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The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women
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Alex Dally MacFarlane is a writer, editor and historian. When not researching narrative maps in the legendary traditions of Alexander III of Macedon, she writes stories, found in Clarkes-world Magazine, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Solaris Rising 3, Heiresses of Russ 2013: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction, The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2014 and other anthologies. Her poetry can be found in Stone Telling, The Moment of Change and Here, We Cross. She is the editor of Aliens: Recent Encounters (2013) and The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women.
Recent Mammoth titles
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The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 11
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The Mammoth Book of the World Cup
The Mammoth Book of the Vietnam War
THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF
SF Stories
by Women
Edited by Alex Dally MacFarlane
ROBINSON
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Robinson
Copyright © Alex Dally MacFarlane, 2014 (unless otherwise stated)
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-47211-166-1 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-47211-171-5 (ebook)
Robinson
is an imprint of
Constable & Robinson Ltd
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First published in the United States in 2014 by Running Press Book Publishers,
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US ISBN: 978-0-7624-5470-9
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CONTENTS
Permissions
Introduction
Sofia Samatar – Girl Hours
Kristin Mandigma – Excerpt from a Letter by a Social-realist Aswang
Vandana Singh – Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra
Lucy Sussex – The Queen of Erewhon
Tori Truslow – Tomorrow Is Saint Valentine’s Day
Nnedi Okorafor – Spider the Artist
Karen Joy Fowler – The Science of Herself
Alice Sola Kim – The Other Graces
Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette – Boojum
Natalia Theodoridou – The Eleven Holy Numbers of the Mechanical Soul
Ursula K. Le Guin – Mountain Ways
Nalo Hopkinson – Tan-Tan and Dry Bone
Zen Cho – The Four Generations of Chang E
Élisabeth Vonarburg – Stay Thy Flight
Carrie Vaughn – Astrophilia
Hao Jingfang – Invisible Planets
Nicole Kornher-Stace – On the Leitmotif of the Trickster Constellation in Northern Hemispheric Star Charts, Post-Apocalypse
Shira Lipkin – Valentines
Rochita Loenen-Ruiz – Dancing in the Shadow of the Once
Nancy Kress – Ej-Es
E. Lily Yu – The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees
Toiya Kristen Finley – The Death of Sugar Daddy
Kameron Hurley – Enyo-Enyo
Genevieve Valentine – Semiramis
Aliette de Bodard – Immersion
Greer Gilman – Down the Wall
Karin Tidbeck – Sing
Nisi Shawl – Good Boy
Thoraiya Dyer – The Second Card of the Major Arcana
Ekaterina Sedia – A Short Encyclopedia of Lunar Seas
Benjanun Sriduangkaew – Vector
Angélica Gorodischer – Concerning the Unchecked Growth of Cities
Catherynne M. Valente – The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew
Author Biographies
PERMISSIONS
“Girl Hours” © 2011 by Sofia Samatar. Originally appeared in Stone Telling. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Excerpt from a Letter by a Social-realist Aswang” © 2007 by Kristin Mandigma. Originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra” © 2010 by Vandana Singh. Originally appeared in Strange Horizons. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Queen of Erewhon” © 1999 by Lucy Sussex. Originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Tomorrow is Saint Valentine’s Day” © 2010 by Tori Truslow. Originally appeared in Clockwork Phoenix 3 (ed. Mike Allen). Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Spider the Artist” © 2008 by Nnedi Okorafor. Originally appeared in Seeds of Change (ed. John Joseph Adams). Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Science of Herself” © 2013 by Karen Joy Fowler. Originally appeared in The Science of Herself. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Other Graces” © 2010 by Alice Sola Kim. Originally appeared in Asimov’s Science Fictio
n. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Boojum” © 2008 by Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette. Originally appeared in Fast Ships, Black Sails (ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer). Reprinted by permission of the authors.
