Marie Brennan’s excellent new book Driftwood (review here, if you’re curious) got me thinking a lot about forgotten stories. You know you’re an /r/Fantasy-ian when you find your ever-growing personal Mount Readmore a source of significant anxiety, but you can’t stop adding titles anyway. We all know the Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough at Last,” even if only for the last bit where his glasses break. We get that guy. And, at least in my case, that’s really only looking at all the great new stuff coming out nearly every day in the SF/F world. It doesn’t even touch on the backlog.
Things like self-publishing and the rise of small press publications also get me thinking (and this is where Driftwood really got to me) of all the wonderful things that will never be read. More casual readers might not know this, but /r/Fantasy favorites like Senlin Ascends and Riyria Revelations started out as self-published because no publisher wanted them. So Josiah Bancroft and Michael J. Sullivan, like many others, self-published, and their books were able to find an audience and take off.
Go back 10 years, maybe 15 at most, and that. Could. Not. Have. Happened. Wonderful books like Riyria and Senlin would have been forgotten. Not even forgotten: never given the chance to live at all. They would have only ever been a thing in the author’s imagination. Say what you will about Amazon (and I’ll say a lot about Amazon), I’m eternally grateful for the role they’ve played in letting all these books come into being.
This is getting a bit afield from my review of Rediscovery, but when I think of all the wonderful writing talent that could have flourished over the decades and centuries and never got the chance, it makes me want to cry. So many worlds withered on the vine, so many lives unmoved that might have been. This is especially true of women authors and authors of color. Publishing was a man’s world, and generally a white man’s world. Women and people of color got published, but they were exceptions (and, as such, exceptional). These are huge populations of potential talent that were largely untapped. Rediscovery is a conscious attempt to push back against that.
The editors here looked, specifically, for short stories written by women and published in the 50s and 60s. They include a bit about each author, written by a current writer, talking about their lives and bibliographies. They were all published in well-known magazines such as Astounding Science Fiction and Amazing Stories and the like. Often they wrote under male pen names, or gender-neutral ones, or just used their initials to make things easier. (Still happens today - it was at the publisher’s insistence that Harry Potter got published with “J.K. Rowling” on the cover instead of “Joan Rowling.” And about once a week at /r/Fantasy we get someone who is surprised to learn that Robin Hobb is actually a woman named Megan Lindholm.)
The stories themselves are fairly typical of Silver Age science fiction. They differ from most stuff of the era in that they are definitely more progressive in their views of gender, race, and colonialism than one might expect. No Robert A. Heinlein-ish sexism (or at least, no Robert A. Heinlein-ish sexism without a hearty eye-roll or three thrown in).
Some favorite stories:
Of All Possible Worlds by Rosel George Brown tells the story of an anthropologist spending five years among an alien society. Enjoyable story of someone going native in a very alien society.
Satisfaction Guaranteed by Joy Leache. A planet inhabited by people who look an awful lot like leprechauns wants to join the Galactic Federation. They need to demonstrate that they won’t be a burden on the Federation, though, and hire a consultant to help them figure out something they can successfully sell on the galactic market.
The Pleiades by Otis Kidwell Burger. Short story set in a society that has achieved immortality. When everyone lives forever, in perfect health, the pleasures of the flesh become relatively unimportant. So what’s the appeal of a burlesque show in such a society? Read and find out!
Unwillingly to School by Pauline Ashwell. This one was probably my favorite. It starts with a young woman on a frontier planet getting her father to the hospital in a rough mining town for medical care. Angry and frustrated over her father’s injury and the patronizing doctors, she deliberately goes into the roughest bar in town looking for a fight and instead manages to trigger the protective instincts of all the hard-bitten prospectors in the place. Eventually she is semi-unwillingly sent back to Earth for college. A first person story, I really appreciate how the grammar and vocabulary got steadily better as she got more and more educated.
All in all a rewarding and interesting read. Thanks to Journey Press and NetGalley for the ARC.
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