Aurora: Beyond Equality

by Vonda N. McIntyre (Editor), Susan Janice Anderson (Editor)

Enter into the world of the future where human potential is fulfilled to hitherto unexpected and unexplored dimensions.Here are nine fantastic stories that run the gamut of ultimate A young woman whose mental condition makes her think the world is all wonderful; a time when space travelers from Earth are all female and cloned; the decision to destroy Ana; a fairy tale of tomorrow, of the Sidhe, beyond death under the waters of the lake.Also included are marvelous tales of the dynamic directions that "thought experiments" have taken; the discovery of a new home for the human race--after the holocaust, a time when electronic secrets must be traded for food; the search for the beginning of the world; and a society where test-tube babies have three mothers who can be female or male.Contributors include Raccoona Sheldon, James Tiptree, Jr., Dave Skal, Mildred Downey Broxon, Ursule K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, P. J. Plauger, Craig Strete, and Marge Piercy.

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories, Fiction, Anthologies, Feminism

222 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Vonda Neel McIntyre was a U.S. science fiction author. She was one of the first successful graduates of the Clarion Science fiction writers workshop. She attended the workshop in 1970. By 1973 she had won her first Nebula Award, for the novelette "Of Mist, and Grass and Sand." This later became part of the novel Dreamsnake, which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. The novelette and novel both concern a female healer in a desolate primitivized venue. McIntyre's debut novel was The Exile Waiting which was published in 1975. Her novel Dreamsnake won the Nebula Award and Hugo Award for best novel in 1978 and her novel The Moon and the Sun won the Nebula in 1997. She has also written a number of Star Trek and Star Wars novels, including Enterprise: The First Adventure and The Entropy Effect. She wrote the novelizations of the films Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

Reviews

[Alexandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like a traitor giving this book only three stars. But it has to be said that I don't feel the anthology lived up to what it was setting out to do.

Does that make me a heretic? Possibly.

In the introduction, Susan Janice Anderson discusses how hard a lot of people said they found the topic. That they had to invent an entirely new society in order to talk about men and women being actually equal (to which in my head I say, duh; you're writing SF aren't you? Maybe that's a bit harsh). It was very interesting reading about what they wanted to avoid (female monsters), and how hard it was to find models of what they did want. The Dispossessed and "When it changed" were of course mentioned.

The stories:
I'd read the Raccoona Sheldon story, "Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!" Really recently for the Galactic Suburbia Alice Sheldon spoiler ep, but I decided to reread it to get the full experience. Here a woman is living in two places - from the outside, it looks like she's delusional. In that place every one is a 'sister' and I've never been quite sure whether this is a term of equality, or whether there are no men. At any rate that world is quite pleasant, living in the aftermath of some cataclysm, but her body is in the 'real' world and that doesn't have a good ending. So... you can dream of freedom but it has consequences? Note that I'm not saying these stories of beyond equality should be all sunshine and rainbows, I'm just commenting on what Sheldon is saying.

James Tiptree Jr's"Houston. Houston, Do you read?" Is another that I read for our spoiler ep - and let's stop and admire Alice Sheldon for a moment by realising that she wrote two stories for this anthology, including this mammoth novella. Anyway here three astronauts from the late 20th century have been slingshot around the sun and into the future (that bit's by accident) where they find the world distinctly changed. The world is inhabited only by women, and those clones of only about eleven thousand originals. Does this really count as beyond equality? I'm not sure. I'm not even really sure that that's the question the story is addressing,

Dave Skal write "The Mothers, the Mothers, How eerily it sounds..." and it's an interesting enough story about recovering from some sort of environmental cataclysm (Anderson notes in her intro how many writers addressed that issue) but again it's not clear that the sexes have moved beyond equality. One of the main characters is a competent anthropologist (female) but the main action seems to take place between two male characters rather than Ana having much to do with it. Mildred Downey Broxon gives a fairly classic under-the-fairy-hill story with a slight twist in the woman going to rescue the man, in "The Antrim Hills," and I guess the fairy King and Queen are equals, and I know that the point shouldn't be to focus on the equality itself but it's hard to SEE the equality when there's no focus on it.

Including Ursula Le Guin's "Is Gender Necessary?" is an interesting interlude for its discussion of some of the issues involved in writing about sex and gender, and I liked that Anderson and McIntyre didn't feel it necessary to include only fiction.

