Recommend Groundbreaking Women Writers

The history of literature is full of groundbreaking women—authors who go where no one has trod before, whose pens carve grooves in which later generations can only aspire to follow. Women have always written. Sometimes they have done so under pseudonyms. Sometimes they have not been published or preserved (and very often they also have); they have surely been underrated, but they have always written. And many women writers have kicked ass so hard that they have left the world of literature irreparably changed behind them. We’d like to hear your recommendations of women writers who have literally set the standards for authors who follow them—whether they were the first to write in a certain field, or inventors of a new genre, or just someone you can’t imagine the world of literature without, leave a comment below telling us about her and why she was so great.

To kick off, we’ve asked a few authors, editors, reviewers, and other friends for their suggestions. Read and enjoy.

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Omi Wilde (story; story)

I was a poetry-enraptured kid when I first learned about Enheduanna, first author known by name to history, but I’m still in childish awe at the way her words echo across 4300 years to reach me. As a princess and a priestess in what we now know as Iraq, she was powerful religiously and politically. Her poetry wove together two religions, creating a new pantheon from among the gods of the Sumerian and Akkadian peoples. As the daughter of an Akkadian ruler and a Sumerian priestess she embodied the unification of the two cultures that she strove towards and her work ensured the stability of her father’s empire. In this, we might consider her to have been the first propagandist as well, but long after the rise and fall of empires it is her poetry and her impact on the form that has endured. “They approach the light of day, about me, / the light is obscured / The shadows approach the light of day, / it is covered with a (sand) storm.”

Further reading: Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart: Poetry of the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna (UTP 2001) by Betty De Shong Meador.

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Cait Coker (TFF Reviews)

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1623-1673) was a British aristocrat, philosopher, scientist, playwright, proto-feminist, and one of the earliest science fiction authors. She was the first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society of London, and she published The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World in 1666. Usually shortened to just The Blazing World, the book tells the story of a young Lady who discovers a utopian society of talking animals in a parallel world, possibly making it the first example of portal fiction. Becoming Empress there, the girl decides to invade the imperfect real world and remake it in a utopian image; the novel is therefore a fictional counterpart to Cavendish’s political treatise Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, also published in 1666. Though she published a dozen works during her lifetime, she was often dismissed and satirized as “Mad Madge,” especially in misogynist plays satirizing popular women writers. Cavendish’s reputation was largely erased and languished until Virginia Woolf wrote an essay about her in The Common Reader, which started to recover her reputation as an early professional writer. In the decades since, Cavendish has had a scholarly revival in the field of women’s writing, if not in popular science fiction.

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Alessandra Cristallini (blog)

In 1816, a nineteen year old girl created science fiction. She is Mary Shelley, and she is my literature heroine. Frankenstein may be regarded as horror in popular culture but if you read it you will discover a novel that has very little of the “evil scientist mad with ambition and hunted by torches and pitchforks in some creepy castle, preferably in the Carpathians” trope. No. At its heart, Frankenstein is a cautionary tale, and not a hopeless one: this is where Mary Shelley’s greatness emerges. Just like modern sci-fi authors she was inspired by the most debated scientific discoveries of the time, with all the mistakes, hopes and dreams that came with them. She saw how science and technology were making lives better, but in a costly way for the people and the environment. She didn’t write an anti-technology story but rather a tale about how progress should be kept in check carefully before we destroy ourselves—and humanity with it. She saw the importance of modern science and realized how life-changing it was going to be. And that's how science fiction was born.

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Maria Grech Ganado (profile; interview)

As was common in Victorian England, Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights (1847) under the male pen-name of Ellis Bell. Initially the uninhibited “savagery” at the Heights, as opposed to the orderly calm of the Grange (a merging of Gothic style with that of Jane Austen), shocked its critics. Today, the novel is regarded globally as one of the best ever written. First assessed as chaotic, the novel's two parts are seen now to constitute a cogent, dialectically balanced structure, influenced, perhaps, by translations of German rather than French literature after the Napoleonic wars.

Philosophical, social and even political studies of the novel’s theme argue that it goes far beyond the intensity of the Heathcliff/Catherine relationship, despite this being the nub of the plot. Catherine/Cathy’s pivotal name returns to “Earnshaw” after going twice through “Linton,” whereas “Heathcliff” dies out completely. It is the only name which “earns” the union of the Heights and the Grange. Patterns of natural attributes, both elemental and animal, also become symbolic (e.g. storm/wolf vs calm/sucking leveret), major relationships reflect elective affinities, prose is rendered poetical and one is bound to discover something new every time Wuthering Heights is reread.

