Fantasy Authors

"Staying in charge of feminism is personally comfortable and personally gratifying for White women and may avoid the struggles and problems talked about his chapter (as well as some others), but if we do, we will lose. Not only we lose allies and our moral decency-no small matter for a radical movement whose position is founded not on armies but on its claims to justice-we will lose something of even greater importance: the ability to understand the interconnections between different kinds of oppression. That is, we will lose any possibility of developing an accurate map of the world. And if we don't have that, we will fail, even in getting anything for ourselves. ("THERE IS A VILLAGE / OVER / THAT HILL", p311)"

"here, of course, we come to the one occupation of a female protagonist in literature, the one thing she can do, and by God she does it and does it and does it, over and over and over again. She is the protagonist of a Love Story."

"Whether tentative or conclusively pessimistic, the invented, all-female worlds, with their consequent lesbianism, have another function: that of expressing the joys of female bonding, which-like freedom and access to the public world-are in short supply for many women in the real world. Sexually, this amounts to the insistence that women are erotic integers and not fractions waiting for completion. Female sexuality is seen as native and initiatory, not (as in our traditionally sexist view) reactive, passive, or potential. ("Recent Feminist Utopias")"

"Puberty is an awakening into sexual adulthood for both sexes. According to Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, it is also the time when the prison bars of "femininity," enforced by law and custom, shut the girl in for good. Even today entry into woman's estate is often not a broadening-out (as it is for boys) but a diminution of life. Feminist utopias offer an alternative model of female puberty, one which allows the girl to move into a full and free adulthood. ("Recent Feminist Utopias")"

"An examination of English literature or Western literature reveals that of all the possible actions people can do in this fiction, very few can be done by women. Our literature is not about women. It is not about women and men equally. It is by and about men. ("What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can't Write")"

"How multiform the universe is, how branching, how structured, how crystalline! Mountain ranges, clouds, trees, human relations, human literary inventions-how fractal they all are! (Introduction)"

"If any theme runs through all my work, it is what Adrienne Rich once called "re-vision," i.e., the re-perceiving of experience, not because our experience is complex or subtle or hard to understand (though it is sometimes all three) but because so much of what's presented to us as "the real world" or "the way it is" is so obviously untrue that a great deal of social energy must be mobilized to hide that gross and ghastly fact. As a theatre critic (whose name I'm afraid I've forgotten) once put it, "There's less there than meets the eye." Hence, my love for science fiction, which analyzes reality by changing it. Mundane, realistic fiction often carries its meaning behind the action, underneath the action, underneath the ostensible action. Science fiction cancels this process by making what is usually a literary metaphor into a literal identity. (Introduction)"

"The "old dykes" who boast of their friendships with gay men, the women who cluster round pro-feminist men (real or otherwise) radiating gratitude and praise, the Lesbians who talk endlessly about their attraction to men and their "bisexuality," when the psychology of genuinely bisexual women is quite different, all who allow fear to impress them morally or make them lie to themselves, who keep in their hearts not affection, not even concern, but adulation of the heroic, normative, central sex-all these are betraying themselves and other women. To lose the connection to fundamental theory and to evaluate discrete bits of personal behavior as feminist or non-feminist (whether they're male or female), is self-destructive and dreadfully confusing. Feminism isn't a grab bag of all the good and nice things in the world (as some, albeit a very few, feminists sometimes seem to think) and patriarchy isn't a collection of personally nasty behavior and all the bad things in the world. Nor is feminism a set of rules for virtuous living. To believe the former leads to helplessness in the face of institutionalized patriarchy and believing the latter leads to otherwise intelligent women boggling about absurdities"

"the demand for "attractiveness," like the existence of pornography, is sexual harassment, nothing more and nothing less."

"much of our mass literature, television, and movies encourages violence against women even more subtly and pervasively than pornography...If pornography is bad because it tells lies about women, is it any worse-or even any different-from the rest of the culture? Patriarchal ideology and culture are nothing but lies about women. I think we often forget this simply because it's so absolutely pervasive in everything from clothing to the design of houses to the structure of cities (anti-children and anti-women)."

"[about feminism] I'm going to propose as the primary demand of patriarchy what she chooses from Matilda Joslyn Gage (1873):n2 that women's resources be available, non-reciprocally and without pay, to men. If men have an unreasonable and unjust double amount of authority (intellectual and other), self-esteem, time, energy, leisure, cultural importance, wealth, freedom, and so on, this is precisely because they have stolen our time, our energy, our leisure, our authority, our labor and the wealth it produces, our self-esteem, our claims to knowledge and achievement, and our possibilities for autonomy and freedom. We are not merely excluded from male activities and institutions; our resources have been appropriated by men as their own in a massive theft lasting for centuries."

"Some revolutionary proposals:"

"Minority art, vernacular art, is marginal art. Only on the margins does growth occur. (Epilogue)"

"middle-class women, although taught to value established forms, are in the same position as the working class: neither can use established forms to express what the forms were never intended to express (and may very well operate to conceal). (Epilogue)"

"The re-evaluation and rediscovery of minority art (including the cultural minority of women) is often conceived as a matter of remedying injustice and exclusiveness through doing justice to individual artists by allowing their work into the canon, which will thereby be more complete, but fundamentally unchanged. (11. Aesthetics)"

"When the memory of one's predecessors is buried, the assumption persists that there were none and each generation of women believes itself to be faced with the burden of doing everything for the first time. And if no one ever did it before, if no woman was ever that socially sacred creature, "a great writer," why do we think we can succeed now? (9. Lack of Models)"

"The idea that any art is achieved 'intuitively' is a dehumanization of the brains, effort, and the traditions of the artist, and a classification of said artist as subhuman. It is those supposed incapable of intelligence, training, or connection with a tradition who are described as working by instinct or intuition. (9. Lack of Models)"

"Ignorance is not bad faith. But persistence in ignorance is. (5. The Double Standard of Content)"

"At the level of high culture with which this book is concerned, active bigotry is probably fairly rare. It is also hardly ever necessary, since the social context is so far from neutral. To act in a way both sexist and racist, to maintain one's class privilege, it is only necessary to act in the customary, ordinary, usual, even polite manner. (2. Bad Faith)"

"Writing pays very badly. Writing pays very badly. Writing pays worse now than it did then. If you do it, do it for the love of it. You may even make a living at it and you may not. (If you do what Danielle Steel does, you probably will.) This issue is very American, i.e. the idea that celebrities have real lives and the rest of us don't. Publicity doesn't necessarily mean power or money and unfortunately believing that the "real" news is about celebrities leaves us all totally ignorant of the forces that are truly hurting us, and truly shaping our lives."

"The United States is a nation made up of many very different sub-cultures (this is not even mentioning class differences). I have heard talk - largely from middle-aged white men - to the effect that everything used to be so harmonious and people so happy and what happened? - but they don't really want to know. Differences that used to be firmly suppressed in a hierarchy that was sold to all of us as "natural" are now busting out all over. When they take the forms of theory or morals (and even when they don't) it's impossible to argue them away. They exist. The Left (to which I belong) must learn them. We must all learn them. It's time and it's hard to do. I'm trying."

"Only those who have reviewed, year in and year out, know how truly abominable most fiction is."

"There are plenty of images of women in science fiction. There are hardly any women."

"Perhaps it’s because I was brought up with no religion at all that I detest the science-fiction tropism towards re-writing Christianity from what one might call the village-atheist point of view. Although (Robert Sheckley's) “Budget Planet” and Fritz Leiber’s “One Station on the Way” are colorful and active enough, there seems to me to be no point in flogging dead fundamentalist doctrines so late in the day."

"In the field of science fiction or fantasy, morality—when it enters a book at all—is almost always either thoughtlessly liberal (you can’t judge other cultures) or thoughtlessly illiberal (strong men must rule) or just plain thoughtless (killing people is bad)."

"Lady Sappho in curly gold letters is the name of the book I will (will not) write. (beginning of "Everyday Depressions")"

"Writing isn't talking. God damn it. Look, James, this isn't going to be an easy letter. I'm going to finish it, put it in the Net, turn my signal off, and go to bed. I'll be asleep by the time you get up, so don't call if you decide to answer your red light or just go looking for something intelligible to read or know about (little enough here for either of us). I keep thinking of the impulses in the Net as sparks flying underground or undersea or bouncing off satellites; of course it's faster than that. It's already morning in Hawaii and this will get to you almost instantaneously when I depress the Transmit key. Which is a little daunting, the irreversibility. (beginning of "Bodies")"

"This is the tale of the Abbess Radegunde and what happened when the Norsemen came. (first line of "Souls")"

"Duke Humphrey, bearded and humped, had died six hundred years before but not really, so that the people of Appletap-on-Flat were understandably frightened when he began to reappear in the outlying districts with (it was said) a demon cat from Zanzibar sitting on his hump and telling him what to do. (beginning of "The Zanzibar cat")"

