Fantasy Magazine Issue 58, Women Destroy Fantasy! Special Issue

by Fantasy Magazine

  Now that I am grown up, I want to be the woman who writes the fairy tales. Because, like the women in those French literary salons, like Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter and Catherynne M. Valente, I have learned that behind the pen is where the power is. That power is with the witch, with her life hidden outside herself, to be the wise woman who knows what cup not to drink from, and who will tell you, but only if you deserve to know. That power is with the woman who tells the story, who changes the shape of things. Magic words.

  I do not want to be the princess anymore. I want to be the witch.

  Even in the modern day, women writers have continued to engage with the literary fairy tale, have continued to pick up these stories, and pull them apart. To use them in the same way as their earlier writers did—to observe society from its edges and use magic and wonder and strangeness to critique the pieces of it that try to define what happily ever after is, and who deserves the chance at one.

  Perhaps because subversion has been built into the literary fairy tale from the beginning, it is a pattern that has been born into the fairy tale again and again. Women writers in particular take the stories and say, if you make us a princess, you will discover that we are witches. We can dance in glass slippers, true, but we can also wear out iron shoes walking to get what we want. We may well wear red, but we do so to show the wolves that they should be afraid to walk into the woods with us.

  We remember that happily ever after is where the story begins.

  And we are still writing.

  * * *

  Sources

  Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. New York: Noonday, 1994.

  Wonder Tales: Six Stories of Enchantment. Marina Warner, ed. Gilbert Adair, John Ashbery, Ranjit Bolt, A.S. Byatt, and Terence Cave, trans. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.

  Zipes, Jack. The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012.

  Zipes, Jack. When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition. New York: Routledge, 1999.

  © 2014 by Kat Howard.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Kat Howard is the World Fantasy Award-nominated author of over twenty pieces of short fiction. Her work has been performed on NPR as part of Selected Shorts, and has appeared in Lightspeed, Subterranean, and Apex, among other venues. Her novella, The End of the Sentence, written with Maria Dahvana Headley, was recently released by Subterranean Press. You can find her on twitter as @KatWithSword and she blogs at strangeink.blogspot.com.

  Read the Destruction:

  WDF’s Handy Guide and Recommended Reading List

  Wendy N. Wagner

  Reading a book is a strangely intimate experience. The words seep beneath the skin and touch one’s very character, not to mention one’s ideas of the world and how it works. Books can kindle passion, start a revolution, change a life.

  I think it is fair to say that our human world is made of texts: stories, informative books, movies, comic books, instruction manuals. Some, like the manual that came with your blender, will barely affect your mood, let alone change the way you engage in society. Other texts, like the books you were forced to read in school, become the underpinnings of our culture. When we look at those books, that canon, we see our society reflected in the mirror of their words. Recommending a book to another person not only reflects on your taste in literature, it sheds light on your own self and your relationship to the world.

  When we look at the recommended reading lists of our SF/F genre communities, we tend to see a very particular reflection, a reflection that, as author Julie McKenna so cleverly puts it on her blog, is “male and pale” (bit.ly/maleandpale). If you look at NPR Books’ 2011 Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books, as selected by its readers (bit.ly/npr100), you’ll see that only fifteen books on the list were written by women, and that the top nineteen were all the product of white men.

  Why is SF/F so dominated by men when there are so many women putting out great works of fiction?

  It’s a massive issue that is bigger than any single article could ever hope to address—but perhaps one tiny component is that not enough books by women and minority writers get recommended to other readers.

  For example, in 2011 (a good year for reader polls, apparently), The Guardian asked readers to recommend their favorite science fiction and fantasy works. The award-winning genre author Nicola Griffith decided to crunch those numbers and came up with an astonishing figure: “I scanned the Guardian comments—yes, all of them—and counted only eighteen women’s names. Eighteen. Out of more than five hundred,” (bit.ly/nicolag). That’s right. The Guardian’s readers were happy to shout out book recommendations—but like NPR’s readers, their shouts were overwhelmingly for male writers.

