Finally I had a very real model for my woman’s world—the world of Fort Desmoines in 1942. This was the first installation of what became the Women’s Army Corps, and I lived among twelve thousand women. (There were, I believe, three senior commanding males somewhere; I never saw them and had the impression they emerged only for parades.) This was the most exciting experience of my life; after a workday of eighteen hours, I trotted from barracks to barracks all night—where all twelve thousand of us were washing our one (1) uniform for the next day—meeting, talking, getting to know the rich and infinite complexity of my sisters. From a fifteen-year-old whose only work experience was delivering singing telegrams, to a fifty-year-old opera singer, women from the mountains of Kentucky who had never worn shoes, $60,000 per year sales managers and executive assistants who in all but title ran big corporations, traveling saleswomen, fatigued debutantes, army widows—what a range! (Including the fifty whores from Dallas some idiot recruiting officer sent us under the impression that the WAC [like its German counterpart] was a comfort station for the male troops. They came in swinging their shiny purses and emerged, most of them, as excellent top sergeants.)
Well, as you can see, the story of the WAC is a rich one, never yet told—and one I hope to tell some day. But I
did
see a real “women’s world” not too unlike the one hinted at in “Houston.”
—August 25, 1984
She was often asked to provide introductions, blurbs, or reviews for various projects. Here are two of these: the introduction to volume 4 of
The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick
(Underwood/Miller 1987) and a review of a novel for
USA Today,
April 3,1987, one of her last pieces of writing.
I think, first and pervasively, it was the strangeness. Strange, Dick was and is. I think it was that which kept me combing the SF catalogs for more by him, waiting for each new book to come out. One hears it said, “X just doesn’t
think
like other people.” About Dick, it was true. In the stories, you just can’t tell what’s going to happen, or happen next.
And yet his characters are seemingly designed to be ordinary people—except the occasional screaming psychotic females who are one of Dick’s specialties, and are always treated with love. They are ordinary people caught up in wildly bizarre situations, running a police force with the help of the mumblings of precognitive idiots, facing a self-replicating factory that has taken over the Earth. Indeed, one of the factors in the strangeness is the care Dick takes to set his characters in the world of reality, an aspect most other writers ignore.
In how many other science fiction stories do you know what the hero does for his living when he isn’t caught up in the particular plot? Oh, he may be a member of a space crew, or, vaguely, a scientist. Or Young Werther. In Dick, you are introduced to the hero’s business concerns by page one. That’s not literally true of the short stories in this volume (I went back and checked), but the impression of the pervasiveness of “grubby” business concerns is everywhere, especially in the novels. The hero is in the antique business, say; as each new marvel turns up the hero ruminates as to whether it is saleable. When the dead talk, they offer business advice. Dick never sheds his concern that we know how his characters earn their bread and butter. It is a part of the peculiar “grittiness” of Dick’s style.
Another part of the grittiness is the jerkiness of the dialogues. I can never decide whether Dick’s dialogue is purely unreal, or more real than most. His people do not interact as much as they monologue to carry on the plot, or increase the reader’s awareness of a situation.
And the situations are purely Dick. His “plots” are like nothing else in SF. If Dick writes a time-travel story, say, it will have a twist on it that makes it sui generis. Quite typically, the central gee-whiz marvel will
not
be centered, but will come at you obliquely, in the course, for instance, of a political election.
And any relation between Dick and a nuts-and-bolts SF writer is a pure coincidence. In my more sanguine moments, I concede that he probably knows what happens when you plug in a lamp and turn it on, but beyond that there is little evidence of either technology or science. His science, such as it is, is all engaged in the technology of the soul, with a smattering of abnormal psychology.
So far I have perhaps emphasized his oddities at the expense of his merits. What keeps you reading Dick? Well, for one, the strangeness, as I said, but within it there is always the atmosphere of
striving,
of men desperately trying to get some necessary job done, or striving at least to understand what is striking at them. A large percentage of Dick’s heroes are tortured men; Dick is an expert at the machinery of despair.
