 Keeping It RealbyGillian PolackToday I’m very happy to bring you another interview. This one is just of two authors. I say ‘just’ but there’s not really any need for cautionary words. Justina Robson and Marianne de Pierres have set the science fictional world rocking with their hard-edged writing. Justina is a UK-based writer, whose novels, from the stand-alones (Silver Screen, Mappa Mundi, Natural History, Living Next-Door to the God of Love) to the series (the Quantum Gravity books) have been shortlisted for a number of major science fiction awards, including the Arthur C Clarke. Marianne is a Queensland-based writer, known mostly to science fiction readers for her Parish Plessis series, set in a post-apocalyptic Australia, and her Sentients of Orion series, which reaches the stars. This interview is a little more focussed than my others; I was very specifically interested in a narrow range of issues that I have noticed appearing in their work. If you want to know what I read and what the writers think, just read on…
Gillian: Both of you have challenged genre expectations, especially with your female characters. Would you mind talking about those female characters and how you developed them and why you chose to shape your novels around them? Justina: I’m glad to be asked about this as the focus of my efforts so far in these genres has been to normalize the inclusion of women and female perspectives in general. When I was growing up in love with science fiction, comics and fantasy, I was quite slow to realize that there were really very few women of any kind in them. But once I did, after my surge of disappointment and anger at this imposed inferiority, I decided that if I went anywhere with my writing I would make an effort at least to redress that balance so that there were, if nothing else, a population-norm of females. First step, existence! Later I came to feel the same way about the exclusion of minorities and the general treatment of all kinds of groups who basically were not white middle class highly educated males from Western type civilizations, replete with all the political and personal baggage of said cultural position, but this took me a bit longer to get to grips with although it did make me even more angry. These things occurred to me when I was around fifteen and still very much entombed in the frameworks I had grown up in—very similar to the white male background of the very writers I was starting to feel so critical about. And at the same time I loved them, because there was no other place except in the SFF genres where you would find such a fantastic playground of ideas about all sorts of things, nowhere else that provided anything like the thrill and glory of adventure on the same scale—not just the backdrops of the universe and stars, the technologies of the gods, but the resulting power of the human dramas. Ordinary literature by comparison, with a few exceptions of genius level proportion, never switched me on half as much. As this critical love-hate relationship started to get going I was also being exposed to our culture’s vision of Literature and its value systems in my English classes at my posh school. Although we actually did read SF in class, much to the utter disgust of many classmates, there was an unspoken but clear distinction everywhere between what was considered valuable and laudable in literature and what was just trash. The books I really liked fell very close to or in the trash category and I was hyper aware of this. Since I already felt very close to unacceptably deviant in many ways compared to the majority of my peer group—didn’t like their music, didn’t live on their side of town, wasn’t in any popular group, would rather draw sexy pirate pictures in art class than anything else—I also got quite angry about my outsider status and quite desperate not to show any further rebellious tendencies in case what I did have in terms of friends evaporated. So at the time I started seriously trying to write novels I was caught in this bind of wanting to rebel and express myself, righting the gender wrongs and crusading for this and that, but at the same time I really really didn’t want anyone to notice what I was doing. It’s nearly thirty years later and I’m still dealing with the tail end of that paradox. Part of its grip on me is, I’m sure, to do with the gender I am—female—and trying to be a Good Girl within the terms of the culture for so long. (And no, being a Bad Girl is only a change, not an escape). Fitting in and not rocking the boat, being nice and pretty and kind…all those fairytale features are something that is inextricable from the notion of female for me, and for many people. When I started to write female protagonists and antiheroes I pondered long on the Nature/Culture aspect of gender development. My first heroine, Anjuli, was from a near future, so for her things hadn’t changed much and didn’t present a special challenge. I tried to present her and the other characters in a “neutral” kind of light. Gender was not an issue in itself in that book, Silver Screen, which is concerned with definitions of humanity and personhood—a struggle for an AI to be recognized as equal to humans. However, I