One, two! One, two! And through and through
I finished Women Writing Science Fiction as Men yesterday afternoon. It was pretty good.
From the title, I had assumed that this would be a collection of short fiction by female writers writing under male pseudonyms. It turns out, though, to be a solicited collection of new short fiction written specifically for this collection; every story is written by a woman, in the first person, with a male main character and, in the words of the editor, “”if changing the narrator from Victor to Victoria didn’t invalidate the story we didn’t want it.” So the idea is that these are stories, written by women, but in the minds of male characters, and in situations which are uniquely male. It’s a pretty cool idea, and I think it turned out pretty well.
The only story I really didn’t like was one by Susan R. Matthews, called Thumping the Weaver, which was set in her “Under Jurisdiction” universe. I think the main issue I had with this story is that I at no point had any idea who any of the characters were or what was going on. It was completely packed full of jargon and slang, and it was very confusing. The rest of the stories I did like; one involving the confluence of the classic twin paradox and a paternity suit was particularly amusing. Another took place in a kind of gender-switched alternate universe of SF fandom, featuring such authors as Asa Ikamov and Sheldon Raccoon (an obvious nom de plume). I think my favorite was a story considering what would happen were Maxwell’s demon to get a job as a policeman.
I would recommend this book to anybody who likes SF. I’m now reading Charles de Lint’s Wolf Moon, and nobody will be surprised that it features a musician and a young woman discovering the world around her. The surprising thing is that, in this book, they’re not the same person!