Backlisted - Science Fiction Special

Episode Date: February 21, 2023

Welcome to our second Backlisted special of 2023. Today we’re joined by the best-selling writer Una McCormack, returning for a record-breaking ninth appearance, having most recently participated in the Christmas episode dedicated to Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfield. These specials are designed to fill the gap until the show proper returns in April. They differ from the usual Backlisted format in that they feature just one guest choosing a number of books in an area they know and care about. This discussion covers five books that have inspired Una as a writer of science fiction from childhood onwards. The books are: Sylvia Engdahl, The Far Side of Evil Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed Octavia Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories Katharine Burdekin, Proud Man Vonda N. McIntyre, Star Trek: The Voyage Home * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Music Music Music Music Music Music Hello and welcome to our second Backlisted Special. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund books they really want to read.

And although today I'm not joined for once by my literary partner in virtue, Andy Miller, I'm delighted to welcome a true friend of the show, returning for her record-breaking ninth appearance, the writer Una McCormack. Hello, Una. Hi, John. Very good to be here. Well, very, very good to have you. And we have, as they say, a fully packed show. But for those people who don't know Una from previous, I can't believe there's anybody who hasn't heard Una on a previous backlisted, but Una is the author of nearly two dozen science fiction novels based on TV shows

such as Star Trek, Doctor Who, Firefly and Blake's Seven. Her most recent books include The Autobiography of Mr Spock and Star Trek Picard Second Self. She's on the editorial board of GoldSF, an imprint of Goldsmiths Press aimed at publishing new voices in intersectional feminist science fiction of more and on. Their first publications are Mathematics for Ladies by Jessie Randall and Empathy by Hoa Pham. Now, the format of these backlisted specials differ from the main show in that they feature a guest choosing a number of books in an area they know and care about. So today, amazingly enough, Una has selected five of the science fiction novels which helped make her the writer that she is today. So that's what we're going to

do. We're going to talk about five different books. Five, I have to say, some of them I'd heard of, some of them I hadn't. Some of them read, some of them I hadn't. But they all, taken as a whole, it's an extraordinary list. Good. Well, I'm glad about that. I toyed with doing recipe books, but I can't cook. So I could have done a Le Guin, actually, if we'd done recipe books. She's got recipes in one of them, always coming home. But no, I thought, let's stick with science fiction. Although, is there possibly the publisher, you see my little publisher kind of antennae beginning to sort of twitch there.

Is there a science fiction cookbook at some point in the future? Who knows? Yeah, well, all these little pellets of food or something. What's first on your pile, Una? So when I was thinking about these i thought oh you know lots of people don't read science fiction so should i sort of come up with a list that you know oh this is kind of your gateway and then i thought now i'm just gonna go straight in with

the with the hard crack i have to say i'm really glad i am someone who i am not a science and i should say that to everybody this is a this is a conversation that is not between two science fiction kind of aficionados. I would say that my kind of taste and interest in sci-fi was really, was probably like a lot of my generation, kindled by puffin books, by Arthur C. Clarke of Time and Stars, of reading Asimov, a foundation trilogy at school. And it kind of developed in parallel to my interest in fantasy, reading Tolkien in particular. And it didn't tip over into the... There were kids at school who were reading, you know,

who were reading kind of the magazines and really getting into the kind of the harder end of sci-fi, which I didn't go. So I very much got, I think, a general reader's impression of science fiction rather than a sort of specialist inside knowledge. And many ways, that's my reading experience, too, because I found that there's quite a fixed canon or there has been in the past with science fiction and I found when I got to Asimov didn't like the sexual politics didn't like the politics and again and again I would kind of run up against this with with the kind of science fiction that people go you must read this you must read this it's the canon this is what you must read and so I kind of started to come in sideways and pick up books that were, I would always pick up a book if it had a woman author. So that was a starting point. I'll give that a crack. And so my journey into it was quite sideways as well.

So I think it overlaps a lot with my interest in utopian fiction, my background as a sociologist. So I found I was I was reading as a sociologist as much as someone who was interested in prose style. I'll forgive quite a lot of inelegancy in a science fiction novel if the ideas are good enough. So the books I've kind of picked kind of track my journey in a way. Some of them people will know. I'll be amazed if there's anyone who's read all five of these, possibly some of my friends. But that's exactly what sort of exactly what these specials are for, is to come at subjects. I mean, it would

be very easy to say the five greatest science fiction novels of all time, and I'm sure we've probably all got a list of those. But this is not that. It's much more interesting, and I have to say, I found it so interesting delving deeply. So, where's our entry point?

Where are we starting? So we're starting with 10-year-old Una McCormack in, I think I'm in Eccleston Library in St Helens. And a shout out to Frank Cottrell-Boyce, the other St Helens. You don't have to come from St Helens to be on this podcast, but it helps. A credit to Notre Dame and West Park education system, I think, You don't have to come from St. Helens to be on this podcast, but it helps. A credit to Notre Dame and West Park education system, I think, of the 70s and 80s. So I'm in Eccleston Library. I pick up a curious book called The Far Side of Evil by Sylvia Engdahl,

which had a very, very striking cover of a sort of a young woman's head with a kind of cutaway, like a model. You can look into her brain. You see somebody is spying on her, spying on her thoughts. So I picked this to represent my preteen reading because I think we get science fiction at that sort of age. And I loved this book. I had this book out of the library again and again and again and again and again. Something about it really, really, really, really captured my imagination. It's not an easy read. It's a very bleak book in many ways. It deals with issues such as, there's quite an extensive passage about sensory deprivation, which I'm amazed I got to read this book. So it concerns a young woman who's a sort of representative of quite a sophisticated intergalactic power. And what they do is they send anthropological agents to visit worlds that are not quite as,

