Monthly Archives: March 2018

Woman on the Edge of Time & He, She and It, by Marge Piercy

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Second paragraph of third chapter of Woman on the Edge of Time:

Already her lips were split, her skin chapped from the tranquilizers, her bowels were stone, her hands shook. She no longer coughed, though. The tranks seemed to suppress the chronic cough that brought up bloody phlegm. Arriving had been so hard, so bleak. The first time here, she had been scared of the other patients—violent, crazy, out-of-control animals. She had learned. It was the staff she must watch out for. But the hopelessness of being stuck here again had boiled up in her two mornings before when the patients in her ward had been lined up for their dose of liquid Thorazine, and she had refused. Pills she could flush away, but the liquid there was no avoiding, and it killed her by inches. She had blindly fought till they had sunk a hypo in her and sent her crashing down.

Second paragraph of third chapter of He, She and It / Body of Glass:

Thus, dear Yod, the story I am about to leave you in the Base is not the way I told it to my child Riva or to my child Shira or to Shira and Gadi when they would sit on their haunches like little frogs, all bug eyes and appetite. I am recording this story just for you in the nights of my ash-gray insomnia, when my life feels like an attic full of boxes I have put away, things once precious and now dusty and half forgotten but still a set of demands that I put it, all of it, in order and deal with it, as bequests, as trash, as museum to set open to the family or the world. This is a time of beginnings and endings, of large risks and dangers, of sudden death by mental assassination. It is also the time my sight is failing again, and this time it cannot be repaired. The darkness of night apes the darkness I dread, and sleep is the lover I fear perhaps more than I truly desire his soft warm weight on me.

Somehow these came to the top of my reading stacks simultaneously, which is a nice coincidence. I thought they were both really good.

Consuela Ramos, the protagonist of Woman on the Edge of Time, has been committed to a psychiatric hospital for striking out against her niece’s abusive pimp. But she finds herself in telepathic communication with a utopian future society where the 1970s are regarded (rightly) as days of dark depression. And yet the future utopia is also fragile and has its own threats (which stops it from being too rpeachy); meanwhile the horrible experiments performed on Consuela by the doctors threaten her mental survival. I think the last books I read involving telepathic time travel were Jack London’s Star Rover and Nevil Shute’s An Old Captivity, but the protagonists there go backwards rather than forwards.

He, She and It is more dystopian. We are in the near future (to 1993); the Middle East has been destroyed in a war, global warming and pollution run rampant, and corporations control all aspects of life for those who accept the security of living in their communities. Our protagonist, Shira Shipman, flees a nasty divorce in one of the corporate burgs to a Jewish free town, to link up with her robot-building mentor; meanwhile a parallel narrative recounts the story of the Golem of Prague. I generally really hate stories with cute robots, and the android here is not just cute but sexy. But it’s far from being the entire point of the story, which involves identity in several different ways, and also is based in really effective world-building and characterisation of the various relationships. Apparently Arthur C. Clarke himself was rather pleased that it won his award, though it is pretty far from Clarke’s own style.

Woman on the Edge of Time was my top unread book acquired in 2016 and my top unread book by a woman. Next on those lists respectively are Robot Visions, by ISaac Asimov, and The Bean Trees, by Barbara Kingsolver

Under the British title Body of Glass, He, She and It won the 1993 Arthur C. Clarke Award. The runner-up was Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson, which won the Nebula and BSFA Awards and which I reviewed here. Third place was shared between Correspondence, by Sue Thomas, which I haven’t read, and Hearts, Hands and Voices, by Ian McDonald, which I like very much. The other shortlisted books were Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis, which won both Hugo and Nebula; Stations of the Tide, by Michael Swanwick, which also won the Nebula; and Destroying Angel by Richard Paul Russo and Lost Futures by Lisa Tuttle, neither of which I have read. (Can there have been any other year when three Nebula winners were on the Clarke list, with all of them losing?) The Tiptree Award winner for that year was China Mountain Zhang, by Maureen F. McHugh, with Correspondence, Lost Futures, and Red Mars again on the shortlist.

Next up in my award-winning sf novels sequence are the three winners of the BSFA, Clarke and Tiptree Awards made in 1994 for work of 1993: Aztec Century by Christopher Evans, Vurt; by Jeff Noon and Ammonite; by Nicola Griffith. I have read the last of these, but many years ago.

