Martian Matriarchies and Metaphors.

Many readers will be familiar with Ray Bradbury's ' Fahrenheit 451 '. For those that are not, it

is a dystopian novel first published in 1953. Books are outlawed and ' firemen ' burn any that

are found. The book's tagline explains the title ' Fahrenheit 451 '-the temperature at which

book paper catches fire and burns...' The lead character Guy Montag, is a fireman who

becomes disillusioned with his role of censoring literature and destroying knowledge,

eventually quitting his job and committing himself to the preservation of literary and

cultural writings. The novel has been the subject of interpretations focusing on how book

burning  suppresses historical ideas and on the historical role of book burnings. In a 1956

radio interview the author said he wrote it because of his concerns at the time about the real

threat of book burning in the United States. In later years, he described the book as a type of

commentary on how mass media reduces interest in reading literature. ' Worldsoul ' was

published by Prime Books in 2012. The twenty-first century will be remembered by many

readers of the future as being the century where social media posts shrank the attention span

of the reading masses. Will libraries survive? And if they do what form will they take ? This

novel hooked me in its opening pages by taking a different slant on the burning of one of the

great wonders of the ancient world: The Library of Alexandria. Instead of having been lost

to the flames of antiquity, it is moved with the aid of a moving spell. We then meet one of

the most visually and interesting liibrarians of the future-one Mercy Fane.

.." Mercy Fane, librarian, a chess-piece study in black and white.."

The novel is set in Worldsoul, a nexus point between Earth and the many dimensions

known as the Liminality. In this place old stories gather, forgotten legends come to fade

and die-or to flourish and rise again. Once ruled by the Skein, who have now vanished, a

Barquess has left in search of them carrying Mercy's mothers. The city is being attacked

with lethal flower bombs from an unknown enemy. Things keep breaking out of ancient

texts and legends and escaping into the city. Mercy pursues one such nightmarish creature

and teems up with Shadow, an alchemist for aid and Duke. One of the hallmarks of

Williams' depiction of character is the strong female bonds that are forged between the

unlikeliest of groupings. Characters that are not whom they seem is another. One such is

Johnathan Deed, Abbot General of the Court, who is in reality a disir, as is his minion,

Darya. The name disir means '  the ladies and they are essentially ancestral spirits, but

some stories are not meant to last..." They have curdled and gone foul, like sour milk.."

He is under thrall to Loki, that old trickster god, whom he meets by taking the

Dead Road, not the only storyway, but one of the most dangerous. There is the most

delightful leonine creature called a ka, whose name is Perra, and who is Mercy's

ancestral spirit. Perra can enter storyways and gaps in stories that Mercy cannot cut

through, even with the aid of her Irish sword. Metafction -fiction in which the author

self-consciously alludes to the artificiality or literariness of a work by parodying or

departing from novelistic conventions and tradtiional narrative techniques-is quite

evident in this novel. Take this passage for instance:-

..." Perra and ka-kind along with others used the secret routes: the little-known

pathways of forgotten stories, the backdoors of tales, the null-spaces between

lines of text and sub-text. The route that Perra now took had brought the ka through

an ancient tale of a winged bull and the sun, a fragment of poetry from an Elizabethan

noble woman's writing desk, and a folktale about fox witches from nineteenth century

China..."

The cognitive estrangement that Science Fiction writers achieve by creating a world

that is dissonant with the reader's experienced world is taken to a new level in this

novel. It is as if the author is searching not just for the lost text from Section C, but

is also searching for a new way to tell stories, a new way for us to receive stories,

and a new way of looking at our perceptions of the other. As the left closes down

dissent and as the right capitalises on the gaps that those silences ferment in, it is

to Science Fiction writers that we will look to more and more for a space in which to

find new models of co-operation. 'Worldsoul' makes literal the metaphor of the book

and the story as a living entity, as a person if you will. The suppression of stories is

tantamount to the suppression of a person, and so I read her handling of Shadow's veil

with great interest. When books are suppressed, when stories are suppressed, we all

suppress dialogue. When we suppress dialogue we replace social interaction with

war.

                 

Where other writers have failed to emotionally engage me with their vision of Mars,

Winterstrike succeeds. This is a truly seminal novel. Hestia Mar is a Winterstrike spy.

She has been sent into enemy territory-Caud- to recover details of an ancient weapon.

She is aided in her escape from capture by the scissor women, the excissieres, one of

the best imagined female warriors in all of Science Fiction.

.." the excissieres, as they call themselves, do not use speech if they are within sight

of one another, but converse by means of the patterns of holographic wounds that

play across their flesh and armour, a language that is impossible for any not of their

ranks to comprehend.."

 All of Hestia Mars family look the same, as a result of ' snobbish and conservative

selection in the breeding tanks...straight black hair, grey eyes, sallow faces..."

She works for Winterstrike's  Matriarchy who are opposed to the Caud Matriarchy.

Her cousin Essegui is preparing for the festival of Ombre. Her younger sister

Leretui has been locked away and given the name Shorn in a room with no windows

or an antiscribe in case she finds a way of sending a message to the vulpen she was

caught consorting with last Ombre. Vulpen are the genetically altered remnants of

ancient man. They are the Changed. They are forbidden. Shorn has been dubbed

The Malcontent of Calmaretto, and I was routing for her from the start. She, and

her sisters Essegui and Canteley have two of the most horrendous mothers, named

Alleghetta and Thea. This world with lesbianism as the norm throws that reader who

is used to reading through the lens of heteronormative relationships to Mars' red winds.

