China Mountain Zhang — Maureen F. McHugh

Cover of China Mountain Zhang


China Mountain Zhang
Maureen F. McHugh
313 pages
published in 1992

China Mountain Zhang is the fourth novel I’ve read in my Year of Reading Women project. It had been on my shelves unread for over a decade before that, silently accusing me every time I walked past. Some novels are like that, shoved aside each time for a more interesting looking book. Which is one of the reasons I put it on my list of twelve science fiction novels written by women to read this year: to force me to finally read it.

Because I should’ve read this long ago. China Mountain Zhang was Maureen McHugh’s debut novel and was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards in 1992, winning the Lambda Literary Award (best science fiction with LGBT themes), the Locus Award for best first novel, and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award (feminist themed science fiction). It also has always been a highly regarded novel in the fan circles I hang around in. Yet until now I never had even tried to read it, largely because everytime I looked through my bookshelves the cover repelled me. And of course you should never judge a book by its cover, but in this case the cover did seem to promise something worthy but dull I never was quite in the mood for. A bit dumb, because of course China Mountain Zhang turned out to be just as good as its hype had made it out to be.

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Who keeps inviting John C. Wright to these things?

SF Signal is a commercial science fiction portal/blog which holds regular socalled Mind Melts, where they asks several science fiction writers their opinion on some topic or other. Usually these are mildly diverting but no more than that, as everybody struggles to say something original to questions like “which difficult science fiction books would you recommend”, but sometimes it goes wrong and they invite John C. Wright to participate. It’s not just that he’s a Libertarian-Catholic wingnut with a persecution complex the size of Jupiter, but that he’s so unbelievably pompous. For example:

World of Null-A was savaged by science fiction’s earliest and best known professional critic of the genre, Damon Knight, who pushed the work into undeserved obscurity, perhaps because he preferred the type of works written, or, rather, committed, by poseurs and artistes such as I mention with scorn above. Mr. Knight dismissed the paradigm-shifting technique of plot-weaving as mere sleight of hand. But perhaps it not as easy as it looks to juggle all the pieces of a jigsaw in midair, forming one picture to the reader, and then, by flipping one more bit of the puzzle into view, to both change the whole picture of what has gone before, and have the picture make sense; and then to do it again. The scientific process itself is nothing other than this juggling of jigsawwork to create successively more elegant and accurate pictures of the cosmos: to dismiss it in art is to overlook it’s significance in life. Others have attempted the Vanvogtian style of paradigm-shifting, either successfully, as with The Paradox Men by Charles L. Harness, or unsuccessfully, as with Mr. Knight’s own deservedly forgotten Beyond the Barrier, a work that serves as a living reminder that those who cannot perform a tricky technique of art at even an apprentice level should not mock it as a mere trick.

Nails on chalkboard.

Get Nick Mamatas a hugo: All You Need is Kill

Nick “proven noticable” Mamatas is up for the Best Editor, Long Form Hugo for his work on the Haikasoru line of translated Japanese science fiction. James Nicoll has decided to campaign for him, by reviewing all Haikasoru books he can lay his hands on. He started with All You Need Is Kill, coincidently the only Haikasoru book I’ve read myself, so I thought to help out by reposting the review f it I did last year at my booklog:

All You Need Is KILL


All You Need Is KILL
Hiroshi Sakurazaka & Alexander O. Smith (translator)
381 pages
published in 2004

James Nicoll was casting about for science fiction books to read one day last week and got pointed in the direction of Haikasoru Books, a newish line of translated Japanese science fiction, found something to his liking and posted about it, as well as a poll on which Haikasoru title to read next. All of which explains why I was pulled towards the cover of All You Need is Kill when I saw it in a local bookstore. Since James liked the Haikasoru that he got and I trust his taste, that was enough reason for me to take a chance on this. I wasn’t disappointed.

What I got with All You Need is KILL is a fast paced, short novel (only 200 pages) that takes two old, familiar science fiction concepts and mashes them up into something new: Starship Troopers meets Groundhog Day. Earth has been invaded by the alien Mimics, seemingly non-sapient but still with the ability to learn from their mistakes and most of the poorer part of the world has been overrun already. Keiji Kiriya is just one recruit given a short training, shoved into a battlesuit called a Jacket, sent out to defend Japan from the Mimics then dying in his first battle — only to wake up in his bunk the day before.

