What do you think?
Rate this book
Love's Body, Dancing In Time
Love's Body, Dancing in Time offers five love stories by the critically acclaimed L. Timmel Duchamp, stories only she could tell. Carnal and queer, intricate and involved, they range from the heart-breaking Sturgeon Award finalist "Dance at the Edge" to the historically authentic, Tiptree short-listed "The Apprenticeship of Isabetta di Pietro Cavazzi," to the subtle, original "The Heloise Archive," in which the rewriting of the eleventh-century abbess's life story dramatically alters the course of European history. Like all of Duchamp's work, this fiction is passionate, feminist, and intelligent.
191 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2004
1 person is currently reading
53 people want to read
About the author
L. Timmel Duchamp
59 books27 followers L. Timmel Duchamp was born in 1950, the first child of three. Duchamp first began writing fiction in a library carrel at the University of Illinois in 1979, for a joke. But the joke took on a life of its own and soon turned into a satirical roman a clef in the form of a murder mystery titled "The Reality Principle." When she finished it, she allowed the novel to circulate via photocopies, and it was a great hit in the academic circles in which she then moved. One night in the fall of 1984 she sat down at her mammoth Sanyo computer with its green phosphorescent screen and began writing Alanya to Alanya.
Duchamp spent the next two years in a fever, writing the Marq'ssan Cycle. When she finshed it, she realized she didn't know how to market it to publishers and decided that publishing some short fiction (which she had never tried to write before) would be helpful for getting her novels taken seriously. Her first effort at a short story was "Welcome, Kid, to the Real World," which she wrote in the summer of 1986. Her next effort, however, turned into a novel. (Getting the hang of the shorter narrative form was a lot harder than she'd anticipated.) So she decided to stick with novels for a while. When in fall 1987 a part-time job disrupted her novel-writing, she took the short stories of Isak Dinesen for her model, tried again, and wrote "Negative Event at Wardell Station, Planet Arriga" and "O's Story." And in 1989 she sold "O's Story" to Susanna J. Sturgis for Memories and Visions, "The Forbidden Words of Margaret A." to Kristine Kathryn Rusch for Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine, and "Transcendence" to the shortlived Starshore. Her first pro sale, though, was "Motherhood, Etc." to Bantam for the Full Spectrum anthology series.
After that she wrote a lot of short fiction (mostly at novelette and novella lengths), a good deal of which she sold to Asimov's SF. In the late 1990s Nicola Griffith convinced her to try her hand at writing criticism and reviews. In 2004, Duchamp founded Aqueduct Press; since then editing and publishing books (her own as well as other writers') has claimed the lion's share of her time and effort.
She lives in Seattle.
Duchamp spent the next two years in a fever, writing the Marq'ssan Cycle. When she finshed it, she realized she didn't know how to market it to publishers and decided that publishing some short fiction (which she had never tried to write before) would be helpful for getting her novels taken seriously. Her first effort at a short story was "Welcome, Kid, to the Real World," which she wrote in the summer of 1986. Her next effort, however, turned into a novel. (Getting the hang of the shorter narrative form was a lot harder than she'd anticipated.) So she decided to stick with novels for a while. When in fall 1987 a part-time job disrupted her novel-writing, she took the short stories of Isak Dinesen for her model, tried again, and wrote "Negative Event at Wardell Station, Planet Arriga" and "O's Story." And in 1989 she sold "O's Story" to Susanna J. Sturgis for Memories and Visions, "The Forbidden Words of Margaret A." to Kristine Kathryn Rusch for Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine, and "Transcendence" to the shortlived Starshore. Her first pro sale, though, was "Motherhood, Etc." to Bantam for the Full Spectrum anthology series.
After that she wrote a lot of short fiction (mostly at novelette and novella lengths), a good deal of which she sold to Asimov's SF. In the late 1990s Nicola Griffith convinced her to try her hand at writing criticism and reviews. In 2004, Duchamp founded Aqueduct Press; since then editing and publishing books (her own as well as other writers') has claimed the lion's share of her time and effort.
