by Kate Elliott
She happened to be friends with my doctor’s nurse, a woman I never knew well but whom I always liked in that distant way a child may like a grown-up whose life seems so removed from her own. Only as an adult did I learn that the nurse I saw for my regular checkups had been a nurse in the European theater during World War II. I never knew this woman had participated in the war in a profound way even though I was always acquainted with the stories of the many male veterans of my parents’ generation. The participation and experience of women in war, in whatever capacity, was not just ignored but set away, papered over; it was another channel lost to view.
My childhood landscapes stretched into the past and also across the ocean. My father grew up in an enclave of Danish-Americans. As a child he went to “Dane School” where he learned the language of his immigrant grandparents. It happened that he was raised as much by his grandmother as by his own parents; his connection to the nineteenth-century struggles they came out of was part of his childhood and so it connected to me. I assumed everyone was surrounded by a net of older relatives whose memories reached into a past they could briefly illuminate. My great-uncle remembered the first time he saw a car. I heard first-hand stories of how people made their way who had very little money and no expectation of more. Their memories made the world they had been part of not so distant from my own because it was part of the story of how mine had come to be. The Depression and World War II were my touchstones as a child not because I was alive then but because these events were central to the lives of my elders.
One consequence of my father’s ethnic upbringing was that, after the war, he went to Denmark to study for a year and returned home with a Danish bride. She was a young woman bold enough to leave her family behind and embark for a new country where she did not (yet) speak the language. In our household, a second language was spoken. We ate different foods and had customs that mainstream American culture viewed as peculiar or charming. This upbringing contributed to creating a view of myself as fractured. I belonged to the mainstream culture because I was white and had an enthusiastically approved European ancestry (Scandinavian-Americans being among that small group of foreign immigrants to the USA who never had to “become white” but were always accepted as white), but I sensed that other topographies influenced my personal landscape as well.
After I wrote that initial story with its two generic male protagonists having adventures in a world filled with men, I made a conscious decision to write stories with girls or women as the lead characters. I knew I would be told that I was merely writing “wish-fulfillment,” and at that time I believed it was wish-fulfillment to populate my stories with whatever characters I wanted, especially ones who represented people like me.
That the standard stories I read provided their own form of wish-fulfillment to the men reading and praising them hadn’t yet occurred to me.
At the same time, elements I took for granted from my own limited yet unique understanding of the world crept into my stories. I wasn’t yet conscious that writing about a woman who had to journey from her homeland to a foreign land was a story I knew by heart because I grew up with it. I wasn’t yet conscious that women not specifically tied to their relationship to a man appeared in my stories because in my tiny world they were visible to me. Elders played a role in the narrative, as did continuity and connection between past and present and between old places and new ones. My slow groping toward an architecture of what I thought made for gripping and “realistic” world building filled in around channels I wasn’t at that time aware had scored so deeply into my creative heartland.
Attending a women’s college in Oakland, California, was a profoundly eye-opening experience for a white girl from rural Oregon, a window into the ways race and class and gender shape America. I trained in martial arts. I married a man from a different religion and converted to that religion not as a favor to him but because I found my spiritual home there. Having children layered on yet more perspectives. Opening the door to the idea that the world was far larger than what I had been told in school and by the culture at large altered my sense of the world. Realizing that the “truths” laid on the table were almost without exception incomplete and at times outright falsehoods forced me to dig deeper into the unexamined assumptions I lived with. Today I keep adjusting my way of looking at the world as I continue to listen, look, and learn.
I never fell out of love with SFF and its landscapes of heroism, adventure, discovery, the numinous, the intangible, the idea of being part of something larger than yourself. It’s an odd thing, falling in love with a story, especially when that story itself sometimes defines and creates problematic elements. Especially when that story denies you an existence.
Most often the cultural landscapes we are familiar with dictate the approach we take to writing and the worlds we write about. Often the true contours of these landscapes remain unseen because they hide beneath the fields we expect to encounter. Often we are not aware that we have unexamined expectations about what we will find in the narrative. These unexamined expectations in fictional terms can be called a “default” of preselected options.
For example, what if a reader genuinely believes that there were only a handful of “exceptional women” in the past and that the rest were passive, ignorant, oppressed bystanders? If this is the story the reader has absorbed through historical stereotypes, revisionist history, and bad television and film, they will approach each narrative with an idea of what a “realistic” landscape looks like (regardless of how many dragons and FTL spaceships it has in it). That reader may call “unbelievable” a fantasy story that includes a guild with women as members; a royal daughter who rides out with her imperial father on a military campaign; a literate woman who administers an archive, composes poetry praised by a court, or writes the first known novel; harem women who control extensive commercial interests; a single woman supporting herself in a trade; Amazons or any woman who fights; and women as leaders of religious establishments and revolutions.
Like air, this default remains invisible if it is not examined by other instruments, just as we do not see the river’s history in its fullness if we only measure the engineered banks.
