Charles Wilson (in Neil Clarke’s Galactic Empires, 2017), combines the story of a sixteen-year- old girl living in a trailer with her meth-addict mother and her abusive boyfriend, with that of that girl’s future self, “raptured up” to the Fleet of the intelligences of creatures saved from dying worlds, itself pursued by the Invisible Enemy, which ultimately turns out to be a group of Elder Beings that in turn “rapture up” the Fleet and thus survive the next collapse of the universe.

Stephanie Saulter (author page)

It’s a shame that science fiction isn’t a more generally optimistic genre. Too often we extrapolate possible futures so dire and hopeless the message seems to be that humanity is aboard a rocketship to all-but-inescapable doom, or at best unalleviated misery. I can’t think of too many writers who buck this grim trend, but among the few is the late and greatly lamented Iain M. Banks, whose Culture novels are the ultimate vision of a far-future, galaxy-spanning, inclusive and egalitarian polity in which humans are only one of many species and virtually omniscient AIs, instead of being the harbingers of our destruction, are committed and wryly indulgent protectors of organic life. The Culture’s liberal ethos combined with flexibility and at times ruthless pragmatism allows it to withstand assaults from without and respond to concerns from within. I’d suggest The Player of Games for a first visit.

Another exception is the grande dame of speculative fiction, Ursula Le Guin. Her SF looks at harmful gender and social constructs, the iniquities of politics and commerce, and conflicts between ideology and idealism with an eye less to endless iterations of the problem than envisioning possible solutions. The Dispossessed is an extraordinary book.

What are some other positive examples of science fiction? Please share recommendations in the comments.

Sunday 2 April 2017

New Issue: 2017.40

“One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits.”

—Ben Okri

Issue 2017.40

 [ Issue 2017.40; Cover art © 2017 Carmen Moran ] Flash fiction
Short stories
Poetry
Full issue and editorial

Download e-book version: EPUB | Mobi