"After she had finished her work at the North Pole, Jannina came down to the Red Sea refineries where she had family business, jumped to New Delhi for dinner, took a nap in a public hotel in Queensland, walked from the hotel to the station, bypassed the Leeward Islands (where she thought she might go, but all the stations were busy), and met Charley to watch the dawn over the Carolinas. (beginning of "nobody's Home")"

"In the summer of 192- there occurred to me the most extraordinary event of my life. (beginning of "The Extraordinary Voyages of Amélie Bertrand")"

"My mother's country: the body and garden of the Great Goddess, fair, ornamental, tended; I can wander forever in Her lap under the sun of Her face, in a cultivated place like the Botanical Gardens of my childhood where everything is suffused with the divine personality, regal, wide, and lovely. Everything's here-pineapples from Java, Norway pine, greenhouses like tropical igloos, the long wide lawns, camomile meadows veiled with hair, lawns that look like-and are-the dancing-grounds of angels. The fatherland is another place."

"Dismissing the whole thing as the world’s aberration and not mine, I went back to bed."

"How withered away one can be from a life of unremitting toil."

"“Rational people,” said the man, “realize that their lives must be made meaningful. Meaning isn’t just given us.”"

"Houses stretched off on all sides, sometimes dipping below the ground and sometimes emerging out of it, piling themselves into pyramids, into almost toppling waves, never one rooftree more than eighty yards from the next. The planet was covered. There were the old, open-air cities planted with whatever would grow, mountains honeycombed, resorts in Antarctica, covered roads crammed with carrier traffic only, hovercraft, sea-craft, masses, structures, and installations under the sea, nets of algae towed in the air, some insects and no animals whatever, but people, people, people everywhere. What’s the opposite of the Garden of Eden?"

"Who's Elaine Beach? Just the one you'd expect. The shy one. The sandy-haired one with freckles. The unhappy one who isn't good-looking. The one who came back to town after a two weeks' absence, claiming she'd been to Chicago and had a baby. The one who's always listening to something else. The one who, on autumn nights, looks as though she can hear something else. The one who hates parties. The one who won't talk about it. The one to whom supernatural adventures ought to happen."

"The trouble with men is that they have limited minds. That's the trouble with women, too."

"Alyx, the gray-eyed, the silent woman. Wit, arm, kill-quick for hire, she watched the strange man thread his way through the tables and the smoke toward her. This was in Ourdh, where all things are possible. He stopped at the table where she sat alone and with a certain indefinable gallantry, not pleasant but perhaps its exact opposite, he said: "A woman-here?" "You're looking at one," said Alyx dryly, for she did not like his tone..."

"This is the tale of a voyage that is of interest only as it concerns the doings of one small, gray-eyed woman. Small women exist in plenty-so do those with gray eyes-but this woman was among the wisest of a sex that is surpassingly wise. There is no surprise in that (or should not be) for it is common knowledge that Woman was created fully a quarter of an hour before Man, and has kept that advantage to this very day. Indeed, legend has it that the first man, Leh, was fashioned from the sixth finger of the left hand of the first woman, Loh, and that is why women have only five fingers on the left hand. The lady with whom we concern ourselves in this story had all her six fingers, and what is more, they all worked."

"He wished his imagination would not take so impressionistic a turn. It never fails."

"Sit a man on his ass with nothing to do but eat and the first thing that goes is his mind. It never fails."

"“And you think they’ll let you,” said Machine. It was a flat, sad statement. “No,” she said, “but nobody ever let me do anything in my life before and I never let that stop me.”"

"Fucking, if you will forgive the pun, is an anti-climax."

"Anyway everyboy (sorry) knows that what women have done that is really important is not to constitute a great, cheap labor force that you can zip in when you're at war and zip out again afterwards but to Be Mothers, to form the coming generation, to give birth to them, to nurse them, to mop floors for them, to love them, cook for them, clean for them, change their diapers, pick up after them, and mainly sacrifice themselves for them. This is the most important job in the world. That’s why they don’t pay you for it."

"There are more whooping cranes in the United States of America than there are women in Congress."

"Maybe I'd better call a halt to the journal for a bit. Until something crops up, that is, which it hopefully won't for a couple of decades. In the meantime: farewell, enjoy your futile lives, etc. This is Bartimaeus, care of The Other Place, signing off."

"Together, we must advance unafraid into the modern age!"

"The boy did the preliminaries, sealing the circles, erecting the bonds. Now we were all subject to the rules of the summoning. But then he stopped. He did not progress. The woman looked at him furiously. "I've forgotten it," he said."

"The boy shrugged. "I've forgotten it," was all he said. And then, "I guess I wasn't taught well enough.""