didn’t want to exclude gendered aspects of her life and personality, which is something I have often felt in genre books—treating her as if her femaleness is irrelevant in the play of events, as if she is more equal to men because she has been made a cerebral being, a functional agent whose only differences are a few physical items of no consequence to the story. Anjuli has a lot of difficulties with anxiety, fitting in and being perceived as a woman instead of just a worker in a large corporate. She deals with this mostly through a relationship with food when she can’t reach her friends and family. Ultimately the story itself hinges on these relationships. She has an antihero counterpart who is much more successful than she is at being comfortable in her own female skin—Jane, a person so contemptuous of gender stereotypes that she eats them for breakfast. Jane does come across as ‘cold’ as a result but she’s no less motivated by love than Anjuli. Most of the relationships in the book are loving ones, family love, romantic love, love of friends. In that sense it felt to me like it was pushing the SF stereotypical story paradigm in which the story revolves around manipulation of or by technology—Man versus Environment, to put it in gamer terms. Of course there are many great SF books that aren’t in that dull paradigm and I think it may be an old, outdated vision of the genre to which I’m reacting. Not to say it’s not a popular vision even so. Even this month I read some remark by a prominent SF critic in a prominent review which turned quite scathing—“romance rears its ugly head yet again”. Because you know, at least SF, in all the moments of toadying eagerness with which it tries to justify itself to the Literati within their own narrow paradigm, at least SF has the hard cool kudos of mighty intellectual content: politics, technology, scientific pseudo-justifications—the Hard Stuff that makes up the cutting edge of human mental struggle against the forces of apathy and the swilling tides of raw biological necessity. That’s what, for a lot of fans of a particular bent, makes SF special. It is not infested with the girl cooties of romance and all that ghastly, biologically, autoerotically suspect stuff. Icky! Heaven forbid we should pollute the Spock-like purity of the mind by suggesting it isn’t the be all and end all. I guess you already realize by my tone that I haven’t got time for this tedious semi-functional vision of humanity. But I think it’s a vision of SF that is quite common, attracting those who like their reality served that way, and repelling a lot of others who assume there’s no place for them in there. Yeah, as usual, it made me livid. Now I know there are plenty of writers—Octavia Butler, Nisi Shawl, Tricia Sullivan, Gwyneth Jones, Kelly Link to name only a few—who write way outside this stereotype of the genre. And I am thankful every day for them. But it annoys me that they are still considered remarkable for the features that set their fiction apart, as if they were a kind of talking dog or a juggling cat—Ooo look, a cat, and it’s juggling!—and I guess that’s why you asked this question in the first place. I feel that there is still a subtle war going on between Da Boyz and Da Gurlz. By no means is this separated on purely biological sex differences but I have so often shared a conversation with other women writers in which we say—oh that’s such Boy Fiction—that I am convinced it is a war of perspective which somehow divides loosely along gender lines. In the end every writer deals with the aspects of life they find most vital. It is strange to choose a genre that seems antipathetic in so much of its execution to those interests, but then, that’s not a feature of the genre itself, only of certain keynote executors and self-appointed gatekeepers. Later in my fiction, after I chased my tail on these issues for ages, struggling so hard to be PC, not to offend, to take all POVs into account, to consider the context, to examine the role of the feminine and the masculine, to see whose identity had got shafted by what notion…I wrote Natural History, whose female lead is a middle aged, slightly overweight black professor with a Boudicca fixation. Some of this was deliberate but after the first few lines Zephyr Duquesne decided she was a fully formed individual, thank you, and I could take my ideas about culturally correcting SF and stick them where the sun doesn’t shine. I like it when characters do that. (She had a romance too, with a lovely man who was a deep sea animal, with a planet and with an awkward, spiky, resentful, angry woman who happened to be a spaceship. They never met in the flesh.) After that my next heroine, in Living Next Door To The God of Love, was a troubled innocent girl who runs away from home to join the faery circus—only in an SF world, so literally. She goes to an enchanted place where she makes/meets the man of her dreams and discovers her dreams are kind of strange, dark and kinky—of course they are because why else would you run away? He tries to persuade her that there is no war between the dark and the innocent, that good is not what it looks like on the surface and corruption is a turning against the self ‑ with mixed success. It doesn’t help that he’s part of an alien entity so powerful and foreign it may as well be a god which is undergoing a revolutionary state change from a position in which individuality is eradicated to a position in which it is celebrated. This is my most relationship-goo book about love, and I think it’s one people instantly get and understand or don’t get and find incomprehensibly mad. It occurs to me now that I would probably do better to flag myself as a romance writer from the start. It’s in trying to read me as SF that things might go astray, even though I am SF to the bone and if I didn’t flag that people would get angry that I didn’t mention the aliens, the tech and the theoretical whizzbangery. My last heroine of note is Lila Black, who starts out as a quite ordinary young woman and ends up a shapeshifting machine with two husbands, one a demon, and a faery dress that constantly takes the mickey out of her. It was the fulfillment of my original girlhood fantasies to write it, which brought me full circle on the original writing impulse that started me off. Lila’s journey takes five novels, but it’s written as much for pure entertainment as anything and the focus on gender aspects is subtler, although it’s still there. I was mostly toying with the idea of Girl Heroism, as displayed by Buffy, for example, in which you try to fulfill this massive world-saving role that is imposed on you and at the same time retain a shred of dignity and selfhood. Having had kids and gone through several major relationships and the transition from a person to a Mother, that was a real burning issue for me. The clothing that strips you of your choices, ditto. The way your body is perceived as a vessel and subject to unwelcome and inescapable transformation and perception by others, ditto. But I didn’t want to write about that directly, it’s just in there as part of the fabric of the story and people can notice it as much or little as they like. I feel that’s about the balance of things that I enjoy in fiction now. Marianne: Justina, I really enjoyed reading this and found parts that resonated strongly with my own life. I had a similar private-girl’s education. I was terribly resentful about being there and hated boarding, so the rebellion thing was strongly in play from the age of eleven. Growing up on a diet of my dad’s boys’ own adventure and spy stories, I became quite incensed early that women were so absent in many of the books that I loved. I didn’t really discover SF until my twenties and by the time I began writing seriously in my thirties, the agenda of making women’s roles in genre more significant was firmly at the forefront of my mind. I didn’t want it to be a crusade though. Like Justina said, normalisation is the key to redressing the balance. When I started writing the Parrish Plessis series though, Parrish kind of took over, as if she’d been in there waiting to get free. I wanted her to be strong and very comfortable asserting her needs. She did that in spades and the response to her character from readers was for the most part, wonderful. At the end of that series I knew I had to do more, and go further. Creating Mira Fedor (Sentients of Orion series) was much more difficult. Because she was born into a society where women were second class citizens I had to spend time building her character properly, making sure she went through the necessary, authentic process of casting off her shackles and emerging as an empowered person. Many readers struggled with that. She didn’t kick arse immediately, she had many quirks and kinks caused by the world she’d be born into. Those readers that came for the ride enjoyed the metamorphosis of her personality. However, many found the chrysalis-to-insect process too uncomfortable. To me as the writer, it was a far more realistic depiction of how it was/is for women in society, certainly in my generation anyway. Mira did not kick arse but she was a thinking person who endured and persevered. That’s what we do in life, isn’t it? There’s been some talk recently on the Internet; male readers deciding to make a point of reading female SF writers. Some of them have approached this in a genuinely interested and intelligent manner. Others though, have been more of the ‘Well let’s see if they can measure up. Oops, no they can’t.’ The latter, as you can imagine, is most enraging. Only just the other week, a female author on one of my professional lists was considering using initials to disguise her gender. Still?! While that mindset continues, we’re still a long way from the normalisation of women in genre that I am seeking. Gillian: Is there anything else that drives your writing as powerfully as that need to normalise female perspectives and write those fascinating female characters? Justina, you’ve already mentioned minorities, perhaps you would like to talk about that a bit more? Justina: I do feel quite passionately that minorities were missing from my reading and viewing as I grew up but then, that was part of the culture at large really—most of the arts were dominated by white middle classes. Hence the backlash politically that started in the sixties and has now reached the point of almost