  Perhaps England is not a good representation of the state of the genre. Its lack of friendliness to women writers has been well discussed. On Foz Meadows’ Tumblr, there’s an excellent discussion and analysis of one large English bookseller’s pamphlet of genre book recommendations (bit.ly/fozmeadows), where number crunching showed “of the one hundred and thirteen authors listed in the genre-specific sections, there are a grand total of nine women and, as far as I can tell, zero POC.” Moreover, it should be noted that since 1972, when the British Fantasy Society began giving out the August Derleth Award for Best Novel, the award has only gone to a woman twice, to Tanith Lee in 1980, and to Sam Stone in 2011 (who returned the award as a response to furor over the award’s administration).

  The giving of awards is the first step in forming canon—that list of works by which our community defines itself, and which sets the standards for new writers entering the field. The Great Books of the fantasy genre form our very understanding of what the genre even means. Fantasy is more than just a hodge-podge of tropes and settings; it is a series of interconnected discussions of the imagination and human nature, built from a common language of Great Books. When the works of PoC and women writers get forgotten, get left out of the canon, then we lose important ideas about what it means to dream and what it means to be human. (For more on this topic, read my blog post “Read the Destruction: Award Winning Novels by Women” at bit.ly/destroy-winners.)

  But beyond the safe harbor of award-winning books, the work of female fantasists can be unexplored territory—so I turned to our contributors for advice. Some of the works on this list have been mostly forgotten. Some of them are ones you may have read before. Some are by white women. Some are by women of color. Some are controversial. Some are just plain fun. And maybe—just maybe—some of them will show you a new way to be a thinking, dreaming human being.

  The Print-and-Read Handy Guide—an introduction

  This guide is the perfect size to print out, stuff in your wallet, and take with you to your local bookstore or library. It’s a great way to start picking up books by authors that are unfamiliar to you.

  Download at DestroySF.com/WDF-Guide

  Obviously, not every book by each author is going to be a perfect match for the column I’ve placed it in. After all, Seanan McGuire writes science fictional zombie horror novels as well as urban fantasy ones. But at least this chart will give you a starting point.

  WDF’s Friend, Contributor, and Staff Recommendations:

  Novels & Series

  Here’s where a bunch of awesome women go into detail about the books they love and think you should read. It’s like getting a bunch of book recommendations from your friends, if your friends were all in the business of writing and publishing genre fiction.

  Jane Yolen

  Winner of the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement

  The Earthsea Cycle by Ursula K. Le Guin: Deep, beautiful, full of new meanings every time you read them.

  Beauty by Robin McKinley: Stunning first novel reworking of “Beauty and the Beast.”

  Archer’s Goon by Diana Wynne Jones: Funny, anarchic, surprising, and with the greatest line in fantasy novels for kids, �
��Power corrupts, but we need the electricity.” I want the T-shirt!

  Elizabeth Bear

  Winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

  The Salt Roads by Nalo Hopkinson: A challenging, beautifully written narrative following the lives of several fascinating women alive at different points in history but spiritually linked to one another.

  The Drowning Girl by Caitlín R. Kiernan: Her masterpiece to date, the compelling story of a woman struggling to reconcile treatment for her mental illness with her glimpses of magical creatures.

  Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord: A fable about love, betrayal, forgiveness, and food.

  The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison: Political intrigue and steampunk elves.

  T. Kingfisher

  Women Destroy Fantasy! Fiction Contributor

  Everybody and their brother has probably already recommended The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison (but if they haven’t, that one!) Otherwise, I’m fond of:

  Jinian Footseer by Sheri S. Tepper: To this day, I’m still not sure why this book works so well for me. The elements—a world where people have various magical talents and fight battles with them—have been done to death and back. But with an utterly sympathetic heroine and a self-aware planet, it rapidly transcends anything similar in the genre. (First of a trilogy.)