well, I'll say developed, but, you know, let's just use that language. And she's observing this world, which is on the verge of nuclear war. And what they're interested in is this idea of the critical stage, which is a point in a kind of civilization history where they'll either blow themselves up or divert their talents to to other interests like space travel. their talents to other interests like space travel. And they're there studying this. And this world is very close to blowing itself up. And a thriller ensues. And our character has to stay undercover throughout. And I mean, the interesting thing about Engdahl, who I had encountered as probably in the early 70s,

through the Puffin list, and there's a book called heritage of the star that puffin published but what i hadn't realized until i started to to read for this podcast was she really believes in this um in this critical stage of civilization and that she's a strong believer in the colonisation of space. And an amazing woman who's still alive and still regularly updating her website. Incredibly, yeah. So I found that really interesting, the idea that these books aren't just kind of, you know, they're not metaphorical.

She really believes. Absolutely, yeah. There's a kind of proselytising aspect to them as well. Perhaps more measured than an Elon Musk. Yeah. But that's definitely there in her fiction. And I think what this book gave me is, I went on to do a PhD in sociology,

and I think what this book gave me, along with Le Guin, who I was reading at the same time, was it gave me some of the kind of mental apparatus to start thinking that way. Oh, societies can change. Well, oh, she suggests they have kind of levels of development. You wouldn't believe that now if you were a sociologist. You just kind of drop that idea quite quickly. But it gives you the kind of levels of development. You wouldn't believe that now if you were a sociologist, you'd kind of drop that idea quite quickly.

But it gives you the kind of brain work to be able to think in that way. And that for me is what science fiction is all about. If I'm reading good science fiction, I can feel the synapses rewiring. It's doing something to my mind. It's making me think differently. And that's what really good science fiction should do.

If it gets to you at 10, you're set. It's an interesting, there are two things that also on Engdahl. One is the difficulty of, she writes about when she first started writing in the late 60s and early 70s, having novels published, there wasn't a category called young adult. 70s having novels published, there wasn't a category called young adult. So knowing what's right, I noticed that Puffin, who were usually pretty loose on these things, just said for Heritage of the Star, which was written after Far Side of Evil,

that just said an exciting, demanding and thought-provoking tale of the future for older readers. Older readers. Well, I went online in the in the sort of mid 90s and i i found her website because like you said she she sort of you know she really was an early adopter of the web and i emailed her and said you know oh god this is really excellent i think it's the first time i contacted a writer like that and i said i adored this book it meant so much to me uh i read it when i was 10 years old and i got this email

back saying you read this book at 10 oh my god there's no way that should have been in your hands by any stretch of the imagination you should have been about 13 or put it older readers yeah exactly this kind of category of uh of a young adult i think what they were called in science fiction they were called juveniles weren't they if you kind of got to heinle adult. I think what they were called in science fiction, they were called juveniles, weren't they? If you kind of got to Heinlein, you were reading a juvenile. Yeah. Obviously, as you say, it's got a cracking plot. And it is, as you say, it is sort of quite bleak.

There's a sort of love story. Spoiler alert, it doesn't end out quite as... No, I think the love story perhaps isn't the strongest part. I think the relationship between her, Alana, the lead, and her female friend, Kari, who knows nothing about the real situation, is probably one of the best bits of the book. You learn about placebo effects from that narrative as well.

It's another thing this book gave me. So all sorts going on. Yeah, because she was a she was a computer programmer i think what must have been a very early computer programmer uh sylvia engel and i love that she says in one of the notes on the book she says some readers thought i used space fiction as a vehicle for political commentary whereas in fact i use political melodrama to dramatize ideas about the importance of space. There's a lot of science fiction writers do this, I think, kind of, you know.

And I think the way she gets away with it is that I think when science fiction becomes too didactic, obviously the prose is going to suffer. But I never feel that her prose is bad. There might be lengthy sections like there are in 1984 of, you know, opinion A being counter counted by opinion b but yeah yeah that's the grand tradition of that's hitler day and you know it's utopia isn't it um but there's always a good story around it i think is there a bit that you can read do you think that

would give us a yeah i don't i won't spoil it but i'll just read the start which i think um imagine me i think she right i i think she's a good, I think she's just a really good writer. They're good on a kind of sentence level, aren't they? Yeah, I think so. And also it's just proper page turner. I mean, I really raced through this one. Good, I'm glad. It's a book that deserves to survive, I think.

And, you know, the whole space thing is like, I mean, the idea is that it's almost like an evolutionary thing that she thinks, isn't it? That we get to a certain point in our development as a species where we need to colonise other. And she's very interesting. She's very clear that she doesn't think we should be colonising places that are inhabited by other races or species. places that are inhabited by other other races or species that we would be that would be she so she's anti-imperialist in that way that we should that we should be expanding in order to it's almost like it's sort of spiking the the guns of aggression and overcrowding and and the ruination of the planet she she keeps updating it she updated it for 9-11 and then she updates it for the climate emergency, that this idea is we need to get into space, but not in a kind of,

as you say, in a sort of ghastly Elon Musk kind of way. Yeah, don't take the same problems, but use it as a diversion of energy into something better, which I think is good. And I think at the back of her mind, secretly, like all of us, she thinks that if we just get out there, then the Vulcans will come past and introduce us to a massive galactic veneration. Genuine alternative. Exactly.

