A Conversation about the Holdfast

These comments first appeared as an exchange on my Guestbook page

Monday, November 07, 2005, 11:32:16 PM

Suzy,

Thanks so much for running this website. I just finished (Nicola Griffith's) "Ammonite" and was wondering if you had any observations on the evolution of the Amazon-planet story over the past twenty years or so. I felt like your Holdfast trilogy was a much more aggressive statement — which I mean in a good way, although it was sometimes emotionally painful to read. — Sam

Hi, Sam;

I liked "Ammonite"very much when I read it years ago, and I'm delighted to hear from someone who's read it more recently. As for the changes in this sort of story over time — early in the last century came Gilman's "Herland" which was naive in many ways but nowhere near as contemptuous, foolish, and sometimes actively hostile as most of the male-authored travesties that followed. Those books pushed people like Joanna Russ, Nicola Griffith, Sherri Tepper, myself, and others to respond with versions of all-female, or female-dominant, societies that we wrote in the seventies and eighties, speaking for ourselves and our gender instead of simply letting masculine arrogance, misogyny, and plain obtuseness continue to speak for us. We didn't all agree, but we all understood that the only way such stories could be told with any sort of insight was if they were told from the inside. And we were the ones in there, inside the prison that generations of men had built to hold us in and so out of the way, out of the running, and out of any sort of power or influence to change things. So we did change things.

There hasn't been a great deal of the "Boys' Own" all-girl fantasy since then; what was important was not so much exactly what we said, but the fact that people with the only true authority to say it were finally speaking up. The result was a massive blow to the previously common assumption that men were in such complete possession of all human experience that almost any male author could truly tell the stories of women's lives if he felt like it, and that what men "knew" was all the story there was — because no female interiority could possibly exist beyond the the "penetrating" male gaze (except for all that baffling "mystery," of course, which didn't matter because it was trivial and irrational).

We knew that for the most part the male gaze saw only what it wished to see. When we wrote what we saw (much of which we sure wished was not there to be seen), the masculine version of the "female planet" was shown up as everything from well-meant nonsense to hateful rage, and, thus revealed, it pretty much died out. But by the same token, the declaration of autonomous awareness made by books like "Ammonite", "Les Guerrillieres", "The Female Man", A Woman of The Iron People", "Motherlines", or The Gateway to Womens' Country" made more books like these problematic too.

Once a bunch of women SF writers asserted their fiction's independence from male expectation and rules, that independence was publicly claimed. It could now be participated in at will by any other women, writers and readers, who cared to do so, without their having to fight their way through for the first time. That particular job was, in essence, done.

Even male writers, seeing how energizing it was for us to open the "virgin territory" of women's SFinal ideas, began to write outside of the dreary confines of masculinist gender-myth and stereotype (a few had attempted this previously, but a very few). It was as if they had been given permission to draw instead on their own perceptiveness, empathy, and curiosity to explore what might become real futures for all, as opposed to what the previously predominantly masculinist SF culture had dictated must become real for straight White men (and so for their attendant "Others").

The benefits were great for venturesome writers of both genders, though, naturally, not for everyone of either. Some of the the older, and/or more rigid, proponents of the masculinist perceptual frame (male and female) chose to ignore the shift in awareness, made clumsy efforts at writing from a new viewpoint which they did not truly understand or share, or went on telling their old stories in the old ways. But most writers moved with eagerness and vigor into the expanded, more complex territory of an inclusive, multi-centered future.

Now, despite the backlash of the past two-and-a-half decades and despite the shift of new generations of women toward much softer, less challenging attitudes, it seems as if gender barriers in F/SF are gone for good. The initial difficulties are forgotten, since few want to acknowledge that things could ever have been so stilted, circumscribed, and downright ridiculous.

But because of this amnesia during an ugly period of anti-progressive backlash on all fronts, I sometimes think that the time is coming when a book like "Les Guerrillieres" will be needed again; I hope not, but who knows?

Nothing this complex and fraught with power issues is really settled once and for all. So it may someday become necessary to do it all over again. In which case, it will be very helpful to have books like these to look back to for inspiration.

Suzy:

You've given me a lot to think about, and quite a reading list. I may write you again when I have thought more on the subject. In the meantime, let me say/ask this: I was just plain blown away by "The Furies". I'd never run across a depiction of women like that before — the level of violence committed by Alldera & Co. is extraordinary, and the stark way it's depicted feels confrontational.

