Yeah, so I’d forgotten I was doing this and it was only thanks to a Tricia Sullivan post calling out the lack of support from blokes for female writers that I remembered about it. I could make excuses but I won’t. It clearly wasn’t important enough to me to keep in mind. Nevertheless I do think this is important enough to restart, one of the ways in which I can make my own little contribution to making science fiction/fantasy slightly more equal.
Because, as Tricia Sullivan notes, it clearly isn’t at the moment. Taking her as an example, we have a critically acclaimed writer, who has won the 1999 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Dreaming In Smoke and who was nominated again in 2004 for Maul, yet she doesn’t have a book contract at the moment, having to write her next novel on spec. This is hardly an unique situation for a female writer, especially an UK based one, to find herself in and things aren’t made any easier by the slow collapse of science fiction publishing in the last few years. As there’s less room for science fiction in publishers schedules, the unfair advantages of the old boys’ networks matter more and it’s a minor disaster that a talented and interesting writer like Sullivan is passed over for yet another mediocre male mil-sf writer.
Since 1995, Tricia Sullivan has written seven novels, most of which are now out of print it looks like. I’ve read two of them, her latest one, 2010’s Lightborn and 2005’s Double Vision. Both are novels in which the normality of the world as we know it has been upset one way or another, with the protagonist in each having to deal with the challenges the new reality brings with it.
What Tricia Sullivan has done with Lightborn is create a concretised metaphor for growing up, that long drawn out moment when you’re a child on the edge of becoming an adult, looking out over the abyss to the incomprehensible horrors of adulthood. Both Roksana and Xavier are young teenagers, forced by circumstances to become more mature, but also kept from being fully adult. It’s no coincidence that all adults in the novel are unreliable or downright dysfunctional, Shined or not Shined; they have to make their own decisions and every time they want to trust an adult, it turns out to be a mistake. Yet Sullivan doesn’t glorify childhood: her heroes do have to grow up, make compromises, without being overtly dramatic about it.
As a science fiction reader you’re obviously biased towards the strange, the potential hallucination to be real, even if there’s a long tradition to use this against the reader. In Double Vision you start off with the default assumption that what Cookie experiences is real, only for Sullivan to sow doubt in your mind as certain inconsistencies become clearer. For example, if the scouting she does in the Grid is so important, why is it that her boss is only interested in which brands she heard mentioned by the soldiers? What is she really used for?
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