Yeah, genuine alternative universe. Yeah, great. Should I read the start? Yeah, go on, go on, it's good. So we join our protagonist Alana partway through the story and we find very quickly that she's been imprisoned. So I'll read a little

bit of it. The wind is howling through the trees outside, a cold, hateful wind. By standing on the bunk I can just barely reach the window. It's quite dark now and the stars are brilliant, though they seem terribly far away.

They, at least, are familiar and comforting, a reminder of home. There's no use pretending I'm not scared. I'm in prison and I do not think that I shall get out. I'm not guilty of the charges against me. I'm not at all what my interrogators think I am. They know nothing of my real identity beyond my first name, Alana, and the fact that I seem to be a surprisingly young girl to be involved in a sabotage plot. They'd be even more surprised if they knew the truth. That's great. And again, you know, one of the other things I like about her, although she does have kind of telepathic capabilities,

there isn't that sort of deus ex machina thing that I dislike in a lot of fantasy of, oh, I can do real proper magic and I can do... And in that sense, she reminds me of your next choice. Well, what can we say about the great Ursula Le Guin? I think, you know, when you asked me to do this, I said, shall we just do five Le Guin books or shall I? Because we very, very easily could have done that.

And I really hummed and hawed about which one to do. But at the end of the day, it could only be The Dispossessed, which I'm holding up in my beautiful, beautiful edition, which is a very cheap paperback, completely in black, a beautiful red anarchy symbol. And that's what The Dispossessed is. It's Le Guin's working through in novel form of the political philosophy of anarchism. It's Le Guin's. I think she does two novels back to back, Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed.

And I think they're just exceptionally good. People tend to like one more than the other. And, you know, they love love both but there's one that particularly speaks to them and it's the dispossessed that spoke to me um i love it never tired of this book one of the things that's interesting about science fiction is it goes right right back doesn't it to the to the beginnings of the novel form if you think of francis bacon's utopia or jonathan swift Swift's, that's utopian, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, it isn't utopian, but it has that kind of other worlds, other peoples,

that kind of, that attempt to try and understand social organisation, political organisation, political philosophy, through placing it in places that aren't real, that aren't part of our kind of known reality. And I agree, I think The Dispossessed, I always thought I preferred The Left Hand of Darkness, but having read The Dispossessed for this. It's beautiful, isn't it? It's so elegant. I mean, and this is properly, beautifully, beautifully written.

I mean, it's a great novel. It's just a great novel. It's not a great science fiction novel. It's, I think, one of the great modern novels. But, I mean, we should say a little bit about what it is because one of the great things about this is some of those sort of trip-to-the-moon type utopian novels or even news news from nowhere by by um william morris are annoying because because the utopia is too utopian yeah and actually this is what's

genius about the dispossessed is an anaris the planet that is the anarcho-syndicalist um planet isn't is far from perfect. It's gone rotten, hasn't it? Something is rotten in the state there. Yeah, and I think the subtitle that's on some editions is An Ambiguous Utopia. And I think this is what, part of what she's doing in this book is saying again and again, utopia isn't a blueprint, okay?

Utopia is practice. Utopia is method. Utopia is a way of being in the world. It's something that we carry with us. And when the lead, Shevak, leaves his failing utopia or his troubled utopia, Anaris, and goes to Urus, he still carries with him the principles that he was brought up with. He carries the utopianism with him. And that's the point of the book, I think, is that utopia is not something we can just leave, achieve, and then leave to get on with things. Utopia is a kind of constancy, a way of being in the world and a way of keeping these principles going in in everyday interactions um oh it's i i i can't tell uh people listening how much i love this book and how much they're

going to get from it consume it some interesting things that come up having reread it again and um uras is the opposite in many ways isn't it it's it's incredibly opulent um uh place but it's but it's patriarchal and it's and it's definitely capitalist and they dress in these you know the everything the food and the and the and the clothing is kind of very elegant and but he turns on them out it's it's it reminds me it's it's i'm always reminded of um of kind of the the those brilliant artists that came out of the soviet union with with le guin you know that he's kind of he aspires towards the sort of the what you might call the western um opulence but in his heart he also believes in the in the kind of um

there's a brilliant bit where he turns around and accuses the the ura ura esti of you are all in jail each alone solitary with a heap of what he owns you live in prison die in prison it is all i can see in your eyes the wall the wall the wall being also a really important metaphor for essential letters but it's that idea that we're kind of we're that they are just as much i mean you know that they're they're sort of prisoners for all for all their kind of apparent freedom exactly that's yeah and and he comes to this place and it makes no sense to him. The ordinary ways that people behave, they seem insane to him, that people allow these kinds of permissions over themselves. In his own mind, he remains free.

When you go back to the other way the society comes from, he is also kind of, I mean mean he's a brilliant scientist and without going into the whole plot he's kind of he is uh he he clashes with authority doesn't he that the whole idea in in an rs is that the children don't the children aren't allowed to talk about anything that's that's interesting to them they have to talk about stuff that's interesting to others anything that's interesting to you is called egoizing egoizing yes or uh uh hanging on to things here the worst you can sort of say to people is that although that's so propitarian of you um and i think what has happened on an rs is that uh perhaps with any sort of revolutionary group, you know, the pieties and the show of it,

the performance of it has become more important than the actuality. So Shevik is sort of driven away because people are jealous of his talent. And they think that, you know, they make him feel unwelcome because they make him feel that his talent has no place. He's not being part of the group. He's trying to get special preferential treatments,

which is the reason he leaves and goes to Urus. But there are a lot of very pious people on Inaris and a lot of people for whom the revolution is lip service rather than lived reality, which is one reason he goes. And, well, I won't spoil the plot because I think people really should read it. I'll get you to read a little bit in a moment. But I did want to just one thing.