And another beauty are the desolations. When Dick gives you a desolation, say after the bomb, it is desolation unique of its kind. There is one such in this book. But amid the desolation is often another one of Dick’s characteristic touches, the
little animals.
The little animals are frequently mutants, or small robots who have taken on life. They are unexplained, simply noted by another character in passing. And what are they doing? They are striving, too. A freezing sparrow hugs a rag around itself, a mutant rat plans a construction, “peering and planning.” This sense of the ongoing busyness of life, however doomed, of a landscape in which every element has its own life, is
trying to live,
is typically and profoundly Dick. It carries the quality of compassion amid the hard edges and the grit, the compassion one suspects in Dick, but which never appears frontally. It is this quality of love, always quickly suppressed, that gleams across Dick’s rubbled plains and makes them unique and memorable.
—November 1986
Kayo: The Authentic and Annotated Autobiographical Novel from Outer Space
by James McConkey
First of all, be warned:
Kayo,
etc., bears no more relation to serious science fiction than
Gulliver’s Travels
does to
The Origin of Species.
It is a spoof, a happy sendup of a number of items that have annoyed James McConkey, from the New Criticism to the Strategic Defense Initiative. The only science-fictional element consists of a note floating down in a little lighted parachute, so gently that the narrator can intercept it barehanded.
It is intended for a Professor Duck, a nearby astronomer who has spent his life attempting to communicate with extraterrestrials, and who never reappears in the book. The narrator takes over and unfolds a missive written in a “code” that is simply English turned backward, the message being “DEAR FRANK WHY CONTACT ME I TOO AM A MURDERER SANCHO.”
The writer is revealed (by undisclosed means) as an alien named Kayo Aznap, on a faraway planet bearing a marked resemblance to Earth—turned backward. He lives, for instance, in the ASU, or Assorted States United, and he is anxious to tell his life story, or stories, provided he can ever stop digressing. So far, so good, and the ASU idea is mildly funny.
But the yarn, taken up by Kayo, is soon inexplicably dominated by references to an extraterrestrial version of Don Quixote, written by an ancestral Aznap who seems to have been traumatized in his cradle by too-liberal doses of Nabokov’s prose style. In the ASU version, the Don is Nod, a disreputable and supposedly lovable nature tramp, and the central event is a recreation of the shootout at the O.K. Corral—a happening which to me lost its kinetic energy some time ago.
The villains are the academic purveyors of “the New Deconstruc-tionism,” and the Aznap dynasty is transfigured by the success of Aznap-Cola, so that Kayo is the confidant of presidents—or rather, of the president, since the ASU has been reelecting the same, surgically transformed man for all time; “Frank,” “Oz,” “Teddy,” etc., are all one man. Kayo’s alleged murder of Nod (who has told part of the tale in his own voice) is the culminating event, being too complicatedly motivated to unravel easily.
Clearly such a devil-may-care affair is good for a lot of yuks. And I fear that yuck is exactly what the author makes of it. There is a skeletal plotline, so hung about and bored through with divertissements that nothing need be said of it. And the author, perhaps sensing that something more earthly is required, indulges (for example) in scenes in which Kayo’s black britches split, revealing his red jockey shorts.
McConkey seems to feel that excellent diction and a heart manifestly in the right place, as concerns deconstructionism, will excuse anything. What it will not excuse is a bookless book.
The point of my account is to portray
Kayo
as a confection, a giant puff cake in the form of a labyrinth of asides, which will delight to tears anyone who is really into lit crit, or who bears either Cervantes or Nabokov a grudge. And it does not weigh on us with pompous panaceas for out troubles—Kayo’s solution to the problems of the ASU is to build gigantic theme parks on the various issues.
It would appear, in sum, that the author, after years of work creating far finer novels, has decided to grant himself some well-earned indulgence. And no one who has worked up a head of steam over the same irritations will begrudge him.
—March 1987
And to conclude, two more personal essays. The first one was never published; the second was written for
Women of Vision,
edited by Denise Du Pont (St. Martin’s 1989).