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Clare McKeown (@ClareMQN)

Although it’s a feminist classic, I only recently read Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” for the first time. Gilman published the short story in 1892 after her experience of being subjected to an extreme “rest cure” for a severe mental health crisis, most likely post-partum depression or psychosis. Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” as a first-person tale of Gothic horror, and in it, she broke ground by daring to challenge the dominant narrative that “hysterical” women needed to be controlled by men who knew what was best for them.

Gilman, like many of the early feminists, was decidedly not intersectional. As Lindy West points out, one of Gilman’s later works in particular, the feminist utopian novel, Herland, is “rife with gender essentialism, white supremacy and anti-abortion rhetoric.” However, West holds, as I do, that we can learn by engaging with the work of early feminist thinkers, even when we must acknowledge where they fall short.

Gilman broke ground by asserting that women are capable of knowing our own minds and our own selves, and responsible health practitioners need to listen to and respect women. Unfortunately, women today still struggle to have our physical, emotional, and psychological pain taken seriously by medical professionals. Reading “The Yellow Wallpaper” in 2018 reminded me of how far we have come, and how far we still need to go.

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Lisa Timpf (Goodreads; TFF reviews)

During her 70-year writing career, Andre Norton penned well over 100 novels as well as several short stories, and edited and compiled a number of anthologies. And yet, many of her readers may have been unaware they were reading a book written by a woman. The ambiguity was intentional, and a function of society’s expectations at the time Norton launched her career. In 1934, Norton published The Prince Commands, a work of historical fiction. Fearing that the then mostly-male audience for juvenile fiction might be hesitant to pick up a book written by “Alice Mary Norton,” she changed her legal name to Andre Alice Norton. Most of her works were published under the name Andre Norton, although she also used the pseudonyms Andrew North and Allen Weston.

After focussing mainly on historical fiction early in her career, Norton branched out into science fiction, exploring themes such as time travel, humankind's first voyages to other planets, telepathic communication between humans and animals, and quests for artifacts related to “Forerunner” species. She also wrote a number of fantasy novels, including the Witch World series.

Norton is credited with helping to pave the way for female science fiction and fantasy writers who followed her, by showing that a woman could write such works, and do it successfully. Her vivid and imaginative settings, the universality of her themes, and her ability to tell and pace a good story made her popular with generations readers, some of whom became writers in their own right. Norton’s legacy lives on in the form of the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy, which recognizes outstanding works of science fiction or fantasy geared toward the young adult market.

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Regina de Búrca (twitter; TFF)

I will be eternally grateful to Ursula K. Le Guin’s pioneering writing for changing the way I think. From the ethnically diverse society in her Earthsea novels, the environmental decline in The New Atlantis to the genderless world of The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin tackled the deep inequality, shortsightedness and greed of our world by creating and exploring others. Her work fearlessly faced issues of gender, sexuality, race and the environment among other topics, advocating justice and independent thought. She questioned widely-accepted notions about sexuality and gender from a critical perspective and never backed down from speaking her truth or standing up for what she believed in. Her prolific work subverted literary genres and conventions while blazing a trail for other women writers. Earlier this year we lost a true visionary when sadly, she passed away, but her groundbreaking legacy lives on, continuing to lead the way.

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Now leave a comment and tell us of your favorite groundbreaking women authors—who changed the world of literature so much that you can’t imaging reading, or writing, if she hadn’t existed?

New Issue: 2018.44

“Did you not call this a glorious expedition? And wherefore was it glorious? Not because the way was smooth and placid as a southern sea, but because it was full of dangers and terror, because at every new incident your fortitude was to be called forth and your courage exhibited, because danger and death surrounded it, and these you were to brave and overcome. For this was it a glorious, for this was it an honourable undertaking.”

—Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1818)

Issue 2018.44

Short stories

• ‘The Thing You Feed’, Joyce Chng (illustrated by Martin Hanford)
• ‘From Out of the Ashes’, Michelle Labbé (illustrated by Miranda Jean)
• ‘My Pet Tiger’, Jessica Dylan Miele (illustrated by Joyce Chng)
• ‘We Have Your Book!’, Patrick Doerksen (illustrated by Dr. T. Eratopo)

Novelettes

• ‘A Faster Tomorrow’, Damien Krsteski (illustrated by Eric Asaris)

Poetry

• ‘Song of Wandering Agnes’, Christyl Rivers (illustrated by Jason Baltazar)
• ‘Jonah’, Soren James (illustrated by Miguel Santos)

Download e-book version: EPUB | Mobi

Full issue and editorial

Interview with Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada

The CFS for Making Monsters may have closed, but our ongoing quest for monsters continues… This week we’re joined by Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada, author of the story “All My Relations” in the Pacific Monsters anthology from our friends at Fox Spirit Books. Our third visitor from the Pacific region, Bryan was kind enough to chat to us about his story, his writing, Hawaiian monsters, and the sea.