It's less ambiguous than I thought it was about the role of women. I mean, it has had criticism from some feminist critics as being kind of that Shevek is very much... He was based apparently on Oppenheimer. Whom her father knew, didn't he? Who her father knew, yeah. And it's kind of, it's a big, you know, it's a sort of male hero and although Odon, who is the founder of the anarchist philosophy on Anaris is a woman,

I mean, it seems to me that that didn't spoil my enjoyment of the book, but I just wondered. My feeling with the Gwyn is that feminism is a as a second language to her it's something that she learns uh through writing science fiction through getting critiques from people like um joanna ross who was you know a first language speaker of feminism and this book is 74 we're just hitting the middle of the women's movement and by the time you get to a book like Tehanu, which completely subverts

Earthsea, Le Guin is fluent in feminism. And you see this transition in her work. And she takes Earthsea and she goes, it's not good enough. I've made mistakes here. I'm going to work with this. I'm going to change this. And Tehanu, I think,

is one of her best books, which is the fourth book of Earthsea I know some people don't like it they are wrong that's what we like that's that's the kind of opinion we like on backlisted as you know um brilliant and it was it was 74 it was published uh Harper and Row in the States Galant's obviously in in the UK um do you want to just read a little just to give us because I do think that one of the great joys of this book is the prose. I mean, it really it really is beautiful. Absolutely. And I think we sort of referred to her her father before, who was very eminent anthropologist Theodore Kroeber.

And I like to think that this sort of comes from Le Guin watching her father and her husband, of course, is a retired academic. So this is when Shevet gets to Urus and he's at the university and he starts teaching. They were superbly trained, these students. Their minds were fine, keen, ready. And when they weren't working, they rested. They were not blunted, however, was another question. It appeared to Shevik that their freedom from obligation was in exact proportion to their lack of freedom of initiative. He was appalled by the examination system when it was explained to him. He could not imagine a greater deterrent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming information, disgorging it at demand. At first he refused to give any tests or grains, but this upset the university administrators so badly that, not wishing to be discourteous to his host, he gave in.

He asked his students to write a paper on any problem in physics that interested them and told them he'd give them all the highest marks so the bureaucrats would have something to write on their forms. A good many students came to him to complain. They wanted him to set problems, to ask the right questions. They didn't want to think about questions, but to write down the answers they had learned. Some of them objected strongly to his giving everyone the same mark. How could the diligent students be distinguished from the dull ones? What was the good in working hard? If no competitive distinctions were to be made, one might as well do nothing well of course chevick said troubled if you do not want to do the work you shouldn't do it oh it's so good

she's yeah you know that reminds me that i don't know whoever is the education is the process by which the notes of the professor are reproduced in the notebooks of the students without passing through the minds of either. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, I think Chevec is a fantastic, rich and complex character as well. Really interesting. I did a fantastic panel on this book with Francis Spufford was part of it

and a wonderful physicist from Cambridge called Gina Halabi. And we had her there to talk about whether physics was any good. She said, you know what, let's pass a veil over the physics because the novel is good. You definitely get, yes. I mean, the thing is, although, you know, there is more, we'll come on to more or less convincing use of physics in other books we're going to talk about. Wherever you're going, you better believe American Express will be right there with you. Heading for adventure? We'll help you breeze through security.

Meeting friends a world away? You can use your travel credit. Squeezing every drop out of the last day? How about a 4 p.m. late checkout? Just need a nice place to settle in enjoy your room upgrade wherever you go we'll go together that's the powerful backing of american express visit amex.ca slash ymx benefits vary by card terms apply um the third choice uh is what, who knows? So I decided to pick something by Octavia Butler. And I thought I won't go with the novels for which she's best known. I'm going to go with the shorts,

Kindred and Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents. I'm going to go for her short stories. So she hardly wrote any short stories, half a dozen, I think. And they're all collected in a wonderful publication called Blood Child and other stories. The thing about Butler, who probably one of the best post-war American science fiction, sort of post-60s American science fiction. And a multi-world winning like Le Guin won Nebulas, won Hugo's. Exactly that.

Won everything going. Genius grants, genius awards. And was for a long time probably the only, certainly the most prominent woman of colour writing science fiction. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there was her and Delaney and then, but for a long time. So absolutely trailblazing, I think. And her early death, I think, was a real, it was a shattering blow. I think we all feel there would have been another Parables novel. There would have been a sequel to another novel.

In these short stories, you can see the germs of novels that were emerging. And she never thought of herself as a short story writer. And yet I think there's maybe six short stories in this and three of them pick up awards. I mean, I was going to say, because in a way, again, one of the things, the engines of science fiction kind of publishing

has been the short story, the great magazine culture of the 50s and 60s. And that was a sort of international movement. I mean, we've talked about the Strigatsky brothers on Backlisted, but short stories were the sort of the kind of the currency. Absolutely, and continue to be. I mean, it still has a strong,

both paper and online magazine, that's still there. I think some of these magazines are still going. Asimov's is still going. Fantasy and SF is still going. You've got online places like Strange Horizons now. But I think people feel it's your apprenticeship in science fiction that you kind of chip away at a handful of shorts.

You know, people still get awards. They're still very prestigious. It's almost unique in a way. I can't think of another genre in which that happens. Some of them, I think, they're barely even, I would say, science fiction. There's one of them that is, I think it's called Crossover. But you can't get past the first one, which is one of the most terrifying and brilliant and weird. She's such an extraordinary writer, isn't she? I mean, I previously had read Kindred, but this is, and I know Andy's talked to about it, but this is something else. Do you want to give us the hideous pitch? Yeah, so a little context to this.

I taught creative writing for a long time and I taught a course on the short story and I was starting to get bored with the science fiction stories I picked. So I kind of threw it out to the internet, as you do. And they said, well, you've got to do Bloodchild by Octavia Butler. That'll sort them, yeah.

The humans from the slick. So I went and had a read of it and I thought, oh, my God, they're going to – can I? And then I thought, certainly can. Yeah, so I gave them this short story. I think it's worth saying that it's visceral, it's shocking, it's inspired by an unpleasant encounter that the author had with a bot fly. Which lays its eggs under the skin.

And in order to get rid of it without inducing infection, you're supposed to allow the maggot to hatch. Exactly that. And from this quite unpleasant material, she generates a horrifying and unflinching and relentless short story about what it means to be living in a sort of symbiotic relationship with another species. So I don't really want to give this story away in many ways. I think people should sit and read it I could read the start I mean things that I would say about it are that it's weirdly erotic which it really shouldn't be I mean this is like Gregor Samsa

actually ending up in a relationship with a human in his insect-like form. As you say, the Tlic are kind of farming humans to carry their eggs. And that sounds obviously awful and grotesque, and it is. But they groom them emotionally as well as physically. So there's a closeness and a tenderness. Yes, and it's not like they're animals. It's more like they're part of the household.

She was very resistant to people saying that this was an allegory for slavery. And I think she's right. It's a much more nuanced story than that. She called it a love story, which I think is a really, you know, but people should read it and read the whole collection. Speech Sounds is about a pandemic. Yes, where people lose the ability to speak. And Very Long, The Evening and the morning and the night,

which is another one about a disease which is called DGD, which calls a dissociative state characterized by violent psychosis and self-harm. There's no pity in these stories, yeah. I saw a remark online, the writer shveta naryan she says that uh um uh you know the novels are unflinching but butler's short stories are all bone and that's exactly right everything is purred down her prose style is already uh really purred down but in the short stories nothing nothing's wasted. So, yeah.

Shall we have the start? Yeah, go for it. I mean, I would say there is curiously, they're tough, but there is weirdly hope. Oh, God. Yeah, yeah. They're all about taking, yeah, humans in the worst situations,

how can we live in this? And not just endure, but find a means to thrive, I think, to find love and hope. Let's give them the start and then see if they go and read it. My last night of childhood began with a visit home. Togatoy's sister had given us two sterile eggs. Togatoy gave one to my mother, brother and sisters. She insisted that I eat the other one alone. It didn't matter. There was still enough to leave everyone feeling good. Almost everyone.

My mother wouldn't take any. She sat, watching everyone drifting and dreaming without her. Most of the time, she watched me. I lay against Tagatoy's long velvet underside, sipping from my egg now and then, wondering why my mother denied herself such a harmless pleasure. Less of her hair would be grey if she indulged now and then. The egg's prolonged life, prolonged vigour. My father, who'd never refused one in his life, had lived more than twice as long as he should have, and toward the end of his life, when he should have been slowing down, he'd married my mother

and fathered four children. But my mother seemed content to age before she had to. I saw her turn away as several of Tagatoy's limbs secured me closer. Tagatoy liked our body heat and took advantage of it whenever she could. When I was little and at home more, my mother used to try and tell me how to behave, to be respectful and obedient. Togatoy was the Tlic government official in charge of the preserve, thus the most important of her kind. It was an honour, my mother said, that such a person had chosen to come into the family. My mother was at her most formal and severe when she was lying. I mean, just the more you read by and about Octavia Butler, the more admirable she becomes,

I think. And I particularly loved, there's an essay called Furor Scribendi, which is kind of like the kind of the fury or the anger of a of a writer um she said that the most important habit it's kind of writing tips the most important habit a writer has is uh is persistence that that's more important than talent and inspiration or even imagination yeah there's a wonderful thing that goes around which is her her kind of manifesto to herself uh her promises that she makes herself you will write you will win awards you will be successful you will achieve you will be known your stories will not be forgotten it's incredible in her own handwriting as well i mean just before we move on because i did i did think and this will

come out in the next book we're going to talk about, is that some people have said, whether, you know, they're obviously, I think that it's too easy just to say, oh, this is a story about slavery, and that must be deeply annoying. But she did say that the idea of being able to imagine, for black people to be able to imagine themselves in a reality that isn't defined by the history that they have is why science fiction works for them. And it strikes me that that must be an issue too for other people who feel that they have been excluded from the mainstream of history. And I wondered if that was a good way of you just saying a little bit about what you're doing in your, with your, in your sort of publishing role.

