Fantastic Metropolis

By now you are likely wondering what my discussion of intelligibility could possibly have to do with the distinction I draw between “oppositional” and “alternative.” First, they are not opposites. Oppositional is not “hard” or “overt” to alternative’s “soft” or “covert.” Let’s go back to Karen Joy Fowler’s story, “What I Didn’t See.” KJF wrote this story after swimming for thirty years in the water of feminist sf. Everyone knows she wrote the story in conversation with James Tiptree Jr.’s “The Women Men Don’t See,” an important early contribution to what soon became the discourse of feminist sf (i.e., the water KJF has been swimming in). Tiptree’s story is oppositional; KJF’s story is alternative. “The Women Men Don’t See” writes in forceful, glorious opposition to the sexist waters Alice Sheldon swam in. Alice Sheldon’s story is almost (but not quite) fully intelligible within the broader sf discursive sphere. KJF’s story is not. KJF’s story is subtle and playful and engages intertextually with numerous feminist sf texts that I’ve yet to hear anyone not at home in the waters of feminist sf even mention in relation to the story.

Obviously in some cases it’s possible to produce alternative texts that are sufficiently intelligible to the mainstream—or else sufficiently elastic—to have no trouble getting into print. Karen Joy Fowler proves that that is so (even though fights do break out about what her texts are actually doing and saying and even what kind of texts they are). But for the most part, through their refusal to adopt the frame of reference of the mainstream, alternative texts are marginal, and getting them into print generally requires a stroke or two of good luck—stumbling on editors who understand them and are able to make them intelligible to colleagues and superiors, or a benign misunderstanding of the text (as I happen to know does happen).

I’ve long suspected that were I to produce outright oppositional texts I’d probably find it possible to pitch my novels to book publishers. But like KJF —and like most feminists writing sf today—I’ve been swimming in that feminist sf water for thirty years, too. And I decided long ago, after reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, that it is a serious mistake for someone longing to live in a different world than the one we have today to retain the mainstream’s frame of reference, which one must do when one writes in opposition. Granted, there are times when it’s necessary and appropriate to write in opposition. But my overriding desire for my fiction is to cut myself free of those terms to the farthest extent that I can in order to understand the world in a different way—and to make the world productively, rather than in reaction. I mistrust reaction. My greatest joy is in creation.

I hope, therefore, to allow some of us who are at home in the waters of feminist sf to continue producing the alternative texts that the feminist sf canon—necessarily “oppositional” in character—has made possible, without undue concern for their intelligibility within the mainstream discourse. I myself am hungry for such texts, which is why I am so thrilled to be publishing Gwyneth Jones’s refused—alternative—text.

Josh B. Lukin: Does the bulk of the historical research precede or follow the idea for the particular story? That is, did you know most of what you needed to for “The Apprenticehip of Isabetta di Pietro Cavazzi” before creating the characters and narrative?

L. Timmel Duchamp: Every piece of fiction I write begins with a clear and distinct voice speaking words, usually only a few words at first, which then gather other words to them. It begins as an impulse to put down the words I hear the voice speaking. And when these first words laid down on the page intrigue me, I’m compelled to continue writing, so as to reveal the world from which they flow. That is, in a nutshell, how most stories begin for me. (Mind you, those first few words that draw me into the story may not always be the first words in the published version—and may not even, many drafts down the line, survive at all.) The dedicated research, whether of history or science or philosophy, takes place only after the world and the language of the story and at least one or two of the characters have been established on the page and in my head. It then usually proceeds in tandem with the writing of the narrative. That was the case with “Isabetta”—though I should mention that I already knew quite a bit about the practice of magic and the institution of the Malmaritate in Early Modern Italy when I began writing the story and so knew exactly where to go to do the research without doing a bibliographical search first. As a general rule, every piece of fiction I write begins with the creation of the fictional world, sentence by sentence, on the page. The world emerges from the language (syntax, choice of words, style), and the characters from the world. The sole exception to this that I can think of is “Things of the Flesh.” There I had the core idea first and only afterwards conceived the setting and characters, which in turn produced the story’s language and world. My research on microbes and the operations of epidemiological investigations, however, did not begin until the world of the story had already come into existence.