One place to start is to tear apart the idea that there is a single authentic story that can have legitimacy for all people, one with a universal message that speaks to everyone and thus to everything. A classic example of a narrative often seen as being a “universal story” in epic fantasy is that of a white man (working within European or USA cultural antecedents) with daddy issues who has to overthrow or surpass his father. Usually he gets laid along the way and receives a woman as reward although she is not as important as his final triumph in the hierarchy of menfolk.
By what standard can this story (and others like it) be claimed as universal? Of itself it is particularist, limited, and superficial when applied to the wide-ranging experience of human beings across time and place.
The trappings and tropes we are told are “realistic” are in fact selective realism.
Many hold to the idea of science fiction and fantasy as a progressive genre, one that can continually open up new spaces, new paths, new visions that have to do with humanity. But if new spaces and new paths are only inhabited by the same people as were valorized in the stories before, then they aren’t new and they aren’t progressive, if progress means anything.
Now and again people bewail how fantasy is an inherently conservative genre but in fact most fantasy has little to do with the actual past. The myths layered on top of the past get more rigid the more they are needed to reinforce the status quo. Modern fantasy has less to do with nostalgia for monarchy and more to do with protecting the status quo of today, the desire to protect the privilege of those who have held on to it for so long. The male main character who through genius or magical skill succeeds at his quest or takes or regains a throne is less about catering to notions of aristocracy and more about essentialism and perhaps even social Darwinism. Both notions are part and
parcel of the same way of organizing the universe: rationalizing that some people deserve better than others regardless of how it came about that they got it. Modern science fiction rarely fares much better than fantasy even if its trappings may seem more democratic or industrial (I won’t say technological because periods of technological innovation exist throughout human history, a fact much ignored by people who love to excoriate “fantasy” for its “pastoral traditionalism”).
In the end I chose to write the epic fantasy and science fiction I wanted to see, not the epic SFF I had been sold as the only authentic brand. I chose to write women at the center of my narratives. I chose to create space for myself by which I meant all of the people I did not see in these stories. Instead of landscapes of received wisdom, of ossified expectation, and of unchallenged assumptions, I chose to build landscapes of possibility and expansion. What had been labeled trivial and unworthy could be exposed as important and necessary. Those who had been invisible through omission and prejudice would become visible and inevitable at the heart of the narrative.
This is my landscape, the heart of everything I have written.
I do belong here. This can be my narrative, and yours too. The landscapes of the fantasy and science fiction genre are not owned by a few, nor can they any longer be defined by a few. The river has many channels, some running strong, some hidden and hard to see, some yet to be carved. We can explore them all.
Thanks to Katharine Beutner, Liz Bourke, Daniel José Older, and N. K. Jemisin for reading and comments.
RIDING THE SHORE
OF THE
RIVER OF DEATH
A CROWN OF STARS STORY
THIS WOODED WESTERN WOODED country far from their tribal lands in the east smelled raw and unpalatable to Kereka, but the hawk that circled overhead had the same look as hawks in the grasslands. Some things were the same no matter where you went, even if you had to ride into the lands where foreigners made their homes to get what you wanted. Even if you had to journey far from your father’s authority and your mother’s tent to seize the glory of your first kill.
The reverberant thunk of an axe striking wood surprised her; she’d thought it was too early to hunt because they had yet to see any sign of habitation. Ahead, barely visible within the stretch of pine and beech through which they rode, her brother Belek unslipped his spear from its brace against his boot and urged his mare into a run. Kereka rose in her stirrups to watch him vanish into a clearing occluded by summer’s leaves. Birds broke from cover, wings flashing. The clatter of weapons, a sharp shriek, and then a man’s howl of pain chased off through the bright woodland.
Edek, riding in front of her, whipped his horse forward. His voice raised in a furious burst of words as he and Kereka broke out of the woods and into a clearing of grass, meadow flowers, bold green saplings, and a pair of sturdy young oak trees.
Belek’s mare had lost her rider. She shied sideways and stood with head lifted and ears flat. Beside the oaks, two had fought. Belek’s spear had thrust true, skewering the foreign man through the torso, but the farmer’s axe had cut into the flesh below Belek’s ribs before Belek had finally killed the man with a sword-thrust up under the ribs. Edek stood with mouth working soundlessly, watching as Belek sawed off the head of the dead man with his bloodied knife. Blood leaked from Belek’s gut, trailing from under his long felt tunic and over the knees of his leather trousers, but he was determined to get that head.
If he could present the head to the begh before he died, then he would die as a man rather than a boy.
His teeth were gritted and his eyes narrowed, but he uttered no word that might betray how much he hurt. Even when he got the head detached so it rolled away from the body, blood spilling brightly onto the grass, he said nothing, only uttered a “gah” of pain as he toppled over to one side. His left hand clutched the hair of the dead man. With his gaze he tracked the sky, skipping from cloud to cloud, and fetched up on Kereka’s face. He seemed about to speak but instead passed out.
