he title, which is hard to remember, gives us in a nut-shell the book, which is impossible to forget.
Weird Women, Wired Women, Kit Reed's sixth collection since her first in 1967, is almost all about women. Women as they are found in America; women as they find themselves. It is about the women of America whom motherhood and sisterhood have wired up strange; women whose estrangement from their fate gives them a weird at-bay gaze; it is about the high wire and circuitry of being a woman and a human person in the Suburbia Deserta of an America where the Hard Rain falls.
Men--though not all men--tend not to come off very well. But they're not really set up as targets. They just seem, as men do, to tend to occupy the bull's-eye.
An accurate eye will not miss the butt.
Almost all the stories in Weird Women, Wired Women are set in suburbs, over a period running from after World War II until just before Armageddon. Some of the tales are fantasy; some are SF; some tackle their tasks without generic walkers to prop them along.
These last are not necessarily the strongest of the lot. When she eschews genre, Reed can sometimes write stories which, with all their tactile wit and irony and sheer intelligence of target sighting, can seem inert. There is something almost supine about "The Food Farm" (1967) and "Songs of War" (1974), a despairing lassitude which balks the reader.
The last line of the latter story--a novella 35 big pages long about a doomed rebellion of women--is "Now that it was all over, things went on more or less as they had before." Which is exactly what the story says throughout. There is no turn. Nothing but the dead trap of truth.
Insights into the human condition
Within the frame of the fantastic, however, her insights tend to intensify, and tales like "Pilots of the Purple Twilight" (1981) or "Frontiers" (1982)--which uncannily prefigures Jonathan Lethem's Girl in Landscape (1998), reviewed here last month--or "The Bride of Bigfoot" (1984) respectively utilize fabulation or SF or fantasy formats to shape and give air to sharp tensile plucking insights into the human condition.
They bristle with what they're telling.
Reed has written prolifically for more than 40 years now. She has published 17 novels, some SF, some not. This reviewer's excitement at being able to praise Mr Da V. and Other Stories in 1967 was very considerable.
Weird Women, Wired Women is a better and more intense book than Mr Da V. Half a dozen of its 20 tales leave a taste in the mind, like dreams which sum up a life, which cannot be forgotten, which sit inside the skull like a new set of eyes. But most of these stories come well into Reed's career. She improves with age, almost constantly.
The problem, therefore, with this collection, is that it is chronological. The first story of all--Connie Willis, in her introduction, describes first reading "The Wait" (1958) as a 13-year-old, and perhaps it is for that reason that she was haunted by it for decades--is probably the worst the book has to offer. It is sub-Shirley Jackson, and in its cartoon enactment of Jacksonian paranoia about the "normalcy" of small-town traditional America, it probably did Reed's career some damage.
Because the frequently-made comparison of Reed with Jackson hampered readers' understanding for decades.
Very aptly, Reed describes the stories collected here as "not feminist but certainly 'womanist'," and it is in the amplitude of her vision of the interaction of America and American women that she differs so markedly from Jackson.
Her stories open
She may make the occasional neat wry poisonous entrapping joke--"Shopping is nature's way of telling you you're not dead." "Beauty may be only skin deep, but believe me, it's the first thing people see"--but in the end, the near future America where most of her tales are set is an open arena where the most intimate dramas of human life play and replay their remorseless, remorseful course. Her stories do not shut; they open.
Her central drama is that of the family. She is the SF writer par excellence of the war between the generations. She has, in particular, a Braille sensitivity to the anguish and mutual self-incriminations characteristic of relations between mothers and daughters, in an America where women's roles are constantly metamophosing, where change is constantly demanded of women.
The near future of America for a woman who has made the wrong changes is perhaps more terrifying than any other near future imaginable; the acuteness of Reed's tales of wrong changes, or of refusals to change, is consequently savage. And unanswerable. The exposure of women to the future of the world is territory she has explored more thoroughly than any other writer of modern SF.
And the book gets only better as it moves towards the end, towards the present. The wisdom of "The Mothers of Shark Island" (1996), one of the last stories in Weird Women, Wired Women, is hilarious, heart-rending, healing.
Kit Reed frees us as we read her.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of the Hugo Award winning Illustrated Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, co-editor of the Hugo winning Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, and one of the co-founders of the Hugo winning British SF publication Interzone. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other places too numerous to list. His latest book, Encyclopedia of Fantasy--which he co-edited with John Grant--is nominated for the 1998 Hugo Award.