“The Eleven Holy Numbers of the Mechanical Soul” © 2014 by Natalia Theodoridou. Originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Mountain Ways” © 1996 by Ursula K. Le Guin. Originally appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Tan-Tan and Dry Bone” © 1999 by Nalo Hopkinson. Originally appeared in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Four Generations of Chang E” © 2011 by Zen Cho. Originally appeared in Mascara Literary Review. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Stay Thy Flight” © 1998 by Élisabeth Vonarburg. Originally appeared in Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction (ed. Nicola Griffith & Stephen Pagel). Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Astrophilia” © 2012 by Carrie Vaughn, LLC. Originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Invisible Planets” © 2013 by Hao Jingfang & Ken Liu, © 2010 by Hao Jingfang. Originally appeared in English translation in Lightspeed. Originally appeared in Chinese in New Realms of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“On the Leitmotif of the Trickster Constellation in Northern Hemispheric Star Charts, Post-Apocalypse” © 2013 by Nicole Kornher-Stace. Originally appeared in Clockwork Phoenix 4 (ed. Mike Allen). Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Valentines” © 2009 by Shira Lipkin. Originally appeared in Interfictions 2 (ed. Delia Sherman & Christopher Barzak). Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Dancing in the Shadow of the Once” © 2013 by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz. Originally appeared in Bloodchildren (ed. Nisi Shawl). Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Ej-Es” © 2003 by Nancy Kress. Originally appeared in Stars (ed. Janis Ian & Mike Resnick). Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees” © 2011 by E. Lily Yu. Originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Death of Sugar Daddy” © 2009 by Toiya Kristen Finley. Originally appeared in Electric Velocipede. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Enyo-Enyo” © 2013 by Kameron Hurley. Originally appeared in The Lowest Heaven (ed. Anne C. Perry & Jared Shurin). Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Semiramis” © 2011 by Genevieve Valentine. Originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Immersion” © 2012 by Aliette de Bodard. Originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Down the Wall” © 2006 by Greer Gilman. Originally appeared in Salon Fantastique (ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling). Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Sing” © 2013 by Karin Tidbeck. Originally appeared in Tor.com. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Good Boy” © 2008 by Nisi Shawl. Originally appeared in Filter House. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Second Card of the Major Arcana” © 2012 by Thoraiya Dyer. Originally appeared in Apex Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“A Short Encyclopedia of Lunar Seas” © 2008 by Ekaterina Sedia. Originally appeared in Journal of Mythic Arts. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Vector” © 2013 by Benjanun Sriduangkaew. Originally appeared in We See A Different Frontier (ed. Fabio Fernandes & Djibril al-Ayad). Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Concerning the Unchecked Growth of Cities” © 2003 by Angélica Gorodischer & Ursula K. Le Guin, © 1983 by Angélica Gorodischer. Originally appeared in English translation in Kalpa Imperial. Originally appeared in Spanish in Kalpa Imperial I: La Casa del poder. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew” © 2009 by Catherynne M. Valente. Originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.
INTRODUCTION
Such pleasure in selection!
The anthologist more than any other knows
the universe is multiple.
—Sofia Samatar, “Snowbound in Hamadan”
I would like to say that women writing science fiction belong to an unarguably long history. Say: Margaret Cavendish, Mary Shelley, Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Merchant, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain – and more. Women fascinated by science and the stars are attested throughout human civilization. Hypatia of Alexandria (350/370 to 415 CE), philosophist, astronomer, mathematician. Mariam Al-Ijliya (tenth-century CE), who designed and constructed innovative astrolabes. Mary Anning (1799 to 1847 CE), excavating dinosaur bones on the Dorset coast.
Women do belong to these histories. The difficult word is “unarguably”. Perennial arguments question how long women have been writing science fiction compared to men, whether their science fiction is truly science fiction, what the definition of science fiction is – to the exclusion of sciences like biology, sociology or linguistics, to the exclusion of non-Western narrative approaches used by women who are not white or not Western. To the exclusion, too, of a wider understanding of gender around the world. Sometimes these arguments are men yelling at clouds. Sometimes they are publishers not buying science fiction books by women, or lists of classic science fiction that are almost entirely by men.