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Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada is a tiny part of his beautiful beloved Hawaiian community that fights every day for breath, for ea, for connection, for sovereignty. He is sometimes called tree, bear, Morris, hoa, and more. He is also sometimes an academic, editor, translator, blogger (hehiale.wordpress.com), poet, writer of dorky sff stories set in Hawaiʻi, photographer, and/or videographer. What he mostly does is surf with his mother and a crew of fierce activist poet wāhine who tease (and teach) him mercilessly.

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The Future Fire: Is the kupua in “All My Relations” an evil monster (in the conscious way that only humans can be truly evil) or is it just a naturally predatory creature like the shark?

Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada: I don’t think that I would say that the kupua is evil. I think that he is just working from a different set of cultural values than we are. For example, his ideas about justice fall more in line with an understanding of living in balance with things around him, being a part of the cycle of life and death, that aligns a little more with traditional Hawaiian understandings of the world. It’s when he really isn’t allowed to participate in the world according to that understanding of justice anymore that he truly becomes monstrous. Though his situation is taken to an extreme, I think that it sheds light on what happens, particularly for indigenous folks, when their worldviews come into conflict with society at large. We are then seen as monstrous and without a place in contemporary times or society.

Is there a science fiction and fantasy tradition in Hawai‘i, and is it distinct from SFF elsewhere?

BKK: This is a tricky question in certain ways, and I guess kind of depends on what kind of genres and cultural understandings you are working with. I think that a lot of our traditional moʻolelo (story/tale/history/account) have elements that jibe very well with fantasy, which is actually what drew me to fantasy in the first place. I read a lot of “myths” from different places when I was younger because there were very few books with Hawaiian stories in them when I was little. But even though some of what appears in our moʻolelo align with elements that appear in fantasy stories, we have never seen them in that way. These are not myths and legends, they are stories that populate the landscape and inform our daily lives.

Living on an island, how visceral is your relationship with the sea?

BKK: For many, but not all, of us who live in Hawaiʻi, we have a very deep relationship with the sea. It’s how we feed our families (though I myself am a terrible fisherman) and how we spend our free time. Those things in and of themselves are not such visceral connections, but what being so intimate with the ocean teaches you is respect.

Some of the most experienced waterpeople, divers and surfers alike, have been taken by the sea, sometimes on clear days and in calm conditions. So many of us have lost people to the water, sometimes because they were inexperienced, but mostly because the ocean is that powerful. We are so often humbled by the sea, and entering it means entering the food chain, something that we are not used to anymore.

I think that is also one of the reasons we are so dismissive of tourists sometimes. We see them on the North Shore in winter, near the shorebreak, turning their backs to the ocean so they can take group photos with the giant waves in the background. We hear about them on the news because they were killed when they went too close to the blowhole where the ocean comes shooting out a hundred feet into the air. One of the things we learn first as young children is to respect the ocean, and so for us the power of the ocean and the danger that comes with it is a basic fact of life, and if you don’t understand that, maybe it’s best if you don’t interact with the ocean.

Among other things, you write steampunk stories set in Hawai‘i. Can you give us a little teaser?

BKK: I recently had a story entitled “Ke Kāhea: The Calling” published in an anthology entitled Black Marks on the White Page, edited by Tina Makereti (whose story is also in Pacific Monsters) and Witi Ihimaera, from Penguin New Zealand. The story takes place in the Hawaiian kingdom of the nineteenth century and these giant creatures called tutua have been coming and destroying heiau (temples) and burial sites.

In Hawaiian, we have a saying “i ka ʻōlelo nō ke ola, i ka ʻōlelo nō ka make” [‘in language there is life, in language there is death,’] so to combat the tutua, a woman whose mother can heal with her voice, a practice we call lāʻau kāhea, combines that training with a device that changes the frequency of her voice to call forth a goddess from a traditional story printed in the Hawaiian-language newspapers.

One of the reasons that steampunk appeals to me is the broadly Victorian settings, because the Hawaiian kingdom, though very much a Hawaiian kingdom, had a lot of Victorian influence. Queen Kapiʻolani and Liliʻuokalani even attended Victoria’s jubilee, and Queen Emma was a penpal of Victoria’s. One of the things that having steampunk set in the Hawaiian kingdom lets me do too is bring my historical research to bear and let people know things about the kingdom that they never knew.