Arthur C. Clarke Award winners:
The Handmaid’s Tale | The Sea and Summer | Unquenchable Fire | The Child Garden | Take Back Plenty | Synners | Body of Glass | Vurt | Fools | Fairyland | The Calcutta Chromosome | The Sparrow | Dreaming in Smoke | Distraction | Perdido Street Station | Bold as Love | The Separation | Quicksilver | Iron Council | Air | Nova Swing | Black Man | Song of Time | The City & the City | Zoo City | The Testament of Jessie Lamb | Dark Eden | Ancillary Justice | Station Eleven | Children of Time | The Underground Railroad | Dreams Before the Start of Time | Rosewater | The Old Drift | The Animals in that Country | Deep Wheel Orcadia | Venomous Lumpsucker | In Ascension | Annie Bot

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Jago and Litefoot: Voyages and Season Five

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These six audios were released in 2012 and 2013, and I actually bought and listened to them then, but did not get around to writing them up in the press of Worldcon and other business. My revisiting The Talons of Weng-Chiang prompted me to go back to these as well. Unusually for the Jago and Litefoot narrative, they all take place outside Victorian London – the first two pretty far away in both space and time.

Voyage to Venus, by Jonathan Morris, takes the two Victorian adventurers and the Sixth Doctor, who turned up at the end of the previous series, to, well, Venus, in a far future where men are withered brainless parasites and women rule; but the non-human natives are restless, planetary disaster threatens, and there is tons of palace intrigue and overseen by guest star Juliet Aubrey as the Empress. Benjamin, Baxter and Baker are all on top form, the script pays homage to the Victorian planetary romances (rather more than to C.S. Lewis), and there are some very entertaining bits of fan service that are not at all intrusive.

Voyage to the New World, by Matthew Sweet, did not delight me as much. Our heroes arrive on the island of Roanoke in 1590, and are caught up immediately in the mystery of the lost colony

Now our heroes are making a go of it in the 1960s; Lisa Bowerman both directs and returns as pub landlady Ellie Higson, who became immortal in an accident earlier in the continuity, Litefoot is managing an antiquarian bookshop, and Jago has landed a gig as the presenter of a nostalgic TV show, which is in itself a very entertaining concept. The theme music is reworked to give it a Sixties feel. Duncan Wisbey returns as Sacker, a policeman descendant of a character from Season 2, and Jamie Newall is entertaining as Jago's long-suffering producer. Best of all, we have Racquel Cassidy (of The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People) as Guinevere Godiva, one of the performers on Jago's show whose interest in theatrical history is more than theoretical.

The first story is The Age of Revolution, by Jonathan Morris. The plot is fairly obvious – another very annoying TV presenter, played by ben Willbond, is rather more dangerous than he first seems – but that doesn't matter, the scenery is excellent. See here for deleted scenes from the script.

The Case of the Gluttonous Guru, by Marc Platt, doesn't quite hit the mark in the same way. Chook Sibtain (who was in both The Waters of Mars and the excellent Sarah Jane story Warriors of Kudlak) carries off a tricky turn as the titular guru rather well, but the plot depends on a certain amount of body horror that doesn't work all that well with these characters in this setting.

In The Bloodchild Codex, by Colin Brake, Ken Bones (the General in The Day of the Doctor and Hell Bent) turns up as a sinister savant in search of an old book. I didn't think it was particularly original, but everyone has fun chewing the carpet.

And we end our excursion to the Swinging Sixties with The Final Act, by Justin Richards, which basically returns to The Talons of Weng-Chiang and serves up a rather glorious sequel, much the same story but set seventy years later with Raquel Cassidy in the Li H'sen Chang role. There is a silent appearance from Mr Sin – it's difficult to write a mute character into an audio but Richards does it. Given the premise of the story, our heroes' means of return to the nineteenth century is no supririse, but the journey to get them there is great fun.

The most memorable quote of the series:

Jago: 'But apart from the cinema, less poverty, the National Health Service, women's suffrage, comprehensive education, aviation, heart transplants, and a man on the moon, what else does this decade have going for it?'
Litefoot: 'Mini-skirts?'
Jago: 'Alright, alright, you may have a point!'