She lives in Seattle.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
February 11, 2024
09 December 2007 - *****. I had read a few sf stories by L. Timmel Duchamp in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and selected this because it is her only published collection. She is a regular participant at WisCon, a convention concerning women in science fiction held here in Wisconsin annually.
Duchamp's style of writing is vocabulous and yet flows lyrically. This book was published by small-press Aqueduct Press, which gave her some control of font and other aspects of presentation. Those presentation choices resonate with the narrative style and imagery of these stories, to result in very pleasurable reading.
The stories in this collection are as follows...
Dance at the Edge
The Gift
The Apprenticeship of Isabetta di Pietro Cavazzi
Lord Enoch's Revels
The Heloise Archive
These stories are all told from a female point of view, and while the subject of each is diverse and science fictional, they do center on matters of the heart. The largest piece in the collection is "The Heloise Archive", concerning an attempt to change history by intervening in the life of the 12th century abbess Heloise using visitations by an "angel". That angel teaches about, and instigates against the misogynistic misinterpretations of the original messages of Christianity, and the consequences of that throughout history on into modern times. The angel's theology is still somewhat more conservative than what I'm used to in my Unitarian Universalist circles, but may prove challenging to some readers who come from a more traditional Christian perspective. And this is all told in the form of letters from Heloise to her lover Abelard.
I highly recommend this author, even if just for the appreciation of her craftwork.
Duchamp's style of writing is vocabulous and yet flows lyrically. This book was published by small-press Aqueduct Press, which gave her some control of font and other aspects of presentation. Those presentation choices resonate with the narrative style and imagery of these stories, to result in very pleasurable reading.
The stories in this collection are as follows...
Dance at the Edge
The Gift
The Apprenticeship of Isabetta di Pietro Cavazzi
Lord Enoch's Revels
The Heloise Archive
These stories are all told from a female point of view, and while the subject of each is diverse and science fictional, they do center on matters of the heart. The largest piece in the collection is "The Heloise Archive", concerning an attempt to change history by intervening in the life of the 12th century abbess Heloise using visitations by an "angel". That angel teaches about, and instigates against the misogynistic misinterpretations of the original messages of Christianity, and the consequences of that throughout history on into modern times. The angel's theology is still somewhat more conservative than what I'm used to in my Unitarian Universalist circles, but may prove challenging to some readers who come from a more traditional Christian perspective. And this is all told in the form of letters from Heloise to her lover Abelard.
I highly recommend this author, even if just for the appreciation of her craftwork.
June 4, 2018
Powerfully written short stories with creative twists and lots of queer chars. Each short story is a perfect little morsel that would fit easily into a larger series.
September 5, 2015
Really stunning short stories. Picked it up randomly at a Seattle bookstore, and was delighted to find it woven with queer and feminist themes, offer that certain breath-taking edge of unreality, and have nuanced and haunting themes. From what I have learned since, L. Timmel is hot stuff in scifi land, with a keynote as 2008 WisCon, and editing a few anthologies I've since stumbled across.
Ranks among the better science fiction/fantasy writers around these days, and a woman I'd love to have for dinner. Recommend it highly.
Ranks among the better science fiction/fantasy writers around these days, and a woman I'd love to have for dinner. Recommend it highly.
March 17, 2011
These are some very elegant, philosophically charged science fiction/alt history love stories. My favorites: "The Gift," about an off-world tour guide writer's tragically misconstrued love affair, and "The Héloïse Archive," a wonderful novella consisting of a series of newly-discovered letters from Héloïse d’Argenteuil to Peter Abelard that, along with showing Abelard's darker side, chronicles a miracle at the Paraclete Oratory that changed the direction of history.
May 4, 2010
Science-Fiction stories of varying quality. The best is a alternate history / time-travel rewrite of Heloise and Abelard, which was awesome in form but maybe a little too purely feminist wish-fulfillment Utopian for me in content: ("See, if we just went back and fiddled with the Church at the right time, it would all come out right ...")
August 12, 2012
An enjoyable collection of short stories. Recommended particularly for anyone with an interest in feminist SF and medieval history-- the Abelard and Heloise story is worth a read.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews