Jean Roberta
Heiresses of Russ has become a tradition at Lethe Press, and choosing a selection of published lesbian-flavored speculative fiction to create a new anthology is an enjoyable challenge. The crop of 2014 offered many choices. Perhaps, in another dimension of space-time, there are several other versions of this book. The editors agreed to choose only one story per author, but some of the authors represented here are so prolific and so skilled at creating imaginary worlds that we might well have chosen other stories of theirs instead. We hope that this sampler will encourage readers to seek out more work by the contributors.
“What if?” is the question that all fiction writers ask themselves. Writers of science fiction, fantasy, and horror go further in their answers than writers of realistic fiction, but the question is always grounded in the here-and-now. What if a cure could be found for the physical degeneration of old age, and what if it didn’t work on everyone? What if androids lived among us? What if wars were fought in space, over the resources to be found on other planets? What if efforts to create longer-lasting fruit and vegetables gave strength to a life-form harmful to humans? What if the folk tales of traditional grandmothers were accurate depictions of a reality that the muggles refuse to believe in?
Stories about lesbians, women who choose women as primary partners, lovers, playmates and co-conspirators, tend to go where few men have gone before. (There are, however, several dazzling stories in this book by male authors.) Most of the real-life issues that lesbians must deal with, as women and as members of non-mainstream communities, appear in these stories in metaphorical form or as plausible scenarios in a future or alternative world.
Lesbianism itself was routinely described by the conservatives of the past as “impossible.” The formula of “woman + woman” (as it is defined in a recent scholarly book about the influence of lesbianism on civilization as we know it*) is thus logically connected with other phenomena formerly considered impossible: scientific discoveries, alternative methods of producing offspring, space travel, communication with beings who are not human or not living in human bodies, historical accounts that have been suppressed and denied.
Relationships between mothers and their offspring are a pattern in these stories that especially interests this editor. Most lesbians have at least considered the possibility of producing children outside of a heterosexual relationship, and “what if?” is a pressing question in this case. In some sense, every woman who becomes a parent is setting forth on a journey with an unknown destination, and the method of conception is the least important variable. In several of these stories, “woman + woman” is compounded when a lesbian couple raise a daughter together, or when a single lesbian mother meets a single, childless woman who had not expected to become part of an emotional triangle.
Lesbian daughters are as well represented here as lesbian mothers, and despite the apparent advances of women and of “queers” in Western culture, the old trope of the dispossessed girl who must leave home at a tender age to seek her fortune in the wilderness still has a real-world urgency. The daughters of patriarchal families are shown having to find or create the homes they want to live in. They don’t all succeed.
The appearance of grandmothers, mothers and daughters suggests threads of continuity from the past to the future, even when this is contested. At the same time, family relationships in these stories are not always based on shared DNA. This seems appropriate in a collection of stories by writers who are all, in some sense, “heiresses” of the late feminist speculative-fiction writer Joanna Russ, who was honored this year by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America with a posthumous Solstice Award.
Lest my discussion of lesbian families suggest characters floating in an amniotic soup of endless love, there is plenty of sex and violence in these stories. The violence of war is shown to be the logical, if horrifying, result of clashing interests. In some scenarios, violence and trickery are necessary means of resisting oppression. The question “What if?” is especially disturbing when the choices are annihilation or the destruction of fellow-beings, but in the real world, there are no easy roads to peace.
No lesbian anthology would be complete without some sex. “Woman + woman” can mean various types of connection, but the sexual kind is probably the most fun to read about. Lesbian erotic fantasy has come of age, and the sly wit in the sexually-explicit stories in this book is as seductive as the juicy adjectives.
Dear reader, I don’t want to delay you any further. Welcome to the worlds within, and may you enjoy the journey.
Jean Roberta
Summer 2015
*The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565-1830 by Susan S. Lanser (The University of Chicago Press, 2014).