I mean, I think most people didn’t even know that Hawaiʻi was a kingdom, much less one that was modern and progressive and had near universal literacy and a widespread public education system. ʻIolani Palace had flushing toilets before the White House did. Hawaiʻi outlawed slavery before the United States did and declared that any slave who made it to Hawaiian territory was automatically free. It wasn’t a perfect place, by any means, but it was much different than people understand. We still get described as Stone Age in the newspapers even now.

What is your favourite place to write or create art?

BKK: I admit that this is not my most productive place to write or create art (that’s mainly sitting in front of my computer writing or doing post on photos I’ve taken), but I love to create with my friends. It’s where I get the most inspiration and strength from them. Most of my friends are activists or writers or poets or artists or all of those things, and so when we get a chance we will gather together and prompt each other to write or produce art that we can present to the community and raise awareness about certain issues.

For example, some friends had attended a conference in Papua New Guinea, where some folks from West Papua talked about the genocide they were facing —500,000 killed since the 1950s—under Indonesian military occupation (and please look this up if you haven’t heard about any of this before). And the folks at the conference asked my friends, who are poets and musicians, to help spread the word about what is happening with them. So we had a gathering at my house, where folks familiar with the situation came and talked to us about it and then we ate together and wrote and planned.

I can’t remember the exact time frame, but maybe about a month later, we put on a performance at Kamakūokalani, the Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. We had poetry and music and speakers, even traditional Hawaiian chants of lamentation for the West Papuans who had been killed. And even though it was a heavy performance to be a part of, it felt important.

If you joined a motley crew of pirates, what would be your sea-name?

BKK: Haha, the women I surf with are a pretty motley crew themselves. They’re all activist poet/writer/organizer folks. And my mom. But they call me Bear, partially because I’m a big guy (and maybe cuddly?) but also because they think I’m kind of growly to other people out in the lineup. So my name also evolved into Justice Bear and Murderbear. I’m thinking Murderbear would lend itself more to high seas piracy than something more cuddly, although I don’t know if a bear is the most fitting sea metaphor.

What are you working on next? What can people who enjoyed “All My Relations” look forward to reading?

BKK: I really wish that the next thing people read from me would be my dissertation! But alas, I am not sure if that is going to happen. February is Hawaiian Language Month, so I just published a sci-fi story in Hawaiian, but I’m working on a story now having to do with deep-sea mining and people genetically modified with shark DNA and trying to connect it with our beliefs around ʻaumākua, or ancestral guardians.

There are also a lot of endangered native species here in Hawaiʻi and a lot of our environment is threatened by invasive plant and animal species, so I’m also working on a series of stories that has a section of the state’s Department of Land and Natural Resources that deals with invasive species that are threatening our magical environment as well, and I think Hawaiʻi works well for that kind of storyline because we have so many different cultures here that have come through here and mixed their cultural beliefs and values in with ours.

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Thank you for joining us, Bryan!

Recommend Fakes

In our regular season of recommendations, we’ve asked a handful of writers, editors, artists and other friends to tell us briefly about their favorite fake, hoax or fraud—long a topic dear to the hearts of any postmodern speculative fiction reader! Take a look at some of the recommendations below, and then please leave a comment telling us about your favorite fake…?

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Rachel Linn (author page)

At some point during my childhood, I saw the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin footage of Bigfoot on television. My little brother and I were obsessed with Harry and the Hendersons (a John Lithgow comedy about a family that befriends a Sasquatch—a film that only an eight-year-old could love, as I discovered when I tried to watch it again a few years ago and couldn’t make it through the whole thing) and I was also fascinated by Diane Fossey (and her book, Gorillas in the Mist, about studying mountain gorillas in Rwanda), so I was very excited when I found out that people may have seen these human-like beings somewhere near our our neck of the woods. Initially, since I was only in second or third grade, I didn’t know that most people thought this video was a hoax. And, though it is still the consensus that this video is likely fabricated, the strange thing about this "hoax" is that no one seems be able to definitively prove that it was one. This really intrigues me--you'd think that fifty years after the footage was shot (and almost thirty years after I originally saw it), we'd have some fancy CSI-type technology to reconstruct what "really" happened using in-depth analysis of zoomed in hair fibers or the shadowy parts of the frames. But no one has found a hidden zipper (to my knowledge, at least). Regardless of the truth about this video, I like knowing that there are some things that technology can't demystify, even if some of them are secretly just elegantly-executed hoaxes.

