A Woman's Liberation:
A Choice of Futures by and About Women

Ten of the strongest women writers in science fiction and fantasy today define the future

	A Woman's Liberation: A Choice of Futures by and About Women
	Edited by Connie Willis and Sheila Williams
	Warner Aspect
	Trade paperback, Oct. 2001
	320 pages
	MSRP: $12.95/$18.95 Canada
	ISBN: 0446677426

Review by Nalo Hopkinson

he contents page of A Woman's Liberation: A Choice of Futures by and About Women reads like a Who's Who of a 30-year span of women's science-fiction writing: Octavia E. Butler, S.N. Dyer, Nancy Kress, Ursula K. Le Guin, Katherine MacLean, Anne McCaffrey, Vonda N. McIntyre, Pat Murphy, Connie Willis and Sarah Zettel.

Some of the stories are forgotten gems rediscovered—frightening, funny or whimsical speculative takes on the world and the women working in it. Some of them are old favorites. The stories include Murphy's "Rachel in Love," about a pubescent young woman whose brain is transplanted into a chimpanzee body. This powerful, uncomfortable story tackled gender, sexual identity, self-awareness and even animal rights and garnered the Nebula Award in the year it was published. Butler's "Speech Sounds" unsettles from the very first paragraph of this Babel story in which humans have lost the ability to understand the written word and each others' speech.

MacLean's "The Kidnapping of Baroness 5" deftly flips fantasy into science fiction in a superstitious village where one woman—the village's "Lady Witch"—is breeding antigen-free pigs for transplantation of their organs into ailing humans. Le Guin's title story uses her trademark ability to convey the lived quality of an experience, taking a young slave girl from abject subjugation through freedom and a developing sense of agency and an understanding of the ideologies and power structures on which her world is built. Willis uses humor to tackle a youngun's rigid idealism in "Even the Queen," her hilarious and contrary story about a future in which women can choose not to menstruate.

A dazzling diversity of voices

Multiply-awarded writer Connie Willis and Asimov's executive editor Sheila Williams have teamed up to produce this anthology of 10 science-fiction works gleaned from the archives of Analog Science Fiction and Fact and Asimov's Science Fiction magazines. There are stories here of rogue AIs, of postapocalyptic plague camps, of snakes whose bites bring healing dreams.

A few stories feel somewhat dated (McCaffrey's "The Ship Who Mourned," for example). It's possible to look at them as snapshots of a moment in the development of the history of science fiction.

"Women's writing" is becoming a no-win phrase, in much the same way that "politically correct"—a term once used self-deprecatingly by believers in equality to remind themselves not to become too doctrinaire—has been co-opted by reductive voices of derision. To say "women's writing" in science fiction nowadays is to risk damning the fiction so labeled with the implication that it is either lightweight or overly polemical. A Woman's Liberation reclaims the celebratory flavor and, ultimately, the accuracy of the term "women's writing."

The beauty of this anthology is in the diversity of women's voices and experiences which it presents. This is fiction by writers whose visions have changed and are changing the face of science fiction and fantasy. The women in these stories, much like their authors, run the gamut from conservative to radical; from independent to communal. Probably many of the authors would have plenty to disagree about ideologically. Certainly they have lots to say. These women—these writers—have opinions, and they're not afraid to use them.

Because of their format, science-fiction magazines can be ephemeral. Kudos to Williams and Willis for archiving these stories into a volume for future reference. — Nalo

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Also in this issue: Angel of Destruction, by Susan R. Matthews

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