A Woman's Liberation: A Choice of Futures by and About Women

Brainship #x.5 - The Ship who Mourned

by Connie Willis (Editor), Sheila Williams (Editor), Ursula K. Le Guin (Contributor)

These ten classic stories, each featuring well-developed, strong female characters, have garnered numerous literary awards and span every style and theme in speculative fiction.

Contents:
Inertia / Nancy Kress
Even the Queen / Connie Willis
Fool's Errand / Sarah Zettel
Rachel in Love / Pat Murphy
Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand / Vonda N. McIntyre
The July Ward / Sharon N. Farber (as S.N. Dyer)
The Kidnapping of Baroness 5 / Katherine MacLean
Speech Sounds / Octavia E. Butler
The Ship Who Mourned / Anne McCaffrey
A Woman's Liberation / Ursula K. Le Guin

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

320 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2001

About the author

Constance Elaine Trimmer Willis is an American science fiction writer. She is one of the most honored science fiction writers of the 1980s and 1990s.

She has won, among other awards, ten Hugo Awards and six Nebula Awards. Willis most recently won a Hugo Award for All Seated on the Ground (August 2008). She was the 2011 recipient of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA).

She lives in Greeley, Colorado with her husband Courtney Willis, a professor of physics at the University of Northern Colorado. She also has one daughter, Cordelia.

Willis is known for her accessible prose and likable characters. She has written several pieces involving time travel by history students and faculty of the future University of Oxford. These pieces include her Hugo Award-winning novels Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog and the short story "Fire Watch," found in the short story collection of the same name.

Willis tends to the comedy of manners style of writing. Her protagonists are typically beset by single-minded people pursuing illogical agendas, such as attempting to organize a bell-ringing session in the middle of a deadly epidemic (Doomsday Book), or frustrating efforts to analyze near-death experiences by putting words in the mouths of interviewees (Passage).

Reviews

[Camelia Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

An anthology of science fiction and fantasy short stories written by women. This collection includes 10 pieces mostly published in the 1980s and 1990s. It’s a mixed bag, some a bit out-dated, but A Woman’s Liberation by Ursula Le Guin and Speech Sounds by Octavia E. Butler make it worthwhile.

[Punk · Rating 4 out of 5]

SF, edited by Connie Willis and Sheila Williams. This right here is a rare thing. It's a good collection of short stories. I didn't love every story, but they all have something worthwhile in them, and the overall quality of the writing is quite high. It could hardly be anything else with these contributers:

Nancy Kress' Inertia -- a leper colony might be the safest place to be during a time of extended social unrest and a world living under martial law

Connie Willis' Even the Queen was easily my favorite, a fantastic story about menstruation and the oppression of women

Sarah Zettel's Fool's Errand was a little weak -- the spaceship's Fool is more than she seems! -- it should have been longer...or shorter

Pat Murphy's Rachel in Love is about a chimp who can remember being a little girl

Vonda N. McIntyre's Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand is the story that comes before Dreamsnake, and introduces Snake, a woman who uses snakes to heal people. I'd forgotten how irritating it was to hear her talk to her snakes like they were Quakers, all that thee/thou stuff gets old quick

S.N. Dyer's The July Ward -- a story set in a hospital with a creepy basement -- was almost more horror than SF, but I really liked Dyer's writing, too bad the name's only one of her many pseudonyms. I'd like to read more of her stuff

Katherine MacLean's The Kidnapping of Baroness 5 is a mix of old and new, genetic engineering in a medieval future where the human lifespan has been shortened to less than thirty years

Octavia E. Butler's Speech Sounds is short, but effective -- the world has lost all spoken and written language, except for a small minority who have managed to hold on to one or the other

Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Mourned -- the story that came before the series of novels

and, finally, Ursula K. Le Guin's A Woman's Liberation -- a slave narrative that spans two different worlds.

None of these are what I'd call hard science fiction, so if you're interested in SF/speculative fiction from a woman's perspective, but don't want to deal with all the space-flight mumbo-jumbo, this would be a great place to start.

[Christy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This anthology is a bit of a mixed bag.

There are a few classic stories that perhaps didn't need to be anthologized here in addition to all the other places I've come across them (e.g., Pat Murphy's "Rachel in Love," Vonda McIntyre's "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand," and Octavia Butler's "Speech Sounds"). I actually like those three stories, but I was hoping for more new (to me) women's science fiction.

Of the rest of the stories, there are four that were just okay (if that) and three that ranged from really quite good to wonderful. The latter three were Nancy Kress's "Inertia," Connie Willis's "Even the Queen" (which is a really interesting and funny story about menstruation of all things), and Ursula K. LeGuin's "A Woman's Liberation."

The story by LeGuin was itself worth the time spent reading the whole book. It is the longest story collected here and it really pays off. It's about slavery, love, and freedom. It drew me in instantly, and it made me cry. No matter what you think about the other stories in the book, I would highly recommend seeking out this story.

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a little dated, but is still a great read with some excellent short stories, especially Speech Sounds (Butler) Fool's Love (Murphy) and The July Ward (Dyer). I was surprised that I only half enjoyed Le Guin's piece; I think it would be more pleasurable for people who have read The Hainish Cycle books. I have read two in the series, long ago, and they seemed more like stand alone books to me at the time. Maybe, I should start with the beginning to get the framework.

For those looking for feminist sci-fi short stories, there are quite a few here to choose from that would fit within different disciplines' syllabi. I think this is where this anthology's strength lies, in its breadth of interpreting Women's liberation.

I read this book on Archive.org on my computer during lunch breaks at work. You can sign up for a library card at Archive.org for free and borrow this book. It has been great source for lunchtime reads.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really lovely little collection of women's science fiction. By women's science fiction I of course mean SciFi written by women. It's perfect for me, the little geek who goes to a women's college. But it's also an excellent anthology of science fiction, spanning the genre from post-apocalypse, height of technology, freaky disease, and completely without context. Things handling social problems we have today, social problems that have existed in the past, and social problems we can only imagine (what do you do when humanity can no longer speak? what do you do when you are a space ship who is in love with a human?).

Anyway, if you like science fiction, I recommend it. I particularly recommend it for young women, but any SciFi enthusiast should enjoy.

[Maia Zade · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't usually read sci-fi/speculative fiction, but this anthology really got me excited about the genre. I'd read "Speech Sounds" by Octavia Butler previously (for a high school English class), but the others were all new to me, and most of the authors as well (besides Ursula Le Guin).

"Inertia" by Nancy Kress
- A community stricken by a strange, disfiguring plague has been isolated from the rest of society. I like that this story kind of flipped the plague premise from what you would expect, and I enjoyed reading (though at times painful, or awkward) the family dynamics with the main character, her daughter, and her granddaughter.

"Even the Queen" by Connie Willis
- In an age where implants allow women to totally forgo menstruation unless they want to have a child, the Cyclists are rebellious for wanting to go back to that 'quintessential' experience of womanhood (i.e., the menstrual cycle). This story was absolutely hilarious, a droll surrealist view on feminism that captured a wide span of viewpoints on women's issues and really begged the question, what isn't because of the patriarchy?

"Fool's Errand" by Sarah Zettel
- A rogue AI escapes into the "net" (a term I'm using because the story was published in '93) and wreaks havoc on the virtual system. Dobbs, the ship's fool, is able to transcend and go into the net to try to negotiate with the AI and stop its rampage. This one kind of went over my head, and I had a hard time conceptualizing an escaped AI 'in the cloud' and what it was like for Dobbs to inject herself and transcend into the cloud, since it's obviously not physical...? I was just confused for this one.

"Rachel in Love" by Pat Murphy
- A doctor manages to preserve the consciousness of his deceased young daughter and transfer it into a chimpanzee. This chimp, Rachel, is thus unique in that she retains the memories of being a chimp while also having the adopted memories of being a human girl. When her 'father' dies, she is captured and taken to a primate research center. This one was sad, full of yearning and confusion for past lives that can never be returned to, and meditations on the divide between humans and other animals, and the ethics of implanting a human consciousness into an animal brain. Really enjoyed this read.

"Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand" by Vonda N. McIntyre
- Snake, aptly named, is a healer accompanied by three serpents (Mist, Grass, and Sand). She is called upon to save the life of a little boy who is dying due to a tumor. The people fear her and her ways at the same time that she is their only hope. As I describe it now, the plot is a lot more about the dynamics between the characters than events, so it's worth a read to see what I mean.

"The July Ward" by S.N. Dyer
- Watson is a medical resident, overseeing the case of one of her medical students, Tom: a John Doe brain-dead after being shot. Fairly light on the sci-fi elements, but I liked the exploration of doctors' mental and emotional states in light of all they go through.

"The Kidnapping of Baroness 5" by Katherine MacLean
- Aging has accelerated, and Lady Witch is a biotech trying to find a way to reverse this process before humanity dies out. A group of marauders has just torn through the kingdom and, in their looting, kidnapped three of Lady Witch's most prized pigs - one of which, Baroness 5, is harboring an unusual pregnancy. This was a very unique premise, and the high fantasy crossover with sci-fi was an interesting touch.

"Speech Sounds" by Octavia E. Butler
- A devastating plague has decimated the population and left the survivors with some form of language impairment: Rye, who has lost her entire family, can no longer read or write. After a scuffle on one of the few buses out of town, she meets Obsidian, a man who can no longer talk or understand spoken language. I mentioned that I read this before, about 5 or 6 years ago now, and everything still hit me fresh as if it were the first time. Great story, and interesting premise of using aphasia/language impairment.

"The Ship Who Mourned" by Anne McCaffrey
- Helva is a consciousness that has been put into a (space)ship after being born with a birth deformity. A physiotherapist named Theoda comes aboard, on a mission to find a cure for a plague that leaves people paralyzed. The parallel trains of "trapped" consciousnesses was fascinating, and quite interesting to humanize a spaceship in that way.

"A Woman's Liberation" by Ursula K. Le Guin
- Rakam grows up as a slave on a vast estate. Her mother gets her an 'in' with the lady of the house, and she becomes a sex pet rather than a field hand, until she's old enough to be married off to the lady's son - a man who dreams of emancipation for the slaves. The novella goes more into depth than I can in a brief summary, but it's a wrenching tale of slavery and the fight for freedom. There are a lot of wordy, 'telling' passages of description, which bogs it down a little, but it was still a moving read.

[Penny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice collection ... as always Connie Willis my favorite.

[Faith Justice · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read and reviewed this book in 2002 for the website Strange Horizons. I obviously loved it. Here's the beginning of the review. A link to the whole thing is below:

"I grew up during the sixties and seventies, yearning to see my female self reflected in the world around me -- in history, business, government, and literature. Those were heady days as women reclaimed their past, forged ahead in careers, and asserted their rights. But it was a struggle. I fortified myself with science fiction, stories that promised a future of bold, confident women -- a future where women existed. That's why, in the beginning of a new millennium, I eagerly perused the contents of A Woman's Liberation and settled in for a pleasurable session with familiar friends and new acquaintances.

I was not disappointed.

Generally, when I review anthologies, I find a few outstanding stories, a large number of good stories, and one or two clinkers. This anthology delivered ten outstanding stories -- not a clinker in the bunch. And why wouldn't it? Connie Willis, who has been honored with more Hugos and Nebulas than any other author, edited the collection with Sheila Williams, the executive editor of Asimov's Science Fiction and Analog Science Fiction and Fact (in which all ten stories appeared). The authors include such well-loved artists as Octavia E. Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Anne McCaffrey. Nine of the ten authors are recipients of multiple significant awards (Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, etc.) and Butler received a 1995 MacArthur Genius Grant.