Then there's a few stories I don't really get. Joanna Russ' "Corruption" sort of has a male-only society that's being eroded by an intruder? I think? I feel a bit uncomfortable about this story given the way the only female character is discussed and as with much Russ work I think I'm missing some points. This was definitely the case with Craig Strete's "Why has the Virgin Mary never entered the wigwam of Standing Bear?" Strete is (was?) Cherokee so I presume at least some of what I don't get here has to do with narrative style and expectations. I liked some of the ideas of exploring the clash of white/Cherokee assumptions about life, and I think the female narrator is shown to be Standing Bear's equal, but I also think I missed some of the ideas being discussed.

PJ Plauger's "Here be Dragons" is a classic story of post colonisation where things have gone bad so groups have split up etc. I quite liked it I terms of thinking about technology and how politics might develop and hierarchies and so on. But for a story that's meant to be beyond gender - slight spoiler, but I guessed I. The first paragraphs, when Captain Grimes is not described as having a beard, that this must be a woman (and she's revealed to be so on the second page). There are a few other incidental women, which I appreciated. However Grimes appears a couple of times as the captain, and competent, and then her other appearances are as being available for sex. She's not developed at all like Karl Dedalus, the focus of the story. Dedalus' mother is clearly a powerhouse and he's taken her name, but this is not enough to claim gender is irrelevant.

The final story is another I was already familiar with: it's excerpted from the novel Woman on the Edge of Time which I read a few years ago. Here Marge Piercy really has done the heavy lifting to imagine what would be required in a society that saw zero differences between sexes, to the point of making men able to breastfeed and removing the idea of live-bearing children... which the traveller from the 20th century, battered though she is, finds horrific. Now it's true that Piercy is clearly writing a much more obvious story another gender equality and that's not the only way of showing gender equality. But the society she shows does have so much more obvious equality than, really ANY other story in the collection.

Perhaps these reflections are the result of reading the stories in 2015. Perhaps they were more bold, more daring, in 1976. I can't apologise for reading in my own time. I can find it fascinating that writing gender equality as natural was clearly so hard then, and apparently still seems to be so now.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall, I have rated this short story collection a 4 even though I have rated some of the stories 1 or 2. This is because the majority of the stories are 4 and the ones I loved I really loved and make up for lower rated ones.


Raccoona Sheldon - Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!

(4 rating) —- This was brilliant! I loved the change in perspectives and of her wonder and naive awe at the world she thinks she is in.

I thought the gender references and anger were brilliant. It had enough quirky elements to make it fun but then turns very dark and very bleak.


James Tiptree Jr - Houston, Houston, Do You Read?

(4 rating) —- I studied this for my masters dissertation a few years ago so was quite familiar with it. However, re-reading it for pleasure rather than trying to dissect it was so much better!

The beginning was all over the place and it took me a while to know what was going on but once they got on the Gloria it all fell into place perfectly.

I loved the exploration of men’s role in the evolution of humanity and how ultimately it was mans true nature that was humanity’s downfall. I loved how the idea of giving equal rights to men was twisted with a gender reversal element. I thought it was a clever way to show women being the oppressors as it highlighted women’s reality and plight in the real world.


Dave Skal - The Mothers, the Mothers, How Eerily It Sounds

(4 rating) —- Loved the focus on returning to nature, be that Mother Nature, environmental nature or human nature, ie, the webbed hands and the womb and evolution! In fact, like the introduction states, a lot of these short stories relate gender equality with ecology and a need to return to nature. Really clever and insightful.

I also really liked the Earth building and dystopian future and was intrigued by the ‘Reconstruction’ and what they had planned for the future of humanity.

Note, I did have to re-read this as at first it didn’t make much sense to me. I found the 2nd read to be very much worthwhile as it was when everything clicked.


Mildred Downey Broxon - The Antrim hills

(4.5 rating) —- This was amazing! It was a bit confusing at first but once I got used to it I fell in love with the folklore and fairies.

I thought the return back to land/earth was brilliant and really quite jolting in a good way. The story and the way it was written really made you forget about the world and really see the underwater palace as real, so when they came back to the top to the ‘troubles’ it was shocking. The unexpectedness of this really made an impact.

Overall, it had a really good mix of genres, setting, characters, themes and conflict.


Joanna Russ - Corruption

(2 rating) —- I had absolutely no clue what this one was about until the end and I still don’t think I fully got it.

I am not a fan of Joanna Russ’ writing but I do generally love her ideas and concepts. However, the disjointed writing in this was too distracting and although it was supposed to add to the feeling of the story I just couldn’t read it properly.

Also, I’m not sure how it relates to the overall book theme of gender equality.


P . J. Plauger - Here Be Dragons

(2 rating) —- I didn’t really like the beginning and I thought it took too long for the story to get going. I also didn’t understand how it fit into the equality theme of the book as there was no real reference to gender. Unless the fact that his mother was well respected and intelligent and guided him well was the point but if I have to question that then it wasn’t a big enough statement for me.