They're clearly products of their environment, and they're aware that they had been treated horribly, but they seem to have no feeling that they should treat their captives any differently. You seemed to be disregarding the common perception/depiction of women as possessing a moral high ground, and possibly setting out to contradict it. At any rate, it's very different from the depiction of women shown in "Ammonite" or other examples of the genre. I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on this. Also, given that such a long time separated the second book and "The Furies", had your own perspective evolved and influenced what you wrote? If you had written it in 1974, would it have been very different? Thanks in advance, Sam

Hi, Sam —

The four novels follow a handful of major characters during the thirty years or so it takes for a remnant culture of men keeping women in slavery to become (via war with escaped slaves returning as warriors) a land in which it's now up to the women to work out a future worth living for everyone. This futurist, feminist epic took 30 years of real time to write, too. In the course of writing it I got interested in how history is made, and how it is turned into myth. Just in artistic terms, there was no way I could have done it faster or sooner — my own ideas had to have time to ripen and progress from book to book.

I'm guessing from your comments that you haven't read the last book, "The Conqueror's Child". The question you raise, about how horribly the free fems treat their male opponents and captives, is the big question of "Child": how might women in power treat men differently than men have so commonly treated the women they've owned (see Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, or most of the world for elucidation, although there's still plenty of evidence right here at home for anyone who can stand to look at it)? In "Child", characters coming from three previous books-worth of accumulated experience confront this question, argue over it and fight it out to a beginning-place for something different.

But first: "The Furies", presenting a version of the gender revolution straight-up and no holds barred. It took me so long to write it because — I didn't want to. I thought, nobody will read this; men will hate it out of guilt and fear, and women won't want to be that angry. Hell, I didn't want to spend the couple of years it would take to write the book being that angry myself! What I wanted to do was to jump right to the beginnings of reconciliation (the story of "Child"), and have a plain old trilogy, like regular fantasy/SF authors, and keep the really nasty transitional stage — war over the transfer of power from the men to the women — neatly out of sight, so as not to frighten the horses.

But that would have been a cheat and an emotional lie.

So I was, quite properly, stymied for a decade (writing other things, of course). In the end I gave up and went with truth. That's why "The Furies" is such a savage book (yes, you're right about that); and, as I'd foreseen, it's the volume of the series that has sold the least over the years — most people don't have the stomach for it, and I can't say that I blame them. I even lost my British publisher (The Women's Press) over how badly "The Furies" did in England.

The problem of "The Furies", once I buckled down to it, seemed to be how to include enough of the sustained and systematic brutality that the fems had endured for generations — which explains where their rage comes from — without loading the book up with lots of unwieldy and unbearable backstory.

My solution was to give hints and a few examples of the past, and trust that this plus the women's cruelty itself would serve as convincing evidence of the extremity of their own previous sufferings. I hoped that readers wouldn't just shut the book, denying that such vengefulness could exist in women, even women who'd been pushed so far. I was determined not to sugar-coat the effects of generations of atrocity on any group of human beings. People who powerfully reject the degradation of slavery will want to do whatever it takes to make damn sure that the culprits don't get to turn around and enslave them (or their children) again.

"The Furies" just poured out in a molten stream, a form of catharsis for me (and, I hoped, for female readers). Oddly enough, once that poisoned wound was lanced the book itself turned out to be about so much more than a gender war — like the relationships among the men and among the women themselves, more, even, than about the relations between the women and the men. And of course it inevitably came to be about how power corrupts no matter who you are.

After "The Furies" I was free to have these characters (whom I'd put through so much Hell!) settle down to figuring out how to fine-tune the new power equation so that the free fems don't have to be just like the masters they'd defeated — so that their children don't have to play out the same insanity and then pass these destructive patterns on in turn to their children. And that became "The Conqueror's Child", at first told through the eyes of someone fresh and young and idealistic — Alldera's daughter, who has never been either slave or master.

Whether "The Furies" would have been the same book if I'd managed to write it in 1974 is really an unanswerable question, because I simply could not have written it then. I didn't know enough about what I thought and what I felt to do that, and I wasn't desperate enough.

Suzy —

I thought "The Furies" was the most interesting book in the series because it was unique and different from the rest of the genre, and because it was unremittingly honest and challenging. I experienced it as terribly painful and emotionally churning to read, sort of like Jerzy Kosinski’s stuff. ('Holdfast’ has a feel that’s much more De Sade than Kosinski, for me at least.) I didn’t experience guilt or fear when reading it, though — I hadn’t oppressed them, and they weren’t coming to get me, so I didn’t relate to that.

What I found disturbing was the way the women were depicted. In harsh reality, given the way they’ve been treated, they probably would act like that. The war would be another Rwanda or Kosovo, which is what you show — but it contradicts the image of women I’m invested in, as being more moral/kind/loving than men, to a degree that really freaked me out. Yes, it would be a very unpopular message. Most people are believers in the moral/kind/loving model of womanhood — women, maybe, even more so than men. I’ve noticed that feminist sci-fi projects that model also. As you say, women don’t want to be that angry… Or that ugly.