So what's not to like? The cover. WarnerAspect did a disservice to the sparkling content by cloaking it in dull, unimaginative garb -- a dreamy cosmic haze with a somber woman's eyes staring out. Luckily, we know better than to judge a book by its cover. I was also slightly put off at first by what I felt was an awkward subtitle: "A Choice of Futures By and About Women." But it became clear as I read that choice was the thread connecting these superbly written stories. In each one, female characters make brave and conscious choices. The characters in these stories discredit the damaging stereotype of women as "victims" -- victims of society, circumstances, their own nature. Even when in such familiar roles as matriarch or concubine, these women take charge of their own lives, make choices and live with the consequences.

Willis introduces the book with "Women's Lib, 'The Liberation,' and the Many Other Liberations of Science Fiction" -- a brief survey of women authors and characters in science fiction. The title of the collection reflects Willis's view that science fiction was able to move beyond its early female stereotypes -- the princess and the scientist's pretty daughter whose main function was to scream and be rescued. This anthology presents some of the foundational authors who came into science fiction during the heyday of the Women's Lib movement and made it their own: Le Guin, McCaffrey, and Katherine MacLean. These pioneers were attracted to science fiction's "what if?" nature. They were eager to explore the possibilities of women in new roles and different societies. The anthology also presents authors from the second wave of women who entered the field in the eighties and nineties. They invaded science fiction space where, as Willis tells it, "abstracts can be made actual, and political, social, and philosophical ideas can take on human (or alien) form." They liberated their imaginations as well as their characters."

The full review with spoiler free comments on each story can be read here: http://www.strangehorizons.com/2002/2...

[Kathleen O'Nan · Rating 4 out of 5]

While this volume was published quite a while ago (2001), it was new and fresh to me. Having read all the women's science fiction that I could get my hands on, starting back in the early 70's, this felt like old home week. I especially liked the title piece by Ursula K. Le Guin. This final piece seems particularly timely as the actual Underground Railroad is being looked at again with a wealth of rediscovered information in both the media (see particularly the September 2016 issue of Smithsonian Magazine) and in the new, highly acclaimed novel of the same name by Colson Whitehead.

[H · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wouldn't define all of these as "feminist", except in that they involve women.

Some great stories:

The July Ward, S.N. Dyer. A ward all doctors know, and don't speak of. My favourite.

Inertia, Nancy Kress. A skin disease has other effects on the quarantined colony of people affected. Liked this too. Maybe we need this disease.

Of Mist and Grass and Sand, Vonda McIntyre. A woman travels with snakes which she used to heal.
Poor Grass....sad.

Speech Sounds, Octavia Butler. Humans lost their ability to speak. I guess it's more than that, because...sign language??

Even The Queen, Connie Willis. A bit silly, about menstruation, or the end of it, but fun.


Some I wasn't so keen on.

Rachel In Love, Pat Murphy. I didn't like this, a chimp girl raised as human wants a BF

The Kidnapping of Baronness 5, Kathrine McLean. More animals

The SHip Who Mourned, Anne Mc Caffrey. Human minds in a ship as their body. And the men are the "brawn" or human pair of the two workers. Ugh.

A Womens Liberation, Ursula Le Guin. A former slave named Rakam is recounting the story of her life on the planet Werel. Normally I like her Hanish stories, but slaves, even ex-slaves...no.

[Nicole Bunge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ten stories from Asimov's and Analog magazine- including some giants of feminist speculative fiction.
Some are short stories set in existing worlds, some are stand alone.

The title story (which is more a novella) resonated a lot for me, as did "Rachel in Love" and "Speech Sounds." Most are pretty "heavy" reading: addressing the issues of sexism/racism/humanity (with the exception of "Even the Queen" - which is just silly.)