Yes. So, so what we're, what we're doing with Gold SF is way back time, back in the eighties, the women's press had a list, which was a science fiction list. So I think we all know the women's press kind of black and white zigzag spines. With the iron, yeah. With the iron, yes. Steaming ahead. But the, the spines I looked out iron yeah with the iron yes steaming ahead um but the the spines i looked out

for were the gray ones and that was the feminist science fiction list and i think over about six or seven years they published maybe 30 three dozen science fiction novels it's the first time that joanna russ is printed in britain uh and i came across these in a little box of books in Newnham JCR in 1991. There was a collection of short stories by Lisa Tuttle. And, you know, you find something like this and you go, oh, right, these are the things I'm meant to be reading rather than all this stuff people's giving me. So I've been hunting these down over and over and over the years. And then around about just a couple of years, about 18 months before lockdown, a friend of mine at Goldsmiths, Sarah Kemba,

who's the director of Goldsmiths Express, we met at a talk I was giving about feminist science fiction. And we kind of looked at each other and we went, why don't we do this again? Because this list was incredible. It put voices into print that didn't get heard. It gave people a sort of space in which they could experiment both with prose and ideas and styles. We could do this. You know, you've got the press.

I've got that. Let's put on the show right here. And this is exactly what we're trying to do with Goldsmiths, with Goldletter. It's like Lucy Scholes wrote a brilliant piece in Prospect about the archive hunters, you know, people are out there. And she said what Carmen Khalil had said about Virago is that Virago will never, that will never end. That process is not, you don't get to, oh, we've done all the, we've done all the undiscovered women writers now. Because in fact what happens is as we're about to go,

as we're about to find out your next book, undiscovered writers of science fiction, be they male or female, are always coming out of the woodwork. Absolutely. Male, female or indeed persons, as my fourth book is very much about. So I've picked a novel called Proud Man by a writer called Catherine Burdekin. Now, Catherine Burdekin is a very elusive figure who published under several names. It's not her birth name. Her birth name was Catherine Cade. She's the youngest sister of Rowena Cade, who founded the Minnack Theatre, and sort of born at the end of the 19th century. It goes to Children and Ladies College. Her family won't send her to Oxford, but she gets married, goes off to Australia, leaves the husband, comes back, moves in with

a woman. Together, they bring up her children and through all this time she's writing and writing and writing and writing. And in the 1930s she publishes probably her best known book, which people may have heard of, under her pseudonym Murray Constantine. She publishes a book called Swastikonite, which is a grimly dystopian view of the Third Reich a thousand years time and sort of traces the connections between misogyny and imperialism and militarism. Very, very, very good book. I came across this in what I think was Peter Carey's

big bumper book of utopian fun. You know, that Faber book of utopias. I'm kind of reading through that. This one catches my eye. It's extremely, all these books are coming across as quite bleak I am quite a happy person so come on it's really shocking excerpt from swastika night and I became fascinated by this writer she's

extremely difficult to track down a swastika night stays in print it's the only one still in print um but but by the by the 60s she had completely disappeared um by the time of her death and she's found in one of these sort of literary treasure hunts by an american academic called daphne patai who finds swastika knight reads and thinks there must be more of this, tracks down the cottage where Cade lived with her partner until her death, goes upstairs, finds this trunk, opens it up and finds almost a dozen unpublished novels, one of which she puts into print in the 80s called The End of This Day's Business,

which is kind of companion piece to Swastika Night. It's a feminist dystopia. What would it be like if women were running? Well, not as good either, not as bad as Swastika Night by any means. But the book I picked is one called Proud Man. And this is another book from the 30s. And again, I think we're given what we're given in The Dispossessed. We're given an outsider's view of another world.

In this case, Earth in the 1930s, that sort of low, dishonest decade. And a traveller comes back from the future, the person, from maybe a thousand years in our future from a world where fully realised people are androgynous, they self-fertilise, they're vegetarian. It's a little bit, you know, it's very 30s.

Yeah. And what we see is the person's view of this terrible world that human beings are trying to struggle and live in. Although what she calls subhuman, which is what makes it so powerful because she's sort of sketching out what perhaps human beings might evolve into. And there's all kinds of extraordinary stuff, isn't there?

The fact that she can't believe that we have lost use, or we don't have the use of our senses, you know, that we can't hear properly and we can't taste properly. And we're locked into this very, very, she thinks, this very, very kind of unhappy-making sexual dichotomy between men and women. The opening section, which is almost like a long essay in a way, is it goes through everything.

You've got toxic masculinity, the fragility of masculinity. You've got the sexual double standard. You know, it's all just laid down there. She had a fascinating writing style. Apparently her writing style was sort of automatic writing. She'd kind of write a book in five or six weeks

and then that was it. The book was done. And it means that she's patchy, But it also means that some of these, there are just these periods of real visionary quality. There's no other writer like her. I think she's fascinating. I'd love to get my hands on those other books. I saw the archive up for sale in roundabout 2001, 2003, but I didn't have a spare 20K at the time. But I'll get to those books one day and write about her. I know that some of them have been reissued by the feminist press. Proud Man is ostensibly available by feminist press in the US. I haven't... And Golang's, who do a very good e-book range

of out-of-print science fiction, have got... I think they've got Proud Man, Swastika Night and The End of This Day's Business. Under the name Murray Constantine. Under Murray Constantine, yeah. SF Gateway is their e-book in print. So those three 30s utopias dystopias you can kind of get your hands on i mean you know she i think should be read next to huxley and orwell really because

that this is this is a much more um it's a much subtler and more interesting um i'm sure you'll read us a bit but constantine also i I discovered she did that name the identity wasn't it wasn't until the 80s that that that's exactly yeah when when Daphne Pataille does this sort of literary you know uh detective work and connects Constantine to uh to the Cade name and when Proud was was Proud Man was was reviewed 1934, a lot of people thought it was Olaf Stapleton, the sci-fi writer. Yeah, exactly that. And definitely a bloke. Definitely a bloke, yes. Tip tree all over again, isn't it? Something inluxibly masculine about this prose. Except it's by a woman. Yes. Why don't you read a little i mean i have to say i really i was