Ruminating on the changes that have followed the “death” of Tiptree—the subtle but palpable differences in the tone of reviews; friends lost, friends gained; above all, the loss of blessed anonymity and simple fun—I am startled anew by the depth of my own loathing for the plight of women. Our helplessness, limitedness, weakness,
thingness
in the world of what cummings called “man-unkind.” Only among the educated of a few North European countries are we even people with audible voices—always excepting those occasional La Passionaria types who spring from some bloodied earth.
But I, daughter of the dull middle class, am no Passionaria, no Golda Meir nor Rosa Luxemburg, nor Margaret Mead; not even a frontier schoolteacher; I feel all too literally hollow at the center—“zero at the bone,” as Dickinson said. Worse: I have this childish fascination with brute power. I see it as (if possible) even more absolute a force than it is: the organizing principle of society. And since I have none, I am nothing.
As Tiptree, I had an unspoken classificatory bond to the world of male action; Tiptree’s existence opened to unknown possibilities of power. And, let us pry deeper—to the potential of evil. Evil is the voltage of good; the urge to goodness, without the potential of evil, is trivial. A man impelled to good is significant; a woman pleading for the good is trivial. A great bore. Part of the appeal of Tiptree was that he ranged himself on the side of good
by choice.
Alice Sheldon has no such choice.
Other women writers may be free of this paranoid reality-obsession. (Except for a few, like Suzy McKee Charnas, who tackle it directly.) Virginia Woolf—to name at random—was too insulated—or did it break through and kill her? Quinn Yarbro transposes to wholly alien worlds (“Un Bel Di”), or focuses on the apolitical moment, (her “Fellini Beggar”). Anne McCaffrey wrenches her women into singing ships, or leagues with dragons. Vonda Mclntyre gives them magical powers—though stressful ones—and often, though not always, a minimally respectful society; but she can show scarifying a war of all against all, with its horribly killed women. Joanna Russ vanes between wild fantasies of power women, and mesmeric writing of real personal experience (again, middle class). Le Guin threatens to live in dreams albeit Superb ones.
What evil can a woman do? Except pettily, to other, weaker women or children? Cruel stepmothers; male fantasies of the Wicked Witch, who can always be assaulted or burnt if she goes too far. Men certainly see women as doing many evil things—but always nuisancy, trivial, personal, and, easily-to-be-punished-for. Not for us the great evils; the jolly maraudings, burnings, rapings, and hacking-up; the Big Nasties, the genocidal world destroyers, who must be reckoned with on equal terms.
[Odd that I mentioned the jollity of evil-doing, the hilarities of mayhem. Powerful, free laughter—I’ve heard it among women only once, and that’s another story. We are but shadow-men in that line too.]
Always draining us is the reality of our inescapable commitment. Whatever individual women may do, it is we who feel always the tug toward empathy, toward caring, cherishing, building-up—the dull interminable mission of creating, nourishing, protecting, civilizing—maintaining the very race. At bottom is always the bitter knowledge that all else is boys’ play—and that this boys’ play rules the world.
How I long, how I long to be free of this knowledge!
As Tiptree, this understanding was “insight.” As Alii Sheldon, it is merely the heavy center of my soul.
Whatever can I do with all this?
Gardner Dozois cheerily told me that now I could write about “growing up female!” Ha! I can do it in a word:
To grow up female is
—
not to be allowed to grow up.
To be praised for childishness, timidity, vanity, trivialities; to be denied tough goals and mysteriously barred from the means of attaining them; to be left for crucial years, unaware of the realities for which boys are being trained; to lack continuity of character and mind; to find oneself reacting helplessly to male advances and retreats and in the grip of obscure vulnerabilities from within; to waste years and emotional strength on idiocies (getting married); to yearn for “love” from those who do not even view one as a person, though they may be sexually attracted; to have no comrades, (unless one is very lucky); to be alone and unarmed amid inexplicably hostile strangers who make smiling pretenses and who will not leave you alone. To have every aspect of your conduct and being criticized as by right, for the pleasure of others. To be confirmed in childishness, and have your vision of adventure narrowed to the space of—a bed.