This is not a book of classic science fiction by women.
The universe of science fiction is multiple: I could have collected stories from an entire century – or more – or I could have condensed my scope. And then, in any breadth of time, which stories to collect? There are so many.
Science fiction is always changing: at its best, it is always exciting, always saying something new. To say that the best science fiction of recent years is pushing the genre into new places is not a new statement – but I am incredibly excited by what the science fiction of recent years is doing. More than before, writers from around the world and of many backgrounds – gender, sexuality, ethnicity – are being published in English, in original and in translation. Their voices are changing science fiction, taking it into more futures and looking at our present and past in more ways. If science fiction is defined as looking at as many worlds as possible, it is an excellent time to be a reader.
I wanted to take a snapshot of this.
The stories in The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women are all (bar one) from the last twenty years. Some of the writers have been working in the science fiction field for far longer than that – writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, Karen Joy Fowler, Élisabeth Vonarburg, Angélica Gorodischer, Nancy Kress. Many started publishing quite recently – Zen Cho, Karin Tidbeck, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Sofia Samatar. Their approaches to science fiction are varied. Their stories are consistent in one quality: they all excite me.
This is not a solution.
It is a snapshot, a collection of stories by women working in science fiction today. I hope it brings these writers to new readers. It cannot deal a one-hit kill to sexism in the science fiction industry. It cannot solve another problem – the tendency to forget the contributions of women from earlier decades; although some of its contents deal very directly with the past: Karen Joy Fowler writing about Mary Anning’s life and discoveries, Sofia Samatar writing about Henrietta Swan Leavitt and the other women employed as human computers by Harvard College Observatory in the 1870s, Tori Truslow’s re-imagining of the Moon to examine the erasure of women’s poetic scholarship. They look at history, they remember it, but they are no replacement for it. They are an addition – as is this anthology.
It is also important to note that the conversation about gender is more complex than just men and women. Non-binary gender exists around the world and always has done, which tends to be forgotten. An anthology such as The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women is, by
elevating the work of women, limiting itself to them (although the complexity of gender identity means that some writers in this anthology are not binary-gendered). It can only be one part of what needs to be a much wider conversation.
What is this book?
A contribution to the conversation about writing and gender that has gone on for centuries. A collection of thirty-three excellent science fiction stories by women. Look: Sedoretu on the planet O. A train journey to the Moon. Alternate universes. Postapocalypses. An exomoon that stops birds from singing. Living spaceships born in gas giants. Cartographic wasps. Callowhales on Venus. Constellations.
Look at what women have written. Enjoy.
GIRL HOURS
Sofia Samatar
For Henrietta Swan Leavitt
Notes
In the 1870s, the Harvard College Observatory began to employ young women as human computers to record and analyze data. One of them, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, discovered a way to measure stellar distances using the pulsing of variable stars.
Quotations are from George Johnson’s Miss Leavitt’s Stars: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Discovered How to Measure the Universe (W. W. Norton, 2005).
Harlow Shapley, director of the observatory, reckoned the difficulty of astronomical projects in “girl hours” – the number of hours a human computer would take to obtain the data. The most challenging projects were measured in “kilo-girl-hours.”
Conclusion
You were not the only deaf woman there.
Annie Cannon, too, was hard of hearing.
On the day of your death she wrote: Rainy day pouring at night.
Oh bright rain, brave clouds, oh stars,
oh stars.
Two thousand four hundred fires
and uncharted, unstudied,
the hours, the hours, the hours.
Body
The body is a computer.
The body has two eyes. For the body, the process of triangulation is automatic. The body can see the red steeple of the church beyond the trees. Blackbirds unfold as they grow nearer, like messages.
The body never intended to be a secret.
The body was called a shining cloud, and then a galaxy. The body comforted mariners, spilt milk in the southern sky. The body was thought to be only 30,000 light years away.