  Rose Daughter by Robin McKinley: It’s a Beauty and the Beast story, beautifully retold, with a sympathetic Beast and a practical Beauty, and it rapidly became the version that replaced all others in my head. (Plus, there are roses fertilized with unicorn manure, so, y’know, what’s not to love?)

  The Wood Wife by Terri Windling: There are not enough fantasy novels set in the American Southwest. This was the book that, around eighteen or so, I wanted to be my life. (Which might have been fairly uncomfortable, all things considered.) It evokes the desert better than any other fantasy I have read and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

  H. E. Roulo

  Women Destroy Fantasy! Fiction Contributor

  The Cold Fire trilogy by C. S. Friedman: A dark and beautiful series. She presents a well-wrought world inhabited by creatures pulled from the darkest reaches of the human mind. She writes with strength of purpose and the characters’ decisions have consequences. The reader is introduced to an amazing anti-hero. The first book is Black Sun Rising.

  The Liveship Traders trilogy by Robin Hobb: Her world is well built, and her characters strongly motivated. She balances a large cast of characters and continually introduces new and exciting elements. Though sometimes dark and violent, there is also delight in the worlds she creates. The first book in the Liveship Traders is Ship of Magic. (Note: If you only have time for a short story, read her SF short story “A Touch of Lavender,” a Nebula and Hugo finalist.)

  Julia August

  Women Destroy Fantasy! Fiction Contributor

  The Darwath series by Barbara Hambly; The Deverry Cycle by Katherine Kerr; The Crown of Stars series by Kate Elliott: What can I say to sell these books? (And there are a lot of books here.) Well, to begin with, there is rich and historically inspired worldbuilding on a truly epic scale. Can I tell you how much I love the names of Katherine Kerr’s young dragons? I love those names and in general Kerr’s complex and layered use of history in the Deverry Cycle. I love how Kate Elliott’s world diverges from its medieval template in fascinating and perfectly logical ways. I love the bitter Mythos flavour of Barbara Hambly’s Darwath, among other allusions spotted only years after I first discovered the original trilogy on someone else’s bookshelf. And maybe most importantly, I love so many characters across all three series. Off the top of my head, indiscriminately and not at all exclusively, Gil, Ingold Inglorion, Rhodry, Jill, and Alain are all inscribed on my memory—and I definitely think the right sibling ended up on the throne in Crown of Stars.

  Kameron Hurley

  Women Destroy Fantasy! Nonfiction Contributor

  Ascension by Jacqueline Koyanagi: I blurbed this book thusly, “There are badass women running around doing badass things and falling in love with each other and with starships, and I’m totally down with that.” I rest my case.

  Black Wine by Candas Jane Dorsey: This book opens with: “There is a scarred, twisted old madwoman in a cage in the courtyard.” And just gets better from there. Folks who read [my story] “Enyo-Enyo” will see some similarities in theme here. Weird time displacement, meetings-of-oneselves, despair, loss, madness.

  The Etched City by K.J. Bishop: It’s about two old war veterans—a roguish man and jaded woman doctor—who try to carve out a life for themselves after being on the losing side of a great war.

  Sandra Wickham

  Women Destroy Fantasy! Nonfiction Contributor

  Kim Harrison: The Hollows series

  Patricia Briggs: The Mercy Thompson series & the Alpha and Omega series

  Richelle Mead: Dark Swan series

  Devon Monk: Allie Beckstrom series

  Kat Richardson: Greywalker series

  Kelley Armstrong: Women of the Otherworld series

  Diana Rowland: The Kara Gillian series & the White Trash Zombie series

  Kat Howard

  Women Destroy Fantasy! Nonfiction Contributor

  Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke: This book is in my top five books of all time. It is an enormous doorstop of a book, complete with footnotes (which you must read, because some of the most gorgeous and eerie bits of the story are tucked into the footnotes.) I reread it every year. Reading this book is the closest I have ever come to feeling like the world is magic, that it is tucked away, waiting for us to wake it up.

  Mortal Love by Elizabeth Hand: Really, it would be hard to go wrong with reading anything that Elizabeth Hand has written, and so I recommend you do. But Mortal Love has so many of my favorite things—art and poets and rock stars and mythology. Reading it feels like drinking absinthe. Pair it with A. S. Byatt’s Possession.

  All Our Pretty Songs by Sarah McCarry: A punk version of the Orpheus myth, set in a city that may well be early ‘90s Seattle. Lush language, and one of the best and strongest female friendships I have ever read. If I had found this book when I was younger, I’d have bits of it tattooed on my body. And it’s the first of a trilogy, so you have even more gorgeous heartbreak waiting for you.

  Shanna Germain

  Women Destroy Fantasy! Nonfiction Contributor

  All the Wind-Wracked Stars by Elizabeth Bear: The language breaks my writer heart, because I know that in a million years, I will never write anything so dangerously beautiful, and because I fall in love with the characters. They delight me and inspire me, and then break my heart into a thousand glittering shards, every time.

  The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood: I used to think that I loved this book purely for nostalgic reasons—it was one of the first books that I read where I remember feeling so connected to a female character, especially because I understood, perhaps for the first time, that there was a possible future, a possible world, where I could be treated in a certain way because of my gender. But when I went back and re-read it recently, I discovered that it wasn’t all nostalgia. This book still burns with a brilliantly drawn protagonist, deft turns of phrase, and a scary view of a future that continues to resonate with me.

  Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor: The non-linear, punch-in-the-gut ride that this futuristic novel takes you on is so brave and fierce and complex that I feel like I could return to it again and again and find something new and wondrous inside it. This novel is beautiful and terrifying in that beauty.

  Sofia Samatar

  Women Destroy Fantasy! Nonfiction Contributor

  Kalpa Imperial by Angélica Gorodischer: Translated by Ursula K. Le Guin, this is the first work by the prolific Gorodischer to appear in English. A collection of linked stories on the rise and fall of empires and the lives of ordinary people caught up in history.

  Cloud & Ashes by Greer Gilman: A trilogy in one volume, set in Gilman’s astonishing
ly rich Cloud mythos. Gilman is the heir of Shakespeare; don’t miss this intoxicating blend of folklore, symbolism, and magic.

  Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord: This is Lord’s debut novel. Inspired by a Senegalese folktale, it’s a beautifully told and very funny adventure of love and chaos.

  Dana Watson

  Women Destroy Fantasy! Staff:

  I have several female authors that I will read absolutely anything by: Tanya Huff, Elizabeth Bear, and Seanan McGuire. All three of them write heedless of genre lines pretty widely, but I started all of them through fantasy. (Also Ilona Andrews, but that’s technically a husband & wife team writing under one name.)

  Other authors whose fantasy I’ve loved over the years include: Melanie Rawn, Kate Elliott, Mercedes Lackey, and Jennifer Roberson. Tamora Pierce’s YA, of course. And I’m not sure any list is complete without Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword.

  Jude Griffin

  Women Destroy Fantasy! Staff

  The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk: The only book to ever make me feel homesick for a world that didn’t exist, but was surely mine.

  The Hollows Series by Kim Harrison

  Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb

  The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley

  The Sevenwater trilogy by Juliet Marillier

  Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey

  Graceling by Kristin Cashore

  Poison Study by Maria V. Snyder

  Wild Magic by Tamora Pierce

  Son of Avonar by Carol Berg

  Laurel Amberdine

  Women Destroy Fantasy! Staff

  The Golden City and The Seat of Magic by J. Kathleen Cheney: Alternate 1905 Portugal with cool magical sea people.

  The Cassie Scot series by Christine Amsden: Fun, romantic urban fantasy series about a young woman with no magic ability trying to make a name for herself in a town full of powerful sorcerers. Small press release.