Yes, you made it work. The characters were fully believable and emotionally intricate. It’s easy to get invested in them. I think that’s why it’s so disturbing; you keep the knobs all turned up to eleven and it’s sometimes exhausting that nothing nice ever happens, but it hardly ever feels orchestrated.

You called it: I skimmed a little over "Conqueror's Child" and then stopped, mostly because I didn’t want to re-experience the same painful emotions if the payoff was going to be return to the ‘Fifth Sacred Thing’-style matriofocal model. I’ll go back and read it now, I promise.

As you may have guessed, I’m interested in all this because I’m working on something similar. . . The challenge I’m struggling with is doing this in the context of the hypothetical situation of a woman-only colony; out of necessity I’m forced to impose on the reader a statement of what I think women are really like. I’m hesitant to do this because I sense it could shatter the suspension of disbelief if the reader happens to disagree with my perspective.

Most of the things I’ve read dodge the question by adhering to established doctrine (moral/kind/loving), which I think smoothes over the honesty I find attractive in Tiptree’s stuff. In the "The Furies" your characters are organized by the imperative of their situation. Ambivalence, vulnerability, and complex emotions are luxuries they can’t afford. (They seem to be fumbling towards them early on, but with the impalements in 'Christs' you herd them back into formation.) A reader might not like your depiction but I don’t get the feeling they could simply reject it unless they’d survived the Holdfast themselves.

Insights? Comments? Thanks in advance, Sam

Sam — Comparison to Kosinski is high praise indeed (in its way — I was astounded by "The Painted Bird" but I doubt I'll ever read it again and I rarely recommend it to readers). Thank you! I'm glad that "The Furies" didn't bother you in a guilt/fear way, since clearly in worrying about that when I wrote it, I was being naive (but I don't agree about a lack of complexity or mixed emotions among the female characters, or the male ones either for that matter — more on that later).

"Motherlines" got me a lot of challenges from readers (mostly women) who were distressed that the women in the book were described as having distinct and distinguishable faces and figures rather than being stamped out on this or that Barbie model (and this in a book about clones, of all things!) and then injected with personalities. Prodded by the requirements of writing "Motherlines", I'd begun looking around me at real women and I used descriptions of what I saw instead of copying the simple-minded templates pushed by fashion magazines, TV, and Romance novels. Readers weren't used to this; most still aren't.

Worse still, they were upset by the way the fems and the Riding Women, in the absence of male characters, simply expanded to fill the whole spectrum of human behavior instead of just the half allotted to females in normal human cultures. Their objections were code for, "Why did you write them as so aggressive-competitive-political-proud-ambitious-etc.?" You're right: the image of woman's nature that you're invested in as a man is not all that different from the image that most women are invested in.

Here's my theory: the world has been "balanced" by assigning to women all the positive "soft" values so that men can a) exercise their own "hard" values freely, knowing that the soft side is the responsibility of other people, and b) men can rest assured that the only people they have to compete with are other men, women being defined out of the lists — the competition for control of All Good Things (including women) — by being too soft, to emotional, too loving, nurturing, blah blah blah, for combat.

It's a brilliant ploy: with one stroke, men halved the ranks of their competition! What a relief! Finish the day's struggles, and a man gets to return to the Refreshment Tent and be rewarded and taken care of by the women, whose job is to reward and take care of him; what a deal!

Everybody benefits, since a majority of women do seem to be less interested in entering the lists, and men don't have to apologize (mostly) for behaving like brutes (because it's all in defense of the "better half"); sort of. And everybody pays, because all struggle for one sex and all nurturing for the other wreaks havoc on anyone who's actually a human being, i.e. composed of elements from both "sides" of an artificial demarcation line. Not all men want to conduct their lives as battles but they are stuck with at least pretending that they do (unless they opt out one way or another, at considerable risk). Not all women want to be mommies, or, for that matter, virgins or whores. Further, in a binary and competitive world one set of values is inevitably assigned a lower value — naturally it's the softer set, and women are stuck with this cultural pedestal-cum-denigration and exploitation (unless they opt out etc).

But, restless as most of us are with at least some aspects of this "system", nobody likes to have their gender stereotypes questioned, let alone undermined. Look, we all know that this system works — in the short run, anyway (we are just now beginning to see the price of unfettered masculine competitiveness running the world, which is the destruction of the planet or at least our species).

Having already upset the apple cart in "Walk" and "Motherlines", I said oh what the hell and showed my female characters in "The Furies" acting out their vengefulness and rage the way any oppressed people who find the power to do so will try to — full tilt, with the few who thoughtfully hold back being attacked as traitors by the rest. The most common example is the French Revolution, but there are plenty of others.

