Fantastic Metropolis

Among the most joyful experiences of my life I number committing civil disobedience and engaging with a jury during the resulting trial, thereby challenging everything I amd the jury understood about justice, authority, and law; experiencing a performance of the Béjart Ballet dancing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at Wolftrap in 1976; a meal (that I spent two days preparing) in Spring 1978, shared with a group of friends who’ve never had the pleasure of being together again since; beholding a sculpture by Louise Bourgeois at the Henry Art Gallery sometime in the mid-1990s that fairly made my body turn to water; engaging with Steve Erickson’s Arc d’X as I wrestled with that novel’s poignant exposition of the contradictions that lie at the heart of American sensibility.

To acquiesce is always to withhold a part of oneself—usually the best and finest part—to wear blinders and bridle one’s tongue. And because that is so, I can’t fathom anyone’s believing that “being happy” could follow from refraining from “criticizing the system all the time.” As for the primary source of my Counterhegemonic Powers: I’ve always believed they were a gift bestowed on me by my grandmother when she taught me that love was a verb best experienced in the active, rather than the passive, voice.

Josh B. Lukin: Could you tell the story of your discovery of sf? Of the sf community?

L. Timmel Duchamp: I came to sf relatively late, in my mid-twenties. I was fed up with the literary mainstream—constantly gritting my teeth at the grating, humiliating sexism of Updike, Barth, Roth, and Mailer, the dominating voices of that time. By sheer good fortune, I picked up Samuel R. Delany’s The Einstein Intersection off a display table in the bookstore in the Student Union, bought it, and read it, and wanted more Though a lot of my friends read sf, I knew nothing about it. So I sampled all kinds of it, at total random. And so I read all over the sf-map, from Delany and Sturgeon to Asimov and Hoyle, from Gordon Dickson to C.L. Moore. “Whoa, that’s hardcore,” someone might say to me, puzzled by my choosing to read a hard-sf novel they assumed wouldn’t appeal to me. Eventually I found my way to Russ, Butler, McIntyre, Tiptree, and Charnas. And then once it got around that I was reading sf, feminist friends would suggest this or that book. (I specifically remember being given Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, which I read immediately after Anna Kavan’s Ice.) Mostly, though, I blazed my own way through an unknown territory. That is what I’ve always done, from the moment I acquired my first library card.

As for the story of my discovery of the “sf community”—that is more complicated. In the concrete sense of becoming acquainted with individuals and groups of individuals, I can point to Nicola Griffith’s contacting me via email and then introducing me to the fem-sf listserv in Fall 1995, as a possible beginning of that story. Fem-sf was small then, about fifty people; I knew and admired the work of many of its members. I eventually met Nicola in the flesh, as well as her partner, Kelley Eskridge, and through them a number of Seattle sf people. The next spring I attended the historic WisCon 20. I don’t think I’ve ever met so many people I’d only known by mail or email at one time. I arrived at WisCon 20 as a visitor to the sf community and went home a member.

But there’s another story here, one known mostly to the fans of feminist sf. I tell this story in an essay theorizing a genealogy of feminist sf, published in Foundation and available now on my website. That’s the story of imagined feminist communities and the implied feminist sf community that I experienced long before I even started writing science fiction. I shared and discussed feminist sf with friends (many of whom did not read sf, other than feminist sf) in the late 1970s and all through the 1980s. Feminist sf and the communities it created on the page filled us with hope and helped us to critique the world we lived in and conceptualize other ways of being; and it also helped shape our relationships with each other, sometimes with painful results, since the world we were living in bore little resemblance to the fictional worlds of feminist sf community, and the people we were fell short of the powerful characters we so loved in the fiction. I’ve found, talking to people at WisCon, that many women in the sf community have had similar experiences sharing feminist sf and idealizing its imagined communities. And so I wasn’t at all surprised to hear people describing WisCon as “a weekend feminist utopia” and the fem-sf list as a “virtual WisCon.” I once observed in a post to the fem-sf list that those old ideals had so shaped our expectations of how our actual, existing community should be that members often suffered disappointment when the reality did not match. The pleasures of the imagined community, I find, don’t always come without cost.