From /tmp/sf.14663 Tue Mar 30 17:27:41 1993 Xref: lysator.liu.se rec.arts.sf.reviews:19 rec.arts.books:6015 Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews,rec.arts.books Path: lysator.liu.se!isy!liuida!sunic!mcsun!uunet!usc!wupost!micro-heart-of-gold.mit.edu!news.media.mit.edu!news.media.mit.edu.!wex From: ecl@mtgzy.att.com (Evelyn C Leeper +1 908 957 2070) Subject: ARTIFICIAL THINGS by Karen Joy Fowler Message-ID: <9301031747.AA01856@presto.ig.com> Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.misc Sender: news@news.media.mit.edu (USENET News System) Organization: Advanced Human Interface Group Date: Mon, 4 Jan 1993 04:37:32 GMT Approved: wex@media.mit.edu (Alan Wexelblat) Lines: 69 ARTIFICIAL THINGS by Karen Joy Fowler A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper Copyright 1992 Evelyn C. Leeper I seem to be on a short fiction binge these days, this being the fourth consecutive collection/anthology I've reviewed. Maybe that's because so many novels seem to be padded-out shorter novels or even short stories. (This was certainly my objection to THE HOLLOW MAN, the one science fiction novel I reviewed recently.) But short stories must of necessity be spare and economical. First of all, any padding is more evident. Secondly (and I suppose this may sound crass), short stories are bought by the word, and few editors are willing to shell out extra money for padding. In any case, I suppose I have a special fondness for short fiction and look at the novella as where "lengthy" background and characterization can be done. Yes, novels can be good, even long novels. Yes, LES MISERABLES is a classic. But though they may win Hugos, few writers are one. So I found the foreword to ARTIFICIAL THINGS of particular interest, because Fowler also prefers short fiction and even got a reputation as "the person who wouldn't write a novel for Bantam." (She eventually did write a novel, but it serves to highlight that many publishers want writers to write novels because they sell better than collections.) The thirteen stories here are a mix of old and new--or at least were when the collection was first published in 1986. Four had appeared in ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE, three in THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION, one in WRITERS OF THE FUTURE, and five were original for the volume. The latter category includes "Contention" and "Other Planes," which are not science fiction at all, and "The Bog People," which is just barely science fiction (by means of a super-weapon which is not necessary to the plot). My suspicion is that these are original to this collection because the market for non-science-fiction short fiction is even worse than the market for short fiction in the science fiction area. Fowler has been labeled as feminist writer. If that means she uses women as the main characters of her stories, it's true, and she does talk about the treatment of women by society and by men in society in stories such as "The Lake Was Full of Artificial Things," "Face Value," "Contention," and "The View from Venus." But she also looks critically (in both an analytic and a censorious sense) at how women treat women in "Recalling Cinderella," "Other Planes," and "The Bog People." These themes are carried through in her other works as well: her best-known story is probably "The Faithful Companion at Forty," a look at how we marginalize the "other" by making him or her merely an adjunct to the main character who is of course a perfect representative of the majority. (As they said about Ginger Rogers: "She did everything Fred Astaire did, and she did it backwards and in high heels." Everyone knows Sir Edmund Hilary, but what about Tenzing Norgay, who also climbed Everest--carrying Hilary's gear? What about Cedi Bombay, the first person to cross Africa both north-south and east-west? He gets forgotten while Sir Richard Burton gets the credit for finding the source of the Nile.) Fowler's stories are not for everyone, and her research sometimes slips ("The Poplar Street Study" has at least one factual error and one extreme unlikelihood, though it's clear the story is intended more as a homage to its source than a serious work), but if you're looking for stories that examine how people relate to each other, I would strongly recommend ARTIFICIAL THINGS. %B Artificial Things %A Karen Joy Fowler %C New York %D December 1992 %I Bantam Spectra %O paperback, US$4.99 [1986] %G ISBN 0-53-26219-X %P 218pp Evelyn C. Leeper | +1 908 957 2070 | ecl@mtgzy.att.com From /tmp/sf.17355 Fri Jun 4 00:01:24 1993 Xref: lysator.liu.se rec.arts.sf.reviews:100 rec.arts.sf.written:11686 rec.arts.books:16094 Path: lysator.liu.se!isy!liuida!sunic!uunet!wupost!udel!news.intercon.com!psinntp!dg-rtp!sheol!dont-reply-to-paths From: leeper@mtgzfs3.gaz.att.com (m.r.leeper ) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews,rec.arts.sf.written,rec.arts.books Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Subject: SARAH CANARY by Karen Joy Fowler Approved: sfr%sheol@concert.net (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) Message-ID: <8279@sheol.UUCP> Date: 15 May 93 14:17:19 GMT Lines: 149 SARAH CANARY by Karen Joy Fowler Zebra, ISBN 0-8217-4088-1, 1993, $5.99. A book review by Mark R. Leeper There is a bookstore in Amherst, Massachusetts, which is, I am sure, not unlike bookstores in a lot of college towns. The store stocks books that as nearly as the managers can arrange apparently represent one consistent political viewpoint. In the store's repertoire you can learn just about all you want to know about that one viewpoint. But if you want to compare it with other ideas of people who do not ascribe to that viewpoint, you have to go elsewhere. It is not that I disagree with that viewpoint--politically it is close to my own--but as far as diversity of opinion, I find I do better at the average airport newsstand. Ironically, the store calls itself "Food for Thought." But it is sort of the literary equivalent of the "House of Toast." "Food for Thought" is a good name for a bookstore, but if I ran a bookstore with that name it would have DAS KAPITAL and MEIN KAMPF, not because I agree with either, but because I don't. It would have Spinoza and Plato and Mishima. A store with that name should have Hawking and Velikovsky. It would have Jeremy Rifkin and Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Wittgenstein and Marshall McLuhan. As food for thought, this place is pretty slim pickings particularly if you are not interested in their one social viewpoint, but they are smart enough to know that there is a ready market for books written in this narrow band of political thought. I guess people feel secure with reading matter that agrees with their own way of thinking. Authors writing from that viewpoint will have as ready a market as they would if they were writing in the "Star Trek" universe. I thought of "Food for Thought" many times when I was reading SARAH CANARY. It was written for their market. A nameless woman mysteriously shows up in a Chinese railroad labor camp in the Washington Territory in mid-winter 1873. The woman is dressed in black and speaks no intelligible tongue. If abandoned to the cold, she will surely die. Chin Ah Kim, a surprisingly erudite laborer, decides to adopt the woman in black, at least until he can get her to a place of safety. In grand adventure style, the simple trip to take Sarah Canary, as the woman comes to be called, to safety becomes a far greater adventure than Chin Ah Kim could have expected. Superficially at least, SARAH CANARY resembles HUCKLEBERRY FINN. We have a set of fugitives running across a stretch of America and while the travelers themselves are of some interest, really it is the backdrop, the portrait of the world of 1872 and 1873 in the Pacific Northwest, that is the focus of Fowler's attention. Most of what Fowler sees in this period is injustice and ignorance. Undoubtedly that is not too far from the truth, but what our characters see is mostly a very 1990s view of the injustice. We see white male injustice against Chinese, Indians, blacks, and especially women, but Fowler never has a white woman being cruel to an Indian. Fowler is describing a world in which there are the oppressors and the oppressed. The oppressed all basically have sympathy for each other. And the choice of the oppressed seems to have come from a 1990s checklist: women, Chinese, blacks. Now, I cannot imagine that this not being a time of a tremendous reliance on animals and certainly there would have been no small amount of animal abuse that the characters would have seen on their journey. That is not where Fowler's sympathies lie, apparently, so no descriptions of animal abuse are mentioned. Fowler, on the other hand, has a good deal of interest in feminism and so, as a result, do all the 19th Century women in the book. Not having a time machine or being able to read minds, it is for me impossible to tell you what was on most people's minds in the Washington Territory of the 1870s, but I certainly felt while I was reading this book that Fowler misrepresents the situation. She takes the attitudes of a very small number of women--the pioneers of the women's movement--and spreads them liberally over the minds of the women in this novel. My suspicion is that more women were concerned with the