completely not sideways by the way had you read it before i had not no i've never heard never heard of it never read it before and i'm interested in in dystopian fantasy from that period of sort of 30s 40s 50s and i'd never heard of katherine burdekin so it's that thing isn't it that we think that the the you know the the trans debate such as it is today um this wasn't being had before I mean this this is absolutely explicitly what this is about absolutely which is that yeah you know the polarity between the sexes is not as straightforward as it may appear exactly that and I think these these histories get lost very quickly and this is the value of going back to texts like these. You find these voices. If you

can't find these voices around you, you have to go to the past and find them and you can find a kind of continuity of being in them. When the narrator in the book is a woman, there's a brilliant interview with a bishop which just and he kept trying to deal with trying to deal with um with her worldview it's absolutely it's beautifully yeah so i i've picked a little bit that that that doesn't really it's sort of only tangentially takes us inside the mind of the person it's it's while she's living as a woman and she's befriended another woman called Leonora. And one of the qualities that the person has is that they're able to sort of, as with many science fiction, there's a kind of psychic abilities as well. And the person's able to sort of feel and hear what Leonora is thinking. So this is a glimpse into Leonora's mind and what the person

notices about her. On the way to the park, she didn't talk very much, Leonora. Her thoughts were very jerky for everything she saw and heard had a front place in them. Had she expressed them in words, they would have been something like this. This is a very peculiar woman, lovely and somehow good and yet not good at all. I am at ease with her. I shouldn't be with an ordinary good person. That man either drinks, has a weak heart or indigestion. His head is a fine shape. This bus is travelling very badly. Ethel is supposed to stop cars knocking. Could the LGOC afford a thought? That's an awful green hat. Some women are colourblind. We know a certain amount of what Charmaine did. We don't know at all about how he thought. How can one make him in a novel think enough like we think, and yet enough

differently? Horns of Roland faintly blowing. Alethea Gifford Verona why Gifford? it isn't her real name no, none of it when people give their real names they have a heightened consciousness of identity she has none what lovely skin she has she makes that woman over there that like a Dutch doll

yes, you, a silly Dutch doll you look with jealous enmity at my lovely Alethea I don't wonder why should she wear a hat if she doesn't want to? You could go without a hat. Your hair's foul, stringy and greasy. That man's in trouble. His wife, his business or his children. It goes on a little bit like this. She's unique. I could tell her anything

and know she would never be shocked and never be admiring. She's absolutely cold and pure and still. That Sharmil novel won't do. It's silly and fussy and stupid. So we're inside Leonora's head there and the person is sort of picking up the impressions of her mind. It is such an odd, strange and compelling book. It really is. It's properly original. I haven't read anything like it.

It is, yeah. And it's this thing I'm saying with science fiction that sometimes you forgive inelegancies because the ideas that you're getting. And almost that the inelegancies are part of it because people are stretching their thinking, they're stretching their imagination, and language is harder to manipulate when you're doing that.

Yeah, and it gives you an insight into all kinds of more interesting debates taking place in the 1930s than perhaps the ones that we that have become the ones that have been signed off by the culture as it were. Exactly much more about gender and sexuality and gender expression yeah a really interesting book and writer. Right we're coming up to the final choice choice which is um has to be uh one that is close to your heart introduced bring on bring on vonda bring on the great the great vonda mcintyre yeah so we've we've done a doctor who book on backlisted my god we know now we're going to do a star trek book so i've picked a wonderful novel

which is uh the novelization of the movie star trek for the voyage home now i i'm i'm sure that listeners to this podcast immediately are able to uh tell me which Star Trek film that one is. It is, of course, The One with the Whales. It's the one where Kirk and Spock go back in time and kidnap a pair of humpback whales and bring them back to the future to save the Earth from destruction. That one, The One with the Whales. Everyone knows The One with the Whales. And it's a great film.

It's loads of fun. It's an absolute joy. Genuinely funny as well i mean i i did re-watch the movie for for this podcast um and and then cross-checked it with to see whether favorite scenes were in the book and most of them were including perhaps my favorite my favorite line in any of the Star Trek films, which is when the cytologist asks Kirk, he said, so what, you're telling me you're from outer space? Kirk blew out his breath. No, he said, I'm from Iowa. I just work in outer space.

John, a line that I get to say surprisingly often. No, I'm from St. Helens. I just work in Otis Faison. Work in Otis. I love it. So I've picked this book because, you know, this is where my career went. Yes.

Somehow all that youthful promise turned into writing Star Trek novels. But I love this book. And partly the reason I love it it's fun, it's entertaining it's got all the joy of the film but then because it's a novel McIntyre has all these extra spaces in which to

put her own spin on the Star Trek universe and what I love most about this book it ends up de-centering human beings completely it ends up as a kind of peace treaty between two humpback whales and an ancient space intelligence. And it's got nothing to do with the humans. Spock is kind of brokering the treaties like the middleman, but the humans

are kind of peripheral to the end of this book. And in all ways, I think McIntyre is putting her vision of the future down on the page. And if I could sing the praises of Wanda Bacchus, I'll come to that in a minute. But I'll sing her praises very, very highly. Well, I was going to ask you because we should. I mean, she's pretty remarkable. And she was the second woman to win a Nebula and the third to win the Hugo Award. She won a second Nebula. I love this.