Craig Street - Why Has the Virgin Mary Never Entered the Wigwam of Standing Bear

(1 rating) —- Well I didn’t understand this at all. It made absolutely no sense whatsoever!



Marge Piercy - Woman on the Edge of Time

(5 rating) —- This is just one chapter of the full book which I have read a couple of times. Reading this chapter again just makes me realise how good this book is and makes me want to read it all over again!

[Betsy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like all short stories, this is a mixed collection. It was written in 1976, and after 42 years, some of the stories hold up better than others.

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/aurora-beyond-equality-eds-vonda-n-mcintyre-and-susan-anderson/

The rubric of the anthology is “Amazing Tales of the Ultimate Sexual Revolution”, the editors sayiong in their preface that they wanted fiction that explored what the world might look like after equality between the sexes had been achieved. They didn’t really get it, but it’s a good anthology anyway.

In fact it incudes two stories by the same author, as the editors were not aware that Tiptree and Racoona Sheldon were the same person. It also includes the first chapter of Woman on the Edge of Time, by Marge Piercy, and Ursula Le Guin’s non-fiction essay “IS Gender Necessary?” A couple of the others are real duds, but the good pieces are very good, and I think it’s a useful representation of both how far sf had come in 1976 and how much farther there still was to go.

[Annise · Rating 3 out of 5]

The stories in this collection all deal with its central theme – equality (primarily gender equality) – to a greater or lesser extent, but it felt like only a couple of them delivered both a good story, and a good depiction of equality. For me, the last story, Woman on the Edge of Time, had the most interesting equal society; I enjoyed the world, but it was an excerpt from a novel and thus did not have a particularly fulfilling story. My favourite was probably Here Be Dragons, which followed a ship's Captain attempting to map a new continent for colonization. A close second was The Antrim Hills, where a young woman attempts to rescue her husband from the Sidhe. In both these stories, the equality was definitely present, but was just an aspect of the plot, so it didn't feel forced.
The longest story, Houston, Houston, Do You Read, was one of the least interesting, and depicted a female-dominant, rather than equal society... and did so with what I read to be a somewhat patronising tone. Some of the other stories rambled, but didn't really seem to say much, either in terms of story or message.

It's a fairly balanced collection, and no doubt other readers would have different hits and misses than me. It's debatable how well it achieves its stated goals (and the editors admit the difficulties they faced on that score in the introduction), but it's well worth a look.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

This 1976 book collections a selection of science fiction short stories on the theme of gender equality. I found them to be an interesting mixture. Indeed, some appeared to have little connection to the theme as far as I could tell. But I was reading from the perspective of 2012, so this might be inevitable. I thought that the second story, 'Houston, Houston, do you read?' was unnecessarily long, taking up more than a quarter of the book. It was also very predictable, likely because I have come across the same plot in other (later?) sci-fi several times before.

My favourite stories, however, were 'Corruption' by Joanna Russ, which was engagingly weird and had a wonderfully unsettling atmosphere, and 'Woman on the Edge of Time' by Marge Piercy, which presented an appealing utopian vision. I've read and greatly appreciated novels by Joanna Russ before, but Marge Piercy is new to me. This collection also reminded me that I still haven't read, 'The Left Hand of Darkness' and should.

I almost always find short story collections substantially less satisfying than full novels. With reservations, this one is well worth reading. Once you get past the lengthy second story, there are some very intriguing ideas and concepts to be found.

[Lane Pybas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an anthology of science fiction stories from the 70s that explore worlds where equality between the sexes has been achieved. Raccoona Sheldon and James Titptree Jr. (incidentally the same person) wrote the standout stories, which both eerily portray males using startling acts of violence and aggression to dominate the female characters in the stories who dare to live autonomously. The other most noteworthy reads are an essay by Ursula Le Guin in which she reflects on her pioneering novel The Left Hand of Darkness as well as an excerpt from Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time. This is a great initiation into the realm of feminist science fiction and an important reminder that science fiction, though it often fails to portray women as fully functioning human beings, is the ideal place to explore the future of human potential and the possibility of a nonsexist world. I’m definitely going to check out more of the writers featured in this anthology.

[Jan Priddy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm sorry that this anthology ever went out of print. It contains wonderful stuff, including, as I recall, Le Guin's original defense of egnered pronouns in Left Hand. She later corrected herself in another essay and I have to say I loved her for that.

[Vicki Cline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short stories about feminism and science fiction.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book because James Tiptree Jr. contributed to it. A more detailed review will follow.