issue "Will there be food enough for my family this winter?" than "Don't I have the right to as much sexual pleasure as a man gets?" Does this sound more like an 1870s or a 1990s woman? Just worrying about sexual pleasure implies a much more affluent society, one like our own, than one like was present in Fowler's setting. While there may have been a few men who sat around like Fowler's men do and spat and complained about uppity women, far more were worried about issues like "Will there be food enough for my family this winter?" When you are scratching your existence out of the ground as much of the population of the Pacific Northwest were, trying to get enough food to eat, food and shelter are the major issues on both men's and women's minds. Sexual politics is a long way down on the list. At least that is my impression. And it is considerably different from Fowler's impression apparently. Fowler writes as if she knows the history of the women's movement and believes that is all that is necessary to understand the period. If the history we learned in schools is indeed just white men's history, Fowler's history is certainly no broader or more inclusive. When she has a character say, "Someday we will learn that when one woman is wronged, we all are wronged," she is not writing in the 1870s I picture. That was probably a very rare sentiment in the 1870s. You would find far more women believing "Blood is thicker than water." (Actually I might question that even as a principle for the 1990s. Do I feel, for example, that when one New Jerseyite is wronged, we all are, or when one science fiction fan is wronged, we all are? Unless I was going to spread the sentiment to everybody, I am not sure it is an idea I would buy.) Time and again, Fowler's characters turn out to be warped just a bit out of the reality of the setting. Just about everybody in the novel seems to have an unrealistically broad knowledge of the world. Chin is a Chinese railroad worker laborer who knows not just about the folklore of China, but also of India. He speaks fluent English and German. It is eventually explained that he was, in fact, more high-born than the other laborers. But his views are as far from those of a high-born Cantonese of the time as they are from those of a Cantonese laborer. Another character considers the possibility than Sarah Canary is a vampire, having read some LeFanu. Yes, it is possible that someone might have read about vampires, but it is very unlikely and such a person would know other creatures of folklore that they would be equally likely to choose. It is only since Bram Stoker wrote DRACULA that vampires have become so central in popular folklore. Perhaps a little more realistic is a self-styled scientist who is a font of amusing misinformation; some of it includes a sexist belief that women are more primitive than men. Fowler smugly pokes fun at all the strange and unscientific beliefs the man holds. Of course, Fowler comes from a time when reliable scientific knowledge is readily and cheaply available. It is easy for her to laugh at the misimpressions of people who have not had her opportunities. However, my impressions of SARAH CANARY are certainly not all negative. Fowler's prose style is actually what attracted me to this book in the first place, and it is what I liked best about the book. She has a short, clean writing style. She never lets the writing get in the way of the story- telling. She tells a story that involves the reader quickly and has a plot that moves well. She has sprinkled in a good deal of historical detail, though not all of which I would rely on. For example, there was indeed historically a mechanical device that supposedly played chess (and which really was operated by a midget chess player inside), but she associated the device with P. T. Barnum. That is just not true. Fowler does have one stylistic quirk. She mixes story chapters with chapters of historical background, usually with a didactic bent. But the story chapter headings are spelled out (like "Chapter Two"), while the historical essays are numbered separately with Roman numerals. Why? It is never clear. SARAH CANARY is an enjoyable book to read, with interesting nuggets of history, but occasionally you want to ask Fowler her if she seriously believes this very weird and eccentric view of the period. %T Sarah Canary %A Karen Joy Fowler %C New York %D March 1993 %I Zebra %O paperback, US$5.99 [1991] %G ISBN 0-8217-4088-1 %P 381pp Mark R. Leeper att!mtgzfs3!leeper leeper@mtgzfs3.att.com Copyright 1993 Mark R. Leeper -- Mark R. Leeper , (908) 957-5619 Fax: (908) 957-5627 AT&T Bell Laboratories - MT 3D-441, 200 Laurel Ave, Middletown, NJ 07748