Fiction Reviews
Beyond & Within
Discontinue if Death Ensues
Tales from the tipping point(2024) edited by Carol Gyzander, Flame Tree Press,
£16.99 / Can$34.99 / US$26.99, hrdbk, 415pp, ISBN 978-1-804-177937-6
These are shorts by Stoker Award short-listers. An anthology of twenty tales and poems by five different women, each looking at the way women are treated by men (mostly appallingly), and with SF, horror and fantasy elements involved.
My favourite is the wryly satirical wild ride Carol Gyzander provides in 'Wearing White Out Of Season'. Here, Ada Lovelace, feeling rather bored and ignored by Charles Babbage (as indifferent to her as his Indifference engine is), decides to create time travel easily and practically overnight and goes off to see how women fair through history. As she goes, she meets and takes along Cleopatra and Marolyn Monroe (both of whom accept the existence of time travel in an instant) and they go on a Bill & Ted’s Excellent and Bogus Journeys (1989/'91) style romp through time together. This gets breath-takingly prophetic when they arrive at a US political rally, witnessing the election defeat of Kamala Harris to an un-named right wing US Presidential candidate. That this came out just before the Trump 2024 US Presidential victory makes it incredibly contemporary. They travel on a little to see the consequences of the right-wing victory as women’s rights even to wear white dresses at will are curtailed, until Cleopatra uses her until this book, unmentioned ability to make snakes do her bidding, the kick-start of resistance movement.
In Lee Murray’s 'Glow', a mysterious light begins to form around men with high performance and achievement standards, unfortunately the Glow is actually an indicator of who the rapists are. The story plays on the ethical impact of how society handles the message, of which the origin is never really declared.
In her 'At Maratoto Pool', in a post-apocalyptic future, a group of women learn of a mysterious healing mud pool in a South American valley and stumble on a strange cult community there, The author’s bond with her guide to the community blinds her to the awareness that her mother never seems to leave the pool, and that it is changing her. A study of the exploitation of idealism and assertion that when something seems too good to be true, there will be a price, and oh that price is a scary one here.
Anna Taborska has several of her contributions actually link together in a chain, and in at least one case, cross-reference events in a work by one of the other writers too.
In 'Mummy Miya', a mummified woman who had her tongue torn out, gets a chance to re-speak in the present day as technology is found that can restore and reactivate her centuries-dead vocal cords. They may not like what she has to say.
In 'Fat', Taborska moves into pure contemporary horror as a scientist and serial abuser creates drugs to fatten women up, as he has a fetish for large girls, who are easily flattered by him saying he loves them as he buys them burgers and cakes with extra-growth hormones, often narrowly avoiding investigation for his offences. He doesn’t care when his girls die from obesity related illnesses. In the sequel, 'Thin', a woman called Isadora, works to rapidly counteract the food additive effects unleashed by the evil doer of the previous story, while also becoming obsessed with a winged and feathered Goddess of old who’s statue she admires.
In 'The Queen Is Dead, Long Live The Queen', readers might expect the winged Goddess of Thin to manifest, but the queens here are ants, and a woman called Elizabeth, who dreams of a matriarchal World, is turning into one.
In 'Storm Warning', to return to Carol Gyzander, Miranda and Caliban develop their own agenda for Prospero’s shipwrecked mariners in a wicked spin on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. When the leering lustful sailors start on Miranda, they have serious cause to regret it.
An impressive series of tales highlighting the fears and repressions many women have faced throughout time, and the striving for equality. Often dark, always readable, but the time travelling trio of 'Wearing White Out Of Season' really belong in a league of their own.
Arthur Chappell
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