The technology in this novel is probably the best realised of our futuristic possible

selves. Haunt locks, blacklight matrices, geise performed by a majike, and antiscribes.

Geas is a Gaelic word, and it means to be under a compulsion or spell. It features

largely in the motivations of many characters in old Irish tales. Diarmuid and Grainne

is one such. It was refreshing to find it having traversed into the future. In the

imagined world of Mars as written by Williams it means ' an ancient word for a

hyper-hypnotic suggestion, exchanged for a fraction of my essential being.'When Shorn

disappears again Essegui is put under a geise to find her. This quest introduces a

Centipede Queen from Earth, Mantis the Mad, the library, and the rather marvellous

demotheas. I do not want these blogposts to spoil the reading experience for any of you.

There is much more to think about after reading a Liz Williams novel than the mere

exigencies of plot. What would the world be like without men? Do matriarchies repeat

the same mistakes of patriarchies? Or are systems in and of themselves self-destructing?

Do all things tend towards dissolution? And why do all histories become suppressed?

There is a great freedom the mind is afforded when we read and write about worlds that

are and are not far removed from our own. We are allowed an objective distance, from

which we can look at ourselves and at each other with enriched perspectives.

With ' Bloodmind' we come full circle. We return to Mondile, the world we met in the first

of Liz Williams books. The novel opens with a corpse, the corpse of Vali Hallsdottir's friend

and mentor-Idhunn. Vali is an assassin for her homeworld of Muspell.

.." Whoever had committed this murder had taken pains to cover their tracks in the non-

      physical world, and if that was the case, then the likelihood was that they had also

     gone to the trouble to hide more tangible evidence, too.."

Her nation is in chaos, preparing to face invasion from the neighbouring country of Darkland.

Vali is held captive and under suspicion of murder by the invading Morrighanu, specifically

by the commander of the Morvern Morrighanu-Rhi Glyn Apt.

.." The person stepped forward. A black-and-silver uniform encased a tall female form.

   Her hands were gloved, but the dataflow of enhancements ran across the exposed

   skin of her face. Blue eyes sparked silver, set in a gaunt countenance. White birds

   , like albino crows circled around her head..."

Vali is rescued by the selk-a semi-sentient species who come down with the arctic melt

water and sing. The selk bring Vali across the northern ice field to the hostile glacier

territory of Darkland, where she meets Thorn Eld, one of the vitki. Vali's ex-lover, Frey

was vitki. In her ingsgaldir initiation she was sent to her death by Frey to kill a fenris.

Vali killed the Hierolath on Nhem where women are kept like the selk in a seni-sentient

state. The three planets and three women who interconnect with each other and with

whom this story is interconnected are Hunan from Nhem, Sedra from Mondhile and

Vali from Muspell. Who we are, why we are, and where we come from underpins the

plots of many Science Fiction novels, but what I loved about this one was the way in

which three women from three different planets come together to try to find the killer

Skinning Knife in order that they can help her or kill her if needs must. This tension

of chase and quest and query coalesces into a page-turning read. High octane thrills,

indeed.

.." The edge of Muspell's sun Grainne touched the horizon's line and a quick

flare sent a thousand suns into my sight......It was said to have been melting icecaps

and changing currents  that had led to the drowning of the world, forcing my own

ancestors to flee outward. They had found Muspell...something in me still mourned

old Earth..."

It transpires that Skinning Knife/Skadi is not vitki, but Morrighanu. Williams often

uses two names for her characters and this adds richness to the pictures she draws.

Skadi was created and born on Nhem. Her mother was Mondhaith. She was bred

with another girl pathogenetically. This is not the first novel where Williams looks

at the issue of genetic engineering. Here in Bloodmind she pushes the boat or the wing

out a little further, and asks a question by providing a fact, albeit a fictional one. Or

maybe not quite as fictional as all that.

" We sold information to the women of the Nhemish resistance -we hoped they could

breed in into the next generation of Nhemish women, release it as a mutogenic virus

so that when the women reached puberty, they would turn on the males. It has not

had time to work yet.."

What fascinates me about this answer are the questions that haunt its edges. Is this a

virus that is being worked on somewhere in some secret lab? What is intelligence?

Are those women who are held in thrall only to their biological functions part of an

experiment? Questions that do not hold sway in traditional discourse are allowed air

in Science Fiction. This is important. In fact it is vital. Science Fiction as it is written

by women like Liz Williams allow us a safe place to air these questions, to meet with

strong and complex women from the future, to remember that as we desecrate our own

planet with toxins and pollute the four elements Nature will give us consequence. That

consequence could be the converse of all that we have struggled for to date. Why is

the genome project only charting the male? Is a future being engineered for us? And

what part do we all have to play in it if we like the cattle women from Nhem acquiesce

in propping up semi-sentience/? Is political correctness like the computer a double-

edged sword? We have a lot to think about and much to celebrate when we enter the

worlds imagined by Liz Williams. In the Gaelacht of Darkland, in the Gaelic of my

own home county Donegal on the North West of Ireland-Buíochas.