febrile inclusionitis; inclusion is a political necessity, to be seen to be including or else risk yourself being labeled an –ist of some kind. I think that there are a couple of generations, of which I am one, where a lot of our consciousness was focused on the unfairness of previous social decades and various kinds of evangelistic need to correct that and so assuage a perceived karmic burden of guilt from older generations, so there’s that. But that’s not personal as much as it is this generational impulse I think. In Silver Screen I chose to write about a character, Anjuli, who is Irish-Indian because I thought that in the near future there would be more, not less, mixed marriages and interracial children. I am white, but my roots cover a large swathe of Europe and the US, and I have a set of cousins who are US/Indian in background, so that felt quite normal to me. I feel like I was luckier than those of my friends who came from all-English backgrounds because I had a lot more variety in the behaviour and views of my various relations which felt like it opened up a lot more of the world to me. I approve of cross pollination absolutely and you can see that everywhere in my work from character background to sexuality, spirituality and so forth. The Forged are probably the ultimate expression of that: they have human minds, up to a point, but they are biologically diverse, mechanically diverse, frequently physiologically unique. At a deep level I am always writing about the attempt to form a unified identity out of divergent and often conflicting interests within characters. I’d say that’s my big issue. Another point of interest that I haven’t really got to grips with in any successful form is another western social trend—the normalization and commodification of sex and sexual behaviours and the shifting perception of gender norms and the degree of social anxiety that goes with that. And finally there’s the difficulty of living at a time when cultures are forced up against each other for economic and social reasons whilst they contain radically different world views that hold conflicting visions of what reality ought to be. I feel that I ought to and must address these things somehow, although I am not certain that I wish to slam into them head-on. Having said that I am writing a book at the moment which slams into them head-on…so much for that plan. Look forward to hearing your views. Marianne: My dad was a French socialist and a pioneer farmer who lived his adult life in the wheat belt of Western Australia. His values informed mine so strongly as a child and still do. He was, above all, an egalitarian and I think this pervades my writing. Whether related to gender, class, race or whatever, I often portray discrimination or inequalities and take great pleasure in seeing my characters endure and sometimes triumph despite it. So the “egalitarian flag” is the one that I secretly fly. Justina’s comment about febrile inclusionitis is amusing and spot on. Nothing is so clumsy as this kind of writing, and in its own way, as insulting as omission. Gillian: “Febrile inclusionitis” is a big problem—when people discuss it as an issue, however, they often discuss those who write badly. I’d rather ask you about your views from the other direction. Who writes inclusion effectively and interestingly? What books do you think we should read and what should we look for in them? Justina: I don’t know what to say about this as when inclusion is written well it’s invisible, except perhaps for the fact you might think ‘oh, so that guard is a woman huh?’ I also don’t like the Should word very much as a rule, I think that it’s just occasionally useful to play some game like changing all the pronouns to the opposite gender and seeing if it makes a huge difference to something. That was suggested recently at a panel I was on in Natcon and I think it’s a neat trick for exposing the gender bias that might be in a text. Having said that, if the gender bias is in the world then it would be foolish to condemn a story for reflecting that unless it was geared towards questioning or upturning the status quo. I hope that’s useful and sorry it isn’t more specific. Marianne: I’m not sure that I can answer your question adequately, Gillian, but to me, Octavia Butler seemed to be able include any number of women, aliens, persons of colour etc and not set off the trip alarm that says “hidden agenda”. And Justina’s last comment about gender bias in the fictional world makes me think back over my Sentients of Orion series. There was extreme gender bias on one of the worlds, and it bred a certain kind of male and female; certain kinds of behaviour. I’m always amused to see criticisms levelled at those books that are along the lines of … “but men aren’t really like that” or “she’s not a real heroine because she won’t stand up for herself.” I say (or think) to them … “Well in this world, they are” and “Give her time to grow ‑ this is not about you, it’s about context.” After all, isn’t the important thing to see how the characters deal with their lot? Isn’t that part of what makes us want to read their story? Books mentioned in this column:
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