Contents are:

Intertia - Nancy Kress
Even the Queen - Connie Willis
Fool's Errand - Sarah Zettel
Rachel in Love -Pat Murphy
Of Mist, Grass, and Sand - Vonda N. McIntyre
The July Ward - S. N. Dyer
The Kidnapping of Baroness 5 - Katherine MacLean
Speech Sounds - Octavia E. Butler
The Ship Who Mourned - Anne McCaffrey
A Woman's Liberation - Usula K. Le Guin

[Meg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesome anthology including some classic stories that I enjoyed rereading (like Ursula LeGuin's "A Woman's Liberation," and Vonda McIntyre's "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand") as well as some that I hadn't read before and loved, like Nancy Kress's "Inertia" and Octavia Butler's "Speech Sounds". The stories took place in a wide variety of settings, and though all the stories had women as protagonists, some of them explicitly addressed "women's" or feminist issues, while others did not. Basically, there wasn't a weak link in the book. Great collection.

[Kaethe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent collection of SF by women, covering a pretty broad span of styles, tones, and topics. Just a really good read, and a perfect suggestion for anyone who's looking for some of the most honored, if not neccesarily best known writers in the genre. Just to be clear, LeGuin, Butler, Willis, et alia, these are not obscure names, except to a reader quite new in the genre. And I know I was praising it just-the-other-day, but "Even the Queen" is also in this collection, and damn, but that's a funny story.

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid book of science fiction written by women about women. I don't think there is a real clunker in the whole collection. The weakest, in my opinion, were Vonda N. McIntyre's Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand and Sarah Zettel's Fool's Errand. They weren't bad, I just didn't find them as compelling as some of the others. I'd read most of the authors before, but did find a couple (Connie Willis and S.N. Dyer) that made me want to seek out more of their work.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great collection of sci-fi short stories about women, by women (which is REALLY difficult to find in a book even now!). This collection has all kinds of stories, from the "alien-other-planet" stuff to "future-on-earth-after-some-epidemic-etc." Ursula K. LeGuin's story at the end, titled "A Women's Liberation" is probably one of the best stories in the collection (and is probably more of a novella than a story), and makes me want to read more of her writing.

[Lindig · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice anthology of sf by women authors only. The only two I'd read before were the Vonda McIntyre and the Anne McCaffrey. I especially liked the Octavia Butler, about a plague that has robbed people of speech; and the Ursula Le Guin, about slavery and revolution and women's roles in them. The only one I didn't like was the Pat Murphy story, Rachel in Love. It's a nice collection that offers something for everyone and ranges from pure silliness (meh) to hard sf.

[Summer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this more than I did, as I love Connie Willis and several of the stories in this collection are excellent. However, several of the stories were just plain boring, so it's rather a mixed bag.

Things I don't want to read again:

-That damned Vonda McIntyre story about the healer and her snakes
-Anything by Anne McCaffrey

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

The stories were good but what has stuck with me is the Ursula K. LeGuin. It has lodged itself into my brain. It felt exciting and necessary to read it. That doesn't happen all that often. Her writing on slavery over the last decade has been powerful. But then I've felt that way about her writing since I was a child.

[Penny · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book caught my eye as I was doing some database clean up. Women and SF? A somewhat unusual combination. And since I was looking for something to read I grabbed it. The stories have all been good. How good? Good enough to make you regret seeing it end. Good enough to make one wonder what else this author has written.

[Deborah Replogle · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of stories of acclaimed women Science Fiction authors, most of them written way back when I first discovered Science Fiction. I loved re-reading them! All of them wonderful stories, but two favorites: Even the Queen by Connie Willis, and A Women's Liberation by Ursula LeGuin. This is a book that should be on every Science Fiction reader's bookshelf.

[michelle]

11/22/07

[SuperCat · Rating 4 out of 5]

The stories in this book are pretty much super. I especially liked the Connie Willis one. But even more than that, I have a lot of new authors to check out. Thanks to lemoncakes for the rec.

[Mckinley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Liked almost all of these short stories. I'd read many of the authors before. Will follow up on a couple and read more by all.

[Sue Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent collection of science fiction stories about women who did something important.

[Adeselna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only read it for Le Guin's story and it is really beautiful.

[Sofia (Nascida para Ler) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ainda não li todos os contos, mas o que já li é lindo!