Consider Her Ways

For years, people looked at me strangely when I cited Carolyn Cherryh as a writer of feminist science fiction. It was the kind of look people might give you if you said you ate chocolate bars for your health, but with a hint of more sinister dubiety; as if I might be in danger of taking on something seriously harmful along with the sweet disguise. My over-reading, if overreading it is (for there's over-reading as surely as there is over-writing, let reviewers beware) of what goes on in the typical Cherryh scenario is partly a historical accident. Serpent's Reach is the first Cherryh book I met. It is an early glimpse into the continuum that the back of Cyteen, the complex novel that is the culmination of this project, calls the ‘Merchanters’ Universe’ series. It features a gloomy tomboy heroine, and a good-dog toyboy who suffers the most remorseless ordeal by genre role-reversal before being awarded with equality. The plot is a space-opera revenge story. It is also a slice from a larger drama about the epic misuse of human reproduction technology. The behaviour of the hive-minded alien Majat is contrasted favourably with the humans’ treatment of their vat-bred underclass. The individual members of the different castes of the matriarchal Majat are endlessly replicated units of function. The small number of personalityanalogues involved have no comprehension of death or capacity for ‘freedom’. The mass-produced human azi, however, are individuals, and therefore slaves who live and die in misery…

Those of you who have read Cyteen, or follow Cherryh at all, may find this abstract familiar. But this was 1980, and my mind was awash with highly self-conscious feminist deconstructions of sf. It was natural for me to assume that Cherryh too was self-conscious in this way, that the story she chose was her story in the reformed sense, not a window into one writer's own private obsession. But the strong female lead has always been an option on the menu in sf. Like the gun-slinging heroine in a western she's the exception that proves the rule; and she proves it by being exceptional.