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John C. Wright comments on that Superman news

James Nicoll, delighting in the pain of his readers again, brings us John C. Wright’s considered response to the news that Superman is giving up his American citizenship:

No, to avoid the legal implications, I suggest we, the comicbook-loving community, merely appear at the offices of DC comics, and stage a riot, have the level of violence spiral out of control, drag the editors and owners bodily out of the building, and hang them from lampposts, and laugh and tell Monty Python jokes while their legs kick, dancing with spasms, in the air, inches from the ground. Then we can scratch their car paint with keys.

I agree, this might cast a pall over the comicbook-loving community, and folk may look down upon us as barbaric—which is why we should all dress in headscarves and Bedouin robes for the bloody event, whereupon the news media and all righthinking people will take great care to present our side of the story in the most sympathetic possible light, and any one who points out, truthfully, that our barbaric act of vigilante multiple murder over an issue of trivial comicbook geekdom nerdification was, well, barbaric, any such feckless abecedarian naif can be silenced and ostracized by being called a racist.

John C. Wright, for those who not know him, is a science fiction writer and a self confessed Christian Randoid whose writing has been noted for being fond of having underage school girls getting tied up and spanked and liking it. The response above is typical of him; yet he thinks of himself as a rational man. Which is also why he can be an Ayn Rand fan and a Catholic. We might think these beliefs conflict, but we lack his innate rationality.

Joanna Russ 1937-2011

Do not complain when at last you become quaint and old-fashioned, when you grow as outworn as the crinolines of a generation ago and are classed with Spicy Western Stories, Elsie Dinsmore, and The Son of the Sheik; do not mutter angrily to yourself when young persons read you to hrooch and hrsh and guffaw, wondering what the dickens you were all about. Do not get glum when you are no longer understood, little book. Do not curse your fate. Do not reach up from readers’ laps and punch the readers’ noses.

Rejoice, little book!

For on that day, we will be free.

The quote Patrick Nielsen Hayden opens his in memoriam post for Joanna Russ with. It’s a quote that has been going through my head as well, ever since I read The Female Man last month. It was only then that I realised how important and how good a science fiction writer Russ had been. Most of her best work had been written long before I was old enough to read science fiction and once I was reading sf, she already had had to give up writing altogether because of medical problems… Not to make it al about me, me, me but there is something sad about only appreciating a writer just weeks before she dies.

Joanna Russ’ importance to modern science fiction is hard to overstate: The Female Man is not quite the first explicitly feminist science fiction novel, but it was the breakout one. It emphatically challenged the boys club atmosphere of science fiction and while the dream in the quote above hasn’t quite been fulfilled yet, thanks to Russ and the people she inspired one way or another, science fiction has become a lot less sexist than it would’ve been otherwise. After The Female Man it was no longer necessary for female science fiction writers to become “one of the boys” to be taken seriously.

But there’s more to Russ than just the one novel: The Adventures of Alyx, an early series of short stories and one novel about a Bronze Age girl kidnapped into the far future and making a living as a survival expert. Alyx is a precursor and role model to all later female sf heroes, from Ripley to Tank Girl to Buffy. Then there’s We Who Are About To…, a novel about a group of stranded colonists and the refusal of the one woman amongst them to play along in the others’ games about restarting civilisation: “Civilization’s doing fine,” I said. “We just don’t happen to be where it is.” There are her other novels and short stories, at least one of which, “When it Changed“, a companion story to The Female Man, is available online.

And then there’s her non-fiction, which contained the same feminist concerns that animated her fiction, the most well known being How to Suppress Women’s Writing, a collection of essays exploring just how female writers are shoved behind the curtain by the male guardians of the literary canon. Some of her non-fiction is available here.

Add it all together and you know why Joanna Russ was such an important writer; unfortunately she was also a writer easy to ignore, almost invisible if you don’t search her out on your own. Her influence is everywhere in modern science fiction, but that just makes it harder to see. Her enforced silence in the last two decades exacerbated this, which she talks about in this interview with Samuel Delany at Wiscon 30. This obscurity should not blind us to the woman we’ve lost this week: Joanna Russ was one of the giants of science fiction and we’re that much the poorer for her loss.