Gwyneth Jones won the Pilgrim Award for science fiction criticism in 2008, and this collection makes it abundantly clear why. It's an eclectic assemblage of essays, speeches, and reviews through which runs one distinct thread: a frustration with the consolatory "feminism" she sees in modern science fiction, and a demand for an angrier, more truthful feminism.
Of the best essays in the collection "Wild Hearts in Uniform—the Romance of Militarism in Popular SF" and "Haraway's Cyborgs [Mostly] at the movies" (a review of Patricia Melzer's Alien Constructions, 2006) form a duet. They argue with, first, the ways in which female and feminist writers have been sucked into revisioning, but not subverting, old tropes of the attraction of violence and the power of heirarchies, often succumbing to powerful stories of women's "true" desire for domesticity, or the "Exceptional Woman"; and second, the ways in which Hollywood has taken Haraways's idea of the cyborg and defanged it. The points made are later supplemented by a review of Fantasy Girls, edited by Elyce Rae Helford (2002). Central to Jones's arguments here—and elsewhere—is that this is not something that men do to women, but which women collaborate and conspire at achieving. Gender for Jones is less an issue of bodies and hormone as of attitudes and choices, as played out in her award winning Aleutian series (of which the impressive Spirit [2009], is the latest part). A later, essay, "String of Pearls," discusses the relationship between sex and horror, tries to cut any automatic links between the two, and offers a fascinating interrogation of Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Dart.
Jones extends her arguments about gender—and about the mistakes she feels feminist science fiction readers and critics have made—into her essay "True Life-Science Fiction: Sexual Politics and the Lab Procedural," which describes some of the research that went into Life (2004), and which has prompted me to remove that novel from the shelves for a re-read. In this essay Jones offers us a portrait of a researcher in action and explores the ways in which science fiction, feminism, and women scientists find themselves working with different vocabularies and experiences. Later, in "The End of Oil [In Three Parts]" she speculates on what the world will really be like in the face of oil shortages and, perhaps more important, the way in which each generation, and not just each gender, generates its own taken-for-granteds.
Elsewhere Jones is concerned with what makes the genre of science fiction. The collection opens with another duet: "What is Science Fiction," in which she takes on most of the common ideas about the field and eviscerates them—this essay could usefully be read alongside Istvan Csiscery-Ronay Jr.'s Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (2008)—and "You can Read it Like a Detective Story: Understanding Genre Fiction," which discusses the ways in which we can use the icons of science fiction to understand what the genre is doing. The first of these essays is concerned with the creation of dissonance and an intellectual derangement. The second is a book review of Paul Bleton's Ça Se Lit Comme Un Roman Policier (1999), and deals with why science fiction and fantasy offer much potential threat, exploring the ways in which the reader reads, the expectation and arousal of the experience of genre immersion.
As the book proceeds we also get to hear what Jones does when she isn't writing science fiction. In "W.I.S.E.R. . . . Shouldn't We Be?" we get a set of notes taken at the Women in Science Education conference, Maastricht, 2007: these are bitty, passionate, urgent, and argumentative in ways which are a model of what lecture notes should be. They do not recount the events they witness, they respond to them; they are critical of rhetoric that seems to demand a lazy tokenism, or assumes representativeness; they challenge the kinds of commonsense arguments that leave women placed as a minority group. They are critical most of all of lazy Utopianism, that makes unwarranted assumptions about the niceness of women, and wilfully lets men off the hook.
Along with all the challenging and critical articles are other pieces which take us off at a tangent or offer us small but significant thoughts: a review of Jane Yolen's Briar Rose; a list of the ten best SF books by women and three by men. One of the most unexpected and refreshing essays is on computer games, material too often dismissed by the middle-class as a distraction from reading. Along with an exploration of the ethics of depicted games, "The Games" provides a fascinating analysis of the intellectual experience of game play which really does explore the kinds of narratives, and narrative experience, that the media offers: most interesting was the discussion of the explorative mode over the story mode.
My first impression of Jones's writing in this book was that it was passionately angry. Later I wanted to ask of her (as she once asked similarly of Brian Stableford), is this play fighting? But this is the wrong question: what I want to ask now is how she combines so skilfully play and fight, so that the play is so intense, and the fighting so exhilarating.
Farah Mendlesohn is the author of The Inter-Galactic Playground, and the editor of On Joanna Russ, both nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Related Book this year. She edited the journal Foundation for six years.