How this worked, in authorial terms, was pretty simple: given the sorts of people these characters were, and the experiences they'd had, how would a person like that — setting gender aside — behave? Once I'd defined the situation in those terms, it was perfectly obvious: if the stereotypes are discarded, each person will just act like a human being, driven by fear and love and avarice and idealism and all the rest. Then the whole sex-and-gender issue falls into place as just another modifier (like stature, intelligence, talents and skills, etc.) of the basic human behavior set as it interacts with the stimuli in the environment.

That's a profoundly disorienting thought, since it means that suddenly both the Lists and the Refreshment Tent, if you like, are thrown open to all. Now each individual must make his or her own decisions about how nurturing, aggressive, seductive, high- or low-minded, treacherous, brave, dependent, etc. they are going to be from one moment to the next. Oh, my god, that's Personal Responsibility! And if everyone you meet, of any gender, is doing likewise — why, anything might happen!

I meant these books to put us into just that imaginary future in order to experience how terrifying it is (which is why the stereotypes are so persistent in the first place). Also, of course, how exciting and attractive it is, to think of having to be alert to everyone around you instead of relying on stereotypes to pre-sort them all into convenient categories ("oh, those are just women, they won't shoot" or "Better get to work, since we certainly can't expect the guys to look after little kids or cook or clean or carry water or firewood").

The fun of the writing, for me, was exactly here: to watch the characters, most of whom still hold their own sets of culturally induced stereotypes, struggling with all this themselves. Also, as an author, not knowing, being unable to predict via the usual assumptions, how any individual character would act or react — that uncertainty was invigorating. I hoped readers would find it so too, enough to carry them over the discomfort of being deprived of their usual signposts of behavior-according-to-gender.

This is kind of the opposite of essentialism, I guess, or a restatement of it as: human beings are essentially human before they are male or female. It's no wonder "The Furies" freaked you out; it freaks everybody out, and when I started out with the writing, I was at the head of the line.

But I take exception to your assertion that nothing nice every happens. Of course nice things happen! Wonderful, hopeful, amazing things happen: people change and learn despite themselves, people find the courage to act on their expanded awareness and understanding, and there's even some sort of intrusion from what might be a spirit-plane into the sweaty reality of these people's daily struggles. Jeez, guy, what more do you want?

And as for showing vulnerability, ambivalence, or complexity of character — much of the force of the story lies precisely the struggle of people (of both sexes) with all of that despite the immense pressures on them to stick to much narrower choices. Everyone in "Walk" is trying like Hell to find some kind of real love inside an impossible social structure; the free fems in "Motherlines" are working out, sometimes with violence and pain, what it means to suddenly become free and so to discover your own individual self under all the deformations of slavery; everyone in "The Furies" is fighting not just the "other side" but the shifting "rules" of how a free fem should act and how a man should act under the pressures of war. The actual plot of that book revolves around how the fems' unity in victory is splintered on just this point.

As for "Child", I leave that for you to discover. Just keep in mind that the whole project is about people breaking free of enforced gender stereotypes and then having to deal precisely with their own (and others') vulnerability, ambivalence, and complexity.

Okay, enough about what I was doing. Let's look at what you're doing.

I have one piece of advice: try shifting your thinking so that you don't look this as imposing your ideas of what women are really like on the reader. It sounds to me, rather, as if you're going to invite the reader to explore and test some ideas on how you think this group of female individuals would act in this situation, and why. This doesn't mean, by the way, that the characters themselves hold no stereotypes about gender (and in an SF milieu, of course, those stereotypes can be whatever you declare them to be so long as you ground them in the characters' own background and experience). But whatever their stereotypes are, those ideas will be sometimes forced into abrasive contact with the alien situation, and sparks will fly — and that's when you (and the reader) will notice the characters' preconceptions about "what women are like". Let your characters do the work; let them come up with the ideas themselves, in the midst of the action.

For the rest, they'll have whatever problems, solutions, reactions, etc. any human beings would have in their situation, and act and react in pursuit of their goals just like anybody else.

Or everything else, for that matter: I recommend to you a recent program on PBS about reassessing (upward!) the intelligence of birds. A crow was shown repeatedly picking up a piece of wire and bending it to just the angle needed to use it to pick up a bit of meat out of a narrow glass vessel. The narrator said, "She actually bends it into the shape that she needs," with none of the standard follow-up of "now she rushes off to feed her babies", either. She was looking after herself, like any functionally successful adult fit to reproduce.

And I thought, "Man the tool-maker — Ha!!"