Published June 24, 2009 | 
To the writers of fantastic fiction who broadened my childhood world.
Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, whose The Little Lame Prince gave me a traveling cloak and a world to see.
Rod Serling, whose brilliant Twilight Zone scripts were published as anthologies, and who promised me a chance at least of justice.
C. S. Lewis, who, on my seventh birthday, took me out of the silent planet and to Perelandra. I was 14 before I got the third book in the trilogy, which was just as well.
Edgar Allen Poe, who showed me I wasn’t the only one with a demon in my view.
Bram Stoker, whose Dracula is still a masterpiece of form as well as terror, and whose “The Judge’s House” is still terrifying.
The great Victorian and Edwardian supernatural writers: E. Nesbit, M.R. James, Henry James, Sheridan Le Fanu, Oliver Onions, F. Marion Crawford, Violet Hunt, E. F. Benson, Cynthia Asquith, Saki, William Hope Hodgson, Margaret Irwin, and so many more.
The editors–particularly Alfred Hitchcock, Seon Manley, and Gogo Lewis–who brought those stories from the dusty vaults of long-forgotten magazines into modern print.
Barbara Michaels, whose Ammie, Come Home said, “Father hurt” in a voice I needed to hear. It is one of the best modern ghost stories.
The great classic SF writers–Theodore Sturgeon foremost among them–who showed up in the early anthologies I found. (Groff Conklin’s anthologies were great.) And Harlan Ellison, whose Again, Dangerous Visions introduced me to Ursula K. Le Guin and my all-time great love, Joanna Russ. Le Guin and Russ are the Empress and High Priestess of SF/F, the two great pillars of New Wave SF.
All the people who carelessly left books where I could find them.
“the two great pillars of …”?
Why was it better to read That Hideous Strength when you were older?
The other day I had to tell someone who Theodore Sturgeon was. It made me a sad panda.
I read the first line as, “To the writers of fan fiction who broadened my childhood world.” Then my eyes bugged a little. Then I reread it and laughed.
I have not heard of Joanna Russ. Based on our mutual love of Le Guin, it sounds like I’ve got some reading to do. Recommendations?
How do you feel about Octavia Butler?
have you read ‘voyage to arcturus’? i didn’t really enjoy it; it disturbed me (i might have been too young), but it disturbed me in much the same way the perelandra series did.
I love Octavia Butler. An amazing writer.
Joanna Russ is a very fine writer but quite different from Le Guin. Try her short stories first — the two more recent collections are Extra(Ordinary) People and The Hidden Side of the Moon. She’s good — tough, insightful, often hilarious, sometimes touching. She may infuriate you, but Joanna Russ will always, always make you think.
(Note the quotations on this icon. Both classic Russ.)
Russ, LeGuin, and now Cherryh
How great to see E. Nesbit and Joanna Russ praised in the same piece.
Yes, yes, yes to Joanna Russ. The Female Man was difficult for me, even as a young lesbian, because it demanded I step so far outside the mental and cultural boundaries of this existence. But the impact has never stopped resounding.
As illuminating as the fiction of LeGuin and Russ is, however, I also strongly recommend their essays about what they faced in writing what they did — for instance, how LeGuin couldn’t hope to get The Left Hand of Darkness published if all Gethenians were referred to as “she”, it HAD to be “he”, the male default is omnipotent. When I was able to read the book later republished with the pronouns as LeGuin preferred, it rocked my world all over again.
If you haven’t read her, I’d recommend C.J. Cherryh as the third leg of this feminist sci-fi triad. But NOT her fantasy novels. Instead, the Deep Space and Cyteen books are astonishingly brilliant creations of a future human space-based culture. And the Chanur series is my favorite of all time — about a pocket of space where species other than humans have achieved sentience and space travel, and have an uneasy, often xenophobic alliance of trade. (One of these groups, the hani, is a matriarchal cat race.) I reread all the Chanur books every six months, and get something new to chew on every time. As I was halfway through the series the first time, losing sleep because I was staying up all night to read, I went looking for information about Cherryh (didn’t even know her gender yet) to see if I could figure out why these books were hitting me so hard. When I discovered she lived at that time in Norman, Oklahoma, I realized the saga is about North American tribes right before and at the point of European invasion. Hope that’s not too much of a spoiler. It’s even better done than Butler’s profoundly disturbing, incredible glimpse into the absolute destruction of Africa by slavery, also done as an allegory.