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E. Saxey (fiction site)

I'm fond of frauds and errors in taxidermy. Birds of paradise had their feet removed to dry them, and on arrival in Europe were assumed to never perch, and live perpetually in the air. There's a sloth mounted on its hind legs, claws aloft, turned into a terrifying attacking predator. But fake mermaids are in a class of their own. These critters are mostly constructed from a big fish and a small monkey, and have a long history in Japan, but appeared in the US in the nineteenth century (beginning with the Fiji Mermaid in Barnum's collection). There's one with a toothy grin in the London Horniman museum, mocked up with wood and papier mache.

You can see the fantasy logic behind a lot of taxidermy myths: it's a tantalising idea that birds of paradise are too precious to land on the ground, and whoever shot that sloth probably wanted to seem braver. But fake mermaids—wizened, fluffy, dusty things—are utterly different from legends of tempting sirens. I appreciate them as a sideways step into a less obvious, more sinister mythology.

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Rhys Hughes (The Spoons That Are My Ears)

My uncle was a fraud. Not a criminal but a more gentle form of fraudster, the deadpan exaggerator. When I was young he told me that there were six continents in the world, Africa, America, Asia, Australasia, Europe and Britain. There was absolutely no doubt that Britain was separate from Europe. In Europe people did peculiar things; they spread chocolate on bread for breakfast and melted cheese in communal pots in the evening. Europe was a place of mystery, a patchwork of suspense, and crossing its borders wasn’t easy. My great dream back then was to build a raft and paddle it to France, which seemed an incredibly exotic destination, and my enthusiasm was increased rather than diminished when my uncle told me that dinosaurs existed there. They had become extinct everywhere else but flourished in France. I couldn’t wait to drag my raft ashore and encounter my first stegosaurus.

My uncle also informed me that we were living in Australia, not Britain, but that everyone else would try to trick me into thinking this was Britain and that they were all in the joke. My favourite of his absurdities concerned the International Date Line. Because Australia was so many hours in the future, people who lived there (like ourselves) could phone relatives in Europe with the results of football matches, horse races and boxing competitions that hadn’t yet happened in the past, enabling those relatives to make a big profit at the betting shop. But my uncle wasn’t unusual. That’s how life was when I was young. If you didn’t tell amusing lies then you were regarded as rather odd, dubious even, a spoilsport and also perhaps a saboteur or foreigner. I would look at adults in the street and wonder if any of them were French and on familiar terms with dinosaurs.

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Bruce Stenning (TFF slushreader)

The story of Marvin Hewitt (recently told in Futility Closet, Episode 180 “An Academic Imposter”) is the story of just how easy it was to get by as a white man in mid-century USA, and just how much leeway you could expect, even as an unashamed imposter. I won’t recap the whole story, as the podcast is worth listening to in its entirety and does so adequately and succinctly, supported by multiple sources.

Hewitt employed secretarial staff to intercept mail and continue the deception. Surely these women had a good idea what was going on but would have had neither social or legal protections to dare expose the duplicity.

FC generally present their fascinating, lurid tales from history in an apparently objective—read amoral— tone, without comment or analysis. In this case, just the briefest acknowledgement at the end of the main story suggests that it was not a good idea to let such duplicity continue as long as it did. We miss any analysis of gender or race, or the leniency shown to such a fraud, beyond simply stating multiple, astonishing occurrences of it. (Can you imagine a woman, much less a woman of colour, at any point in history, being given such leeway? Can we imagine her taking such a position of academic responsibility even without any fraud or imputation?)

Technology might have made sustained identity theft more difficult, but the systemic and sociological privileges would largely be unchanged in this day and age. Stepping outside the academic context, I might mention that a certain individual in a prominent position of power must surely be the quintessential example of leniency in the face of unrepentant fraud. But there are many others.

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Valeria Vitale (TFF bio; City of a Thousand Names)

My favourite fake-related story is told in the movie F for Fake by Orson Welles. The protagonist is Clifford Irving, acharming conman who, in the 1970s, tried to fake the autobiography of the eccentric tycoon Howard Hughes… while the subject was still alive! Irving relied on the fact that Hughes, at the time, was living as a recluse, but the plan didn’t work out, and Irving was arrested. However, the resourceful man managed to sell another project to the publishing house: The Hoax, a true(?) account of how he organised the con. In the movie, Wells suggests that Irving could produce convincing (fake) autograph documents by Hughes, thanks to the help of his friend Elmyr de Hory (or that was one of his many fake names), a professional forger who claimed to have sold paintings in the style of famous artists to all major museums. He doesn’t name names, but his repertoire, as shown in the movie, is astonishingly convincing. Moreover, the movie has been crafted by Wells using almost entirely footage that had been shot for other projects, sometimes completely repurposing images and dialogues. A sort of fake movie on fakes, if you like.

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Now tell us something about a fake or hoax that you think is worth the story…