Kereka stared. One of the young oaks had a gash in its side, but the farmer hadn’t chopped deep enough to fell it. Bugs crawled among the chips of wood cut from the trunk. A cluster of white flowers had been crushed by the farmer’s boots. His red blood mingled with Belek’s, soaking into the grass. This could not be happening, could it?
Every year boys rode out of the clans to seek their first kill, and every year some did not return. Riding the shore of the river of death was the risk you took to become a man. Yet no lad rode out in the dawn’s thunder thinking death would capture him.
Edek dismounted and knelt beside Belek to untie the heavy tunic, opening it as one might unfold the wings of a downed bird. Seeing the deep axe cut and the white flash of exposed rib, he swore softly. Kereka could not find words as she absorbed the death of her hopes.
“He’ll never get home with this wound,” said Edek. “We’ll have to leave him.” He started, hearing a crack, but it was only Belek’s mare stepping on a fallen branch as it turned to move back toward the familiarity of its herd.
“We can’t leave him.” Kereka knew she had to speak quickly before she succumbed to the lure of Edek’s selfish suggestion. “He is my brother. The begh’s son. It will bring shame on us if we abandon him.”
Edek shrugged.“If we take him back, then you and I have no chance of taking a head. You must see that. He can’t ride. He’s dead anyway. Let’s leave him and ride on. Others have done it.”
She set her jaw against his tempting words. “Other boys who were left to die hadn’t already taken a head. He’s taken his head, so we must give him a chance to die as a man. We’ll lose all honor if we leave him. Even if both of us took a head in our turn.”
“I don’t want to wait another season. I’m tired of being treated as a boy when I’m old enough to be a man.”
“Go on alone if you wish, Edek the whiner.” Kereka forced out the mocking words, and Edek’s sullen frown deepened with anger. “You’ll sour the milk with your curdling tongue. You can suckle on your grievances for another season. You’ll get another chance to raid.”
As she would not.
Last moon the begh’s son from the Pechanek clan had delivered six mares to her father, with the promise of twenty sheep, ten fleeces, two bronze cauldrons, a gilded saddle, three gold-embroidered saddle blankets, five felt rugs, and a chest of gold necklaces and bronze belt clasps as her bride price. Her father’s wives and the mothers of the tribe had been impressed by the offer. They had been charmed by Prince Vayek’s respectful manners and pleasing speeches. Perhaps most of all they had been dazzled by his handsome face and well-proportioned body displayed to good effect in several bouts of wrestling, all of which he had won against the best wrestlers of the Kirshat clan. Her father and uncles had praised his reputation as a mighty warrior, scourge of the Uzay and Torkay clans, and all the while their gazes had returned again and again to the deadly iron gleam of the griffin feathers he wore as his warrior’s wings. Other warriors, even other beghs and their princely sons, wore ordinary wings, feathers fastened with wire to wooden frames that were riveted to an armored coat. Only a man who had slain a griffin could fly griffin wings. Such a man must be called a hero among men, celebrated, praised, and admired.
Her father had decreed she would wed Prince Vayek at the next full moon. Wed, and be marked as a woman forever, even unto death.
This was her last chance to prove her manhood.
When she spoke, her voice was as harsh as a crow’s.“We’ll weave a litter of sticks and drag him behind his horse.”
Dismounting, she turned her back so Edek could not see her wipe away the hot tears. Honor did not allow her to cry. She wanted to be a man and live a man’s life, not a woman’s. But she could not abandon her dying brother.
Grass flattened under the weight of a litter as Belek’s mare labored up a long slope. Kereka rode at a walk just in front of Belek’s horse, its lead tied to her saddle. Her own mare, summer coat shiny in the hot sun, flick
ed an ear at a fly.
She glanced back at the land falling away to the west. She had lagged behind to shoot grouse in the brush that cloaked a stream, its banks marked at this distance by the crowd of trees and bushes flourishing alongside running water. She squinted into the westering sun, scanning the land for pursuers, but saw no movement. Yesterday they had left the broken woodland country behind. Out here under the unfenced sky, they’d flown beyond the range of the farmers and their stinking fields.
From ahead, Edek called her name. She whistled piercingly to let him know she was coming. The two birds she’d killed dangled from a line hooked to the saddle of Belek’s horse. Belek himself lay strapped to the litter they had woven of sapling branches. He had drifted in and out of consciousness for four days. It was amazing he was still alive, but he had swallowed drips and drops of mare’s blood, enough to keep breath in his body. Now, however, his own blood frothed at his lips. The end would come soon.
Maybe if he died now, before they reached the tents of the Kirshat clan, she and Edek could turn immediately around, ride back west, and take up their hunt in fresh territory. Yet even to think this brought shame; Belek deserved to die as a man, whatever it meant to her.