Customer Reviews

Men Writing Science Fiction As Women

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I enjoy a good themed anthology that brings together different perspectives on a common science fiction topic. Some of my favorites have focused on time travel (The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century), space opera (The New Space Opera), and detective stories (The Thirteen Crimes of Science Fiction). The set-up for this collection gave it a good chance of being added to this list. Editor Mike Resnick invited nineteen male science fiction writers to produce stories with female protagonists from the imagined perspective of a female writer.

Three stories that represent the collection well are:

Barry Malzberg's "Crossing the Border" seems to make fun of the collection's theme. Phillip undergoes a surgical transformation to become Philippa. Some of his past follows her.

John Teehan's "A Small Goddess" is a newly-self-aware AI that runs a multi-story office building. She adopts a pet that she finds in the building. This is neither as ominous nor as interesting as it sounds.

Jack Dann's "Summer" is about a woman dealing with Winter--the long-term, scary kind. Perhaps Jack succeeds too well in adopting a woman's perspective--I don't quite understand it. It's me, not him, I'm sure.

I won't be adding this collection to my list of treasured themed anthologies. Too many of the stories were just okay or didn't seem to reach their full potential as entertaining stories. And far too often the theme seemed to get in the way. I was continually reminded that gender-driven perspective was the Big Issue of each story. It too-often loomed larger than the individuality of the characters and too-frequently distracted from the telling of a good story.

What many stories needed was, ironically, a softer touch.

This collection had two criteria: first person story as a woman and putting a male character in her place wouldn't work. By and large the 19 stories do that. But this is where fiction reviews are tricky because we all have different tastes. I loved 12 of the stories -- the characters were believeble but most importantly I wanted to find out what happened to them. Yes, a lot of them had to do with motherhood or lack thereof or sexism -- sadly both are factors in a woman's life, one by biology (perhaps not always) and one by society still. It would have been nice to see a story where that wasnt't the case but we are all trapped by our own experiences.

This novel appealed to me, partly because I wanted to see how men would write from a woman's position, but mostly because I was in the mood to read good science fiction short stories. As stories go they're not bad, although I did expect more.

There's a wide variety of stories in this book. The first one opens up with a woman who's lover wants to have a child, but lacks a uterus due to an in-body espresso machine. On the other end of the spectrum you have Phil, who's undergone a procedure to become Phillpa, and his mental state isn't that great. You have a story about Marie, the computer AI for a building, and how she came into being. There's a young girls coming of age kind of story mixed in with a archeological dig, and a fairy's first days as a living creature.

Several of the stories center around motherhood: a woman who finds herself pregnant obtains an illegal gene bomb to force a doctor into making her child smart, another is about a young woman who agrees to become a breeder for an alien race that came down and conquered humans. A third has a mother searching for the daughter that was taken from her 12 years before, and another deals with mind travel, where a woman's unborn child mind travels back in time to ensure they are concieved.

Overall there's a pretty wide variety of stories in this anthology, and there's bound to be something for everyone. Generally the female characters are pretty beleivable, with few exceptions you don't pause mid story and wonder who is writing the story. There are a few oddball stories that leave you wondering, or stories that seem to have parts of them rushed, as if the author became tired of the story and wanted to wrap it up as quickly as possible.

If you're a fan of science fiction and women characters, this is worth checking out. You're bound to find something you'll like in the 20 stories.

Popular male writers provide engaging new tales in this anthology and successfully do so from a female perspective. The concept is intriguing, but obviously gimmicky too. The tales are well written entries that cross (no pun intended the gamut of sub-genre lines. Each one provides a first person account starring a female protagonist (in some cases antagonist might be a more apropos term). However, the fun in this nineteen tale anthology is not the gender switching, but in observing how males see females. Mike Resnick summarizes the tales best in his introduction to this collection when he quotes from his novel Outpost: "What's the most dangerous race you ever came across? Women! I mean an alien race. So do I." Readers will have a fine time seeing favorite writers switch from pants to skirts in an entertaining compilation.

Harriet Klausner