Her first one was in 1978 for Dream Snake. And then she won a second Nebula for a book that sounds amazing called The Moon and the Sun, and it beat George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones. It did. And it's described as an alternate history set in the court of Louis XIV where the Sun King believes his immortality is assured if he devours the flesh of a sea creature.

It's a belting novel. It's absolutely great. I've written it down. That sounds right up my street. Just read all her books. I mean, from Dream Snake, which is a stone-cold feminist classic, right up to The Moon and the Sun. There's a film got made of it starring Pierce Brosnan, which is really, it's not very good

apparently. There's an unpublished novel, which I've read called The Curve of the World, which is outstandingly good. It's a kind of life's work to get this book into print. It's about an ancient Minoan civilization. And you can kind of read it alongside The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengroo. It's kind of novelizing the ideas of that book. It's incredible. She was an outstandingly good writer. And that's the reason she got this gig. This was a high profile gig to relaunch Star Trek

as a major franchise Roddenberry does the first novel of the first movie and they look around and they go who's the best science fiction writer in America at the moment? Vonda McIntyre and they get her to do these three books for the next Star Trek 2, 3 and 4

And they're in that great Simon Schuster pocketbook series. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That people know and love and have written for. Just teeing you up there. But, I mean, I just wanted to ask you about the process of, because I suppose that, for me, is interesting, is that you've got the bare bones of the story there.

But what you're saying is that what McIntyre does, I mean is that something you get it excites you as well as a writer that you you've got a franchise so people know who the kind of characters are but how you are able to to as it were insert your own kind of creative and imaginative vision absolutely and I think it was reading books like this that gave me the kind of courage to do that, that I could kind of go, you know, I don't just want these to be Star Trek novels. I want them to be my perspective on what matters about utopian fiction.

Or, you know, these franchises have a long life for a reason. People love them. They want to be with these characters. They want to be in these situations. If I can sneak in a bit of, you know, anarchism or feminism or whatever I believe in and get that on the shelves of a Walmart in Oklahoma City, I think I've done my job.

And that, in a way, it kind of links all these books, doesn't it? I found a great quote that The theodore sturgeon's about science fiction said it's it's one of its prime function is to create other kinds of social systems to see how they would work or if they would work that kind of and that's in a way what you're saying is although it may not seem that there's a political uh theme to even to star trek but of course of course it's always there because we're always projecting out from our own reality into what would an alternative reality look like. Would it work? Exactly that, yeah.

If Margaret Thatcher's saying there is no alternative, science fiction is saying, look, I've got half a dozen just here. And if you don't like these, I've got others. Exactly. We can just come up with something better because, you know, it's got to be better than this. Do you want to read us a bit of Wanda's Deathless? I will.

Wanda's phenomenal. We should also mention, we shouldn't forget, handheld reprinted her first novel, The Exile Waiting, which is a companion piece. That's Handheld Press,cdonald's brilliant handheld press who uh again friends of friends of the show but very much so and that's a companion piece to dream snake which is her great her great novel uh so i did want to mention that but i'll just read you the very very start of uh star trek the voyage home so it's very pretty

and we are with the ancient space intelligence just orientating people the traveler sang amid its complexities and its delicate immensely long memories it sang in the complete cold of deep space the song began at one extremity spun in circles of superconducting power and speed and evolved. It culminated in the traveller's heart after a time counted not in micromeasures but on the galactic scale of the formation of planets. The traveller sent each finished song into the vacuum. In return it received new songs from other beings. Thus it wove a network of communication across the galaxy. Oblivious to the distances, it connected many species of scented creatures,

one with the other. From time to time, it discovered a newly evolved intelligence to add to its delicate fabric. On those rare occasions, it rejoiced. On much rarer occasions, it grieved.

Really lovely. She's so good. She's so good. And that's obviously great tips there as well for other Wanda McIntyre books, which are Dream Snake and The Exile Waiting, which is the one that's published by, the first novel that's published by Handheld, and The Moon and the Sun, which is the alternate history set in the court of Louis XIV. Great. I mean, Una, new worlds and new civilisations.

We have boldly, we have boldly. We boldly went. We boldly went. Unfortunately, that is all we have time for. So I just wanted to say thank you. What an amazing collection of books. My pleasure. It was great fun.

And we will obviously be putting links to all of them up on the website, as we normally do, and in our bookshop, our backlisted bookshop. So thank you to Una. Thank you also to Tess, who is Tess Davidson, who is standing in for Nikki today. She works with us as producer and researcher and many other things besides. So thank you, Tess. We, as you know, are technically on sabbatical and we'll be back with normal service. technically on sabbatical and we'll be back with normal service will be resumed in april but in the meantime there is nothing to stop you downloading all previous 176 or something episodes links clips suggestions for further reading on our website backlisted.fm and we're always pleased

if you contact us on twitter and facebook and indeed now on Instagram. You can also support us directly by supporting our Patreon at www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. For a modest sum, patrons get to hear backlisted episodes early and entirely advertising free. And those who subscribe to the Lock Listener level get two whole extra podcasts each month. We call it Lock Listed and it features the three of us talking over books films and music we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight that though is the end of our

backlisted science fiction special is there anything you know that you want to add anything else you want to throw in as a sort of a farewell observation oh i mean i could talk about this stuff all night so i I'd better stop now. Well, thank you. It's been fun. And look out for, we will be reissuing some of, at least one, possibly two more of older episodes before we return in April. And there will be one more, I think at least one more special before that too. But thank you all for listening. See you all in a fortnight. Bye.