This week I have been reading about women and science
fiction and the surrounding issues of representation, opening and closing off
of meanings. To that end I am making
this week’s post an inquiry into science fiction writing. And in "good" Writing Project style I learn by trying this out myself and letting things get way messy.
So I am a pretty committed sci-fi and fantasy
reader myself, but I have never tried to write any... until now :) I have some rather hefty imagined
possibilities for what is right now just a small and possibly needy portion of
story. There is still a bunch of
detailing work I have spinning around in my head. For now, though, I tried to get across, some of the big ideas that seem important about the story and the deets that I could muster. And through
this story I hope to also narrate my reflections on a history of women and science fiction, which is a mixed, emerging and multiplicious bag of utopianism, separatism, images of possibility, and protagonizing of women. So here we go…
_____
Marni scanned her new Peoples History Card at the gate of
the transport. She let the rise and dip
of her newly minted personal quick response code slide unfamiliarly through her
fingers and slipped it back into the pocket of her apron as she followed the
slightly muddy flashing arrows along the passageway. She aligned to her internal sense of time and
estimated that on Emig the older children would be ringing the dinner bells
soon. Her own stomach rumbled at that
and she marched on wondering if they still had dinner bells on Earth IV and if
they did who rang them. Emerging out of
the passageway into the night air the city overwhelmed the senses of all but the
most sedate, and Marni, once inside her carefully chosen airtax, retreated into
her thoughts for the ride through the city.
It was easy enough to bring to mind Daga and the
children. She let her thoughts flow to a
particular story, one that she kept close, while others slipped in and out,
whether or not she had recorded them. This
was a good start and Marni breathed a little easier. She knew that the council had asked her to
come on this journey to Earth IV because of her particular imagination work and
her familiarity with the inner workings of the Recorded People Stories. Still, she couldn’t help but feel relief that her
mind-stories were safely available, even if she had only been away from home
less than a day. She tuned herself to
the images now fully. Wondering if
something different would emerge this time.
****
She and Daga had been
maybe twelve years old. It wasn’t so long
in the future that they would be transitioning away from the children’s circles
or at least taking new roles there if they chose to stay. They squatted side by side at the creek toes
sinking into the rather smelly mud bank.
When Marni and Daga had arrived at the play circle an hour ago, Nila, one
of the adult teachers this season, looking slightly frazzled with her own infant,
Tino, nursing and three other small children playing nearby, had asked the two
older children to fill the water buckets for the day. Marni and Daga were happy enough to venture
beyond the circle on this errand, especially when they saw Henry, the other
teacher for this cycle, tying on his apron and joining Nila and the younger
children. As the older children walked
through community toward the woods and creek, they talked about it being a good
thing that this was Nila’s last week before cycling to another workfield. The children’s circles work was generally the
most respected and all out consuming works for a reason. Marni and Daga thought Nila looked ready for
a break. Marni thought maybe Nila would
spend the next weeks with the baby Tino at the Recorded People Stories House,
where she might reflect and imagine ways to narrate her times this season in their
circle. Daga thought instead that Nila and
Tino might go straight to a conference cycle with the current council to work
on a plan the children and she had been exploring for possible changes around
the treatment of farming animals.
And now, knowing that both well routined adults were there
at the circle with the younger children, and the afternoon dinner preparations
still hours away, Marni and Daga hesitated, the water buckets just hauled up
from the deepest water and sitting behind them. And Daga began the familiar game,
“That tree is not a tree.”
Marni, picking up the lines, smirked, “It’s an Earth IV
transport.”
“And this creek?,” Daga asked.
“It’s a marble. Let’s
go, Dag.”
“And you, Marni?”
“Me, what?”
“What are you not, Marni?”
“I think I can hardly unravel that un-naming but named
question.”
Daga stared hard at her, pressed on her palm slightly, did
not let this idea go, “What are you not?”
After years, probably, Marni answered.
“Not yours?”
****
In the airtax Marni smoothed her hand on the manufactured
leather armrest and opened her eyes. This
surface felt firm, much more than her story.
She recalled a rant by her favorite mentor, Sarrah, “Fuzzy is good! Do you think we want one-sided, firm, hard,
completely known, stories, Marni?! No!” This made her smile and feel slightly less
uneasy, but she couldn’t help wonder about how well fuzzy had played out so far
in her life. Oh she supposed, honing her
Sarrah-voice, that that was one of
many possible interpretations of events.
Sigh. She was distracted from her
musings by her stomach growling loudly.
She thought somewhat sourly that by now surely families and circles all
over Emig had full bellies and she was another thirty minutes from her
destination and her eventual dinner.
___________
A day later Marni sat in a conference room at the university
center carefully moving her eyes from person to person, from teacher to
teacher, she thought, for that is how they called themselves. She worked to imagine the stories that
brought these people together and brought her across space to the planet her
foremothers had called home. She drew
her attention to two women, Jaclyn just beside her and Ansor directly across the
circle. Jaclyn had a paper notebook out,
not uncommon on Emig, but something that seemed out of place in the highly
digitized surrounding here at the university. She knew that Jaclyn’s work over
the past year had been the reimaging of Emig’s Recorded People Stories for the
context of Earth IV. She knew that Jaclyn’s
own stories were key to the project’s beginning. Ansor,
whom Marni was casting as the group’s wise elder, had in fact several devices
she seemed to be worked with at any given moment, a sleek flat screen rising
only centimeters from the table surface, a small, clear, handheld data device,
which her single thumb seemed to compose with and on a table behind Ansor, to which
she rotated to every few minutes, a decidedly not-sleek, homemade patchwork of technologies
that reminded Marni of both Jaclyn’s rustic notebook in this room and the
digital wares of Emig in general.
By the end of the day Marni was trembling with excitement of
this new project and her possible role in it.
The work this group of teachers seemed so fresh to her, not that she did
not feel this newness of ideas on Emig.
She did. In fact, there, possibilities
seemed endless. To Marni, sometimes too
endless. Today though she had the idea
that the Earth IV teachers’ imaginations of a Recorded People Stories felt like
a new possibility in a place where roadblocks and ends were everywhere. That is the difference, Marni thought, here
the availability of the closings of meaning makes my open-imagination work more
vital.
Ansor did not seem as enthusiastic as Marni felt, or as
anyone in the room particularly. Though
she was fully involved and was the person who had sent the request to Emig
Council for someone, for Marni, to come.
Ansor, in so many ways both opposite and matching to Sarrah, reminded
the group whenever affect seemed to happily rise, that their last project had
ended in the co-opting of their fantastic idea by the National Business,
Marking and Learning Association. At
this she held up each time her own People’s History Card at pointed with her
red acrylic nail to the row of “badges” imprinting the plastic. “This, friends, is the way our last
imagination project turned out! I (at my own and this university’s expense, of
course) am the proud owner of forty-seven imagination badges. I am a competitive asset to this
institution! Oh, damn. This is important work you all, still, but we
must be deliberate, so that the stories cannot be easily undone, sized up,
quantified . Marni, tell us again how
people talk about The Stories, what do they say?”
At seven o’clock there was a dinner bell as the group fell
into a walk together to the dining hall.
The bell reminded Marni of her question the day before, and she wondered agin who rang the bell and who prepared the dinner?
And speaking of questions of who… looking around her, could it be
possible that not one of the women in the group (There were ten people, and
eight women, six under 40 she guessed) had a nursing baby to take part in this
work? She shook her head and herself and imagined
for a moment the many possible arrangements people may have for work and family on Earth
IV. She breathed out, and asked Jaclyn, “Who
rings the dinner bells?”
